Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [107]
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