The Weight of a Mustard Seed (4 page)

Um Omar's discrepancies were not defiance, they were the liveliness of a young woman. She knew very well her place as a wife, and her role of confidante, supporter and homemaker. It was very clear and socially ingrained and she never had a moment's rebellion. “The man tells you what to do. A woman who knows Islam obeys her husband because obeying her husband and obeying Islam are connected.”

It was only in the mid-eighties that Kamel Sachet insisted on Islamic covering for his wife and daughters. Um Omar resisted and refused for three years. It took her a long time to get used to it, she did not feel comfortable and she would take her headscarf off and then put it back on and complain and submit. Her daughters wriggled and pulled but their father's will was clear. Um Omar said that children adapt to anything; for her it was more difficult. “I was in my thirties.” Gradually she adjusted, relented, agreed. She began to see the truth of the religious tenet and even came to regret that she had not donned the
hijab
earlier.

The war against Iran wore on through the decade, debilitating, grindingly attritive. The longer the war went on the more
religious Kamel Sachet became. He was in his thirties when he began to pray at the correct times, five times a day. He read the Koran and thought what he might have achieved if he had memorized it in his youth. His family became a strict reflection of his rectitude, his faith and his control.

One day, Kamel Sachet found an old box of family photographs. Many were of Shamh in her younger years, dressed up and made-up in high heels and lipstick. He didn't want to be reminded. He took each picture out of the box and looked at it and said, “This is not a good picture,” and then cut it into strips with scissors. Shadwan—his eldest and favorite daughter, perhaps the only one who dared, spinster guardian of her family, its secrets and pride—gathered the photos that he had dropped and kept them. Only the few that we held in our hands had survived the massacre.

Z
AID WAS THE SACHETS' YOUNGEST SON, THIRTEEN
or fourteen when I first met him, a cool kid, played soccer, liked video games, knew all the Manchester United players. His mother wanted him to apply himself to studying English at school, she tried to help him with his homework, but Zaid was not enthusiastic. She complained, “I end up learning more than he does!”

The family had an archive of videocassettes, forty or more, that covered the years of Kamel Sachet's career. Zaid, adept at video recorders, resetting, reconfiguring and hooking them up to the TV, kneeled in front of them one afternoon.

“What do you want to watch, we are not sure what many of these are…”

He read out the handwritten labels. “1986, 1988; this one is of a shooting competition my father won.” It was a whole life stacked up in stilted video segments, a life that was, from the labels Zaid was reading, mostly battles. “Kurdistan, Mohamara, Fao, Kuwait, when Saddam visited…”

I said I thought we should begin with Mohamara because that was the first battle.

 

T
HE VIDEO WAS
dull and shaky, striated with age. It had been shot, presumably by an Iraqi combat photographer, in September 1980, during the first offensive of the Iran-Iraq war. For months Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the new Islamic Republic of Iran, had taunted Saddam with the rhetoric of religious revolution; Saddam in turn had reinvigorated old border arguments. The two sides traded insults and rocket attacks, incidents blew firestorms, propaganda machines printed lists of enemies and denunciations. Finally, hoping to take advantage of the revolutionary chaos inside Iran, Saddam ordered an invasion of Khuzestan, a border province with an ethnically Arab majority. He threw a division at the main provincial city, a city the Iranians called Khorramshahr and the Iraqis Mohamara. The division took half the city but was stopped at the river; the Iranians held the bridges. Then he sent in the Special Forces.

Their assault on Mohamara came from the desert. For much of the footage there was no commentary and the sound was muted. The dark green of the Iraqi army uniforms moved against scenery which was the same dust olive dun, as if war rendered everything khaki in tone. Beige sand, gray desert, yellow shadows of ruts and scars stamped by tank tracks and infantry boots. The sky was filled with black plumes rising from the red volcano fires of punctured oil pipelines. In the first scene a tank crew poked their heads out of the hatches as their tank rolled along a stretch of fresh poured black tarmac road. The camera panned and clunkily refocused on an Iranian tank on fire and beyond it, the flat desert bisected with the verticals of skeletal metal pylons.

The bombardment of the city began. It seemed heavy: the
only sounds on the tape were the boom thuds of the artillery. An Iranian fighter jet flew across the sky, banked and fired three pairs of rockets that flashed with white flame and blew into explosions. The plane tried to climb to safety after its run but was hit by an Iraqi missile and burned in a screaming fireball, in split seconds, to nothing.

