Aben Rajama In the name of Allah, most benevolent, ever merciful. The first stone hit her on the face. It tore into the flesh under her left eye. The young girl screamed and held her face with both hands. The scream of pain became a scream of horror as her fingers felt the exposed bone. She crouched as a second stone hit her on the shoulder. She rose and attempted to flee holding her bleeding face with one hand while trying to collect the long robe gathered around her legs with the other. She turned and stumbled as a shower of rocks brought her down. * * * In the name of Allah, most benevolent, ever merciful. Many miles away in Baghdad, a man standing at the window of an upper story of a tall building watched smoke rise from somewhere near the Green Zone. To Dr. Ahmad Al Naid, the smoke meant running back to the hospital he just left. Suicide bombers favored the hours of the morning to leave this world, he thought. "Anyone who kills a believer intentionally will be cast into Hell to abide there forever and suffer God's anger and damnation," says the Koran. Ahmad had stopped wondering why, day after day, the men of his country wrapped themselves in explosives and dashed off to such destiny. By habit, after seeing the smoke rise from a bombing site he waited for the odd silence that always followed a bombing. He watched two Black Hawks rise slowly in the distance like black legless roaches, slow in spite of their sophistication, and veer towards the Green Zone ready to land on the carcass of the city. Hatred whitened his knuckles of his hands gripping the parapet. He remained by the window, as if suspended over the city, on the brink between his memories and what awaited him at the hospital. As he watched the smoke swell in round masses of darkness, his mobile rang. Its incongruous sound always surprised him. He turned and woodenly reached across the bed for the phone. A voice was calling him to the other side of the world. It took him a moment to recognize the voice of an American colleague, Lance Holder, a good man, always full of enthusiasm and bleeding-heart good intentions. "Yes, Lance, yes," he answered in a weary voice. "Yes, I am quite well. What did you say-what fairy tales?" Ahmad sat on the bed. Holder's voice came through in staccato bursts. "I want you to send me some fairy tales, some folk stories from Iraq. to make the Iraqi conflict tangible. you understand. so that people in the States may feel closer. you know. Not agreeing with the war and so on. so you know. Just send me some of the stories from your childhood. I'll get them published. Hello?. Hello.?" Ahmad dropped the phone on the gray sheets, the well-meaning monologue now muffled. Fairy tales indeed! Anger failed to stir whatever residual strength was in the leaden pool of exhaustion which threatened to drown him. Lance's earnestness reminded him how his colleagues in the West basked in a blissful sunny ignorance. They learned geography through war. It took mass murder to arouse their interest in another people. Fairy tales! He could hear the voice calling from the bed . "Ahmad . Ahmad . I lost you . did I lose you?!" Indeed , thought Ahmad. Unreality and fatigue spread a heavy cloak of immobility over him. He remained sitting on the edge of his bed. Ahmad had been a good Muslim. He had studied in the West, yet his heart had remained pure. When he lived abroad, he started to believe that a man could follow the words of the Prophet, and still live a life enriched with new knowledge. The verses of the Koran were not less beautiful when read in a new light. On the contrary, Ahmad had convinced himself that the truest and most beautiful of Western thoughts were essentially the same as the teachings of the Islam. He believed he had found 'the oil of a blessed tree, the olive, neither of the East nor of the West.' Every religious tradition at its core celebrates God and the sacred nature of life. The rest of religion, he had concluded, was just a collection of manipulative interpretations that men extrapolated to satisfy their own greed for power. He had gone even farther, beyond religion, and thought he had understood the essence of being human, the moral value beyond all the religious beliefs. He held on to that moral essence, pure and unsoiled by religion and ignorance. When he had returned to Iraq his mother watched him in horror. "You gained knowledge but lost the peace of your soul," she had said finally. Ahmad witnessed the dictatorial rule of Saddam Hussein, the perverted violence of the fundamentalists and the feeding frenzy of the invaders. He did not discuss politics or much of anything else with anybody anymore. His hair turned gray, as did the skin of his face. His features settled in a square rigid mask. His lips, which had been soft and rich in pleasure, turned down at the corners as his facial muscles fixed in a tetanic spasm of intense disgust. His rare comments were cynical and cruel. Only his large eyes, as grey as his face, roved the space around him as two terrified animals, giving him an unsettling appearance. He had failed in everything. He had failed as a doctor; he had failed as a Muslim, unable to defend his country against the invaders; and he had failed his religion losing faith in