Читать книгу Exile - Ciler ilhan - Страница 6

Iraq II

By the time the Americans came to Iraq, I’d long given up hope for both Iraq and for that scum who called himself a ‘father’.

I was pleased. Pleased that piece of filth might finally get his just desserts. My sister Rana and I never got over the pain of losing our husbands.

Stupid me! Just goes to show I still hadn’t learnt my lesson after having seen so much wickedness even from my closest. Just goes to show I’d failed to understand how power makes the sons of Adam lose their humanity, turns them into demons. Just goes to show I’d failed even to imagine how ruthless foreigners would some day give birth to the demons within, how they would take to the streets and feast endlessly on these lands, these holy lands where civilisations once took root. It just goes to show that I didn’t realize that the soldiers who would go for their bullets, making no exception for children, and who would go for their zips, with no respect for mothers or daughters, would cast their humanity off and become possessed. It just goes to show that I failed to envisage that my Iraq would from then on live by night, by night alone, as if now located at the poles, where the sun would never again be able to extend its fragile visage over daybreak.

And that boy from Karbala, whose big brother was taken away in a night raid; I dream of him every night; his pupils dilated, behind his mother with his kid brother, leaning against the wall. As if the wall would help him. He is shivering like a leaf in his pyjamas, but the screams are the mother’s, crying for her elder son, who was taken from his house in the middle of the night to be carried first to torture and then to his death; what falls to his share is the silence of a grave. That dark-eyed boy in the newspaper who harbours in his eyes the sorrow of the world, the anxiety of the world. His picture won’t leave my desk; nor his face my dreams. Oh my mighty Mesopotamia! Oh how they have hurt you.