A WAR CHILD

Robert Rhodes

Child of the moment,
kaffiyeh of night,
do you realize that since you came, we have not known what to do?
—Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef, "The Trees of Ithaca"

I don’t even know his last name. But I could find Hassan on some Baghdad thoroughfare with mysterious ease. He has come unheralded from the other side of the world, but I would know him as if he were one of my own children, even though we have never met and do not even speak the same language. I have imagined him for so long, and inhabited his life for so many futile afternoons, that this vicarious child has become whatever I believe him to be.

Father, Allah, Jesus, Yahweh—please spare him this madness. Or so I have bargained and implored, mostly with shadows. I have even prayed, assuming someone is still accepting prayers from this country of invaders.

Hassan must be nine now. When my friend Tom Cornell of the Catholic Peace Fellowship met him last Christmas—before the war, before the obscenity of the occupation, when life still was relatively quiet in Iraq—Hassan was shining shoes with a clatch of boys every day near the Tigris River in downtown Baghdad.

They congregated, this truant fraternity of bootblacks, near the big hotels where all the Western journalists and peace activists stayed. They plied their trade, ran the gamut of minor scams, and lived the way homeless boys live in cities all over the world. I try not to imagine what that really means, or what demeaning grief or neglect Hassan—a small boy with a beautiful cinnamon face—has had to endure because of his circumstances.

The territory they worked lay near one of the deep turns the Tigris takes through central Baghdad. On the far shore stood the Republican Palace, one of the primary targets of the American "shock and awe" campaign of aerial deconstruction. Today, the so-called Green Zone surrounding the headquarters of the occupation, with the palace at its center, is still subject to rocket attacks, suicide bombers, and other jolts of sudden fatality. So little has changed.

In short, the only home these children knew has been transformed into a smoldering district of the underworld, a place of depravity patrolled by frustrated and frightened soldiers who would sooner shoot than be shot, and who often do.

Spare him this madness.

In the local parlance, Hassan’s father is an "Ali Baba"—a thief, a ne’er-do-well confined to one of Saddam’s despairing jails for some untold crime. No one really knows where Hassan lived, or how he survived exactly, only that he stayed close to the older boys with their shoeshine stands, keeping to the streets where they knew they could make some money and remain relatively safe from harm.

Though they would be hard to imagine, there are worse lives certainly, and far better ones, especially as lives go for those who are alone. But this was all I knew at first of Hassan—an Iraqi boy on the other side of the world who has haunted my heart for more than a year now.

I have thought of the horror Hassan must have witnessed more times than I should. What must war do to a child like this? What grief, what immovable fear must have faced him during this time of insanity, while people here went about their lives with barely a thought for their own orphans, much less for Iraq’s?

When the bombs began to fall, thousands of them, they turned Hassan’s neighborhood, his grim haven where people from the West occasionally alit, into a constellation of intractable doom.

Are they still accepting prayers from this country of invaders? Please listen carefully then. . . .

In our home, Hassan has become a silent fourth child. Since I heard about him from Tom, we have prayed for Hassan every night and tried in vain to imagine what his life must be like and how it must have been affected by the war.

We never consciously chose to remember Hassan like this. It just occurred, in a sure and natural way that has made him real and alive to us.

Around the beginning of 2003, our children and I decided to light a candle to remind us to pray for Hassan, or just to stop in the middle of whatever we were doing to put ourselves in his place, mindful of whatever was happening in Iraq that day. Many nights, the tall glass candleholder—the kind found glowing next to Catholic altars—flickered until morning.

When I would put my children to bed at night, we often would pray out loud for Hassan, and for all the other children like him in Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever else came to mind. It is quite moving to experience the certain and authentic compassion that children feel for one another—a compassion that doesn’t discriminate or rely on reason for validation. In the mind of a child, I learned, the plight of someone like Hassan was no less a concern than anything that might befall us here, or disrupt the holy shadows of our own home.

As often occurs with children, my own powers as an adult seemed to evince far more influence or sincerity than I would have thought. As Hassan continued to become a part of our life—of our struggle with what had been happening in the world—the children hoped for some compelling agent of mercy to come forward and intervene. It was a mercy I had been hoping for, too, though out of my own sense of powerlessness, and not from faith.

Finally, though, what was expected of me did become clear. As we talked about Hassan one evening this summer, our daughter Lydia, who is six, asked what I had hoped she never would.

"Hassan must be scared," she said quietly. "He must really be hungry and upset because the war is happening right where he lives."

I said Hassan probably was frightened, just as we all were when we thought about him. My wife’s fear has been an especially private one, defying words. But I said Hassan was a smart little boy who knew how to find his way around and get help.

"What if all the helpers he knows are dead or ran away?" she asked. Her distress had more integrity than mine ever did. "I’m afraid Hassan is going to get hurt, or something bad will happen if somebody doesn’t rescue him."

