Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War

by Megan K. Stack

  “I’m so happy you came,” I cried in relief.

  “Me too.”

  “Let’s have some tea.”

  We climbed up to the disco restaurant, and I began to extract, piece by piece, the story of Ahmed.

  What did Ahmed think when he heard the war was coming? He didn’t know what to make of it. A dust storm tinted the air blood red for two days straight. Ahmed’s family thought it was an omen. The neighbors said it was the end of the world. His family had fled Baghdad for Karbala when the invasion began. They got so scared they dug pits in the yard, planning to hide underground if the fighting grew too intense. Ahmed dug for twelve hours without stopping, hollowing out useless craters, working just to feel his muscles ache, to create the illusion of action and control. “Everyone was afraid. The women, the children. You had to do something to make them less afraid, even if it’s a lie. You have to do something.

  “I was entirely sure they’d kick Saddam Hussein out, and I was glad. I was sure it would make a difference in five or ten years. Maybe our kids will face a different life, not like our life.”

  Ahmed had sailed through high school on smarts and taught himself perfect English by listening to BBC radio, but there was no money for college. He had to find work and prop up his family. His father, he told me that first afternoon in the Babylon Hotel, had “political problems.” In Iraq, political problems can mean anything. Politics are power, machismo, tribal pull, wasta. Even a casual squabble with the wrong person can swell ominously into a political problem. Ahmed’s father had a disagreement in the 1960s with a man Ahmed called, capital letters in his voice, “a Tikrit Guy”—a man from Saddam’s hometown and tribe. Ahmed’s father had shot the Tikrit Guy in the leg, and the grudge had never faded because grudges were a national sport. The Tikrit Guy had hounded Ahmed’s father for years, pulling strings to punish him at every turn. Ahmed’s father was arrested, imprisoned, and tortured three times under the old regime.

  The second time, Ahmed’s mother had sold everything they owned to raise $25,000. She’d given the cash to a corrupt official who, in turn, wrote a report claiming Ahmed’s father had been executed in the desert, closed his file, and set him free. That was back in 1981, before Ahmed was born. His father, after stopping home long enough to conceive Ahmed, had escaped to Kuwait and found work with a British oil company. When he finally made it home six years later, he’d stuck around long enough to get his wife pregnant again before vanishing back into the government’s clutches. This time his arrest was secret, and the family couldn’t track him down.

  “All those twenty months we were looking for my father,” Ahmed stared down into his teacup, memories dark and jumbled. “My mother was pregnant, her abdomen was getting big. We didn’t have a place to live so we were living in rental houses, we moved seven, eight times. We asked everyone. In the end we found a way to get him out of jail.”

  The family fled to Karbala, hoping to get off the Tikrit Guy’s radar. They stayed there until 1994, then moved to Najaf for a few years before finally, warily, creeping back to Baghdad.

  Those were long, grinding sanctions years, when Iraq lay frozen under Saddam and Ahmed plunged blindly into his youth. On languid summer days he’d sleep until afternoon, find his friends, look for pretty girls in the market, and thrust his telephone number into their fingers in a fit of hormones and hope. Buy a sweet, cold ice-cream cone, maybe see a movie. The hours clicked out in pool halls. “I’m a professor of billiards,” he says.

  At midnight he met the other runners for training, and they bounded like antelopes through the darkened streets, feet ponging off the blacktop, night hot as an oven’s breath. It was all in his voice: the boys moving like animals, the quiet intensity of the night, music slipping from parties, closed gates and silent windows and dark cars all sliding past the running boys. The possibility, and the youngness.

  Ahmed ran until he was one of the best endurance runners in the country. They paid him four dollars a month on the national team, but he didn’t run for the money; he ran because he loved it, because it cut his world into a simple, Manichean place, neatly divided between good and evil. It was combat as much as a race.

  “When you fight somebody you’re the good one and he’s the bad one. And if you defeat him, I can’t describe it when you live this moment. They say you’re the best.”

  Since the war, he had begun to lose his taste for running. He couldn’t run anymore in open spaces. The students at the university taunted him as he bounded past: “Hey crazy, what are you doing?” Gunfire cracked his concentration.

