I, Who Did Not Die

by Zahed Haftlang

  Inside a Red Cross tent set up outside the mosque, we had a choice to file a refugee claim to stay in Iran or get on a bus for Iraq, and let’s just say the buses filled up fast. As we boarded, the Iranians tried to hand each one of us a Koran as a goodwill gesture, but I just had to laugh. Arabs wrote the Koran, and now they wanted to give us a copy of it? We dismissed the offering and chanted for our country, right there on Persian soil.

  We are victorious, victorious!

  God’s banner is with us.

  Who dares enter our lands?

  Who dares touch our soil?

  We are the ones whose arms can never be twisted.

  Paradise! Paradise is our nation!

  This time, I looked out the bus windows. And I saw green again, the color of things that are alive. After so many years in gray and beige, green was a revelation. My eyes drank in the mountains and the palm fronds. We pointed out birds and dogs and cats, clamoring to see another creature as if we were touring a zoo. Unfortunately, we did not see any pretty ladies. As we approached the arched gate at the border, I saw a line of Iraqi guards and a huge crowd of civilians waiting behind them. Because our bus bore Iranian flags, we could not cross the border into Iraq and had to stop just on the Iranian side of the big gate. As we stepped out, trumpets in the Iraqi military band started bleating and I walked through the archway and received handshakes and hugs from some important military officials, one of whom put a bag of money in my hand. A heavy one.

  Our names had not been released to our families, so the crowd that awaited us behind a waist-high police barrier was made up of regulars who showed up every time a prisoner release was announced, hoping their relatives would be freed. There was so much confusion as people shouted out names and prisoners hollered back, while other prisoners kissed the ground and splashed sand on their faces. Ecstatic screams of reunion mixed with the blaring of the band, and I stood off to the side and tried to get my bearings, slowly making my way toward the throng, when I heard a woman’s voice cut through the noise, clear as if she had turned to me in the kitchen of Bruce Lee Restaurant and said “The eggplant girl is here.” My sister Samera. I searched faces and spotted her, tugging on an officer’s sleeve and talking intently to him. The officer turned and put both hands to his mouth and shouted over the cacophony: “Who among you is Najah Mohammad Hossein Aboud?”

  “Me!”

  Samera slid her eyes over my broken teeth, my sunken cheeks, and my beard, and shook her head as if to say, “No, you have the wrong guy.” The brother she knew had a healthy ripeness to his body, but now I stood before her like a dehydrated and gnarled tree trunk.

  “Samera,” I said.

  She jumped, as if I had pinched her.

  “Najah? Is this what you look like now?”

  Tears flowed down my cheeks as I took hold of the barrier with both hands and hopped over it and into her arms. She kissed my forehead and my cheeks and my nose, and I let myself collapse into her. It was a pink dream come to life, but I feared it would slip away and any moment I would wake up back in my prison cell. Then I felt someone tugging on my pants and saw a boy of about ten smiling at me.

  “Uncle!” he said, reaching his hands out for a hug.

  It would have been rude to deny him, so I obliged. Then like little chirping birds, I heard the words “Uncle, Uncle!” peeping all around me, as a chorus of little ones competed to hug me next. I looked up at my sister, who had been just a student in school the last time I saw her.

  “Are they all yours?”

  “I have seven!”

  Each of their embraces was a little injection of painkiller. I promised myself I would do everything I could to safeguard their innocence. Samera and her husband took me home to their house in Baghdad, and we drove through a war-scarred country that I didn’t recognize. Every street had vacant, bombed-out buildings that had never been repaired. My restaurant was now a weedy lot. Gas stations were closed, and when I asked why there were so many empty shelves in the grocery stores, all I got was a shrug and a vague answer about economic sanctions. I saw beggars stooping over to pick up cigarette butts and shuddered at how undignified poverty had made my people. Even the bag of money by my side was a joke—the dinar was so devalued that what I thought was a fortune turned out to be about fifty bucks.

  Over the next few days, my life fast-forwarded through births and funerals as I raced to catch up with all that had happened in my absence. My family had assumed, after hearing nothing for so long, that I had died in the war, and the shelling had gotten so bad in Basra that they had abandoned the family home and scattered. My father, who had never hid his opinion that Saddam was to blame for the war, fled to Jordan, where he could say such things without fear of execution. My mother had died of a heart attack, and whether that was because of the stress of war, we’ll never know. My older brother, Jasem, had emigrated to Canada, along with my sister Fatemah and my brother Ali. Samera and Samir were still in Baghdad, and in Basra just my sister Karima, the only one who knew I had a fiancée and son. And she was dying.

  A cousin gave me a ride to Basra, and it was just in time. Cancer had eroded Karima’s spine and she had withered to just a wisp of what she once was, and I felt her bones through her bathrobe as she struggled to rise from bed to hug me. Talking exhausted her, so I mostly stayed by her side and held her hand, sadness swallowing me slowly, like a snake devouring a mouse. I selfishly wished I had been kept a few more months in prison so I wouldn’t have had to see her die like this. Whenever she opened her eyes and smiled at me, I told myself I was bringing her comfort, but I could tell that having me there was also taxing her stamina. After three days, I kissed her good-bye for what I already knew was the last time and left her in the care of her nurses. On the way back to Baghdad, I asked my cousin to drive past Alyaa’s home, but I couldn’t find it. The buildings were so damaged that nothing was recognizable anymore. We tried a few other streets in case I was on the wrong one and finally gave up. I felt the last string holding my heart together snap.

