Would she have forgotten who she was, for the greater good of the university? Possibly. It was a strange conundrum she’d noticed among many university lecturers, who’d arrive as scholars but retire as administrators.
‘We’re almost there Madam Mina,’ said the young boy, who was practically skipping with excitement. His elation was contagious. Mina was looking forward to witnessing the moment the water gushed out. She was already thinking over the outlines of an interesting paper she would write on ethical scholarship and the overlap between archaeology and humanitarian work.
As the road twisted to the right, a group of men hard at work appeared in the afternoon sun. Digging like this would have been unthinkable during the summer but it was winter and the temperature was bearable, even in the early afternoon. The men were eager to find the water source and Mina thought that they would probably have braved the summer’s dazzling heat with just the same dedication. Jack looked up and noticed two figures approaching. He stopped what he was doing and walked towards them.
Despite his jeans and shirt being coated in dirt, he had the same rugged and handsome air about him as he had at their first meeting in the more rarefied confines of the university. She couldn’t help but notice his thick brown hair and his firm chest, shoulders and arms, all seemingly carved out of wood. His lack of pretension and unpretentious walk made him all the more attractive. He was definitely the strong, silent type. With every step he took towards them, Mina felt her heart beating faster.
‘Mina, I’m so happy you could make it,’ he said, looking straight at her with his piercing blue eyes. ‘Why didn’t you drive up here?’
‘My car broke down in the village,’ she replied, slightly embarrassed.
‘Man, you must be exhausted!’ He turned to his sidekick, ‘Muhad, where’s the Prof? Did you leave him in the village so you could keep Mina to yourself?’
Muhad blushed and dropped his head. Mina struggled not to burst out laughing. ‘The professor couldn’t make it, but I’m sure he’s as anxious as me and young Muhad here to see the result of your work.’
Muhad looked up at Mina and gave her a large, toothy grin.
‘You drove to the village alone? That was really dangerous,’ Jack said to Mina, trying not to seem too concerned.
‘I said I was coming,’ she answered, ‘So I came’.
Mina wasn’t quite sure, but she thought that Jack did not seem overly disappointed about Almeini’s absence.
‘Right!’ he replied quickly in an effort to change the subject. ‘Let’s join the workers. We’ve almost cracked it!’
When they reached the elevated spot where the men had been digging, Mina could feel the expectation in the air. She stood among them for what seemed an eternity, with little Muhad jumping around the trench. The men seemed so hopeful and absolutely focused on what they were doing. Suddenly, in the settled stillness of the air, they heard a gurgling sound, then a trickle of muddy water appeared.
Great cries of ‘Allahuakbar!’ went up and the workers yelled with joy. They had found the water pocket. Some were crying, others laughing madly. Jack was running left and right shouting orders to the various workers. He was smiling broadly, but had not lost his head: they needed to make sure that the water was channelled immediately, and he was already calculating the potential supply to the village from the flow of the water. The men got back to work with renewed vigour.
After a while, covered in mud, Jack waved to Mina and smiled. She smiled back. There was a feeling of elation in the air, a sense of easiness. Here in the middle of nowhere, in the most basic conditions, they had witnessed and shared undiluted joy. ‘Water gushing from the bowels of the desert …It’s like a tale from the thousand and one nights,’ thought Mina.
Hassan was on his way back to the small flat he shared with his mother, more light-hearted than he had been in months. Mina believed in him, valued his opinion and had confided in him. He would tell his mother to stop worrying about him, that he would make amends and resume his studies. He was in such a dreamy state he did not see the two men waiting in the side alley beside his mother’s block of flats. They grabbed him as he passed by and flung him into the alley. A huge man punched Hassan hard behind the ear and he was knocked off balance. The man held him against the wall, while his skinny partner took out a flick knife.
‘You are two days late.’
‘I’m sorry! I was going to pay you two days ago, but I was not paid by my boss. I’ll have it soon.’
The huge man punched him again, hard.
‘You were warned. Three weeks, not one day more,’ he said, and brought the knife up to Hassan’s throat.
‘Please!’
The skinny thug winked at the huge man and punched Hassan full in the face. His nose broke and blood gushed down his face.
‘I can get the money! In two days, I’ll have the money,’ begged Hassan.
‘How’s that?’ asked the thug.
‘My boss owes me money. I’ll explain the situation to him. Two days. Please!’ The man glared at him, hesitating over what to do next.
‘Right. You know what two extra days means?’
Hassan nodded.
‘We add ten percent to the total.’
Hassan nodded again.
‘You have two days. If you don’t have the money then, we will be visiting your mother.’
They left him bleeding in the alley. Hassan shivered on the ground, curled up in pain. There was no other way out. He would have to contact Bibuni and tell him about Mina’s tablet.
Chapter 7
December 4th, 2004. Evening
Mina sat on a flat rock, watching the villagers at work, taking photographs and writing in her diary. The sun had almost dipped below the horizon. She felt conflicted; she loved this beautiful country but her relationship with it was uneasy. ‘Probably like any second-generation immigrant returning to their country of origin,’ she thought.
She felt angry when she observed dispossessed men and women walking by her in the bombed streets. There were so many people with makeshift houses, jobs and lives. Although she had not seen any bombings or gunfights, the bullet holes in every other building said it all. A sense of utter ruin was everywhere. It literally hung in the air, burnishing the whole country with an intense sadness.
On the other hand, she knew perfectly well that road-side bombings and kidnappings were carried out by terrorists. It was as if the US had stumbled into a hornet’s nest, between the Kurdish separatists who used the war to further their own agenda against the Turkish government and the Christian Armenians who probably wondered how long they could survive in an increasing ‘Muslim versus the West’ conflict. People of various denominations and sects fought each other constantly since the end of Saddam’s reign.
Those who had been oppressed under Saddam’s regime, longed to rise stronger after their lengthy ordeal. After Saddam, the power vacuum had been quickly filled by the US, but it could not last. America would have to leave soon, before the people’s frustration and resentment turned to uncontrollable anger.
Yet, the presence of American troops in Iraq did not deserve to be compared to the tyranny of living decades under Saddam Hussein. Mina’s parents had left Iraq long before the first Gulf War in 1989 but she remembered her father saying at the time, ‘Bush is calling for the Iraqi people to rebel against Saddam, but he won’t step in to get rid of him. Bush is no idiot, he won’t get involved in internal Iraqi politics because he’s got no-one up his sleeve to replace a tyrant. Iraq is not ready for democracy, not as we experience it here. Tribalism, corruption and internal
