I Have Iraq in My Shoe

by Gretchen Berg

  * According to Wikipedia, Ali Hassan al-Majid, military commander and chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, was dubbed “Chemical Ali” by Iraqi Kurds for his use of chemical weapons against them.

  Chapter Ten

  Attempted Assimilation

  Immediately after the drivers left my villa that first morning, my anxiety just evaporated. It was as if I had been holding my breath all week and was finally able to let it whoosh out. I unpacked and put everything away in proper places, and it felt like home.

  It’s amazing what a familiar down comforter and fragrant candles can do for a place.

  Adam came in to look at my room, out of the sheer curiosity of seeing where all the crap would go, took one look at my homey bed, and enviously wailed, “Aww, a comforter!” He was stuck with the shiny, garish, standard university-issue polyester top blanket. I grinned at him and shrugged.

  Every morning I would wake up, unlock my bedroom door, pad down the hallway and down the cold stone stairs to the kitchen. There was a large picture window over the sink that displayed our small front yard, immaculately manicured by the Kurdish septuagenarian gardener, who worked in his traditional costume. The traditional Kurdish costume was essentially an MC Hammer jumpsuit with embroidered cummerbund and rolled-scarf head wrap. The little old man was always crouched over the short rosebushes, picking at something while various small birds chirped and flitted from our eaves to the neighbors’. Ahh, domestic life in Iraq.

  Classes hadn’t started yet, and Warren was being vague about the start date, which just meant I was being paid to hang out and wait. I was really good at doing nothing, so it was a win-win.

  The Erbil campus came equipped with both a gardener and a driver, Chalak, to whom I referred as our Man-About-Town. Chalak didn’t really speak English, but he understood most of what Adam and I said, and would take us on errands and help us with household needs when he wasn’t busy sitting on the porch swing, smoking his cigarettes. Chalak was also really good at doing nothing. He wore jeans and plaid button-down shirts, had light-colored hair and blue eyes (unusual for a Kurd), sported the ubiquitous Kurdish-man mustache, and loved his cigarettes. He lived somewhere else in Erbil and would drive his trusty old pickup truck to English Village Sunday through Thursday to work for the university.

  One day our Man-About-Town informed us we had to go to Security. That was all Chalak could explain in his extremely limited English. “We go Security.”

  One of my biggest frustrations was the absence of maps or organizational material for the city of Erbil. I had asked Chalak for a map, and he said there was none. Warren was also unable to assist in my endeavor and said there really just weren’t any maps or many marked streets. At home I was so used to driving myself everywhere, but here I was stuck in an unfamiliar city, chauffeured from place to place, and completely dependent on Chalak and his knowledge of Erbil. I had no bearings, no sense of the city at all.

  Chalak said Security was “around corner,” so Adam and I thought it was the little booth at the entrance to English Village. Chalak, however, kept driving out of the village, onto the main road. We drove about six or seven miles before reaching our destination. Security was a small three-story building with many random employees who stopped and stared at Adam and me as we walked up to the second floor, down the hall, and into a large office. The office was furnished with several couches and armchairs upholstered in a rough, textured fabric. I imagined the catalog offering the set as their Loofah Collection. Opposite a large, clunky desk sat a large, clunky television set showing a Turkish soap opera. Perhaps the security employees didn’t know about the Asian-woman aerobics show? It was funny that I had felt slightly silly and shallow, asking Warren if I would have TV there. The Kurds clearly loved their TV as much as I did.

  The man behind the desk didn’t look particularly official or businesslike in his Members Only–ish jacket, with his hair greased up like Danny Zuko, the Fonz, or one of the kids from Jersey Shore.

  The greasy man spent the first five minutes chatting with Chalak in Kurdish while Adam and I just sat there shrugging at each other and trying to figure out what was happening on the Turkish soap. It looked very dramatic. All of a sudden the questions began. Greasy Man asked if Adam and I were married, what our jobs were, what our parents’ names were, what our fathers’ jobs were, the names of our siblings, the occupations of our siblings, and our previous jobs. We answered all the questions as straight-faced as was possible, and after much note taking, paper-shuffling, and another five-minute Greasy Man/Chalak conversation, we were permitted to leave.

  What was that all about? Why did Kurdistan need to know if I had siblings, or what my father did for a living? I’m thirty-eight.

  Being an official, registered immigrant in Kurdistan was one step toward assimilation, but I also wanted to assimilate on a more personal level. I wanted to feel comfortable in my new surroundings. I wanted to have a routine.

