Still In Shadow

The woman with the sharp cheekbones and matted hair has no papers to show the man at the gate, but she has a child. The girl is 2 1/2. Her feet are wrapped in dirty bandages. Eyes fever-bright, she mews nervously in her mother’s arms.

“Any treatment, any medicine, anything,” the mother intones, but nobody is listening. Flies crawl on the woman’s face; she doesn’t seem to notice. She lets the crowd jostle her, rocks her baby and waits. They are waiting, all of them, for The Americans, these uniformed figures who overran the sagging, dust-streaked town of Samawah weeks earlier on their charge north to Baghdad. The Americans now represent the only figment of authority in a place gone wild with uncertainty, and this morning the people of Samawah have clumped themselves into a seething crowd to await them. A fence separates the Iraqis from the old courthouse, a remnant of their fallen regime; they are stuck on the wrong side.

“Don’t push against the gate,” barks an Iraqi policeman from the other side. He throws out his chest. A cop for 31 years, he doesn’t realize that his threadbare green uniform marks him as the leftover of a dead government.

“Enough!” he snaps at the crowd. “You have to wait.”

“Every day they tell us to come tomorrow,” frets an aging peasant, squinting his face into furrows. He wants compensation for 50 sheep that were killed, he says, when the Americans bombed a palm grove. “My family lives off those sheep,” he says, tugging nervously at his headdress.

A Jeep swings to the curb, and down into the pandemonium steps Capt. David Ashe, a military lawyer. Opening a path with his few Arabic phrases, he wades into the clinging, crying crowd. It will take him hours to work his way through the bodies and into the offices of the courthouse. “Mister!” they scream. “Mister!”

“Marhaba, marhaba,” Ashe greets them. He turns to a translator. “Er, will you please tell this gentleman it’s the job of the local government to hand out ration cards? And--oh, my goodness! Has this man been injured?”

The crowd falls back in disgust, clearing a circle around a squat Iraqi. The tip of his nose has been blown off. He blinks and snorts, his eyes beady over a mask of blood and pus.

“The hospital told him to go to Baghdad, but he says he is poor!” somebody cries.

“He probably got treated and didn’t like the results,” a Marine guarding Ashe mutters darkly.

“They should be doin’ somethin’ with him,” replies a third Marine. “That looks like gangrene.”

“Please tell him we have many, many people who need medical help,” Ashe says. “Please ask him whether he has family or friends who can take him to Baghdad.”

It is April of 2003, a few weeks after Baghdad’s fall. Mists of sand wash the desert sky over Samawah, about 150 miles southeast of the Iraq capital. Words are everywhere, as pressing as the heat and sun, the queasy perfume of sweat and smoke.

“Is there a judge?”

“I know where there are 30 men with guns!”

“The Baath Party took my animals.”

“Where do I go?”

“Mister.”

“Mister!”

The American soldiers have come from Ohio, Michigan and Texas to sleep on the floor of the old train station, at the veterinary hospital, and in a ruined hotel. They have taken over the post office and the cement factory, the television station and the schools. Hundreds of them are making a home among tens of thousands of townspeople.

This is how occupation has come to Samawah, a scorched and worn little city in the Shiite heartland--as a great global shift played out in intimate interactions. Baghdad has fallen, but the fighting has just begun. The blood will flow for months, months will turn to years, and thousands of people will be killed, maimed or torn by grief. But that’s just one shade of what is going on here. Millions of ordinary people are being tossed into an extraordinary event. They are working their way from daybreak to dusk with a hope of a few graces, simple and human. The people of Samawah want peace, a paycheck and a good night’s sleep. The foreign soldiers want to stop playing police. They want to go home.

When the heat of afternoon rises off the Euphrates River, when the sun stands overhead and not a shadow moves in the lanes, Samawah looks like a defunct stage set, the shops broken and shuttered. The road from Basra to Baghdad rolls straight through the center of this lazy sprawl of a town, past the tired-looking storefronts and moldering hotels. Even the goats and sheep clop slowly before the shepherd’s stick, bleating and exhausted.

Gunfire rattles in the streets, then stops, and nobody knows who shot whom, or why. Explosions shake the city, smoke crawls into the sky, and nobody blinks. Now summer is coming on hard. Salt sits on the fields like snow; the river stretches through town as flat as a snake.

Samawah has become a town of watching and waiting. The women squat over their wash in the slimy river shallows, and the Marines look on from the shadows of the opposite bank. The shopkeepers stand by their bins of almonds and mulberries, their eyes flickering over the soldiers’ backs. Trepidation is thick. Trust is the obsession of foreign soldiers and townspeople alike. They are a puzzle and a confusion, each to the other.

