Station Zed (6 page)

—
from a Sumerian spell, 2000 BC

Like molten bronze and iron shed blood

pools. Our country’s dead

melt into the earth

as grease melts in the sun, men whose

helmets now lie scattered, men annihilated

by the double-bladed axe. Heavy, beyond

help, they lie still as a gazelle

exhausted in a trap,

muzzle in the dust. In home

after home, empty doorways frame the absence

of mothers and fathers who vanished

in the flames remorselessly

spreading claiming even

frightened children who lay quiet

in their mother’s arms, now borne into

oblivion, like swimmers swept out to sea

by the surging current.

May the great barred gate

of blackest night again swing shut

on silent hinges. Destroyed in its turn,

may this disaster too be torn out of mind.

BUT THEN THE GULF WAR CAME ALONG, and suddenly the poem was taken up as an anti-war poem: so current events had transformed what I thought of as a general statement into a topical, political statement. And soon I would be flying just to the west of the Great Ziggurat, damaged by 400 bullet holes and five large bomb craters made by US warplanes as they bombed a nearby Iraqi airbase.

I remember teaching a class of undergraduates in which a young Iraqi woman, who had lived through the bombardments of Desert Storm, sat among us. The students had no idea that she was from Iraq, nor did I, until she wrote a paper about surviving the bombing. I asked her before class if I could use her paper as part of the discussion, and whether she would mind talking about the bombardment that she had lived through. She agreed, a slight girl wearing a beige head scarf, with perfectly plucked, and absolutely symmetrical eyebrows. She was a very soft-spoken young woman, and her command of English was perfect, though more formal than the English most of the students spoke.

We were reading the
Iliad
, and were talking about the anatomical particularity with which Homer describes the wounding and death of the individual heroes. I asked them to think about the only war that they knew at that time, the first Gulf War, and to discuss their sense of whether or not, given the images of backs and lungs and livers and bellies pierced through by spearheads, it was possible to justify the slaughter of war, including the civilians killed as “collateral damage.” Almost the entire class, women as well as men, said that it was possible to justify the slaughter, based on American interests abroad, on overcoming dictators for democracy, and on the hope that a better life could come out of battle. I then asked them what they would say to someone who had actually lived through the bombardments to achieve these worthy goals—and that this someone was here, sitting among them, as one of their fellow classmates? How would they explain to their classmate the necessity of the bombs? Silence fell on the room. Everyone looked deeply uncomfortable: I realized that I’d betrayed them, as well as the young Iraqi woman, who sat very still in her seat, though I hadn’t meant to. I’d assumed that there would be at least some opposition to the “just war” thesis, and I was disconcerted when I realized that not one of them had moral qualms, or at least qualms that they were willing to express. And then one boy said, “I guess if I were that person, I’d think that most of what I just said was pretty stupid.” And when I asked the young woman to talk about her experience, she said something like: “We sat in our house with the lights off. The bombs went on for a long time, and when they stopped, all of us were so tired, we went to sleep.” She plucked her head scarf a little further over her hair, fell silent—and then the class ended.

What’s built collapses

to be rebuilt, ruin on top

of ruin piling up into

a ziggurat pocked by shell holes

so that our knowledge is the knowledge

of drifting sand, grit in the cupboard,

grit under the bed where a doll’s head,

button eyes open, lies forgotten.

We will be covered by the dune

and uncovered in time,

our helmet straps wasted away,

metal eaten through—

though we, the fallen, perpetually

on guard, will stare back at you

from the streaked bathroom mirror,

making yourselves presentable to the light of day.

For us, the marshlands drained and turned

to dust will be our present kingdom,

our spectral waterway among the always instant reeds,

shivering, bending to the current.

I PROVED MYSELF TO BE INEPT at putting on my bulletproof vest, attaching this to that in all the wrong places, before figuring out how to velcro the waist panels tightly around my stomach so that they were under the vest, not over it, and adjusting and readjusting the shoulder straps to make sure they were tight. I didn’t look very military: in fact, I looked like I was wearing a bib, a sort of Rambo, Jr.

Now that I was strapped into my vest, it felt fairly light weight, around eight pounds—thick enough, according to the specs, to give reasonable protection against handguns. But when you consider that a bullet fired from a military-style weapon is the equivalent of a five-pound sledgehammer smashing into you at forty-five miles per hour, serious bruising and broken ribs are pretty much guaranteed. I put on my helmet and snapped the chin-snap fast, but I had to keep pushing it back from sliding down over my eyes. Rather than protected, I looked—and felt—like an overgrown infant.