  I really wanted to work out.

  Adam had discovered a men’s gym where he could do all his heavy lifting, and there was a women’s fitness center adjacent to the men’s. I was kind of amazed that there even was a gym (that women could go to). I decided I could have a little look-see one day while Adam was working out.

  Chalak drove Adam and me to the gym. When Adam took his gym bag and went off to the testosterone arena, Chalak walked with me to the estrogen entrance. Men weren’t allowed past the front desk, so Chalak explained to the man behind the desk that I wanted to go to the gym for a trial day. I walked past the front desk and around the corner into what seemed like an enormous, musty garage. The floor was covered with squishy floor mats that fit together like jigsaw puzzle pieces. There were a few weak, caged light bulbs that hung from the rafters, and broken windows so the birds could fly in and out and poop on the exercise equipment as they pleased. Oh, sad place. This was where crippled exercise equipment came to die.

  There were around twenty Kurdish women, all in some form of full covering, mostly velour sweat suits. A few wore head scarves, and some were just wearing turtleneck sweaters and pants. They were all in the middle of a 1970s aerobics class, where there was a lot of arm-flapping and calisthenics-type exercises. When I walked in, all heads turned toward me and I froze. I smiled politely and carefully sidestepped over to an empty exercise bike, climbed on, and started pedaling. There was no danger of my overexerting myself—the bike wasn’t plugged in. In fact, the only machine in the entire room that was plugged in was one of those vibrating things that you stand on and it just jostles you around.

  The women continued to flap their arms and do waist bends and, every once in a while, turned to look at me, sitting quietly on my broken exercise bike. Without warning, one older headscarved woman, arms still flapping up and down, marched over to me and shouted in (unfortunately) understandable English, “You join class!”

  Me: Ohhhh, no, no, thank you.

  Headscarved lady: (yelling) WHY?

  (Panic setting in. Everyone staring.)

  Me: Oh, I just…um…need to…work up to it?

  Headscarved lady: (inexplicably still yelling) OH, OKAY!

  She nodded curtly and marched back to her spot, still flapping her arms. I thought that was really quite nice of her to invite me to join them. However, I was still in my state of awed observation and was not prepared to be the main feature in the Kurdish version of a Jane Fonda flashback.

  The fitness center was kind of like a combination gym/party room/day care, with colorful “Happy Birthday” banners (in English) hanging from the ceiling and sticky children running around shrieking and playing on the weight machines. Yes, there were weight machines. Most of them still had plastic wrap on the seats, anointed with the occasional plop of bird doody.

  The aerobics class took a pause, and everyone went running around the room in circles to some very loud, wailing Arabic music. The women were still staring at me, even as they jogged. I slowly crept over to the elliptical machine, which also was not plugg
ed in. I had to somehow pass the time, because Chalak wasn’t due to pick us up until Adam finished his workout, which lasted for an arduous ninety minutes. Ninety minutes of my pretend exercise had to burn at least a few calories, so I climbed back on the unplugged exercise bike and pedaled away.*

  Friday is the Islamic holy day, so the Middle Eastern weekend is Friday and Saturday. Chalak didn’t work on those days, and Adam and I were left to fend for ourselves, sans car, sans driver, and sans direction. Adam had been to Erbil a few times before, and one sunny Friday he felt confident that he could find a good restaurant where we could have lunch. It was something to do.

  We started out walking around 10:30 a.m. wearing long pants and long-sleeved shirts in the ninety-degree heat. We were totally culturally aware. We walked five minutes to the entrance of the compound, crossed the threshold out into the real world, and turned left. There were no other pedestrians on our route, and we were the object of much attention from the drivers. There was a great deal of horn honking as the cars whizzed past. It could have either been because Erbil was like L.A., and the drivers were so surprised to see people walking, or just because Adam and I were so sexy in our pajamalike outfits. I started yelling, “Thank you!” after each horn honk. I told Adam, “You know, I get that we’re supposed to be covering up the sexy here, what with all the stipulations on the Cultural Awareness pamphlet and all, but the sexy really comes from the inside. You can’t cover up this sexy,” and I gestured wildly up and down my frame. That made Adam laugh pretty hard, and then another horn honked. “You can’t cover up this sexy” became my new motto.

