In the language of war, the missing are neither prisoners nor dead; they are ghosts acknowledged by no one, drifting through records as names and numbers, without ever regaining the form and presence that once carried the lived traces of their existence and the fleeting habits they were thought to have left behind.

Those who were missing passed through the Al-Nahda and Al-Alawi bus stations, southward from the former, northward from the latter, drinking tea after eating fried eggs, before falling asleep on the buses as though already dead. They had no names, only small, suspended dreams, while Baghdad, their postponed dream as in films, received them only as ghosts; they drank its tea, but it was not generous. Near the Iraqi Museum, lines of soldiers stood without reflecting on history. I once joked with my friend Fawzi Rashid, the historian and archaeologist: “What do the soldiers at the Al-Alawi bus station think about?” and he laughed, replying, “They were certainly not thinking of Uruk, but of Baghdad, that was the real mistake.”

He Continues to Trace His Origin

A story written by a blind man and listened to by a deaf one. As for the reader, he is forced to invent words that were never spoken. A crossword that never fills its blanks until it empties at remarkable speed. Only delirium assists the carpenter as he builds a coffin for a dead man whose size, weight, and imagination he cannot know. But do the dead even need imagination? In this case, death resembles a Wednesday that never arrives because Monday has stretched itself to swallow Tuesday, there is no Wednesday without Tuesday. The carpenter distracts himself with jokes to delay his urge to cry with the family of the deceased, who still have not found his body after the records labeled him “missing.”

The Language of Hidden Hours

But how many were missing in that eight-year war? “52,785” names appear in the official records. Each name carries a number, a military rank, a home address, a date of birth, a civilian profession, and other details stripped of meaning. The records were never meant to function as a waiting list. I once had a missing friend who spoke with admiration about the film Gone with the Wind. I told him I had read Margaret Mitchell’s novel, and his eyes lit up as he said, “Then you haven’t seen Vivien Leigh.” I replied, “Tomorrow is another day,” and he looked at me in silence. Later that evening, he asked, “Do we have another evening?” It became a futile attempt to search for his name among the “52,785” recorded missing.