Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (17 page)

Earnest aid workers rigged refugee camps in the eastern desert. They thought it would be that kind of war, that refugees would straggle out and live in tents. Everybody imagined how the war would be and set things up for the war they had conjured. But you can’t see a war before it’s happened. Those tents stood nearly empty for months, irrelevant crusts on the edge of a sinking country. The first refugees cruised into Amman in gleaming cars with smoked windows. They sweated filthy dollars, bought posh flats, and drove the price of real estate through the sky. Saddam’s daughters flounced through the beauty parlors. It was that sort of war. But in the beginning nobody knew.

Then the twitching, sand-blind city stared down the first Friday
after the U.S. invasion began, and news spread: The clerics would sermonize about the evils of war, and then people would rampage in the streets. It was a useful idea, because inaction was driving everybody crazy. Maybe the government could have stopped it, but then a clever regime bends so as not to break; this is otherwise known as staying power. All that anger shouldn’t fester; it had to find release. So it would go into the streets, but only in a flash, as a quick demonstration of the travails the monarchy faced in keeping the people’s passions in check. It would show the Americans how their invasion made everything harder for this benevolent government with the pretty, plucky queen, and let the Arab brethren see that Egypt and Syria weren’t the only ones who got into a lather for the Great Arab Cause. Yes, Friday riots were the answer. Everybody had something to gain, and so did we, because the reporters were pent up and chomping for a story. Friday is the Muslim Sabbath, and everybody goes to the mosque to hear the sermons. It was a good day to whip up the crowds.

Friday came and I overslept, woke up, and called the
L.A. Times
translator, Nour.
*
She was snippy. We had never met. “I’ll be in the street with some other journalists,” she said. “You can meet me there.” I heard small children yelling in the background.

“What street?”

“Near the al-Husseini mosque.”

“
What
mosque?”

“Al-Husseini!”

“Where is it?”

“It’s—it’s downtown,” she sighed heavily. “The taxi drivers will know. Okay?” She hung up.

Creaking cars and tinted Mercedes and policemen jammed the streets. Koranic verses moaned from streaked windows. The taxi wove and wheedled downtown until the driver’s weary gestures indicated it would be faster to walk. As I pushed through the crowds in the shadow of dingy apartment blocks and dreary offices, I dialed and redialed Nour, hearing busy signals.

Then I saw them: a cluster of jeans-clad foreign journalists, cameras
swinging from their necks, all of them clumped around a young Arab woman who chattered into her telephone as if she were alone. I planted myself in front of her and stared until she hung up. “Hello,” I said.

“Hello,” she said.

“Are you Nour?”

“
Nora
,” she said archly. “Do I know you?”

“I’m Megan. From the
L.A. Times
. We talked a while ago. We were supposed to meet.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You were supposed to translate for me.”

“I don’t know who you are,” she said lightly. “But I’d be happy to help you.”

I sighed. “We just talked on the phone.”

“Well,” she said, “why don’t we walk together anyway, and I’ll help you out.”

She had been herding us along as we talked, Nora the Pied Piper of pale and gangly journalists, and now we had reached the old mosque. Piled rose-and-white limestone in the oldest quarter of Amman, the mosque is not far from the skeleton of the Roman amphitheater, and they say it was set on the ruins of the Temple of Philadelphia. But whatever splendor graced this valley in the days of the Romans has been rubbed away by centuries. Wealthy Jordanians didn’t stay in the tight, shabby streets of downtown; they climbed up the hills and into the desert to build lavish white houses. At the al-Husseini mosque, poor men peddled slabs of cardboard for makeshift prayer rugs and knelt down like ragged flowers in a stained concrete garden. The voice of the preacher piped through a loudspeaker.

“The Arab nation is being humiliated because we are not religious enough,” Nora translated. “The Arab nation tasted humiliation because we do not pray enough.

“If we unite as Arabs, we will win this war. This war is a sign for us to move forward and do something about our nation.”

