I, Who Did Not Die

by Zahed Haftlang

  “We are neighbors, we are two brother nations of Muslims. We have no feud with Iran; it’s America and Israel that started the feud between us,” I said.

  The bigwig practically kissed me. I saw my opening and asked him when we would be exchanged back to Iraq.

  “Don’t worry, son. The UN is negotiating bilaterally. There should be an answer soon.”

  Eight months later, Iranian officials showed up and read some prisoners’ names off a list. I peeked at the paper and saw that it said “International Committee of the Red Cross” on the top. During the war, the Red Cross had tried to document all the POWs, but they were denied access to many of the prisons in Iran. I’d never seen a Red Cross worker in any of the prisons I’d been in. The prisoners whose names were called today were the lucky ones who had been documented elsewhere, and now, because they existed on paper, they were being freed. Which begged the morbid question, what about the rest of us, who technically didn’t exist? When the chosen ones got on the bus the next morning, were the rest of us going to be taken out back and “disappeared”? Nobody said this out loud, of course, but it’s what we all were thinking when we shuffled back to our cells that night.

  The world had forgotten us.

  The men who didn’t make the cut got busy writing notes to be delivered by the eighty men who were leaving. They carefully unwrapped paper from cigarette butts and, using syringes they’d stolen from the clinic and filled with ink made out of cigarette ash and soapy water, wrote notes to their families in miniscule script.

  The next morning, the soon-to-be-free were lined up on one side of the yard, waiting for the bus. I joined the throng trying to thrust notes at them, but instead I looked each one in the eye and asked them straight from my heart, “Please, if you go to Basra, find my family. Tell them I’m alive.”

  FIFTEEN

  GRAVESTONE

  Sometimes when you pray for something, a different prayer gets answered instead. I had begged Mira Sahib to kill me, but I should’ve known he’d never get rid of his court jester. Prison camp in Ramadi was severely lacking in entertainment—there was no television, no music, and no women—so how else were the guards going to amuse themselves if they didn’t have me to toss around?

  I wished for the sweet release of death, but instead I got something better. I got resolve. It came after a dream. In it, some force was coaxing me to walk across a canyon on a tightrope. Fall, and I would be consumed by the flames below. Succeed, and freedom waited on the other side. I was terrified, because people ahead of me were falling and the rope was swaying perilously, but I lowered my center of gravity and duck-walked across. When I awoke, I felt like I had a magic force field.

  Prison was nothing more than a silent battle of wills, and all my life I’d won that particular contest. All I had to do was outlast my captors, because this couldn’t go on forever. Energy coursed through me as I rose, imagining a steel rod inside me, stretching from the base of my skull through my spine, and anchoring me to the ground. I took a step, then another. And what do you know—I, Zahed Haftlang, the drooling chai wallah from Masjed Soleyman, had shaken off his tremor. Just like that.

  “I can walk!” I shouted, waking up the cell with syllables as clear as gongs. All my neurons were firing in the right order again. I silently dared the officers to toss me in the sewer again. I’d kick their asses—with my mind.

  But I never got the chance. Just days later, the guards woke the whole camp up before sunrise. Normally, when you got a wake-up call before the sun, you were a dead man. Executions were always done before dawn, and you were lucky if you got a quick bullet because otherwise it was a beheading or a hanging, and not the nice, quick kind of hanging. They hanged you so that just your toes scraped on the ground and you died after you finally gave up trying to stand on your tiptoes. But surely they couldn’t be planning to kill all of us?

  We assembled in neat, single-file rows facing the platform in the courtyard, where Mira Sahib was pacing absentmindedly and moving a baton from one armpit to the other. Usually, during the daily count I stood in the back to avoid his gaze, but this time I stood front and center. To my left and right, men were trembling, whispering to Allah for mercy.

  Mira Sahib blasted his whistle, and all sound stopped. Then he extended his right arm, palm up, and swept it dramatically in an arc in front of his chest, like he was Rumi himself about to recite a poem. He pronounced each word slowly and deliberately as if his sentences were being recorded for all eternity.

  “Your imprisonment has come to an end!” he boomed. “May you be enlightened and aware for the rest of your life, so the steps you take never lead back to Ramadi. As of this moment, you are guests at this camp. In a few days, the Red Cross will release you to your homeland.”