The outskirts of the city came into view. Dry concrete block houses stood isolated from each other. The tanks moved slowly, dead tread infantry spread out between them. The tape recorded the heavy gravel throb of the engines, like a mechanized heartbeat. There was also the blurred sound of distant machine gun bursts. White smoke from farther inside the city indicated Iraqi shelling.

“That's him!” Zaid pointed excitedly. His father, Major Kamel Sachet of the Special Forces was marching into Mohamara, striding forth across the battlefield, his unit following him. He wore a clean uniform and he was holding a pistol in his right hand. He wore no helmet and had a heavy black beard that obscured his face.

Zaid sat up from lolling in front of the fast-forward button, pulled his T-shirt straight respectfully, and watched his father be a hero.

The battle moved into the city. Almost the entire civilian population had left; only a few families in the ethnic Arab quarter remained. Houses, streets, angles, lines of fire, fields of fire, range and cornered obstructions; walls were parapets. The cameraman stood behind an Iraqi soldier with a long elegant Soviet Dragonov sniper rifle, propped in the empty window casement, scoping the street. Cut to a platoon of Iraqi soldiers strung out under a colonnade of dark dusty trees, advancing amid the random
ping ping
of rifle bullets. There was an explosion, they fell back a few meters and then ran forward, running
across the road, with hip-laden weight, rifles shuggling at their side, heads down, in a running crouch. One stopped, kneeled, and fired a bazooka from his shoulder.

Um Omar shuffled into the room in her black velvet robe carrying a plate of jammy biscuits. “They were very brave, these young men,” she commented, settling down in an armchair and making herself comfortable. She had just had the sofas re-covered in a brighter fabric, blue and yellow, and wanted to know if I liked them.

“Yes, very much,” I told her. Zaid rolled his eyes and his mother, catching this, gave him a stern indulgent look as if to say, as I had heard her remind him teasingly on several occasions, “Go and do your English homework again!”

We heard gunfire outside, loud, but not close by. It was the middle of the afternoon, spring of 2004, and gunfire was common enough not to comment on but, as the gunfire intensified on the video, a re-echo, bursts, volleys, and single shots, it felt like watching a war in stereo.

For several minutes the action on the tape stopped around the approach to a bridge. The Iraqi soldiers at the bridge fired across the river. In the foreground, next to a splintered tree branch, lay a splayed Iranian corpse, glass-eyed and open-mouthed. The Iraqi soldiers stood a few paces from the body, firing firing, rifles recoiling and juddering with expelled cartridges. One of the soldiers stepped back, flinching, as an Iranian bullet slid past his face. There was the sound of zinging pissing bullets from among a grove of decapitated date palms. Two Iraqi soldiers hauled a martyr from the house opposite. The body was slung in a white sheet and the soldiers carried it one handed, right hands gripping their rifles.

Edit. End of the battle and silence. Nothing but the streets of Mohamara and on the tape, no noise at all, a silent pan of raw
history. The cheering of the Iraqi soldiers had been deleted. The camera showed only a grimy grinning line of soldiers raising their arms in the air with the two fingered victory salute standing underneath an Iraqi flag. Farther along the road, soldiers marched tired and heavy and light shouldering belts of ammunition with victory. One soldier was filmed ripping a poster of Khomeini off the wall with his bayonet. Tanks and jeeps and armored cars drove past Iranian graffiti: “
Sons of Sadr.
”

After this footage came a propaganda package overlaid with a hail of bombastic martial music with a strong righteous baritone singing, “I won't stop. I won't stop.”

And a voice of dooming booming wartime patriotic exhortation:

The camera chronicled the empty captured streets:

There was a scene of Iranian prisoners. They looked thin and thinly dressed and only half in uniform. Their captured ammunition belts, their rifles and their RPGs, rocket propelled grenades, were laid out on display. They were what they were standing up in, some clothes, a tired body, fear of the unknown and nothing more. They were marched off roughly and told to keep their hands on the back of their necks.

The brass voice of victory returned to the soundtrack:

Major Kamel Sachet appeared again. This time he was shown conducting a brief meeting with his lieutenants in a room with blown out windows. He was pointing at a map and the over-voice informed the viewers:

K
AMEL
S
ACHET'S SECOND
son was born on 10 October 1980, in the middle of the battle for Mohamara. Um Omar got word to his battalion headquarters in Baghdad and they passed him the news on a radio relay that he had a son. Kamel Sachet wanted to call him Nasser, which means victory, but his driver, called Ali, said that Ali would be better. Kamel Sachet agreed.

