The American Granddaughter (18 page)

When Younis opened his wallet on cigarette breaks, we all knew that he was devouring Salma with his eyes.

‘Where’s Younis?’ someone would shout, and another would answer, ‘He’s stuck in Sadr City,’
sadr
being the Arabic word for ‘breast’. The soldiers’ laughter would rise, and he would answer with literal translations of insults from colloquial Arabic. Comic swear words that we wouldn’t hear again after Younis’s death. Just as we would no longer hear him begging for a movie starring his idol, ordered by army post, because ‘the corrupt postmen would steal ordinary post’.

The army promised a two hundred thousand dollar reward for information about the location of the missing soldiers. One of them was a young soldier from Michigan called Brian, not yet twenty. A sense of frustration reigned in the camp. Four thousand US Army personnel, along with two thousand from the Iraqi police force, went out to search for the missing soldiers in the Triangle of Death. The neighbourhood of Basateen and Nakheel was located between Yusufiyya, Mahmoudiyya and Lutayfiyya, only half an hour south of Baghdad.

A few days later the Iraqi police found the body of a man in US Army uniform and with a tattoo on his right arm. The body was bloated, having been floating for at least two days among the weeds of the Euphrates. Lieutenant-Colonel Jocelyn Apperley, spokesperson for the Baghdad command, released a statement saying that the body belonged to Joseph Anzack Jr, one of the three missing soldiers. It had two bullets in the head and four in the chest. General Petraeus told the
Army Times
that he knew who was responsible for the kidnapping. It was an associate of Al-Qaeda.

‘Tie a yellow ribbon ’round the ole oak tree . . .’ Chris’s singing was better than his cooking.

Deborah tied a yellow ribbon around the palm tree after she read that the schoolmates of the two soldiers who were still missing tied yellow ribbons around the trees on the two roads leading to their schools. The ribbons caught the imagination of the residents of Waterford, Michigan and Lawrence, Massachusetts. I didn’t understand at first.

‘Haven’t you heard the song before?’ asked Deborah.

‘It sounds familiar. I think I’ve heard the tune before.’

‘Look it up on the internet.’

When it was time for my nightly emailing ritual, I looked for the song and listened to the original version. It was sad in a hopeful kind of way. ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon’ was a pop song written by Irwin Levine and L. Russell Brown and sung by Tony Orlando and Dawn. It first came out in April 1973 – that is, before I was born. It stayed in the number one spot in the UK and US charts for four weeks and sold three million records. And it wasn’t just a bubble, either. The song came back to the radio eight years later, during the American hostage crisis in Tehran. The listeners liked it because it revived a tradition that was followed in the nineteenth century, when the lovers of American cavalrymen tied their plaits with yellow ribbons as a symbol that they were waiting for someone’s return. Yellow was the colour of the cavalry. Later on, the song inspired John Wayne in his movie of the same name. The yellow ribbon became the symbol for absent loved ones, whether in prison or in the Vietnam War. Now, in this war, it was a sign for them that they would find arms open wide to receive them when they came home.

I clicked again, and what did I find? The song hadn’t passed without controversy. In the autumn of 1971, Pete Hamill, a commentator in the
New York Post
, wrote an article with the title ‘Going Home’, in which he recounted the story of a high school student who sat next to a former prisoner on a bus. The boy was going on a school trip to the beach at Fort Lauderdale: the prisoner had just been released and was on his way home. Throughout the trip, he was anxious about finding a yellow handkerchief tied to the bark of an ancient oak tree. Hamill claimed to have heard this story through oral tradition. The
Reader’s Digest
reprinted the article nine months later, in the summer of 1972. In the meantime, ABC adapted the story for the screen and gave the role of the returning prisoner to the actor James Earl Jones.

All that was before Levine and Brown copyrighted the lyrics of their song. When the song was released and became a huge success, Hamill threatened legal action, claiming that he owned the copyright for the idea behind their lyrics. He wanted a share in the millions that the two songwriters made.

