Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [103]
Ahmed was twenty-three years old, a Shiite living in the urban killing fields of Baghdad’s Hay al-Amal neighborhood. He had the kind of pinched face you see all over the world, and never on a wealthy man: the kite corner jut of cheekbones over wasted dents; eyes deep and suspicious and darting, too dark to tell the pupil from the iris. It was the hardness of his face that was familiar, the anger that glimmered deep behind his eyes like a piece of light at the bottom of a deep well: the face of a man who is learning, bit by bit, the limitations of empty pockets and lowly family stature.
He ran all the time, ran until the flesh burned off his bones. He was running that day, in a T-shirt and old jeans and sneakers he’d bought secondhand. When Saddam was still around, Ahmed had run the half marathon on Iraq’s national team. Now he came to the university campus every day to train, though he couldn’t afford to attend classes. The college kids bustled past to brighter futures as he worked on his body, the only part of him that had ever proven profitable. He’d picked up his girlfriend on campus; she was a college girl drifting forward while he ran circles around the grounds.
“Why do you run so much?” I asked him.
“To forget,” he blurted, and then he shrugged a little, as if to say, I know this sounds melodramatic but it’s also true. “I do this to forget the problems, the situation outside. I can’t stay in the house all day. My father’s afraid. He says, ‘I’ll give you anything to stay home,’ but I can’t, and that makes a problem between me and my father. Even my girlfriend, we had a fight yesterday. In my neighborhood now we live one afraid from the other, because we don’t know who anybody is. When I drive to my house and come home at night, they think I work with the government or with the terrorists. They don’t know. They’re afraid. Each one is afraid now.”
He was a Shiite, though, so maybe he was pleased with the newfound political power his people had picked up since the war. Maybe he viewed these hard times as transitory. He frowned.
“They took the power place, but it’s too bad,” he said. “The problem in the past was just Sunni rule. Now it’s just Shia rule. It’s stupid. We have to find a balance between Sunni and Shia. I just follow my mind. I think that’s the right thing. God gave us a brain to think, not to follow. Most Iraqis are ignorant, they don’t understand that. If you say Ali al Sistani is bad, they want to kill you. But if you ask, ‘Why do you follow him?’ they can’t answer.”
He didn’t want to talk anymore. His body was turning away, his face fixed in expectation of good-bye. But he took my notebook and copied down his mobile telephone number before bounding off into the stifling gold of day.
“This Ahmed, he’s—he’s noble,” Caesar said as we walked back to the car. “The way he answered the questions. It’s great. You know what I mean?”
I did.
I wanted to go to Ahmed’s house, to see the street and rooms, to meet his family. But I couldn’t go to Hay al-Amal without signing their death warrants. Nor could he visit our place—we couldn’t invite a stranger off the street to see the checkpoints and the layout, to glimpse the faces of the Iraqis who lied to their families and neighbors about working with foreigners. Everybody had too much to lose.
So I called Ahmed and arranged to meet neither here nor there, but in the brick-sheathed purgatory of the Babylon Hotel. I had been encouraged by colleagues to think of the Babylon Hotel as a refreshing liberation from our claustrophobic offices, a small, accessible slice of a deadly country. But like everything else in Iraq, the hotel had turned weird and sad. It had been, before, a popular place for posh weddings, but it had gone derelict and sinister, full of tight, hot air and hard glances. Sitting in the sticky cave of the lobby was like squatting