The American Granddaughter

by Inaam Kachachi

  ‘Believe me, nobody’s clean in Iraq today. The only difference is how much crap each of us has swallowed.’

  ‘Wrong. There’s still the faction of my Grandmother Rahma and her ilk.’

  I went to the top of the screen and clicked delete. I didn’t want to keep this message in my inbox. It hurt, because it read like a message of consolation, like he was telling me, ‘Don’t be ashamed, sister, of your US Army uniform. We all have an ugly uniform, too, that we wear under our skin.’ Why did he have to imply that I was ashamed of what I did? Come here and face me, Mr Muhaymen, and let’s compare notes. If you were here, I’d look you straight in the eye and say, ‘I’m not sorry.’ We came here to do something great and you ruined it. We brought you a basket full of flowers and you vomited all over it. I have nothing more to say. I’m an army interpreter, and that’s what I’ll remain. I don’t want to be your sister, neither by milk nor blood. Wasn’t it blood that opened that rift between us, and drove me to say ‘you and us’. I couldn’t be anything but American. My Iraqiness had abandoned me long ago. It fell through a hole in my pocket and rolled away like an old coin.

  I tried to be both but failed. I took off the khaki and put on the abaya and went to the market in Karada. I bought a loofah and plastic slippers and those chewing gum pieces sold in little bags. I talked to the shopkeeper and teased him in his own accent. He looked at me and smiled encouragingly, like I was some foreign orientalist.

  Now, with the nobility of an older brother, Muhaymen wrote to me to absolve me of the calamities of this war. ‘You’re not responsible for the devastation and lies, Zeina. You’re like the rest of us, a victim of lies that are bigger than you.’

  Delete. I didn’t need to be patronised by a hypocritical tribesman who invited me in so that he could clear his throat then offer me protection, making vows on his honour and his moustache, and keeping his knife hidden behind his back. Who was lying to whom, Muhaymen?

  I was naïve to have imagined democracy to be like candyfloss, colourful sugar wrapped around thin sticks that we could go around distributing to the kids. ‘What colour would you like, Ammou?’ The nice guy in the democracy van dips the stick in the melted sugar then hands it to the eager child. We sold you a dream that was too good to be true. But we weren’t alone. You had your own spin doctors and nuclear scientists and generals. They told us about weapons of mass destruction, about Bin Laden, about a bomb that would finish off Israel. September 11th was waiting for a scapegoat, so we bought it all. You believed us, and we believed them.

  Delete. Empty words in the windmill of words.

  What good did it do, all this ‘us and them’ analysis?

  What use was any of this now, my dear anaemic Sumerian statue?

  The last time I saw him was when Tawoos sent for me, saying that Nana Rahma was refusing to eat and no longer had the strength to leave her bed. Her health was deteriorating and she wouldn’t go to hospital.

  When Tawoos asked her, ‘Do I send for Zeina?’ she cursed me in her Mosul dialect. Tawoos told me my grandfather used to swear a lot, but for my grandmother to swear in the presence of all her saints, the true and the fake, that was unheard of. The Virgin looked out of her miracle-working picture whose flame never failed and didn’t interfere. I pleaded with Tawoos to tell me what Grandma had said.

  She told me, like a child repeating something that she knew she wasn’t supposed to have heard, covering her mouth with her hand as she said the words. ‘She said, “I’ll throw her out if I see her, that slut who was raised in the gutter.”’

  Quite a khalooqa. Another word from my forgotten lexicon that jumped to mind. That’s what people in Mosul called a choice swear word: khalooqa. My grandmother had sworn, and promised she’d throw me out of her house. I contemplated sending her a doctor from the camp, but feared that he’d receive his own khalooqa and also get thrown out. She might even make a scene and invite the neighbours to join in, each with their own khalooqa. I knew she’d rather die than let an American examine her, an army doctor at that. But I couldn’t take seriously the insults she’d directed at me. I knew I could handle it and take refuge from her in her love for me. I’d take her anger and absorb it. What was the worst she could do?

