I Have Iraq in My Shoe

by Gretchen Berg

  Am wearing red 1990s Nancy Reagan Adolfo power suit, sporting tight smile, and ranting about family values.

  In public do not show overly physical affection to your spouse or girl/boyfriend.

  In red Nancy Reagan suit, am climbing on top of imaginary Iraqi boyfriend on public park bench.

  If you ask a local person for a date, or establish a relationship with a local person, be mindful of the cultural differences and be guided by your partner. Being conservative is a good general attitude to practice.

  Need more Adolfo suits.

  8. Relationships

  Often you may see same-sex people holding hands, kissing, or hugging each other in public. This is a normal way for Iraqis to express friendship and affection and should not be interpreted as homosexuality or stigmatized in any other way.

  Picturing Iraqi men climbing on top of each other on public park bench.

  9. Homosexuality

  It is against the Islam religion. As it is a forbidden practice, please avoid talking about that subject with locals.

  Must ignore men on park bench.

  10. Tips

  Tipping is not common or required here. It’s at your discretion in hotels, restaurants, airports, etc.

  Common sense. Taking an order at Starbucks, then calling order over to coworker who pours tea and milk into cup is not going above and beyond call of duty. Put that tip jar away.

  11. Events

  If you want a local to attend a dinner, party, or other gathering at your house or in a restaurant, try not to add alcohol to the event.

  Am not being encouraged to mingle with locals.

  Due to cultural differences, local women won’t feel comfortable being invited to men’s houses or apartments, but that does not mean they won’t accept invitations for restaurants or public places.

  Just plain smart. See original programming on Lifetime network, starring Tori Spelling or Meredith Baxter-Birney, for emphasis.

  Do not show physical affection (kissing, hugging, etc.) when you visit a local and vice versa.

  High fives?

  12. General

  Do not take alcohol as a gift.

  Sad face.

  Pork is taboo in Islam; do not expect to find pork on menus or in private homes.

  No bacon?

  Expect to receive presents or gifts from locals during Eid, Nawroz, Christmas, birthdays, and New Year. Giving gifts in appreciation and friendship is also always appropriate.

  Must communicate that I really don’t mind receiving alcohol as gift.

  I had some difficulty with the “rules” in this pamphlet but blamed my jet lag for my completely inappropriate imagined responses. I was a sort-of guest in this country and would have to keep my mouth shut.

  Bacon, I miss you already.

  Later, sitting in Warren’s office, I turned to him and said, “Listen, you have got to stop calling me ‘Gerts.’”

  He looked shocked. “Why?”

  I reminded him that I was the one who had told him about the nickname in the first place and that I hated it. Not only did it put me into a retro, junior high tailspin, but Gerts rhymed with “squirts.” No one gets a positive visual from “squirts.” He promised to stop saying it but then seemed desperate to find a replacement nickname. “What can I call you?!” he practically wailed.

  I didn’t know why a nickname was necessary. My name was only two syllables; it wasn’t as if it took that much energy to say it. What was his hang-up with nicknames? Nicknames should never be forced. Look at Sean Puffy P. Diddy Diddy Combs. It has to come naturally. However, Warren seemed bound and determined to call me something other than Gretchen.

  I began suggesting alternatives: Gretch (the obvious choice, just stop short of saying my entire name and save yourself a whole syllable), Gretta (created by college roommates, although still with two syllables), Gretel (really only used by my friend Joli, and that hungry witch who lives in the woods), G-Funk (just like I was saying on the airplane!), G (for rappers), Princess Jasmine, or Princess Buttercup, or Princess… Anything that started with “Princess” was usually okay and might have reminded him that I was still due one pony. None of these seemed to satisfy him.

