Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [102]
“Please call the interior minister and tell him that our convoy with Atwar Bahjat has been attacked,” Iraqi journalist Fatah Sheik barked into his cell phone, crouching close to the ground. “Can’t you hear the shooting? Please tell the minister.”
Commandos raced through the courtyard. Somewhere, a rooster crowed.
“Send us Americans and national guard,” Sheik begged. “Among us are correspondents, there are almost fifty of us.”
The gunfight lasted more than two hours, until the police escorts ran out of ammunition and the shooting slowed, then stopped. At least two men had been shot dead. The Sunni cleric who presided over the neighborhood sent along a message of apology. It was a misunderstanding, he said. He invited the mourners to stop by his house for coffee. It was just another working day in Iraq. No hard feelings, just two more souls.
At the graveyard the men hoisted the coffin down. Atwar’s friends had covered it with the Iraqi flag and placed orange flowers on top. Because she died a single woman, her family had draped a bride’s veil over the head of the coffin.
They prayed over her body, repeated that there is no god but God, and hurried her coffin along a dirt path through the cemetery. At the lip of her grave, the men began to argue. Nobody should see her body, they said, not even the gravediggers who lowered it into the earth. They shoved and yelled. At last, somebody produced a bedsheet to stretch over the body, to protect it from view. The cloth was blue and yellow and green, its patchwork pattern childish and light.
Atwar’s mother tossed fistfuls of candy into the grave.
“Atwar, my love!” she cried before the cameras. “Can you hear me?”
But Atwar was gone.
As the cars turned back toward Baghdad, a plume of black smoke arched into the sky. It was a homemade bomb that had been laid along the road, planted to strike the mourners as they left the cemetery.
Sometimes you are lucky, and turn the other way.
FIFTEEN
THERE WOULD BE CONSEQUENCES
After Atwar died, the months spun out fast, hotter and bloodier, until another summer caught Baghdad in its claws. Ariel Sharon fell into a coma and was stripped of his job as Israeli prime minister. Iran announced the successful enrichment of uranium. In Iraq, it was dying and more dying, death getting stuck in the glue of itself. You didn’t know how to tell the story anymore. When I returned to Baghdad in the summer of 2006 I went looking for a young Shiite, somebody whose life and aspirations and circumstances could serve as an emblem for a tortured land.
At Baghdad University heat beat the air stiff as egg whites. Dust flew loose from the dying grasses, shaking like pepper into the lungs, and the trees struggled to hold up their branches. Students trickled down the scorched paths and shaded lanes to the parking lot and the street beyond, eyes low and books clutched over their hearts. They moved away when we tried to talk to them. The university had gone to war with the rest of the country. Professors had been murdered and driven into exile. Militiamen moved among the students. You couldn’t just blurt it out: Are you Shiite? We had to finesse, talk about politics and The Situation, listen for dropped hints. Iraq was fractured enough that people tipped their hand when they talked politics. We stopped a young man, but he was shy and inarticulate. We stopped a girl with a Winnie the Pooh lunchbox, but she turned out to be a Sunni.
Then there was Ahmed, stretching in the shade of a spreading tree, jouncing on worn running shoes. When I approached he stood his ground and cast judging eyes over my face, my clothes,