  I moved into my brother Samir’s one-bedroom house with his wife and three children, but without a job, I was constantly in the way. Commerce had ground to a halt in Baghdad, so I did what I’ve always done: I hustled. I took a shallow wooden box, attached some straps to it, and peddled cigarettes and candies and bags of chips on the street just to survive. At night, I sometimes slept outside rather than be a burden on my younger brother and his family. My life had become quite ironic. When I was in prison, all I had wanted was to get out, blissfully ignorant of what was waiting for me beyond the walls. Now that I was free, I actually longed to be cut off from the outside world, to have the certainty of regular meals and an assigned place to sleep. I was more despondent, and hungrier, than I’d been in the last few years.

  Two weeks into my new career as a peddler, the military intelligence office tracked me down and called me in for an interview. Finally, I thought, they were going to compensate the POWs with military benefits. But that was before I knew “interview” was the cover word for “interrogation.” I showed up at the appointed time and recognized dozens of fellow prisoners in the lobby. We were called together in a group before an Iraqi military officer, who eyed us warily. He wanted to know if we’d been subjected to Iranian “reeducation” programs while in prison. Basically, he wanted to know if we’d been brainwashed into becoming enemy sympathizers by all those forced religious classes.

  “If you all are truly Saddam loyalists, why didn’t you commit suicide before letting yourselves get captured?”

  We were stunned into silence. When he got no response, he tried the question a different way. “Did you surrender so the enemy could take your tanks?”

  He couldn’t be serious. After seventeen years, he was accusing me of being a traitor? In Khorramshahr, I saw our own men running back to Basra, sprinting for the Shatt River and diving in. Those were the cowards who gave up, not the people like me who kept fighting and got captured. I boiled inside, but saying an
ything at this point would only make this guy even more suspicious. My God. We were the prisoners who had been singled out for torture because we stood with Saddam, and now instead of thanking us, Saddam’s men were questioning our loyalty? This was a bigger blow to my self-esteem than being a prisoner, more devastating than fighting a war that had gone nowhere. I had given up everything for my country, and now my country wanted nothing to do with me. In Saddam’s Iraq, you were either a martyr or a war hero. A POW was an embarrassing thing in between: a national disgrace at best, a spy at worst.

  “The government is going through tough economic times,” our interrogator said, explaining why we’d be getting no government assistance. “Once the sanctions are lifted, we will review your circumstances.”

  His words were bullets, and they lodged inside the last remaining granule of dignity I held deep in my chest. I left his office without any hope that I would be able to get back on my feet. I knew my family loved me, but it was humiliating to go from being the family success story, spoiling all the siblings with my restaurant fortune, to barely one step above a beggar, cajoling strangers to buy marked-up treats they couldn’t afford from my wooden box. My brothers and sisters were barely scraping by themselves, and I was nothing more than a burden. I shoved thoughts of Alyaa and Amjad to the back of my mind, because I couldn’t let her see how low I had sunk. I needed to be able to support my family before I could get my family back. Iraq was a dead end, and I needed to leave if I was going to survive.

  The next morning Samir and I went downtown, with fifty precious dollars in my pocket, to bribe government workers to issue me a passport. We took our places in a fantastically long line at nine in the morning when the office opened, and three hours later, it was finally my turn. The passport officer looked at my photos and my military papers, and I could see a question forming on his brow.

  “Where have you been all these years?”

  “POW.”

  He folded my documents and handed them back to me.

  “We received orders that returning POWs are not permitted to leave Iraq for one year.”

  In other words, the regime was so paranoid that returning prisoners might be spies that it was keeping them under tight surveillance. He lifted two fingers in the air, signaling the person in line behind me to step forward.

  “How dare you!” I shouted. I knew it wasn’t his fault, but he was the only one there to hear my complaint.

  He turned his attention back to me with a poison smile. “Sir, it’s time for you to get the hell out.”

  Samir hooked me by the elbow and tugged me out of line. I was a rabid dog yanking on a chain, so angry I could already feel seventeen years of stifled rage connecting with that condescending bastard’s chin.

  “There’s nothing we can do but wait,” Samir said as he flagged down a taxi.

  I slammed the car door and immediately began chain smoking, shouting to my captive audience.

  “Our country destroyed us! Cut off our air supply! All those years in prison, for nothing!”

  I paused only to catch my breath and take a drag on my cigarette.

  “We stayed loyal to our country, and this is our reward? To be a suspect? We give up our lives only to be trapped like prisoners by our own government?”

  The driver pulled to the side of the road, cut the engine, and turned his grizzled face to study me. I could tell right away that he was one of those older men who had had a prestigious job once, before the war. Iraq was full of taxis being driven by former lawyers and professors and scientists.

  “Excuse me, may I ask you a question?” he asked.

