‘Kebab.’
‘How do they allow food in from outside? Couldn’t it be poisoned by insurgents?’
‘That’s why you have to eat garlic with it. It’s strong enough to stop the effect of any poison,’ I said, extending a clove of garlic pickled in date vinegar to him, the smell of which alone could knock an elephant out. He took it in his fingertips like he was holding a scorpion, cautiously brought it to his nose and suppressed a sneeze. He threw the scorpion back on the newspaper and hurried away on his long legs. I yelled after him, ‘Don’t be scared, Big Ben. It doesn’t explode under your tongue.’
Then came salvation. Two women from the northern villages came to the camp looking for work. They’d been cleaners at the Tikrit High School for Girls and had lost their jobs when the school closed because of the war. Their husbands were disabled Iran War veterans, and they were sole providers for big families. Captain Dixon’s heart softened, and he decided to employ them as cleaners and to make tea. As I was constantly craving edible food, I studied the women and chose the fatter of the two. ‘Do you know how to cook dolma?’ I asked her in all seriousness, as if it were a security interrogation. She smiled with peasant cunning and answered, ‘Dolma, biryani, teshrib, everything your heart desires. You name it and I’ll bring it.’ I gave her twenty dollars and asked her for a pot of biryani. She came the following day with a relative helping her carry a pot that was big enough for a whole army unit. That day, I ate till I was full, as did Dixon and ten more of the inveterate starving soldiers. It was a meal the likes of which they’d never even imagined. From that day on, Nahrain became my personal cook. She also started taking my clothes to wash and iron in return for a few dollars.
We ate by day, and by night, as the city slept and anxiety and fear abated, we raided. I went out on my first night raid ten days after my arrival in Tikrit. They called me to accompany the unit raiding a house in which we were told Al-Douri was hiding. We didn’t come across him there. We found an underground tunnel that led to a vehicle of the type that’s attached to the back of lorries, big as a mobile home. We later found out that he’d left before we arrived. We always arrived after they’d left. An Iraqi-produced version of The Fugitive.
XX
The writer opened her desk drawer and brought out a bundle of newspaper cuttings and human rights reports that she tossed in my direction. ‘Read these,’ she said.
I know what’s in them. Every night I sit cross-legged on my bed, place the laptop in front of me and criss-cross continents. I read about false intelligence and cooked-up reports, about resignations from the president’s advisors, about the president’s slips of the tongue, about his lies, about controversies between the Pentagon and the CIA. I read about protests in America, about numbers in the billions. I read online and see with my own two eyes what the screen cannot show. I watch army coffins being shipped home. Friendly fire; Al-Qaeda; Zarqawi; corruption; systematic plundering; sectarianism; mass exodus. Reporters murdered. Iraqi scientists murdered. University professors. Women.
‘Yes. What do you need me for now? You have piles of documents to help you finish the novel.’
‘It’s not me who’s writing. It’s Rahma. Haven’t you figured that out yet?’
Has my grandmother put her up to this? What use was it to Rahma if she managed to pry my head open and fill it with all her own values and life experiences? My grandmother was as mad as Tawoos. Just a different kind of madness. Tawoos once told me, ‘When I die, don’t bury my hands with me.’
I winked at my childhood nanny and said, ‘Have you heard of an afreet dying?’
‘We all die in the end. And I don’t want these hands to be eaten by worms. So when I stop breathing, take my hands and wear them over yours, like gloves.’ Tawoos opened her palms between us and mourned her manual skills that would be buried with her. ‘Have you ever seen hands like mine, Zeina? Hands that are skilled in everything? They can cook and mix dough, embroider and sew and sweep the floor and wash clothes and beat rugs, they can iron and plant and harvest and milk the cows and pluck chickens and feed birds, they can saw wood, bandage wounds, hammer nails and give the finger. What more do you want?’