  When I knocked on the door, Haydar opened it and kissed my head. He looked like Muhaymen, just ten years younger. He led me to the inner room. Tawoos was sitting cross-legged on her abaya on the floor by my grandmother’s bed and murmuring verses from the Quran while the Virgin Mary listened. ‘Zeina, you’re here.’ Hope appeared on Tawoos’s face as she leapt up to welcome me. My grandmother didn’t move. She was awake but her eyes were closed. Her silence encouraged me, so I took off my coat and shoes and snuggled next to her under the covers. She tried to push me away when I hugged her, but her strength failed her. We stayed like this for a while. Tawoos cried soundlessly in the corner, while Haydar stood chain-smoking just outside the door.

  When did Muhaymen get here?

  I must’ve dozed off, engulfed by the warmth and the darkness or the rhythm of Tawoos’s sobbing, because I didn’t notice him coming in. I smelled him before I saw him, and when I opened my eyes his lean figure was standing over me like a bow drawn taut to shoot an arrow. Was he going to kiss me or strangle me?

  How strange the look in his eyes was.

  He didn’t ask me how I’d got there or where I’d been. It was no time for questions. And I was no longer scared. I would extend my hands and surrender to whoever wanted to kidnap me, put a bullet in my head or plant a bomb in my way. What would it change? I’d be just another number in the daily statistics. I was exhausted, and my diary was filling up with the names of dead friends. I didn’t want to live like this, with the bitterness on my tongue and the wind of grief blowing through my heart.

  I decided to stay the night. At sunset I went out to the garden and picked some oranges to make juice for my grandmother. I begged her to drink it, invoking the memory of my grandfather and everyone she loved, until she relented and accepted the glass from my hand. Tawoos got up to make us dinner, but wagered me Nana Rahma wouldn’t touch it.

  There was another power cut. I went outside, and Muhaymen followed me to the small back yard. We sat on the interlaced iron of the rusty old swing, not saying anything at first. I wanted to ask him about the ongoing battles in Sadr City, but I held back. I was sick with worry about him. I followed the news of our soldiers fighting with the Mahdi Army and prayed for him, the Iraqi who cut me in two.

  ‘I was very worried about you these past weeks,’ I finally said.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, you’ve done your best. You plucked the ripe along with the withered, and the blood you spilled has reached our knees.’

  He spoke to me as if I was the Pentagon, not Zeina ‘my dear sister’. It hurt.

  ‘Listen, I’m not staying here long. My contract ends in two months.’

  ‘But you should stay till the end. Didn’t you say that you like movies?’

  ‘This is not the time for jokes.’

  ‘You can’t run away now, before the scene of your exit from this country.’

  ‘Muhaymen, I don’t appreciate your tone.’

  He ignored my protests and started to describe scenes that seemed familiar from another war. The Vietnamese who worked for the US Army hanging on to the wheels of helicopters that took off with the American soldiers and embassy staff. Leaving the Vietnamese to their fate.

  He didn’t call me ‘dear sister’ any more. Tawoos’s milk was spilled in the mire. The war came and sat between us. So the opening scenes were over now, and the real plot was starting. I looked away from him as he continued, ‘Have you prepared enough helicopters for all the collaborators?’

  ‘Please stop. This hurts.’

  ‘That’s okay. It won’t kill you to hurt a little. Do you know Talib Shannoun? Hassan Abdul-Amir? Muzaffar Al-Shatry? Qais, Hatif, Raad and Abdul-Hussein Al-Nadaf? Those were my friends. They died under your bombs.’

  Muhaymen had deceive
d me with his conciliatory emails, and now he came to exact revenge. It wasn’t like me to stay quiet, but I was choking on my replies. Should I ask him about Brian and Jessica and Michael, my friends who were torn apart by mortar shells and roadside bombs?

  Muhaymen was attuned to my pain. He could read me, and he showed no mercy.

  ‘Why did you come?’

  ‘We rid you of Saddam.’

  I knew it was a cliché. I heard myself, and I sounded like a Fox News reporter. The writer would certainly edit this out.

  Muhaymen came back with a slightly more original line, ‘You drove King Kong out of the city and claimed the whole of Iraq in return.’

  XXXV

  I wasn’t at her house to receive the mourners when she died.