A third click brought up an amusing statistic: ‘During its popular years, tens of radio stations played this song regularly, until the number of times it was played reached three million. That is the equivalent of seventeen years of continuous airtime.’

But the fourth click was more important. A video that had gone viral on the internet featured a satirical cover of the song by the African-American band Asylum Street Spankers. They changed its chorus line to ‘Stick Magnetic Ribbons on Your SUV’. That was their way of mocking the yellow ribbon stickers that had become fashionable on cars in support of the American soldiers fighting in Iraq. I looked for the ribbon on YouTube and listened to the Spankers, swaying with their rhythm and giving free reign to my melancholic mood. I could see a long chain of our soldiers’ bodies lining the road from Hanoi to Baghdad. My Iraqi experience was starting to taste of vinegar.

XXXIV

I missed him and I had to see him. Hearing his news from Tawoos was no longer enough, and his emails didn’t quell my longing. I wrote to him from the Green Zone and pretended that I was in Detroit. He said that he was writing from an internet café on Palestine Street, but I imagined that he was in one of the Mahdi Army hideouts. Our emails exhausted me more than they soothed me. He didn’t believe I was in Detroit, and I didn’t know where he was writing from.

When did Muhaymen detect the Green taint and find out that I was on the other side of hell? Or had he always known and played along, like an actor with a minor role? For his part, he had nothing to hide from me. Militias nowadays were replacing political parties in Iraq. Religious faith was the new politics, and everyone was sheltering under the umbrella of one group or another.

I think he was way cleverer than me. He understood once and for all that human beings are changeable and learned to embrace his own inconsistencies. Which of us was the chameleon? My supposed brother found the ultra-adjustment pill, swallowed it with a glass of water and went with the flow. Why should he be ashamed of the fact that he was a communist who turned Islamist? Or that he was a prisoner of war in Iran? Or that his younger brother worked with the intelligence of the former regime?

‘Believe me, nobody’s clean in Iraq today. The only difference is how much crap each of us has swallowed.’

‘Wrong. There’s still the faction of my Grandmother Rahma and her ilk.’

I went to the top of the screen and clicked delete. I didn’t want to keep this message in my inbox. It hurt, because it read like a message of consolation, like he was telling me, ‘Don’t be ashamed, sister, of your US Army uniform. We all have an ugly uniform, too, that we wear under our skin.’ Why did he have to imply that I was ashamed of what I did? Come here and face me, Mr Muhaymen, and let’s compare notes. If you were here, I’d look you straight in the eye and say, ‘I’m not sorry.’ We came here to do something great and you ruined it. We brought you a basket full of flowers and you vomited all over it. I have nothing more to say. I’m an army interpreter, and that’s what I’ll remain. I don’t want to be your sister, neither by milk nor blood. Wasn’t it blood that opened that rift between us, and drove me to say ‘you and us’. I couldn’t be anything but American. My Iraqiness had abandoned me long ago. It fell through a hole in my pocket and rolled away like an old coin.

I tried to be both but failed. I took off the khaki and put on the
abaya
and went to the market in Karada. I bought a loofah and plastic slippers and those chewing gum pieces sold in little bags. I talked to the shopkeeper and teased him in his own accent. He looked at me and smiled encouragingly, like I was some foreign orientalist.

Now, with the nobility of an older brother, Muhaymen wrote to me to absolve me of the calamities of this war. ‘You’re not responsible for the devastation and lies, Zeina. You’re like the rest of us, a victim of lies that are bigger than you.’

Delete. I didn’t need to be patronised by a hypocritical tribesman who invited me in so that he could clear his throat then offer me protection, making vows on his honour and his moustache, and keeping his knife hidden behind his back. Who was lying to whom, Muhaymen?

I was naïve to have imagined democracy to be like candyfloss, colourful sugar wrapped around thin sticks that we could go around distributing to the kids. ‘What colour would you like,
Ammou
?’ The nice guy in the democracy van dips the stick in the melted sugar then hands it to the eager child. We sold you a dream that was too good to be true. But we weren’t alone. You had your own spin doctors and nuclear scientists and generals. They told us about weapons of mass destruction, about Bin Laden, about a bomb that would finish off Israel. September 11th was waiting for a scapegoat, so we bought it all. You believed us, and we believed them.

