Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [38]
Then Hussein arrived. He stood at the edge of the stall and stared defiantly at us. “Salaam aleikum,” I murmured. Raheem spoke softly, rolling out more elaborate blessings, letting the man see that he too was Shiite, that he, too, was from the south. Hussein’s shoulders fell slack.
“Look at this.” He turned his back and yanked up his shirt. The crater of a bullet yawned on his left shoulder, deep pink, the size of a crabapple.
“This,” said his cousin, dragging on his cigarette holder, “is why he thought he was dead.”
“So you want to know about the grave?” Hussein’s eyes sized us up.
Raheem assured him that we did. A pause. And then:
“Do you have a car? I’ll show you.”
We slipped into the desert, wrapped in air-conditioning, blinded by sun. As we drove along, Hussein’s story spilled in broken sentences, fits and starts:
It was 1991, the year of the first American invasion and the failed Shiite uprising. Iraqi troops swarmed Najaf to crush the insurrection. Shiite blood ran in the streets. They stopped Hussein at one of the checkpoints choking the city, heard his name and tribe, and arrested him. He and scores of others were carted to the Salaam Hotel, the Peace Hotel, and herded into the garden, where they stood crammed together so tightly nobody could sit down. Lorries came rumbling to take them away with hearts shaking and hands bound. They drove out into the desert, the same road we bounced over now. Finally, deep in the stretches of dunes, they stopped. The soldiers hadn’t bothered with blindfolds. Hussein saw everything.
He saw trenches. He saw four security officers, each one holding a rifle. He understood that it was a firing squad. He understood that there were bodies in the trenches.
Four by four, the prisoners were forced to stand at the edge of a trench. Four by four, the blasts echoed over the desert, and the bodies dropped down into the graves. Hussein stood and watched while they killed four of his cousins and one of his uncles. The sun was slipping low. Hussein would be among the last killed.
He took his place on the lip of the grave. He looked down and saw men still squirming in the pit. Then the guns crashed. The bullet bore into his shoulder, sliced up through his neck and tore out through his cheek. He toppled down into the pit, cushioned by dying men.
“I lost my sense in the beginning, but then I heard something, I felt something,” he said. “They were checking if anybody was still alive, looking at people, shooting.” He heard voices at the edge of the trench. Somebody said, “Just leave them, we have other things to do.”
Hussein listened to the silence. He wondered whether he was alive or dead. Finally he crawled out and stumbled into the desert darkness. He stayed with the Bedouins at first. They patched him up, but begged him to move along. He moved from house to house, called on the aid of fellow Shiites. When he was well enough to move, he sneaked over the border into Iran and hid there for months. He finally came back with a counterfeit identity card.
Now Hussein murmured directions into the driver’s ear. We turned up a dirt road, bumped along, and stopped. We would have to walk from here. Our shoes sank in hot sand. The desert was blank as forgetting.
“I never came back to this place,” Hussein said suddenly. “I was afraid.”
We came to a ridge. “It was here,” Hussein said, his face twisted. “Here.” It was almost a bark. He bent down, hands scooping around in the sand, throwing fists of dirt, sliding over slick dunes. His fingers pored over the grains. I glanced at Raheem, but Raheem’s eyes were fixed on Hussein. Now Hussein had turned up something in the sand. He held a bullet aloft, eyes gleaming: “See? You see?
“When I got better I went to see a man whose father was killed with me,” he said, fingering the bullet. “I said to him, ‘Your father died with me.’ I thought he should know.”
Your father died with me. As if Hussein had died