The American Granddaughter (15 page)

I didn’t want to see my mother sitting on the grass like Gina, her white-streaked hair falling across her face, smoking and coughing by my grave. I would stop reading the newspapers from now on. They brought only sadness. War was a rotten onion.

XXVIII

Muhaymen lectured me on theories about how emigration created a rupture in the migrant’s spirit. He kept asking me questions about my life in the States. There were five million Iraqis who’d left the lives they knew and fled into the unknown, and that concerned him. He thought emigration was like captivity: both left you suspended between two lives, with no comfort in moving on or turning back. I saw it differently. I told him that in this day and age, migration was a form of settling, that belonging didn’t necessarily come from staying put in one’s birthplace.

Muhaymen was astonished by people like me, who were able to settle as immigrants. He called us ‘those who changed their skin’. I didn’t like his rigid judgements, so I protested, ‘I only have one skin. It just has multiple colours.’

‘Is your name Zeina or Chameleon? I only know the motherland, and I can’t imagine having a stepmother land. I find the idea of a second homeland ridiculous.’

‘But the whole world can be your homeland. Haven’t you heard the expression “citizen of the world”?’

He looked at me with resigned pity, as if he was watching a straw tossed by the wind and looking for a tree to hang on to. Looking at me, he started to whisper words I couldn’t at first make out. They were extracts from poems he had composed while in prison. Because he hadn’t been allowed any paper, he’d memorised them. The poems were gentle in parts, and in others they were mysterious, more like prayers or riddles, talismans designed to mislead the prison guards. Do prisoners fear that their captors can read their minds?

I could only respond to Muhaymen with the poems memorised from my childhood. We were taking refuge in poetry, because direct flirtation was not allowed. So I retrieved verses that Dad used to recite as we sat for breakfast in the garden. My father liked Al-Jawahiry when he was drunk, and was inclined towards the
Mahjar
poets when sober. He liked the elegance of their language, which was fit for presenters of literary programmes. As we dipped our bread in our morning tea, my father, the renowned presenter, recited poetry and read the impact of his voice in our eyes. He trained his voice at our breakfast table, and we listened as we ate, or listened and forgot to eat, my mother’s breath always trembling when he recited ‘Tigris of Goodness’.

Were all those morning lessons in vain? Did my father teach me the language and train me in careful pronunciation so that I could end up an accredited interpreter for the US Army? I suppressed these thoughts, just as Muhaymen had hidden his thoughts from his captors. I feared that he could hear what was on my mind. He seemed pleased with me and looked surprised when I recited a classical poem, waving my forefinger to punctuate the words as a sign of gravity. I was following the example of
Sitt
Gladys Youssef, my poetry teacher at school. He said I reminded him of the orators of Najaf, and although Najaf was a Shia city, and Gladys an obviously Christian name, he jokingly added, ‘Did Miss Gladys come from Najaf by any chance?’

We giggled together like two carefree lovers. So he did know how to joke and giggle. With just some simple training, he’d be completely to my liking. But he didn’t let me indulge in my fantasies for long, gathering the net quickly and regaining his earnestness.

I was aware of the self-censorship I applied as I told Muhaymen about myself and my life. I told him about my father’s good looks, my mother’s cough and my brother’s intoxicants, about the dullness of our home in Detroit after Dad left us and moved to Arizona. I came up with entertaining anecdotes from the many jobs I’d had: as a secretary at a tourism agency, an interpreter at an immigration agency, a babysitter, a radio presenter at a Chaldean station in Detroit.

‘In Chaldean?’ he asked.

‘And in Assyrian too.’

I told him everything but kept my current job secret. I used stories like fishing nets. I threw them in his direction and pulled him towards me. He was both heavy and weightless, surrendering and resisting at the same time, a swordfish trying to swim against the net and being let down by the current. But the bronze face darkened when I got to the story about Calvin, my American boyfriend whom my mother couldn’t stand.

‘Your mother must be right.’

‘How can you say that when you don’t even know Calvin?’

‘Do you love him?’

‘I don’t know. We’ve been together for four years.’

‘How do you mean together?’

Oh, the sweet taste of jealousy!

Those were the first signs of a shift in my milk brother’s feelings. All I had to do now was stir the coals to heighten the flames. Did I have to wear khaki, join an army and go to war in order to meet him? How much of my life had been wasted until then! Immigration. Detroit. Green Card. The rotting wooden houses of Seven Mile. Big paper cups of lukewarm coffee. Fancy cars bought on credit. Rental wedding suits and evening gowns. Virgin brides shipped over from the northern villages to the faraway continent. Grocery shops protected from theft by machine guns. The stores that immigrants dreamed of owning. The impoverished rich who gained money only after hard labour took their health. They went home at the end of the night drained and barely able to recognise their families.

I left all that and came to find him, only for a sip of breast milk to stand between us. But he was open for cheating. He would reject me for himself but offer me his brother Haydar in a sham marriage that would let me carry him along, like hand luggage, to the States. Besides, what would I do with Haydar once we got there? What would he do with me? He would get his Green Card, plant a thank you kiss on his ‘dear sister’s’ forehead, then the vast continent would swallow him up.

‘Muhaymen, why don’t
you
come with me to America?’

‘What would I do there, my dear sister? Work on a taxi between Dearborn and Detroit?’

This black sarcasm that clung to every Iraqi cut through me. It was as if they’d all lived through so much and couldn’t see more life beyond the ruins of experience. As if Muhaymen could smell, from here, the disappointment that awaited him over there. He rejected my invitation and didn’t want to see that, with me by his side, he wouldn’t have to suffer like other immigrants had suffered.

Listen to me, my brother, my lord, my love, I can assure you that you won’t be standing in line for the food stamps that are handed out to the disabled and the unemployed, to black Americans and pregnant women.