Delete. Empty words in the windmill of words.

What good did it do, all this ‘us and them’ analysis?

What use was any of this now, my dear anaemic Sumerian statue?

The last time I saw him was when Tawoos sent for me, saying that Nana Rahma was refusing to eat and no longer had the strength to leave her bed. Her health was deteriorating and she wouldn’t go to hospital.

When Tawoos asked her, ‘Do I send for Zeina?’ she cursed me in her Mosul dialect. Tawoos told me my grandfather used to swear a lot, but for my grandmother to swear in the presence of all her saints, the true and the fake, that was unheard of. The Virgin looked out of her miracle-working picture whose flame never failed and didn’t interfere. I pleaded with Tawoos to tell me what Grandma had said.

She told me, like a child repeating something that she knew she wasn’t supposed to have heard, covering her mouth with her hand as she said the words. ‘She said, “I’ll throw her out if I see her, that slut who was raised in the gutter.”’

Quite a
khalooqa
. Another word from my forgotten lexicon that jumped to mind. That’s what people in Mosul called a choice swear word:
khalooqa
. My grandmother had sworn, and promised she’d throw me out of her house.
I contemplated sending her a doctor from the camp, but feared that he’d receive his own
khalooqa
and also get thrown out. She might even make a scene and invite the neighbours to join in, each with their own
khalooqa
. I knew she’d rather die than let an American examine her, an army doctor at that. But I couldn’t take seriously the insults she’d directed at me. I knew I could handle it and take refuge from her in her love for me. I’d take her anger and absorb it. What was the worst she could do?

When I knocked on the door, Haydar opened it and kissed my head. He looked like Muhaymen, just ten years younger. He led me to the inner room. Tawoos was sitting cross-legged on her
abaya
on the floor by my grandmother’s bed and murmuring verses from the Quran while the Virgin Mary listened. ‘Zeina, you’re here.’ Hope appeared on Tawoos’s face as she leapt up to welcome me. My grandmother didn’t move. She was awake but her eyes were closed. Her silence encouraged me, so I took off my coat and shoes and snuggled next to her under the covers. She tried to push me away when I hugged her, but her strength failed her. We stayed like this for a while. Tawoos cried soundlessly in the corner, while Haydar stood chain-smoking just outside the door.

When did Muhaymen get here?

I must’ve dozed off, engulfed by the warmth and the darkness or the rhythm of Tawoos’s sobbing, because I didn’t notice him coming in. I smelled him before I saw him, and when I opened my eyes his lean figure was standing over me like a bow drawn taut to shoot an arrow. Was he going to kiss me or strangle me?

How strange the look in his eyes was.

He didn’t ask me how I’d got there or where I’d been. It was no time for questions. And I was no longer scared. I would extend my hands and surrender to whoever wanted to kidnap me, put a bullet in my head or plant a bomb in my way. What would it change? I’d be just another number in the daily statistics. I was exhausted, and my diary was filling up with the names of dead friends. I didn’t want to live like this, with the bitterness on my tongue and the wind of grief blowing through my heart.

I decided to stay the night. At sunset I went out to the garden and picked some oranges to make juice for my grandmother. I begged her to drink it, invoking the memory of my grandfather and everyone she loved, until she relented and accepted the glass from my hand. Tawoos got up to make us dinner, but wagered me Nana Rahma wouldn’t touch it.

There was another power cut. I went outside, and Muhaymen followed me to the small back yard. We sat on the interlaced iron of the rusty old swing, not saying anything at first. I wanted to ask him about the ongoing battles in Sadr City, but I held back. I was sick with worry about him. I followed the news of our soldiers fighting with the Mahdi Army and prayed for
him
, the Iraqi who cut me in two.

‘I was very worried about you these past weeks,’ I finally said.