Just as Tawoos wanted me to inherit her hands, my grandmother wanted me to inherit her memory. And the writer was happy with the decision because it served her novel. She’s only good at writing, the only work that defied Tawoos’ capable hands. It was noble work, in people’s eyes. Unlike sweeping and polishing glass. But it also had the power to bend the truth.
Every time I tried to escape from her, I saw her shadow behind me, attached to my own. They merged until I couldn’t tell them apart.
Even my grandmother feared what the writer was doing. She didn’t want the words being taken out of her mouth and confined to paper. Paper was incapable of conveying the hoarseness in her voice or the heat of her breath. What my grandmother was after was a direct channel from her memory into my consciousness, without the writer’s mediation. That was the only thing my grandmother lived for now. I don’t know what gave her the idea that my family history would redeem me. She would use it to put me back on the righteous path and to correct the directions of my compass. The stories she told me mirror the history of the homeland. Her characters were perfumed with the scent of Iraq, and her education programme took no shortcuts. It was full of committed employees and loyal craftsmen, teachers who dedicated their lives to the blackboard, integrity being the real protagonist. Wasn’t there a single person in the whole family who was idle or corrupt? Could a movie be suspenseful without villains?
I would be the villain, then. I would be the element of suspense, the foundation of conflict that made any drama possible, the hook that held the writer’s interest in the story. I didn’t know how far she’d got in the novel she stole from my reality. Did she still hate me and take Rahma’s side, stereotyping me as the traitor and her as the epitome of authenticity? How did she know my grandmother wouldn’t slip from between her keyboard-hitting fingers and go to meet her God, anyway?
So Rahma would die. And the writer would kill me off, too, in the end. She would arrange an abduction, or a mortar, or a roadside bomb under an army vehicle. If I had the choice, I would go for friendly fire. With my own hand, not my enemies’. I didn’t feel like satisfying the blood thirst of any Mujahideen. I knew she wanted to have a black bag placed over my head and have me shot at close range. That’s how treason was supposed to be punished. But I refused to die a coward’s death. I demanded the chance to fight back.
Come back here, don’t go. Restart the computer. And don’t interrupt.
XXI
We were told that he was an evil son of a bitch.
He was a security official in the former regime. It was people like him that we were supposed to be holding to account for their crimes against humanity. There was no pity for someone like him. As long as he, and others like him, were free, Iraq could not rise up and give its rendition of the hymn of democracy. It was midnight when we headed in three vehicles to the house of that contemptible man. Twenty soldiers got out and surrounded the house. They were armed to the teeth, but to me they looked like panthers moving in the dark. I waited in the Humvee with two soldiers guarding me. I wasn’t scared but I was nervous. It was my first real raid.
Four of the soldiers broke the iron garden gate, went into the yard, kicked the wooden door and were inside. Inside, a family was sleeping; a woman woke up and started screaming. Then a man appeared in his white dishdasha, holding out his open hands towards the soldiers and saying, ‘Yes . . . Yes.’ They shouted and gestured at him to lie face down on the floor, and he immediately understood. He dropped down quickly as if he’d been trained for situations like this. They ordered him to extend his arms to the sides and he did so. A soldier stepped forward and tied the man’s hands behind his back with a nylon wire. Then they called me over from the vehicle to do the interpreting.
I looked at the ‘target’ and the M16 aimed at his head, and I noted his goo
d looks: green eyes and a tall figure whose dignity was emphasised by the white dishdasha. Not everyone could continue to look dignified while lying face down on the floor.
The unit’s sergeant brought out a piece of paper from his pocket and told me to ask the man his name.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Mohammad Khalil.’
‘Your full name.’
‘Mohammad Khalil Mohammad Ayash Al-Abeedy.’
He sounded as if he was choking on his pride. From an inner room we heard children crying. The name that the ‘target’ had just given didn’t match the one written down on the sergeant’s piece of paper. From the open door a woman appeared with uncovered hair and a light-coloured dishdasha. She addressed me directly, her voice full of panic, ‘Sister. Wallah, my husband’s done nothing. He’s done nothing, wallah.’
