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 Two Years of War: Taking Stock
 
 By Anthony Shadid
 
  BAGHDAD
 
  A bear of a man, with an exuberance that matches his girth, Mohammed Hayawi looked over one shoulder, then the other. He glanced up at shelves eight rows high, and down at dusty stacks spilling across his bookstore, some a dozen deep.
 
 There were books by communist poets and martyred clerics, translations of Shakespeare, a 44-volume tome by a revered ayatollah and tales of Gertrude Bell, a British archaeologist and adventurer. Along the window were books on Iraq's recent past: "What Happened in Baghdad," "The Secret Life of Saddam" and "The American Empire and the Invasion of Iraq." 
 
 Hayawi shook his head. He shrugged his burly shoulders. None of them can describe his country, nor his time.
 
 "Not one book," Hayawi said. He squinted his eyes, a look of suspicion tempered by a mercurial smile.
 
 There's a phrase that Hayawi has uttered often over the past two years. He has said in times that are good and bad, chaotic and, more rarely, subdued: "I challenge anyone to say what has happened, what is happening now and what will happen in the future."
 
 In interviews every few months, beginning before the U.S. invasion in March 2003, Hayawi, now 41, has watched the fate of his country unfold with fear that turned to anger, and resentment that melted into resignation, bound together by a resilience that is perhaps this country's defining trait. Resilience can mean many things  --  fatalism, endurance, persistent hope and an ability to make the unusual normal.
 
 Hayawi's story is neither stirring nor tragic, but rather quiet  --  the conflicted reflections of one man, a prominent bookseller in Baghdad on a journey through tumult in a country that he, like his fellow citizens, struggles even now to understand.
 
 Hayawi is an Iraqi who resents the U.S. occupation but voted in the election the United States backed. He is a devout Muslim, but fears the rise of religion in politics. He is a Sunni who resists identifying himself as such, even as he is forced to do so more and more. And from behind his desk, over cups of excessively sweet tea, cigarettes that never stop burning and a water pipe that is delivered every day after lunch, he watches the very complexion of his country transform  --  in books, conversations and politics, sometimes in the most subtle of ways. Iraq changes even as the rhythm of its life remains the same.
 
 In streets more tattered than ever, there is the inspirational: posters of voters with their ink-stained fingers, a testament to their courage in defying insurgent threats to disrupt the election. And there is the grim: rubble crafted by the bombs of the U.S. invasion that mixes with the birds' nests of steel rods, concrete slabs and twisted girders left by the more recent destructiveness of car bombs.
 
 Outside Hayawi's bookstore are the lasting scars of looting that followed the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Inside, he celebrates an inventory in which "the prohibited has become permitted." He points to celebrated freedoms that Iraqis will probably never surrender. And in the same breath, he glumly asks any customer who will listen, "Can Iraqis live on freedom alone?"
 
 The Renaissance Bookstore is on Mutanabi Street, a stretch of bookstores and stationery shops that is as storied as it is narrow. For a generation or more, the street, named after one of the Arab world's greatest poets, served as the capital's intellectual entrepot. Under international sanctions imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, with Hussein still in power, it embodied the capital's plight.
 
 Its stores were lined with textbooks from another generation and dust-covered religious tomes that seemed more for show than for sale. (Displayed outside Hayawi's store was a copy of Business Week from June 29, 1987. "Who's Afraid of IBM?" the cover read.) More often than not, the street was a dreary, depressing flea market for used books. Vendors sold off their private collections in a desperate attempt to get by, as Iraq's already feeble economy descended further into misery.
 October 2002 
 It was five months before the U.S. invasion. Hayawi smiled, but was tired and unshaven, the hue of the heavy bags under his eyes deepening as the day wore on.
 
 "Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was wrong," he said quite boldly  --  a blasphemous idea in the prevailing theology of Hussein. 
 
 As an Arab, he said, he was embarrassed by the idea of an Arab country attacking another Arab country. As a Muslim, he was ashamed of a war that pitted co-religionists against each other. And, in remarkably brave words, he declared he was angry at Hussein for doing it. Looking back, he could even understand the justification for the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when U.S. troops attacked Iraq in response to the invasion.
 
 But now? he asked.
 
 He listed possible justifications for war, then explained them away. Because of weapons of mass destruction? We don't have any. If we did, he declared, we would have fired them at Israel. Because of our leader? What, he asked, does he have to do with us?
 