At the courthouse gates, the young lawyer named ashe lets the mob swallow him like a surfer giving himself to water. Ashe believes in the invasion, as he thinks Saddam Hussein was a danger to his people and a menace to the region, particularly to Israel. And he believes, too, in this project of reconstruction; he gleans possibility in the wreckage around him. A 35-year-old lawyer in combat boots and crew cut, he is given to terms such as “goodness” and “golly” and “gee.” Moving among Iraqis, he practices the Arabic he studies by night in the abandoned train depot where the soldiers sleep.

Ashe is Jewish, the son of a man who fled Europe to escape the Holocaust. He grew up in Virginia Beach, Va., and spent his summers as a lifeguard. After Sept. 11, he rented a car, drove north to Manhattan and volunteered on the rescue squads at Ground Zero. It wasn’t long afterward that the reservist was recalled to active duty. He is waiting until he leaves town to spring the closely guarded secret of his religion on his Iraqi companions. “I can’t wait to see what they say about that!” he whispers.

Upon arrival in Samawah, Ashe received sparse orders. “The MRE’s are around back,” his commander growled. “Go set up a legal system.”

So he spends his days at the courthouse, where the past is gone, but its arbitrators linger. The judges and lawyers from the old government are as pressed and neat as museum pieces, more careful than curators. They smile without opening their lips and utter vague and optimistic phrases. “Bridges of trust are beginning to be extended,” says Dhia Ni’ma al Umran, a newly appointed 54-year-old judge and gentleman farmer.

The courthouse has been stripped bare by looters, but Umran’s chambers feel locked away, as if the war had barreled down the streets and missed this room altogether. The carved ceiling is an arch of ornate curls; the desk stretches wide and splendid; heavy legal tomes ponder yesterday’s law.

The people of Samawah don’t like to come to the courthouse. They are haunted by the memory of torture and execution that shadowed southern towns such as this one. People used to come here and disappear. Nobody’s talking about that now--not Ashe, not the judges and not the lawyers he’s combed through in search of a respectable jurist. After days of interviews and hand-wringing, he has settled on Umran, and appointed him with a rickety flourish. The inaugural speeches were lifted from the website of the American Bar Assn.; refreshments were a crate of military-issue apples.

“He’s a judge--kaboom!” Ashe says and chuckles. “I’m flying by the seat of my pants here.”

Now Umran sits behind his wide desk, and the lawyers hover around like moths. Ashe watches the judge intently. He believes Umran is as upstanding as any American Founding Father; he says so unabashedly. But Umran has little faith in Iraqi democracy and no notion of what sort of law ought to rule his land--maybe American, he says with a sidelong glance at Ashe.

“Third World politics are false politics,” the judge says with a ponderous bow of his gray head. “Democracy and freedom are for Europe and America.”

Ashe doesn’t hear this last bit; he has drifted out of the room. He needs guns for the courthouse security guards. There’s no appeals court. He’s wondering where he can buy windowpanes to replace the ones broken by looters. He’s haggling with local contractors over the plumbing. He wanders to another office and settles deep into a lumpy armchair. Dust clouds and clanging traffic spill through empty windows. Ashe and a band of lawyers are poring over the existing provincial constitution, debating which clauses to chop away. Death penalty for political crimes? Freedom of assembly?

“I know a lawyer in Baghdad who can help,” says Ala Hanoch, a local lawyer and antiques dealer.

“Are you in contact with him?” Ashe asks.

“As you know,” Hanoch says with a sigh, “there are no phones.”

They mull in silence. Then the door clatters open and a robed man fills the frame, weeping heavily. Rogue Baathists have killed his brother and kidnapped his family, he tells a translator. It was a punishment, he says, for his family’s cooperation with the Americans.

“Do you think he’s telling the truth?” Ashe asks the translator.

“He’s crying,” the interpreter replies. “Why not?”

Ashe studies the man’s smudged face, clears his throat and straightens his shoulders. “His tears are interesting and persuasive,” he announces, and his words ring through the empty rooms. “But I think what we’ve got here is a case of neighbors feuding.”

The sniffling stranger is led away. Ashe trails out of the room a few minutes later, and the lawyer Hanoch turns angrily in his seat.

“You see?” he hisses. “This is the simplest political principle: You have to do positive things among the people so they accept you. The Americans promised many good things, but the people are beginning to be upset.”

He leans back in his chair, taps out an angry tattoo on his desk with his fingers.