In front of our armored vehicle—a Chevy Suburban SUV reinforced with steel plating—a beefy, but terminally polite security contractor dressed in khakis, a brown knit shirt, a gray windbreaker, lightweight hikers, and sporting a buzz-cut, gave us a briefing: “Once you’re inside the vehicle, please stay away from the doors. We’ll let you in and out. If we take fire, or if I give you the signal to get down, I’d appreciate it if you could get on the bottom of the vehicle. I’ll climb in back with you and cover you. Once we get to our destination, you can leave your armor and helmets in the vehicle. Then we’ll open the doors, and we’ll proceed single file to our destination. Everything clear?”

The car cover blown halfway off the car

billows and bags, sagging back

to a slack void before being blown wide

open, almost as if a man, or a man and woman,

or a woman and her soldier

wrestled over and over, amorous

and/or murderous

in the cold Brooklyn wind, the weak Christmas Day sun

lighting in stark shadow the shredded

plastic bags billowing in leafless branches

above what keeps billowing

below, a duet singing what’s above

to what’s below, sky and earth concentrating

all their powers on what could be three, or four,

or countless small wars

rolling over the earth’s surface

the way the canvas rolls in the animating wind,

the corners at war with the center

they want to tear free of, the center

tugging and yanking at the corners—

but it’s all just a piece of canvas sewn

to fit over roof and windshield and hug bumper

and headlights, so ingeniously

tailored that even this small skill rebukes me

for my seeing in its roiling

sullen gas flares

breaking out all over the earth, and the security contractors

who are paid to keep me safe

wearing their in-ear radio receivers

hearing what’s going on out there as we move

in the armored Suburban among the lucky and the doomed

until one or the other or both

lie still as the car cover

going slack over the skin of the abandoned car.

IN ONE OF OUR WORKSHOPS, a slight young woman wearing a black and white headscarf, with a round face and large black eyes, and with just a hint of mascara on the lashes, stood up to read her poem. Her name, I think, was Mariam, and she stood very straight in front of her classmates, and read to us with a quiet, unself-conscious dignity. Her pronunciation was excellent so I have a good memory of what she wrote. She said that she was woken near dawn by her older brother in her bedroom, who had bent down to gently kiss her on the cheek, and to ask her if she wanted anything special in the market. And when she looked up at him, to tell him “No,” he said to her, very gently, that this would be the last time she’d be seeing him. But she was so sleepy, she didn’t quite take in what he meant, and a moment later he was gone. Later that morning, she wrote, she was in the kitchen having breakfast with her mother. And then their neighbor came in and gave them the news. She wrote that as she heard the news, she felt herself get smaller and disappear: she had no hands, no face, no body to feel with. There was no kitchen, no mother, no her. The neighbor, she wrote, told them about the “car accident.” She wrote how she remembers her brother’s words coming back to her, how gentle he was when he kissed her on the cheek, how he would always bring her special things from the market. And then she sat down, seeming completely self-possessed, except for the sadness that had come into her voice and hung now in the room. No one said anything for a while, as what she hadn’t said—didn’t need to say, since everyone in her generation already under stood—resonated for a few moments. Chris and I looked at each other, but were slower in grasping what it was she’d left out. And then it dawned on us too: her brother had been a suicide bomber and blown himself up in the car.

FOR ALL THE VIOLENCE GOING ON IN IRAQ, in my little white box of a CHU, my container housing unit, it was eerily calm. And no wonder: the entire complex of CHUs was covered by a huge steel roof and surrounded by twenty-foot high, reinforced concrete blast walls—”to keep bombs and missiles from falling right on your head” was how the fellow who gave me the key to my CHU put it. This kept the whole compound perpetually in shadow, but it added to the feeling of isolation and quiet.

There’s a poem by Tomas Tranströmer in which he’s in a motel room so anonymous that faces of his old patients begin to push through the walls. The CHU was something like that, a refuge from the violence, a deprivation chamber I was grateful to retreat to, but also a little theater of the mind in which what happened during the day came back to haunt me in the ammonia smell of disinfectant mixed with drying mud that exuded from my CHU. Mariam’s face came back many times, and the face of her brother, though I could never quite make out his face because it was always too close to hers. I could see the shape of his head as he bent down to her ear, but his body was lost in shadow. His gentleness and the violence of his final act resisted my attempts to explain or understand. Of course, I was imposing on his entire past the moment when he’d pressed Send, making that moment more significant than a thousand other moments which, as he lived them, would have had their own weight and value. A back-page newspaper photo of smoke pouring up, a vague ghost-face pushing forward into the white walls of my CHU—except for the glimpse Mariam had given me, that was all I could see.