Hari Kunzru - Gods Without Men

She was told to get her stuff and wait with everyone else in the parking lot. They stood in a long line, holding their passes, until they’d all been checked off by a Marine with a list. There were more people than she thought there would be. Easily over a hundred. Batch by batch they were loaded onto trucks and driven out into the desert.

The sergeant who rode with them shouted instructions and handed out bottled water. The name of their village was Wadi al-Hamam. It was located “fifty clicks” away. No one was to move from their seats while the vehicle was in motion, due to considerations of health and safety. They drove across a flat plain, dust kicking out behind the back wheels of the truck and masking the vehicle behind. The passengers sat facing one another, bouncing and sliding from side to side on the benches, their luggage piled between them like the worldly goods of refugees. The afternoon light made everyone’s faces glow golden yellow. The thin-faced man with the bad teeth, the two women trying to read a celebrity magazine. It was a freak show. This was going to be her world for two months?

Wadi al-Hamam was weird. The village looked exactly like one of the little towns where her mother had family. Walls of cinder block and concrete and mud brick, a whitewashed minaret. Poking up over the roofs were wooden telegraph poles carrying a tangle of wires. The desert stretched away in all directions. They’d parked beside a row of shuttered stores with one-room apartments over them. Signs hand-painted in Arabic: TAILOR. AUTO SPARES. The sky was peach and lilac; it looked hand-painted too.

“See,” said Uncle Hafiz. “This is for me.” He was pointing to a building with an English sign fixed to it: MAYOR’S OFFICE. She looked around more carefully. All the buildings were actually shipping containers, with false fronts to make them look like houses. As they walked toward the hall for their induction, she realized that the telephone wires didn’t go anywhere. The bricks and cement were sheets of molded plastic, tacked to wooden frames. It looked like what it was, a stage set for an elaborate play.

Know that attempts have been made by powers on Earth to persuade you that your reality as Star People is false

That night everyone sat up late and sang songs. It was like a wedding back home; the women congregated on one side of the room, the men on the other. They ate snacks and sipped glasses of sweet tea. It was good to be surrounded by a crowd gossiping in Arabic. It felt as if a weight had been removed from her shoulders. At first she enjoyed herself, laughing and making jokes with the rest. Then, like a tower collapsing inside her chest, all her pleasant feelings crumbled. It was no use. The singing, the hands clapping — everything led back home, to her old life, to the good things and the bad and eventually the worst thing of all, the corpse lying on the garbage heap by the airport. She slipped out and hid in the dormitory, pulling the sleeping bag over her head so she didn’t have to hear the music.

She knew it would feel strange to be surrounded by soldiers, but since Uncle had moved them to the desert, she’d seen enough of them — hard-faced young men driving about in trucks, buying cases of beer at the supermarket — to be prepared. So she was ready for that part, but not for this, not to feel as if she were actually back in Iraq. She tried to make the picture cute, to add a soundtrack of passionate guitars and surround it with pretty bleeding hearts and flowers and color the scene in romantic black and white, but still Baba lay there, broken and dead. He’d been all alone. He must have been so frightened. It was worse, somehow, because they’d never let her see him. That only made his ghost more powerful.

There were a few memories that came back time and again. An evening at some uncle’s house. How old was she? Nine, ten? Everyone was sitting outside because of the heat and she was playing with Samir, a chasing game that was making them both giggle and scream. Her father was talking around the brazier with the other men, smoking, wearing a dishdasha instead of his ordinary suit. He was relaxed, enjoying himself, playing at being back in the village. She had a flash of herself at that age, her feet tucked underneath her as she read a book on the swing chair.

They used a drill on him. She overheard Sayid say it, only a few months ago. No one had ever told her that part.

There were nights just after the war started, when there was bombing and everyone had to sleep in the main room, laying their bedding down on the tiled floor. It was a large room, but they all ended up close together, because it wasn’t safe to be near the windows. Who could sleep on such a night? The children went crazy. Even the adults would act hysterical, her mother and the other women bickering about stupid things, raising their voices, bursting into tears. Sometimes the men would go up on the roof and look over the river toward the ministries, smoking and watching the shock-and-awe. She always begged to be allowed to go up too, but she never was. It was one of those nights, when everyone was staying over and the electricity was cut so the whole apartment was like an oven and the family was tense because someone had gone out and not come back. She was dancing with Samir in the candlelight, making up the songs and music herself, from fragments of the pop videos they showed on state TV:

Sexy sexy!

Sexy sexy!

The two of them were hopping about, singing the naughty words and screaming with laughter. Then her father came in. They thought he was going to scold them but instead he started dancing too, wiggling his hips and singing along.

Sexy sexy!

Sexy sexy!

Her mother and Auntie Amira came in, asking what all the noise was about. At first they stood in the doorway, looking stern; then they started to laugh. Baba raised his arms in the air, scrunching his lip and making his mustache wiggle from side to side. He took her hands and danced around the room.

Round and round. Her daddy. All hers.

But he would keep getting involved in things. She remembered him crying — actually crying — about what had happened to the treasures in the National Museum. He went to ask the Americans to do something about it, waiting all day in the sun in a line of other men, as if he thought he’d be invited to sit down in an office with a glass of tea and say to some sweaty pink fellow in a uniform, Look, my dear, I happen to be a professor of history and unless you people smarten up, you won’t achieve a passing grade . As if he thought he’d come back with something, a promise or an answer. There were two or three times when he stopped the car and tried to talk to soldiers about some problem he’d spotted. In her dreams his body came back to life and did such things. Her father’s corpse, standing by a tank with foreigners pointing their guns at it; raising its hands to remonstrate with them, the drill holes like moles on its face and neck.

Her mother was different. She had a better survival instinct. But he would never listen to her.

Her father’s corpse, hunting through its looted office, dripping blood on the desks and chairs. She’d gone with him; she couldn’t remember why. The thieves had been through the whole university. All the computers were gone. There was dust and broken glass everywhere. They’d even ripped the air conditioners out of the windows.

After a while people stopped going out. What had become of the city? Gas lines and bombs and kidnappings and crazy foreign mercenaries shooting at drivers who got too close behind them on the road. They’re using this place like a playground, said Baba. They think it’s their sandbox to play in with their big metal toys. He’d seen some pilot casually fly his helicopter under the crossed swords of the Hands of Victory. Though he’d hated Saddam, this made him shake with anger. She couldn’t understand why; there seemed to be much worse things happening. The university was closed, and while things were so dangerous, there was no chance it would reopen. At first, Baba tried to do some work at home, reading and writing. Then he stopped. He was worried about money. They sold the car, then Mama’s jewelry. Her father’s corpse and her uncle, two zombies manhandling the washing machine down the stairs.