My lips trembled and I struggled to keep my composure. On my own initiative, and without double-checking with the sergeant, I reached out and gently pushed aside the weapon that was aimed at her husband’s head. I said, ‘It’s nothing to be scared of. Just a simple investigation.’
The sergeant was asking me, ‘It this the man we want?’
‘Not according to his name.’
He told me to ask him for ID.
‘Where’s your ID?’
He’d barely lifted his head towards his wife when the sergeant shouted and aimed the weapon back towards the man’s skull. ‘Face down on the ground!’
The ‘target’ did not need my interpretation to understand what was required of him. He swiftly stuck his cheek to the bare yellow and black tiles. I intervened again and whispered to the sergeant, ‘Take it easy. He’s asking his wife to bring his ID.’
I received a look of gratitude from the green eyes before they returned to the floor. The man said to his wife, ‘Quick, bring the ID quickly, from the drawer under the TV.’
The woman went looking for the ID but couldn’t find it. She was panicking and confused, yelling from next door, ‘I can’t find it! Where the hell is it? Where did you put it?’
I interpreted what she was saying for the sergeant, while the man on the floor was grinding his teeth as he yelled back to his wife, ‘Check the cupboard by the TV, woman!’
A few moments later, the wife returned with the ID. I read it and handed it to the sergeant, pointing to the name that didn’t match the paper at all. Neither the first name or the father’s name, nor the grandfather’s or the family surname. Under profession, it said ‘teacher’. Again I confirmed to my colleague that this was not the wanted man. The sergeant, who had three sharp-angled lines on his arm, relaxed and ordered the soldier to cut the hand ties. They helped the man up and sat him on a chair, before the sergeant asked him one more time for his full name to confirm that he was the owner of the ID. The man repeated the name. I directed my colleague’s attention to the fact that the man was a teacher, so he asked him about his profession. The man replied, ‘I am a professor at the University of Tikrit.’
The sergeant asked him if he knew so-and-so – the man whose name was on the piece of paper – and he answered, in English, ‘No’.
‘Oh, you speak English?’
‘Yes, I do.’
But then the man seized this moment of calm to address me in Arabic, ‘Sister, please, explain to them that I’m not from this city and don’t know anyone here. This is my first academic year at the university.’
The sergeant stepped forward, bowed before the man, shook his hand and said in a theatrical tone, ‘Sir, please accept my apology.’
The man of the house, whose door we’d broken fifteen minutes before, replied, ‘No problem, it’s okay.’ He repeated it a few times, his eyes watering in disbelief at the fact that he’d survived. I too could not believe it. I was finding the scene before me very moving.
We gave the man a compensation claim form and left through the broken door. But we didn’t return to the base right away. That night, we went and broke the outer gate of the neighbouring house. Then we knocked on the inner door and a stooped old man came out, also wearing a white dishdasha and carrying an inhaler, and behind him stood a woman of the same age. There was no one but them in the house. After examining the ID, we confirmed he was not the ‘target’ either. We apologised and gave him a form for the cost of the outer gate before leaving to break someone else’s door. But before our soldiers aimed their boots to kick the third door in, we heard the sound of a car speeding through the parallel street. The curfew had started at 9 p.m. and not even a fly would dare move at this hour. We dropped everything and ran back to the vehicles to chase after the fleeing car, but we only caught up with it when it stopped outside casualty at Tikrit hospital. The driver was helping an old man out of the car and supporting him through the hospital doors. We followed them inside and confirmed that the old man had suffered a heart attack and needed urgent treatment. We examined their IDs and the name of that son of a bitch we were after wasn’t among them.
So we returned to the base a little before dawn, and I didn’t sleep that night. When I got up for work at 6 a.m., I was still carrying a mental image of the university teacher with his cheek pressed to the floor, and his attempts to hide his humiliation in front of his wife and children, and even worse, asking us to excuse him. That image would be responsible for many nights of insomnia to come.
