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Later in the afternoon, as I sat down to a dinner of cold lamb and wilted lettuce in the lightless hotel restaurant, Ahmad reappeared, holding a faded hotel brochure. It showed a young man, clean-shaven, wearing a red tuxedo and holding a large tray of cakes and pastries. Behind the waiter stood a tall, blonde European woman in a tennis dress, and another in a bikini. The young man was smiling broadly. “This was me,” Ahmad said. Then he looked at the photo, staring back at it in wonder.
Sad
“The Taliban are believers, and the Northern Alliance are believers, too,” he said. “Only I am a nonbeliever now,” Amanullah said, looking at his hecklers, “because I allowed myself to be tricked.” The truck rumbled away.
People ask me what happened in Iraq, and I tell them the story of Wijdan al-Khuzai. Iraq might have been a traumatized country, it might have been broken, it might have been atomized—it might have been a mental hospital. But whenever the prospect of normalcy presented itself, a long line of Iraqis always stood up and reached for it. Thousands of them, seeing the opportunity in the events of April 2003, had set out to build an ordinary country with ordinary ways: newspaper editors, pamphleteers, judges, politicians and police officers. “Every morning, I come to work with a passion to serve my
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A sad description of Iraq. Post 2003
For the Iraqis, life among the Americans often meant living a double life, the one they thought the Americans wanted to see, and the real one they lived when the Americans went home.
The double life
“Napoleon’s invasion changed Egypt in ways that never would have been possible,” Shakarchy said to me. He seemed sure of himself. He was wearing a cardigan sweater. “Sometimes you need to impose new ideas by force. Sometimes there is no other way.”
A different viewpoint
“You’ve got to understand the Arab mind,” Brown told me outside the gates of Abu Hishma. “The only thing they understand is force—force, pride and saving face.”
As he spoke, Rashid Majid, age eighty, pushed his way past the guards and stepped through the schoolhouse doors. He was wearing a coat and tie, and his silvery hair was combed to perfection. “Get out of my way,” Majid said, hurrying by. “I want to vote.”
“We all have to die,” Jawad said. “To die for this, well, at least I will be dying for something.”
In reference to voting for the first time (Iraq)
“When my uncle was killed, I promised my aunt that I would avenge his death,” he said. She had answered, Abu Marwa said, by repeating an Arabic saying that is often invoked and rarely acted on: Ashrab min Damhum, I will drink their blood. After they killed the Syrians, Abu Marwa took their kafiyas and brought them to his aunt, proof that revenge had been taken. She accepted them with gratitude. And then Abu Marwa presented her with a vial of the killers’ blood. “She drank the blood of the Syrians,” Abu Marwa said, still seated in the couch, in the darkness. “You see. We were for revenge. She
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