Allah. He could not comprehend the upbeat energy of his colleagues, who were able to participate so glibly to the reconstruction of Iraq. Frustration and disgust made him indifferent. The hubris of the men of the coalition and the self-destructive fanaticism of his fellow citizens repelled him with equal intensity. Human life had no value. Not for the Americans, not for the Sunnis, not for the Shiites, and certainly not for the new-fangled profiteers flocking in from all over the world. They were just acting out the never-ending bloody strife that had characterized humanity from its beginning. Thousands of years of civilization had been meaningless-as meaningless as the long years of his medical studies, as the whole of his culture. He had joined, almost by inertia, a group of physicians who traveled to the villages in the countryside where medical care was unavailable and where the new weapons had left unspeakable horrors. In one of the villages, he met a young woman, Aminah; and life as he knew it, life as horrible as it was, had stopped. She had appeared one morning at his tent with a child in her arms. When he had asked her what was the matter with her little brother, she had lowered her head and said it was her son. She was so small he had taken her for a child. Neither his faith nor his knowledge had helped him when he faced Aminah, whose name meant truthful. Later, he thought she was truthful. She appeared at his tent and stood there, a small bundle of life and love. Before long, t hey began meeting in the cold nights and sometimes as he held her in his arms, he held his own terror. They always separated in the grey hours before dawn, as the sun rose like scalding pain opening another day. Her husband was a young man who worked as a mechanic for the Americans. 'Also forbidden are married women unless they are captives of war,' says the Koran. Aminah's husband worked for the Americans, for the enemy. That made her a captive of war. The stupidity of his self-justifications made his smile bitter. He held her tight as he imagined the punishment reserved for adulterers. Nausea had always gripped him when he reached the parts of sacred texts describing physical punishment. Ahmad had feared for Aminah, but her village did not harbor any strong religious group. Stoning was fashionable in many religions. Some texts even gave specific instructions, recommending the stones be not to be too large as to administer a quick death nor too small as not to be effective. The men who thought such words, the men who wrote such words, the men who acted upon such words were beyond his consideration, he refused to accept their very existence. Fanatics did roam the country like spurts of rabies adding perverted crimes to the general horror. There were rumors of stoning, mutilations and random executions being performed here and there but the village where Aminah lived was just a remote outpost of makeshift huts, which had collected near a defunct plant of the Hussein era so Ahmad had believed her safe and had left to return with the medical team to Baghdad. Baghdad, his city, his love. What was there to love? When he decided to leave the States he had tried to explain to his colleagues the unbearable sense of longing and desire that pulled him back. One of them had told him that Baghdad was "too rectangular." She had explained that all she saw in the images on CNN were modern buildings, multi-lane highways, next to dirt alleys where children roamed in the dust, where fat women in scarves wailed and mustachioed men drank coffee and complained. He had shrugged and let her waddle in her sense of humor. How could he explain? Baghdad had pulled him back from an easy life in New York, away from the dazzling discovery of Europe, and finally from Aminah. He had given up life for a pile of rectangles. The rectangles were now becoming blurred, as if eaten at the edges, just as he was. He felt his whole body was turning to stone, eroded and indifferent. Tiredness weighed like an armor of pain on his body. He bent down to pick up the sweat-soaked shirt he had thrown on the floor. The humid material in his hands altered hatred to tenderness as the shirt turned into Aminah's shoulder, soft and delicate, like a lily in the moonlight. *** In the name of Allah, most benevolent, ever merciful. The stone had crushed her shoulder so she could no longer lift her arm to protect her face. She leaned with her right hand against the wall. Everything seemed to stop. She turned slowly towards the executioners. She could not see them. She saw the silent crowd behind them. She could not discern their faces. The stones that had not reached her had lifted clouds of dust from the ground. As the dust settled, the sun appeared whiter than ever. It was all so silent and peaceful. Then pain exploded as a large stone tore her lips and crushed her teeth. Her mouth disappeared in a cascade of blood. *** In the name of Allah, most benevolent, ever merciful. An acrid smell of smoke invaded the room. The explosion must have been closer than he had thought. Yet he still could not move. He bit his lip and he felt the light bites of her teeth on his lower lip, when she had told him she would drink his blood like wine, the wine she had never