I said to him, in an attempt at sympathy, ‘But your core must have stayed the same.’
‘The one thing that stayed the same was my hatred for Americans.’
I let the hose of the nargileh drop from my hand.
We spent our days walking around Amman and avoiding the flat. We left early to go to the hospital to check on Grandma, then went to the Gardens hotel for breakfast. Muhaymen would drive to Abdoun, and we’d leave the car and walk in the quiet neighbourhood. We pushed our hands deep into the pockets of our coats and watched the patches of snow that adorned the city’s hills.
We talked about our past lives, each of us trying to gather a whole history into a small capsule for the other to swallow, so we could rest from talking. I was in a hurry, and my time was not my own. I knew that my days in Amman were numbered and that the Zone awaited me. My gilded cage that protected me from murderers and ambushes. I wondered if my killer would be Muhaymen or one of his comrades, a wild thought that placed me on the edge of a great abyss.
A masked mujahid, like the ones I’d seen on extremist websites, walks towards me and, as soon as he’s near me, stabs me in the side. I cling to him as I fall to the floor and uncover his face. I smile, content that death has visited me from his hand. He removes my helmet and lets out a silent scream when he realises that the blood he’s spilled is his sister’s. It was a dream that I saw with my eyes wide open, my mouth going dry and my hands stiffening, a Bollywood movie that hadn’t been made yet.
XXVII
Layers of mist were peeling off our eyes like the layers of an onion. Tawoos would make sideways cuts in the onion with the knife, then soak it in boiling water to make it easier to peel. It was the first step in the graceful waltz of cooking dolma. Can I have this dance?
The news and images that assailed us day in and day out were like hot water that peels off the layers of mist. But the waltz was no longer a gliding dance that twirls the soul to the tunes of violins made of ebony and rosewood. How long did it take us to understand that war was no dance and no picnic, that death had a bitter aftertaste?
The photograph of Regina Barnhurst in USA Today showed her sitting cross-legged on the green grass of Arlington Cemetery, as if she was on an idyllic ‘picnic’ enjoying the fresh air and the spring sun. Her ginger locks fell on her face as she bent towards the inscription on a white headstone. The photographer seemed to have placed the camera at the lowest possible point before pressing the button. The picture had the same vantage point as the grass, growing with it in the shadow of the headstone.
Tommy brought us the newspapers tied with cotton twine. They stayed piled up in the corner, their smell reminding me of bagel shops on cold mornings. On each table a jar of honey and a newspaper. I cut the twine with the knife that I carried in my belt and checked the TV programmes. What would my mother be watching tonight, over there?
It was Memorial Day, and the newspaper was flying its kite over the cemeteries and the grief-stricken homes. Nobody wanted to forget or help others forget. Photographers flocked to the mothers and set up their cameras on the doorstep of their tears. People liked to read about grief, and this woman was too weak to fight the readers’ requests. Regina, or Gina, as they called her, came here every Sunday, spread a blanket on the grass and sat cross-legged, writing letters to Eric Herzberg, her son who was buried under the headstone, one of thousands of identical headstones that were lined up as far as the eyes could see in Section 60 of the cemetery. Underneath every one of them lay a soldier killed in Iraq.
Gina didn’t lift her head to look at the women and men who wandered in silence among the graves. But Leesa Philippon saw her from a distance and felt an urge to get closer to her grief. She approached Gina and touched her shoulder. The visitors to cemeteries communicated by touching each other’s shoulders. It was the sign of a common grief. They were like a group of blind people stepping into traffic, each one guided by the shoulder of the one before them.
Gina had lost her son, the marine lance corporal, to a sniper’s bullet in the third year of the war. Leesa lost her son Lawrence in combat near the Syrian border on Mother’s Day of the same year. A hand guided by a shoulder that was crushed by suppressed grief. Weeping openly would not befit the mothers of national heroes.
