The American Granddaughter (9 page)

As an extra precaution, I got off at the main street then took the first right turn, across from what used to be called the Tuesday Market. The cold January wind was blowing into me and causing my
abaya
to billow. A large man wearing a grey
dishdasha
was walking towards me from the other end of the street. I pulled my
abaya
across my face, leaving only my right eye exposed to see the road. It’s not that I was scared, but watchfulness was a habit I’d developed here. As the man passed next to me, intentionally walking as close to me as he could, I looked him straight in the eye to let him know I was strong and not afraid. I heard him say, ‘Hey, beautiful. Your eyes can read and write.’ Good God! I nearly turned back and ran after him and begged him to tell me more of his creative chat-up lines. Where I came from, no one chatted up women in the street so boldly any more – not me, anyway. Women here wallowed in the luxurious silk of flirtatious words and smouldering looks that protected their skin and soul from indifference and neglect.

How could I ever explain to Calvin, in a short email at that, what it meant to have an eye that could read and write? Would he catch my meaning and, for my sake, oil the wheels of his sluggish imagination as one oils a squeaky door? My poor American lover. No matter what he did, he’d never be able to match that Iraqi drifter who walked past me near the Tuesday Market one afternoon and scrapped the rust off my femininity.

I was stumbling over the hem of my
abaya
as I searched for the house that, for all the times I’d seen it in my dreams, I imagined I’d be able to find with my eyes closed. But everything in Baghdad had changed. Here I was, finally, in front of the low iron gate, reaching out and ringing the bell but hearing no sound. There must be a power cut, which was good if it meant I’d have the luxury of sitting by the old-style paraffin heater, not that accordion of an electric oil heater, curling myself over it and resting my feet on the smooth metal base, keeping its warmth for myself. It was a scene from a movie I titled
Exquisite Self-Indulgence
.

I crossed the short garden path and knocked once on the wooden door. Before I had time for a second knock, Tawoos opened the door, pulled me inside, closed the door behind me and locked it, turning the key twice and sliding the long wooden bolt into place. She called it
al-saqaata,
returning to me another lost piece from the lexicon of my childhood.

Tawoos couldn’t seem to get enough of hugging and kissing me, saying that she too had a share in me. My attention was drawn away from her to the house, which was filled with the aroma of rice, respiring on a low flame. An incomparable scent that masked the damp smell of the old rugs and the weak white smoke of camphor incense. Was it Good Friday or something?

My grandmother walked towards us with effort and pulled me out of Tawoos’s embrace and into her own. ‘I knew you’d come. Blood is thicker than water.’ She took me by the hand to the sofa by the window, where there was more light, and sat next to me. She started to beat her thighs with her hands like women only do at funerals and catastrophes. The sad look in her eyes as she looked at me said it all. I felt vulnerable and exposed and sat there waiting for the sermon of reproach. I knew what I’d done wrong and had no intention of defending myself. When she’d had her fill of looking at me, she picked up a khaki jacket with gold stars on the shoulders and started polishing its bronze buttons. Every now and then she extended the cotton rag in her hand to Tawoos, who’d place it on the top of a Brasso bottle and, with a deft flip, soak the rag in the heavy liquid. Why were we all sitting in silence?

My grandmother took back the rag from Tawoos and rubbed the stars on the jacket with much patience and tenderness. When she was done, she got up and moved with effort to the wardrobe. She took out a wooden clothes hanger on which a pair of khaki trousers were hanging, neatly pressed. With great care she draped the jacket around the clothes hanger, buttoned it and brought the full army suit and laid it out beside her on the sofa. ‘Have you forgotten, Zeina? It’s the sixth of January. Armed Forces Day.’ Suddenly the rituals she was performing made sense. She was reliving what her husband used to do every year on this day. For hadn’t Grandfather Youssef persisted in marking this day, in his own way, after he’d been kicked out of the army?

