Correspondents, page 21
Rita was already in the street, which was paved with shattered glass from all the storefronts, every one of which had had its windows blown out. A large dressmaker’s sign, featuring a photograph of a stiffly smiling, typically over-coiffed and made-up Baghdadi bride, lay smack in the middle of the street. Rita had waded right into a crowd of young men, some of them with Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders, who were screaming and cursing as they stared at the blown-out front facade of the well-loved Al Saha. Some of its large potted palms had been thrown into the street by the blast.
“Death to America! Death to Bush!” the young men had already begun chanting.
“What happened? What happened?” Rita was asking them in Arabic. Nabil, still feeling dazed and disoriented, approached her, ready to, as she put it, “work.”
“Very big bomb! Very big,” several of the young men cried in English. “This way.”
They followed the crowd down a side alley that led into a network of smaller, residential streets where modest, walled villas—not the more lavish homes of other parts of Mansour—stood in rows. Everywhere, Nabil saw blasted-out windows and residents standing around, or pacing, dazed, some of them cursing openly. But it was when they rounded the corner that he truly moaned in astonishment and horror.
A huge gash lay in the middle of the road, perhaps twelve meters deep by twenty-five meters long by eight meters wide. It was filled with rubble, in which Nabil could make out the details of household interiors—a rust-colored couch, a sentimental watercolor picture of old Babylon still in its frame, a cream-colored electric kettle. On all sides of the crater, what had been homes were now heaps of rubble. The neighborhood had been completely flattened, pulverized to half detritus, half dust. People stood at the edge of the crater, staring into it, either dumb and dazed, trying to comprehend what had just happened, or wailing. A middle-aged, unveiled woman in Western clothes, a white blouse, jeans, and sneakers, knelt on the ground, sobbing, pounding her fists into her forehead, yelling “Oh my God, oh my God,” over and over again.
And then Nabil looked down and saw what he hadn’t yet seen as he’d surveyed the full vista: a hand, a woman’s hand, he surmised from the gold ring still on the fourth finger, lying in the dust just a meter from him, its thumb and index finger bent back, which gave the strange impression that it was reaching out for something. A bundle of meat and a bone protruded from its back end, which had been crudely, not cleanly, hacked off. Nabil just stared at it, shocked and mesmerized.
“Look,” he finally said to Rita, who stood a few paces from him, taking pictures with a digital camera and scrawling into her notebook. He pointed at the hand.
She looked at it, grimaced, then looked at him. “I’ve seen that before,” she said. “In Tel Aviv. Is that the first hand you’ve seen?”
He nodded. She shook her head. “I hate to say this, but nothing is as bad as the first one.” To this, he said nothing. “Come on,” she added. “Let’s talk to people.”
She walked toward the kneeling, wailing woman in jeans, knelt down beside her. “Ya khala,” she began, continuing in Arabic: “Can you tell us what happened?”
The woman began speaking through chokes and sobs. “My son, my son, I lost my son. He was working in the courtyard. I left him just for twenty minutes to buy food. I can’t even find him, he is buried under the house.” She gestured behind her. There was no house to speak of, just a small mountain of wreckage, in which Nabil could make out, as in the crater, household details: a floral printed shirt, a sneaker, a TV remote control, a toilet seat.
Nabil translated, and Rita scribbled. “May I ask your name, ya khala?”
“Umm Yusef,” she replied numbly.
“And was your son Yusef ?”
“Yes,” the woman replied, amid a fresh wave of tears. “He was fifteen years old. I was keeping him home from school because I was afraid to send him out.” She looked up at them, with what seemed an angry revelation. “Why were they bombing here? This is a neighborhood, there are no government buildings here, no weapons. I thought I was keeping him safe by keeping him at home. Now, how will I live without my son? I don’t want to live. I wish God had taken me too. This will be no life.”
The woman folded into herself with gasping sobs. Rita put a hand on her back and rubbed it. “Ya khala, I am so sorry. Where will you go?”
