Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [106]
“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. The 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