Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [29]
Gunfire popped in the street all night. Brushing my teeth, I imagined them shooting their way into the hotel. There was nothing to stop them. Every ill-intentioned man in Baghdad ran wild in the streets below. I slept anyway on the hard bed. Fell silently into black and dreamless slumber, quick and melting, a sugar cube dropped into hot tea.
We drove away from a burned-out museum on a heavy, dank afternoon, and as we slipped toward the Rasheed Bridge, I glanced idly over. “Stop here, stop!”
They were digging fresh bodies from the dirt of a scabby little park. Nurses in paper masks clambered in and out of trenches, bringing up the dead. The park stretched parallel to the Tigris, tapering off at the gates of Saddam’s palace. Some diehard Iraqi soldiers had dug trenches and made a last stand here, firing their guns against the American tanks.
“I talked to them,” one of the neighbors told me. “I said, ‘Run away, because nobody should kill himself for Saddam Hussein.’ But they refused. They said, ‘We will fight the Americans here.’”
When the battle was over, the neighbors said, U.S. soldiers had wrapped the dead in body bags, dumped them down into the soldiers’ trenches, and bulldozed the earth back over them. But the graves were shallow, and after a few days the stink of decaying flesh rose from the ground, winding around the houses like lace.
It’s hard to misunderstand the stink of death. If it gets into your nose, you know what it is. The body knows; the nerves know. Something like rotting vegetables or spoiled meat, except there is an awful note of metal. Now the smell poured out of the earth as if they had drilled a hole into the rotten heart of the war itself. The volunteers wiped at their eyes, hoisting the heavy flesh from hand to hand, laying the bodies onto orange stretchers. The smell drew young boys; they pulled their T-shirts over their noses and squatted at the rims of the trenches, as close as they could get, staring down. The old men stood a little farther off, muttering. The nearness to death fixed their faces in masks. Even the little boys were silent beneath widened eyes. Everybody stood and watched as the earth relinquished its bodies. American tanks groaned past on the road toward town, sightless beasts with bigger troubles to attend to. The wind changed; the neighbors clutched rags to their faces and gagged.
A quiet spring afternoon spread itself over the riverbanks, exploding in brassy sunlight. Shadows stretched themselves long under the palms, and purple flowers burst over a bullet-pocked fence. War stained the landscape like streaks of rust. Bomb-singed buildings rose. Birds wheeled in the sky overhead. Stone women posed with their upturned jugs, frozen, pouring air perpetually into the green waters of a decrepit fountain. Teenagers cruised by in an antique car they’d stolen from Saddam’s palace. A stray dog trotted to the edge of the park and sniffed the air, caught the reek of death and turned tail. Rocket launchers lay in the grass like forgotten toys. The neighbors were afraid to touch them.
“What else could they have done, eh? At least they had the decency,” one of the neighbors told me. He was a forty-year-old Iraqi-British banker, come home at this most unpropitious time to take care of his father, who’d had a stroke. His name was Haytham; he’d been trapped in Baghdad through the weeks of war.
“There’s a few hand grenades lying around. My nephew picked one up the other day. These kids haven’t got a clue, they just think it’s an amusement park.”
A baby camel hoofed the earth nervously in a penned garden outside Haytham’s house, blinking at us. He had escaped from the presidential palace up the road, presumably from the menagerie kept by the cruel and capricious Uday Hussein. Nobody knew what to do with him.
“It’s a lovely camel, isn’t it?” Haytham said, and grinned. At our backs, the workers