The American Granddaughter (5 page)

That first evening, I had no urge to wander around the palace. Destruction doesn’t trigger my curiosity. There was nothing but scattered metal beds on which soldiers slept. I was dressed like them but hadn’t yet gotten used to mixing with them. Still, the day ended with a pleasant little surprise. Dinner arrived in bags from the Semiramis Restaurant in the Dawra district. I found out from the young man who brought us the kebabs that it was a restaurant owned by an Assyrian guy. Welcome to the dear cousins!

By the fourth day, we’d all had enough. Finally, the handsome major came with the instructions we’d been waiting for. He said we would all be sent in a military convoy to Tikrit.

‘Tikrit? Saddam’s city? They must be kidding! What kind of dog’s chance is that?’

Of all members of the group, Lebanese Rula and Egyptian Nadia seemed least concerned to learn of our transfer to Tikrit. Neither of them had heard of the city before, and they didn’t know what it meant for Iraqis. So while we were all complaining, the two of them remained calm. The major ignored our protests. He knew they were empty. There wasn’t a soldier who wouldn’t feel special being sent to serve in Tikrit, the city that could raise her children to the highest heaven or cast them underground to the depths of hell.

The major told us to get ready. We gathered our things, which were taken by soldiers, chucked onto two trucks and covered with a sheet. I climbed into the back of one of the trucks. Three armed soldiers rode with us, and armoured vehicles accompanied us, one in front and two behind, a helmet and a machine gun peering out of each.

The hot air stealing in through the gaps in the cover hit our faces and the dust burned our eyes. Still, I wanted to see everything. And what I saw, as we crossed parts of Baghdad, were ruins that I had never seen the likes of before. The debris blown by the wind from the burning, crumbling buildings was evocative of the ash that had rained over New York on that painful 11th of September. Pain could only lead to pain, and destruction to equal destruction. Or that was what I thought in my early naïve days.

‘This is Samarra.’ An involuntary cry escaped me as the spiral minaret appeared on the horizon. I remembered my personal history in that place. The school trips, the sixth-grade girls with the plaits and white ribbons, the dancing circles to the tune of popular songs under the gaze of Ma Soeur Madeleine, the French nun who was like a surveillance tower watching over us. The egg and mango pickle rolls wrapped in aluminium foil. Was that why those days shone like silver in my memory?

I braced myself against this wave of nostalgia and feigned nonchalance in my smile as I pointed to the minaret and said to those sitting beside me, ‘I climbed all those steps when I was less than ten years old. All the way to the top.’ The scenes of my childhood poured over me like hot rain, burning instead of cooling. I watched, as if a feckless tourist, the Bedouin women as they passed by with baskets on their heads, holding the hems of their
abayas
in front of their faces as they stopped to watch our convoy. The faces were difficult to read, except for the faces of children, who waved to us with thin, sunburnt arms.

I hadn’t given much thought to how Iraqis would receive us. What I’d seen on TV wasn’t discouraging. These were people eager for regime change, dreaming of freedom and welcoming to the arrival of the US Army. Why, then, were the black eyes looking out from behind the
abayas
overflowing with all that rejection? There was no friendliness in those eyes, or joy. Their irises seemed to be made of the same substance of sadness. What did this country hold for me in the days to come, besides the bones of my ancestors?

I don’t remember how many hours it took us to cross what they called the ‘Highway of Death’. We sensed danger whenever the driver suddenly speeded up as we passed through an inhabited town or a major crossing. The convoy didn’t stop or slow down for anything until we reached Tikrit. We wound our way into the inner streets until the main American camp appeared before us, a zigzag road and concrete barriers marking its boundaries. Again, the children were waving to us, while the looks of adults surrounded us with suspicion and resentment, looks that seemed to be saying, ‘Here come the rabble!’ What little energy I had left wouldn’t permit me the simple act of jumping out of the dusty lorry. My behind had taken a battering from bouncing with every bump in the road, and all my bones ached. In a move of uncharacteristic chivalry, the soldiers helped the women off the truck and carried our things inside.

‘Inside’ was just another one of Saddam’s palaces.