  “There is no emotion now.”

  His thoughts spun in circles, swallowed their tails, and his feet pounded to earth, over and over again. The students were ignorant, he thought. Many came from the south, same as his family. “They’ve been in darkness for the 1980s and 1990s, so what can you expect?”

  Why was there nowhere better for running?

  First, because there was a war. And second, because he was poor.

  He dreamed of being a rich man. Then he could buy himself a treadmill and train at home. He could stay inside the four walls of his house all day long; he would never have to leave. He could buy the luxury of his own prison, one he designed himself and loved.

  Instead he works a poor man’s job in a pharmacy. He hates it, and the pay is thin. His perfect English, the tongue he pieced together one word at a time during long, dark hours hunched over a transistor radio, is languishing. The words are slipping away. Sometimes he strikes up a quick conversation with the American soldiers, just for the practice, but they don’t say much. Hey, they say to Ahmed, what’s up? And then they move on. If Ahmed’s father sees him approach the soldiers, he’s in for a fierce fight. His father doesn’t want him speaking English on the streets; the neighbors might suspect Ahmed of working with the Americans. That’s where the money is. Ahmed knows it—doesn’t he know it? His friend came to him and offered him a job as a translator with the Americans. He won’t do it. Too dangerous, he says, and then his face twists up and he puts his teacup down and sets in to explain that he’s not afraid, per se, it’s just that his family can’t afford his death. This is the manly choice, he explains.

  “I don’t mind dying because I’m faithful. I have an idea that you’ll die on your day. But if I die, who will support my family? We don’t even have a house now.”

  Now he is talking quietly, glancing over his shoulder.

  “They killed one of my friends. He was working as a translator for the U.S. army. They took him from his home. His mother was worried. She called me and said, ‘I don’t know where he’s gone.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry.’ The next day they found him. They had cut his throat and wrote on a piece of paper, ‘Don’t work with foreigners or you will die,’ and they put it on his head. That made me cry for a week. He was twenty-six. He’d been working after the fall [of Saddam], but they threatened him and he left the job. I told him, ‘Don’t go back.’ I think he told his mother, ‘I’m going to sleep with my friends,’ but he was working. He didn’t want her to worry. Now his mother is completely destroyed.”

  Everybody is getting killed these days. You could be sitting out on the stoop, like Ahmed’s neighbor was a week ago, and wind up dead. Four militia thugs had rolled past, threatening people on the street. We’ll kill you, they said, we swear we’ll kill you. The neighbor punched their license plate into his cell phone. The gunmen saw. They made a U-turn, drove back to his house, and shot him cold. Just another disposable Iraqi soul, lifeless on a whim.

  “My neighbor was twenty-eight, with green eyes.” Ahmed has a habit of dragging his long, skinny hands down his face, as if tracing the shape of a mask. “So handsome.”

  That was why Ahmed’s father didn’t want his son to leave the house. That was why the two screamed and fought like cats, day after dreary day. Mostly, they fought out the classic struggle—a restless Ahmed demanding independence, his father steeped in worry for his safety. But it cut deeper in Baghdad. T
he war wasn’t everything; it’s just that it never went away. Ahmed was fighting the timeless battles of being twenty-three years old: for adulthood, for a path through a hard world, for love. But the war was tangled up in everything, not wholly responsible for his woes but tainting them, seeping into them, coloring everything.

  Another friend kept coming by the house. “I’m going to sneak into Europe,” he told Ahmed. “I’m going to get a fake passport. I know a guy. You speak English. We can find work. It will cost you $6,000.” “Give me a break,” Ahmed said. His friend went home, and then his mother started in. “Why don’t you go?” she demanded. “This could be good for us.” Ahmed stared at the ceiling all night. “I was thinking, if I go, what will they do? My father is sixty, what if he can’t work, who will support them? Even if I get there, maybe I’ll get caught.”

