The Weight of a Mustard Seed (5 page)

W
ITH HINDSIGHT, IT SEEMED TO DR. HASSAN
that the long and miserable national descent began in 1983. Three years into the war, the oil money began to run out, blood into sand. The dinar fell from its stronghold of one to three dollars and would carry on falling for the next twenty years. For the first time Iraqis needed to have official permission to leave the country, and those with strategic skills—army officers, doctors, engineers—often found permission denied. Something changed: a sense of weariness and wariness, of claustrophobia; casualties mounted; war sacrifice ate hope with increasing ravening. Life became separated into before and after; good times and times that had to be endured.

Long decades later, in the spring of 2006, Dr. Hassan and I sat in his office in safe exile in Abu Dhabi, reflecting. Dr. Hassan had been watching the coverage of Saddam's trial. In court Saddam had jabbed and lectured, cogent and defiant. In Dr. Hassan's professional opinion, Saddam was “paranoiac aggressive”; in his own world he was still President. He threw his prosecution back in the face of those kangaroos who dared to make up their own justice and declared, “I am responsible for everything!”

The formal charge against Saddam was the killing of over a
hundred male inhabitants of the town of Dujeil, reprisal for an assassination attempt in 1982.

“Did you see they read the name of the doctor who was attending the execution in Dujeil?” Dr. Hassan leaned back in his chair and rubbed one side of his face with his palm, a gesture of strain, an effort of self-reassurance. “The doctor's signature was on the death certificates.” Dr. Hassan was caught by the idea that the signature could have been his own. “Dr. Huda,” he recalled, distractedly, to himself, “yes something like this, it was a Christian name…one day if
my
name…and at the trial of Saddam Hussein, was read out…”

“When did you realize it was bad? 1983? Or earlier?”

We went back to the very beginning.

 

I
N THE SUMMER
of 1968 Hassan graduated from high school with the highest mark in all of Kerbala province. His father was in prison, wrongfully convicted of embezzlement, and he and his mother and siblings were reduced to a small rented house in Kerbala with no electricity or running water. For such a lowly family, his was an extraordinary achievement. Hassan was awarded the fortune of twenty dinars for his scholarly success and his picture was taken for the local paper. He went to Baghdad to enroll in the university.

At six in the morning on 17 July Hassan woke up to the sound of gunfire cracking. He was staying in a hostel off Rashid Street and went out into the ocher summer dawn and asked the pavement sellers setting up for the day what had happened. The defense ministry was a few streets away, they pointed.

“Another coup,” said one, shrugging his shoulders.

“A coup? Do you think they will block the roads?” Hassan was mindful of the scant three banknotes in his pocket. He had
planned to return to Kerbala that day; he did not have enough money for a longer stay.

He went back to his hostel and drank a glass of tea and listened to the radio. General Aref was finished, that much was obvious, but it was not clear who was now in control. At seven-thirty the radio issued Proclamation Number One. Various promises were made to deal with the Kurdish problem, Palestinian guerrillas, the righting of the military catastrophe against the Jews the previous year, the rule of law, equal opportunities and “a democratic life.” More flowery rhetoric was reserved for the denunciation of the regime which had just been deposed: “a clique of ignoramuses, illiterates, profit-seekers, thieves, spies, Zionists, suspects and agents.” On the streets, Dr. Hassan recalled, no one paid much attention; there had been so many coups and generals and presidents since the murder of the King in 1958. Political fervor boiled with Arab pride, the injustice of Palestine and the indignity of British imperialism. A swirl of ideologies, the Communist current and the nationalist current and the Baath Party current each flowed faster and faster as if it were a race. The Baathie revolution of 1968 was expected and came, calmly, like a break in the weather, as if in answer to the turmoil. The lanes under the crumbling balconies of the old Ottoman quarter were noisy with hawkers and sellers going about their business as usual. Hassan noticed a girl walking past with her head uncovered and wearing a skirt that showed her legs. All the barrow-men and the porters, the tea hawkers, the traffic policeman with the whistle in his mouth, an old man on a mule, watched her progress, but the girl, carrying a satchel of university textbooks, seemed to regard their lusty interest contemptuously. These were modern times and what did she care for the backwardness of the dirty lower strata? Another revolution! Progress! What did this all mean
for the common man? Not much, a shoulder shrug of indifference. That day Hassan felt no ominous portent, there were no roadblocks or curfews after all, he traveled back to Kerbala in the afternoon without incident.