X

Zein. Darling Zayouna. Zuweina. Zonzon. The
zeina
– adornment – of the house. My Grandmother Rahma always went over the top with nicknames, as if under her tongue there lived a cunning bird that prompted her with words of affection, pampering and coddling. As if she carried, in the deep pockets of her dressing gown, a clockwork device that disassembled the complex letters of any phrase, beating and grinding them, then mixing them anew into delicious little shapes that were somehow easier to digest.

My grandmother told me that Tawoos was coming to visit, and I knew that she meant the tall, dark, somewhat masculine woman into whose open arms my brother Yazan and I used to run whenever she came, carrying sesame buns and sweets from her faraway house in Thawra City. Was Tawoos – Um Haydar, as she was known to the outside world – a relative of ours or just a friend of my mother’s? My grandmother gave me a sidelong look, contemptuous of the stupidity that I seemed to have imported from overseas. Could I possibly have forgotten Tawoos, the seamstress, who was tied to us by a lifelong kinship? ‘All our clothes, all our handkerchiefs and scarves, sheets and pillowcases, come from the work of her hands.’ That was my grandmother’s summarised calling card for the woman who came over every Tuesday to help with her chores, which comprised a list that would have been too long to include in the most up-to-date encyclopaedia: patching up worn curtains; tidying up Rahma’s cupboards; washing and changing pillowcases; ironing sheets and tablecloths; picking oranges from the garden, making juice and filling bottles with it to put in the fridge; making
kibbeh
balls and half-cooking them for freezing; preparing the henna mix in the special pan and applying it to Rahma’s hair (under the pretext that it prevented headaches); threading Rahma’s eyebrows and upper lip; sprinkling cockroach repellent in the corners and drains; washing the yard, sweeping the rooftop and wiping the dust off the satellite dish so that it didn’t interfere with reception; burning sandalwood incense in all the rooms of the house; picking olives, seasonally, from the garden, salting them and laying them out on woven trays in the sun; making pastrami by filling the
saandaweylat
with mince and hanging them on a rope in a breeze. The list of the tasks that this strongly built woman had mastered over decades of being a faithful companion to my grandmother went on and on.

When Tawoos first heard the term
saandaweylat
she thought the women of the house were talking about the hosepipes for washing the rooftop or watering the garden. Or maybe they were talking about sandals, those light shoes that they wore in summer? How was she to know that, in the dialect of Mosul,
saandaweylat
were the intestines of cows, which were filled with a mixture of minced meat, garlic and spices in order to make pastrami? Even after finding out the real meaning, she still found the whole thing too disgusting and kept calling them ‘
sandwilat
’ instead, with a lighter ‘s’ and shorter vowels, as if by lessening the stress on all the letters she could somehow block out some of the smell. Or maybe she found some similarity with ‘sandwiches’, that other strange word that Tawoos found a bit suspicious.

‘I’ll tell you a story that happened during one of those long green springs in Mosul. That particular spring was more red than green because of the communist tide. We nearly sacrificed our lives for our
saandaweylat
.’ I liked it when Rahma expounded her views on politics, sounding like an expert on strategic affairs or CNN commentator when she said things like ‘communist tide’, ‘American plot’, ‘Zionist conspiracy’, ‘the Jewish Farhud’, ‘Rashid Ali’s nationalist movement’, ‘Mosaddegh’s coup’, ‘the intrigue of Nuri Pasha’ who believed that ‘the master’s house was always safe’, ‘Kissinger’s plan’, ‘the charisma of Nasser’. Even charisma was a familiar concept to Rahma!

‘My sister Ghazala telephoned from Basra, a week before Christmas. Apparently I answered in a tired voice and she asked what was wrong, and I said I was exhausted because I’d been mixing five kilos of flour for the festive cookies and had just finished cleaning the
saandaweylat
and preparing them to be
loaded
. That same night security forces knocked on the door and turned the house upside down. When they didn’t find anything, they took my two uncles to one of their secret interrogation centres and beat the shit out of them: “Tell me where it hurts so I can help you.” They wanted them to confess where the shotguns and machine guns were hidden, those that the women had encoded as
saandaweylat
when they relayed the message over the phone. “Do you think the revolution is blind to its enemies?”’

