It didn’t occur to me that the lorry was the harbinger of an evil event. Maybe I came close to thinking along these lines, and then reconsidered, wondering, ‘How could this be a bad omen, when the only thing that’s new is that I’m the one who’s taken to following the lorries? There’s no omen here, no basis for foreboding or dread. It’s odd behaviour, but, whatever obscure impulses it may suggest, it’s just another of my passing obsessions, nothing more.’
No more friends of mine died on New Year’s Eve, nor did I see a crow making auguries toward the College of Engineering. Nothing out of the ordinary occurred. That is to say, I spent the night in front of the computer, and then, at a polite quarter of an hour before midnight, I moved to the sitting room, where Hamdiya was watching television, and sat down with her. When the clock struck twelve, announcing the end of the year 2002, I said to her, ‘Happy New Year, Hamdiya,’ and kissed her. She kissed me back, and said, ‘Happy New Year.’ Then the phone rang, and it was Nadir ringing us from Dubai; this was followed by another call, from Nadeem, who was spending the evening with his friends.
‘What would you say to a cup of mint tea, Hamdiya?’
‘What an excellent idea!’
I made tea and arranged some pieces of cake on a plate with two sprigs of fresh mint and then on the side I added a handful of almonds and raisins. The plate looked pretty — smiling, I brought the tray to Hamdiya and placed it before her. ‘Chef Nada,’ I said, ‘wishes you a nice night and a happy year!’
Hamdiya laughed and replied, ‘You really have style, Nada!’
‘A little treat on New Year’s Eve!’
We drank our tea and ate the sweets, and it seemed as though the new year, like our shared company that night, would be calm, routine, perhaps pleasant.
That is not what happened.
The first two months of the new year brought cares and troubles that were only the preamble, the dry-run, for what the third month would bring.
Nadeem said that he was going to move to Dubai to work. Despite the care he took over completing his paperwork, and even though he received a travel visa for the Emirates and signed a contract with the same firm for which his brother worked, he didn’t seem happy. He didn’t express whatever was going on inside his head, although it was not difficult for me to read the look in his eyes. His decision to travel meant that he had to accept the way things were and resign himself to them. He wanted to study architecture, and he did; he applied himself seriously and conscientiously to his studies, acquiring knowledge that pleased him, and the door of his imagination had opened on to a dream he must now relinquish — raise a white flag before the age of thirty, and admit, ‘I give up.’
In the background beat the drums of war, another war, bigger than all the rest. We followed the Security Council debates, and the unfolding scenarios of imminent conflict. ‘They’re going to attack Iraq,’ Nadeem said, while I clung to the possibility that it was just scare tactics, an attempt at verbal terrorism. The memory of the previous war was as present as if more than ten years hadn’t elapsed since then, the first war that the boys had been old enough to pay attention to. In 1982 they had been little, more preoccupied with football games, the cartoons on television, a half-point more or less on a test at school, or a goal scored in a game in which a girls’ team had defeated the boys. On that day I confined myself to telling them that Israel, which had attacked us in 1956 and 1967, was attacking Lebanon. I wouldn’t have approved of their watching the news broadcasts with me, and when the occupation forces moved into Beirut, with the ensuing massacre, I summarised what had occurred in an expurgated statement: ‘The Israelis have been behind the killing of a great many people — when you’re a little older, you’ll learn how terrible Israel is.’ I concealed from them, though, the videotape I had acquired, about the massacres at Sabra and Shatila — images of bloated corpses and flies. I also concealed the elaborate tale of the Phalangists and the Lebanese forces that had perpetrated the slaughter as Israel’s proxies. I thought, ‘Two little boys not eight years old — why poison their imaginations with images of bloodshed, the complicated relationship between invading forces supported by locals, and a resistance supported by part of the populace, while the other part wants to crush it?’
But on the day of the first attack on Baghdad, in 1991, they were in high school, and they followed the reports on television, read the daily newspapers, and discussed the course of events with their schoolmates, agreeing or disputing.
This war now looming over Iraq would be Nadir and Nadeem’s second war, and the second one to affect their lives.
Four days before the war began, there was a telephone call from one of my former classmates. ‘Siham died,’ the caller said.
I was about to ask him, ‘Who is Siham?’
I must have been quiet a long time, for he thought the line had been disconnected. ‘Hello? Hello?’ he said.
‘Siham Sabri?’
‘Yes.’
‘When?’
‘Three days ago. Her obituary appeared in yesterday’s Al-Ahram.’
‘Was it suicide?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What does her family say?’
‘They’re saying she was struck by a car. We want to organise a ceremony for her. We want to publish a collective obituary in the newspaper in all our names, and we want…’
I rang off.
I went back to the previous day’s newspaper. The announcement appeared at the top of the obituary page, in the third column from the right.
Siham died on Thursday the thirteenth of March 2003, corresponding to the tenth of Muharram in the year 1424 of the Islamic calendar. She was struck by a car in a place not very far from her home near the flyover exit to Orouba Street, which leads to the airport. Was she walking along distractedly when she crossed the road — was it just one of those accidents, like so many that preceded it, brought about by Lady Fortuna when she chances to spin her wheel at random? Or was Siham ill, and unaware that she was crossing a busy thoroughfare on which the cars hurtled along too fast to stop easily should a driver be surprised by a woman in the middle of the road? Or did she dash into the path of a car, having decided to die on that particular day? Had she wanted her death to take place on Ashoura, or had she specifically wanted this moment to pass in silence, unnoticed by anyone amid the violence and turmoil, that her disappearance might itself vanish behind the collective fear of an impending invasion? Or had she chosen to anticipate the terror by her death because, though she had endured illness and pain, she could not face what was coming?
She was struck by a car — that much her family confirmed. How and why? I don’t know.
In three days the news of her death would settle into some secret place — buried, invisible, or erased — where I would not see it or stumble across it. The air strikes on Baghdad, and the attack on Iraq by ground forces, began. Then came a telephone call at ten o’clock in the morning: ‘Two streets away from your house there’s a battle going on between students and security forces. The students are trying to reach the American Embassy, but the security forces have surrounded them and are beating them up. Some have been wounded — we’re going to Tahrir.’ A belated and hopeless effort to protest — so be it. Nadeem said he would go with me to the square. Hamdiya tried to dissuade him, then decided to accompany us.
We remained in Tahrir Square from one in the afternoon until eleven in the evening; the security forces left us alone to hold our demonstration there, interfering only when some protesters made renewed attempts to get to the two embassies — the British and the American — in Garden City. At that point fierce battles were waged with truncheons, tear gas, and fire-hoses on the part of security, and on the people’s part the usual weaponry: such stones as were to hand. At eleven o’clock, the number of protesters dwindled, while that of the soldiers encircling the square increased. I went home with Hamdiya, but Nadeem went with his mates to a coffeehouse in Bab al-Louk, a few metres from Tahrir Square. I wanted to go home to listen to the news, because even while standing in the square or walking through it or chanting or talking to some of my old comrades, inside me the thought kept repeating itself ceaselessly that the event taking place there was far from a demonstration consisting of twenty or thirty thousand: merely a voice on the sideline, it would change nothing in the greater scheme of things.