The American Granddaughter (8 page)

How could he possibly take her there? Was he out of his mind? They would make mincemeat of her, grill her on charcoal and eat her fresh off the grill. Al-Jazeera would be reporting the murder of an American soldier in the suburbs of Baghdad. The number had reached three thousand. He couldn’t trust anyone, not even Muhaymen, who’d become a different person since he’d returned from captivity. Muhaymen used to collect rare recordings of Billie Holiday and sleep clutching the transistor radio tuned to FM. When they found out he was a prisoner of war in Iran, no one touched his record collection for three years. Tawoos kept them in a box under her bed, and wouldn’t sell them even in the direst of circumstances. On his return, Muhaymen took the box out to waste ground, poured gasoline over it and set it on fire in front of everyone. Muhaymen had aged before his time. At forty, he was already an old man.

Haydar had a different mentality. Zeina’s choices didn’t shock him as they did the old woman. He didn’t have anything against the American girl. So he considered Rahma’s words and decided he couldn’t do what she was asking of him. He said, ‘Zeina is still one of us. Have you forgotten,
Khala
, that she drank from my mother’s milk?’

‘Your mother’s milk is pure, my dear Haydar, but the girl has been led astray. Zeina has seen dark days and lost her sense of right and wrong. You have to help me.’

Haydar shook his head vaguely. He couldn’t refuse and couldn’t agree. He understood Rahma’s heartache, but wasn’t enthusiastic about putting his hand in hers to re-educate Zeina. How many thousand Iraqis, how many millions, did the old woman want to re-educate? No, Zeina could be his only ticket out of the shifting quicksand he was in. She could help him with the immigration documents and take him along to America. There he would catch up on his lost youth, he would drink as he liked, let his hair down and sing and dance without the self-appointed guardians of virtue coming after him.

Long live America, land of the drunk!

XVII

All homecomings are cherished except this one. My arms are open wide to receive all the prodigal children except this girl. Could this really be? Zeina, Zonzon, Zuweina. Her grandparents were inconsolable when she was taken away from them just as she was hovering at the threshold of adolescence. And now she returns, but like this?

The girl was herself a beautiful adornment to match her name, and she loved nothing more than staying at her grandfather’s house. When she was born, Youssef and Rahma had already crossed over into the land of old age and were now used to its pangs of melancholy. Then Zeina descended on them like a bright ray of sunshine, like confetti, as the creative Tawoos used to say. They raised her from the time she was still in nappies, watched over her with prayers and sheltered her under their watchful gaze. Unlike the rest of the family, the child wasn’t leaning towards blondness, but had kissable skin the colour of roasted almonds.

Batoul would arrive in a hurry, leaving her car running outside while she threw the girl onto their bed and dashed off to work. With Zeina, the wide bed that was stretched on a solid wooden plank turned into a joyful meadow of playfulness and laughter. They delighted in her as she grew up and floated around them, answering their calls and serving them like a brunette guardian angel. They hadn’t imagined that life would be so cruel as to deprive them of Zayoun. But Batoul could not stay in the country after what had happened to her husband. How could anyone in their right mind believe the allegation that Sabah Behnam, the soft-spoken TV presenter who was scared of his own shadow, had conspired against the ruling party and the revolution?

They had knocked on their door in the neighbourhood of Al-Amin at three in the afternoon. Batoul was washing lettuce at the kitchen sink, her husband sitting by the fridge in his pyjama bottoms. When Yazan opened the door, solid hairy arms pushed him aside. Their swearing came in before them. ‘Where’s the handsome nightingale? Where’s your pimp of a father?’ Sabah sprang up and in one leap was standing before them. ‘Yes . . . wha . . . what is it? Is everything all right?’ He received a slap on the face in lieu of a reply. They dragged him away as he tripped over his pyjamas that had slipped down and gathered around his feet.