“I have a sister in Dora.”
Rita looked up at Nabil. “We can take you to Dora,” she said. Nabil repeated the phrase to the woman, to make sure she heard it well. “We have a driver nearby. We won’t leave without you.”
The woman didn’t reply, just kept sobbing. “I don’t want to live. I don’t want to live. God take me now too, so I can be with my son.”
“I am so sorry, ya khala,” Rita said again. But as she spoke, Nabil noticed, she was already surveying the landscape again. Silently, she nodded at him to move on.
He was loath to leave the woman alone. It was an odd and alienating feeling, he thought, to be “working” amid such chaos, to know one’s primary job was merely to observe and pull information and feelings from people rather than to join rescue efforts. Groups of men, dusty and some spattered with blood, were trying to pull back large chunks of wall wherever they could, to see whether anyone lay beneath, still half-alive. Other men were walking around with garbage bags and gloves, retrieving chunks of flesh or body parts.
Three teenage boys, their soccer jerseys covered in dust, came running up to them. “Did you hear what this was?” they shouted to Nabil. “The Americans thought Saddam was at Al Saha, they had a bad tip. They were trying to hit Al Saha, but they missed, the dogs.”
“They were trying to hit Al Saha?” Nabil repeated, shocked. He and Rita had barely escaped with their lives, he thought. They and nearly a hundred other people in the restaurant.
“What, what?” Rita demanded. “What about Al Saha?”
Nabil translated back for her.
“How do they know it was an American bomb?” she asked.
He translated this for the boys. “Look at the size of the crater!” they shouted, gesturing back at it. “Saddam doesn’t have bombs that size!”
“Do they live in the neighborhood? Do they know anyone who died in the bombing?” Rita asked.
No sooner had Nabil translated than the boys exploded with pointing and explanation. Nabil had to ask them to slow down, take a breath. “There was the Malouf family,” said one of the boys, the smallest of the three. In the front pocket of his jeans, Nabil now noticed, was a pistol. “The grandmother and the father and the little son, Kassem, all died. Kassem already had lost a leg from an infection that they had to amputate last year. He was eleven years old.”
“And over there,” pointed the second boy, “was Abu Kassem’s brother, Abu Nazar, and he died and his daughter, Leila, died too.”
“We think so far about eight or maybe nine people have died,” said the third. “We can’t find Umm Fouad, the grandmother from that house.” He pointed to another heap on the opposite side of the deep gash in the road.
As she scribbled, Rita asked, in Arabic,“How do you feel about the invasion?” A moment before he could echo the question, Nabil realized she had formed it flawlessly, so he was quiet. Her Arabic seemed to sharpen in a crisis, he noted.
“Death to Bush!” cried one boy.
“They said their bombs would be so precise, would only kill Sad-dam and his friends,” said another. He gestured sweepingly. “Why are they doing this? What did these people do? They were our friends, our neighbors.”
Nabil glanced several meters behind them. Alongside the crater, a middle-aged man in drab office attire, a white shirt and black slacks, crouched and wept, his head in his hands, while a man half his age held him. The neighborhood was so much like his own, he thought. He could easily picture the same scene on his street. His family had packed their bags and fled Baghdad a week before the first bombings to stay with his mother’s cousins in Najaf, but they were back now. What if the Americans got “intel” about Saddam’s associates or weapons caches in Kadhimiya? Would they be next?
He caught Rita’s eye as it strayed. “It’s Ali,” she said.
Sure enough, Ali was hurrying toward them, a cigarette in one hand, his forehead beaded in sweat.
“I heard the bomb,” he announced. He stared in awe at the crater, surveyed the Mansouris picking through the wreckage like zombies or weeping. “They said on Fourteenth Ramadan that they thought Sad-dam was at Al Saha.”
“We know,” Rita said. “We were at Al Saha when it happened.”
