The Weight of a Mustard Seed (24 page)

 

W
ALID'S OWN POSTSCRIPT
to the story was neat enough; a certain justice. Colonel Hassan was assassinated in Baghdad three months after the events of the night of Desert Fox. Two men sprayed his car with automatic fire and then managed to make their escape. It was said that they had been prisoners at Abu Ghraib and had been sent to kill him by opposition parties in Iran. Somehow this made Walid smile.

After eight hours of listening to Walid's story, I went home and poured a drink, drank it and poured another. Walid was not his real name. Our mutual friend and interlocutor, an
Iraqi former Sunni officer I had known in Baghdad, called him F——, but he told me not to write it down. “Everyone in Middlesbrough knows me as Walid. In the book,” he told me, “call me Khalid Ben Walid,” he said smiling. The original Khalid Ben Walid had led the Muslims to victory against a Byzantine army at Yarmouk in 697. “I like this name.”

F
EBRUARY 1999. AT NINE O'CLOCK ONE MORNING
the phone rang. Um Omar answered it in the kitchen, and shouted for Ali to come and take the call. Ali was not expecting a call and he held the receiver to his ear with some trepidation.

Scratching through the static, metal rasp voice asked,

“Are you the son of the traitor Kamel Sachet?”

Ali turned his back on his mother and replied monosyllabically.

“Yes.”

“Do you know where Abu Ghraib prison is?”

“Yes.”

“Go there to receive his body.”

Ali hung up and stood still, shocked, feet planted, motionless. His mother looked over at him. She had heard only the flat half of the conversation but saw something in her son's face.

Before she could ask, Ali said, “My friend is stuck at a checkpoint. I am going to help him out.”

Ali dared not tell his mother or his sisters for fear that their alarm and wailing would provoke the watching agents; his younger brothers could not be trusted with the confidence. He hurriedly changed from his
dishdasha
to a pair of trousers and
a shirt. He took a jacket, the weather was wet. He put some money in his pocket and worried that it would not be enough. His elder brother Omar was staying at their aunt's house and Ali got in the car and drove there first. Omar was not in. His cousins didn't know where he was and he could not tell them it was urgent. Ali sat in the car and thought for a moment: who he could go to? He decided to go to his father's driver's house. Ali Mishjil had worked for his father for twenty years, since before Ali was born—it was he who had told Kamel Sachet to call his son Ali instead of Nasser—and when Ali explained to him the phone call, the faithful servant began to shake with emotion. Ali had someone to help, but they needed a relative, an older man, to accompany him to Abu Ghraib. Ali was only eighteen, perhaps they would not release his father's body to him. So they drove back to the aunt's house to check if Omar had returned.

At every intersection, Ali Mishjil beat the steering wheel with his hands and repeated, “Abu Omar is gone, Abu Omar is gone.”

Omar had not returned and could not be found. They next drove to an uncle's house, to Khalid, one of Kamel Sachet's younger brothers. He was also out. Another uncle, Hamid, was away. They went to another uncle, Mohammed. Not at home.

Ali felt burdened with unluck—it was God's will, and not for the first time: When Grandmother Bibi died he had been the first to receive the news; when his mother's sister died he was the first to receive this news. Why had God chosen him again, to suffer the loneliness of death and the misery of having to share it, to tell it, give it to other people to suffer with?

They turned off the highway into a bland, walled residential district.

“Abu Omar is gone!” Ali Mishjil was distraught. After these
weeks of waiting, the shadows behind the eyes that could not meet their inquiries, untold but knowing anyway, Ali realized he was dry eyed. His father had been missing for more than 50 days. He had left for work in the morning of 16 December, weighed down by the imminence of the American attack, but looking forward to the opening of his third mosque in the afternoon. He never came home. At first his secretary said that he had a meeting with the President, then the meeting was stretched to some unspecified mission. A few days passed, when there was still no news and those friends he and his brother Omar knew to call stopped answering their phones, his father's secretary had come to the house with a small package, that he said, fumbling with the words, unable to look any of them directly in the eye, Abu Omar had asked him to deliver to his eldest son. It was his father's pistol and his gold watch.

The cul-de-sac logistics driving to and fro, this fraught mission, absorbed Ali's anger. An hour, two hours passed this way. Finally they went to the house of his father's sister and found her husband there. Abu Shakur was not a brother of his father, but he was all that could be found and would have to suffice. Abu Shakur was kindly and a little bit old, he carried a venerability, but he was not a close relative. Somehow this made Ali ashamed; the three of them seemed to be an unworthy cortege.