My heart at that moment felt hollow and dusty, like an old pine cone jammed in my chest. My lungs went limp and cold and I castigated myself for ever bringing the subject up. Why burden children with a dilemma I had no understanding of myself? I tried to think of a way out of all this.

Then she asked, "When are you going to go there and bring Hassan to live with us in Kansas?"

Her question struck me with such force that I wasn’t sure if I’d really heard it, or simply intuited what both of us had been thinking. Either way, I knew I had no answer.

"I don’t know," I said.

Our children are used to my traveling occasionally in my work, so making a trip to Iraq hardly seemed inconceivable.

"Someone has to go and rescue Hassan," she insisted. "You have to go and bring him here to live with us."

For her, the matter was settled, which made the whole affair even more heartbreaking. How many children, I thought, set adrift in this forlorn society, would be as generous as my own daughter?

I told her I would bring Hassan to be in our family if I could, but that things weren’t that simple. I said I would have to think about it for awhile.

As she climbed into bed, I thought about what I really would do if there were a way to help Hassan. I tried to imagine what the parents of countless children in Iraq must be enduring through all this. As I turned off the lamp and stood at the door, Lydia called out again, this time with an urgency I had never heard from her.

"You have to go and save Hassan and bring him here," she said.

Spare him this madness. Spare him these heedless invaders.

"You have to do it. Time is running out!"

Hassan, like a lot of his friends, is well-known among the journalists and activists who have been in Baghdad throughout the war. He is quite charming and has a way of ingratiating himself to anyone with a heart.

Because of this, Tom and I have been able to keep track of Hassan, after a fashion, primarily through our acquaintances in Christian Peacemaker Teams and Voices in the Wilderness, activist groups with people still in the country. On the Voices Web site, there are even a few photos of Hassan, a couple of which we have on our computer at home—photos that, for us anyway, have become iconic of the fate of all Iraqi children. In one, he is eating an outsized piece of chocolate cake, a cup of tea nearby, amid crumbs. His clothes are tattered but warm, and he is smiling.

By e-mail, I have been able to get a few first- and second-hand reports on Hassan, and so has Tom. Over the months, we have been able to put together some basic, but occasionally harrowing, facts. Like all information emerging from a war zone, it is subject to considerable error and confusion. But when one is grasping straws, even rumors will suffice.

First, we believe Hassan was wounded. At some point during the invasion, apparently after American forces entered Baghdad and swarmed the neighborhood around the downtown hotels, Hassan suffered a leg wound. According to one report we received, the wound went untreated and did not heal for a long time.

He also has had some problem with his teeth. Though some of the photos that show Hassan on the Voices Web site show a beautiful if crooked smile, he lost some front teeth when he was hit by a car, apparently before the war began.

At some point after the invasion, Hassan and his friends disappeared from the neighborhood around the Palestine Hotel. Apparently, they were edged out of their territory not by danger but by unemployed men who trailed the Westerners and the soldiers in search of income. Postwar economics were hard at work.

For quite awhile, this was where the trail went cold, and I began to wonder if Hassan had not passed out of our lives once and for all, his fate never to be known. Ultimately, this probably will happen, but the other day Tom told me he had heard a few scraps that gave at least a little hope.

Hassan’s father apparently has re-entered the picture. After many jails in Iraq were turned out amid the invasion, Hassan’s father got out and was able to track down his son. What this means, we have no way of knowing.

According to Tom, though, Hassan and his father are now living in Al-Sadr City—a Shiite district in eastern Baghdad formerly known as Saddam City. This district was something of a stepchild in the hierarchy of Baghdad politics. During the Saddam regime, it was a place of outcasts, denied many of the utilities and amenities that were basic in other districts. Today, with the Shiite resurgence, Al-Sadr is slowly emerging from its own dark age, though even by Iraqi standards this is not saying a lot.

Nonetheless, I cannot help but wonder if time is not still running out for Hassan, or at least for other children like him. Though the recent capture of Saddam Hussein adds an unpredictable wild card, reading the news of escalating violence in Iraq—violence that has little target anymore but seems to be violence for its own inverted purpose—hope becomes a distinctly short commodity. It even begins to appear pointless to hope, a mockery of what we know to be real.

Clearly, I will not be the one to rescue Hassan, if anyone does. Knowing this brings a terrible emptiness with it. But perhaps we have done a little, after all, to keep this child safe for a season, though I can’t say what.

Still, having come this far with him, I find it astonishing that even now I don’t even know Hassan’s last name, or much about his broken family, or even the sound of his voice. But I know on the street I could find him with mysterious ease, and I can bring his face to mind in an instant, even faster than I can my own.

I even begin to believe that if time really does run out for Hassan, as I have been warned it could, I can somehow make it start again. This is all the hope I can afford.

—Robert Rhodes lives in Newton, Kansas, where he is assistant editor of Mennonite Weekly Review.