Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [100]
In the days after Atwar’s death, we all watched her last standup dozens of times. The Iraqi channels looped the clip over and over for viewers who were caged indoors with nothing but television to stave off the anxiety of curfew. Death squads stole through the streets, the Shiite “black shirts” sacked Sunni mosques—and all the while, the image of Atwar flickered in corners. She wore a turtleneck and tied her head scarf in the jaunty sideways knot that had become her trademark. The face on the television screen was etched with the story of her homeland’s degeneration. Her skin had grayed, her eyes grown heavy, her face puffed with fatigue. She looked exhausted.
The decay I saw in Atwar’s face had eaten into the city, too. Baghdad faded and sank; Baghdad was lost. The swollen and thrumming streets where we’d met, dripping in heat and life and gaudy shouts of color, had vanished. The clatter of city life gave way to the scrape of machine-gun fire, the roar of car bombs, and the dull thud of mortars. Baghdad, with its tightly packed neighborhoods, sleepy gardens, and lazy river vistas, was swallowed by infinite reels of razor wire and blank-faced cement barriers.
Atwar looked sick, and so did Iraq. Atwar died, but Iraq just kept bleeding.
The day after the shrine bombing, we held a staff meeting. “The violence is getting worse,” Borzou, the bureau chief, told the Iraqi staff. “We need to prepare for what’s coming. We need to be ready for the fighting to get much heavier. We need to figure out how to work under curfew. I’m asking for any suggestions you have.”
“A bicycle,” said Suheil.
Everybody laughed like it was the funniest joke they’d ever heard. Nervous grumblings, too-quick jokes.
“No, really, I am thinking about getting a bicycle!” he protested. “Because I think we will face many more times like these.”
Everybody talked at once.
“I can’t believe we’re preparing for another war here.”
“Some of us can work from home.”
“Not all the time. In the mornings and afternoons we don’t have electricity.”
“Some of you are close enough to walk.”
“But the problem is, if there’s a curfew in your neighborhood and you leave, even by foot, everybody’s going to wonder, ‘Where’s this guy going?’ Even your family panics when there’s a curfew.”
“If something like this happens, we can’t freeze,” Borzou told them. “This is our calling. We can’t shut down. You deal with the shock later.”
I looked around me, at Raheem, Suheil, Salar, Caesar—at the drawn faces of Iraqis who risked their lives working for us. They have been here the entire time, I thought. When does later come?
It was just a short walk to the Arabiya offices, cutting back around the hotel where we lived, crossing a small gate, and traversing some parking lots.
“We will send somebody with you,” Salar said.
He means a bodyguard. With a gun. Like the one he sent to follow me through the supermarket.
“No, I don’t want it.”
“This is a bad time,” he said.
“Please, Salar, I really don’t want it. It’s just across the parking lot.”
“I’m sorry, but this is my responsibility. Today is a difficult day.”
So I shut up and walked along silently with my own private gunman, out into the wintry afternoon. In the Arabiya offices I found some of Atwar’s family members forgetting to drink their coffee on stiff couches. Raw silence stretched between their words. They spent a lot of time staring at the floor. On the walls gleamed pictures of prettier places: palm trees and beaches, golden sunlight brimming in leaves.
The aunt had hard eyes: “She’s an honor to her tribe, she’s a martyr, she’s better than ten men. She’s a martyr for Iraq.”
“How did this happen?” wailed Atwar’s sister, collapsing onto the aunt’s shoulder. “What did she see? She didn’t see