I, Who Did Not Die

by Zahed Haftlang

  “Get out.”

  I rose carefully, keeping my eyes on Yadollah as I backed toward the door. He pivoted in place, keeping a bead on me. I lowered my head, then ran like hell. I sprinted all the way down the mountain, stumbling and springing right back up. I didn’t really think Yadollah would shoot me in the back, but you never know. And wouldn’t that be just too perfect—soldiers dying all around me year after year, and somehow I escaped mortars and snipers and land mines, only to be shot in the back over a beast. Served me right. I somehow still hadn’t learned my lesson that stealing has consequences. Liars and thieves can’t expect things to turn out for them, and now I’d just lost my third family; I thought that must be some sort of sorry-ass record. My own, then Mina’s, and now Yadollah’s. Clearly, I was put on this earth to be alone.

  By the time I reached my tent, my failure felt total and complete. I’d tried to make up for what I’d done by bringing gifts to Yadollah, but somehow I’d doubled down and made it worse: not only had I taken his ram, I’d taken his trust by building a friendship before I confessed. I was rotting from the inside. Outside of me was a shell that I could fool people with, but only for so long; inevitably they realized I was made of garbage. I would have killed myself if I wasn’t such a coward, but I couldn’t even manage that. Without the sanctuary of Yadollah’s friendship, the ram was going to come back for me and finally finish me off. The only thing I could do was stay in bed and wait to feel the heat of his breath on my neck, just before he gored me. Only this time, I wasn’t afraid, because I didn’t see the point of living. The ram was coming to do me a favor, to do the one thing I didn’t have the guts to do. So I waited, immobile, hiding under the covers. I certainly didn’t want to see Yadollah again as he herded his animals to the spring. But by the third day of my self-imposed bed rest, someone must have reported me to the commander, because he popped his head in the tent and scowled at me.

  “You gonna get up, soldier?”

  I sat up, hoping he would think I was just sick.

  “Haftlang, you used to be a medic, yes?” he asked.

  I confirmed.

  “Then get up; you’re going to Halabja, in Iraq. Need you to help with the corpses.”

  I nodded and followed him outside, happy for the chance to get away from Yadollah’s orbit. I didn’t know what had happened in Halabja, but a soldier filled me in along the drive. Just that week, our military, along with Kurdish guerrillas, had captured Halabja and a bunch of rural mountain villages just inside the eastern border of Iraq. It must have been one hell of a battle, because more than one hundred of us left the battalion for the eight-hour drive to help with the cleanup. Our convoy stopped on the border just a few miles short of town, and we were directed to a tent and each of us was given a gray hazmat suit and a gas mask. Three days before, Iraqi planes had flown over the town and dropped bombs that contained some kind of chemical gas, and thousands of civilians had choked to death within a matter of minutes. We didn’t have to take the assignment if we feared for our health, but for a lowlife like me who deserved to be dead, this was the perfect duty. At nineteen, with six years of death under my belt, I was what you might call a death professional. I zipped up my suit, tightened the straps of the gas mask, and marched into Halabja.

  Everywhere I looked, people were frozen in time, like photographs of themselves. Little children who had been playing in the street were now sprawled on the ground, their tiny fingers still clutching dolls. Parents had taken their last breaths as they crouched over their babies, trying to protect them from the gas. And the creepiest thing about it was that there was no mutilation or gore, just ordinary people toppled over like they were sleeping, yet with gray slime trailing from their mouths. A dog lay on its side with food still in its mouth, its tongue hanging out. Birds littered the ground, and frogs and fish bobbed on the river’s surface. Lizards were frozen mid-crouch.

  I shuddered. Whatever had happened, had happened in a flash, and the calculated evil of it stopped me cold. Even the silence was violent—streets stripped of birdsong, conversation, running engines, shutting doors, or babbling televisions.