Gina had nothing to say to the newspaper reporter who intruded on her quiet grief. Her tears were just drops in the sea of the cemetery. Maybe the other visitors would be more eloquent, she thought, but he insisted on hearing her. So she told him she empathised with the grief of Iraqi mothers that she saw on the news wearing black abayas and weeping over the children they lost in the streets of Baghdad.
That was another story. The reporter left Regina Barnhurst and went to Leesa Philippon. She and her husband drove seven hours to come to Arlington Cemetery. She’d wake up early on the designated day, get dressed and put on a little make-up, then sit in the car as if she was going to work.
Here, a stone’s throw away from Congress and the White House, Leesa met dozens of grieving mothers and formed a club for the families of soldiers who’d died in Iraq. More mothers had joined since. Mother, can I have this dance?
Beth Belle met Leesa Philippon in this club. Their sons were buried side by side. When Lawrence Philippon was killed, Captain Brian Letendre delivered the news to Leesa and her husband. They’d invited him to sit in their living room, and offered him coffee. But the captain didn’t stay long. He had more news to deliver to other families. He’d come from Baghdad on a short break and hadn’t seen his own two children yet. The Philippons became friends with Captain Letendre and his family. Soon it was his turn. He was killed in a suicide bombing in Iraq and was buried two rows away from Lawrence’s grave. Officers came from Iraq every day carrying the news of death and brand new boxes wrapped in the flag. The war went on, reaping its harvest. The club continued to grow, and new grieving mothers kept joining.
The grass grew greener in Arlington, the national cemetery. Four million tourists came here every year. They walked past the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, smiled into small digital cameras and mobile phones, and stood a while by President Kennedy’s grave. They looked at his photo and thought of how Jackie stood here before them, how their footsteps might coincide with hers. ‘Great footsteps coincide,’ as my father used to say.
It was sometimes impossible to tell those visiting Section 60 apart from the tourists who filled the place. The mourners watched the cameras and sports caps, the water bottles peeking out of light rucksacks, the pointed mobile phones in every hand taking snapshots of the unending rows of white headstones. Dominoes with names and dates engraved on them instead of the black dots. The tourists went back to the buses that awaited them in the car park. The mourners remained sitting by the headstones, standing guard over the heads of the absent. Those absent from roll calls in the camps in Iraq now lay in another sixty-five cemeteries across America. Though silent, they were still a source of embarrassment. How many headstones were there in Detroit so far?
I didn’t want to see my mother sitting on the grass like Gina, her white-streaked hair falling across her face, smoking and coughing by my grave. I would stop reading the newspapers from now on. They brought only sadness. War was a rotten onion.
XXVIII
Muhaymen lectured me on theories about how emigration created a rupture in the migrant’s spirit. He kept asking me questions about my life in the States. There were five million Iraqis who’d left the lives they knew and fled into the unknown, and that concerned him. He thought emigration was like captivity: both left you suspended between two lives, with no comfort in moving on or turning back. I saw it differently. I told him that in this day and age, migration was a form of settling, that belonging didn’t necessarily come from staying put in one’s birthplace.
Muhaymen was astonished by people like me, who were able to settle as immigrants. He called us ‘those who changed their skin’. I didn’t like his rigid judgements, so I protested, ‘I only have one skin. It just has multip
le colours.’
‘Is your name Zeina or Chameleon? I only know the motherland, and I can’t imagine having a stepmother land. I find the idea of a second homeland ridiculous.’
‘But the whole world can be your homeland. Haven’t you heard the expression “citizen of the world”?’
He looked at me with resigned pity, as if he was watching a straw tossed by the wind and looking for a tree to hang on to. Looking at me, he started to whisper words I couldn’t at first make out. They were extracts from poems he had composed while in prison. Because he hadn’t been allowed any paper, he’d memorised them. The poems were gentle in parts, and in others they were mysterious, more like prayers or riddles, talismans designed to mislead the prison guards. Do prisoners fear that their captors can read their minds?