I laughed, and my grandmother laughed with me as she told me how the security men came back the following day and headed straight for the fridge. They searched it, scattering tomatoes everywhere and breaking water bottles. Then they screamed at the women: ‘Where are the
saandaweylat
, bitches?’ My uncle’s wife, the bravest among them, signalled with her hand towards the red pastrami bundles that were hanging from a rope above their heads, giving off their strong aroma of garlic and spices, and said: ‘Here they are. You hungry? I can fry some for you and throw in some double-yolk eggs.’ Tawoos wiped her tears of laughter away and shook the hem of her
dishdasha
with the inevitable murmur, ‘Let this laughter bode well for us, dear God.’

Grandma Rahma ran a trembling hand across my hair, hoping those stories would win me over to her side. This woman didn’t give up easily, and it seemed like her plan was to baste me over a slow fire. She took a little bit out of her pot full of stories and used it to nourish my roots, to bring life into the branches of my belonging. She spread her fingers to rub my forehead, the way she used to drive fear away after a nightmare when I was little. She rubbed vigorously to drive away the evil spirit that had possessed me and returned me to her in a distorted form. ‘Zuweina, my child, is there any other country on this earth where people entertain themselves with memories of oppression and abuse?’

XI

Calvin had asked me once, ‘What do you think, Zeina, is the greatest invention of the twentieth century?’ In his right hand he had an empty can of beer that he was squeezing into a glob of metal. Calvin could consume a chilled beer in two swigs. He enjoyed the sound of creaking metal as he opened the can and then took a long first swig made up of multiple gulps. He swallowed and let out a snake-like sigh, imitating the handsome, rugged actor in the Pepsi ad. Calvin, too, was handsome, at least to me. I once tried to translate for him the Arabic saying about the monkey being as beautiful as a gazelle in his mother’s eyes, but he stared at me blankly and said that indeed he considered the monkey more beautiful than the gazelle. His realism didn’t irritate me. His freedom from the oriental superstitions that filled my pockets and weighed me down, and his lack of a sense of humour, didn’t turn me off. Nor did I dislike his ginger curls and the freckles on his nose and his back. I liked Calvin the way he was. If he had been romantic, or gallant, or a bit funnier, with dark flowing hair, I would’ve been inclined to lose myself in his love and leave the world behind to remain under his feet. The kind of love that borders on obsession scared me. I tried to avoid it so I could stay in control of the rudder of my soul, the only true companion in the days that I often just watched pass me by.

I sat on the balcony and looked at Calvin lying on the bamboo sofa and thought to myself that yes, he was the man for this phase of my life. I was quite content with the temporariness of what he gave me. Tomorrow, as Scarlett O’Hara had it, was another day.

‘You tell me first what you think is the greatest invention,’ I retorted.

‘You really wanna know?’

‘Yeah, go ahead.’

He got up and went through the door that was held open by a large stone. In one long stride Calvin reached the fridge and returned with the second can of beer. One
shabkha
there and one
shabkha
back. That was how we’d describe Calvin’s beer-hunt stalk in our dialect. But I didn’t have the energy for the process of translating
shabkha
for him. He’d ask me to say it again in Arabic. Then he’d try to pronounce it as if spelling, one syllable at a time, before shaking his head in mock amazement while repeating the word, happy with his linguistic fluency. Finally, he’d take out his little diary and write ‘
shabkha
’ in English letters with the definition next to it.

He carried on the conversation, ‘Don’t yell at me, sweetheart, but I think the invention of the century is the remote control.’

‘Doesn’t surprise me that that’s what you think, you lazy
tanbal
.’

I stuck my fingers in my ears as I uttered the Arabic word, to indicate that I wasn’t in the mood for explaining what it meant. He nodded obediently, drank half the can in the first swig and let out his usual sigh, before challenging me, ‘Come on, Zaynaa
,
your turn. What’s the greatest invention of the twentieth century?’