“Democracy,” he finally says, “is not just a shirt we can put on one morning and wear. To expect us to do so shows no comprehension of our status.

“We don’t know what liberty means.”

First came the bombs, splintering the factory buildings. then came the American soldiers, who left their newspapers and boxed military meals strewn amid the wreckage and scrawled lewd theories about the sexual preferences of somebody named Hanson on the walls. The mobs came last of all to haul away the pieces, grabbing what they could of Samawah’s state-run cement factory. Now, a few weeks after the fall of Baghdad, its managers stand guard against the waves of looters, for even the chairs have been stolen. Wild dogs scavenge in the ruins; the air stinks of spilled oil. The factory once meant the chug and slam of progress in a poor town, regular pay, hundreds of jobs. Now quiet clamps over the wreckage as steadily as the harsh noon sun. A factory official gazes around and recites a verse written to commemorate the burning of Baghdad centuries ago: “ ‘Do you know the bitterness of disaster?’ ” The other men sit silently, letting the heat soften their thoughts.

Across town, the tenement house has no lights. the children gather in the doorways, wordless and wide-eyed in their nightgowns. The stairwell is dark and as warm as breath. Qasim Mohamed al-Hajaj is home.

Hajaj is 35, a newly hired translator for the Americans. He has spent all morning sitting behind a long desk in the courthouse. He does that every day now--sits and listens. The soldiers, including Ashe, scramble back and forth. Rowdy Iraqis fight their way into Hajaj’s face to yell and beseech, sweat and wheedle, pound the table and weep. They demand jobs, protection, payback.

Hajaj has but one reply; it’s what the soldiers told him to say. “Tell me your name.” He copies it carefully on a longhand list.

“Come back next week,” he says. “Sorry.” They get so angry, he tells himself.

In the afternoons, Hajaj finds a ride in a crowded minivan. He bounces over the river, past the empty seats of the abandoned soccer stadium, off into brown stretches of parched land. Hajaj is a poor man; he lives on the edge of town. His neighbors spend their days trading bleak forecasts about when the electricity might come back.

As April dwindles toward May, the ragged nervousness Hajaj stomached through the war has subsided. He comes to work in a trimmed beard, khaki pants, Oxford shirts. He is slight, his bearing hesitant. He earns $5 a day translating, which is more money than he ever made as a schoolteacher.

“The soldiers are good people,” he says carefully. “They treat me as an equal.”

When he is with them, working and busy, it’s all right, he says. But when he stops for a minute--when he thinks it over--he feels sick. An American man is just a man, after all, a hand to shake and a face to see. But the mass of Americans and the mass of Iraqis? That, Hajaj says, is never going to work.

“The Americans may give us food, and they may give us money,” he says. “But they are dangerous for our morality.”

Hajaj is a deeply conservative Shiite Muslim. The wounded and serene brown eyes of Ali, cousin of the Prophet Muhammad and the central figure of Shia Islam, stare down on his family from a woven tapestry on the walls of their living room. His wife, Kawtar, stays in the kitchen, where visitors won’t glimpse her face. She sends her husband forth with trays of olives, cucumbers and stuffed tomatoes. Hajaj is a little ashamed--meat, cheese and eggs have been hard to come by since the war.

When the American-led armies invaded, Hajaj huddled at home with his wife and two young children. The jets roared overhead. American tanks rolled past. Gunmen crouched on the roof of their apartment house, shooting down on the American troops until the Americans shot back and the gunmen were killed. When the children slept, they tossed through nightmares.

Now that Baghdad has fallen, Hajaj has caught the fever spreading through these heavily Shiite lands--a hope for power mingled with the dread that loose American morals might rub off. “We are against certain freedoms, specifically freedom for women,” Hajaj says. His 5-year-old daughter wears her hair braided into five long plaits; she spins on her toes, and her ruffled skirts swing into a pink arc. She will begin school the following year. Hajaj can’t bear the thought that she might grow up to reject the hijab, the Muslim headscarf.

“If we must be in contact with the Americans,” he says, “I fear we will be corrupted by their ideas.”

Hajaj has been listening carefully to the sermons of the clerics. They speak of an Islamic republic, and Hajaj prays it will come to be. The Americans are the complication--he doesn’t want them to stay, but he doesn’t really want them to go either, for he believes that a civil war would ensue. In his heart and in his gut, he believes the Americans will remain, and that his people have been conquered. “The Americans will never get out of this town,” he says, picking absently at his plate. “They will live with us for 100 years.”