S
HADWAN REMEMBERED BEING SMALL AND THE
Iranian planes screaming in the night. Her father was away at the front. “We all woke up, we were very afraid.”

At the beginning the war went well for Iraq. Their anti-aircraft crews shot down the Iranian jets and monuments were made from the wreckage. Shadwan watched the news on television. Saddam was everywhere. “I liked his face. He was handsome and young. He wore good clothes. He was the President.” At school the teachers extolled his virtues as a strong dynamic leader.

After his great victory at Mohamara, her father came home on leave. One morning she took a book down from the shelf and asked him to help her read what was written inside. He rebuffed her. “I don't want you to love me. You should give all your love to your mother.” Only much later she understood that he had said this to protect her.

Shadwan looked like her father, she had his tall grace, his quietude, his seriousness. She was born nine months after her parents were married. Kamel Sachet named all nine of his children himself, and to his first, he gave the name of an island battle between the Egyptians and the Israelis in the Red Sea.
“It is a very unusual name,” Shadwan told me proudly, “it was also the name he gave his Kalashnikov.”

She had a soft pretty face and her father's firm jaw gave her countenance a weight, a frame, a shape of determination. Her expression was kept carefully demure. In mixed company she always wore a long housecoat, usually blue or olive green, conservative rather than drab, and a matching headscarf. Without
hijab
, in female company, her hair was dark and wavy to her shoulders; she seemed to smile a little more and the strain of propriety was dispelled. She said little, but she was not shy to speak; in this she was also like her father. She noticed that she analyzed things in the same way as he did, carefully, judging by value, not appearance. When she was a child she was always well behaved and he would hold her up in front of her siblings as the model exemplar. She remembers him laughing at Omar and Ali's antics and getting down on the floor and playing with them like a lion with his cubs. Later, as the war went on, he stopped laughing with his children, his manner became grim and stiff, and he never played with the younger ones.

Shadwan was diligent at school, respectful at home and modest in her demeanor. All the Sachet children agreed she was always her father's favorite; Shadwan would drop her eyelashes and look down into her lap so as not to appear proud, but she would say, “Yes it's true, I was his favorite, everyone knew this,” and give a small laugh, it was a point of family amusement.

All through her childhood Shadwan submitted to her father's pride with obedience. She studied hard and was at the top of her class. She was sent to an elite girls school—Saddam's daughters were in the years above and below her—but she did not go on picnics or outings or to the ice cream parlor with
school friends. If she needed to go shopping she went with her mother. When she was seventeen she asked her father if she might be allowed to go to a small party her friend Sohor was giving at her home. Her father agreed and drove her to the house and picked her up afterward. When she was eighteen she asked again to be allowed to go to the birthday of her friend Amineh. Again he agreed and drove her there and picked her up afterward. At the end of the school year Amineh had a gathering to celebrate their graduation and Shadwan was also allowed to go to that. Apart from family occasions, she had only been to these three parties in her whole life. She had never felt the excitement or the rebellion of being a teenager.

Shadwan was not naturally gregarious like her mother, she had inherited a gravity, a certain contained self-solitude, from her father. In contrast to her mother's chortle, Shadwan had a shy smile that spread slowly and rarely. Generally, she preferred to stay inside at home. She told me that it wasn't so bad: if she was bored she would go to bed and sleep and in sleep there was the respite of oblivion.

One day Shadwan showed me her room. It was small and austere and lined in wood; against one wall was a narrow single bed neatly made with a green blanket. There was a wooden bedside table, a small lamp and a few shelves. The books were mostly on her two favorite subjects: religion and psychology. The room was dark and functional, no pretty thing adorned it. Shadwan smiled as I looked it over and tried to think of something to say. I could not tell if her smile was one of pride in the room's modesty or of a more intimate rue, a look between one single thirty-year-old woman to another: do I not deserve something more?

Sometimes Shadwan would show me a pair of new shoes or a headscarf or a handbag or I would glimpse a flash of diamanté
at her wrist or across her toes. She had her dreams and hopes, but her life, through various circumstances—her father's position, war, lack of security—had been circumscribed, she managed a kind of diffident righteous acceptance of this, but she lamented her shut-in sufferance: “I never had any good times after secondary school.” She bowed to her religion and her father's expectations. When she came of age, many suitors came to ask for her hand. Her father refused all of them.

