Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [37]
Then, suddenly: “Could you please write down the following statement: ‘What I have seen in courts and prisons, if you hear, you’ll quit your job. If I told you what happened in prison, you would quit journalism.’”
Like so many other southern Shiites, Abu Adi was a little twisted by torture. He’d been arrested for trying to escape to Syria in the 1980s, and spent three years and four months under torture in prison. Three years and four months, he told us, the number seared into memory, and when it was over they sent him to the killing fields of the Iran–Iraq front.
“As soon as the government is established, I’ll make a court case against the manager of public security,” he said.
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“I don’t know his name,” he said too quickly.
It was a lie. I knew it was a lie, Raheem knew it was a lie, and he knew we knew. He was still too afraid to say the name out loud.
“I have to chase him,” he filled an awkward silence. “I’d like to see whether this man is a beast or a human being. It bothers me.”
“And now,” I asked, “do you feel safer?”
“We’re still afraid,” he said. “They are talking about liberty, but Saddam’s followers are still here among us and we don’t know what’s going to happen.”
His nerves seemed to sway back and forth, blaring into bravery, then shrinking back into themselves. He grew bold and cursed the old regime stridently, or gave us a crumb of a story. Then fear would slip over him like a hood, and he’d fold back into himself.
“Saddam’s people are devils and shades of human beings,” he spat out.
But then he leaned forward and said softly, “I’m afraid. Please, if Saddam Hussein comes back, come back here and take me out.”
Then, slurping down one last glass of spiked tea, he told us how we could find a local hero: the man who survived the mass grave.
His name was Hussein Safar, and around Najaf they called him the “living martyr.” We found his cousin selling Islamic cloaks in the market, and he sent little boys scampering to find Hussein. While we waited, the cousin led us under the awning of his shop and served bottles of sticky-sweet juice. He smoked cigarettes from a gold plastic holder, stroked his graying goatee, and then he, too, told us calmly about the day he was arrested, along with his mother and three brothers, on suspicion of conspiring against the regime. They had tortured his mother and made him watch. He begged for a piece of paper to sign, eager to confess to anything. They pulled out his fingernails, hung him from the ceiling, electrified him, and set dogs upon him. He confessed to links to Iranian and Kurdish groups, hoping a false admission would make the torture stop. It didn’t. He didn’t get out until his family gave $5,000 to a well-connected neighbor.
As he spoke, his hands trembled. He grew silent. And then, shyly, he said: “Really, it is a shame upon us that we have such things.”
A shame upon us. I shivered in the heat. Yes, that was it, somebody had finally said it out loud. These people were embarrassed about what they had endured, about the parts they had been forced to play—victims or tormentors, it was all unendurably shameful. They had been co-opted, tortured, spied upon, and had spied themselves. They had sunk deeper and deeper into collective guilt until the moment of their final humiliation: they had been invaded by the Americans. They felt inferior, as if something must be wrong with themselves, in their culture or their souls. Was it liberating for this small-time merchant, admitting these torments to a young American woman with pity written all over her