The American Granddaughter (14 page)

Muhaymen’s eyes widened in panic when I told him I didn’t believe in milk that made siblings out of strangers, or in marriage on paper, or in the prohibitions that stood in the way of desire. He didn’t understand that a free woman like me would only need him to bring the coal of his eyes closer for the sparks to turn into flames and the taboos to collapse.

I said to him, with a diabolical coquettishness that I wasn’t used to in myself, ‘I want to find a husband here and live like a tame cat at his feet.’

‘You? A tame cat?’

‘Even if it’s only a temporary “pleasure marriage”.’

‘These things are not done, Zeina. Where did you get such base talk from?’

‘Isn’t that what the men here do, and women accept it?’

The anger in his eyes made them darker and more beautiful. Looking at his face, I was lost in a sea of raw bronze. Did they flash like this, the eyes of Sumerian sculptures? His anger couldn’t have been neutral or disinterested. My instinct told me that he wanted me even more than I wanted him. I swayed with my want on the edge of the abyss, and tumbled down feeling light as a feather.

XXVI

We sat on the top floor of Al-Quds Restaurant, like any couple from a conservative family, and ordered kebab and yoghurt. It was hot and the place was crowded with people running errands downtown. Judging by their accents, the majority were Iraqis either living in Amman or passing through it. The waiter showed us upstairs to the family section. I was being treated as his family, and my grandmother’s operation had been successful and she would be leaving the hospital in a couple of days, so I was happy.

I didn’t attempt to light a cigarette in case it disturbed him. I knew that men here didn’t like women who smoked. And I was here in a man’s company. He walked in front of me and chose the table, took the seat facing people, leaving me to look at the wall. It was he who talked to the waiter and ordered our food, asked where the restrooms were, then indicated to me with the corner of his eye that it was down the corridor on the right. I didn’t complain. On the contrary, I, who’d always been the ringleader, planning trips and booking restaurants and deciding who sat next to whom, was enjoying the fact that someone else was taking over.

I ate like I’d just emerged from a famine. Muhaymen’s company increased my appetite. He tore the flat bread with his hands, gave me one half and murmured, ‘
Bismillah.
’

‘The kebab here is so tasty,’ I said.

‘Not as tasty as the kebab in Karbala, or the pickles in Najaf.’

‘Leave your sectarianism out of it and just enjoy your food,’ I said gently, and he smiled obediently. Our whispered tones made me feel a certain intimacy between us, as if we were a couple on honeymoon who had come to Amman for a breath of fresh air. My unattainable fantasies were all I got from him, but they sufficed. I was a soldier facing death and hanging on to life by a thread.

We went out in the sun, headed to Al-Dawwar al-Thaleth and entered a quiet café. Muhaymen took me from café to café and from market to restaurant to avoid being alone with me in the flat. When I got tired he sent me back by taxi and took his time following. When he did come to the flat, he went straight from the front door to his room, walking quickly, almost running, and shut the door behind him. I stayed in front of the TV, a secret joy dancing in my chest, because if he really felt he was my brother, he wouldn’t have worried about being alone with me.

Once we were coming out from seeing my grandmother when he met a friend in the hospital corridor. Like all conservative men, he ignored my presence completely and took his friend aside without introducing him to me. They asked each other how they were doing, then I caught a few sentences in another language, which I recognised as Farsi, because one of my school friends was an Assyrian from Iran.

One afternoon he took me to a café on the Airport Road and let me order a mint-flavoured nargileh. Watching the clouds of smoke I exhaled, he started to whisper something that gradually got louder until I could make out the words:

My love is like wedding silver.

My love is like a nargileh adorned

With turquoise water,

Alight with beauty.

Oh train, slow down, won’t you?

Let my sad song call

To the desert bird in its flight.

I knew this poem by Muzaffar word for word, but coming from Muhaymen it sounded so much sweeter. I was easily charmed by beautiful words, and it made me happy that he was reciting poetry to me. If this wasn’t flirting, what would be? But he didn’t allow my happiness to last. Sometimes he would treat me like a tourist.

‘You foreigners like to smoke the nargileh because it’s exotic.’

‘I’m not a foreigner.’

‘Your name is Zeina but you’re American.’

‘And your name is Muhaymen but you speak Farsi.’

His surprise didn’t show, but I saw a muscle twitch in his left cheek before he let out a broken sigh and said, ‘I learned it when I was a prisoner of war in Iran.’

How much time would I need to know him, with all his history?

How many notebooks would he have to fill to learn me with my past and my present?

I suddenly felt how ungenerous time was, and that what had passed of it shouldn’t have passed. Not like this. The cafés of Amman were too narrow for our story. Their lazy rhythm couldn’t carry the urgency that made our words race against their letters.

He was taken prisoner during the last year of the war with Iran. Fighting the war was not a choice he’d made. He’d been strolling with a friend of his on Saadoun Street when a military recruitment patrol simply lifted them off the pavement and threw them into the back of a truck that transported volunteers to the front lines.

‘They just collected us from the street like municipal trucks collected rubbish. I didn’t volunteer, and I hadn’t even finished my studies, but who would’ve listened to reason in those crazy times?’

The four years that Muhaymen spent in captivity turned him inside out. He went there a communist by birth and returned a religious man who debated matters of heaven and hell.

I said to him, in an attempt at sympathy, ‘But your core must have stayed the same.’

‘The one thing that stayed the same was my hatred for Americans.’

I let the hose of the nargileh drop from my hand.

We spent our days walking around Amman and avoiding the flat. We left early to go to the hospital to check on Grandma, then went to the Gardens hotel for breakfast. Muhaymen would drive to Abdoun, and we’d leave the car and walk in the quiet neighbourhood. We pushed our hands deep into the pockets of our coats and watched the patches of snow that adorned the city’s hills.