 

T
WO YEARS AFTER
Kamel Sachet and the Special Forces had captured Mohamara, the Iranians counterattacked and retook the city. The Iraqi army was pushed back across the desert, fighting in patches, often overwhelmed and tens of thousands were taken prisoner. Saddam shot the general in charge of the retreat and announced that the army would redeploy along the Iraqi border. There was a sense on the television news and in radio reports that this would mean the end of the war; most people were quietly relieved. Perhaps Saddam hoped Khomeini would be satisfied. Khomeini, maddened and bloodied, was not. The Iraqis dug themselves into the desert and settled for a fractious stalemate. The rest of the war, six more years to come, would be mostly fought on Iraqi soil.

As the war ground on, Kamel Sachet became tougher, more formal and prone to excoriating, tight-lipped anger. The children came to fear his moods and kept a careful orbit around his preoccupation. When he was home the house was quiet, the plumb-line tension in his frown set the atmosphere. His sons looked up at him from a distance, fretted for his approval and dreaded bringing home a set of bad school marks. Shadwan remained his confidante. Sometimes he would tell her about his experiences. Once a trench wall collapsed on him during
shelling and he was buried in the sand. He told her how he had waited listening to the voices of the rescue party coming closer and closer until he could hear them inches away beginning to dig him out. She had teased him, “Yes! And then you had to clean your clothes all over again!” And he had told her, “Yes, I got out of the trench brushing the dust from my tunic!”—he was always fastidious about his uniform being clean and well pressed.

One afternoon, when Shadwan was eleven, a relative who served under her father's command came to the house and talked to her mother in low tones. Um Omar was five months pregnant and when she came back into the kitchen, there were tears in her eyes and her face was stern and full of worry. She told the children that their father had been wounded and he was in hospital and that,
inshallah
, he would recover. Shadwan kept a picture of her father under her pillow, and at night, when she took it out to look at it, she would cry a little through her prayers. She heard her mother crying at night also, when the little ones were asleep.

Kamel Sachet's eldest brother, Abdullah, came to the house and brought a portrait of Saddam to hang on the wall. He told Um Omar to get rid of the religious books and to stock her bookcases with Baath Party literature. Um Omar wouldn't let him put the portrait of Saddam up, but she gave away some of the religious books and put some Baathie pamphlets in the small bookcase in the reception room where guests would see them. Various relatives came with advice. Kamel Sachet's salary had stopped, Um Omar continued working and refused all offers of money; she dared not become indebted or take charity, she would not make her family beholden. She was trying to find a way—phone calls and blind alleys—but everyone she went to for help was afraid to tell her anything. The director
at her school called her to his office and told her that if she did not participate in the Baath Party she would not be able to keep her position. She paid up her membership and attended the weekly meeting as required, but Shadwan could see this was something bitter for her. Shadwan could feel a sense of shame in her mother and a sense too of trying to hold her head up in the midst of it. She did not smile any more and shouted at her children when they were boisterous. As the weeks of uncertainty lengthened, so did the space between the words and their meaning that Shadwan overheard in adult conversation. Shadwan began to understand that her father was not in the hospital after all.

After three months an official came to the house and presented her mother with written permission to visit Kamel Sachet at al Rashid No. 1 Prison. Shadwan went with her mother and her Uncle Abdullah the following Friday. She remembered that the guards were polite but searched everything, even the plates of food her mother had brought. Um Omar submitted to the inspection and said nothing as they stirred a knife through her saffron rice and thumbed through the extra clothes she had brought for him. They were shown into a waiting room with a table and a sofa. It was a military place and somehow cold.

When her father came in he looked tired and thin and his face was pale and yellow colored. His uniform was clean and pressed although his badge of Major had been removed. He hugged everyone and he pulled Shadwan onto his lap. He laughed and pretended to be at ease. “Your clothes!” he scolded them first, “they are not beautiful enough!” Um Omar looked down at her hands. “No!” he said, “You must buy new clothes and the next time you come I will see them and you are not to cry!”

He told his brother not to hire a lawyer if the case went to court and not to find a solution by asking for favors.

“I am here until I am here,” he said. He told his wife to call the baby Ahmed if it was a boy and Esma if it was a girl. He told them everything would be alright.