  I went from building to building, writing down addresses and counting the dead, making notes of how many bodies were on each floor. But after three days, my sergeant told me not to bother with the paperwork. There were so many corpses that there was no point in cataloging them all; it was just slowing down the more pressing need to get them buried. Bulldozers dug large graves, and we lined the pits with a limestone powder that was supposed to absorb the poisons in the bodies and prevent toxins from leaching into the soil. I put the bodies neatly into the graves, careful to keep family members together and all facing the same way. I stacked fifty to sixty bodies at a time, and tried to close my mind to what I was doing, but still I couldn’t stop myself from smoothing down tangled hair or a wrinkled shirt, looking for any small dignity I could give them before lowering them into the hole. At this point in the war I had become so accustomed to corpses that they no longer shocked me, but this kind of death was different. Even as I was burying these villagers, I knew their faces would haunt my dreams. There were thousands, too many to count, and even more victims who were wounded and disfigured in the makeshift clinics on the border. The poison gas was indiscriminate; it was hard to distinguish the doctors from the patients because everyone was burned.

  In one house I found a dead couple in a sexual position in their bed. I untangled them and carried the wife out first in a sheet. I returned and wrapped the man in a blanket, but he was heavy, and as I dragged him through a doorway, the back of my right sleeve caught on a nail sticking out of the door frame, exposing my arm to the poisonous air. I dropped the body and frantically searched my pockets, pulled out the emergency syringe of atropine, and plunged it into my thigh. It contained enough nerve agent antidote to hopefully protect me until I could get the secondary shot at the medical tent, about two miles away.

  By the time I stumbled out of the building, my arm was already blistering, and it itched something awful. Nobody was sure what sorts of poisons were still in the air, but everyone thought it was some combination of mustard gas and hydrogen cyanide. I was dizzy and sweaty, and held onto the wall to ride out a full-blown coughing fit when another soldier found me and helped me run to the medical tent, where the doctor gave me the secondary injection, which didn’t seem to do much. The doctor led me to a water truck with high-pressure hoses, all the while assuring me that I’d be OK. I didn’t believe him. I stripped off my suit and stood in the pounding spray, wondering if I was going to have the same death as the bodies I’d been clearing away, just a slower version, my throat taking days instead of minutes to close up. When I was clean, the doctor put an antibacterial ointment on my arm, gave me painkillers, and ordered three days of bed rest.

  My arm still hurt, but I went back to work. After a month, we didn’t have to wear gas masks anymore. The wind had blown away the chemicals, and we could allow relatives from other villages into Halabja to hold funeral ceremonies for their loved ones. Every day, mourning Kurdish families recited poetry and sang songs as we lowered their family members into the ground. By the third month, we had finished burying the dead, and residents who had fled were living in their homes again. By the time I left, a huge boil had developed on my arm, and it oozed so much that I had to change the bandages several times a day.

  When I returned to my unit, I volunteered to go with a group being relocated to Sumar in Iran, a mountainous crossing point on the border a couple hours south in a desolate region dominated by Kurdish tribes that had joined forces with several Iranian rebel groups fighting Khomeini’s revolutionary government. We had a military camp in Sumar, but it was basically undefended, because the knuckleheads stationed there were so stoned on hash that they were letting the enemy guerrillas slip freely across the border. My job was to help get the place back in order.

  We had to rely on mules to get our supplies up the steep mountain passes, as howling winds threatened
to send us tumbling down the narrow dirt paths. When we arrived, the camp was completely disorganized. The commanders had been killed in a rebel ambush. The generators were out of gasoline, ammunition was dangerously low, and there was only enough canned food, bread, and dates to last a few days. Water was scarce because the mules could only carry a few gallons and had to make several treks a day up and down the mountain. Excavation equipment couldn’t reach the rugged terrain, so our guys were fighting from aboveground bunkers, easily visible from higher elevations. Our army lacked intelligence, unable to keep track of the ever-shifting alliances between the different militias and clans that regularly attacked our frontier posts, killing our soldiers and making off with our weapons.

  I walked into a beleaguered platoon that didn’t see any reason to fight anymore. It was disgraceful, and I was determined to stop them from getting picked off one by one. When I arrived, I found soldiers sleeping off opium or hash binges, and when I confronted them, they complained that they couldn’t aim their weapons properly because the mechanism that calculated coordinates was in Russian. I had to show the lazy bastards how to aim with their own eyes, sighting off the barrels and using plain common sense. Every day, another guy deserted, and reinforcements never came; few dared to travel on the rural transport lines, exposed to sharpshooters who hid behind tall shrubs and in caves. No one wanted to take that risk, especially now that the United Nations had put Resolution 589 on the table, a promise on paper that both Iraq and Iran would lay down their weapons. The word was that after eight years of war, in which neither side had gained anything, both sides were going to sign the document. Any day now. But that didn’t mean we should give up early and let our country down. We still had to be men and fight until the very end.

