The American Granddaughter (3 page)

That was it, then: CIA headquarters in Virginia.

A place that was the subject of whispered stories became my daily destination. It was no longer a mystery hidden behind green walls and tall, well-maintained trees. It was just an assortment of offices and ordinary employees, among them clever ones who could read my facial expressions and stupid ones who spent their days scratching their balls and waiting for the pay cheque at the end of the month.

They put me through detailed interviews and made me sit through lectures on the nature of the job, showed me maps and films explaining the geography of Iraq, and sent me for a full medical. I wasn’t alone in that bizarre marriage. Translation agencies were multiplying and producing dozens of applicants every day. There were Iraqi men and women from different sects and backgrounds. Some were relatively recent migrants who had come to the States from Rafha camp after the Kuwait War; others were veteran migrants who had arrived here in the 1960s in search of economic gain; and yet others were ‘in-betweeners’, ’70s migrants who had escaped the Baathist prosecution of communists and headed for Eastern Europe, somehow ending up in the mecca of capitalism. There was a strange mix of Americanised Islamists, and leftists led astray by Moscow’s compass. Some were vain and showy performers, while others were introspective, but each and every one looked fit for a part in a movie I’d call
I Ain’t Got No Work
. There were veiled women, girls in tight jeans, men with Stalinist moustaches, young men with heads shaved like rap artists. Not all were Iraqis. Some of the would-be translators were from other Arab countries, others were Arabised foreigners.

We each filled out a thick folder of forms, answering questions about every single member of the family, their ages, their addresses, their past and current nationalities. I heard former Baathists joking among themselves that those ‘lists’ were like the lists the regime in Iraq used to demand from its followers. Your name, your tendency and your brother’s tendency, your father’s trouser size, your sisters’ eye colours, and the addresses of all your relatives, to the seventh remove. I took my time answering everything and paid attention to my handwriting. There was a question about relatives in Baghdad, to which I answered that my maternal grandmother lived in Baghdad and that she was my only family there.

My grandmother, Rahma Girgis Saour. I transliterated her name into English, and under date and place of birth, I wrote: 1917, Mosul.

IV

CHEEEEESE
.

The photographer gave his standard instruction for us to show our teeth. We all followed like actors in a Colgate advert and smiled for the camera. Less than a week later, the photograph would be delivered to us, enlarged and in transparent wrapping. We would grab it eagerly and make various comments as we pass it around. I would then carry it carefully to my room and put it in the expensive frame that I’d bought especially from the home accessories section at Macy’s. It would finally settle on the mantelpiece in our living room, displaying the four of us formally dressed and posing in the garden of our house on the day that we became Americans. How we had waited for that day!

Looking at that picture, it’s easy to see that my father had dressed up especially for the occasion in his dark blue suit, the one made by Mujawwadi, the tailor in Baghdad’s new market. As for the slim blond boy – my brother Jason – and the dark-skinned young woman who looked like she was borrowed from another family – me – we had both worn without argument what Mom had told us to. She was the only one not dressed up. She hadn’t passed the thin black kohl pencil along her upper eyelids, the only make-up that she normally wore. She had on her old blue baggy dress, the one that usually meant it was a major cleaning day. Our protests had done nothing to change her mind. ‘Stubbornness is a birthmark that Batoul was born with. God-given.’ That was what Grandma used to say about her eldest, my mother.

So Batoul wasn’t dressed and made up for the occasion like the thousands who filled the area surrounding Wayne State University in Detroit. The city council had lined the street with thousands of chairs, and the happy crowds of Arabs, Puerto Ricans, Chinese and Indians came and took over the place. All were in their best attire, as though it were a holiday, but even more special than a holiday, for this was a one-off.

My mother walked apart from us and looked like she was in a funeral procession. She sat huddled up and hugged her handbag like there was something in it she was sheltering. She glanced sideways at her neighbours in the surrounding seats who couldn’t contain their excitement. It was their collective wedding. The moment that would banish their fears and drive away for ever the spectre of homelessness. The day they swore allegiance to their new bounteous homeland. After the oath, they would be entitled to push out their chests and boast: ‘I am an American citizen.’