At the main gate of Abu Ghraib the guards would not let them through and told them to turn off the engine and wait. After an interim they were told a car would be sent to collect them. Abu Shakur told Ali to wait in the car, he would go and do the paperwork.

“Stay here, if you come with me, in the state you are in, you will curse the government and they'll arrest you—”

Abu Shakur was shown into the office of Colonel Hassan.
Colonel Hassan greeted him with an expression of regret. He opened his palms (“What could I do?”), then pressed his fingertips together in mock supplication.

Abu Shakur sat stiffly and cut through this false sympathy with a direct ambiguity.

“If Kamel disobeyed an order,” he stated clearly, in full reference and memory of his brother-in-law's unimpeachable reputation for loyal obedience, “this was his destiny.”

Colonel Hassan looked down at his dirty fingernails and replied, perhaps in an effort of mild justification, “It was for the interests of the country. I hope our God will help you to be patient.”

A form was presented to be signed.

Colonel Hassan asked politely where they intended to bury the body of Kamel Sachet. Abu Shakur told him, in Kuthar, near Hilla, where the family had some land.

Colonel Hassan warned him, “Take the body there and only there and no other place. If you take the body through Baghdad or stop the car in any other place we will take it back from you and bury it ourselves.”

Abu Shakur signed his name.

“A funeral is not permitted,” continued Colonel Hassan, in case he had not made himself perfectly understood. “A gathering of any kind is not permitted.”

Ali was in a state of slow shock and could feel nothing but an emptiness, an awful emptiness swirling with dull rage. Abu Shakur explained that they were not allowed a funeral, Ali nodded. Then they went into the town of Abu Ghraib and hired a taxi with a roof rack for the coffin. It was probably not the first time the taxi driver had been hired for such an errand. His parking place was in the middle of a low row of vegetable sellers next to a restaurant that served rice and kebab
to the families of the prisoners who came to visit. Opposite, up a track screened by dusty eucalyptus trees was the place where they buried the executed prisoners whose families did not know they were executed. The bodies were buried in trenches marked with the prisoners' metal wrist tags stamped with a number. No one ever told the relatives that asked, sometimes, in the restaurant: “What happens when the food and clothing parcels are returned unopened? Is the prisoner transferred? Where?” To Abu Shakur, the driver offered no pleasantries where none were to be had and agreed the fare without much haggling.

The coffin was narrow and made of cheap reused thin wooden boards; gray, plain and without markings. Ali Mishjil pried off the creaking lid and looked inside. The general's jacket had been laid over his face; he was still wearing his uniform, although it looked dirty and scuffed. For confirmation, Ali Mishjil pulled back the jacket. Ali stood a little way off and waited, hope running into grit. He wanted it not to be true and some terrible mistake, he wanted to hear any thin thread of lie—but Ali Mishjil cried out, screwing fists into his eye sockets, wailing incoherently at God and Ali knew it was him.

It was difficult and awkward, watched by the guards who offered no assistance, to lift the coffin onto the roof of the taxi. Ali and Ali Mishjil, strong with the imperative of the task, hoisted the coffin up. The taxi driver pretended to lift but didn't put much strength into his effort. As they heaved it up and rested it on the rim of the roof for a moment, Ali saw at eye level through a gap in the planking, a sliver of his father's naked foot. He recognized the long delicate scar along the ankle, an old familiar shrapnel wound from an attack outside Basra. As the last filament of hope fell soundlessly, he summoned strength from his pain and anger and pushed the dead
weight of his father across the roof rack of the scratched up taxi.

They set off followed by an Oldsmobile and a landcruiser, each carrying four Amn officers. A little way out of the gate, the coffin grated dangerously on the roof and they were forced to crawl slowly to the roadside souk in Abu Ghraib where they bought some more rope and tied it down properly. They resumed their journey and took the highway west, stopping in Mahmoudiya, near their destination, to buy perfume with which to anoint the body and lengths of white fabric in which to shroud it for burial.