The three months I stayed in Tikrit were depressing on more than one account. The summer heat was unbearable. On nights when I slept on the terrace to get some air (the air-conditioning was broken), the mosquitoes tormented me, and the tanks and Humvees passed by my head on their way to the raids. To add insult to injury, there was no bathroom where I slept, whether with hot or cold water. What a miserable life for a palace!
I was deprived of the basic God-given right of having a toilet nearby. ‘Use a plastic bag,’ was the advice I received from one of the kitchen workers. I used to follow it when desperate. Other times I would walk to the other palace and jostle in line with the soldiers for their restrooms, which were like high-school toilets. Filthy and with obscene graffiti on the walls. There was always someone standing outside and peeking through the cracks or pestering you with questions or protesting that your shit was taking too long to come out.
For all these hardships, I let out a scream of savage delight when I was told that I’d be leaving Tikrit and transferring to the Green Zone in Baghdad.
XXII
‘What do you say we raid her house?’ said Donovan, my new captain in the Green Zone, one hot July evening. I thought he was joking.
In July, water boils in the jug, as the Baghdadi saying goes. That’s why we were sitting on the edge of the artificial lake with our feet in the water. The lake was no longer fit for swimming now that weeds had started growing in it and green-blue spots were floating on its stagnant surface. The soldiers who’d arrived here at the beginning of the war told us that the palaces were like something out of the Arabian Nights. There used to be an army of horticulturalists whose job it was to cultivate and maintain the garden, and they’d brought rare flowers and plants from all over the world. The lakes used to be as clear as glass; wild geese and river fish roamed in them. Then the new government officials and the members of the new ruling council arrived with their guards and wreaked havoc in the place. Gone were the specialists in roses and jasmine. The waterfowl were barbecued.
At first I didn’t get Captain Donovan’s drift. I was asking him about the possibility of visiting my grandmother, whose house was just half an hour away by car from the Zone. So he suggested we raid her house, and it turned out he meant what he said. He didn’t oppose the visit, but worried about drawing the neighbours’ attention, and so implicating my grandmother and putting her in danger. He argued she’d become an easy target for terrorists if anyone suspected that her granddaughter worked with the Americans. ‘So what do you suggest?’ I asked.
‘If you want to see her, there’s only one way: we can raid two or three houses on the street. Her house will
be one of them, and it’ll look like a normal search patrol.’
At dinner that same evening we discussed the plan with the rest of the unit. We would run investigations in the neighbourhood, under the pretext of looking for suspects, then we’d raid her house. A raid usually takes over two hours. So I’d have plenty of time to get my fill of my grandmother, while the soldiers rested on the sofas of the lounge, ate watermelon and looked at the icons of saints. We had our plan, set the date and carried on drinking Coke and devouring glasses of jelly in an attempt to cool down. The more we ate and drank, the more we sweated.
It’s time for me to step away from the keyboard and into the scene. I want to live this visit outside the text, play my true part, which lies beyond arranging words. So I’ll let the writer describe, in her high style, what happened during that pretend raid. She’s visibly relieved at my withdrawal and starts to write:
The turquoise ceramic piece still hangs in its usual place at the entrance of the house, warding off evil with its seven eyes. The smell of the oil lamp welcomes the arrivals and announces yet another power cut. The darkness of the night and the noise of the approaching armoured vehicles have turned the neighbourhood streets into a ghost town. The same darkness is a convenient cover for Zeina and her friends. One of the soldiers knocks heavily on the door, and it’s opened by Rahma herself. Three soldiers go in first, followed by Zeina, who quickly shuts the door behind her and, despite the darkness that is broken by nothing but a lonely candle, rushes to make sure the curtains are also drawn. The rest of the unit stay behind, in the safety of their armoured vehicles.
The American Granddaughter Page 8