As the loudspeakers echoed the voice of the state governor reading out the Oath of Allegiance, as the crowd of men and women stood up, raised their voices in unison and – with all the passion and assertiveness they could muster – repeated the words after him, as the newly baptised Americans hugged each other and exchanged congratulations, I heard my mother’s voice break as if she was suffocating ... I turned to her and she looked like she’d been attacked by a sudden fever. Her pale face had turned purple and tears streamed down from her eyes and seemed to evaporate on touching her burning cheeks, like water dripping from the teapot onto a hot stove.

I reached out and took her stiff hand in mine. The masses put their hands on their hearts and sang out the national anthem as the jazz band started playing ‘God Bless America’. The voice of my mother, the Iraqi woman Batoul Fatouhy Saour, was the only one out of tune, as she wailed in Arabic, ‘Forgive me, Father.
Yaabaa
, forgive me.’

What on earth had brought my Grandfather Youssef to University Street in Detroit?

V

It was the day for preparing army uniforms.

Pushing a trolley in front of me, I stood in a long line of women and men, like in a supermarket. Except we weren’t browsing shelves stacked with tinned food and cartons of milk. We were headed for the clothes warehouse. Tables were spread out in front of shelves packed with folded clothes. Khaki trousers and shirts, shoes and socks, belts, woollen underwear. We were brides and the army was in charge of our wedding trousseaux. I followed what everyone in the line in front of me was doing, reaching up to the shelves, pulling out clothes in my size and putting them in my cart. Our measurements had been taken the day before so we knew what to pick.

One of five days of preparations that preceded our departure.

As soon as we arrived in the camp they roll-called our names. Z
ay
na Behn
ay
m. That’s how they pronounced my name. I moved forward, and they checked my identity and gave me a sheet, a pillow and a blanket. I carried my gear under my arm and walked to where the bedrooms were. Each room slept four or five. The following day was for medical checks. Army doctors were no different from other doctors except they were in uniform. Another day was for filling out official forms with personal data. Did my life really contain all I was being asked to recall?

To get to the camp I’d taken a civilian plane from Detroit. There was an army bus waiting for us at the airport. The moment I placed my right foot on the bus steps, I realised that I was folding away all my past life. Everything before me was a brand new page, and from this moment onwards my life would no longer be the same. The girl who had grown up watching her dreams burst like balloons at the end of a birthday party was going to war. The silly girl who’d cried more than once over failed loves was about to join the US Army.

I didn’t give in to my daydreams for long. It wasn’t a time for such indulgence. My bus companions were letting off steam through forced cheerfulness, laughing about everything and nothing. I knew that laughter wasn’t necessarily a sign of happiness. Benjamin, the cleaner at the Assyrian Club in Baghdad, was given to laughing non-stop after his son was killed in the Kurdish war. After a few days I never saw him again. He was taken to Al-Shamiya
psychiatric hospital.

There were two other women on the bus, an Egyptian and a Lebanese. I could tell from their accents. The Egyptian, who was a hustler by nature, commanded the scene and demanded attention. She told me, later on, how she’d cast her net over an American visiting Alexandria, and how he’d married her and brought her to his country. She acquired citizenship and left her husband after she got pregnant by a Cuban pizza delivery guy. She was joining the translators and leaving her nursing baby behind with her ex-husband. She was dark and plump with long hair and jittery movements. I liked her openness and felt that we could be friends.

The Lebanese had two suitcases with her, each as big as a city and filled with beautiful clothes and cosmetics. She said that her name was Rula. She sat on the bus, with her legs crossed elegantly, and looked like she was going on honeymoon to Paris.