But Hajaj has no time to brood, and so he pulls himself wearily to his feet. His 4-year-old son, Muhammad Ali, scoops up a toy machine gun. He pulls the trigger, the plastic rattles, and the little boy squeals in delight. “I have a gun, too!” the child tells his father.

Hajaj sets off walking to the Baathist school where once he taught English grammar to recalcitrant young men who refused to join the army. None of the students have shown up since the war, but the teachers have nowhere else to go. They sit around in hollow classrooms, swap rumors and wait for somebody to pay their salaries.

“I will be a teacher again,” Hajaj says. The job with the Americans is too heavy for his conscience. “It’s only a question of time.”

There’s a fire at the old bridge directorate; black smoke pours into the sky. Neighbors stand around and watch, as they have nothing else to do, and there is no fire department to call. Among them stands a stout tower of a man. He has taken his young son for a walk; the boy’s tiny hand disappears into the folds of his father’s palm. “If I got killed in the street, nobody would protect me,” the father says. “If we think about these things too much, we go mad.” The light falls long at night, the sky breaks into blue streaks, and the river runs silver beneath. Boys swim in the river, roll and twist, and horses stand up to their bellies in the water to cool themselves. Somebody is singing an old song: “I have crossed the river for your sake.” It sounds like a child. At the old hotel, American soldiers gaze out the cracked windows at vacant lots. One says: OK, pretend you’re in a suite at a beautiful beachside hotel, pretend you’re looking out over the ocean, pretend this is great. And so they pretend.

Samawah’s brand new, U.S.-backed deputy mayor has light in his black eyes and a snap of energy in his hands. He has lived through an exile’s solitude in far and chilly lands, but now, in late April 2003 and after 23 years outside of Iraq, the U.S. soldiers have brought him back to his ancestral lands. Behind the ropes of flowers that strangle the high gates of city hall, Khalid Azarrah, this improbable Odysseus, is here to stay.

In a hot, tight office, he sits surrounded by men. Like everybody else, they want electricity, water and security--more than that, they want someone to tell them what to do. They huddle in a circle on rickety chairs and swivel pinched faces to regard one another. They are waiting in intimate shadows, in air sour with sweat, for something to happen, for the new Iraq to begin.

Azarrah sits among them unfazed. His tortured homeland lies in ruins beyond the marble gates, but he has the taste of destiny in his mouth. For the first time in his life, he has caught the tail of something he’s always pined for: He has snagged a piece of power.

“Maybe I am not suited to the position. Maybe there are people better than me, and they deserve it,” he says, flashing his gap-toothed grin. It’s a smile that says: Don’t be fooled by my modesty. “God willing, if there is a government, we will have elections. We are still organizing.”

One morning exactly 23 years ago, Azarrah donned Bedouin robes, drifted into the deadly blasts of the desert with a pack of herdsmen and slipped over the border into Saudi Arabia. Back then, he was running away from Samawah because he despised the government. Saddam Hussein had invaded neighboring Iran, forcing Iraqi Shiites to take up arms against their Iranian brethren. Shiites who resisted fighting writhed in torture chambers and were lined up to be shot all over southern Iraq. Azarrah, a member of one of this region’s most prominent tribes, refused to join the Baath Party. He didn’t want to fight.

“I was angry about the war. My family hated the regime,” he says. “It was destroying everything in the country.”

So he kissed his family goodbye and left with empty hands. He rode a camel, slept under the stars with the Bedouins and carried no passport. His exile was long and lonesome. He worked odd jobs in Saudi Arabia, then drifted on to Qatar. He made his way across the ocean to Toronto, where he settled down as best he could, far from the date palm groves, mud houses and soft Arabic tongue of home.

He learned French and found a job as a supermarket checkout clerk. He got married, and his wife enrolled in a university to become a pharmacist. Azarrah kept in touch with other Iraqis through an exile organization, the Iraqi National Assn. for Human Rights. The group lived on nostalgia laced with political activism. They spoke of home and dreamed of the day Hussein would fall.

In 2002, he says, the CIA telephoned him. We’re going into Iraq, he says they told him. We want you to come with us. They sent him an airplane ticket; that’s when Azarrah believed they meant business. He flew to Washington, then to Frankfurt and Amman. Finally he went to Kuwait. It was an American tank that brought him back home. Shortly after he left Toronto, his wife gave birth to their first baby. Azarrah has never seen his daughter.

“Country is more precious than children,” he says.

He has been installed by soldiers in a city hall guarded by tanks. Iraqis who came with the Americans are deemed tainted by many of their countrymen, but Azarrah doesn’t shrink from the association. “We have a historic hatred for the Baath regime. They killed our sheiks and used our desert for cemeteries. The people consider the Americans better.”

