Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [109]
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
“Yes,” Ahmed snapped.
Then some men moved into the restaurant, and she tugged on his sleeve.
“Well,” Ahmed said, “actually, there is a problem. She has been recognized.”
Recognized. Cold fear shot through my veins, pushing from my heart all the way down to my toes.
“What happened?” My pulse bulged in my throat.
“As we were coming in downstairs, at the door, she saw somebody she knows from university. This guy. He’s strong, he’s somebody … you know what I mean?”
“Yes.” He was involved with one of the armed groups.
“So this guy, he says to her, what are you doing here? And she says, nothing, just coming to spend a little time. And he says, you’re not going to meet with that American upstairs, are you? She said, no, of course not, what do I want with an American? And he says, good. Because you know, if you were meeting with an American, there would be consequences.”
Consequences. That American upstairs.
But Ahmed is still talking.
“Well,” he says, “we thought he was leaving. But now he has just come into the restaurant. He has seen us, and he has seen you, and he knows we are together.”
I sit perfectly still, frozen, understanding what it means. I know, we all know, that this could be as good as a death sentence for Ahmed and Birak. And there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. There would be consequences. Nobody will touch them here. It wouldn’t happen like that. If it comes, it will come to them later. Nobody will believe I am a journalist. They will think these two are collaborators. The best they can hope for is an empty threat. But people will remember. This label will stay on their heads for years. Secret meetings with an American.
“What do you want to do?” I ask Ahmed. “Do you want to leave?”
“No,” he says.
Suddenly I can’t think of a single question to ask. The blood won’t get out of my face. Birak fusses. She’s barely touching her tea. She whispers to Ahmed.
“Are you sure you don’t want to leave?”
“She wants.”
“Maybe it’s a good idea. Why don’t you two go first?” We never walk out to the parking lot together.
“Okay,” he says.
“I’ll call you.”
They are gone. I pay the bill and walk out into Baghdad’s sordid steam.
Back at the bureau, my Iraqi colleagues tried to make me feel better. “You know, maybe it was a joke,” they said. “Iraqis say anything and you can’t tell if it means something.” There was worry in their eyes.
It’s true—the problem with Iraq is that you just can’t tell. What begins as a notion hardens into truth. Threats and jokes turn into suggestions, take on plausibility and then achieve reality. Impossible things happen every day. The blood of the Iraqis has gotten cheap. All of that is the problem with Iraq.
Ahmed’s telephone never rang again; it was permanently switched off. He might have gotten scared and changed it, but I don’t think so. His determination was too fierce to cower; his sense of courtesy too deep-rooted for him to vanish without an explanation. Unless, perhaps, he was embarrassed. Unless Birak threatened to leave him. Unless he got so rattled he told his father the truth, and his father locked him up in the house. I have invented one hundred scenarios to explain his disappearance. They lie like a flimsy mat over a tiger trap of sorrow and guilt.
The truth is, I don’t even know if they made it home from the Babylon Hotel that day. I don’t know if they lived through that summer, or the summer after. Maybe he is alive somewhere. Maybe he made it out to Europe, or to America. I want to believe that he is unscathed, not just breathing in body but whole in spirit too, that the woman he worshipped was not hurt, that his heart was not broken.
Either way, I know that I am guilty. I took a chance with their lives, walked up to the table and gambled. I came to Iraq in a cloud