  At first I thought he was going to toss us out, but his expression was genuinely curious. The volcano inside me settled from boil to simmer.

  “What happened to you, son? You seem to be exploding.”

  I told him my life story in three minutes or three hours, the words tumbling out in an unstoppable rush. When I finished, he opened the glove compartment and took out a piece of paper. He drew a cross, then a checkmark on top of it.

  “Try again tomorrow. Give this paper to the same officer who denied you.”

  Samir and I exchanged glances, but I put the note in my pocket as if its message contained the meaning of the universe and shook the driver’s hand as I got out.

  “Looney bird,” I muttered, watching him drive away.

  “Hey, you got a better plan?” Samir asked.

  He did have a point. Out of curiosity or desperation—take your pick—the next morning we handed the coded message to the same officer. This time, he snapped his heels together and saluted the paper, which I found comical yet also somewhat fascinating. He asked for my photos and for a phone number so he could call me when my passport was ready. I reached in my pocket to hand him the bribe, but he waved it away.

  “That won’t be necessary,” he said. Then he lifted his two fingers again. “Next!”

  We walked away, stunned. And sure enough, that afternoon, my brother’s phone rang with someone asking for me by name. The voice on the other end of the line said he was calling on behalf of a General somebody—I was so astonished that I didn’t catch the name.

  “General? I don’t know any generals.”

  The voice ordered me to go to the glitziest hotel downtown, the multistory one where the foreign dignitaries and journalists stayed that was encircled by a blast barrier. It was air-conditioned, for sure, and rumored to have a pool on the roof.

  “Why?”

  “Room nine. Now.”

  Then he hung up.

  “You’re going to need some clothes,” Samir said.

  We changed into the cleanest shirts he had and took a cab to the hotel, while my mind raced through the plots of American spy movies, where the unsuspecting hero walks right into a setup. I thought, What if Iraqi intelligence is behind this, and I go in the room and they put a gun with a silencer to my temple and off me? I have no idea who that taxi driver was, what that cross and checkmark meant, and I quite possibly just handed over my own death sentence. The taxi curved up the circular drive and stopped before a gilded entryway with bellhops flanking the door. My brother was about to go inside with me, but I put a hand on his arm and stopped him. He was innocent; he shouldn’t have to die because of anything I was wrapped up in.

  “Stay outside, away from the entrance,” I said. “If I’m not out in thirty minutes, I want you to run away.”

  A look of understanding came over him, as if he just realized that this might be a trap. Then he looked at me as if he was memorizing my face. He hugged me tight, and I went inside.

  The door to room nine opened a few inches and an army private peered at me through the crack.

  “ID?”

  I showed him my military ID card and then he slipped me an envelope. Inside was my passport, still warm from the printer. I tried to give him some money, but he looked away and shut the door. And within the hour, before anything could go wrong or be taken back, I was on a bus to Amman, Jordan, to find my father.

  He was living in a run-down house with seven young men who let him stay there for free in exchange for housekeeping. As undignified as it was for a university-educated former port official to scrub floors on his hands and knees, it must have been equally as jarring for him to see me looking like an old man of his generation. But as soon as we embraced, I began to believe that I just might get through my own hard times. I promised my father I would get us both back on our feet, and his roommates helped me find work buying leather jackets from Iraqi importers at the bus depot, which I then resold for a higher price on the streets of Jordan. Dad’s roommates generously cleared a spot for me in the house so I could sleep on the floor. Within a week, one of my father’s roommates let me use his cell phone to call my sister Fatemah in Canada. She said she would wire me money and then passed the phone to my brother Jasem.

  “I’m coming to see you,” he said.

  I had forgotten what it felt like to have a support system. I didn’t know how to
ask for help anymore, so they were offering it first, slowly reminding me what a family was for. I handed the phone back and felt something close to hope again.

  When Jasem showed up, I ran outside and we hugged and cried in each other’s arms for half an hour before we could compose ourselves. He had changed for the better, and was clearly now the handsome one in the family. He agreed.

  “Prison has ruined you,” he teased.

  That day was the first time I’d ever seen my father cry. Jasem took one look at our living situation and invited Dad and me to stay with him in a hotel for a few days of vacation. We had a warm meal in the hotel restaurant that night, and let me tell you, the whiskey went down quite pleasantly. On the fourth and final day of Jasem’s visit, he and I stopped at a bar. He took a shot of whiskey and plunked the glass down and winked at me. I mimicked him with a shot of my own, and he nodded in approval. Then he raised his hand and ordered two more shots, then turned to me.

  “Do you have courage?”

  “Of course! I will kill half the people in Amman if you just say the word!”

  “I just want you to be daring. I want you to save a life.”

  I put the second shot of whiskey back down and focused on what he was trying to tell me. Whatever he was getting at, it wasn’t small talk. He put an arm around my shoulders and pulled me closer and lowered his voice.

  “This is just between you and me. I’m going to give you my passport and you use it to get to Canada. Once you arrive, don’t worry, I’ll handle the rest.”

  “You’re drunk,” I said, tilting him back toward his own barstool. He tilted right back toward me.