I stared at the military uniform laid out before me, looking like a crucifix without a head. Why did my grandmother want to carry this cross for the rest of her days?

I rested my head in her lap and let her tell me her stories that were steeped in the scent of Iraq. She delved deep into her memory for anecdotes and other means of explanation. She told me of my family’s history that was manifest everywhere around us. The print of my blood and the bones of my ancestors. I drank her stories in, but they didn’t quench my thirst. There was a missing link somewhere, and it wasn’t my grandmother’s job to find it, but mine.

She said, ‘They forced your grandfather into early retirement, a few months after the revolution of ’58. He didn’t belong to the opposition or conspirators or anything. But there’d been an attempted coup in Mosul and they executed those involved and dismissed all the Nationalists from the army.’

‘But how come Grandpa joined the Nationalists when he was a Chaldean Christian?’

‘And why not? Religion never stopped anyone loving their country.’

The army had been the dream of every young man in Mosul during the forties. When my grandfather got an army scholarship and left his hometown to go and study law in Baghdad, his mother cried and considered him an emigrant, although the capital was no further than a night’s journey on the train. He graduated and became an officer in the army, moving up the ranks until he earned a colonel’s stars. He idolised the khaki uniform, and forced everyone in the house to do the same. Like most men of his generation, he was used to a drop of arak every evening, but he never touched drink when in uniform. He’d even avoid arguments when he was wearing it, so that if he lost his temper he’d quickly take off his jacket and military shirt before attacking the offender with a tirade of swear words.

Did my grandmother exaggerate her stories a bit, use her imagination to lure me back into the fold? ‘I swear on the lives of everyone I love that I’m telling you everything as it happened, and the walls of this house are my witness.’ She told me how Grandpa got angry once, when he came back from his office at the Ministry of Defence to find his younger brother rummaging through his private papers and reading the letters he’d sent to my grandmother from Jenin during the Palestine War in 1948. His army unit had gone to free another Iraqi unit that had been under siege inside the fort of Jenin. They had stayed on for some time after accomplishing the mission. For a while there was a truce, but the war between the Arabs and Jews has carried on to this day. My grandfather snatched the letters from his brother’s hand without saying a word and put them back in the drawer. He hurried to the bedroom, took off the army uniform and reappeared in his underpants to slap my great-uncle.

Colonel Youssef Fatouhy used to take delight in the attention each of his army colleagues paid to his military attire. He told my grandmother that army general Ghazi Al-Daghestany had the most immaculate uniform in the Iraqi Army. Unlike that colonel he shared an office with at the ministry before the revolution, who revealed a vest full of holes whenever he took his shirt off during the hot summer months when they were both on night duty. ‘When that same man was inaugurated as President of the Republic in the sixties, your grandfather thought of sending him a dozen new vests as a gift!’

After my grandfather’s retirement, the new leader, Abdel-Karim Qasim, who had been a comrade of his during the Palestine War, sent for him and told him, with characteristic kindness, ‘Nobody has any doubt about your patriotism or your loyalty to the army. I asked you to join the Free Officers and you refused. However, we did share salt and bread in the past. So I’ve nominated you for the post of legal consultant to the National Railway. Please don’t turn down my offer.’ My grandfather took the well-paid job and was grateful to the leader. How else would he have supported his large family when he was forced into retirement at the age of forty? Except that legal consultants to the National Railways didn’t wear military uniform with shiny stars on their epaulettes. My Grandmother Rahma sensed his dismay, and so hid the khaki uniform in the storage room. She was worried that seeing the uniform every time he opened the wardrobe would upset him. But on the eve of the first Armed Forces Day after his discharge, he went looking for his uniform and flew into a rage when he found that Grandma had moved it into storage. He removed the mothballs and took the uniform himself to the dry-cleaner. He returned with it wrapped in glossy white paper, the kind used for wrapping holiday gifts. In the years that followed, family members got used to this sight. When they saw him come home with a white package draped over his arm, they’d say, ‘Here comes the groom’s outfit.’ They would whisper it, for they knew they’d be in trouble if he heard them. They didn’t need a calendar to know that the 6th of January was approaching. If they woke up on a cold morning and found Grandpa polishing the stars on his army jacket, then they knew it was the eve of Armed Forces Day.

