by George Capaccio

It was the night before Christmas and my first time in the home of Um Haidar. Her name in Arabic means Mother of Haidar. She is not like anybody I have met in Iraq. When she enters a room, she is all there is to see. Her beauty is strength drawn from the deepest well on earth. The lines of her face travel as far as the most distant stars and there they conceive of heaven. But here, among us, her life is sorrowful. She bears her grief with the dignity of women who have carried water long distances on their head.

A few years ago an American missile destroyed the homes on her street, wounded many of her neighbors, and killed her little boy. She is not afraid to talk about that time and how she found his body and carried him inside and how he never rose from the dead to finish the game he’d been playing. After his death, she took his name, Haidar.

Her speech is more measured than anything by Chaucer. The way she turns her head to show she is listening but hasn’t understood, the way she lets others be completely themselves in her presence and does not judge or demean anyone who comes to see her. I felt honored to be with one so immeasurably human.

In Basra, only the rich have computers. So it was no small event when Rahim, who is not rich but who is American, revealed his laptop PC. We were sitting on rugs in the living room. Um Haidar, her family, and we three Americans–all of us drinking hot tea and finding the places where we could feel united.

Rahim, wearing a skullcap and thumbing prayer beads, pulled up his gallery of photos from Iraq. Um Haidar, holding her youngest child Mustafa in her lap, edged closer to the screen, eager to see her people through the eyes of this Muslim from America. Image followed image in quick succession. Children gaunt from cancer and malnutrition. Old men in the oldest of suqs displaying their wares. A woman walking beside a road, her black abaya inflated with wind, date palms in the distance. The joyful face of a taxi driver.

Then came Jumuriya, the Basra neighborhood where Um Haidar lives. There was the street a lone assassin from 30,000 feet had hit with the push of a button. Um Haidar leans forward. It’s all coming back. Broken houses. Piles of rubble. Men with shovels and wheelbarrows trying to pick up the past. Children wedged into doorways, still afraid to venture forth. The crushed body of a little girl.

Um Haidar, shocked, cries out. “Maysoon!” Both hands leap to her mouth. Tears fall. Rahim lets this last image stay. It floats on the surface of the screen with its awful power intact. Um Haidar touches Maysoon’s face.

“She was my neighbor’s child,” she tells us. “That is how she looked when we found her. She and my son Haidar were friends. They were playing together that day.” Um Haidar wipes her eyes.

She is weeping now. Weeping for this little girl covered in dust and pressed like a flower into the pavement of sleep. Her white shoes, her pretty dress, the hair she kept just so. Her eyes forever closed. She is weeping, it seems, for all the children killed that day in Jumuriya. Weeping for the thousands upon thousands
of children in Iraq who have died from war and sanctions. Their little deaths go by like the vaguest of dreams in our common mind, vaguely remembered, misunderstood at best.

Um Haidar has seen enough. She turns away. Rahim shuts down the application. A mysterious logo comes up. We sit for a while not talking while the children romp around us. The lights cut off as they always do this time each night. Rahim clicks the computer shut. Someone fetches a lantern. Another cup of tea is poured. We talk again and are cheerful in the dark.