I could only respond to Muhaymen with the poems memorised from my childhood. We were taking refuge in poetry, because direct flirtation was not allowed. So I retrieved verses that Dad used to recite as we sat for breakfast in the garden. My father liked Al-Jawahiry when he was drunk, and was inclined towards the Mahjar poets when sober. He liked the elegance of their language, which was fit for presenters of literary programmes. As we dipped our bread in our morning tea, my father, the renowned presenter, recited poetry and read the impact of his voice in our eyes. He trained his voice at our breakfast table, and we listened as we ate, or listened and forgot to eat, my mother’s breath always trembling when he recited ‘Tigris of Goodness’.
Were all those morning lessons in vain? Did my father teach me the language and train me in careful pronunciation so that I could end up an accredited interpreter for the US Army? I suppressed these thoughts, just as Muhaymen had hidden his thoughts from his captors. I feared that he could hear what was on my mind. He seemed pleased with me and looked surprised when I recited a classical poem, waving my forefinger to punctuate the words as a sign of gravity. I was following the example of Sitt Gladys Youssef, my poetry teacher at school. He said I reminded him of the orators of Najaf, and although Najaf was a Shia city, and Gladys an obviously Christian name, he jokingly added, ‘Did Miss Gladys come from Najaf by any chance?’
We giggled together like two carefree lovers. So he did know how to joke and giggle. With just some simple training, he’d be completely to my liking. But he didn’t let me indulge in my fantasies for long, gathering the net quickly and regaining his earnestness.
I was aware of the self-censorship I applied as I told Muhaymen about myself and my life. I told him about my father’s good looks, my mother’s cough and my brother’s intoxicants, about the dullness of our home in Detroit after Dad left us and moved to Arizona. I came up with entertaining anecdotes from the many jobs I’d had: as a secretary at a tourism agency, an interpreter at an immigration agency, a babysitter, a radio presenter at a Chaldean station in Detroit.
‘In Chaldean?’ he asked.
‘And in Assyrian too.’
I told him everything but kept my current job secret. I used stories like fishing nets. I threw them in his direction and pulled him towards me. He was both heavy and weightless, surrendering and resisting at the same time, a swordfish trying to swim against the net and being let down by the current. But the bronze face darkened when I got to the story about Calvin, my American boyfriend whom my mother couldn’t stand.
‘Your mother must be right.’
‘How can you say that when you don’t even know Calvin?’
‘Do you love him?’
‘I don’t know. We’ve been together for four years.’
‘How do you mean together?’
Oh, the sweet taste of jealousy!
Those were the first signs of a shift in my milk brother’s feelings. All I had to do now was stir the coals to heighten the flames. Did I have to wear khaki, join an army and go to war in order to meet him? How much of my life had been wasted until then! Immigration. Detroit. Green Card. The rotting wooden houses of Seven Mile. Big paper cups of lukewarm coffee. Fancy cars bought on credit. Rental wedding suits and evening gowns. Virgin brides shipped over from the northern villages to the faraway continent. Grocery shops protected from theft by machine guns. The stores that immigrants dreamed of owning. The impoverished rich who gained money only after hard labour took their health. They went home at the end of the night drained and barely able to recognise their families.
I left all that and came to find him, only for a sip of breast milk to stand between us. But he was open for cheating. He would reject me for himself but offer me his brother Haydar in a sham marriage that would let me carry him along, like hand luggage, to the States. Besides, what would I do with Haydar once we got there? What would he do with me? He would get his Green Card, plant a thank you kiss on his ‘dear sister’s’ forehead, then the vast continent would swallow him up.
‘Muhaymen, why don’t you come with me to America?’
‘What would I do there, my dear sister? Work on a taxi between Dearborn and Detroit?’
This black sarcasm that clung to every Iraqi cut through me. It was as if they’d all lived through so much and couldn’t see more life beyond the ruins of experience. As if Muhaymen could smell, from here, the disappointment that awaited him over there. He rejected my invitation and didn’t want to see that, with me by his side, he wouldn’t have to suffer like other immigrants had suffered.