  I missed my grandmother’s wake while I was stuck in the Zone. It was dangerous outside. The city was on fire. Going to her house, and mingling with all the mourners there, would have been an unforgivable breach of security regulations. So I focused on trying to convince Captain Donovan to let me go to the Chaldean cemetery. I said I would follow the funeral procession from a distance. He refused, because the new cemetery was in a faraway suburb.

  I played on his emotions. I was aware of how close he’d been to his grandmother, who had died a few months back while he was in Baghdad. He’d spent most of his childhood with her after his parents’ divorce. We used to listen as he made his phone call to Orange every Sunday after dinner, where it would still be Sunday morning in Connecticut. If he dialled the number and didn’t get an answer right away, his face would go pale. He always feared she’d die in her sleep. But Captain Donovan’s grandmother didn’t die in her sleep. She died a three-hour drive away from her house, by a roulette table at a casino. The little golden ball had stopped on the number she’d put fifty dollars on, and her heart stopped with it. When the news reached Donovan in the Green Zone, so many miles away, we watched him cry and laugh at the same time. The small phone was nearly crushed in his hand as he squeezed it the way Calvin crushed his beer cans.

  Donovan finally gave me permission to attend the funeral mass in the church, on the condition that I sit at the back and leave before the ceremony was over. He added that I should take a few soldiers with me and go in a convoy of armoured Humvees. But I put my hand up and interrupted him for the first time, ‘No, sir, forgive me. You gave me permission to go, and I’m not taking anyone with me. I’ll take a taxi from the gate. I’ll be wearing civilian clothes. I won’t attract attention.’

  As if the roles were reversed, the enlisted interpreter gave orders and the officer obeyed. I wouldn’t be able to explain why Donovan agreed. Except that my visible grief seemed to give me a kind of power that superseded military rank. Everyone around me felt it, I think, because they were treating me as if I was some sacred but breakable object, one of those stolen Assyrian sculptures that we sometimes found during the raids. The soldiers would bring it back to the camp, put it on the captain’s desk and walk around it, whispering in awe, worried that if they got too close or spoke too loudly the thing would crumble before they’d taken it back to the museum. In a way, I too was a rare object for them. They knew no one else with an Iraqi grandmother who had died in Baghdad, because of the heat and the curfew, a half-hour drive away.

  My grandmother didn’t suffer from a specific illness. ‘It was grief that killed her,’ according to Tawoos’s prognosis, which brooked no doubts. She was rubbing henna into my hair as I sat cross-legged before her on the warm tiles at the entrance to the bathroom in my grandmother’s house when she said, ‘Nana Rahma will die out of grief.’

  ‘She has more strength than both of us. Don’t bring her bad luck.’

  ‘May she live long, but can’t you see how she’s wilting? It’s out of sadness and humiliation.’

  Was Tawoos possibly right? Did my grandmother die from the humiliation of my job and my army uniform? Did she die of shame? The shame of an American granddaughter?

  Tawoos told me that Rahma had a half-filled bottle of Mistiki arak that had been my grandfather’s. She kept it carefully wrapped in a pillowcase and didn’t touch it except in extremity.

  ‘My grandmother drinks arak?’ I asked.

  ‘No, but she’d bring the bottle to her nose and breathe in, because the smell reminded her of her husband, then she’d cry and feel better,’ Tawoos said, then swore by Imam Abbas Abu Fadhil that Rahma drank the whole bottle the day she saw me ‘wearing American clothes and riding a tank’. She spent the whole night wailing like she was mourning a beloved daughter that death took for a bride.

  Tawoos must’ve lost it. She too was getting old and didn’t know what she was saying any more. My grandmother died because she was over eighty years old. Her time was up. It wasn’t my fault if someone’s time was up.

  I put on the black trousers that I wore on the way out of Detroit and a black cotton shirt. I wrapped myself in a long raincoat and hid my hair under a generous headscarf. Deborah smiled when she saw me. She waved to me and teased me with a newly acquired Arabic word, ‘Hello, Hajja.’ I waved feebly back and walked outside, with her voice behind me saying, ‘Take care.’

  It was almost eight in the morning. The overcast sky was the same colour as the big concrete barriers at the gate. I hailed a taxi and asked the driver to take me to Saint Joseph Church in Eastern Karada. He drove off, and I sat in the back covering my face with my hand and letting my tears flow like rain after a drought.

