Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War by Megan K. Stack

of dirt because, just maybe, the earth of Karbala might contain a trace of the martyr’s blood. “They are telling the story of Hussein’s death,” Raheem murmured. The women wailed and wept and beat their faces as if the message had just arrived, as if this were news and not history.
    A small, older woman squatted on the hot earth, staring wearily up at the pilgrims and clutching a black-and-white photograph in her fingers. The tomb of Hussein hulked to the sky at her back, an exquisite mountain of turquoise tile and yellow brick. The woman in the picture was young, maybe a university student.
    “Who is that?” I asked.
    “It’s the martyr,” she said, and stared hard into my eyes. It was her daughter.
    The woman was only sixty, but her face was withered by tears and sun, scratched by wrinkles. Her daughter, Amina Abbas, had been twenty-two years old when she died.
    “She was executed by Saddam’s government officials in 1982.” The woman spoke quietly. “She was visiting me here when they took her away. I never knew the reason.” Finally, the government had ordered her to claim the corpse of her daughter. She picked up the body and buried it herself, in secret. She never told a soul. She had lived through twenty years of silence.
    “I am here to prove to people that my daughter has been executed,” she said, and tears cracked down her face. “People are saying she’s in prison. I want to prove she was executed.”
    She was talking into a roaring crowd; nobody was listening. There were too many dark stories for hers to catch anybody’s attention. Every family had scars, secret graves, people who got erased from the world. In this communal frenzy, there was only room for the tale of Imam Hussein. Beneath his overarching martyrdom, all the other martyrs took their place. It was a straight line of Shiite souls, stretching from 680 down to this moment.
    Other pilgrims hesitated before they answered questions. When I asked their names, they cringed. Agents of the former government lurked in their midst, they whispered, and bore their eyes into mine. When I said “Saddam” to an elderly woman, she shook her head wildly from side to side and clapped a hand over her mouth in elaborate pantomime. They were struggling, still, to shake the shades of the past.
    Yesterday I had been in Baghdad; now I had crossed into another plane of reality, but this, too, was Iraq. There was no strongman now to force the Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds into their former roles. And in those earliest days, each community was living through its own particular reinvention. The Shiites gloried in newfound power, the Sunnis realized they had lost their grip on government and would languish in regions empty of oil. The Kurds set about rebuilding their private corner of the country. The notion of Iraq was yesterday’s invention, a place carved out by European meddlers in the twentieth century. Now it had been dropped and smashed, and each shard was an island. The tides rose in between and swelled into seas: waters of oblivion and loathing, time and tears.
    Raheem and I spent weeks traveling southern Iraq together. He was a short, tidy man nearly old enough to be my father, a moderately religious Shiite from the southern town of Amara. Raheem never looked mussed, tired, or cranky. He tucked his button-down shirts into work slacks, cropped his silver hair so it sprang from his scalp like bristles of a steel brush, and kept his feelings to himself. He was discreet, perceptive, skilled at getting information out of people without lettingthem realize they’d given it. They say in dangerous places it’s best to be the “gray man”—the person who does not stand out. Raheem was a gray man.
    At the time, I knew only that Raheem was a Shiite teacher who seemed secretly pleased by the U.S. invasion. I didn’t know that he hated Saddam Hussein and his Baathist party or that, in his quiet way, he had resisted them fiercely. When he was a young man,