By this time, delayed and circuitous, it was afternoon prayer time. They went to the mosque at the graveyard and asked for gravediggers and for those who washed the bodies for burial. Abu Shakur attended to these details, Ali stood on the sandy verge and remembered his father walking with him through these very graves. He had told him he wanted to be buried next to his grandfather. Ali crouched in grief, winded by the sound of his father's voice in his memory, and touched his fingertips to the dust.

He remembered his father teaching him how to shoot. He was nine and his father was commanding a unit in Diala. One of his officers showed him all the different kinds of weapons, put them into his small hands to feel, the barrels, the safety catch, the heft and responsibility, and stood over him while he practiced disassembling a Kalashnikov. In the afternoons sometimes he would be given fifteen bullets to fire at rows of cans. Ali would always ask for more bullets, try to wheedle them out of the bodyguards, sometimes even steal them from his father's office. He liked to shoot geckos but he was not allowed to; all around was the detritus of battle, old and unexploded ordnance, a stray bullet could hit something and blow it to king
dom come. An orderly hovered to one side and picked up the spent cartridge casings. His father stood behind him, correcting his grip.

“Relax a little,” he would tell him, “hold steady,” “aim carefully,” “no, not like that, place your feet further apart.”

A few men had come to pray but they passed Ali without greeting him and washed their hands at the outside basin, wiping carefully between each finger, sharing a vanishing slip of pink soap, without turning their heads to look behind them.

Ali had wanted to go the Military Academy and train to be an officer. He wanted to be like his father, like those officers his father commanded, respect, loyalty—an expensive pistol on his hip, a Mercedes to drive, or a Toyota Crown, something that carried and conferred status. His father had refused. He told Ali that the army had once been a good place, but not now. Ali had tried to argue, he did not understand, he saw his father with all his medals and decorations, the many people who revered him, visited, petitioned, the many he helped, the daughter of one of his officers killed in battle he had paid to train as a pharmacist, the mosques he had built, the way the ordinary people in Amara had looked to him for protection, like a guardian lord.

His father brushed off his son's admiration and his ambitions, he told him, bitterly, “Saddam always keeps the people he needs close to him; when they are no longer needed, he ignores them.”

As they waited for prayer to conclude, Ali felt his temper tremble and the inadequacy of this funeral.

Abu Shakur had gone to find the Sachet family plot but he could not locate it. He came back and asked the mosque attendants to find a map of the cemetery.

“Who is this you are burying?” they asked.

“This is Kamel Sachet we have here.”

Then the mosque attendants began to cry and lament, they knew Kamel Sachet, they knew a good man had been killed, they bemoaned Saddam and asked how could such a hero have been executed?

Five cars full of local Amn officers drove up. They parked and the officers positioned themselves on the road and around the mosque. They had been told to keep an eye on the burial of an executed man; they had no idea who was being buried. Adnan Janabi, hearing the news through Janabis in the intelligence network, drove up to pay his respects, no matter the consequences.

The Sachet family plot was found and the gravediggers started to dig in the dusk. The corpse washers laid the body out on a slab over a drain and brought buckets of hot water. Ali came into the mosque to see what was happening but Abu Shakur touched his elbow and led him away, “It's better that you don't see this.” Ali demurred, he was afraid to look at his father's dead face and imprint this as his last memory of him. Through the door to the washing room, which was slightly ajar, he could see the sleeve arm of his father's uniform, brown with blood, stiff and unnaturally rigid, bent across his chest, and the dried blood between his father's fingers—a corpse washer came over and drew Abu Shakur to one side. There was a problem, he explained. The body was in a bad state; it had been dead for some time. He paused uncertainly, respectfully. They could not undress him, skin and flesh would peel away stuck to his uniform. The man held out his hands apologetically. For Kamel Sachet, such a man who had built three mosques and kept his prayers, for such a man to be buried unwashed!—He was very sorry about all of it. Presently the imam came over and soothed things.

“No, no, don't concern yourself, God knows these problems: for a martyr, in these situations—it is not necessary to wash a martyr. Do not worry. If there is any responsibility that needs to be taken, I will be responsible.”

So the corpse washers carefully folded the General's arms across his chest in death repose and wrapped the body in a shroud. Ali came in when they had finished and put his hand on his father's white cotton hand.

Final prayers were said. Ali wiped his hands over his face and hung them at his sides, through the reassuring sibilance of prayer, the familiar, the repeated, the cyclical, the continuous, the everlasting certainty. He felt, however, no solace in the promise of paradise.