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Authors: Janine di Giovanni
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said he wasnât really political, but he believed in Assad and he would continue to fight, as soon as he was fitted with his prosthetics. He said they were capable of making extraordinary false limbs â he talked about athletes who were able to run using artificial legs.
âYouâll go back to the front line with an artificial leg, and an artificial arm?â
âIâm an officer â I will go wherever they send me, but yes, I would go back to the front. I would fight again.â
Firis turned and gave Mama, who had flinched when he talked about going back to fight, a bright smile.
âDonât cry,â he told her, as she turned her face to the wall. He tried to lift himself up with the side that no longer had aleg or an arm. To me he said, âYou must not pity me. I have two loves. My fiancée and Syria.â
When I left, Firis was being taken away for an examination; his mother was still looking towards the wall, the dish of uneaten pastries balanced on her lap.
4
Homs â Thursday 8 March 2012
When my son was born, shortly after the American occupation of Iraq, I was unable to cut his nails. It was a visceral, rather than rational, reaction. I would pick up the tiny baby scissors, look at his translucent fingers â clean and pink as seashells â and feel as though I would retch.
One night, in the hour before daylight, that hour when the subconscious mind allows the source of such neurosis to become clear, I suddenly understood my inability to perform such a straightforward task. I had a vision of an Iraqi man I once knew who had no fingernails.
In the dying days of the Saddam regime, pre-April 2003, I had an office inside the Ministry of Information for several months. It was a sinister, paranoid place. After a while, I fell into the bubble of that world and became paranoid myself. Staying inside the country required a special visa: one had to prostrate oneself before the Saddam officials to receive it. Journalists begged, bribed and pleaded to stay inside the country to report, offering the ministers live goats they could kill and eat for holiday meals as well as money, food, expensive wine and pharmaceutical products from the West (such as Regaine, to stop hair loss), which sanctions did not allow.
But staying inside Iraq came at a high cost. Even with visas, we were followed and videotaped. Our phones were tapped. We all knew that our hotel rooms were equipped with hidden cameras. I dressed and undressed in the darkened bathroom.
And we were surrounded by the remnants, the ghosts of Saddamâs brutal regime: the terrified, the stunted, the families of the disappeared, the survivors of brutal torture.
One of these was the man with no fingernails. Every Monday morning, he arrived in my office and stretched out his hands, utterly un-selfconscious that in place of nails were bloody, raw beds of flesh. He had come for his weekly
bakhsheesh
 â his bribe. His job was to get the money to seal my satellite phone so I could not use it unless the Ministry watched me. Once you paid, you would receive a seal â which only he could break â allowing you to use it. It was a backwards, futile system, of course, but everything about how Saddam operated in those days was pointless.
Every time the man arrived and I looked at his spread hands, I immediately felt a wave of panic that quickly turned to nausea. And yet, I could not take my eyes off the place where his fingernails had been ripped off. Questions that I could not ask him raced through my mind. What had he done to deserve such agony? Was he an informer? Had he tried to escape Iraq and been caught? Was he part of the secret network attempting to overthrow the dictator? I never asked. Nor would he ever have answered. We were living in a republic of fear. He became one of those sinister fixtures one holds in oneâs mind for ever, hovering on the fringes.
The man, whose name I
âYouâll go back to the front line with an artificial leg, and an artificial arm?â
âIâm an officer â I will go wherever they send me, but yes, I would go back to the front. I would fight again.â
Firis turned and gave Mama, who had flinched when he talked about going back to fight, a bright smile.
âDonât cry,â he told her, as she turned her face to the wall. He tried to lift himself up with the side that no longer had aleg or an arm. To me he said, âYou must not pity me. I have two loves. My fiancée and Syria.â
When I left, Firis was being taken away for an examination; his mother was still looking towards the wall, the dish of uneaten pastries balanced on her lap.
4
Homs â Thursday 8 March 2012
When my son was born, shortly after the American occupation of Iraq, I was unable to cut his nails. It was a visceral, rather than rational, reaction. I would pick up the tiny baby scissors, look at his translucent fingers â clean and pink as seashells â and feel as though I would retch.
One night, in the hour before daylight, that hour when the subconscious mind allows the source of such neurosis to become clear, I suddenly understood my inability to perform such a straightforward task. I had a vision of an Iraqi man I once knew who had no fingernails.
In the dying days of the Saddam regime, pre-April 2003, I had an office inside the Ministry of Information for several months. It was a sinister, paranoid place. After a while, I fell into the bubble of that world and became paranoid myself. Staying inside the country required a special visa: one had to prostrate oneself before the Saddam officials to receive it. Journalists begged, bribed and pleaded to stay inside the country to report, offering the ministers live goats they could kill and eat for holiday meals as well as money, food, expensive wine and pharmaceutical products from the West (such as Regaine, to stop hair loss), which sanctions did not allow.
But staying inside Iraq came at a high cost. Even with visas, we were followed and videotaped. Our phones were tapped. We all knew that our hotel rooms were equipped with hidden cameras. I dressed and undressed in the darkened bathroom.
And we were surrounded by the remnants, the ghosts of Saddamâs brutal regime: the terrified, the stunted, the families of the disappeared, the survivors of brutal torture.
One of these was the man with no fingernails. Every Monday morning, he arrived in my office and stretched out his hands, utterly un-selfconscious that in place of nails were bloody, raw beds of flesh. He had come for his weekly
bakhsheesh
 â his bribe. His job was to get the money to seal my satellite phone so I could not use it unless the Ministry watched me. Once you paid, you would receive a seal â which only he could break â allowing you to use it. It was a backwards, futile system, of course, but everything about how Saddam operated in those days was pointless.
Every time the man arrived and I looked at his spread hands, I immediately felt a wave of panic that quickly turned to nausea. And yet, I could not take my eyes off the place where his fingernails had been ripped off. Questions that I could not ask him raced through my mind. What had he done to deserve such agony? Was he an informer? Had he tried to escape Iraq and been caught? Was he part of the secret network attempting to overthrow the dictator? I never asked. Nor would he ever have answered. We were living in a republic of fear. He became one of those sinister fixtures one holds in oneâs mind for ever, hovering on the fringes.
The man, whose name I
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