The American Granddaughter (7 page)

‘Oh my God!’ I cried out before I could stop myself. I bent down and was about to pick one up, but pulled my hand back before touching it and looked to the colonel for permission, who nodded encouragingly. ‘Sure, go ahead.’

The bundle I held in my hand might have been ten thousand dollars. I wouldn’t know because I’d never seen so much money in my life, not even in the biggest casino in Las Vegas. And these were dollars and not gambling chips. ‘Is this real money?’ I asked.

‘Of course.’

‘Aren’t you worried that it might get stolen?’

As soon as I’d uttered the question I realised how inappropriate it was, but it was too late to take it back. No, I didn’t mean, and it hadn’t at all crossed my mind, that one of our soldiers could steal any of the money. If I, for instance, had happened to find a fortune in one of the cupboards of the kitchen where I slept, I wouldn’t have taken a cent for myself.

I had an experience in a mall in Miami once that I considered a test of character. I’d been browsing through the expensive handbags when I found a bulging purse on the shelf. At first I thought it was one of the items on display. Then I realised it looked second hand and that someone must have left it there. I opened the purse and found fifteen hundred dollars in hundreds and twenties. I didn’t attempt to hide it or stick it in my bag and hurry out. I took it, matter-of-factly, to the store security, brought out the ID inside it and asked them to call the woman in front of me. I wanted to make sure that the purse would be returned to her. Mind you, I’m not stupidly honest. If I was walking down the road and found a hundred-dollar bill on the ground, I wouldn’t stop and yell, ‘Whose money is this?’ but would gratefully put it in my pocket and walk on. But seeing six million dollars piled under my feet in a closed room! And in Tikrit, of all places. This was what I’d humbly call a new life experience.

Next to the dollars there were various other bundles of different currencies piled up in no particular order. Iraqi dinars, pounds and euros. I was told they had been counted, added and multiplied, and found to be the equivalent of three million dollars.

‘Look at this.’ One of the soldiers in charge of the inventory was holding a chain with a big gold heart. I took it from him and opened it. On its right side was a picture of Saddam and on the left a picture of his wife. The inventory was still ongoing, and news of these findings had not yet reached the media.

That was in May 2003.

XV

Her voice was still ringing in my ear since I’d spoken to her on the phone from Tikrit, two days after my arrival in Iraq.

‘Zayoun, my life, where are you? Still in Amman? When do you get here, my lovely?’

The words stuck in my throat. I stuttered. I didn’t know how to break the news to her. Would she be happy or would she start lamenting? ‘I’m in Tikrit. Don’t worry about me. I’m working as an interpreter for a construction company. I’ll come visit as soon as I’m given leave to travel to Baghdad.’

‘What construction in these black days?’

‘It’s an electricity company, Grandma. They’re building new power stations to replace those bombed in the war.’

‘I can’t believe you’re actually here, in Iraq. Call me every day, sweetie pie. Every day, Zein, okay?’

I’d heard that Grandmother Rahma was very alert and never missed a thing. She could ‘see through thick yoghurt’ is what they used to say. I hadn’t experienced her abilities first hand until the second phone call. As soon as she heard my voice, she said sharply, ‘Listen, Zein, my daughter, I haven’t been able to stop thinking since we talked yesterday. I want to come see you in Tikrit. I can’t wait any longer.’

‘But the company doesn’t allow visitors.’

‘I understand. Stop right there. You work with the Americans, don’t you?’

She interrupted with the panic of an oriental mother who suspects her unmarried daughter is pregnant and will tarnish the family’s honour. The pain in her voice made me fear that her heart would stop beating if I told her the truth. So I lied to my Grandmother Rahma, I couldn’t have done otherwise. I told her I was a UN representative observing the operations of the US Army among Iraqi civilians. I felt life return to her as she listened to me, as if she was eager to reject her own intuitive certainty and believe me, hanging on to the weak thread that I extended to her. She asked in her Mosul accent, which added to the seriousness of the situation, ‘So who do you get your salary from, daughter? Bush or Kofi Annan?’

