The Sweetness of Tears (31 page)

The soldier’s lips formed an
O
, as if he understood, but I wondered. I was going to get used to that chant over the next week. The more I heard it, the less strange it became, feeling more and more like people at church, in Garden Hill, shouting out hallelujahs.

At the airport terminal, there was a lot of hustle and bustle. Most of the people there were U.S. military. You could tell which ones were going home just by looking at their faces. And, I’m guessing, if you got close enough—which no one in our group tried to do, keeping as much distance between themselves and the soldiers and Marines as they could—by their breath, too. The ones going home looked and acted like they’d started celebrating a little early—the only shop in the duty-free was a giant liquor store, so it wasn’t hard to guess how. The ones arriving in country looked pissed.

Our first destination was Karbala. It took twelve hours to get there by bus, even though it’s only about sixty miles south of Baghdad. Dr. Salman said that part of the reason it took so long was because we had to avoid the most direct routes, which were the most dangerous, sticking instead to smaller, out-of-the-way roads, making the journey safer but more circuitous.

There were a total of six buses for our group. We had to go very slowly. The roads weren’t very good and we stopped and pulled over a couple of times for U.S. convoys going by, many more times for checkpoints. Dr. Salman had warned the group about how to behave at those checkpoints. No cameras. No cell phones in sight. And if American soldiers boarded, he urged us not to stare at them, not to look angry or upset or scared, to do what they asked, to open bags and get off the bus if they ordered us to, without arguing.

We were boarded only a few times. When it happened, a small group of U.S. soldiers would walk up and down the aisle of the bus a couple of times, staring sternly into each of our faces, making everyone nervous. At the sight of them, I couldn’t not think of Chris, who was the reason I was there. Again, I was struck by the fact that none of the soldiers recognized me as American. That felt strange. And scary, once, when one of them stopped and yelled, fiercely, at a woman in the group who had forgotten to put away her video camera. He nearly took it away from her. By now, she was crying. Dr. Salman came over, apologizing profusely, until the soldier got off the bus, still muttering angrily to himself.

Until that one soldier yelled, I had had the nearly irresistible urge to stand up and wave and say, “Hey, guys! Where are you from? I’m from California!” After that, I sank low into my seat, glad not to be noticed. If Chris were among those soldiers and Marines, would he recognize me?

On our way to Baghdad,
Chris wrote
. Finally! We hardly see any women in the towns and villages on the way into Baghdad. Those we do are all in black. The people—men and women—look at us suspiciously. We look at them the same way. I guess they’re afraid of us. I would be, too. In our uniforms and tanks, we must look pretty scary. Truth is, we’re scared, too.

I was wearing a black
abaya,
like the other women. We’d all had to practice wearing them, at Dubai, since it was an Arab form of clothing and none of the Indian and Pakistani people normally wore them. Most of the women in our group—other than Deena and a couple of others—did normally cover their hair, wearing the scarf they called
hijab,
but not the
abaya
. From what Deena said, this was an unusually religious bunch of people. Obviously. I couldn’t see irreligious people wanting to go on a pilgrimage in a war zone.

Everyone in our group that I talked to said the same thing with regard to the danger, when I asked about it. They weren’t afraid. They were at peace. The Imam would see to their safety. And God.

All the way to Karbala, we passed burned-out cars on the side of the road. And bombed-out buildings. There were gutted grooves in the road, too, that one of the translators on the bus said, darkly, were the marks of American tanks.

Almost there. It’s been a mess getting there. We had to stop and clear the road a lot, from all the bombed-out cars, trucks, and debris. A lot of the buildings, too, are damaged. Our bombs got here before we did. We see people, too. A lot of them, waving white flags.

Also along the way, we passed other pilgrims, on foot, who were walking from other parts of Iraq to get to Karbala for the Arbaeen holiday. In every town and village we passed, there were tents set up for the pilgrims to sleep and rest in and stalls where water, tea, and food were served at no charge.

“That’s the traditional
sabeel,
” Sadiq said. “In Karachi, too, people line up on the sides of the Ashura procession, serving water and tea to the people walking in the
juloos
. Feeding the hungry and thirsty is a way people remember the thirsty children of Karbala.”

