The American Granddaughter

by Inaam Kachachi

  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 sou
nd 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?’

  ‘Ha ha. The nargileh, of course.’

  ‘But that’s a nineteenth-century invention, pre-technology.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Lucky for me that I came across it before it’s extinct.’

  He finished the rest of his beer and sighed happily before commenting on my choice, ‘I thought you’d choose the laptop.’

  It was true that I never parted with my laptop. But despite our attachment, I didn’t appreciate its ultimate necessity until I went to Iraq. If I had to choose between my laptop and the bulletproof vest, I’d take the laptop without blinking an eye. On the white, luminous pages of this little machine, on the screen framed by sky-blue, I would record, night after night, my days in this country that seemed to grip me round the throat. For it was there that I launched my own jihad and let my soul go off-road, into the dangerous wilderness of wanton abandon.

  Was this, my darling, what they call love?

  XII

  How much curiosity and hunger does the human eye possess? My eyes were two coals blazing from the dust, my eyelids squinted against the inferno of the sun whose power I hazarded at a trillion watts. But instead of hurrying into the shade, I was still intent on surveying my surroundings. We were on a grassy hill, and the dates on the palm trees were dry and shrunken to the size of small grapes. That was where the two trucks had let us off. Twenty-nine new army recruits standing in the grounds of Saddam’s palace in Tikrit, our belongings piled up in front of us. A corporal came over with a piece of paper and started calling our names. Whoever heard their name had to take their things and stand aside and wait for the Humvee that would take them to their post. Nobody liked their assignments, and protest filled the air. ‘But why did you bring us from Baghdad to Tikrit if you’re going to send us to Nasiriya or Kut?’ Even those assigned to Hilla or Ramadi or Baquba grumbled to themselves as they headed towards the vehicles. Had they been expecting a trip to Hawaii?

  A gentle-looking guy called Dawood looked like he was about to be sick. He was being separated from the rest of the group and didn’t know where they were taking him. As for the tough guy from Karbala, he stood to one side smoking in silence and throwing mocking looks at the rest of us, poking fun at our petty fears. I later learned the secret behind his bravery. Before emigrating and settling in Philadelphia, he’d served in the Iraqi army. He’d been through both the Iran and Kuwait wars, and the fear in his heart died after having seen more corpses than the rest of us put together. I hadn’t heard the adjective ‘jeonky’ in what felt like a lifetime, but that was what came to mind as I watched that man.

  We all hoped for a safe assignment. We all hoped for a sip of cold water and a clean bathroom. We hadn’t showered in days, and the heat was adding to our grime and stickiness. Was there no end to this journey? And why did we, the five women in our group, have to show more patience and endurance than the men? One of the women with us was about seventy years old. The company hadn’t put any age limit on applications. Regardless of your age or religion or background or ethnicity or educational level, you qualified for the job as long as you spoke Arabic and English, even if you could barely read them. The corporal told our elder colleague that she would be positioned in Beji. She cried out in panic, ‘Where is that?’ and he answered politely, ‘Ma’am, they will take you.’

  Hanaa, who was born in Akra, wanted her work to be there, close to her people. But the list in the corporal’s hand took her to Al-Imara. And when Rula was told she would work in Hilla, she said rashly, ‘I won’t go to Hilla. If I’m not placed in the Baghdad Hotel or the Green Zone I’m going back to the States,’ to which the corporal replied without hesitation, ‘Ma’am, we will put you on the first convoy returning to Baghdad and you can take the plane from there.’ Later on I heard that our Lebanese colleague went back and didn’t complete her contract. The Egyptian followed soon after.

  All the names had been called and mine still hadn’t come up on the list. I was still standing after all my travel companions had dispersed.

  The corporal approached me and asked, ‘Are you Zeina?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘You’re staying in Tikrit. That’s why I didn’t call your name.’ So Tikrit was to be my destiny. I had returned after fifteen years to find myself in the birthplace of the dictator that we came to overthrow. This was turning into a bit of a horror movie, No Beast Left in the City.

  I got out of the Humvee that dropped me off at my station. The sun was about to set. I stood and took in my surroundings, in a 180-degree pan from left to right. I counted no less than twelve palaces, the biggest being the one I was standing right outside. It was built with some kind of light-coloured stone. On every stone of the outer wall were carved the letters SH – Saddam Hussein. The marble covering the floor was fascinating, with patterns in rose, pistachio green and violet. I looked up as I entered, taking in the high walls with inlaid wood and the sparkling crystal chandeliers dangling from the ceilings. There was a vast reception hall, still holding some remnants of earlier times, some French-style sofas, Louis XIV and all that. But the upholstery was worn and the wood disintegrating. Did things really fall apart so quickly?

  I took the small camera out of my bag and asked someone to take a photo of me sitting on one of the gilded sofas with my leg over the armrest. Vulgarity was necessary under the circumstances. So that was my first photo of the New Iraq. I wasn’t disturbed by the thought of
whose behind might have rested on this seat before me, or of how this hall was once crowded with the master of the house and his guests. They were all a bunch of hypocrites and corrupt rulers who’d clung with their teeth to power until the bitter end.

  It was a spacious palace, but they couldn’t find room for me to sleep on my own. They seemed to have been expecting a male translator. They debated the issue among themselves while I sat on my gold throne awaiting the outcome. I was then taken to a room that stood between the big palace and the guards’ house, which was itself another palace, though smaller. My room had once been the kitchen of the smaller palace. I panicked a bit as I looked around me at the boxes of provisions and piles of tin cans that filled the place. But then two soldiers came and carried everything out to be stored somewhere else. I spent the evening washing the floor until the coloured marble tiles gleamed once more. Just like that, the guards’ kitchen came to be my personal room in Saddam’s palace. I opened my big green bag and started arranging my clothes and things into food cupboards and cutlery drawers. The two soldiers returned with an iron bed, sheets and a blanket, and wished me a good night. I slept the sleep of the dead.

  XIII

  Rahma addressed her morning prayer to the miracle-working silver-framed painting of the Virgin Mary that was placed to the left of her bed. Rahma’s style of worship was devised to suit her different moods, her preoccupations and the state of her health. It was even adaptable to the availability or lack of electricity in that it wouldn’t interrupt the soap operas. The morning prayer could be held in the evening, especially when there was a power cut and no TV. There was no harm, either, in saying her Hail Marys while she rubbed her arthritis-stiff hands with almond oil, or in adding in a massage for her strange-looking feet whose big toes curled on top of the others, if she felt like prolonging the prayer. Her ritual was completely her own.