It was heavy, and were it not for the darkness and the short distance, I would have opened it up on the way. But I was patient until I set it before Grandfather, who was surrounded by five of his sons and one of his sons-in-law. He opened it and took out a disassembled rifle and two pistols wrapped in rags that were wet from the petroleum grease smeared on the weapons.
Relatives were crowding into Grandfather’s house, where tension showed on people’s faces and strained their words. There was bitter coffee, war stories, and calls for manliness. They kept repeating the story of Grandfather with the dog when he was small, together with his maxim, as inspiration.
They made their plans in the light of incomplete information from some of those who had visited Tikrit recently, given that Grandfather didn’t know anything about the city now. He said, “I used to know Tikrit when it was a small village, with its red earth covered with rats and its donkey-trading shepherds. So, where is the prison?”
They said, “We don’t exactly know since there are so many buildings and police stations there now. Mustafa knows because they put him in prison two years ago for cursing the government in the sheep market.”
“Bring me Mustafa,” Grandfather replied.
We didn’t sleep that night. The entire Mutlaq clan gathered together, along with all the villagers who had married into it. The house and the courtyard were packed with men getting their gear ready and loading their guns. Checkered kuffiyas were draped over their shoulders as their hands ran over their weapons, becoming reacquainted with how they worked. Meanwhile, the women busied themselves with cooking and bringing out equipment hidden in old cloth bags. And with whispering about what had happened to Istabraq. And with fear.
The children were playing a war game, and whenever they took a break to rest, their glances fell on the weapons between their fathers’ hands, which they tried to touch by sitting quietly nearby until their fathers weren’t paying attention or were preoccupied by conversation. Some of them pleaded with their mothers to tell their fathers to bring them along, but the mothers rebuffed them with decisive sharpness: “You’re not going anywhere. This is serious business and not a game.”
As the night drew on, the children slept in their mothers’ arms, on their fathers’ laps, or on the grass. The men sat in small groups while Grandfather reminded them of the raids of the first Muslims and recited the Qur’an until the first of the roosters announced the arrival of dawn. Grandfather rose and gave the order for the call to prayer. Then he led us in prayer as a group. I was seventeen years old at the time and considered one of the men.
We got in our cars and set off in a convoy to arrive at first light. We surrounded the provincial government building. My uncle fired a shot into the air, prompting the governor to come out onto the balcony behind the flower pots in his red-striped pajamas. He looked us over before disappearing to give orders to those inside to call the police and the central authorities. He came back into sight on the balcony, but this time he was wearing an elegant suit and necktie. Grandfather whispered into the ear of my uncle, who shouted out to the governor, “Give us Noah immediately! If you don’t, we’ll tear the building down around you!”
The governor called out nervously, “Please, come inside! Come now, friends, let’s come to an understanding!”
Grandfather said to my uncle, “Tell him, ‘There’s nothing here for us to come to an understanding about. Give us our Noah and we’ll return to our homes!’”
My uncle called out these sentences, circling his palms around his mouth like a funnel in order to amplify the sound.
The governor pushed his child, who had come out rubbing his eyes, back inside and called back, “Which Noah? I have no idea what you’re talking about!”
Grandfather elbowed my uncle in the ribs, and they began climbing the main steps in front of the building until they disappeared into the darkness beyond the gates. The governor also disappeared from the balcony when he saw the two of them entering.
It was only ten minutes before the armored vehicles and police cars surrounded us, and two helicopters circled in the sky. A megaphone called to us from an unknown direction — maybe from all directions, from the sky, from the ground, and from behind the flower pots on the balcony: “Throw down your weapons and surrender!”
We were all wearing masks, and one of us responded with a shot, after which the air exploded in a roar of shots exchanged between the two sides. We learned afterward that the one who fired the first shot was my cousin Sirat, who was in love with my sister Istabraq. For that reason, he was the most zealous and angry of us all, and his aggression carried us all away. We all began firing at the armored vehicles in a tumult until we were shrouded by the smoke bombs that fell from the helicopters. Silence reigned, except for coughs and exchanged curses, which continued until we found ourselves in darkness: every one of us in a cell.
We received punches, kicks, lashes, and curses, and we could only respond with groans. The more they tortured me, the more I thought of Grandfather and feared for him. I kept asking them about him but was answered only with blows. They weren’t even trying to interrogate me. I kept saying to myself, “He will certainly die if they are doing to him what they are doing to me.” My body went numb from so much pain, and I was no longer strong enough to move. I lost consciousness many times under the blows, waking up to curses and cold water being splashed on me.
It went on until I thought I had been there being tortured for years — or was this the torment of the grave, which Grandfather had told us about? I kept wishing that it was all just a nightmare, that I would wake up afterward to my mother’s breakfast of cream and butter on warm bread, dates fried in oil, and cardamom tea. Later we learned that the agony was for one day only, since that night they carried us out and threw us — bloody, groaning corpses piled on top of one another — into the beds of army trucks, after having shaved our hair and mustaches entirely off. The trucks set off amid a military convoy of nine armor-plated jeeps and continued until it reached the village in the middle of the night. There, our worried families were waiting on the rooftops of the houses.
The convoy stopped in the middle of the village, in the big square in front of the mosque. We used to play muhaybis and khawaytimi there at night when the month of Ramadan fell during the summer. It was also the place for village funerals, weddings, horse races, donkey races, and sack races — with the bags used for the cotton crop tied around our waists — as well as the high jump and the long jump. The police and the soldiers got down with their weapons and spread out across the square, while four of them began unloading us, carrying us out by our arms and legs. Before they threw us on the ground, they would bring each person to the captain. He would pull out of his pocket the new ID card that had been issued for each of us. They had changed all of our surnames from al-Mutlaq to al-Qashmar. In the Iraqi dialect, the word has the connotation of scorn, disdain, and insult, and it is applied to those who are said to be oblivious and stupid. In dictionaries of classical Arabic, which I paged through later, it means “short, stocky, piled up on itself.”
I heard my name as I was being carried: “Saleem Noah al-Qashmar.” Then I was thrown on the ground, and pain shot through my back.
When I regained consciousness, my mother said to me, “We thought you were dead, and that they were announcing the names of the bodies. We couldn’t say a thing, we were so afraid.”
“And Grandfather?” I asked.
She said, “He’s fine. They didn’t beat him too much. But they shaved his beard, his mustache, and his hair like everyone else.”