Ali flicked away his cigarette and scowled. “This is precision? These are devils.”
“We have a lady here we need to drive to her family in Dora.”
They walked back toward where Umm Yusef had been, to find she was no longer there. “I don’t know where she went,” Rita said, scanning the scene.
But something had caught Nabil’s eye as he stared into the crater, something he’d spied jammed between two large pieces of wall. He’d thought at first it was an object of some sort, but as he looked at it, he realized it was a human figure, small and charred, positioned as someone might lie when sleeping on the side, arms and legs splayed away from the trunk. He squinted and discerned that the figure had a full left leg but a stump on the right. The several men who had been searching for human remains had missed it thus far. Nabil just stared at it for several seconds, perversely engrossed in his examination, his stomach churning, before he finally pointed at it.
“Look,” he said. “It’s a body. I think that’s the little boy they mentioned. Kassem. You can see he was missing one leg.”
The three of them drew closer to the edge of the crater.
“Yes,” Ali eventually said. “That’s a body. That was a little boy.”
Nabil watched Rita as she stared wordlessly at the body. Her mouth opened as though she were going to form words, but then it closed again, and she continued to stare at the form, her face unreadable. She, too, seemed mesmerized. Slowly, she stepped forward until she stood at the very edge of the crater. Then, not taking her eyes off the body, she pulled her digital camera from her bag, raised it to her right eye, and snapped. She then moved a few paces to the right and snapped again. She put the camera back into her bag and pulled her notebook and pen from the back pocket of her jeans.
Nabil watched her as she wrote, looking up every other second to regard the body again, “in the crater . . . wedged in rubble . . . body little boy . . . amputated . . . burned head to toe.”
“How old would you say he was?” she asked, not taking her eyes off the body.
“I would say eight or nine,” he answered.
“8, 9 y. o.,” she scribbled. She then continued to stare at the body. She shook her head slowly. Then she turned to him.
“I can’t believe they didn’t send Claude out with us today,” she said.
Claude, the photographer.
“I asked if I could have Claude last night,” she added.
Nabil said nothing. It hadn’t been what he thought she was thinking.
She looked away, scanned the scene. Her eye caught the middle-aged man in office attire, still weeping and rocking under the arm of the other man. She sighed heavily. “Let’s go talk to that poor guy,” she said. “Then I’d better get back and file.”
She walked and he and Ali followed. Then she stopped and turned back to them. “And you know something else?” she added. “What do you want to bet the paper doesn’t run that picture I just took? I bet they wouldn’t run it even if Claude had taken it.”
She walked on, and Nabil followed. Here we go, he thought, as they surrounded the weeping man. Time to work again.
An hour later, back at the villa, Nabil and Ali, joined by Umm Nasim, who brought them small glasses of sweet tea, stood smoking, watching the three TV screens, as Al Jazeera and the BBC broadcast the very images from the bomb site that they had just seen—the keening survivors, the enormous crater, the men picking through the rubble for body parts—while on CNN a correspondent related the incident without showing tape. Miss Rita was at her makeshift desk, working the phones and e-mail, trying to get American military officials to confirm or deny that coalition forces had dropped the bomb and to tell her why. She’d pulled off her head scarf the moment they entered the villa’s garden, and now it lay in a small heap beside her laptop.
Ali exhaled smoke, shaking his head. “Dogs,” he muttered. “They won’t even show what they did.”
“I know,” Nabil muttered back. He felt the same stomach sickness he’d felt after hearing about the bombings in Al Sha’ab and Al Shula, only worse this time. One imprecise bombing on the Americans’ part he could perhaps forgive. But now there were at least three he knew of! Dozens and dozens of people who’d had nothing to do with Saddam’s evil had died; dozens more had been left without relatives, homes, or possessions.