Not very radical, I thought. Whatever happens, this cleric will be able to say it wasn’t his fault. Rings of praying men radiated from the mosque, a field of timeworn carpet and bowed heads. Everybody was tensed. It was coming and we waited. The prayers ended and the men
stood, dusted off their dishdashas and the knees of their slacks. The street was crowded as a circus and silent as a cemetery. More men poured from the dim recesses of the mosque. Eyes flicked around, wary. Who would start the demonstration? They had so little practice.

A knot of men broke from the shadows and charged into the street, words in their throats and fists in the sky, screaming the timeless incantation of Arab dictatorship:

Bil roh! Bil dam! Nafdeek, ya Saddam!

With our souls, with our blood, we will sacrifice for you, O Saddam. This is shouted in every single Arab country; only the name changes. We will sacrifice for you, O Mubarak, we will sacrifice for you, O Rafik, we will sacrifice for you, O Bashar, we will sacrifice for you, O Islam, O Nasrallah, O Sheikh Yassin. In every Arab country, crowds of young men rush into the street to holler about sacrificing soul and blood for a dictator. It’s the cave art of political discourse, done as automatically as American students pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic, et cetera. Except these men are not passive, muttering their lines, hands limp on their hearts. They flame with rage and fierce pride. And then, through some alchemy, it cakes off like dried dust and blows away. The feeling is there, and then it is not. I looked many times at these skinny men with their thin mustaches and injured eyes, watched their mouths stretch and snap around the words. They looked back at me with hatred and yet it was tainted with confusion over which they hated more: themselves and their circumstances, or me standing there staring. Could they even say themselves, could they sort through the palpable indignity of having to cheer for an abusive power, through the vague pride and eagerness to please authority that rang in their voices?

With our souls! With our blood!

Disorder had been induced, the shouting scared away the pigeons, and after that nobody needed a prompt. The men who lurked cagily on the stained old streets, waiting for somebody else to get things started—they joined in, too. They punched at the sky, screamed for Iraq and Saddam, cursed America and Israel. The protestors emptied the dirty air from their lungs, the chains loosened for just this one afternoon, just this hour, just this place smeared with sun until it looked like a dream of itself. Nora stood unabashed in her short sleeves and blue
jeans, hair knotted back into a ponytail, bangs dripping into her eyes, translating the chants, matter of fact and unreadable.

Rows of riot police stomped up a side street, gripping shields and clubs for beating. The demonstrators marched toward them, screaming their chants.

I put my hand on Nora’s back. “We’re in the wrong place,” I had to yell. “We’re going to get stuck in between them.”

“I think it’s okay,” she said. “So far it’s calm.”

“It won’t stay calm. Watch.”

The crowd had thickened by then, swollen and scraping against the shuttered market stalls, too big for the cramped stone streets. The police sticks pointed skyward, and the afternoon collapsed in running. Shoes slammed on hard streets. Every shop was a blank eyelid, screwed tight. There was nowhere to escape and so we ran with the demonstrators, riot police at our backs, swinging their clubs, thwacking at any limb, any spine. These were not hardened activists; these were middle-aged Arab men whose resolve vanished at the first smack of club on skin. Their hands thumped against our shoulders, shoved us aside. Panic turned to stampede and we raced through bodies slamming blindly into bodies, bone on bone and muscle on muscle, ragged breath, and clothes snagging on the sides of buildings.

Somebody was shouting and we turned to see a shopkeeper holding a demonstrator by the collar, punching him in the face, over and over. “Get out of my store!” he yelled hysterically, thrusting the man into the stampede. Somebody had found an open door and we jammed ourselves through, ran up one flight of wobbling stairs after the next, hunting for a window. Sweating, shaking, laughing. Nora was silent. Her enormous brown eyes flickered.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “This is great.”

I worked my cell phone out of my jeans pocket. I had a message from Nour: Are you here? I stared at it, frowning.

“Wait,” I said to Nora. “So you’re not Nour.”

“I’m Nora.”

“You don’t work for the
Los Angeles Times
.”

“No.”

“And we didn’t talk on the phone this morning.”

“No,” she said, and a laugh spread across her face.