  He heard about a way to get to America, too, but it cost $12,000 and you didn’t even know if the passport was real or counterfeit. “Now just Chinese can go to America, by containers,” Ahmed said, and it was one of the many moments I realized that Ahmed paid a lot of attention, not only to the world around him, but to everything. All that information was loaded up behind those dark, angry eyes, and sometimes a crumb floated to the surface.

  Ahmed has some relatives in Seattle, and others in Minneapolis. His cousin came from America to spend a month, but he ended up taking off after five days. “He came and saw and said, ‘What’s this? It’s hell, it’s dead here.’ He got really upset.”

  One of his relatives has a company in America. He invited Ahmed to stay with him, work under the table for eight dollars an hour, and woo a woman into marriage before his ninety-day visa ran out. But how would he get a visa to begin with? His relative told him he needed to put $100,000 in a U.S. bank account. He might as well have told Ahmed to lasso the moon and water-ski over the Atlantic.

  Baghdad shifted like a kaleidoscope, the tortured fragments of the streets rearranging themselves into bloody walls, panicked faces, rubble piles, then scattering again. For a while, Ahmed’s feverish face looked to me like the face of a city.

  The trial of Saddam ground along that summer, but few people paid attention anymore. The Americans dropped two 500-pound bombs on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi one morning, but the insurgency was diffuse and powerful and protected by the tribes and, at any rate, the violence in those days had more to do with civil war than an anti-American insurgency. They’d stop buses of laborers, round up all the Sunnis, and slaughter them. The bodies turned up constantly—tortured, executed, handcuffed, blindfolded. A country in the throes of a nervous breakdown; every day was a long limp.

  I asked Suheil, one of the translators, how he could stand it. How Iraqis could bear to go on living like this. We were standing together in a room stuffed with computers and televisions, puzzling over another day of mass murder. Suheil fixed his thick glasses on his nose and answered immediately, precisely, as if he had been giving this very question a good deal of thought, just waiting for somebody to ask.

  “You can put a frog in boiling water and it will die immediately,” he said. “But if you put the frog in a pot of water and raise the temperature gradually, then the frog will survive even when the water is boiling. The frog survives because it’s not receiving the heat in a lump sum. There is something called adaptation. Iraqis have been prepared for this. They receive this gradually, gradually. When the regime fell the horrors increased, gradually and slowly.”

  Ahmed almost never dreamed. He couldn’t dream when he was depressed, only when he was happy, and since the war began, that was almost never. His family lived in a cramped rental house. Ahmed slept on a cushion on the hallway floor, lulled to sleep by the flash and croon of television. Sad songs, that’s what he liked, Turkish songs. Mickey Mouse, Popeye, and Sindbad until sleep swallowed him sweetly down. When he was lucky enough to dream, it was always about her. He dreamed she was driving a convertible in the summertime, no head scarf, hair streaming loose and free behind her. In the dream he stood on the side of the road and watched, yearning, as she passed him by. This was his girlfriend, Birak, a twenty-three-year-old temptress who tormented his days. Another night, after we had started to meet at the Babylon Hotel, he dreamed that she married him in an enormous hotel, four hundred floors arching into heaven like a layer cake of money and security, a sturdy tower of possibility and pleasant expectations. Ahmed, who could describe everything, had no words for the beauty of that dream.

  But that was a dream; daytime was different. In the morning his father came home from work as a night watchman and screamed at Ahmed for making too much noise, keeping him awake. Daylight meant the endless hunt for gasoline, which they needed for the generator. Ahmed and his father fought epic battles about that generator, driven half mad by the constant, ancient male pressure to keep it filled. In waking hours, his father fell into debt and decided to sell the refrigerator. Ahmed couldn’t bear it. “Next time, he’ll sell the cushion I sleep on. You wake up one day and you can’t find anything to sell.”

  So he gave his father all the money he had, sold his fancy mobile telephone and took a cheaper model. He wore his old clothes. Students at the university, other men, taunted his girlfriend, told her she shouldn’t waste time on a man whose prospects were so visibly shabby. “They tell her, why do you go with this guy? He always comes in the same clothes.”

  While I talk with Ahmed, she pouts and rolls her eyes and wiggles her feet, watching her shoes flash while he talks in English.