Nadia, the Egyptian who shook every time she laughed with an invisible electric current that ran through her pores, was telling Rula that she wanted to work in one of the fabulous palaces in the Green Zone. Everything to her was ‘fabulous’. I heard Rula answer that she’d refuse to stay anywhere except the Baghdad Hotel. How did she know about the Baghdad Hotel? She curled her full upper lip and said, ‘Even if they don’t pay for the hotel I’ll pay out of my own money.’ How deceptive the dreams of adventure could be! How could this pampered girl have known that we were going to sleep in the arms of death and seek shelter in our coffins? I myself didn’t know, nor did Sahira or Captain Donovan, or Brian, whose body would be found floating among the weeds of the Euphrates.

We got up at 5 a.m. to join the queue for registration. Our routine was becoming more like that of a military camp. Everything around us was rough and masculine, and we weren’t yet trained to be macho. But it wouldn’t do to cling on to femininity. Here you were either a soldier or a concubine.

We stood in line with the soldiers. They in their army khaki and we still in our civilian clothes, tight jeans and high heels. I was surprised to see the other girls had found the time to paint their lips and apply coats of mascara. At what hour had those killer eyes woken up?

The following day I got my army uniform with my name stitched into it. For reasons of personal safety, they gave us the choice between using our real family names or any other. The tight jeans and high heels were gone. We were no longer distinguishable from the soldiers at the camp. I took comfort from this. It was a tangible sign of my new character: intrepid Zeina going to war.

Then came the day of our departure.

VI

The words filling my head are white clouds taking flight. They move and merge and change shapes, then all at once they stop and pour forth their acid rain. My fingers race on the keyboard, trying to capture the images before they disperse, like white clouds chased by the wind.

I write knowing that death could come at any moment. In the form of a roadside bomb, or a mortar shell that drops on my head inside the Green Zone and leaves me burning like a matchstick. Will I live to finish this story that’s not mine as much as it is hers? My grandmother, my enemy, my beloved, the image of my old age.

I ignore the writer who’s intruding on my space at the computer, sitting shoulder to shoulder by my side, as if we were a duet forced to play on one piano. She wants us to type together – four hands, twenty fingers – the story of the American granddaughter returning to the family home in Baghdad. But I don’t want her by my side. I push her away and fight against her persistence. I keep pressing the backspace key, deleting the words she writes.

She’s been irritating me since I realised how she had circled and manoeuvred in order to force out a patriotic novel at my expense. The impostor wants to kill me off so she can win for herself the admiration of idiotic critics, TV politicians and dinosaur nationalists. She wants to paint me as the villain and my grandmother as the brave and kind heroine, something like the actress Amina Rizq in the Egyptian film
Nasser
: a woman of principles, who, when her grandfather dies in forced labour at the Suez Canal, refuses to receive mourners until the Free Officers take over in the July revolution and she believes his death has been avenged.

The writer sees me as a stepdaughter of the occupation and my grandmother as a jewel of the resistance. I am the sinning Magdalene who deserves to be stoned, and my grandmother an immaculate virgin in her eighties. She gives me the features of the prodigal daughter who returns like a female Rambo on a US Army tank. She traps me twice – inside the Green Zone and inside a hateful character – and imposes her unreconstructed nationalist imagination on me, an imagination inherited in black and white and sepia, no longer suitable for the age of Photoshop. But her traps neither impress nor interest me. Her weak narrative plot tries to silence me and rob me of my right to have a say in the affairs of this land that witnessed my birth and the births of my parents. Why does she want to prevent me from participating in the story in my own way, with full commitment and without a prompter feeding me the lines, hidden off-stage?

I bet it’s because she herself has only ever known the words of prompters. She’s never written one sentence of her own making, never tasted the joy of expressing what’s really on her mind, out loud and without fear of a raised rough hand that could descend on her soft cheek with a slap to reprimand the digression. She’s conditioned to reject her own reason, to believe blindly in the intimations of the heart and to accept rhetoric and poetry as keys to the undisputed truth.