  His nickname obsession was puzzling. When he was whisking Steve and me around the school that day, rushing through introductions, he would say, “This is Gretchen, who’s going up to Erbil, and this is Steve, Joe’s brother.” Joe had been working at the university for a year, and everyone knew him well. One Kurdish staff member said, “Ahhh, Joe’s brother! Same, same!” So Steve’s nickname became Same-Same. There was an instructor at the school named Ryan Bubalo, who was apparently Warren’s nemesis for reasons that were never entirely clear to me. Warren called him “The Boob” behind his back. Rizgar, who had picked us up at the airport, was Warren’s designated Kurdish driver, and Warren had nicknamed him Turd Ferguson, from Saturday Night Live’s Jeopardy! sketch:

  Will Ferrell as Alex Trebek: “Apparently Burt Reynolds has changed his name to Turd Ferguson.”

  Norm MacDonald as Burt Reynolds: “Yeah, Turd Ferguson; it’s a funny name.”

  My least favorite nickname was given to poor Jen, a great Canadian girl who was the kind of person who put you immediately at ease. She was genuinely warm and friendly, with a quick smile. Warren inexplicably called her Skank. “Hey, Skank! You’d better snatch up some guy soon; you’re gettin’ to be Cougar-age! Heh heh heh.” Jen was twenty-nine and about as far from Skank as you could get.

  Given The Boob, Turd, and Skank as alternatives, I guess I should have been grateful for Gerts.

  After the HR orientation, and what seemed like hours of waiting in Warren’s office for him to finish up whatever he was doing, he said he wouldn’t have time to escort me back to Zara, and I should just have one of the drivers take me and then drop me off at the hotel, which would be my temporary home in Suli for the next three days. Wow, he was really just throwing me into the swing of things. By that time my eyes were at half-mast from exhaustion, and my stomach was gurgling in protest of the emptiness.

  I swung my bag over my shoulder and clomped down the two flights of stairs to the main level, passing several female students on the stairs. (Skinny jeans and heels were “in” here? Tablecloths, you’re out.) I reached the main level, where the drivers’ room was, and knocked on the door. A short, Kurdish man with beady eyes blinking behind wire-rimmed glasses answered, and I looked past him to where three other Kurdish men sat, drinking tea and talking. The stench of unwashed armpit was unbearable. I tried not to breathe through my nose and said, “Um, I need someone to take me to Zara and then to the Bayan Hotel.”

  The man who had answered the door looked me up and down and then said, “Yes, I am Sabah. I manage drivers. Hello. Ahhh, there are no drivers now. You must wait until four o’clock.”

  I looked at the three men drinking tea, then at my watch which said it was 2:30, and I gasped. I had to wait there for another hour and a half? Weren’t those guys drivers? Tired and hungry! I halfheartedly thanked Sabah and clomped back up the stairs to Warren’s office.

  I relayed the Sabah conversation to him, and he smacked his hand down on the desk and threw his head back with an exaggerated eye roll. “Fucking Sabah. Gerts—sorry, Gretch—go back down there and tell him I said someone needs to take you now. They’re lazy, and if you don’t yell at them, they won’t do anything.”

  Oh, for crying out loud. I really didn’t have the energy for this. But I went back, clomping down the two flights of stairs I had just clomped up again and back to the drivers’ room. I knocked on the door again, and when Beady-Eyes opened the door, I just took a deep breath and said, “Warren says someone needs to take me right now” and waited for a reaction.

  Sabah made a “pfft” sound with his teeth, then yammered something unintelligible at one of the tea drinkers, who slowly stood up, finished draining his cup, and slowly made his way over to the door where he motioned for me to follow him.

  Welcome to I
raq, woman.