  “What do you think I should do about this?” Ahmed says one day in anguish.

  “About work?”

  “No,” he says, as if it’s a foolish guess. “About this girl. My friends said you have to love her for a while, maybe she’ll begin to think of you seriously. She makes me suspicious. She makes fun of me. I know why she does this. She don’t want to tell me the truth. She pretends most of the time, actually.”

  Ahmed was fighting to keep her. He was besotted, obsessed. Maybe he needed that to get through the days, the illusion of working for something, the promise of payoff, pretty and good. Ahmed scraped together spare money to take her to restaurants, sometimes. He took her to Internet cafés. But not too much, he added quickly. “There’s a lot of curious guys. She’s a very beautiful girl. And she’s not helping me with this. She says, ‘Why are you getting angry? There’s no reason to get angry.’ She says, ‘I can’t fall in love. Don’t talk to me about this subject.’ I said, ‘No problem.’ She’s faced a lot of bad things in the past.”

  She was torturing him; anybody could see that. Earlier in the war they’d dated for ten months. “The first sixty days we flew to the stars together,” he says, “so she got inside my heart.” But they squabbled and split. She started dating another student, a man Ahmed knew.

  “We don’t like each other, but we smile, face each other, say hello, how are you,” he muttered darkly.

  Seven months after they’d broken up, they bumped into each other on campus. All the feelings came back to Ahmed, all in a wash. He began to spend a little time with her, just friends, they agreed. She needed to go to the doctor to check on a skin rash, and he gave her a lift. Afterward Ahmed bared his soul. I’m starting to love you, he said. I can’t call you my friend. Now they were together every day, and Ahmed was living a sweet torment.

  “I can’t reach anything with her!” he told me woefully. “She always gives you a different opinion. I don’t know how I should do, what I should think. It’s strange for me, because I’m always thinking the right thing, doing the right thing. Not with her. Sometimes she’s trying to trick me. I’m sure of something, but she says, ‘No, it’s not like that.’”

  She knew when she was being discussed; she’d sit up straighter, bat her hazel eyes, and rub against her chair like a cat, in an awkward, exaggerated imitation of wiles she’d seen on television. She was all dressed up in a skirt cut from tulle like a ballerina’s tutu, woven with sequins of silver and gold, tottering forth on high heels, chubby finge
rs heavy with rings, eyes weighted down under thick, runny makeup.

  Ahmed and I both looked at her.

  “The one thing I dreamed in my life was to make her love me,” he said balefully. “But it’s too hard.”

  With Ahmed, I couldn’t make it clean. Why did he keep coming, risking his life? Was he bored, curious, did he hope I’d give him money or help him get a visa? Maybe he just wanted to impress his girlfriend, to show her that an American woman found him so fascinating she bought him tea and spent hours copying his words into lined notebooks. Maybe he himself didn’t know, perhaps he just said yes because I asked and he wanted to see what would happen. And there I was, sopping at puddles of spilled words, sponging it all onto paper. He was a character and a type. Even as he spoke I was seeing him as a soul built of black letters on a bright electronic backdrop, a spine and legs and arms constructed of short newspaper paragraphs, representing a generation, representing a sect. Imagining how his words would reconstruct themselves for the reader, hoping these quotations I snatched up would transport Americans into this boy’s world, into this filthy, exhausted war. I wanted that badly from Ahmed—the impression he left. I was trying to steal—not his soul, but his shadow.

  I was pushing my luck, asking for too many meetings. I wanted Ahmed’s story to be good. I knew I’d never be able to visit his home, but I sketched diagrams as he described the rooms—the kitchen, the family tree and Koranic verses framed on the wall, the nylon bag where he kept his few pieces of clothing. Then I had a better idea: I’d give him a camera, and he could shoot pictures of his home, his world.

  We never got around to it.

  One day I met Ahmed, as usual, at the restaurant in the Babylon Hotel. And, as usual, Birak came along. But something was askew. They were quarreling, lapsing into Arabic in front of me. Her features were knit; she held her tongue. She gazed at the table. Ahmed stared her down, defiant.