 Baghdad was gripped then with anticipation of war so deep it seemed to accelerate time. In those days, it could sometimes be heard that the capital was cursed  --  that it was being made to pay for all the wrongs of Hussein. It was a corollary of fatalism: We can do nothing about what we deserve.
 
 "Why the crisis after crisis?" Hayawi asked. And he shook his head, helpless.
 Summer 2003 
 After the invasion, Mutanabi Street told another story. Before, it was a tale of isolation, sanctions and dictatorship, a country with no future. Now, it was an exposition on the half-truths of occupation and liberation.
 
 At every turn were the lingering scenes of looting: arched windows shattered and yellow-brick walls scalded black. Before the war, the market stayed open until 10 p.m., sometimes 11 p.m. Now the street shut down by 3 p.m., often earlier.
 
 A once-limited catalogue of books had exploded. There were titles by Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir Sadr, a brilliant theologian killed, as the story goes, when Hussein's executioners drove nails into his forehead in 1980. The long-discouraged iconography of the Shiite revival was everywhere: renderings of living ayatollahs competing for space with portraits, glossy in the sun, of 7th-century saints marching to their deaths. Nearby were new issues of FHM and Maxim, their covers adorned with scantily clad women.
 
 Liberation was never easy to define; the occupation was unlike any other.
 
 "If the Americans want to do well, they have to gain the trust of the people," Hayawi said at the time. "Until now, there is nothing. We want to see something malmus," or tangible. Rafahiya, Hayawi said. It was a word heard often those days. It means prosperity, and it was what Hayawi and most Iraqis thought the Americans had promised after Hussein's fall. Those promises, he said ruefully, were like water that trickles through your fingers when you cup your hands.
 
 He ran his hand over his fleshy, sweaty cheeks. "Does this look like the face of 39 years?"
 
 In the months following the invasion, the Americans and Iraqis rarely measured material progress the same way, their perceptions spanning the chasm of culture, language and experience. To the United States, the point of reference began with the day after Hussein's fall. To Iraqis, it stretched back a generation, to the 1970s, when Iraq's standard of living competed with those of Europe's poorer countries. 
 
 "It has changed definitely," Hayawi said. "It has changed for the better. But we wish that it could even be better." 
 Spring 2004 
 A year after the invasion, when the U.S. occupation was still called an occupation, Hayawi was always conflicted. He and his four brothers who ran the bookstore  --  founded by their father in 1954  --  were making twice as much as they had before the U.S. invasion. They traveled freely to Lebanon to purchase books. Their shelves burst with new titles, some purchased by government employees whose burgeoning salaries had created a new consumer class.
 
 But living under occupation, Hayawi found his pride wounded. He told a story that he often liked to repeat. 
 
 In his Chevrolet Caprice, he was driving to Syria on business when he was stopped at a U.S. checkpoint manned by soldiers in two Humvees. Through an interpreter, one of the officers  --  clad in camouflage and dusty from a desert wind  --  began to ask routine questions. 
 
 " 'What are you doing here?' he asked. I said, 'What are you doing here? You're my guest. What are you doing in Iraq? I should ask you, you shouldn't ask me.' " The interpreter told the U.S. officer what Hayawi said.
 
 "He laughed, and he patted my shoulder," Hayawi recalled. "This really happened."
 Winter 2005 
 Iraq's first free election in a half-century, on Jan. 30, posed a difficult choice for Hayawi. He thought, wrongly, that "the roads would be flooded with blood up to our foreheads." He was a Sunni Arab, part of a community that largely boycotted the vote, out of fear or principle. He was uncertain whether to vote until the day itself, when Baghdad erupted in joy unparalleled since Hussein's fall.
 
 The election "was like someone inviting me to lunch. I can't say no," he said, a little meekly. "If you say no, this is disrespectful."
 
 Hayawi sat at his cluttered desk days after the vote, atop a cream tile floor swept clean but stained with age.
 
 "I knew that the paper I put in the ballot box was for America. I know I was being hypocritical. But there was no other choice," he said, waving his cigarette between his fingers. "The future of Iraq is a line that goes through the occupation. If you asked me why I was voting, it's because I want to find something to pull me out of this mud."
 
 He looked out his window, emblazoned with an Iraqi flag. "Maybe this is the rope that will save us."
 
 Two years on, his complaints were the same: lines for gasoline in a country with the world's second-largest oil reserves; less electricity than a year ago; his suspicion that foreigners were taking the profits from oil, whose production hovered at prewar levels.
 
