Excerpt
“It’s a long story, my son.” He tries to avoid the answer.
“What kind of a job do they have, my uncle?”
“They work for the CIA.”
Hakim is astonished. He’s speechless, as if his breath has been stopped like
when the noose tightens around the neck of the hanged man or the moment
when the bullet finds the chest of the soldier or the innocent passerby. A long
silence overtakes Hakim and for a while he wonders about the meaning of what
he has heard! Jennifer’s father works for the CIA. What does he do for the CIA?
“What do they do for the CIA, my uncle?”
Ibrahim is not ready to tell him anything further and says, “It’s a long story,
my dear son, I’ll tell you some other time.”
His tone is very firm and Hakim knows he must stop his questioning.
“Tell me more about the war, uncle. What else happened in those days? How
did the war affect you?”
They stop walking and his uncle sits on a bench with Hakim next to him.
Ibrahim takes another deep breath, lifts his eyes to the horizon as if to find what
is appropriate to tell him, or perhaps searching for help from the diaphaneity of
the sky. But no matter how much clarity and translucency he uses in his words,
the bitter truth is that the unjust curse of war is always the same and cannot be
dressed in colors or limpid images. It’s as bitter and as unjust and always hits
blindly trying to open new roads with the bodies of the dead as foundation.
“As I mentioned before, Hakim, war is a terrible thing. It turns a lot of
otherwise peaceful people into killers and assassins. Suddenly everybody has a
gun. Where they find the guns is questionable, but everybody has unspent
munitions or a hand grenade. How soon people start brandishing guns is
incredible. All the hatred and old antagonisms flare up; you see the worst of
human behavior show up just like that; murders, decapitations, maiming all
start appearing and it make you wonder how so suddenly—it’s terrible, I hope
neither of us ever have to go through such an experience ever again.”
He stops for a while again and his breathing becomes heavy like a work horse
carrying a heavily loaded cart uphill. He focuses on Hakim’s expression to see
whether he needs to carry on, but his nephew is hungry to hear more although he
still doesn’t know how far to reach into the darkness of those days.
“The Americans tried all kinds of new things in that war, we were their
guinea pigs. They tried experimental weapons, new drones, new ways of
incapacitating people, new chemical weapons, you name it. In Falluza they used
incendiary white phosphorous that burns the body like it has been exposed to
extreme heat. It was horrible to see the burnt bodies of civilians on the streets for
days, until they were picked up and taken away.”
Libros Libertad 