• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 324 0

and when she came into the room they whispered that her father was a martyr. His name was Ahmed Shawkat; he was a journalist and a Shabak Kurd, a member of an ethnic and cultural minority centered around Mosul. He ran a newspaper and had written a book on the controversial topic of Mosul’s founding; his efforts had earned him death threats. One day he climbed onto the roof to use his satellite phone. Somebody stole up behind and shot him at close range. They found Ahmed Shawkat sprawled in blood. There was nothing very unusual in this story, only that he was her father, and now she lived under the martyr’s mantle. She had been awake for hours when she arrived at the hotel in the dark. She had already gone to the graveyard alone, to pay her respects.

Sun cracked the horizon at the cemetery, and the land breathed with tides of mourners who pushed and paused, wandering from one family tombstone to the next. Early spring had breathed on the hills, but the tang of cold bit our faces and numbed our fingers. Beggars came, and children, trailing over grass rich as felt. Graves sprouted Iraqi flags, crossed daggers, pierced hearts. Sticks of incense smoked and trashy sweets glistened from the earth. Women keened over graves, singing songs of doomsday: “The God who created heaven and earth can do the same again. If he wants it to be, he’ll say, ‘be.’”

A twenty-nine-year-old man named Ahmed Younis Muhammed stood over the grave of his oldest brother. Like thousands of his countrymen, the brother had been shot dead in the epic folly of the Iran–Iraq war. Muhammed’s family had been suffering ever since: he couldn’t find a job, and they could hardly make ends meet.

I asked him whether his family would slaughter an animal that day. He winced.

“We don’t have anything to sacrifice,” he said, quietly and deliberately. “We have sacrificed enough. We’ve spent our lives sacrificing. All we do in this country is sacrifice.”

Blackbirds circled overhead. Little girls in brilliant dresses blew along the paths like loose petals and, crying and singing, kissed the dirt. Flapping cloth and robes gave the feel of row after row of clothesline. Our heavy-eyed stringer ghosted along before us. The fresh green smell of earth wouldn’t leave my nose, life exerting itself on a field of death.

Soon we left the graveyard and went looking for an animal sacrifice. When we saw a truck cruising past with a lamb in the bed, we followed. We lost the lamb, but wound up on a side street where we caught sight of a young cow being led through a gate. This was the home of a merchant named Jamal Almola. He was a mountain of a man with a thick mustache; he wore bright white robes and his family huddled around his table, drinking sweet juices in anticipation of their feast. While we all stood around introducing ourselves, the cow hoofed at the driveway nervously, tied near the marigolds.

What does it mean, I asked Jamal Almola, this blood sacrifice?

“This is like a prayer,” he said. “We will give the meat to poor families, to help the poor families.”

The cow snorted in panic.

I tried to get Jamal Almola to speak more expansively about the slaughter, but he was having too good a time. He brushed the questions aside, urging juice upon us and begging us to stay for dinner.

The children watched while the men held the cow down on the threshold of the house. They turned its face toward Mecca, and a relative named Rashid cut its throat. The cow did not die quickly. It shivered and twitched. The blood bubbled and surged, swelling over the pavement. The children giggled and knelt down, poking their palms into the blood, playing with it. The men hacked the warm cow into pieces. We kept stepping back delicately, farther and farther, trying to find a spot of dry ground. But the blood grew; it followed us over the soil. It was swallowing everything. Finally I gave up and knew it would stain me, too.

The sky was still steel overhead, and the city had the drained-away swoon of a holiday in progress. We would eat, we would leave, we would drive back to Baghdad … but the satellite