BAGHDAD — I first noticed the shop nearly two years ago, because of the guitar and the spray of pink plastic flowers hanging on the wall outside. A yellow and red stairway led to the door.
It was a defiant display of color in a tense city of grays, blacks and browns. More remarkably, the store appeared to be selling musical instruments at a time when religious extremists were attacking anything that hinted at Western decadence. Several times a week I'd pass the corner shop, always peering upward to make sure the guitar and flowers were there, always vowing to visit.
The time was never right, until now. With violence at a relatively low ebb, I had a few free hours one day, and the simple outing no longer seemed to carry the risk of getting blown up or trailed and abducted on the way home
But as I learned from shop owner Faiz Khalil, he may be confident enough about the future to have added even more outdoor displays, but he's not confident enough to call the shop by its original name. That would identify it as a Sunni-run business in a mainly Shiite city, where calm is spreading but where trust remains as rare as the French-made oboe on his store shelf.
So the store named Khalil has become the store named Sadiq.
"It's a common name," Khalil, a short, stocky man, said with a shrug during a nearly two-hour conversation in the cramped store overlooking one of central Baghdad's busiest streets.
His wide grin and friendly banter hide what he acknowledges is his deep sadness about the situation in his country. He soothes himself by listening to violin music, because it too is sad.
"It reflects life," Khalil said.
Call it distrust, fear, wariness or suspicion. Even now, with violence down about 80% in the last year, the sense of uncertainty is epidemic among Iraqis. That has not changed since I first spotted Khalil's store, and it is proving one of the most stubborn challenges to Iraq's recovery.
I thought back to February 2007, when the first of an additional 30,000 U.S. forces were arriving in Baghdad to quell sectarian bloodshed. I went on a patrol with some as they tried to coax information about neighborhood militiamen from residents. The people we met, both Shiite and Sunni, lived in terror and wanted protection, but they were afraid to give much information to the troops.
"Everybody has a weapon," one man told us that night. "I don't even trust my brother-in-law."
