• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 357 0

my bed a raft; it rippled and rolled beneath my body. I knew, even half asleep, that it could only be an earthquake. But when I asked around, the driver hadn’t noticed, or the supermarket clerk, or even Hossam. You would think an earthquake would be enough to break something, to shred an old idea, that the shifting of tectonic plates couldn’t help but express itself tangibly in our constructed world. You forget that most earthquakes simply aren’t very powerful. Not compared with all the concrete, bricks, pillars, braces, rocks—the architecture of structure, the foundations of inertia. Something has shifted below the earth, and maybe it will keep moving until it means something, but that day may only come when we are no longer here to see. The earthquake came to Egypt, rattled things about, and rolled off again. Nobody noticed. In the end, I found a wire story on the Internet—a marginal clump of paragraphs, flickering through half-life in cyberspace. An earthquake came to Egypt at dawn, the wire story said. No damage was reported.

At least I knew I hadn’t dreamed the whole thing.

FOURTEEN

ALL THINGS LIGHT, AND ALL THINGS DARK

I stared at the name, and from the sterile text of wire reports, the name stared back. Atwar Bahjat. I screwed my eyes into a long blink and opened them. The name was still there. The bodies of Atwar Bahjat and her cameraman and soundman were found early Thursday …

Winter light struggled through the windows. Outside Iraq clenched tight as a muscle, the streets of Baghdad hollow and silent. I had been writing all night, overcooked coffee chewing my stomach. I was alone in a silent room in a drab hotel, staring at a computer.

The day before, an enormous thing had happened. Sunni militants crept through the streets and set off bombs in the gold-domed shrine at Samarra, revered place of pilgrimage and worship devoted to the tenth and eleventh Shiite imams. Sunnis and Shiites had been murdering each other all day and all night, taking their revenge. Civil war had never felt so manifest. The translators and drivers who worked for the various news bureaus in our building had sorted themselves into separate rooms: Sunnis here, Shiites there. Just like that, all at once. Tight-jawed and tense, they clumped around television sets listening to their respective clerics, getting angrier by the hour. Everybody in the building was nervous.

Staring at Atwar’s name, all I could think about was color: green and orange, blue and red. Instead of memory, that’s what came—the idea of bright color. I hadn’t seen Atwar in a long time, and it felt even longer. Time moved slower in Iraq, weighed down by life and death.

When we met in the summer of 2004, the city rotted and sagged with hues: the wicked sheen of sunlight on new cars; wilting red flowers taped clumsily to car windows in blaring wedding processions; the soft, green haze of date palm groves. In the few seasons since, Iraq had blurred itself into dry-eyed black and white.

Atwar had worked at Al-Jazeera that summer, covering the world’s biggest story for the world’s most controversial news organization, struggling to prove herself in the crucible of Iraq. Those were the days when homemade beheading videos were delivered to Al-Jazeera and broadcast to the world. U.S. officials openly loathed Al-Jazeera, complaining that the cameramen cropped up conveniently whenever a car bomb went off and accusing the reporters of alliances with insurgents. For their part, the journalists had little to model themselves after: the Arab world didn’t offer many examples of responsible journalism. The network made an interesting story. I asked to shadow a Baghdad correspondent, and they sent me to Atwar.

“Atwar Bahjat!” The Iraqi men in my office had admired her full cheeks and carbonated eyes ever since Saddam’s days, when she’d dished up propaganda on Iraqi state television. “She’s a poet, you know,” Salar told me. It was true: she was a poet, a feminist, and a novelist. She was just twenty-eight that summer, and already emerging as one of the Arab world’s most respected