  The driver waited in the car while I went into Zara, where I wandered up and down each aisle of the store, looking for edible items that did not require cooking. I didn’t cook. I just needed a few things to tide me over for the next two days until I was taken up to Erbil. I settled on some kiwi, a container of yogurt, a small jar of honey, and a can of dolmas. I knew dolmas! I used to get them at Trader Joe’s! These were all familiar things: nothing that would involve me standing over a boiling pot of water, staring at a box with instructions written entirely in Arabic, and ultimately starving.*

  Zara had four checkout counters, which were just like any other grocery store checkout counters. The cashier passed my items over the scanner, just like any other grocery store scanner. The bagger prepared to bag my groceries, just like any other bagger, except that I had brought one of my super eco-friendly cloth shopping bags with me from home (I brought everything), which I handed to him. I paid the cashier with my new beige and blue bills of Iraqi dinar and then turned back to the bagger, only to find that he had put my groceries into a plastic bag and my cloth shopping bag into another plastic bag. I had to say, “No, no,” and took the cloth bag out of the plastic bag, then placed my groceries inside the cloth bag while the cashier and bagger looked at me curiously. This was Zara’s inconvenient truth. I guess you’re less concerned about the environment when your country is in a constant state of turmoil.

  My temporary accommodation in Suli was a room in the Bayan Hotel. The lobby was a small room with a thick Persian rug, a cheap-looking pleather couch, and a low desk where the manager sat watching a small television set. Despite Warren telling me that the manager was “a great guy” and he’d get me anything I needed, I still felt apprehensive about being there. Were people noticing that I was a single female staying at a hotel alone? Was I just being completely paranoid? It was Iraq. I couldn’t avoid paranoia on my first night there. Of course, there was also the problem that my incessant television watching contributed to a completely overactive imagination, and I was envisioning insurgents (or cave trolls, or vampires, or Dementors) lurking around every corner.

  The entrance to the lobby of the hotel was in the front, but to access the hotel rooms you had to walk around to the side of the building. Two diminutive, pungent Bangladeshi boys dragged my luggage from the lobby up to the third floor, where my room was located. Was Bangladesh an even worse place to live than Iraq? I wondered. Why would they be here? These were the questions that were popping into my head as I followed my hockey bags up the stairs. Also popping into my head was the woefully ungracious “Oh my God, I will never get used to the smell of body odor.” I just have a really sharp sense of smell.

  The room was a suite, with a small kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and living room with the requisite heavy dark furniture. The suite was dark, even after I flipped on every possible light switch I could find. I loathed darkness. This stemmed from a childhood where my dad was obsessed with saving electricity. So much so that he would turn off any lights in any rooms in the house, even if those rooms were occupied by offspring who might have been reading, watching too much TV, or just enjoying the happy brightness. My overwhelming need for bright light may also be related to my self-diagnosed claustrophobia, in my entirely nonmedical opinion.

  I couldn’t find a can opener for the dolmas, so I enjoyed a very skimpy dinner of kiwi, yogurt, and honey and felt decidedly healthy and self-sufficient after all the airplane food, snacks, and Cinnabon I had consumed in the past twenty-four hours.

  In the dimly lit bedroom, I unpacked a few of my clothes and toiletries, surveying all the stuff I had dragged over several continents. So much stuff. What if I needed to get out of here in a hurry? What if this was a huge mistake?

  I brushed my teeth (with the cyanide-free Crest I brought from home) and checked that the front door was locked. I then closed myself into my bedroom, locked that door, and checked to make sure the windows were securely locked. I felt a sudden kinship with OCD sufferers and checked the locks again.

  I collapsed on the bed and groggily reviewed my initial observations of Kurdistan, Northern Iraq.

  Kurdish was the main language, not Arabic.

  Diet Coke/Diet Pepsi was nowhere to be found, and I had a severe caffeine headache.

  Wine and beer were to be found—there were liquor stores.

  The national bird was a plastic bag.

  It was mountainous. Not desert-ous.

  The electricity went out several times a day, but only for about ten seconds at a time.

  Many of the men bore a striking resemblance to Borat.

  Many of the men wore body odor like a badge.

  There was a dress code. The dress code I saw for women? Revealing clothes: not okay. Extremely tight clothes: perfectly acceptable. Lots of skinny jeans and high heels. Some covered their heads with a scarf, some didn’t.

  Everything was in a state of disrepair.

  The dim lighting made everything seem kind of dirty and sad.