  One night, when there was the smallest of fingernail moons in the sky, I heard somebody yelling nearby. I looked over and saw one of my men being dragged, kicking, on the ground, by someone with a gun. I took aim, shot the intruder in the head, and then jogged over to my soldier. He’d been shot in the upper thigh, and I tied my jacket around his leg above the wound to stop the bleeding. His breath came out fast, and he told me there was a major ambush on the mountain pass and the enemy was heading this way. I heard the ting of a bullet fly by us, and I dropped to the ground. I had to get him behind some cover before the sniper got us.

  “Can you walk?” I asked.

  I helped him rise and lean into me for support, and we hobbled together back to camp, where I sat him down behind a tent near the bottom of a trail that led up the mountains. I wanted to get to the peak so I could look for orange flashes in the night and determine where the shooters were. I was nearly to the crest when I heard panicked screams and spotted Iranian soldiers retreating from the west, racing through our encampment, rousting everyone out of their tents. Our men were surrendering, but there was nowhere to run, as machine-gun fire erupted in a ring around camp, and men ran in every direction, firing their last bullets randomly, hoping to at least take one down before their own slaughter. It was over. We were being annihilated. I ran back down the path and flopped down next to the injured soldier. I turned my rifle over in my hands and then rested the barrel under my chin. He reached over and pulled the gun out of my hands.

  “Hey, what are you doing? It’s not over yet! Climb back up and use your last bullets to kill a few more!”

  His voice snapped me out of it, and I started back up the mountain. The gunfire had stopped for the moment, and when I looked over the ridge to the valley below, I saw dozens of my men, pressed in together with their hands on their heads, guns pointed at them. I didn’t wait to see what was going to happen next. I ran, stumbling in the dark, down the path and away from camp. And right into the barrel of a gun.

  I dropped my rifle and lifted my hands ever so slowly. My captor pushed my own weapon into my back, and I could hear explosions now as he guided me toward the other prisoners. I put my hands on my head and looked at my feet, blending into the crowd. I should have killed myself when I had the chance. Figures, I was too cowardly and the price I paid for it was getting caught at the very last minute of the war. But I did have one tiny piece of luck. There was the barest of moonlight, and I just might be able to slip away in the pandemonium. I looked at the prisoner next to me and tapped him on the shoulder. I nodded toward the mountains, indicating that I was going to make a run for it, and he nodded yes. I counted to three, and we peeled off into the night, running like two men with nothing left to lose. The explosions and shouting covered the sound of our footsteps as we huffed up the trails and ducked into a cave.

  At daybreak, the firefight was still crackling. My companion wanted to run north, higher into the mountains. That was rebel territory, and I argued that it would be safer to run east, deeper into Iran, but he was adamant, so we went our separate ways. I scurried through the bushes, in what I thought was the best route, but then the gunfire got louder. I spotted a small depression at the bottom of a hill and hopped into it, crouching into the smallest ball I could make with my body. Then I felt grains of sand fall into the collar of my shirt. I looked up and saw two shadows. Then I felt a gun barrel rest on the crown of my head. One of the shadows knew Persian.

  “Don’t move, motherfucker.”

  TWELVE

  SPECIAL PRISON

  If the calendar I’d scratched into the cave wall was accurate, it had been almost two years since I’d seen the sun. After marching us blindfolded out of the mountain, we were driven eleven hours back across Iran to the western border. During the ride, I could only catch glimpses of shapes where light leaked into my blindfold, but my body responded to the warmth of the sun like a stooped-over plant that had suddenly been moved into the light, my muscles injected with instant strength and my skeleton stretched taller, photosynthesis restored. When the bus finally stopped and my blindfold was removed, I had to squeeze my eyes shut against the harsh light and wait for the white circles to stop swimming behind my eyelids before I could try again.