The last word isn’t out of his mouth when the power fails and the lights quiver away, leaving city hall in darkness. The men shuffle their feet and swipe at the sweat on their brows.

Azarrah doesn’t say a word.

The months spin past, and uncertainty gathers as low and dark as rain clouds over Samawah. When darkness falls, bandits roam the streets, stealing whatever they can. Tribal resentments simmer into street fights. Young men who have been ducking the draft in remote villages find their way back to town. Fearful of walking home after dark, women grow restless in their confinement. Freedom flexes itself like a new brand of violence. Words explode from long-stifled thoughts, cheap and plentiful. The people argue, print newspapers and open Internet cafes. There are demonstrations to stage, dissent to be aired, political parties to forge. A babble of words pours from television sets. In the streets people protest unemployment and corruption, smear the walls with graffiti and hang posters from storefronts: “We’re against Baathists joining the regime.” “Peace yes, terrorism no.” “Death for Saddam’s criminals.” “Justice for the mass graves.”

There are things for which Hajaj, the translator, can’t forgive the Americans. They are small gestures that seem insignificant, but from Hajaj’s deeply conservative Shiite perspective, they come dripping with dire meaning. Take, for example, the day that two Iraqi women walked right past the checkpoints and sandbags to enter coalition headquarters.

Hajaj is mortified. It isn’t because they are women, exactly--there are plenty of foreign women wandering around in T-shirts and khakis, women who laugh in immodest peals and toss wisecracks back at men. That’s one thing. “It’s acceptable,” says Hajaj. “If they’re Dutch or American, that belongs to them.”

But these are Iraqi women, Muslim women; the rules are different. “It made us so nervous,” Hajaj says. “We knew it was wrong.” The women are employed by the coalition to teach American officers about local customs, but to Hajaj, that’s irrelevant. Nothing can justify their disappearance into an armed compound full of foreign men.

Hajaj pleads with the coalition to call off the sessions. Not only do the lectures shatter the honor of the women, he tells the Americans, but they’re also a grave insult to the entire town. “There are so many places, rooms, where they can do their jobs in front of people,” he says. “But not behind walls. Not in secret.”

The Americans ignore his complaints. “Now people suspect the women,” Hajaj says, darkly. “They might even shoot them.”

It is February 2004, a glittering morning in late winter, and the moon stains the heavens like a thumbprint. Hajaj has ducked out of work and huddles in a sun-warmed car, out of the desert winds. “This is the beginning,” he says. “This is the first step in trying to introduce freedom for women. And it is not acceptable.”

Iraqi schoolchildren have painted a blast wall that was erected since the invasion to block the compound from the street; it’s gaudy with pictures of suns, American flags and blue water. Hajaj’s gaze drifts back to the main gate, where Dutch guards watch over a cluster of Iraqis. They are peasants and tribesmen clutching photographs of dented cars and old government documents. Some of the men were at the courthouse months earlier; Hajaj has seen their faces many times. “Nobody ever got paid,” he says with a shrug.

Hajaj still hasn’t managed to land a teaching job, so he has stayed on with the Americans. The months have pushed him to the apex of Samawah’s translator pool--he is the translator for Jim Soriano, the American head of the local civilian government.

When his children see their father on television alongside his boss, their eyes grow wide. They call the stranger “Uncle Jim.” Hajaj vows he will never let his children mix with the Americans. “The Americans say yes, they will leave Iraq, but they mean no,” he says. “Even if their troops leave, their companies will stay. They want to try a new occupation, not military, but economic.”

If Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the revered Shiite cleric, calls for a revolution, Hajaj won’t hesitate. He says he will battle against the occupiers. Time is growing short, he warns. His people won’t swallow the occupation much longer.

“We support Sistani without thinking,” he says. “The clerics will call for a fight, and the people will follow--and they should follow. Even if they die, they should follow.”

He speaks as though he were describing the weather, with the same soft light glowing from his dark eyes, as if he didn’t work for the occupation, and as if he weren’t speaking with an American. Hajaj sees no contradiction. The warmth of personal friendship can glow here in this car or at his job--but religion hovers always overhead, ready to crash down, to shatter all things trivial or earthly and blur a people into a faceless force: the occupiers and the occupied.

He has learned the translator’s art of disappearing, and he has measured the space between his people and these strangers. “We in Iraq decide with feelings only,” he says. “Foreigners decide with mind and reason.”