  There was a split second of absolute silence, as everyone needed a moment to absorb the sentences to make sure they had heard them correctly. Then we became euphoria itself, one ecstatic whirling dervish made up of hundreds of interlocked arms as we jumped together, dancing and crying with joy. The sensation was like a free fall, the same weightlessness I felt jumping off a cliff into the river as a kid, my skin zinging with the anticipation of impact with cool water. I couldn’t speak, but I could laugh. And I laughed and laughed and laughed. It was suddenly so funny to me how the universe kept trying to kill me, and I kept wiggling out of it every stinking time. We didn’t ask why we were suddenly being let go, but I doubt it was because the Iraqis suddenly had a change of heart. If they had hearts at all, they would have let us go two years ago when the war was over. But I certainly wasn’t going to argue. The International Committee of the Red Cross was coming to rescue us, and that’s all that mattered. I clapped and sang and hopped with everyone else like I’d just been given a billion dollars. Okay, assholes, you asked for a belly dance . . . well, here . . . it . . . is! I shimmy-shaked all over that prison yard, moving to the beat of my own private mantra: two years, four months, seventeen days, eight hours, and twenty-three minutes. Two years, four months, seventeen days, eight hours, and twenty-three minutes. Two years, four months . . .

  As if on cue, a white SUV painted with red crosses pulled up in the middle of our celebration, and I turned to see three men and a woman get out. The sight of a female—a non-Muslim female without a hijab, at that—took my breath, and I stared at her even though I knew it was impolite. Her blond hair and brush of pink lipstick were like magnets pulling my eyeballs. Even from far away I could glimpse the whiteness of her teeth and smell the rose petals in her perfume. We stopped dancing so we could follow her every movement while the Red Cross recorded our names, officially moving us from the missing-in-action column to the POW column. Apparently, our captors had fallen down on their international promises to provide the Red Cross with prisoner lists.

  The workers gave us each civilian clothes and closed-toe shoes, soap, and shampoo. After I washed and it was my turn for a medical exam, I kept my eyes on my new shoes in the presence of the French female doctor. Those shoes reminded me that I wasn’t dreaming, that my beatings had come to an end and I was going to get out of Ramadi, and I had to keep checking that they were still on my feet and this wasn’t a dream. Also, I was self-conscious in front of a woman, and was afraid that if I looked up, I’d stare again. With Agha-ye Ahmadi translating, the doctor said my tendons were destroyed by hanging from my thumbs and I would need surgery. She must have thought I was an idiot, staring at the ground without a response.

  “Comprenez-vous, monsieur?”

  Her voice was happy and innocent, like the peep of a songbird, and when she called me “mister,” my eyes filled with tears. I had forgotten what respect felt like, or that I was deserving of it. I had a flashback to my hospital room in Masjed Soleyman and Mina asking me what temperature of water I preferred. The doctor rested a manicured hand on my shoulder until my sobs subsided and I could explain that I missed my fiancée and why we would never be able to marry. The doctor took me in her embrace and gently rubbed my back while mak
ing a shushing noise, just like a mother would. I let her, desperate to feel kindness again, to feel safety. She said something that sounded like flute notes again.

  “Compassion is what makes the human face lovely, and love makes the mind beautiful,” Agha-ye translated. “Even now, compassion and love have roots in your soul because in spite of everything, you remember Mina.”

  I lifted my head from her shoulder and focused on the gold cross she wore around her neck.

  “Merci,” I said.

  I took her words with me that night when I slept outside in the dirt, looking up at the stars. She might have been right, that somewhere, buried deep inside me, was a dormant seed of good that one day might grow again. I let myself ponder this, with my belly full of a Red Cross buffet of chicken and tomatoes and sangak flatbread. I stretched my gaze all the way to the bright pinpricks of light in the sky. Now that we were technically free men, there was no way I was ever going to sleep in a cell again and miss looking at an expanse as great as this.