I almost replied that it was the same pocket anyway, that appearances didn’t make much of a difference. But I reassured her instead, and carried on with my fabric of lies, telling her that our role was necessary to prevent American transgressions. I was scared she would demand, like my mother did, that I ‘swear on my father’s life’. But she didn’t. That would have been the only way to catch me out.

Two days later, my grandmother arrived at our base in Tikrit. She introduced herself to the outside interpreter. He sent me a note telling me that Rahma Saour was asking for me at the gate. I changed quickly into civilian clothes and ran outside. She was standing in the line next to the palace wall that was designated for the women who gathered there every day, from early morning, to enquire about a missing husband, register a complaint or request compensation. I quickly signalled for the interpreter to bring my grandmother to the guardroom. I completely surrendered myself to her embrace and her smell. We hugged and cried while the soldier looked on sympathetically and the Iraqi translator wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. But when I invited her to enter the camp she refused, resolutely shaking her head. It was her Kurdish stubbornness that she carried like a birthmark from the day she was born in Bikhal, and which had been passed on to her daughter Batoul, who in turn passed it on to me. Stubbornness was genetic for the women in our family, like the mule. ‘I came to this world under the waterfalls,’ my grandmother took pride in saying, when I was a little girl sitting on her lap, by way of explanation for her natural steadfastness, telling the story of my great-grandfather, the pistachio trader who moved between the Kurdish villages and roamed the borders of Turkey and Iran. A determined and stubborn man, the legacy passed on by the women of the family. It was a story that crossed continents, as the details had reached me when I was older in Detroit.

As we hugged, I cried tears of love and nostalgia, and she cried tears of love and frustration, and maybe shame. She must have seen the male and female soldiers coming and going around us, the army vehicles entering through the gate, the interpreters receiving the terrified folk and mediating the rising anger. But things were still unclear during those chaotic first few months. People were still recovering from the earthquake-like shock, still unsure whether to welcome those who’d arrived in tanks or to spit on them.

It was, of course, out of the question for me to leave the base unguarded, so I stayed with my grandmother in the guardroom, tissues drenched with snot, sweat and tears piling up between us. I was lost for words, so I said, ‘Is there anything that you need? Do you need money?’ She shot me a glance that made my tongue freeze and replied in her wonderfully metaphorical dialect, ‘
Wallah
, now you can fart from a big ass.’

I looked around, embarrassed that any of the translators might have heard her, and my grandmother smiled for the first time since she’d entered the poorly air-conditioned room. She stretched out her swollen legs and smoothed her long dress. She was wearing a pair of new black clogs with thick black stockings, the standard footwear for Iraqi women of her age. She’d arrived from Baghdad in a car driven by a broad-shouldered young man who had long hair, a thick moustache and a deep cleft in the middle of his chin. He was Haydar, she told me, the son of Tawoos. And while I was used to hearing the name Tawoos – Tawoos did this, Tawoos said that, Tawoos cooked this – I still wondered at the strangeness of the name – which meant ‘peacock’ in Arabic – every time I heard it. Tawoos had been with the family since the days before my mother was married. She had dedicated her life to their service and become one of them.

‘Have you forgotten Tawoos?’ my grandmother asked me as I searched my memory for a face to put to the name. I shook my head and reassured her that I hadn’t forgotten. How could I? But I was seeing her son for the first time and had never heard his name. ‘Haydar. His name is Haydar, Zeina. He’s your milk brother.’ That strange phrase didn’t stop me in my tracks at the time. I didn’t quite take it in. How could he be my brother when I didn’t know him and hadn’t heard his name before? But the young man was there in front of me, standing next to the car with a bottle of water in his hand and watching me like I was a riddle he was trying to solve. It wasn’t until later, when I moved to Baghdad, that Haydar would solve my riddle and I would get used to his presence in my life.

I sat for two hours or longer with my grandmother, talking and exchanging news. She asked about our many relatives who were dispersed in different countries, forgetting the names of children and mixing up the names of cities. Did the Hekmets find asylum in Sweden or in Holland? Who was it who died and was buried in New Zealand, Jalal or his brother Kamal?