Hajaj’s job has imprinted him with a few American habits. With sheepish pride, he breaks a conservative Muslim taboo by shaking the hand of a foreign woman. He has been thinking about secular pluralism, and his zeal for an Islamic regime has soured.

“Back then, after the war, we were very excited, and we wanted what we couldn’t have before, and that was Islamic rule,” he says of his one-time enthusiasm for an Islamic state. “But then we saw the Islamists and how they’re behaving, and I changed.”

“I think man can have his religion without any rulers,” he says. “The connection between God and man has nothing to do with rulers.”

Hajaj earns $250 a month, more money than he has ever dreamed possible, and he relishes the newfound rite of spending. When the cruelest swelters of August gripped the southern marshes, Hajaj bought the family’s first air conditioner and installed it in the sitting room.

He has bought his wife a gold bracelet, and when he slipped it onto her wrist he felt his chest puff with joy. Never before could he have afforded to present her with a piece of gold--when they were married, he was so poor her family had to pay for their couches. Now Hajaj is replacing the furniture, stick by stick. He is laying some of the money aside; he hopes to build a house.

When the workday is done, he makes his way home. He runs his eyes over satellite dishes spreading like a pox over the roofs of hardscrabble homes. “Each house has its own satellite nowadays, and you know very well they have some channels which are unacceptable,” he says, dropping his eyes in shame.

He steps past the sewage that clots the lawn of his tenement house, past the old men with mottled skin who use dried palm fronds to brush dust from the walkways into the dust of the yard; the dust blows on, caught by the wind. He swings open the scarred door to the dim stairwell, where somebody has scrawled in Arabic, “ . . . is a tramp.” The girl’s name has been scratched away.

Hajaj climbs the stairs and makes his way past the stalactites of mold that drip down from the hallway ceiling. His family waits on the other side of the door. He is happy; his wife is soon due to give birth to their third child. With a conspiratorial twinkle, he whispers that it’s a “liberation baby”--conceived during the dark and uncertain weeks at the dawn of the occupation. The doctor says it’s a girl.

Men and women walk their pilgrimages in a frenzy, treading the dusty road north to the holy shrines at Najaf and Karbala. They go forth in pairs or in packs, aboard wheezing vans or on foot, relishing the journeys that were restricted under Saddam Hussein. They may take days on the road, dozing in palm groves on the way, eating the rice ladled out by eager Shiites in makeshift roadside waystations. Samawah is rooted in the Shiite south, a region that has blossomed since Saddam’s fall. Freed from a leader who tortured them and banned their religious festivals, the Shiites celebrate every wrinkle of their customs. But this Shiite renaissance has its dark side. Hardliners blow up a music store in Samawah for selling sinful songs, and they menace Sunni Muslims and other minorities. In a decrepit neighborhood, fevered young Shiites storm into a Sunni mosque, lock themselves inside and dare to be kicked out. A 20-year-old holds the key. It is payback; under the Baathists, he was arrested for lurking near another Sunni mosque and accused of slipping into Friday prayers. He was sentenced to six months in jail. Now, he says, this shrine is the right of his people.

Deputy mayor khalid azar-rah is losing his footing. The new Iraq isn’t what he expected.

The Americans appear in his office, armed with the complaints of the townspeople. They say Azarrah isn’t doing enough to support the political parties, that he is collecting perks and plying his tribesmen with favors and jobs.

He protests. “To the political parties I gave headquarters and even cars,” he reminds the Americans.

But they shake their heads.

They portray him as a kind-hearted opportunist with solid tribal ties, a man who wants to serve his country and line his pockets along the way. When they haul cement into town to build a new police station, Azarrah announces he’ll need a few truckloads for his family homes. When the Americans stand in his way, he recoils like a righteous man wronged. Is he in charge or not? What is the purpose of power if it comes without privilege?

“Whenever I signed an order to appoint somebody, it was canceled by the Marines,” he says. “I tried to grant weapons licenses to tribes and chieftains, but that was canceled, too.”

On the margins of a government he’d hoped to head, Azarrah writes a letter to the coalition: If things don’t change, consider me resigned. The next thing he knows, the Americans have replaced him.

“I feel I’ve served them and offered something, but there’s no appreciation,” he says. “I’ve served Iraq.”

Brooding, he blames the old regime. “The Baathists,” he says, “did not teach us integrity.”

The road from town stretches along the Euphrates River and into a glen of date palms where shadows fall over an earth rich and brown, then pushes on into a yellow expanse of desert. The homes of Azarrah’s family compound come into sight, rising like sandcastles from the wastes. This is where Azarrah spends his days in February 2004, nursing his pride and biding his time.

