Apart from Calvin, I mostly mixed with Arabs. ‘You, my darling, represent the American minority in our midst.’ He liked that joke, just as he liked everything I said, mostly. My Calvin, my poor, unassuming, drunk Calvin, unemployed most months of the year and who, when I raised my voice in conversation with friends, would think we were fighting.
‘Don’t worry, my dear. We’re discussing politics.’
‘Politics, always politics!’
At home I never heard my mother speak anything but Iraqi Arabic, although my father wanted us to learn Chaldean too, his mother tongue. English remained the language of the street, work and the news. We would contort our jawbones and speak it the moment we stepped outside the house. Our cars took us and our English around from street to street and from mall to mall. Then they brought us back to the zinc-covered garages in front of the house, where we changed language again and slipped indoors.
‘How come your daughter hasn’t forgotten the language of your country?’ the neighbours would ask when they heard me chatting on the phone to Sahira, and my mother would smile and look at me with a pride that bordered on gratitude. How she wished she could have given me the surname of her respected Mosul family: Zeina Behnam Saour. If only my destiny had led there and I’d married one of my maternal cousins. Or if I’d carried my mother’s surname alongside my father’s on my ID, like Spanish women did. Oh, the hopes of Sitt Batoul, and her stubbornness and her constant arguing with my dad. Wasn’t he the one who deserved credit for my language, that jewel around my neck that was the source of her pride?
Something, perhaps divine good fortune, stopped me forgetting how to read and write in Arabic after we left Baghdad. There was, of course, Hermes, my sensitive friend from Alqosh, whom I considered my most faithful ‘girlfriend’. A poet in the style of Nizar Qabbani, Hermes wrote plays and stories in Arabic and asked me for feedback on what he wrote. Lots of books and novels came for him by mail, ordered from a bookshop in Dearborn or from neelwafurat.com online. He’d devour them like fast food then pass them on to me. I loved to read slowly, savouring the weight of every word. I would read aloud, as my grandfather would do when I was little, holding the newspaper in front of him while my grandmother listened. My father, too, liked to read aloud. That was his job, and it put food on our table, but then that turned into poison.
As in the homes of all immigrants in our community, the corners of our apartment – one of four apartments that made up a derelict wooden building in Seven Mile – were also piled high with cassette tapes and CDs of Arabic songs by Fairuz, Um Kulthum and Kazim Al-Sahir. Plus, I had my gang in Detroit. The movie about us would have to be called Zeina’s Gang. That’s how my mom referred to my group of Lebanese, Iraqi, Palestinian and Syrian friends. There was one Egyptian woman among us, and she never tired of talking about the plays of Mohammad Sobhy, which meant nothing to me at the time. My gang met for dinner on the first Saturday of every month at one of the Arabic restaurants in the city. We chatted and laughed, ate tabouleh, mejaddareh and shawermeh, and danced to the rhythms of oud and tabla. That was the one evening that Calvin eagerly waited to be rid of me.
So of course I passed the language test.
I waited for them to contact me but they took their time and the war started without me. I heard on the news that the president had secured the support of Congress. Who cared about the United Nations? What nations anyway, and what bullshit? With the start of operations, we all became slaves to the TV screens. We were addicted to the news and never got our fill. If you nodded off in front of the screen, dozens of hands would shake you awake. If you sleep, you miss out on history!
Despite my enthusiasm for the war, I experienced a strange kind of pain that was hard to define. Was I a hypocrite, a two-faced American? A dormant Iraqi like those sleeping cells of spies planted in an enemy land and lying in wait for years? Why did I suddenly go all Mother Theresa – the namesake of my patron saint – over the Iraqi victims? I collapsed into myself as I watched Baghdad being bombed and the columns of smoke rising after each American attack. It was like watching myself use my mom’s cigarette lighter to set my own hair on fire, or cut my own skin with my nail scissors, or slap my left cheek with my right hand.
Why couldn’t I sit still for five minutes? I told that other who was also me that there were terrified children and innocent civilians dying in Baghdad. I told her those children could be the children of your classmates from school, and the dead civilians could be the sons of your uncles or the daughters of your aunts. That charred body at the entrance of Al-Karkh Hospital might be Suheil, the son of your neighbour Sitt Lamiaa, the boy who tried to kiss you on the roof of your house in Ghadir. Have you forgotten your very first kiss, on the day you’d gone up to the roof to watch the solar eclipse, clutching in your hands the cardboard sunglasses that had come with the day’s newspaper? You were not yet ten.
The TV wouldn’t stop charging us with emotion. It pumped us with adrenaline as it carried images of smoke and the noise of explosions, scenes of men running to escape death, and of boys yellow-faced with panic but waving victory signs to the cameras all the same. I watched people enter government buildings and leave with tables and chandeliers and chairs and plastic plants carried on their heads or their backs. Everyone racing for a share of the pillage. Some laughed at the camera when they realised they’d been caught unawares, but the majority looked away and rushed on. Baghdad had become a free-for-all. Iraq was leaderless.
But in spite of everything I saw, I wasn’t afraid or tempted to withdraw. So when Sahira came and threw that burning coal into my lap, I applied again. I didn’t wait long this time, but soon received a phone call from a man who didn’t introduce himself. He gave me a sentence to translate into Arabic as a quick phone test, and asked a few questions about my age, qualifications, health and social and financial status. He wanted to make sure the applicant wasn’t in debt and just after the money. I answered all of his questions calmly and with few words, trying all the time to visualise his face. I don’t know why I attached the face of Sean Connery to his voice: I was applying for work as an interpreter, not as a secret agent. It seemed that my calmness persuaded him that I was suitable for the job, because he asked me to come in for a meeting and, two days later, sent me a plane ticket to the capital.
I said goodbye to Mom and Jason and travelled on a grey morning to Washington DC, joining dozens of other Arabs who had applied for the same work. From there I called my dad in Arizona and told him that I was going to Baghdad. At first he said nothing, then he mumbled a few words from which I gathered that he didn’t like the idea, not because of the war but because he imagined that his death sentence was still in effect and feared they might arrest me in his place.
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 oth
ers 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. Zayna Behnaym. 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.
The American Granddaughter Page 2