  When I finally found my equilibrium, I was standing in a dirt courtyard with ten-foot tan walls on all sides, topped with coiled razor wire. We were at a military base in a city called Arak. Even though we were still imprisoned, above the walls there was so, so much to see. My gaze rolled over the jagged rust-colored mountaintops, lingering on the clouds as they scudded across the summits, shape-shifting into white mushrooms, then spaceships, then steam. There was a date palm in the courtyard, with its outstretched fronds like a mother’s protective arms, welcoming us to rest in her shade, and I noticed the diamond-shaped pattern in the bark of her trunk, which reminded me of the net that was lowered into our cave at Sang Bast. The colorful roar of the outside world was enthralling, and for a second I felt so happy that if roots had suddenly shot down from my feet and anchored me in place, I would have been pleased to live in that one spot forever, just noticing everything.

  When the guards at Sang Bast told us we were being sent to a “special prison,” they said it with a sneer. The Iranians had converted a section of their Arak military base into three adjoining prisons, one for regular enlisted men like me, another for the volunteer militia members, and a third one for the high-ranking Iraqi officers. The barracks were reserved for POWs culled from prison camps all over Iran who were deemed the “unteachable” inmates who stubbornly stayed loyal to Saddam. So I expected to walk into a torture chamber, but Arak might as well have been a hookah bar compared to where I’d come from.

  Our cells were unlocked from six in the morning until six in the evening, so we could go outside to the courtyard, spending our free time any way we pleased. There were no forced prayers or chants, and they fed us more stew, bread, and rice, sometimes even giving us fruit, so that we were no longer so hungry and sick. Our rooms were in a low-slung, U-shaped building facing the warden’s office, and guard towers marked all four corners of the compound. The cells were ten feet by ten feet, with windows, and contained about twenty or twenty-five men each, so tight we had to sleep on the floo
r head to toe like spoons. But compared to the caves, this was a mild complaint. Twice a week, inmates from all three prisons could mingle at mealtimes.

  Even the guards, low-ranking grunts in their early twenties who were sent to Arak for prison duty as punishment, went easy on us, some even confiding that they had a low opinion of the Islamic Revolution. Many were dirt poor, from Baluchistan Province, which shares a border with Pakistan, and because of their mixed Iranian-Pakistani blood, they were considered second-class ethnic minorities in Iran. They complained of discrimination by “pure” Persians who singled them out for the lowliest job in the military—babysitting enemy prisoners. In this way, the guards felt imprisoned, too, and sympathized with us, some even sharing their cigarettes and teaching us Farsi words. They worked at less than half-speed, coming by only sporadically to check on us, just to make sure we weren’t digging holes to escape. I enlisted one of the guards to tutor me in Farsi in exchange for Arabic lessons, and within a year I could understand most of what he was saying. I couldn’t hold a debate about world affairs, but I could converse about the need for soap or a blanket or an aspirin.

  Even the warden was a pretty decent guy, giving us a couple hours notice before he’d inspect our rooms. He let us call him by the Farsi word for “colonel,” Sarhang, and often called on me to translate between him and the prisoners. Within eighteen months, when the inmates held an election and chose me as their spokesman and prison translator, Sarhang gave me my own cell next to his office, where he could easily summon me to interpret when prisoners needed to see a doctor or he needed to make announcements to the inmates. Besides privacy, my new quarters had a few upgrades: a small wooden desk and chair, an electric teapot, a cup, and a spoon. I hadn’t felt this rich since my restaurant days, when I wore a Rolex watch and vacationed in Morocco.

  We found many ways to pass the time. Some of the prisoners became excellent craftsmen, using spoons or their fingernails to carve date pits into miniature roses and faces and animals, then stringing the beads into rosaries and necklaces, using thread they’d pulled from their blankets. They found rocks in the yard and carved and polished them into tigers and squirrels and soaring birds. Some men spent a long time shaving with sharpened stones, and one guy even used tweezers to make his grooming ritual last longer. The way we read books was by telling long stories, and I continued recounting all five Bruce Lee movies in an episodic fashion, embellishing the storyline here, twisting the plot there, and blending scenes from different films so the movies never sounded the same twice, or like any Bruce Lee movie they had already seen. Something about Lee’s personality, his attention to physical and mental strength, appealed to the prisoners’ need to make something useful out of their rage and helplessness. Often I demonstrated Lee’s moves while telling my stories, and the men became interested in martial arts and wanted to learn it for themselves. So I started giving lessons.