There were a couple of translators on each bus that Dr. Salman had hired and arranged for, along with the buses, who had joined us before we left Baghdad. When one of them heard Sadiq explaining to me about the
sabeel,
he bitterly said, “This tradition wasn’t allowed under Saddam. For Iraqis, none of the traditions of Muharram were allowed, though the regime allowed foreign pilgrims access to Karbala. It was a tourism thing—good for business. But it was different then. Government people were all over Karbala, limiting the interaction between the foreigners and the locals. The Shia in Karbala and Najaf were Saddam’s biggest threat to power. And they suffered for it, too. But now, everything is different. The Americans saved us from the tyrant!”

“So—you’re glad w—they came?” I asked.

“Of course! I used to give thanks for Mr. Bush every day, in my prayers.”

“Used to?”

“Yes, sister. Not anymore. Now, it is clear why they came. With all their promises. They came for oil, they came for their own purposes. They knocked Saddam off of his throne, out of his palaces. And now they live there themselves. No one is fooled. It is long past time for them to leave. Thank you very much, Mr. Bush.
Yalla
. Now, go.”

In Baghdad, on patrol, we get out on foot and walk the streets of the neighborhoods where Iraqis live. Sometimes, people come up to us and want to shake our hands. Some of them speak English. They say thank you. For getting rid of the tyrant. Some of them ask us how long we’re staying. Not everyone smiles at us. I get it. I don’t want to be here any longer than I have to, either.

When we got to Karbala, I was a bystander. I watched the others, participating when I had to, trying my best to blend in with the waves of black, billowing fabric of the women of our group. The sound of somber prayers and melodies, in Arabic, blaring out from street-corner speakers, alternated with more mundane program announcements, following us everywhere. As we elbowed our way through clumps of people, more private recitations, hard to hear over the PA system, reached out to our ears, swerving from Arabic to Urdu to Farsi and even English.

The entrances for all the shrines were different for men and women. “That is something new,” Sadiq said. “Before the war, women and men came to the shrine together.”

To get in to each one, we had to pass through four, five, sometimes six checkpoints, each of us frisked and wanded each time. It was all very organized. We checked our shoes in before entering. Everything around the shrine and inside of it was clean and grand and beautiful, the marble floors covered with richly woven rugs. Our hotel, the Baitul Salaam, the House of Peace, was right across the street from the grounds of the main shrine, the one with the golden dome, which was Imam Husain’s.

Sadiq said, “This is a new hotel. There are lots of new buildings, lots of development. At least in the vicinity of the shrines. Before, you can’t imagine how much poverty there was. I was overwhelmed by it. Though I come from Pakistan and am no stranger to the kind of poverty that is, well, distressing. There were children with outstretched hands everywhere you looked. And adults, too. I’m not speaking of homeless people and beggars. I mean our translators and guides and taxi drivers. The level of need, because of the shortage of goods from years of sanctions and also because Saddam deliberately kept these areas downtrodden, was obscene.”

We pass out candy to the kids. They’re cute. But some of them are dirty. They crowd around us when we go on foot patrol. They rip off the wrappers first thing and eat it up like they’re starving. I gave away my stash of Hershey’s bars. They were all warped and melted, anyway. I’m sticking to hard candy from now on. Gotta ask Mom to send me more. One of the other platoons, the one we call the Hard Ass Platoon, doesn’t like it when we give the kids candy. They don’t like them running up to ’em. To tell the truth, Sgt. Dixon doesn’t like it much, either. He carries hand sanitizer around, rubbing his own hands with it, offering it to everyone around him, too, whenever the kids reach out and touch us, ’cause he thinks the kids carry germs that are gonna make us all sick. But at least he’s not mean to the kids, like the Hard Asses are. I remember going to Africa with Jo and Grandma Faith. Washing those kids’ feet. Don’t think the sarge would make a very good missionary.

Speaking of which, some of the guys and I found out about an orphanage run by nuns—Iraqi Christians—in Baghdad. So, we’ve been trying to go once a week. Most of the kids there are disabled and abandoned. It’s nice to just play with little people who don’t look at you like you’re an alien.

