The Boy Beneath the Sheet
Central Hospital, Baghdad
August 2003

The boy lay under a sheet. He looked like a shadow, under the green, fluorescent light. His father stood over him holding a small glass of milk. The man wore a wool glove on one hand. He had heavy wrinkles under his eyes. He, like most of the mothers and fathers in these hospitals, said he had an important story to tell.

The dim ward of the children’s hospital in central Baghdad was muggy. It smelled rank and fresh, like shit and blood . There were beds full of sick children and hovering women hidden beneath hijabs.

The father introduced himself as Abu Shwakit--father of Shwakit. He wanted me to see his son. He ripped down the bed sheet and uncovered his son’s withered body. The boy lay on a stained mattress, his skin powdery white, his bony hands like dead crabs on his chest. He bled from small holes in his ankles . A boy Christ.

Dr. Ihsan Jassim al Douri talked about the  boy’s medical diagnosis in his best English. “This patient had a psychological fit,” al Douri said. “It was reoccuring, and made brain damage. Brain damage progressed to epilepsy. This is a condition of the war. You know, if you see him you suspect his age three or four year, but he is 13. Because growth development delayed, because he has a handicapped, wasted brain disorder and recurrent fit.” The doctor talked, and his chest, neck and arms pushed forward--even his eyes bulged--eager and overwrought.

The father spoke to al Douri in Arabic. As he spoke, al Douri translated:
My son stopped eating regularly 12 years ago.  Our house was close to targets hit by the laser-guided bombs American warplanes dropped in 1991 during the first Gulf War.
The father pulled up his son’s T-shirt; he gestured to us : Come close; look at his belly. Distended.Shwakit, less than a year old at the time of the bombing, went into shock. Then he stopped eating. We thought it would be temporary. Then he became epileptic.He stopped developing.

Luay, my driver and guide, stood back and listened. Luay was a well-to-do Baghdad businessman and a one-time reporter for an Iraqi television station. He was a Sunni Muslim with a Christian mother. He had been driving me around the lawless city in his black BMW with its busted air conditioner and tinted windows. He had brought me to the children’s hospital with another journalist to help us report the about a lack of medicine and medical supplies, a consequence of the war. Luay had been the one approached by Abu Shwakit, to ask who I was, could I help him, listen and possibly tell his story.

I looked over my shoulder and saw Luay leaning against a support column, wiping his sweaty face. He looked around the room at the people staring back at him. He looked disgusted.

There were women swaddling babies, fanning away the heat and flies. Some breast-fed discreetly. Two women cried silently. They sat in adjacent beds with children asleep beside them and whispered, as if they were telling one another something awful.

Luay said they smelled like poor people, like dirt and urine and shit. He felt the taste of them in his mouth. He wanted a cigarette. After a few minutes of the father’s story he walked towards the entrance and stood there and waited for us to finish.

I did what I was there to do. I photographed the boy’s ankles with their leaking holes; I photographed his withered legs. I photographed him in his diaper; it was like a thick hoop,a fat collar, dividing his wasted legs from his limp body. As I photographed, the digital click of my shutter sounded too loud.

“This is permanent brain damage for life. At which time you can suspect the patient to die,” al Douri said. He told us how the boy’s health had deteriorated over the years: “This boy has poor muscle power, and this makes a secretion in the chest. This secretion make a brain damage. Brain damage, brain damage, brain damage. At the end, brain death, body death. All the body dead.”

Shwakit’s father stood over him, his face the color of ash. He looked exhausted, like a man who had been running around for years trying to fix disasters as they multiplied around him. I photographed as he spooned milk into the wheezing boy’s mouth with a silver spoon. It was easier to see him this way, through the lens. The boy’s tongue resisted, and milk drippled down the side of his swollen face. I dropped the camera and let it hang around my neck. The father squeezed and wiggled the boy’s nose to force him to swallow. The milk gurgled in the boy like water in a half-clogged sink; the boy jerked a little and hissed. He closed his mouth, but the father gently pried it open again. I could see white gums stained with black and blue spots. I pulled the camera up and viewed the boy through the lens again. I framed, composed, dissected--the  boy became an object. Easier that way.

The father pointed with the spoon at his son as if we couldn’t see him. My son,he said. He is the damage of American policy. Shwakit’s own eyes slotted back in their sockets. What did the bombs do, but kill people? he said. People, not politicians. His son the damage of the 12-year UN embargo, and what did that do but help kill 500,000 children and they were still dying. And Saddam and his son Uday, punishing the people, because of their own lunacy, because of the American bombs that provoked them. It is always the people who suffer.

The father had wanted to get his son out of Baghdad. He had tried many years ago.
 “They record his name in many humanitarian aides previously, in order to transfer him and introduce him to special doctors. Neurologists, good doctors,” al Douri said for the father. “But because the father not related to the Ba’ath party, no traveling, no help.”

And now Iraq is in shambles, the father said. The new administrators are doing nothing for his child. Things work too slowly. Children were suffering. Children died. He did not want to see his only son die. The father said he wanted to take the boy to Turkey, where he knew of a brain operation that might help his son recover.

“But the father knows his condition, and there is no benefit to get outside Iraq and get good treatment,” al Douri said. “The father knows this is the end stage and there is no benefit. This is a chronic condition. No, this is the end stage.”

The father rested the spoon next to the glass of milk on the bedside table. He  leaned over and tugged down Shwakit’s T-shirt. It was printed with goofy cartoon elephants, giraffes and tigers. The word CIRCUS hung in an arch over the animals. He pulled the cover back over the boy, as if he was closing a book. The father nodded and sighed, but kept his head up as we turned to leave.

There was nothing to say. I stared at the boy’s slack face, the arrowhead tongue rolling in his mouth, the specked gums and floating eyes. I wanted to remember him, record this moment. I wondered what my seeing might do. The disruptions and damage of the war would continue. The boy would die soon.

As we walked out, al Douri said he was hungry. He wanted us to buy him lunch. “I’m not hungry,” Luay said without looking at him and lit a cigarette. The thought of food made me nauseous. al Douri continued to talk about the problems in the hospital; the boy was just one of them.

It was 120 degrees outside, maybe hotter. The sun had dulled the color in the courtyard, the yellow chipped outer walls of the wards, the thin strips of grass around the concrete, the shirts and pants hanging from a sagging wire strung between a large tree and the building. The sky was faintly blue. There were attendants bent over, washing the sidewalks, dunking rags in pails of dirty water. Women in black hijab dragged themselves through the courtyard.

I had a headache, and the hot air was too dense to breathe. I was thirsty. My knees were about to give. Luay, watching me, told me to sit down next to him . I thought I might vomit. I braced myself,  hands on my knees. The weight felt like somebody else’s. I couldn’t move. Luay smoked. To avoid the smoke I turned my head and closed my eyes. The multiple images I made of the wasted, withered boy flashed like a slideshow through my mind.