With every regime change that followed, my grandfather awaited the phone call inviting him to rejoin the army. But one coup followed another, the years passed and the phone never rang. The hair on Colonel (retired) Youssef Fatouhy’s head turned grey, his hearing grew weaker, his army salute no longer shook the ground he walked on. Parkinson’s disease affected his legs, and his hesitant steps became like those of a toddler trying to stand up for the first time.

My grandmother was tired of talking. I slipped from her embrace and stood next to the khaki suit. I touched its thick wool with the stark design. It was nothing like the uniform we wore in the army, with its practical camouflage and modern synthetic materials. I picked up the olive-coloured beret, ran my hand over it, lifted it carefully, like it was a crown, and placed it on my head. I went to stand in front of the mirror. My grandmother was watching me with tear-filled eyes. Were they tears of anger or affection?

The first time I’d worn a soldier’s uniform was at Fort Bliss army base in Texas. Calvin still laughed whenever he remembered how I had come back and told him that wearing the uniform had made me feel masculine. He’d got up from his sprawl on the sofa and given me a half-drunk military salute, spilling some beer from the can he was still holding on his forehead in the process.

But I had been full of pride when they gave me the camouflage uniform. I felt certain I was going on the mission that would finally earn me my American citizenship. It was my chance to repay the country that had embraced me since my adolescence and given me and my family a home. My early days in Detroit hadn’t been promising, mind you. I was homesick and would cry every night before going to sleep. Every night for three months. Until my mother started to worry about my health and thought about sending me back to Baghdad. But in the fourth month I started school, and my tears eventually dried up. I was drawn into the regular cycle of life. That movie was
Her Return from the Grave
.

I had known nothing about army uniform or military training. When I was first given the helmet I had no idea what a complex thing it was, something that required know-how and practice. Basically it was a bulletproof piece of metal covered in cloth, but it had to be tied in a certain way in order to fit on the wearer’s head and settle properly in place. ‘Remember that a mistake in fitting the helmet could mean the difference between life and death,’ we were told. The corporal who taught us about the helmet also taught us how to tie the army boots over knee-long socks into which the trousers were tucked. As for the army shirt, it was made of heavy material and worn over a brown T-shirt, which made us sweat profusely and feel stifled.

I remembered all that as I weighed the temptation to unbutton my grandfather’s jacket and drape it around my skinny shoulders. I was worried that this might upset my Grandmother Rahma. But she only hesitated a little, then got up and took the jacket with the gold stars in her trembling hands and helped me into it. She was standing behind me so I couldn’t see her face. But then she turned me around to button the jacket. She stepped back to look at me from a suitable distance as if contemplating a painting. I could not mistake the meaning of that look in her eyes: what crazy times did we live in, if the dress uniform of an Iraqi colonel could give birth to a bulletproof vest that was made in America?

XIX

I was a Tikriti now!

It was the revenge of my American neighbour whose Lebanese husband owned a grocery store in downtown Detroit. Candice was born and raised in the town of Little Rock before she met Rokuz, fell in love with him and followed him to Michigan. I used to call her Candice the Tikriti, because she came from the same town as the president, in this case Clinton and not Saddam. Her husband got my joke and laughed at it, while she wasn’t sure what I was on about but swore at me jokingly.

I settled in Tikrit as a cultural adviser at the Civilian Affairs Division. An interpreter who not only transferred words between two languages but also offered the soldiers her sociological expertise. I explained to them, for instance, that entering places of worship was not to be done with shoes on. That they had to give women time to cover their heads before breaking into a house. That people were repulsed by the security dogs, as they considered them impure. I told them these things and they were free to take them or leave them.