We talked about our past lives, each of us trying to gather a whole history into a small capsule for the other to swallow, so we could rest from talking. I was in a hurry, and my time was not my own. I knew that my days in Amman were numbered and that the Zone awaited me. My gilded cage that protected me from murderers and ambushes. I wondered if my killer would be Muhaymen or one of his comrades, a wild thought that placed me on the edge of a great abyss.

A masked
mujahid
, like the ones I’d seen on extremist websites, walks towards me and, as soon as he’s near me, stabs me in the side. I cling to him as I fall to the floor and uncover his face. I smile, content that death has visited me from his hand. He removes my helmet and lets out a silent scream when he realises that the blood he’s spilled is his sister’s. It was a dream that I saw with my eyes wide open, my mouth going dry and my hands stiffening, a Bollywood movie that hadn’t been made yet.

XXVII

Layers of mist were peeling off our eyes like the layers of an onion. Tawoos would make sideways cuts in the onion with the knife, then soak it in boiling water to make it easier to peel. It was the first step in the graceful waltz of cooking
dolma
. Can I have this dance?

The news and images that assailed us day in and day out were like hot water that peels off the layers of mist. But the waltz was no longer a gliding dance that twirls the soul to the tunes of violins made of ebony and rosewood. How long did it take us to understand that war was no dance and no picnic, that death had a bitter aftertaste?

The photograph of Regina Barnhurst in
USA Today
showed her sitting cross-legged on the green grass of Arlington Cemetery, as if she was on an idyllic ‘picnic’ enjoying the fresh air and the spring sun. Her ginger locks fell on her face as she bent towards the inscription on a white headstone. The photographer seemed to have placed the camera at the lowest possible point before pressing the button. The picture had the same vantage point as the grass, growing with it in the shadow of the headstone.

Tommy brought us the newspapers tied with cotton twine. They stayed piled up in the corner, their smell reminding me of bagel shops on cold mornings. On each table a jar of honey and a newspaper. I cut the twine with the knife that I carried in my belt and checked the TV programmes. What would my mother be watching tonight, over there?

It was Memorial Day, and the newspaper was flying its kite over the cemeteries and the grief-stricken homes. Nobody wanted to forget or help others forget. Photographers flocked to the mothers and set up their cameras on the doorstep of their tears. People liked to read about grief, and this woman was too weak to fight the readers’ requests. Regina, or Gina, as they called her, came here every Sunday, spread a blanket on the grass and sat cross-legged, writing letters to Eric Herzberg, her son who was buried under the headstone, one of thousands of identical headstones that were lined up as far as the eyes could see in Section 60 of the cemetery. Underneath every one of them lay a soldier killed in Iraq.

Gina didn’t lift her head to look at the women and men who wandered in silence among the graves. But Leesa Philippon saw her from a distance and felt an urge to get closer to her grief. She approached Gina and touched her shoulder. The visitors to cemeteries communicated by touching each other’s shoulders. It was the sign of a common grief. They were like a group of blind people stepping into traffic, each one guided by the shoulder of the one before them.

Gina had lost her son, the marine lance corporal, to a sniper’s bullet in the third year of the war. Leesa lost her son Lawrence in combat near the Syrian border on Mother’s Day of the same year. A hand guided by a shoulder that was crushed by suppressed grief. Weeping openly would not befit the mothers of national heroes.

Gina had nothing to say to the newspaper reporter who intruded on her quiet grief. Her tears were just drops in the sea of the cemetery. Maybe the other visitors would be more eloquent, she thought, but he insisted on hearing her. So she told him she empathised with the grief of Iraqi mothers that she saw on the news wearing black
abayas
and weeping over the children they lost in the streets of Baghdad.

That was another story. The reporter left Regina Barnhurst and went to Leesa Philippon. She and her husband drove seven hours to come to Arlington Cemetery. She’d wake up early on the designated day, get dressed and put on a little make-up, then sit in the car as if she was going to work.

Here, a stone’s throw away from Congress and the White House, Leesa met dozens of grieving mothers and formed a club for the families of soldiers who’d died in Iraq. More mothers had joined since. Mother, can I have this dance?

Beth Belle met Leesa Philippon in this club. Their sons were buried side by side. When Lawrence Philippon was killed, Captain Brian Letendre delivered the news to Leesa and her husband. They’d invited him to sit in their living room, and offered him coffee. But the captain didn’t stay long. He had more news to deliver to other families. He’d come from Baghdad on a short break and hadn’t seen his own two children yet. The Philippons became friends with Captain Letendre and his family. Soon it was his turn. He was killed in a suicide bombing in Iraq and was buried two rows away from Lawrence’s grave. Officers came from Iraq every day carrying the news of death and brand new boxes wrapped in the flag. The war went on, reaping its harvest. The club continued to grow, and new grieving mothers kept joining.

The grass grew greener in Arlington, the national cemetery. Four million tourists came here every year. They walked past the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, smiled into small digital cameras and mobile phones, and stood a while by President Kennedy’s grave. They looked at his photo and thought of how Jackie stood here before them, how their footsteps might coincide with hers. ‘Great footsteps coincide,’ as my father used to say.

It was sometimes impossible to tell those visiting Section 60 apart from the tourists who filled the place. The mourners watched the cameras and sports caps, the water bottles peeking out of light rucksacks, the pointed mobile phones in every hand taking snapshots of the unending rows of white headstones. Dominoes with names and dates engraved on them instead of the black dots. The tourists went back to the buses that awaited them in the car park. The mourners remained sitting by the headstones, standing guard over the heads of the absent. Those absent from roll calls in the camps in Iraq now lay in another sixty-five cemeteries across America. Though silent, they were still a source of embarrassment. How many headstones were there in Detroit so far?