And as for Rick, Miss Rita, and Claude: He knew it was their job to get out the story, but to see how mechanically they went about it, with no time for tears or outrage—he found that slightly appalling. He’d noted how, in the weeks before Baghdad fell, Rick had laughed with other correspondents after the press conferences at the Information Ministry when Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, Saddam’s press minister, whom the foreigners called “Baghdad Bob,” had continually declared that Saddam’s army was slaughtering American soldiers at the gates of the city and proclaimed that Baghdad would never fall to the Americans. Of course, it had been laughable—everyone knew that the Iraqi army stood no chance against the American-led troops—but it was the scorn with which they laughed that privately infuriated him.
They had no idea what it felt like to have a Godzilla-like foreign power about to take over their country. Uncomfortably, he found himself having strange feelings of loyalty to Saddam, of wounded pride for him, as he nursed a fantasy that somehow the Republican Guard would push back the coalition. Saddam was an Iraqi, after all. A monster, but their monster, not a marauding foreign monster. And today, not for the first time but certainly the most sharply yet, he felt dirty for helping the Americans, just because they paid well and it made him feel more important than working in a grocery store.
“Look at her,” Ali muttered, flicking his gaze toward Miss Rita. “She showed no emotion. Even looking at that boy’s body. She likes us to think that she is an Arab. No, she’s not. An Arab would show emotion.”
“She’s doing her job,” Nabil muttered back. But, of course, he’d had exactly the same thoughts.
“Nabil!” It was Miss Rita calling him, so he walked to her desk. “Can you take the other sat phone and call some professors and get some reaction?” She asked him to do this often, call around to a group of political-science professors, most from the University of Baghdad, all of whom spoke English anyway, to get analysis for her stories. “I won’t just use American analysis,” she said, and he knew she felt she was being very virtuous for aiming to include the Iraqi point of view in her stories.
“Of course.” So he did just that, managed to get hold of one or two professors, who were still, remarkably, showing up for their classes. The professors said exactly what he thought they’d say, which was that if America was trying to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis in order to get them to support a new, supposedly democratic government, its bombing campaign was having the opposite effect.
“I figured that’s what you’d get,” Rita said when he delivered the quotes to her.
Near six o’clock, Rick and Asmaa returned. They’d been doing a story at Abu Ghraib, west of the city, which the coalition was using for prisoners of war, which mainly meant Iraqi soldiers who hadn’t been smart enough to desert and go home. None of them had been very enthusiastic about fighting for Saddam’s losing cause—as much as they might’ve said they were before the invasion, out of fear of the slim chance that Saddam would remain in power. But Rick and Asmaa had heard about the Mansour bombing, and Rick immediately joined Rita in working on the story.
“Nasty day,” Rick pronounced loudly, to the room in general, on his way to Rita’s desk.
Asmaa grabbed Nabil’s arm and led him back toward the kitchen. “I need a cigarette and a tea,” she said.
He followed her into the kitchen, where she fished cigarettes out of her bag, handed him one, then lit both his and hers. She refilled the electric kettle from their stockpile of bottled water, and flipped its switch. Unlike the rest of the city, the villa never lost electrical power, because the newspaper had paid the equivalent of twenty-five thousand American dollars to install a backup generator.
Asmaa leaned against the counter and exhaled, looking at him bitterly. “This is at least three times now their bombs have killed dozens of innocent people. Rick wants to go to Al Kindi tonight to look at victims.”
Al Kindi was the nearby hospital that, since the invasion, had been flooded with the hemorrhaging and the burned, among them small children. The smocks of its overtaxed doctors and nurses, not to mention its very floors, were often smeared in blood.
Tears welled up in Asmaa’s eyes. “I don’t know if I can do it. It was bad enough seeing men being held like dogs at Abu Ghraib today just because they were part of the Iraqi Army. They are not the enemy!”
It was disconcerting for Nabil to see Asmaa about to cry, something she rarely did. “Tell Rick you don’t feel well,” he said. “I’ll go with him.”
But she shook her head. “No. Thank you, but no. This is my job, and we are being paid well for it. This is part of the job.”
