Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [31]
Oh-my-God-I-am-sorry-for-my-sins-in-choosing-to-sin-and-failing-to-do-good-I-have-sinned-against-you-and-your-church-I-firmly-intend-with-the-help-of-your-son-to-make-up-for-my-sins-and-love-as-I-should-Amen.
I said it a few more times. Then I sat and tried to imagine my family. They would still be sleeping. My mother would go to church in a few hours, and she would sit scared, praying for me. She had been alone since my father died four years earlier. I had waited until the last minute to tell her I was going to Iraq. I had called her from the hotel in Amman, just a few hours before I drove over the border. She had said, “Oh my God,” and her voice broke. I remembered being at church with my mother on a Sunday morning. One of her friends said, “Well, every time I feel sorry for myself because my kids are in another state, I think of your poor mother.”
I had come to church because I wanted to sit someplace that felt like home. Like St. Paul’s, with its enormous stained-glass saints and the one pane darker than the others since the long-gone day when a boy threw a snowball through it after catechism class. We had stood with frozen feet and gaped at the awesomeness of his transgression.
We dyed eggs every year on Easter Sunday, punched a hole at the fat end of the egg, pricked the thin end with a needle, and blew them hollow. My father whipped all those raw eggs, chopped potatoes, and cooked Spanish tortillas. He knew how to drop a little oil into the dye so that the colors came out swirled, churning, like the sky over the sea. The firehouse on Main Street sold spring plants to raise money for the firemen: lilies, grape hyacinths, tulips. The spice of the bright blooms, the cool press of earth, the wet greenery packed in the cement depths of the firehouse. You breathed it and knew the long winter was over. I remembered the smell as Mass droned on in Arabic.
The hymns had the same swooning wail as Muslim muezzins. Rendered in Arabic, the prayers were unrecognizable, the sermon a glaze of language. I tried to feel some holiness seeping off the worshippers, but I couldn’t feel anything. Only the press of madness outside, in the streets and the country beyond. In my head I chanted the rosary, clinging dumbly to the words.
As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be.
Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
SIX
THE LIVING MARTYR
The Shiite pilgrims walked south into the first sun. They had been marching for days, from the south and from the north, past the palm groves and abandoned battlefields and farms. They came in cars and trucks and buses, too, the women squeezed into flatbeds, veiled heads bent together. They clotted the road, choked our path, and we eased the car into the space they left. We had driven out of Baghdad in the dark, glided south as blackness melted into dawn and villages shook themselves from slumber. When traffic tangled the car, we climbed out and walked with the pilgrims.
“This is incredible,” I kept saying to Raheem, the translator.
“Yes,” he beamed. “It is.”
A thirteen-year-old boy doggedly pushed his crippled brother in a wheelchair. Old men crawled along the road until their knees bled. Villagers sprayed water over the pilgrims’ heads to cool them; stirred cauldrons of tea and vats of rice; offered spigots to rinse their feet. Holy men clambered onto cars and serenaded passing crowds with passages from the Koran. When time came for prayer, men spread their rugs in the road and bent their heads to the earth.
We were tracing the path of the American invasion