  I finally gave up willing the light bulbs to grow brighter, turned them off, and went to sleep, hoping the locked doors and windows were secure. Why hadn’t my friends and family protested more? They let me come here! Scarlett left Tara for new opportunities in Atlanta. Why couldn’t Iraq be more like Atlanta? I hope the body odor smell doesn’t stick to my stuff…

  * This country confused me. While Kurdish was the main language, the grocery items were brought in from Turkey or the surrounding Middle Eastern countries, so the labels were either in Turkish or Arabic, not Kurdish.

  Chapter Eight

  I’m an Immigrant

  I was awakened around 4:00 a.m. by the sound of faraway wailing. As soon as I figured out where I was and had a few more pangs of “What have I done?”, I listened to what I assumed was the Call to Prayer. I had heard about this: loudspeakers were placed all over the city and broadcast a man wailing a somber, eerie-sounding tune that was the reminder it was time to pray. I prayed that I would be able to fall back asleep.

  I decided I needed some added strength when getting dressed later that morning. After wrapping myself in a chunky wool cardigan sweater and scarf and pulling on a pair of brown Capri-length pants, I drew my red suede Diane von Furstenburg boots out of the hockey bag and said, “Okay, boots, Wonder Woman me.” They cheered me a little and reminded me of home, online shopping, and my mom. She said they wouldn’t be practical here, but HA! It was cold! It was like eight degrees. Celsius, but still. That’s only forty-six American degrees.

  With all the hectic craziness of the previous day, I had forgotten about how rainy and muddy it was. There was a sidewalk from the hotel door to where we loaded into the SUV, so I didn’t notice the mud until we arrived at immigration and I stepped out of the car in my pretty Wonder Woman boots. I cursed my poor short-term memory. Wonder Woman needed to go get her residency card so she could be a legitimate resident of The Iraq, and now she also needed to have her boots professionally cleaned. The only thing that helped me feel less ridiculous was that Carey, the school’s new director of finance, who just arrived from Washington, D.C., hadn’t anticipated the mud either, and her sleek ivory trousers now had an interesting splatter pattern covering the back side. Steve, who probably put the least amount of thought into his outfit, appropriately wore brown shoes and jeans.

  Carey, Steve, and I were taken to immigration by a university-employed bodyguard who looked exactly like a Middle Eastern Buddy Hackett. He was not tall, muscular, or imposing, but he did carry a gun. The immigration “complex” was behind a barricade and down a muddy road, where one of our stops was a couple of wooden tables set under the same kind of plastic coverings we used for our sandbox when I was little. It was like registering for Coachella or Glastonbury, except they shuffled our paperwork around, then sent us on our way, without lanyards or drink tickets.

  The paperwork was just the first step. We were also required to do the following:

  Participate in a sassy photo shoot for our resi
dency card photos

  Have blood drawn (to check for HIV, according to Warren)

  Be fingerprinted four different times—or, rather, thumbprinted

  I was thumbprinted four times with my left thumb only. I noted that smart criminals could literally get away with murder here, if they were just careful not to use their left thumb.

  There was one building where we spent most of the morning, and the scene was surreal. There was a small waiting room lined on all sides with plastic chairs, which were filled with swarthy men who just sat and openly stared at us (we were later told they were mostly Turkish Kurds).*

  From my chair I could see into one of the adjacent rooms, where there was a thirty-two-inch television set on the floor, tuned to a channel showing three slight Asian women in colorful aerobics gear doing pelvic raises. This made me snicker. Carey had a better vantage point from which to view the rest of the room. I whispered, “Are there men in there watching the TV?” She craned her neck a bit then resettled in her seat and said, “Yep. Two of them.” We were then called into that very room to have our blood drawn.

  Our doctor (nurse? physician’s assistant? who could say?) was a very casual-looking man, just hanging out in a sweater and khakis. He was obviously an enthusiastic aerobics fan, who I hoped had some sort of medical background. At least the needles came out of brand-new wrappers for each of us. That was reassuring.