I wanted to hear new stories and overlap and confirm the ones I already knew. Two million or more Iraqis had fled Iraq, mostly to Jordan and Syria, and I spent weeks in Damascus and Amman, sitting in cafés or hotel lobbies or on a thin pallet in a refugee hovel drinking, accordingly, glasses of tea or orange juice, or cans of warm Pepsi. “And how is your family?” I would ask and then horror stories came out. Everyone, without exception, had a horror story. Kill kidnap kill kidnap kill kidnap. In various permutations: brother, self, wife, five-year-old son; ransomed, shot, missing. They had stopped blaming the Americans; somehow the horror had gone beyond anger or fault. One woman I remember, a modest, educated, English-speaking, handsome woman in a long black abaya. She was Shia married to a Sunni—inter-sect marriage was common in Baghdad—and her husband had been killed in a bombing. During her mourning, her brother-in-law had come to her and threatened to tell the insurgents she was a Shia spy unless she gave her fifteen year old daughter to his son for marriage and took her fourteen year old son out of school to work in his garage.
What do You think about The Weight Of A Mustard Seed?