Listen to me, my brother, my lord, my love, I can assure you that you won’t be standing in line for the food stamps that are handed out to the disabled and the unemployed, to black Americans and pregnant women.
‘What’s wrong with coupons, Sitt Zeina? Twenty million Iraqis lived on them for twenty years. Then they were called rations.’
It made me happy when he called me ‘Sitt Zeina’. But conversation didn’t flow easily between us. He would get into his sarcastic mode and start to deride everything I said. Then he’d notice I was upset and attempt to placate me by calling me ‘dear sister’, which made my blood boil. With these two words, he turned himself into my legal chaperone and put up a veil between us that defined the space in which each of us moved. It was a warning statement, like ‘smoking kills’.
‘Dear sister’ was flat and vague, a metaphor that led to hell or a talisman that protected from sin. He used it for his own sake, not mine. By uttering those words, he became more resistant to my seduction, and at the same time extended a bridge from his blood to mine. When I heard them, the tide of my melancholy rose and brought me closer to insecurity. I hated the ridiculous position he put me in and cursed the day that brought me back to this country.
XXIX
Death sat on the edge of our beds; it planted itself under our pillows and settled at our feet.
It spared me, not taking me seriously enough, but it took its time selecting our best soldiers.
Death had extravagant taste.
I passed by the medical clinic on my way to work and saw the guards pull a stretcher out of a truck with a corpse covered by a sheet or an army jacket. There were always other soldiers standing on the side, smoking gloomily and rubbing their eyes. I didn’t know who the victim was this time and was afraid to ask. A grey mist covered my eyes. My tears flowed inwards.
Death was coming closer. It started attaching its black ribbons to names I knew. Comrades with whom I had shared meals. Charlie was killed by a roadside bomb. He was a civilian, an ex-marine, contracted by the army to drive local translators from one camp to the other. I didn’t know about his death until days later. At first I thought he was away on a mission, until his sister went on his email and sent a note to all his contacts. She told us that his body had been blow apart a few miles south of Mosul.
The situation in Mosul wasn’t any different from other cities. People woke up in the morning to find severed heads thrown in public squares. It was a terror that the city’s memory found familiar. The difference was half a century. Old people remembered the end of the ’50s and shook their heads. Cities were cutting their own heads off at the hands of their children.
I found utter chaos when I reached Mosul. Police stations were bombed and closed down. Masked men were roaming the streets. Was this the city of my ancestors that made my heart flutter at the mention of its name?
A new Iraqi army force, the Wolf Brigade, was created to bring the situation under control. It was one of the units we formed to work with our troops. They chased insurgents from street to street in the hope of returning order to the city. We called them insurgents, or rebels, terrorists, criminals, troublemakers – anything to avoid using the word ‘resistance’.
I was in Mosul for my second Christmas in Iraq. Four days earlier, a suicide bomber had entered Ghazlany, the camp where I was staying near Mosul Airport, and blown himself up in the food hall, in the midst of soldiers eating their lunch. Twenty-two people died, among them fourteen from our forces and four Iraqi soldiers. Fifty-one Americans were injured. The suicide bomber had been vetted by our security, which meant we trusted him and counted him as one of us. He had smuggled the explosives into the camp incrementally. That same evening one of the local religious groups claimed responsibility for the bombing and applauded it as an act of resistance. Just a different point of view, according to political analysts and the research centre brain-boxes. What was happening in Iraq had happened in France and in Vietnam, predictably exaggerated according to the more radical temperament in the region. Weren’t we told that no war resembled another?
I didn’t hear the sound of the explosion in my room, but heard the missiles that followed, launched from outside in the direction of our rooms. Our bedrooms were metal wagons called ‘hawks’, twenty feet by eight. We slept in cages like monkeys.
One of the missiles landed on the room across from mine. The shock of the explosion threw me onto my back. The sergeant who lived in the room had gone to brush his teeth. He narrowly escaped death in the cage.
The American Granddaughter Page 11