Whatever the source of his supplies, Azarrah’s homestead may be one of the few places in Iraq where reconstruction is pushing quickly ahead. Great mountains of brick climb from the sands, and skinny workmen scramble to smear mud over fresh-built wooden frames. Little boys haunt the work sites, giggling and pinching one another, scuffling in the dirt on the banks of a fetid canal.

In the middle of the din stands a vast Bedouin tent, strung with lights and padded with carpets. Azarrah settles into the shadows and slides down onto a red cushion. The tribesmen line the walls, listening. The air is flecked with horseflies.

He fishes into his breast pocket, pulls out a laminated credential from his Iraqi exile organization and turns the card in his hand. It’s a token from the old days, when times were hard and the overthrow of Hussein was just an idea. Back then, it was easier to dream of the glory of the day after. Now it’s been nearly a year since Azarrah set eyes on his wife. She is still studying in Toronto, raising a daughter he doesn’t know.

“Until now, I can’t afford a house for them,” he says. “It is not possible to bring them.”

Azarrah has the wounded air of a man ill-used. The Americans don’t know what they’re doing, he says: They ignored his warnings; they are destined to learn a tragic lesson too late. The trouble is beginning already, he says. “These [Islamist] brigades are behaving so badly, they’re starting to remind us of the Baathists--detaining people and torturing them without the knowledge of the Iraqi police. To treat those Islamic movements in a nice way is not in the interest of the Americans, especially at a time of transition.

“If the Americans don’t take care, they’ll be sorry,” he says. “They’ll be very sorry.”

But he doesn’t stay glum for long. He grins his toothy grin and settles deeper into the cushions. The sun is as heavy as honey today, pouring itself all over the desert floor. Azarrah still has his tribe, and the game is not over yet. Perhaps he can snag a job as a foreign ambassador, he suggests. “I plan to stay here, even if I’m working as a simple peasant. This is a gift from the sky.”

The men hunching along the tent walls grow very quiet. Azarrah continues.

“Believe me, nobody can get rid of Saddam Hussein,” he says. “Only God and Bush. Those ballots in Florida were the gift of God to the Iraqis.”

Samawah moves as if it were dreaming. Unemployment drags on people’s spirits. Patience runs thin. The cement factory reopens about six months after the invasion, but there isn’t enough electrical power to produce cement. The water is dirty; sometimes it flows brown from the faucets and smells like a swamp. Rusting car parts emerge from black, stagnant pools along the road, and entrepreneurs with grease-stained hands sell black market benzene from rickety card tables. In the morning, the men line up for hours to buy gas. The farmers smuggle their sheep into Saudi Arabia to sell at a higher price. “Would the Americans [be pleased],” asks a city councilman with a drooping moustache, “if the Iraqis entered their country without making anything better? After Desert Storm, the infrastructure was repaired very quickly. I’m not praising Saddam, but I’m giving you an example. Now nothing is being fulfilled, and chaos is beginning.”

Capt. Ashe can’t hold his tongue any longer. Through a translator, he is swapping afternoon pleasantries with a local judge when he finally lets himself tell the truth.

“We’re grateful that an American would be so nice to Arabs,” the judge tells him.

“Well,” Ashe replies, “I think it’s nice that an Arab community has been so welcoming to a Jew.”

The translator turns his face toward Ashe, frowns, then gathers his courage: “El saad . . . .” Which is to say, “This gentleman . . . . “ The translator, Ashe realizes, doesn’t want to say, “I am a Jew” in the first person.

The judge nods absently. “Yes, of course . . . . “ Then his face freezes. “You’re a Jew?”

In case you’ve never met one, Ashe thinks to himself, this is your front-row view.

Rumors have long stuck to him. People whisper that he is a spy, that he has lived many years in Egypt, that he speaks fluent Arabic and only pretends to fumble so he can eavesdrop. Now, when they hear about his religion, they say much worse. After all, the ground is thick with conspiracy theories--that Israelis are secretly running the administration, that the entire invasion is an exercise in Zionism.

But in the long months of occupation, the Iraqis have grown more difficult to shock. And in the end, despite people who Ashe says “looked at me cross-eyed,” his religion doesn’t make much difference. He figures he has done some good here: He has written a provincial constitution on a dusty laptop at battalion headquarters, stealing gleefully from the U.S. Constitution. “We the people . . . .” He has managed to get $250,000 in coalition money to pay for the courthouse reconstruction, driving the cash--stuffed into empty MRE boxes--north from Basra. He has investigated and dismissed 22 of the 24 provincial judges. People demonstrated against him after that, but Ashe doesn’t mind. After all, he figures, it was an exercise in free speech.