‘What’s wrong with coupons,
Sitt
Zeina? Twenty million Iraqis lived on them for twenty years. Then they were called rations.’

It made me happy when he called me ‘
Sitt
Zeina’. But conversation didn’t flow easily between us. He would get into his sarcastic mode and start to deride everything I said. Then he’d notice I was upset and attempt to placate me by calling me ‘dear sister’, which made my blood boil. With these two words, he turned himself into my legal chaperone and put up a veil between us that defined the space in which each of us moved. It was a warning statement, like ‘smoking kills’.

‘Dear sister’ was flat and vague, a metaphor that led to hell or a talisman that protected from sin. He used it for his own sake, not mine. By uttering those words, he became more resistant to my seduction, and at the same time extended a bridge from his blood to mine. When I heard them, the tide of my melancholy rose and brought me closer to insecurity. I hated the ridiculous position he put me in and cursed the day that brought me back to this country.

XXIX

Death sat on the edge of our beds; it planted itself under our pillows and settled at our feet.

It spared me, not taking me seriously enough, but it took its time selecting our best soldiers.

Death had extravagant taste.

I passed by the medical clinic on my way to work and saw the guards pull a stretcher out of a truck with a corpse covered by a sheet or an army jacket. There were always other soldiers standing on the side, smoking gloomily and rubbing their eyes. I didn’t know who the victim was this time and was afraid to ask. A grey mist covered my eyes. My tears flowed inwards.

Death was coming closer. It started attaching its black ribbons to names I knew. Comrades with whom I had shared meals. Charlie was killed by a roadside bomb. He was a civilian, an ex-marine, contracted by the army to drive local translators from one camp to the other. I didn’t know about his death until days later. At first I thought he was away on a mission, until his sister went on his email and sent a note to all his contacts. She told us that his body had been blow apart a few miles south of Mosul.

The situation in Mosul wasn’t any different from other cities. People woke up in the morning to find severed heads thrown in public squares. It was a terror that the city’s memory found familiar. The difference was half a century. Old people remembered the end of the ’50s and shook their heads. Cities were cutting their own heads off at the hands of their children.

I found utter chaos when I reached Mosul. Police stations were bombed and closed down. Masked men were roaming the streets. Was this the city of my ancestors that made my heart flutter at the mention of its name?

A new Iraqi army force, the Wolf Brigade, was created to bring the situation under control. It was one of the units we formed to work with our troops. They chased insurgents from street to street in the hope of returning order to the city. We called them insurgents, or rebels, terrorists, criminals, troublemakers – anything to avoid using the word ‘resistance’.

I was in Mosul for my second Christmas in Iraq. Four days earlier, a suicide bomber had entered Ghazlany, the camp where I was staying near Mosul Airport, and blown himself up in the food hall, in the midst of soldiers eating their lunch. Twenty-two people died, among them fourteen from our forces and four Iraqi soldiers. Fifty-one Americans were injured. The suicide bomber had been vetted by our security, which meant we trusted him and counted him as one of us. He had smuggled the explosives into the camp incrementally. That same evening one of the local religious groups claimed responsibility for the bombing and applauded it as an act of resistance. Just a different point of view, according to political analysts and the research centre brain-boxes. What was happening in Iraq had happened in France and in Vietnam, predictably exaggerated according to the more radical temperament in the region. Weren’t we told that no war resembled another?

I didn’t hear the sound of the explosion in my room, but heard the missiles that followed, launched from outside in the direction of our rooms. Our bedrooms were metal wagons called ‘hawks’, twenty feet by eight. We slept in cages like monkeys.

One of the missiles landed on the room across from mine. The shock of the explosion threw me onto my back. The sergeant who lived in the room had gone to brush his teeth. He narrowly escaped death in the cage.

There was a church set up in Ghazlany for Sunday mass. On the Sunday following the bombing, the church was full. The priest was wearing a white embroidered cloak, his khaki trousers showing underneath. My little inner demon came and sat beside me, looked at the priest’s trousers and asked, ‘Where do you think he’s put his helmet?’

‘Under the altar.’

‘Wrong. Can’t you see it hanging on the cross?’

There was a black soldier playing the guitar, together with a Gospel choir. I pushed my demon away and closed my eyes, abandoning myself to the voices that carried good tidings and soothed my loneliness and grief. I’d spent the previous night writing an article and emailing it to all my friends. I told them about the history of Mosul, its geography, about the twisted minaret. I explained a little bit about my job, in general terms. I’d write a sentence then delete it to steer away from security prohibitions. I wrote that my work was exciting but could be depressing. I didn’t write that it depressed me to interpret the vague sentences that were part of a language mastered by those detained for acts considered rebellious, the majority being poor and desperate young men. They refused to cooperate and answered questions with an invariable, ‘
Wallah
, I don’t know.’ The American soldiers had learned these words, having heard them so many times, and started to use them among themselves. Tommy or Michael or Deborah would spread their palms, turn down their lower lips, shake their heads and say in laughable Arabic, ‘
Wallah
, I don’t know. Don’t know anything.’

One time, when the officer went out and left me alone with an elderly detainee, he faked a gentlemanly smile and asked me, ‘Where is sister from?’

‘I’m American.’

‘But your accent is from Baghdad.’

‘Right, I was born in Baghdad.’

‘And why do you work with the occupiers of Baghdad?’

I cut the conversation short. ‘You’re not allowed to speak when the officer is not present.’

Before I was sent to Iraq, the woman officer who conducted my security interview had asked me, ‘If the terrorists kidnap you and threaten to torture you, what secret information would you be willing to give them?’

‘I’d stick my shoe up their asses,’ I had replied with utter seriousness. She wasn’t shocked at my crudeness and seemed to like my answer.