 

H
ASSAN JOINED THE
Medical Faculty at Baghdad University but after two terms it was clear he could not afford to continue without joining the army for sponsorship, and in order to take up his commission, Hassan was told he had to join the Baath Party.

Politics were still in turmoil. On campus there were many parties: Nasserites, Leftists, Muslim Brotherhood, Progressive Socialist Workers, Islamic factions; it was a dangerous mix of popular struggle and force, strikes, arson and rallies, counterplot and propaganda, denunciations, arrests, gunfire and assassination. Students were taken out of exam rooms and never seen again; Dr. Hassan remembered a young Baathie student leader called Ayad Allawi who liked to brandish his pistol—it was a revolution after all—at communists when fights broke out in the Student Club. From time to time, government cars were bombed.

His father warned him against getting mixed up in politics, but Hassan filled in the application form without much misgiving, signed his name to a dictated paragraph declaring the socialist and Arab nationalist principles of Baathism and went to the weekly meetings as required.

Dredging this history in Abu Dhabi, one question echoed in my head: Didn't you know? Didn't you know? I was hoping to elicit the very first pricks of misgiving, things he had seen which bothered him, a disquiet, at least concern—the telephone rang. Dr. Hassan turned away from me and took the call.

Dr. Hassan put the telephone down and smiled. He resumed his chronology. In January 1969 he and the other Baathie students were ordered to Tahrir Square (“Come and enjoy the feast!” exhorted the radio), where fourteen prisoners, nine of them Jews, were to be publicly hanged as Zionist traitors. The Baath Party, insecure in their tenure, young, nascent, then just another regime in a series of overthrowing coups, was showing its boots and its bite. The chants swelled in the throats of a hundred thousand people crowded under the swinging cadavers. “Death to traitors!” “Death to Israel!”

“What did you think, standing there?”

Dr. Hassan did not excuse himself, but neither did he berate himself. Those executed were spies, they had been convicted of working against the revolution; these were the consequences.

“There was no concept of democracy, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, the rights of an individual. We didn't feel these things, we didn't think these things, we didn't have any practice of them. I came from a religious town where you could never give your frank opinion. No one had ever been able to speak freely, contradict or question the prevailing order, or especially any kind of religious institution. There was no discussion of these things, life simply
was
, and was organized already. We did not feel mercy or pity for those Jewish spies who were hanged. We didn't know the reality, that they were innocent, that they had been tortured. People were shouting, ‘Death to the spies!' OK, we shouted, ‘Death to the spies!'”

In 1974 there was another coup attempt in Baghdad. Hassan and his Baathie cadre at the University were issued with rifles and sent to defend the Ministry of Defense. He waited, with his hands sweating around the wooden stock of the gun, for an attack. He thought,
What, for the sake of Allah, am I doing here?
(In the retelling his knees began to vibrate gently—a minor
tremor, some latent nerve?) He admitted that he thought to himself, squatting next to a sandbag with the grit and rubble under his newly issued, heel-cracking black army boots,
This is trouble, this is trouble that we might get hurt or killed in and we cannot get out of this trouble.

 

B
Y
1983 D
R.
Hassan was a major in the army medical corps with a successful private practice. He dressed well and liked Italian shoes, he bought a new car every year and rented a house where he and his friends could gather for parties, a place to bring their girlfriends and drink and relax. He was comfortable, confident, proud of himself, he had rank and respect and money.

