Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [27]
A hot dawn came, the air in the car tight and edged with body smells. The dust storm smelled, too, stirring in the yellow sky. In the desert you learn that dust has a smell, a little like washed cotton sheets or baking bread with the texture of scratchy silk in the back of the throat. Arab springs always bring winds and the smell of dust. We were almost to Baghdad now. I played with the name like a small charm, jingling it in my palm like a jack. A mystical, shadowy city. Babylon, the House of Wisdom, One Thousand and One Nights. As we drew closer through the desert, little shards of wonder spiked through the slur of my thoughts. I sat up and looked out the window. Everything was mustard and ocher, weary and wilted. A landscape so unremarkable you forgot it before you stopped looking; stretches of sand and dust without the startling scale of a great desert. This was a petty desert, mean and brown, spotted with rotting structures, the listless monuments of disinterested men.
Cars packed the roads on the edge of town, inching along. Nobody bothered with the confines of lanes, and every bit of pavement was packed tight with humans and their machines. The cars lurched, staggering elephants lashed with marauded booty—embroidered sofas, farm animals, paintings. Looters hauled their stashes. Families fled toward the city and away from it. The cars braided the intersections like pick-up sticks; nobody gave the right of way and so they were all locked into place, paralyzed by the mute jam of collective stubbornness. A man with a swinging potbelly hopped from his car to holler at another driver. The faces of women were framed in the glass, sour and small. Horns squalled. There was no power in Iraq. No electricity and nobody in charge. All the traffic lights were dead. Without the commands from the dangling lights, the Iraqi drivers got themselves stuck in deadlocks and quarrels.
I imagined people treated like animals for years—ignored when they kept their heads down, kicked when they straggled out of formation, expected to wag their tails for a pat on the head. And now every last system was gone, and smothered humanity exploded, unbound, over a grid of cracked infrastructure teeming with testy American soldiers. I rubbed the grit from my eyes and watched. Men and women boiled raw, hitting against each other, free to react in dangerous compounds.
I rolled down the window, got a lungful of dust, and sank back, coughing.
The lobby of the Palestine Hotel swelled with life, a dim womb packed with bodies and drained of electricity. The elevators were dead, and so were the phones that called up to the rooms. I was supposed to find John, the Los Angeles Times correspondent who’d been there through the war. He’d arranged accommodations for us. I found his room number on a hand-scrawled registration log and climbed up the dark stairs, along hot caverns of corridors. I knocked on the door, and nobody came. So I decided to take a walk, to write down some notes. Dust still blotted out the world, biblical and sobering, scattering locusts, foretelling the plague.
Marines had surrounded the hotel and sealed off the side roads. Beyond the checkpoints and razor wire, masses of Iraqis swarmed. They had come for help, sniffing around for jobs, or to stand and glower at foreigners. Everything had collapsed, and there were Americans inside the hotel, so they clumped as close as they could get and stared, looking for clues to the new Iraq. The Iraqi army had melted away like wax brushed against a flame. Saddam was on the run. They had been left to their own devices.
I waded into that crowd with a notebook, looking for an English speaker to hire as a temporary translator. I couldn’t get a question out of my mouth before they pounced on me and closed in, ranting.
“All the world was putting its hands on its eyes when Saddam killed us. Why now? Where is the