#2. AL-QADISIYA GENERAL HOSPITAL, BAGHDAD, IRAQ
Friday May 1, 20:13
ALI HASSAN slumped in a wheelchair in a white-tiled cubicle. He was wearing a white cotton gown tied at the back and a red woollen blanket round his shoulders. Brown daubs of iodine spotted his legs, chest and face. He had stitches in his left shoulder and stitches in his left foot. His left ankle, compressed within a tight white bandage, throbbed continuously. A plastic tube fed saline into his left wrist whilst another fed glucose into his right. He had been given a morphine injection but he was still shaking uncontrollably. His head ached and he was desperately thirsty. Snapshots of the horror flashed across his eyes.
The blood.
The fire.
The haze of dust.
The oranges bouncing in the road.
The woman in her pink knickers trying to cover her blood-spattered breasts.
The dead cat.
The American soldier vomiting blood.
The bag of bread covered in blood.
Oh God. The bread! He'd lost the bread. What would his mother say? He started to rise from the chair. A white-coated orderly moved towards him.
''Must get the bread!'' gasped Ali. ''I lost my bread.''
The orderly pushed him gently back into the wheelchair and gestured to a nurse for another sedative.
The American soldiers had grabbed both him and the little boy. A paramedic had fired questions at him. He'd nodded or shaken his head, not really understanding anything. Something had pricked his arm. He could not remember much more. He had been in an ambulance. He had been on a trolley. Someone had swabbed his wounds. Every bone in his body felt broken. He had seen dozens of people pass through the clinic, all bleeding, all broken. He had seen
Fatima's foot.
He closed his eyes. He knew the truth now. Uncle Wagdy had told him. Uncle Wagdy had looked tired, eyes red-rimmed, each line on his face carved more deeply than ever.
''Uncle,'' Ali had croaked. ''I lost my shoes. I lost the bread.''
Wagdy, sobbing, had gathered his nephew into a hug.
Ali had escaped with superficial cuts, bruising and a badly twisted ankle. He had been lucky. His sister was critically ill. She had indeed lost her foot. She had also lost a lot of blood. She had head injuries and spinal damage. She might recover, the doctor had said, but she needed a transfusion and had internal injuries to her kidneys, spleen and liver. When she had been blasted from the street, leaving her right foot behind, she had smashed through a solid concrete wall. She might still die. But she was lucky too. Their brothers had been blasted into hundreds of bloody fragments inside the mosque. A concrete block had smashed through their mother's head. Their father's remains had not yet been recovered. The coffee shop facing the mosque had taken the full force of the outward explosion. Policemen were still bagging up the thousands of pieces and trying to separate the fragments into individual corpses. It was likely that the remains of Hassan, Mohamed and Hussein would fill one small bucket.
''But the bread,'' Ali had croaked.
They did not understand. The word for 'bread' in Arabic is 'aish', the same as 'life'.
''Yes, you're going to live,'' said the doctor, cheerfully ruffling his hair.
Thirty-four people had died and a further hundred and six had been injured. Because a weasly faced runt had decided to blow himself up for the Glorious Victory of Islam.
''What shall I do? Where shall I live?'' he asked his uncle pathetically.
''You'll be all right.'' His uncle patted his knee. ''You're a survivor.''
Ali's eyes had filled with tears. ''Can I see Fatima?'' he had asked.
''Later,'' Uncle Wagdy had said. ''She's in surgery right now.''
Sour came to see him. She wore a green-and-blue headscarf, a soft blue jumper and jeans. She looked tired and anxious. Her younger brother was on life-support and fighting to survive. Her mother too was dead. They cried together. She held his hand. Ali cried some more.
''Poor Fatima,'' Sour kept saying, ''Poor Fatima. What will she do?''
What will we do? wondered Ali.
''We need to be brave,'' said Sour.