It is just starting to “get fun,” he thinks, when the orders come for him to pull out. “My Arabic was really getting good.”

By the summer of 2004, he has settled into Virginia Beach, Va., and life as a newlywed--he and his girlfriend had eloped to Las Vegas just before he left for Iraq, just in case anything happened to him. He ran for Congress on the Democratic ticket. The district was thick with military families, and Ashe liked to remind voters of the time he served in Iraq. But when November came, he lost.

His work in Iraq still shadows him. He exchanges e-mails with people in Samawah; Ala Hanoch, the lawyer who lashed out about him in the early days of the occupation, now says Ashe is one of his closest friends.

Even the coalition authorities accused Ashe of firing judges too hastily and without cause. He didn’t have much patience for their complaints. The coalition never gave him any instructions or advice when he needed it, he says--left to his own devices in Samawah, he did the best he could.

“What it all comes down to is the question--Who do you trust? And the answer is, You’ve got to trust somebody,” Ashe says. “For all I knew, I’d hired a translator who was going to get me killed, but what was I gonna do, sit back at the railhouse?

“You’ve gotta stick your neck out.”

The bones are in a date palm grove on the edge of town--some 300 bodies have been found so far. There are more in a second trench near the hospital. Samawah’s past is being dragged slowly into view; the mass graves are being exhumed. The people gather the bones and put them into sacks. Families identify their lost loved ones by watches, eyeglasses and ID cards. These things have endured beyond the flesh. The graves date from when the Shiites rose up against Saddam Hussein in 1991. They expected America to support the revolt. But when the people of the South began to fight, the United States turned its back, and they were slaughtered. “I have two brothers and an uncle in that grave,” says a security guard with deep wrinkles. Without sarcasm, he adds: “We are grateful to the Americans.”

There is a new sadness in the translator’s face--his “liberation baby” is stillborn, and his wife can never have another. Her heart is broken. She can’t bear to see the newborns in the hospital, so Hajaj trundles her home and nurses her on the living room couch. She stays sick with sadness for months.

Bit by bit, Hajaj’s resistance to the Americans melts. He poses for a photograph with Paul Bremer while he is still head of the U.S.-led occupation. Hajaj dreams of a job with an American company. His old ideas about right and wrong, us and them, yawn wider. Many of his countrymen would classify him as a collaborator.

He still thinks satellite dishes are a symptom of moral decay, but he breaks down and buys one anyway. “Just for the cartoons, for the children,” he says, with an apologetic shrug. “We can’t stand the news.”

No longer does he forbid his children to know the Americans; as spring turns to summer, he begins to invite American friends home from work. His 5-year-old daughter learns a few words of English and paints her fingernails red.

Then some of the Shiites, led by rebel cleric Muqtada Sadr, begin their insurgency. Fighting flares in the holy cities, tanks roll over the sacred cemetery at Najaf, and bullets pierce the dome of the shrine of Ali in Karbala. Hajaj is in agony. He can’t bring himself to go to work because he can’t stand to see the Americans. He stays home with his children. When he collects himself and returns to work, nobody asks for an explanation.

Little more than a month later, late last June, the Americans turn Iraq over to an interim government, and most of the Americans pack up and leave Samawah. Hajaj’s job is defunct; the Americans leave him with a letter of recommendation. They call him a “cultural guide,” a “walking reference,” a “discreet and professional” man whose “energy and drive destined him for duties larger than those of an interpreter.” The letter, signed by Jim Soriano, says: “Any employer should run, and should not walk, to sign up Qasim al-Hajaj.”

He would like to go back to the classroom. But in August 2004, his application is still languishing at the education ministry. “I should hear any day now,” Hajaj says. He doesn’t seem to remember that he said the same thing more than a year ago. On this sweltering afternoon, his new window unit purrs cool air over his family. It’s like this, Hajaj says: The Americans have done him good--and done his people harm.

“As a whole, they are the occupier of our country,” he says carefully. “But in specific, I consider them my friends, because we lived together and worked together and they didn’t do anything to me.”

His daughter sits up very straight and listens. Hajaj’s voice grows bolder over the murmur of cartoons. “Opposite,” he says. “They would do anything for me.”

He falls quiet. He thinks.

“They are my friends,” he says slowly. “Until now.”

By which he means, so far. For the fight for Iraq is not settled, and the war’s legacy is unfolding still.