She asked about my brother, Yazan, and I told her that we called him Jason now, as it was common to Americanise our names. I told her that Yazan had been involved with drugs, but was getting help and hoping to return to school. I talked to her about my mother’s illness and her constant cough. ‘Hasn’t she quit smoking?’ she asked. ‘No. She’s just as you left her. Smokes excessively and suffocates herself. She has the lungs of a policeman who never refuses a cigarette.’ My grandmother looked impressed that I still remembered those local figures of speech.

She hesitated for a moment before asking about my father. I told her that we didn’t see him often since he’d split up with Mom and moved to Arizona. He’d opened a small bookshop there and printed a local classified ads paper. ‘What happened to the love that your mother took on the world for?’ I didn’t know how to answer. Although I was pushing thirty, I had never experienced such love that would make one oppose the whole world in order to live it.

My grandmother refused to eat or drink anything at the base. Despite the heat, she pushed my hand away when I offered her a glass of water. As if our water was poisoned. Then she got up and returned from where she’d come. Before the car drove away, I heard her reproof, ‘Was it necessary, this tasteless job of yours?’

XVI

The old woman put her hand on the shoulder of the young man with the thick moustache sitting on the kitchen chair on the other side of the table, and brought her face closer to his. Her paleness contrasted with his darkly tanned skin. Her lips parted to say something but words failed her. Her heart wouldn’t let her say out loud what she was thinking. She forced the words, and her voice came out with a strange rattle, like that of a rusty tin can left to the wind.

‘She’s working with the Americans. Zeina’s working with them.’

‘
Khala
, everyone works with the Americans these days.’

‘No, Haydar, my sweet. That’s not true. None of our relatives or neighbours work with the occupation.’

‘But she’s American herself. She left here when she was a young girl and she became American.’

‘So Americans forget their roots?’

‘No, but Zeina was brought up in a world different from ours.’

‘We will bring her up from scratch, this ignorant girl. Right, Haydar, my dear? We won’t leave her to her ill manners.’ She said the last two words in Turkish for effect: ‘
tarbiya siz
’.

Haydar quickly put his palm to her mouth. ‘Shush, you shouldn’t say that. She’s still our daughter.’ He could not believe that a woman of Rahma’s age still preserved, in the folds of her wrinkled skin, all the heritage of generations brought up with a strong sense of justice. His own generation was used to fear and hypocrisy, to bribery and double-dealings and ulterior motives. They’d wanted all of us Baathists. For those who were too stubborn to join the party, they’d invented the decree that said every good citizen was a Baathist by default. Besides, there’d been an abundance of wealth that had turned their heads. Factories and contracts, schools and scholarships and delegations abroad, hospitals and festivals and magazines and artificial lakes and rivers, tourist resorts and research centres. Then the windmill of war started and drained the oil to the last drop. The men were gone, and the women left behind beating their chests. Still the winds of righteousness kept blowing between the Tigris and Euphrates, endlessly roaming the land. The breaths of people like Rahma came out under the cover of darkness to blow on the wounds of our souls, to heal the fissures with a secret ointment that was said to be inherited from the days of Babylon and Assyria. So when the Americans came, they found a mysterious country that they couldn’t decipher. Their local guides were even more clueless.

‘They came riding the occupation tanks.’ A phrase that was used to describe those local guides. It had a lighter ring than treason. But Zeina was not a traitor in Haydar’s eyes. She was a girl who worked in translation and didn’t understand politics. Initially he had been happy about this sister who seemed to have descended on him like a gift at a time when gifts were rare. Then, when he opened the shiny wrapper, he felt let down. The present wasn’t exactly what he wanted. She was too proud and independent for his liking. She was someone who made her own decisions, made plans and followed them through without expecting help or advice. She was a woman with balls. But as he got to know her, his disappointment was eclipsed by the avenues of conversation that opened up between them. He was elated when she praised his knowledge of music. She was surprised that someone from his conservative neighbourhood would know anything of Janet Jackson and the rest of the first family of soul. He wished he could invite her to his house in Sadr City, to the room that he shared with his brothers, so she could see for herself the biggest collection of Madonna posters in Iraq. Even the ceiling was covered in posters. When it rained, the leaking water sometimes unstuck the glue, letting the pictures fall to cover the sleepers.