Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [62]
Then I looked at her, and I understood what she was saying. In fact, people did not believe in the Americans. But Nora had. Nora had loved America, and she had stood up for it, not so much in words as in deeds. She had embraced the Americans she met, aspired to American-style journalism, traveled to America to be educated.
“Americans are the ones who always say that America is the model,” she said weakly.
There were a lot of things I wanted to say, but it was all wedged too deep. I wanted to tell her about rural America, about all the different classes and experiences and geographies she hadn’t penetrated when she’d studied in New York. About the cruelties and brutalities of American history that she could not intuit, the things that dragged behind my country. Just as I could not hope to understand the men who hollered for Saddam, she could not make any sense of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib. We were both just crusts of deep and complex icebergs, the small pieces that poked over the water and showed themselves to one another. At the end we were standing side by side, just standing there and looking, like that first day when we’d met, Nora with her bangs in her eyes and her bright red T-shirt watching the praying Muslims at the mosque and waiting for the riot to begin. I was thinking of police beatings, prison rape, racial tensions; about lost suburban youth; about senseless, sadistic crime I’d covered in stifled, silent, dying small towns, the America that Nora didn’t see, in all its ugly complications and rotting institutions. I wanted to say, if you believed in the place before, don’t stop because of this. But it was more, too, and all these thoughts and memories spun through, fast, and so I started blurting things out.
“You know, I really don’t understand the Arab reaction to all of this. I just don’t. In these countries, people get tortured every day. And nobody says a word about it. And then the Americans are exposed and everybody wants to talk about that. Why don’t all these Arabs who are so angry at the Americans deal with their own leaders? Why don’t they demand something better from their own governments?”
Nora gave me a look I’d seen many times, but never on her face. It was resentment, impatience.
“But Megan,” she said slowly, “that’s the point. We don’t expect anything from the Arab governments. We expect something better from the Americans. That is the idea of America.”
“After everything that’s happened? Seriously?”
“I thought so,” she said. Then she got quiet. Her eyes were down again, and I thought she was about to cry.
But she held it together and we sat there while piped music wove its canned dreams through sterilized air. Boys in spiked hair and slender women in hijab poured through the shining caverns of this shopping mall named after Mecca—rich Iraqi refugees and the rich Jordanians who resented them, buying American sneakers and Chinese microwaves with their British credit cards. Nora was an Arab and I was an American, after all. That distinction grew up like a wall, and we each sat on our separate sides, sipping at our cappuccinos, groping around for words, both of us polite to the end but not bothering to pretend this could be repaired.
I saw Nora again the next time I came to Amman. We ate sushi and neither of us breathed a word about Abu Ghraib. Not too long after, Nora left Jordan to go to graduate school in the United States.
She didn’t like it nearly so much the second time around.
* A pseudonym.
* A pseudonym.
TEN
A QUESTION OF COST
It was the kind of lazy, sun-dappled day made for lemonade and swimming pools, and kids all over the compound banged through screen doors with the taste of summer freedom in their mouths. It was the weekend, and men in primordial hunches grunted along sidewalks in headphones and jogging shorts, teenagers wheeling past on bicycles.
“I can’t get over how American it is here,” I said vaguely to Valerie. She laughed an airy laugh and said, “Yeah, that Leave It to Beaver thing.” Yeah, I thought. A world bleached clean