 But little else  --  neither past nor future  --  was conclusive.
 The Present 
 Every day on his way to work, Hayawi passes a wall, right before the Sarafiya Bridge.
 
 A slogan celebrating the fallen Iraqi leader has faded, leaving only his name. A leaflet by followers of a young militant cleric, Moqtada Sadr, exhorts, "Be an enemy of the oppressor." Partially blotted out is another slogan that declares, "Death to the lackeys." Election posters linger, promising "to revive what was destroyed by the criminal Baath regime." Nearby is a heap of tin cans, plastic bags, wet orange peels and flies, underneath an injunction to keep the city clean.
 
 His views over what was ahead were like the wall itself. They collided and intersected, contradicted and agreed.
 
 He approved of attacks on U.S. soldiers  --  like most Sunnis, he considered that part of the insurgency legitimate resistance. But he recoiled at the car bombs and suicide attacks against Iraqi police and civilians, whose deaths are far more numerous.
 
 "A car bomb in front of a school, in front of children?" he asked. "Can you call this an act of resistance?"
 
 He worried about the growing sectarian and ethnic divisions in the country, perhaps the most lasting legacy of the U.S.-supported political process in Iraq. He was Sunni, but did not identify himself as such. To Hayawi, the sectarian focus was a harbinger of strife like the civil war that consumed Lebanon from 1975 to 1990. "Iraq resists sectarianism, but can't prevent it," he said.
 
 In his bookstore, once-banned titles were selling well. Most were Iranian imports by Shiite clerics. Also popular were titles by radical Sunnis: Mohammed ibn Abd Wahhab, the 18th-century godfather of Saudi Arabia's strict brand of Islam; the austere medieval thinker Ibn Taimiya; and Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian author of the seminal militant tract "Signposts on the Road," who was executed in 1966.
 
 Even more sought-after were language books  --  English, French, Turkish and Farsi  --  what Hayawi called passports to the rest of the world. The bestsellers: books on astrology by Lebanese writers made famous by satellite television.
 
 "People want to know what their destiny is," he said, smiling.
 Rhythms of Life 
 Every morning, Hajji Sadiq, the money-changer, ambles into the Renaissance Bookstore.
 
 "What's the exchange rate?" Hayawi bellows to him.
 
 "I won't tell you unless you're going to buy," Hajji Sadiq answers him, slurring his words through the gaps in his teeth.
 
 Business resumes for another day, with endless trays of tea  --  each glass costing 10 cents  --  brought through the door.
 
 "Habibi!" Hayawi shouts to customers, greeting them with an Arabic term of endearment. An elderly beggar covered in black appears at the entrance, as she does every day. "God's mercy on your parents," she mutters. "Can you help me?"
 
 The topic is the rain that had flooded Baghdad in March, and Hayawi tells a story about Hajjaj, a medieval ruler of Baghdad known for his cruelty. In the tale, Hajjaj asks a subject, "Who brought me? Did God bring me, did I bring myself, or did you bring me to you?" The first answered that Hajjaj came on his own. Wrong, Hajjaj said, and he ordered him beheaded. The second answered God. He was beheaded, too. The third said he would answer only if his life was guaranteed. Hajjaj agreed.
 
 "Our misdeeds brought you to rule us," his subject said.
 
 Others in the bookstore nodded. "Maybe God's angry with us," Hayawi said.
 
 Two Kurdish booksellers come in, bringing a gift of honey from Sulaymaniyah in the north. They greet Hayawi in Kurdish, then the conversation continues in Arabic.
 
 "If you can give us a good deal, it's okay," Hayawi said. "If you can't, we'll depend on God."
 
 The electricity cuts out, an event so routine no one seems to notice. Hayawi scrutinizes a 25,000-dinar note, suspicious that it's counterfeit. His brothers call for more tea.
 
 Hajji Sadiq returns hour after hour, quoting hardly perceptible changes in the exchange rate. Hayawi whispers in jest that the money-changer is carrying $10,000. "Be careful out there," Hayawi shouts before turning to his brother. "There will be a day when I rob Hajji Sadiq," he jokes.
 
 By 1 p.m., power returns, and 10 minutes later, a water pipe arrives. Sweet-smelling, apple-flavored tobacco fills the room.
 
 "Life goes on," Hayawi says. "We are in the middle of a war, and we still smoke the water pipe."
 
   

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