Ali could not think straight. What would she do? Their parents had spoiled her, their brothers had spoiled her. Everything had been done for them, not just the cooking and washing, but the tidying up, the cleaning, the shopping. Ali had been born the youngest son, but Fatima, she was the princess. She wanted to be a princess. She was her family's princess. Her room was pink and covered in pictures of fairy-tale castles, princesses, the Queen of Jordan, and ponies. Lots of ponies.
The bomb had brought back all the bad memories, of his childhood, of the War, of the terror, the anxiety, the tension that had gripped his city, his family, his class-mates. He remembered how the Government had said the Americans would use chemical and nuclear weapons, how this had sent the neighbourhood into blind panic. His father covered the windows with black sticky tape then painted the glass white, to reflect the glare from a nuclear bomb. His mother stockpiled food, his uncle and aunt and their children came to stay in the living room, his grandmother, old and frail even then, moved into his parents' room and Fatima moved in with him and his brothers. He slept on the floor with Hussein. They squabbled incessantly and never left the flat, especially when the bombing started, great roars of aircraft sweeping overhead and deep booming explosions rocking the buildings. The men tried to play cards whilst the women hugged the smaller children. Ali, just turning ten, held on to Fatima whilst Mohamed and Hussein stood on the balcony shouting defiance until Hassan yanked them inside and slapped their necks. An especially loud blast made Ali wet himself.
When the power failed, his mother lit candles. They ate fuul and soup cold from the tins. When the water was cut, they used buckets for toilets and washed in water from bottles. Ali felt dirty all the time, and never slept, sitting awake on the mattress staring into the darkness of those long, cold nights, rocking himself silently backwards and forwards.
Two days after the bombing began, a fierce dust-storm whirled in from the desert. They had not known it was a dust-storm then. All they had seen was clouds of red dust billowing through the air-holes in the bricks, under the door, through the grille of the air-conditioner.
''Oh my God!'' his mother screamed. ''It's the chemical weapons! They're going to gas us!''
They held on to each other, sobbing and kissing goodbye until it passed. Which it did.
Later that day, when it was quiet, they ventured outside into the shattered street to look at the craters, the deep gashes which scarred the walls of buildings, the corpses of neighbours lying in gutters, every tree blackened and scorched, the sweet, cloying smell of death and burning human flesh hanging in the air. Surviving neighbours were dazed and shell-shocked, wandering around purposelessly or picking over the rubble for treasured possessions, a doll, a family photograph, a wedding album, a Qur'an.
Then a sand-coloured half-track with a machine-gun mounted on the front had trundled round the corner followed by half a dozen heavily armed soldiers in sand-coloured body armour, helmets and goggles. They were Americans. The Government said American soldiers behaved like beasts, raping boys and murdering girls. Ali asked Mohamed what 'rape' meant. Mohamed told him in lurid detail. It became his greatest, most paralysing fear.
These Americans, though, had marched along the street, smiling, waving and tossing out candy bars, Chiclets and packets of Marlboro cigarettes.
''Where are our boys?'' Ali's father had called.
''Run away,'' came the reply.
''And Saddam? The Government?''
''Run away too,'' said the soldier. ''They all ran away.''
So the Mother of all Battles that Saddam had promised actually lasted only two days and the American troops proved friendly, helpful and very non-threatening. Ali played football with some and learned English from others. He had slept badly, though, for at least a year, waking in the night sweating and crying, especially when a bomb went off o
r gunfire rattled in the darkness, but gradually he adjusted, got used to the thick, choking, black plumes of oily smoke which decorated the countless mounds of bricks and rubble, the broken, discarded corpses which littered the pavements, the twisted, charred heaps of quietly rotting, quietly rusting metal of one-time cars which lined every road.
Funny, he thought, he really had got used to it, to the point of just walking past it all each day as the conflict blended into the background. He supposed you could get used to anything if you lived with it for long enough.
He reached out and took Sour's hand.
She smiled weakly.
Then the doctor returned.
Ali felt cold and sick.
Sour held his hand and cried.