  The driver shouted, ‘It’s the American bastards, isn’t it? I wouldn’t want anyone to be at their mercy.’ He must have thought I was disappointed by a failed petition or something. I didn’t reply. I wiped my face and nose with the edge of my headscarf and asked him to hurry because I had to be at a funeral. He didn’t seem moved, as if the people of Baghdad only left their homes to go to funerals. It was daily routine, no different from going to the cinema in happier lands.

  I thought about what I’d find when I got there. Who would come? Would the funeral proceed in peace? If it was up to me, I would have arranged for military protection, but Rahma would have risen from her coffin and spit on us. My love for her shouldn’t tarnish her last moments on this earth.

  I started crying again, and the driver continued pouring his curses on the head of the occupation and the ‘black day’ that brought the Americans to the country. ‘Sister, don’t cry. Thank your God that you’re walking on two legs. Yesterday I carried two women to emergency, and they’d both lost their legs in an explosion on the bus. One of them died before we’d made it to the hospital.’

  When I got to church, the body was already there. I saw the funeral car outside the high iron gates. My tears wouldn’t stop. I walked over a pond of slippery mud, leapt onto the pavement, then ran up the steps to the church’s main door. There was a power cut, and the churchwardens probably didn’t want to use the generator for a quick minor ceremony. None of the old woman’s children were here to pay generously – they were all abroad. So candles were both cheaper and more atmospheric.

  The darkness helped me. I walked on tiptoe down the side aisle and settled between the black-clad women in the first two rows. The other rows were empty. I wasn’t going to sit at the back. I was the only granddaughter she had present here. I stayed focused on the shiny wooden box and the gold crucifix that adorned it. I didn’t look at the faces of the women around me. There was no time for social pleasantries. The coffin was placed on a plinth draped in blue velvet, three wreaths of plastic flowers leaning on either side of it. I tried to pierce the wood and get to my grandmother’s skin. I didn’t like it when they tied the hands of the dead to their sides. If she were free she would have hugged me.

  The old priest encircled the coffin with an incense holder swinging at the end of a thick chain and releasing puffs of white smoke. The fragrance reached me quickly.

  ‘Qadisha Alaha, Qadisha Hilthana, Qadisha Lamayotha. God’s mercy be on her,’ went the Chaldean prayer the priest was chanting.

  Women were blo
wing their noses loudly into their handkerchiefs, their chests rising and falling with each sigh, their bodies swaying back and forth to the rhythm of the chant. The two young deacons followed the priest and repeated the prayers after him. To be here they’d had to get up early and venture into streets that had turned into human traps. Their eyes scanned the mourners for a young face that might have made the risk worthwhile.

  My sobs were getting louder. A chubby older woman turned towards me. Her face was still pretty despite her age, and the memory tape turned in my head until I realised she was my Uncle Munir’s wife. Apparently a similar tape was turning in her head, because she peered at me closely and with growing surprise. Then, in a heavy Mosul accent that rolled the ‘r’, she said, ‘Who? Zeina? Batoul’s daughterrr? When did you arrrrrrive from abrrroad? Come herrre, my dearrr, and let me kiss you! May Allah have merrrcy on your grrrandma’s soul. It would have made herrr so happy to see you.’

  One by one the women forgot about the body of my grandmother laid out by the altar. They left their places on the narrow benches and came to me, repeating my name in whispered tones and taking turns hugging and kissing me. Their kisses were properly wet and noisy and left their mark on my skin, not going to waste in the air. Their lips were like suction cups that stuck to my cheek and absorbed my grief. Their tears caressed my face, and my tears moved to their tired cheeks that were so used to wetness, as if they’d long been addicted to the saltiness of tears. Women here took their crying seriously. It was a way of life, an exercise they did regularly, individually and in groups, to stay spiritually fit. Crying strengthened the heart muscle and lowered the blood pressure. It sometimes had an intoxicating effect not unlike that of beer. I watched the teardrops suspended at the tips of their noses and remembered that I hadn’t had a proper cry since childhood. I’d had a moderate life, with no extremes of sadness or joy.