Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [48]
Listening to this pampered young heir with his tailored suit and air of entitlement, my thoughts drifted back to the night of the party in Tripoli. I looked at Saif al Islam and remembered how the night had ended.
It was one in the morning, and we were driving home. I sat in the passenger seat, and an older party guest sat in the back. He had lingered quiet and staid all night, nodding his graying head as the young cubs bounced and hollered, but now he was buzzed on black-market wine. He spoke in faltering English of political chants and soccer songs. “The soccer stadium is the only place people can speak,” he told me. “So they yell.” Then he unleashed a torrent of incomprehensible Arabic so I’d know what they yell.
“What does that mean?” I asked, but he ignored the question. He broke into a scrap of a soccer song as we rolled through the sepia tint of streetlights. We slipped past the billboards of Qaddafi’s jowly face, eased into the driveway of the man’s villa.
He got out of the car, and lurched into the frame of my open window. His face was panicked.
“I’m sorry to talk so much,” he said miserably. “It’s the wine.”
His fingers wrapped around the window frame as if he wanted to hold us back with his arms, fearful of the control he’d lose when the car backed up and carried us away into the night, taking his words away from him.
“You didn’t talk too much. It was nice to meet you.”
“Please don’t write the things I said,” his voice rose through the thick air. “I know about newspapers. They write everything.”
Of everybody at the party, this man had spoken the least. Except for his funny little tirade about soccer, he’d barely said a word beyond pleasantries.
“Don’t worry,” I told him. “I won’t write what you said. I don’t even remember your name.”
“You never met me,” he hissed. “We never spoke.” He looked into my eyes. All of his dignity had melted into the salty night. He was pleading.
“I never met you,” I repeated. “We never spoke.”
He stared a minute longer. He sighed. And then he turned his back, shuffled to the gate, and disappeared behind the walls, feet dragging like rocks.
* Name has been changed to protect the family.
EIGHT
SACRIFICE
On the day of our feast, the black hand came to kill people.
—Official statement read on Kurdish television, February 2, 2004
Violence is a reprint of itself, an endless copy. I mean to say that by itself, violence is not the point. A bomb, a battle, a bullet is just a hole torn in the fabric of a day. Violence is all of the smashed things left behind, and then the things that grow anyway, defiant. Girls move silently behind closed curtains, broken-down schools shut their doors to students, lovers marry in secret. Violence is the babies you have, the jokes you tell, the fixing of windows and mopping of blood. Against that brave human circus of mundane high-wire acts, it is not very important after all, the big empty sound of the bomb, the smell of the chemicals, or the hospital cots where people bleed to death, reeking of burned hair. Anybody who gets close to violence gets a little bit stuck, the gum of it clings to their feet and slows their steps. Iraq was always a tangle to me, a place where there was personal death and also collective death—a city, a neighborhood, a society can get maimed or killed just like a man or woman. The only difference is that cities can be reincarnated, collectives are replenished and resurrected. When the people go, they’re gone for good.
As the occupation dragged toward the end of its first year, Saddam Hussein paced in prison and his sons were dead, but the anti-American uprising raged and the first whiff of civil war was rising from the land. Now going into Iraq meant wading into violence. You felt it when they stamped your passport at the border offices, smelled it when you stood at the door of the plane with the hot winds scouring the tarmac. You expected it and it didn’t startle you. It was a part of every day. In the first months after the invasion, there had been other things, too. Date palm orchards