  It took four days for the Red Cross to process all our paperwork, and when it was finally time to board the twenty-two freedom buses that would take us to Iran, the Iraqi officers stood off to one side to watch us depart. Mira Sahib was there, and as I neared him, I lifted my gaze and looked for the first time directly into his eyes. Never before had I, or anyone, dared such a disrespectful thing. I needed him to see that I was a person, not property, so I raised my chin until we were facing each other man to man. His irises were golden, like the light of sunset falling on sand, and intensely arresting, like every part of his physique. It’s almost as if he hypnotized me with them, because I stood in place and searched those eyes as if they could tell me why their owner could have such a twisted mind inside such a lovely body. I couldn’t help but think what a waste of a perfect specimen he was. What happened to you? I wondered. Did you have a father who beat you, too?

  Mira Sahib did not appreciate this. He wasn’t about to let me go without reminding me of the pecking order. He leaned in so that we were nose to nose and growled, “That so, motherfucker?”

  I jumped back, as if he had spit on me. All these months I had resisted the urge to fight back, but now there was no holding back. Oh, no, Mira Sahib, you don’t get to insult me anymore. I unbuttoned my pants, pulled down my underwear, shook side to side, and waggled my penis at him, while pointing at it with both hands just in case he missed the message: “Get a ladder and climb on this!”

  I didn’t even have time to pull my pants back up. Mira Sahib lunged, and with a hand that could palm a watermelon, he hooked a finger in my nostril and his thumb in my mouth and flung me like a rag doll into a cinder-block wall. I felt my nostril tear and heard a sharp crack as my jaw collided with cement. I spat blood and a few teeth, and my ears rang louder than an army of mosquitoes. But this time, instead of stepping back to watch the beating, the guards formed a safety perimeter around me as Red Cross workers pulled Mira Sahib away and put him in handcuffs. My nose and jaw were broken, and the French doctor insisted I stay in Iraq for surgery, but I refused. I didn’t trust an Arab doctor to take proper care of me, I protested, eventually convincing the Red Cross workers that I could survive on painkillers until I got into Iran. After much arguing, I finally got put on the last Red Cross bus in the caravan. I hobbled aboard to a chorus of cheers and applause and shout-outs to the Prophet Muhammad, and collapsed into a plush seat next to my surrogate grandpa, Amu Safar. Air-conditioning cascaded over my skin.

  “You are a madman,” he said, turning to examine my swollen face.

  The drugs were kicking in, so I was able to manage a bloody grin. Amu Safar’s eyes crinkled, and then he erupted in a full-blown belly laugh, the first time I’d ever seen him do that. He slapped his shins and shook his head, shaking hard like someone was holding him down and tickling his ribs, and it lasted so long that I worried the old guy’s heart might seize. But it was glorious to behold, and it kind of took the sting out of my injuries.

  “You’re just lucky he didn’t rip off your dick.”

  I giggled alongside him, drooling blood and making a general fool of myself, which only sent us on another laughing fit. What I’d done was totally stupid, yes, but also totally worth it.

  As we got closer to the Iranian border, the singing on the bus intensified, and the passengers began shouting at our potbellied Iraqi bus driver to go faster. I think they were starting to piss him off, calling him “carriage driver” and telling him he needed to hurry up, because he peeled off the highway on a side street just outside Fallujah, abandoning the Red Cross bus caravan. We were supposed to take the less inhabited belt road around the city, which was a safer route through enemy territory. Now, we were heading directly into the mouth of the beast. As we looked out the windows, trying to figure out where we were, the Red Cross worker assigned to our bus began walking up the aisle to question the driver. But before she could get there, he inexplicably parked before a crowd of a couple hundred Iraqi men, women, and children gathered on a city street corner, bolted off the bus, and disappeared into the throng.

  Suddenly the crowd outside turned into a militia. Bricks and rocks crashed through the windows of the bus, sending glass shards raining down on us as we scrambled to the floor for cover. I heard fists pounding on the sides of the bus and felt it start to rock from side to side on its chassis as the mob closed in, hurling epithets and calling us Majusis—pre-Islam fire worshippers. Once the windows were smashed out, they threw rotten tomatoes and rocks in. A plastic bag with a brown liquid sailed in and landed on Safar’s back.

  “What the hell?” he said.