He was gone for just three weeks, but they passed like three eons for Batoul and the rest of the family. If his father-in-law hadn’t sought the help of a friend from the old regime, who happened to have a son who was important in the new regime, the poor fellow wouldn’t have reappeared on the face of the earth. When he returned he was unable to speak, his teeth were broken and he cried non-stop, as if they had inserted a reservoir of tears under his eyelids. It was days before he dared to tell his wife what had happened to him. She took him north, to her aunt’s house, to get away from the tension in Baghdad. There, under a pistachio tree in Einkawa, he told her that the denouncement came – by God I swear – from his closest colleague, his crime being that he’d protested about the news bulletins being too long and had said that the news was merely recycled leftovers from the day before.

Before they beat him up, urinated on him, broke his teeth, pulled his tongue with pincers and extinguished their cigarettes on his skin, they had sat him down naked at a table, set up a TV camera in front of him and given him a news report to read. The first item on the report was the execution by hanging of TV presenter Sabah Shamoun Behnam after his having been convicted of conspiring against the party and the revolution. Batoul, who had been brought up in a house where values of truth, justice and dignity were upheld, couldn’t let what had happened to her husband pass. She decided to launch an official complaint and went to ask her superior at the university for advice regarding the legalities. ‘They tortured my husband, Professor!’ she told him.

The university dean listened to Batoul’s complaint, and, being a senior party member himself, laughed embarrassedly and told this staff member who’d come seeking his help, ‘Tortured him? My dear, that wasn’t torture. They were just messing with him.’

So it was all a game then, when they broke Sabah’s teeth, clipped off the tip of his tongue and electrocuted him. The dean himself assured her that real torture would have been something else completely, something that went beyond a few playful tickles and the dislodging of teeth. If it had been anything more serious, she wouldn’t have found a trace left of her husband. In the distinguished dean’s opinion, she should thank God for her husband’s safe return, ‘smelling of roses’ and walking on his own two feet.

Batoul left everything she owned, the house, the car and the university job, and took Yazan and Zeina and escaped with her husband, that black night, out of the country. A relative forged a passport for the fugitive TV presenter, under the name Korkys Shamoun, occupation spare parts dealer. Sabah grew a heavy moustache and hid his eyes behind thick glasses, to more closely resemble the photo in the new passport. Though he didn’t really need the disguise, because no one, seeing the shambles of a ghost that he’d become, would have recognised the formerly handsome presenter.

They arrived in Jordan and submitted their documents to the UNHCR, then waited their turn. Although bribery could have bought the whole of Iraq, Batoul wasn’t carrying any testimonies or medical reports or warnings of job dismissal. Sabah’s tongue, perforated by a stapler and clipped with pincers, was the only supporting evidence for his family’s asylum application.

The grandparents’ hearts were broken as they said goodbye to Zayyoun, and they drenched her face with their tears. She was not the first or only member of the family to leave, but she was the sweetest and dearest. And it wasn’t going to be a normal journey from which the departed may later return to be reunited with their loved ones, but an escape to a faraway land that felt like death, no later reunion expected or hoped for.

But fifteen years later, Zeina did return.

All homecomings are cherished except this one. It burns the soul.

XVIII

In my black
abaya
, which covered my body and part of my face, I got out of the taxi that carried me to the old house. The midday sun was as bright as it usually was on winter days in this part of the world. My woollen top was making my neck itch, and I could feel the drops of sweat between my breasts.

It occasionally clouded over. The weather would darken and rain would pour down as if a water tap had suddenly opened in the sky. Then a few minutes later an angel’s hand would reach over and turn the tap off. The sky would instantly clear and regain its brilliance, while people down below staggered in the mud and swamps that formed in the twinkling of an eye. The transformation would be so sudden that it looked like it was part of a movie set, with ready-made cinematic props wheeled in from the warehouses of Universal Studios.

I’d been missing my grandmother.

