The American Granddaughter

by Inaam Kachachi

  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 wor
n 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.

  I was based in one of the presidential palaces. ‘Like a figment of the imagination,’ as Rokuz, Candice’s husband, used to say when describing to us the wealth of the Gulf sheikhs that he worked with. In the palace I sat on a luxurious chair upholstered in olive-green leather, wide enough for three of me, and wrote at a Napoleon-something style table. At first we used to stop and gasp at every gilded settee or Chinese carpet. We used to go dizzy from looking up at the inlaid Andalusian ceilings and Bohemian chandeliers. But in less than a week we had grown used to the palace and its furnishings, as if we had been born in the arms of such riches. Sometimes we even felt hard done by when soldiers in the Green Zone emailed us photos that they’d taken in fancier palaces. They were the children of the capital, while we were the children of the provinces. Though the people of Tikrit were anything but provincial. To us, they were more like sophisticated riddles that we couldn’t solve.

  Men and women came to the gate every day with claims, protests and demands. Our soldiers had burned down his shop; an army vehicle had run over her cow; the windows of his house had been broken; their whole house had been destroyed by a bomb. We were to blame for every single disaster in this pampered city. I listened and interpreted and filled in forms and gave advice. But I didn’t permit myself sympathy or displays of emotion. They came, in the mornings, having stood in long lines before the gate and submitted with resentment to the thorough and harsh search process. We recorded their losses and avoided getting into discussions. A week or two later, financial compensation would be issued, which ranged from a hundred to a thousand dollars. Those were the daytime visitors.

  The night’s darkness provided the needed cover for other visitors, those who came to volunteer ‘useful information’. That’s how they usually described the rumours they passed on, in the hope of a job or a contract or a few greenbacks in return. One of them would come to tell us he knew the location of Ezzat Al-Douri, the King of Clubs in the ‘most-wanted Iraqi playing cards’. ‘Believe me, he will be in such-and-such a village at such-and-such an hour,’ he’d say. I’d take down his statement, translate it and pass it to the commanding officer. Another day a young woman with big kohl-lined eyes came to the reception and asked for a private meeting. She wasn’t from Tikrit but was studying at the university here. She entered, disguised by her abaya, and stood in the line for compensation claims. As soon as we entered my office, she threw off her abaya and said that she had ‘useful information’. I took her to a back room and called the intelligence officer and interpreted her words to him. The student said that a group of her colleagues were planning an anti-occupation meeting at such-and-such an hour. She gave us some details then went on about how much she admired the West, how she loved rock music. She was pretty, witty and gregarious, and her English was okay. But I felt uneasy in her presence. I estimated she was less than twenty years old. A fledgling collaborator.

  The young informer fell in love with our intelligence officer, Lieutenant Frankie, an African-American from Chicago. He liked her in return and was easy prey for her pointed stares. It got to the point where they were planning to get married. She used come to visit him twice a week. As standard precaution, none of us trusted her completely. For how were we to know that she wasn’t planted by the resistance? Even Frankie sometimes had his doubts, and enlisted my help – on the basis that I must know the mentality of women here – to test her out by drawing her into conversation and finding out if she really loved him or if she was pretending. I didn’t at all mind being a consultant in matters of the heart. It was like having a part in a movie along the lines of Juliet in Tikrit.

  Once their relationship reached the stage of holding hands, I left them to it. I didn’t really care about what went on between them. I wasn’t the vice police. I think he promised to marry her once his service in Iraq came to an end. She believed that he would come back for her and take her to Chicago.

  A story that happens in all wars and between all nations. But the young informant was found one morning, dead on top of a mound of garbage, with her throat slit and her eyes gouged out. This was the first real shock that put an end to my reckless sense of adventure and placed me near the heart of the tragedy. The first drop, as my father would say.

  At night I had to take part in patrols and in raids on houses where we suspected terrorists might be hiding. Those were long nights of anticipation, full of voices yelling and pleading and wailing, and looks that were sharper than daggers. Strangely, what I felt wasn’t fear, as much as an awareness that I was going through experiences that nobody would have guessed that I’d see. Yes, there were those who bragged about making history. And we were indeed making a new future for the country that held my ancestral
bones and had, once, held me in its arms.

  The difficult raids took place after 10 p.m. Our evening in Tikrit started around six, dinner time, the hour when young people in America would be back from work or university and getting ready to go out to the gym or to a bar or club. Our dinner at the camp was shit. Dried food in plastic packs. You opened the bag and poured hot water onto the powder inside. The energy released by the reaction between the water and the powder heated up the food and turned it into outer-space dishes of chicken with pasta or meatballs with vegetables. There was also a yellow powder, which turned into something resembling fruit juice when you added water. When they wanted to spoil us, an army cook was sent, twice a week, to prepare hot American meals – sliced ham with mashed potato, for example. I generally preferred the shit bags.

  We dealt with our constant hunger by sending one of the local interpreters to a local restaurant once in a while to bring us some roast chicken or tasty kebab. The local interpreters were our envoys to the outside world. They didn’t enter the camp, but stood at the outer gate to interpret between the guards and members of the public, who were then escorted to the next gate to be handed over to an American interpreter. That would be me.

  The first time I scoffed the market kebab, I hadn’t yet built up my immunity and I suffered severe stomach cramps and even worse diarrhoea. But I didn’t give up. I carried on craving the local kebab, which was pure fat with a hint of meat. And therein lay its tastiness. The diarrhoea lasted about a week and I lost three kilos.

  We had a lieutenant who was more than two metres tall. His name was Benjamin Green and we called him ‘Big Ben’. One day, he came down from his high tower to look upon us, and I was sitting cross-legged on the marble floor of the palace, my sleeves rolled up, before me a spread of kebabs, leeks, spring onions and garlic pickles on an old newspaper. He looked down at me with contempt, like he was a white colonialist talking to a savage native, and said, ‘What are you putting into your mouth?’