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A Baghdad Bookseller, Bound to His Country
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Mohammad lay buried under books, rubble and car parts. His voice faint, he asked Nabil to get help. Through the haze, Nabil saw an opening.
He waded through the rubble, using a book in his right hand to bat back flames, his left hand to propel forward. "I was swimming in the fire," he said.
At the hospital, doctors pulled shrapnel from Nabil's brain, back and neck. They gave him six liters of blood and treated him for burns. He fell into a coma for three days. Nabil called out for his son and brother, relatives recalled. Then he called out the names of other booksellers he'd grown up with on the street, including Shiites and Christians.
With the death of his only son, Nabil's family line was severed. To help ease his pain, relatives told him that the two men had survived.
As he told the story, Nabil paused, and his hands shook. "I knew they were gone," he said.
A few days later, unable to find adequate medical care in Baghdad, his brothers carried him onto a plane for Beirut.
The family's collection of rare books, first editions and manuscripts burned with the store. They included two priceless books of Arabic calligraphy.
A Time to Rebuild
In Baghdad, scores of streets and markets have been bombed, sometimes repeatedly. Yet life springs up again quickly. Within a few hours, Iraqis fix windows, clean up streets, bury the dead.
Most don't have the means to leave Iraq. The Hayawis do. The brothers sold their family house in Baghdad for $330,000. But instead of living off the proceeds or investing outside Iraq, as many Iraqis have done, the Hayawis used the money to rebuild their two stores, repay debts and buy more books.
"It is our livelihood. It is our heritage. It is our history," Nabil's younger brother Bediyah al-Hayawi, 52, said matter-of-factly. "This is our country. How could we not be committed to it?"
Nabil was initially hesitant to rebuild Yahye's shop, fearing the memories. But while he was recovering from an operation, one of his two daughters, Zina, brought him Yahye's briefcase.
As he recounted this, Nabil stopped speaking, then reached under his desk and brought out the briefcase, pulling a sheaf of white papers from it. It was Yahye's will, written three months before the bombing.