  I plucked it off and saw that it contained a foul mixture of dung and water. I lobbed it back out the window. By now the Red Cross worker was standing at the front of the bus with her Colt 45 pistol raised in one hand and her walkie-talkie in the other, frantically calling for help. The crowd was throwing blankets now over the broken windows, so they could climb in from the outside, and we took off our shoes and whapped their knuckles to fight them off. Some of the dung bombs burst, ruining our fresh clothes and filling the clean bus with a musty farm stink. Clearly, these Baathis had been waiting for us, and our driver had set us up. They had made their ammunition in advance, and who knows what else they had planned for us once they got inside. I was livid. No way was I going to survive war and prison camp only to be killed by a bunch of backward peasants with homemade weapons.

  Mercifully, an Iraqi military jeep roared up with a mounted machine gun in the back, and all the officers had to do was fire a few rounds into the air and the locusts scattered. The whole thing was over in less than ten minutes. But that’s all the time it took to turn us from clean-shaven back to stinky, bloody subhumans. An Iraqi admiral boarded the bus and spoke with the Red Cross worker, and he instructed her to have us driven to the nearest military compound so we could shower and wash our clothes. After we cleaned up as best we could, the military gave us a new driver and some medical kits, and we continued on toward Iran, shivering in our wet clothes and fixing our wounds with bandages and tape. This time, nobody harassed the driver.

  The Iraqis would have to work harder than that to break our spirit. Each time we passed a road sign showing the decreasing distance to Iran, we let out a huge cheer. Forty kilometers, huzzah! Thirty kilometers, ho! The sun shone brighter and the air smelled sweeter the closer we got, and I’m not just being poetic. Everything really did become more enchanting as we neared the motherland. Finally, we reached the Mundharieh-Khosravi border checkpoint, where buses with Iraqi prisoners were parked, ready to be exchanged bus for bus with us. But before we could touch Iranian soil, we first had to be received by a bunch of political and military officials, and smile like national heroes as they hugged us and passed a Koran over our heads and gave praise to God, Muhammad, and his family. Helicopters flew overhead in ceremonial circles, and the Iraqi military was marching in formations. I don’t know whom the show was for, because no one from the public was allowed to see the
top-secret prisoner exchanges. I noticed that the Iraqis waiting to be exchanged wore suits and looked well fed and strong; they could have passed for businessmen waiting for a commuter train. We, by comparison, were gaunt and disheveled in ill-fitting donated clothes, with the faint odor of cow dung.

  Then finally it was time to step out of the neutral zone to our respective sides. Amu Safar and I walked together, and he broke into a run the moment he spotted an Iranian guard.

  “Am I on Iranian soil?” he asked.

  The guard pointed. “A few more meters that way.”

  “Show me exactly,” Amu Safar demanded.

  The guard took Safar’s trembling elbow and guided him a few more paces. There was no line or marker, just sand all around.

  “Are we really here?” he asked.

  “Yes, Uncle,” I said. “This is Iran.”

  Amu Safar dropped to his knees and collected fistfuls of sand, letting it spill through his fingers as he swayed back and forth, his eyes squeezed tight, his head turned skyward. He keened with a sound halfway between a chant and a wail.

  “Hello, Iran; hello, Mother; hello, Cyrus the Great; hello, my everything . . .”

  His rapture multiplied all around me, as men kissed the ground and thanked their country for waiting for them. I exhaled for what felt like the first time since I was a small child. Amu Safar was now praying, bent over his knees with his forehead on the sand. I gave him a few minutes to get reacquainted with his country. Then I cleared my throat, overloudly.

  “What are you going to do now, Amu Safar?” I asked.

  He didn’t respond.

  “Amu?”

  I nudged him with my foot.

  I crouched down and shook him, then pushed him to one side and saw the all-too-familiar fixed stare. The old man’s heart had thumped its last thump.

  “Paramedic!” I screamed.

  What happened next was a blur. I remember the red and white of an ambulance, a sheet being draped over my friend, and the sound of whirring helicopter blades as someone helped me board a helicopter. The chopper landed on top of a hospital in Tehran, where I underwent surgery on my tendons, nose, eardrums, and jaw. It took six weeks to recover, during which time I fell into the most exhausted sleep of my life, and then finally a Sepah military officer drove me home to Masjed Soleyman.