Three days a week he saw patients at the Rashid Military Hospital. After the retreat from Mohamara, he noticed an influx of psychological casualties, shell shock, shaking, hysterical paralysis on the right, gun-holding side of the body. He began to notice waves of malingerers that coincided with each heavy assault. Gunshot wounds to the hands or feet, self-inflicted broken arms; soldiers would inject petrol into the backs of their hands and their flesh would swell and erupt like a volcano, seeping, horrendous, accompanied by a fever. The Military Amn ordered the doctors to send these deserters to prison after they were treated. The usual sentence was five to seven years, but psychiatrists like Dr. Hassan would often write “under tension” on their files and send them back to their units. Often he helped his friends out; he would write sick notes for officers, especially if there was a big attack coming up, or he would make a false medical report, “mentally depressed, unfit for service,” so that eighteen-year-olds could avoid conscription. He felt sorry for them, Sunni and Shia alike, young men
faced with the meat grinder of the war; he did what he could to help them avoid the front line.

Then one day, a friend of his disappeared. Dr. Hassan asked around discreetly, confidentially; no one knew—then another friend disappeared. Both were, like him, Shia from the shrine city of Kerbala, like him, they had done well in their studies and joined the Baath Party and progressed into good jobs in Baghdad. Dr. Hassan felt a cold chill and self-diagnosed anxiety. A colleague of his, Dr. Laith, confirmed in a corridor whisper, yes, his friends had been arrested. Dr. Hassan took sleeping pills and he dreamed about leaving the country but dared not apply for an exit visa. He regretted returning to Iraq after his training in Munich, but he had had no choice, now it was too late. He thought:
I should hide, but everywhere they will find me
.

One January morning he received a letter requesting him to report for an interview at the Military Amn. He put on his olive green combat dress and a fur-lined fatigue jacket to guard against the cold. He sewed 200 tablets of temazepan and Valium into the collar of his shirt and the waistband of his trousers and put only a little money and his military ID card in his pocket. He took a taxi to the Amn office instead of driving his own car; he knew he would not be returning.

Dr. Hassan presented himself for arrest. They pulled off the badge of rank from his shoulder and took his watch, blindfolded and handcuffed him and transferred him, by black windowed minivan, to the Military Amn headquarters. His head was forced forward so that he had to walk bent over with his torso parallel to the ground and he was led along an underground corridor and down seven concrete steps and pushed into a cell. The cell had a cement floor, a solid metal door with a window slot and a dirty mattress; but it had been newly painted. A
single light bulb burned brightly and continuously and the buzzing blades of a ventilator fan, irregular white noise, drove him half mad with tinnitus. Twice a day, at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., there was a toilet break, the cell doors were opened and the prisoners had to run through the corridor, herded and slapped by guards wielding cables. For three days he remained alone, lying drugged and slothful, abandoned to his own mind. He remembered twenty years before, visiting his father in prison, he remembered that injustice—now repeated! He remembered how proud his father had been when he had achieved the highest high school marks in the whole Province of Kerbala, he had waved the telegram at everyone in prison and they had all given thanks to Allah, that he, an unlucky man, had such a son. Such a son! Dr. Hassan opened his eyes but the white walls bounced cruel electric light and he closed them again into a red interior. In prison, in this country of prisons! His memories came in waves of regret. He recalled the shape of the woman he had loved in Munich under his hands and the bright green spring trees along the boulevards—why had he ever returned to Iraq? He rued and kicked at his decisions—he should have known—and his mind rewound to his duties as a junior doctor attending to prisoners during the war against the Kurds in 1974: lacerations, lesions, swellings, bruises, black eyes, septicemia, infections, toxemia, renal complications, nails extracted, one or more, sometimes all ten, third degree burns on the fingertips due to applied electricity. At night he could hear screaming and sobbing, he ate his Valium and drove himself crazy calculating what his friends might have said under interrogation, what he should say, what he would be compelled to say.

After three days they woke him at 3 a.m., handcuffed and dragged him, bent over, down the corridor. Up the seven steps,
outside, a five minute walk, it was dank and cold, then inside again. They sat him on a stool. They kept him blindfolded but he had the impression that it was an old stone vault with blank walls. He could hear two guards at the door while two other officers paced back and forth and questioned him.