“Oh my God. I’m so sorry. You must have thought I was crazy. I thought you were somebody else. I never met our fixer here, I don’t know what she looks like.”

“Megan,” she cut me off. “It’s no problem.”

She started giggling. I started giggling.

“Hey,” I said, “we can’t really see anything from here. You want to go back out?”

She did.

It took police half an hour to haul the last diehard protestors into paddy wagons. When they finished, the shopkeepers unlocked the metal screens and threw open their dens. Clumsy racks sprouting feather dusters and baseball caps resurrected themselves from the bed of concrete. The men hauled out old chairs, lit coals for their water pipes, and sat smoking, eyes fixed over the street as if nothing had passed.

Nora packed us into her car and whisked us off to a café. Here the Jordanians were young and lithe with designer eyeglasses, tight jeans, and flirty glances. Pop music bounced off walls the color of watermelon. It felt insane to be here, insane that this was the same country as the sweaty, tumultuous warrens of downtown an hour earlier. Do these kids even know about the demonstration? Nora shrugged. They are not interested, she said.

One of the journalists in our group is talking about the men who follow him from his hotel.

Nora frowns. “Shhhhhhh.”

“It’s not safe to talk here?”

“It’s not safe to talk
any
where.”

We fall quiet. Then Nora says, “Here’s what we do, guys, okay? My friends and I have a system we use so we can talk. It’s like a code. Like, we say ‘flower’—what do you think that means?”

The queen? Somebody guesses.

“Her husband.”

Flower
means “king.”

Mouse
means “intelligence agent.”

These days, Jordan is full of
mice
. Everybody is afraid of them. They have never been so prevalent, or so powerful. Why? Because
flower
is
scared. He’s very close to the West, which is not popular, especially since the Palestinian intifada, the war in Afghanistan, and now this war in Iraq.
Flower
was educated in English, people criticize his Arabic. Since September 11, it seems like everything is illegal. There are a lot of things the Jordanian newspapers won’t print; they just can’t. After September 11, there were even more red lines and topics that angered the government.

What are the repercussions, we ask.

Actually, she says, it’s like a point system. The first time, if you mess up, say they know you said something bad about
flower
, you get called in. They might give you a warning. The second time, they might give you a beating. The third time, you’re going to prison. Roughly like that.

Nora closed her mouth as the waiter drew near. The girl at the next table wiggled her shoulders and sipped through her straw, eyes locked on her boyfriend. The music pumped on.

After the United States invaded Iraq, my job got more complicated. Suddenly it was a tiresome problem, being an American. My nationality invaded every interview. If I wanted to talk about agriculture or mosque renovation, we’d end up dissecting America first. Every Arab had a detailed critique of U.S. foreign policy, and no intention of missing his chance to unburden all that outrage into the ear of an honest-to-God American. If I were strategically smart, I’d listen sympathetically to the complaints about America’s basic moral unseemliness, my silence a delicate, implicit apology. And then, after I’d scraped and nodded and mm-hmmed, I could wedge in a few questions. Stay cordial, I’d remind myself. You catch more flies with honey.

But I couldn’t always do it. I didn’t have the patience.

“You don’t really have a democracy in America. I know you’re not free to write what you see. You can only write what the government allows you to write. You don’t have to pretend with me. I know how it works.”

“America used to be a great, powerful country. Now you let the Israelians run everything. The government and the business, too. The Israelians knew about September 11. Why is America so blind?”

“How did the United States elect this Bush? We thought Americans were intelligent but now we see that they are not.”

Sitting there, I’d get agitated. I didn’t rub this man’s nose in his country’s corrupt, cruel leaders, or remind him of the shame of living quietly inside a dictatorship, impotent amid torture and censorship. I did not force him to represent his government. And yet I could not expect the favor to be returned, because my own government dripped with strength. As a citizen of an invading power, I could be called to account. My leg bounced wildly, my eyes narrowed, I dropped the pretense of taking notes. When you stop writing, people always notice.

“Write this down, please,” he intoned condescendingly.

“I don’t need to. I’ve heard it before, and it has nothing to do with the story I’m working on.”