For the three days that we stayed in Karbala, we woke before dawn and made our way to Imam Husain’s shrine for morning prayers. We entered the inner courtyard of the shrine through the gates of the exterior walls, geometrically adorned, accented in a shade of green that was dull compared to the brilliant blue borders of the main building inside the square. I followed what everyone else did—for the morning prayer and all the others—standing shoulder-to-shoulder in neat rows of black, bowing, touching my head to the ground, in my heart saying the Sinner’s Prayer the way I had in church at Garden Hill, instead of the verses of the Quran and the prayers that everyone else was reciting. My ears pricked up at one of the prayers recited everywhere we went, a kind of salutation that had familiar names in it—Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Jesus—whose title was the Spirit of God. After morning prayers, we’d come back to the hotel for breakfast and make our way to other shrines around town, the most important of which was the one for Abbas, Imam Husain’s brother. There were smaller shrines to visit, too, the markers for where each martyr of Karbala was killed. Returning to the hotel at lunchtime, most people would pray after lunch, nap, and then wake up again for all the evening prayers, making another round of the shrines, now beautifully lit up against the dark of the night sky.

Inside of the shrines, the sarcophagi were penned in with silver and golden screens, which the pilgrims went around, touching and kissing, rubbing them with cloth that they would take home with them as spiritual souvenirs.

By the actual day of Chehlum, or Arbaeen, the city was packed. Going outside of the hotel was like getting onto a six-lane highway, packed with bumper-to-bumper human traffic. The day started with the sound of loud drums beating through the streets, right after the dawn prayer, signaling the beginning of a day full of processions.

“They’re different, in some ways, from the processions in Pakistan,” said Sadiq. “Here, they do reenactments of the battles, too.”

Accompanied by the drums, I saw the fake sword play in the reenactments, the men beating themselves with their hands, with chains, with knives—real ones. It was pretty gruesome. I understood why Sadiq had fainted when he was a little boy. The people in our group just stood on the sides, next to the palm trees, and watched it all like tourists—taking in a river of people instead of fish, black and white schools streaming, speckled with brilliant flashes of red and green, the colors of the flags and banners held high against the sand-colored brick that most of the buildings in Iraq seemed to be built of. I watched the blood flowing in the streets, not wanting to, but unable to turn my eyes away from the sight.

“Are you going to do that?” I asked Sadiq.

He shook his head. “I don’t. Not anymore. I give blood instead. Like a good, enlightened grown-up.”

Deena leaned close and whispered in my ear, “Are you all right, Jo? With all of this?” She waved her hand around. “It must be very—strange! To say the least.
I
find it to be so. I can’t imagine what
you
must be thinking and feeling.”

“It is strange. But I’m all right. I’m—I’m open. You know what I mean?”

She nodded.

As I spoke to her, my eyes followed the path of the blood on the pavement, saw the men who came to wash it up with hoses when the procession ended, getting the street ready for the next round.

We were patrolling the streets in the Dora neighborhood, on foot again, when it happened.

Such a stupid, stupid mistake. It’s one of those things you shouldn’t even have to think about—that you don’t slam the cover on a live weapon. But Foley did. His M-16 discharged, hitting a kid who’d been playing in the street in front of his house. Foley was with Sgt. Dixon, way behind. Me and Phillips were on the other side of the street from where the kid was, watching him as he ran into the street, in our direction, probably wanting candy. He must have been eight, nine years old. Doc ran up and got down on the ground, took the kid’s head in his lap, and tried to do what he could. The boy’s dad came running out of the gate right after he heard the shot. He saw Doc working on his son, and stood there, shouting, “Allah! Allah!”

Then a woman came out of the house across the street, a bag in her hand. “I’m a doctor,” she said, in English. She got down on the ground next to Doc, who looked at her and shook his head. When he pulled his hand away, I didn’t have to be a doctor to see why. Some of the boy’s brains were spilling out of the back of his head, sticky with blood, some of it stuck to Doc’s hand. The woman closed the boy’s eyes and stood up and spoke to his father in Arabic. He started screaming and yelling and sobbing. She put her hand on his shoulder and kept talking, her own eyes streaming. Sgt. Dixon called in for our captain to come.