Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [28]
“They’ve been fifty years in London, drinking and eating. They don’t represent the Iraqi people. We want somebody from here, who suffered with us.”
“Bush wanted to make this a civil war. They make no safety. They intend to. They know everything.”
“Iraqi people, we know nothing about democracy. Until now we’ve had a knife over our head by Saddam Hussein.”
It was all there: the tortures of the past; the irritable chaos of the invasion; every woe that was about to crash down. At the time, these rough men in their sweat-stained clothes sounded paranoid. I would soon interview professors and merchants who were less aggrieved and more reasonable, who sounded more correct, predicting that security would soon return, that early spasms of violence were just a mob reaction to sudden, total change. These were comforting things to hear; they matched what U.S. officials seemed to expect. Many of those merchants and professors are gone now, dead or fled. The vision of the mayhem to come was in the collective howl of the street, among people who’d learned to expect nothing. The poor people were the ones who got stuck there, and they were the ones who saw it coming. Strung out on sleeplessness and adrenaline, I was clobbered by the first wave of a feeling that kept coming back for days: that it was all a mistake, that none of us should be there, the soldiers or aid workers or me. It was all a misunderstanding, and now we were lost abroad and the Iraqis were lost at home, and from this chaos absolutely anything could be born.
I stayed out too late that night. I got stuck on the streets after dark, and had to find my way back to the little hotel where I was to sleep. I barely remembered where it was by daylight, and now there didn’t seem to be a lightbulb burning in the entire city. The sandstorm had thrown a gritty blindfold over the stars. My stomach began to twist.
“There’s a curfew,” a marine warned me as I moved past a checkpoint, an American voice in the dark. “You shouldn’t be out on the streets.”
“I don’t have any choice,” I told him. “I have to get back to my hotel. It’s right up the road.”
“Be careful out there.”
I waded into night, and the lights buried themselves behind me. In this absolute darkness, the human enterprise of pharmacies, pavement, and mosques seemed like folly, cardboard things thrown together in denial of their flimsiness. A darkness like that overpowers everything. War comes studded with darkness, power outages and shadows and dark roads. But I never saw anything as black as that first night in Baghdad.
I smelled bodies passing unseen: the rotten tang of sweat; the heavy sag of flesh. Over the roar of blood that rushed and crashed through my veins, I imagined I could hear the thoughts of criminals snake past. When a person had crazy eyes, my mother would say, “If he were a horse, they would shoot him.” The streets of Baghdad were like that, except instead of seeing a glimmer of madness, you could taste and breathe and brush against it. Crazy pressed in on all sides, jabbered in gunfire, chafed every sense. The whisper of sleeves, pants, stitch on stitch, weave on weave. The glance of skin against fiber, hairs pricked up and throbbing, and even the stir of air, pushed in currents by breath and bodies and fear. The sandstorm churned the sky overhead. Danger gelled in the streets like floodwater; I swam through it, breaststroking through mud, and all the time my heart was throbbing.
If I disappear in this dark, they will never find me.
I don’t know how I got back that night. One foot before the other. I groped my way to the corner, and remembered to turn left. Even now, writing about it, I am nervous. My heart picks up and my pupils grow wide. The notebooks look ancient to me. The writing is forgotten. After I turn the pages, I drop the books and wash my hands with soap, as if I have touched an infection, and watch the water slip off down the drain.
We stayed in a little dive called the Swan Lake, its lobby plastered with whimsical pictures of gondolas and swans. There