I hadn’t seen her since her visit to the base a few months before. I’d heard her voice on the phone and talked to her. Her voice was that of an inconsolably lonely woman. She told me about spending a depressing Christmas on her own with the sound of gunshots and mortar shells, talking to the television whenever she had electricity, and waiting to return to God’s embrace. Hearing her, I was possessed by a familiar little
jinni
that I knew couldn’t be stopped. Calvin, who’d suffered his share of my extreme moods, used to ask me the name of this
jinni
and I would tell him it was called
khannas
. I laughed as he kept trying and failing to pronounce the ‘kh’ until his throat ached. ‘From the roof of the mouth, sweetheart.
Kha
.
Kha
. Not from the throat.’

I celebrated Thanksgiving at the base with my colleagues. They’d brought us all the dishes we craved – turkey, legs of lamb, stuffed chicken and
masgoof
fish. Everything was cooked by the Bengali and Turkish cooks who’d been contracted by the US Army. They laid out the tables and we lined up, like at school, to fill our plates. We were served by the colonels and generals, as army tradition for Thanksgiving dictated. The ingredients had been brought by trucks from Turkey via Zakho. We knew they’d arrived when packets of pistachios and almonds and strings of figs and dried fruit started appearing on the tables. But could apricot syrup be an adequate compensation for beer? The soldiers were always complaining about the prohibition on alcoholic drinks. On more than one occasion, a local employee had faced punishment when caught smuggling beer onto the base. Some of the army informants would occasionally come to the outer gate with a well-wrapped bottle of arak and ask for it to be delivered to officer so-and-so. The officer would have paid for it, in advance, in greenbacks.

One day, a woman for whom I’d translated a compensation claim came to the gate with eight big portions of Mosul
kibbeh
– a special delicacy of minced lamb and cracked wheat – and left them to be delivered to me. That was the most beautiful present I’d ever received. That evening I held a banquet for my colleagues.

Christmas 2003 followed not long after Thanksgiving, six days before the new year, according to the tradition of Western churches, which celebrated Christmas a few days earlier than Eastern Orthodox ones. One of the army’s Christmas traditions was for high-ranking politicians to suddenly descend on us, Santa-like, so that TV cameras could capture images of them spending Christmas with ‘our sons and daughters in Iraq’.

My
khannas
possessed me when I heard my grandmother’s voice on the phone. We were in the first days of 2004, still a few days before Eastern Orthodox Christmas, and my
khannas
would tolerate no delays. I left Tikrit in the morning, after persuading the commanding officer that I had to go and see a female gynaecologist urgently. He’d told me that that was what the resident doctor was for, but I feigned Arab feminine modesty and insisted that I had to be examined by a woman doctor. I told him that the cleaner, Nahrain, had booked an appointment for me with a doctor acquaintance of hers in Mosul, and that she would see me at her home, not in a hospital. Nahrain arrived at the agreed time and confirmed my story. But the commanding officer was still uncomfortable about my going to Mosul under the circumstances. ‘What circumstances, sir?’ I asked him. ‘Our patrols are everywhere and I will be back before dinner.’

Nahrain went out ahead of me. I followed wearing civilian clothes, similar to what city women here wear, and draping the black
abaya
she’d brought for me over my head. I found her waiting for me on the street with a taxi that a relative of hers drove. I hugged her and thanked her for her help. ‘I will bear the sin of your lie, Nahrain. I can’t thank you enough.’

‘This wasn’t a sin at all. It was a good deed, and God will reward me threefold.’

As the car started on the road to Baghdad, I was in a state of disbelief that the officer had permitted me to leave. A recruit of Iraqi origins had been kidnapped and vanished without trace. We heard that he used to visit some relatives of his and had married their daughter. Did one of them denounce him?

We passed devastated buildings and bombed-out areas, followed by fields still awaiting spring to announce their greenness. A few times we passed army convoys, and I was about to raise my hand to salute them but just managed to check myself in time and keep my hand under the
abaya
, cautious not to meet the driver’s eye in the mirror. Finally there were the palm trees marking the outskirts of Baghdad.