Basra was tear-stained, but Baghdad was blood-splattered.
“Men, yes, but also women, little children, babies even, all killed,” cousin Yusef was saying to the ragged crowd still stuffed inside Shafiq’s home, their clothing grimy from days of continuous wear. The looting had largely run its course and a local businessman set up a militia to enforce calm.
These families had thought they were beaten down to their last reserve of strength—until they heard about the orgy of violence in the capital. Now they were terrified, not for themselves but for this friend or that cousin or this aunt who might be dead.
“Dragged out of cars, slaughtered in their homes, stabbed with knives, beaten, raped.” Yusef knew everyone wanted information.
“Who was killed?”
“The Simhas?”
“What about the Jews in Government? They couldn’t stop it?”
“Is my family okay? The Shamouns…what did you hear?”
“My daughter’s there! My little one!”
Yusef held his hands out, palms down, to quiet the questions. “We are trying to figure this out. Right now we only know one thing for sure. This is an enormous tragedy and we may all have to leave the country.”
It seemed incomprehensible, but suddenly the crowded masses in Shafiq’s house who had already left their own homes were talking about going all the way to India—and never coming back.
Not everyone was ready to leave. “We’ve been here since Adam,” protested one father.
“And we’ve always lived peacefully,” said another, but he sounded doubtful.
“This is our home,” echoed a third.
Shafiq was thinking: India?
“You cannot imagine the devastation,” said Yusef. “Worse than anything in our history here.”
But after he delivered the most gruesome news, he shared another side of the story. “So many were saved by our Muslim brothers. One young girl, she was separated from her parents and started running from the mob. They tried to attack”—the listeners gasped in revulsion—“but she was rescued by a man who pretended he was going to take her away himself. ‘This one is mine,’ he shouted, and he wrapped his coat around her little body. But the second they were alone, he took her in his arms, apologized with tears in his eyes for the fright she suffered, and rushed her back to her family. Now she’s safe.”
In the days that followed, as the news trickled in from Baghdad, it repeated the same pattern. There were atrocities: old men killed for nothing, young children brutalized, women murdered. And then there were reports that were as unbearably touching as the poetry of Khalil Gibran: the Muslims, and Christians too, who risked their own lives to stand guard in front of Jewish homes.
Shafiq had seen it in the Kurds at his father’s warehouse. These were people of faith, but it didn’t divide them, just made them stand for what was right.
His cousins in Baghdad had escaped the worst—but only barely. Yusef said the family hid in a small room on the roof when their house was attacked.
Shafiq thought of his own roof, a place for freedom: to watch birds soar, to look at sparkling stars, to eat the bread his mother baked in a conical oven she kept there. It was impossible to imagine his cousins huddling in a storage corner, hearing their house being ransacked and escaping death only because they were not discovered.
“Everyone was so scared that little Ghazi would cry, but he could feel the fear and was silent as death.” Yusef looked down and spoke softly. “Just three years old, but he could tell it was too dangerous to make a sound.”
Ghazi. The youngest of Shafiq’s cousins, named after the king of Iraq.
A kind of numbing shock washed over Shafiq. His hopes were briefly raised when Salim came by that afternoon. But Salim didn’t bring Kathmiya, only more jarring political lectures.
“Where were the occupiers when our brothers in Baghdad were being slaughtered?” Salim demanded. “My friend is an English translator and he told me they purposely played coy, refusing to enter the city until the worst damage was done.”
This time, no one contradicted him. The displaced were too dispirited to care if the riots had been an intentional British tactic, but they were hardened enough to believe the occupiers had failed to subdue or rescue those they now controlled.
Salim pointed to the radio. “You can listen to the BBC all you want, but you won’t hear them confessing to their complicity in murder.”
Shafiq was sick of the grim politics. He just wanted to go outside. The closest he came was to peer through the shutters and steal a glance at the distant street.
The sentiments of Jews around Shafiq had definitely shifted. There was a fear like none he had seen before, even as members of the community started venturing out into the streets as calm slowly returned. Some, whose businesses were looted, carried a deep wound, speaking of how hurt they were by the devastation. Others were openly outraged, talking about appealing to the British for justice. And still others were simply planning to leave. “Escape,” was the word they used.
There was a hushed silence among all of them when the announcement crackled across the airwaves…“Nazi Germany has dropped bombs on Zhitomir, Kiev, Sevastopol, Kaunas,” the newscaster boomed from London.
“Hitler has invaded the Soviet Union!”
People were too frightened to cheer—just listening to the BBC could draw jail time—but their silent jubilance spread like a ripple crossing the Shat Al-Arab river.
“It is over,” Shafiq heard adults rejoicing around him.
“Hitler’s really gone too far this time. He’ll never win now.”
“It’s a disaster for Germany,” Ezra said.
Maybe so, but Shafiq knew that didn’t mean it was the end.
Weeks went by before calm finally returned enough for Shafiq to climb over the roof and down into Omar’s house. There he was welcomed with endearingly familiar grandiose schemes.
Within seconds, the two were plotting to follow the Bedouins up and down Iraq’s railways to learn how they rob people and survive on nothing but their audacious crimes.
“What if they try to steal from us?” Shafiq asked.
“I have it all figured out.” Omar lit up. “We promise to lead them to some rich people we say we’re going to rob. Then just before we get to there, we jump off the train and run like we’re being chased by killers.”
“What do you mean, ‘like’? We really will be running for our lives,” Shafiq pointed out.
Omar just grinned.
The conversation rocked back and forth as casually as a porch swing until they headed out through Omar’s living room, where Shafiq saw Hajji Abdullah sprawled on the couch, his frail legs tangled in a damp, crumpled sheet.
“Is your dad okay?” Shafiq whispered. For a moment he worried that he had forced an issue on Omar, who had been so considerate in ignoring the monumental disruptions in Shafiq’s life.
But Omar just shrugged. “My mom’s worried.”
Shafiq felt a pang. “Are you?”
“Too weak to clean the floors at the school, probably can’t keep his job much longer,” Omar said soberly.
Hajji Abdullah stirred.
“Maybe we could read to him?”
“Maybe later,” Omar replied. “After we come home with millions of dinars,” he joked.
Shafiq pictured them rushing in, arms draped with stolen treasure. He wanted to thank Omar for the note, which had been worth more than gold, but they were laughing too hard, and there was no time to interrupt that.