tasted and never would. Laughing shyly at her own daring, she had wondered how he, a man following the word of the prophet , had drunk the ruby juice of the grape. Her faith and her love were not mutually exclusive. Ahmad had told her stories about gardens with singing fountains and quoted poems whose words were as far as, and even farther than, the moon from the makeshift tent where he lived. He tried to tell her about what had been his hopes, what he had looked for in Europe, the States and what had brought him back to Baghdad. He could not remember and it did not matter. When he had attempted to tell her about his world, nothing came to his mind. The other world seemed just a game whose rules and goals he had forgotten. All he had now were the desires, the fears, the life pulsating in the young woman. At that time he provided what medical care he could in the provinces in the North. The great absence of Baghdad had been filled by the presence of Aminah. The anxiety and stress of the uncertainty of the city were supplanted by daily frustration and occasional visits of true horror. Weapons of unknown and secret power, weapons nobody described, nobody admitted having and nobody admitted using left their traces on men, women and children who appeared daily out of nowhere in the outpost searching for help. He had been told that the forces of Saddam Hussein had used such weapons in the North, the Allies everywhere else. One day while he was attempting to debride the gangrenous limb of a young man who had stepped onto a mine months before, an explosion crushed the village. Ahmad and his patient watched a plane fly away. The plane had dropped a few bombs in the desert and almost as an afterthought had dropped a few more on the village. To Ahmad the plane in action appeared bored. As they scrambled out of the tent the young man told him that the plane was unmanned. 'If there are twenty among you with determination they will vanquish two hundred; and if there are a hundred then they will vanquish a thousand unbelievers, for they are people devoid of understanding,' says the Koran. Vanquish? Fight? Fight what? He walked amongst the shattered huts, his heart a bitter paste in his mouth, looking for Aminah. Whoever created this was not devoid of understanding, he was devoid of humanity. Men do not fight with unmanned planes. These are not men. He had searched the village for Aminah, his throat dry with fear. He had found her back at his tent where she had run looking for him, crazed with love, reckless for her life. In seeing her smile crack the dust covering her face, he was created. His hopeless ethical and religious struggles were over. In his tent she had let the ragged clothes that covered her body fall at her feet. He had lifted her small face with cupped hands as if lifting her reflection from a pool of quiet water and dove into her love. *** In the name of Allah, most benevolent, ever merciful. As she lay on the ground, she fought for consciousness against the pain. She crouched against the wall, which rendered the blows even harder. By then as blood covered her face she could not see much, but she felt much. She could no longer lift herself up. She saw the legs of the men forming the row of the spectators, a forest of rags waving in the sun. There was even a child, a boy holding on to the leg of a man. In her anguish, an instinctual scream for her child tore out of her body. *** In the name of Allah, most benevolent ever merciful A second explosion shook the floor of the apartment. Ahmad turned to the window just to see it disappear as if a black curtain had been drawn against it. This explosion was very close; maybe at the market place a block away. This realization awakened him to motion. He dashed down the stairs while putting on the shirt humid with sweat, cold against his chest. He ran as if Aminah were waiting outside. He ran towards the market against the crowd of people escaping. A mortar exploded the wall next to him. The dust burned his eyes. Stunned from the violence of the explosion he could not hear any sound. He saw a blood splattered hand stick out from the debris as a flower in the sun. He dropped to his knees and started lifting debris. He uncovered the arm and then the face of a young woman. His hearing returned and he was surrounded by screams. He saw a few Americans following a truck, moving in their sand colored uniforms looking, with all their full packs like insects encumbered by technologically advanced carapaces. He called out for someone to help him lift a large chunk of cement lodged against the girl's chest. A siren blared drowning his voice. In the name of Allah, most benevolent, ever merciful. As all her strength departed, she lay still. The crowd dispersed. Her body formed an almost imperceptible mound among the stones. _ _ N.B: The names of the characters in this story-a fictionalization and amalgamation of real events-have been changed. The method of stoning described here does not correspond to the kind reported in today's media. According to a recent Amnesty International report, that traditional stoning method proceeds as follows:
_ _ Aben Rajama is a scholar and a physician. |
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ISSN 2150-6795 |