  We passed several armed guards along the way, just guarding random cement-walled buildings, and as the guards would eye us suspiciously, Adam and I would smile and wave. Nearly all the guards would respond with genuine smiles and waves themselves. People really are the same everywhere, I thought. It was nice to see that the men with big guns still spoke Friendly Smile.

  We walked and talked about how Adam used to live with Warren down in Suli, but Warren had kicked him out of the villa for no apparent reason, and he had to stay with another teacher for a couple of months right before moving up to Erbil. Adam was one of the most mellow, unaffected guys I had ever met, and I couldn’t imagine anyone not getting along with him or having a reason to dramatically kick him out of a living arrangement. Adam said, “Yeah, I mean it was kinda weird, but he just wanted me out and I was like, ‘Okay, man’ and moved out of the villa.” That first day in Suli, when we were hanging out in his office, Warren had said to me, “Gretch, keep an eye on your food. If you let Adam into your kitchen, he’ll eat everything, seriously,” and then he went on to complain that Adam was a huge slob who never did the dishes and that he “left shit all over the place” and that their villa was always a “fucking pigsty.”

  I had been over to Adam’s villa a number of times since we had moved to Erbil, expecting a mosh pit of filth, and it was always disappointingly clean. He did his dishes regularly and picked up after himself. He definitely wasn’t a slob. On the other hand, I had stopped in to Warren’s villa in Suli during that first week, where he was living by himself after having kicked Adam out, and there were piles of dirty dishes and shit left all over the place, and it was pretty much a fucking pigsty. Warren’s words, not mine.

  We had been walking for an hour, in ninety-degree heat, when we finally reached an area that looked as if it might have restaurants. It was a busy street with basic buildings that included dusty storefronts for furniture stores, a produce market, and a couple of hotels. Adam had been hoping to get us to Bakery & More, a Lebanese restaurant with a bakery on the ground floor. He thought we were headed in the right direction, but we had been walking a long time and were both losing steam, and my stomach was starting to eat itself. We stopped in front of something called the Darya Hotel and decided to see if it had a restaurant.

  We entered the lobby, where there were several men sitting on leather couches, smoking shisha pipes. They all turned and stared as we approached the front desk.

  With my previous traveling and experience living in a foreign country, my pantomime skills were pretty good, and Adam and I were able to mime “menus” and “eating,” so the manager led us to the restaurant area. It was empty, which usually isn’t a good sign, but then the manager motioned for Adam to go into the kitchen to take a look. For once, I welcomed the role of lowly female and collapsed into a chair, just relieved not to be walking and sweating profusely anymore.

  Adam came back from the kitchen, shrugging, and said, “Yeah, looks good. Clean.” We had a delicious meal of (da-da-da-dum) chicken kebab, hummus, and fatoush. I was noticing a distinct lack of variety in the cuisine. But here, I could completely ignore variety, if the trade-off was Diet Coke. Diet Coke! I had been looking for it since I got here! I squealed as the waiter brought it to the table.

  The waiter at the Darya Hotel was a lively young man who told us he came to Erbil to avoid the unrest in Mosul. Mosul was the notoriously dangerous city two hours west of Erbil; it was discussed in one of those Internet news stories I had carefully ignored prior to coming to Iraq.

  This waiter was the first one who had asked me what I wanted before asking Adam. Over the past couple of weeks, I had been ignored in most interactions with locals (even with Man-About-Town Chalak), and I was the last to be acknowledged and served at restaurants. The waiters at Assos, in Suli, spoke to and waited on the men first. The manager at the Bayan Hotel spoke to me only after conversing with Warren and the male drivers. When we were getting settled in Erbil, the university’s drivers directed all inquiries and comments to Adam. It was no surprise that men were treated better here, but it was a little unsettling to experience it, repeatedly, firsthand.

  One day, I was thinking out loud that it was annoying that they really didn’t respect women here. I was certain that Warren had been thoroughly brainwashed when he countered, “Gretch, they totally respect women here. They’re treated like gold.” Gold is a commodity. “They are like prized flowers.” Flowers, also a commodity, just slightly less valuable than gold. “That’s why they have to keep their heads covered, to shield their beauty…” Blah, blah, blah. I couldn’t believe he actually bought that. I later heard him say, “Yeah, they [Muslim men] basically think all women are whores. It’s why the women can’t be left alone. The men think they’ll just screw anything that walks.” I’m sorry, what?

  My brain veered off on a tangent, and I considered the likelihood of Muslim women really wanting even to have intercourse with their husbands, much less “screw anything that walked.” Female genital mutilation was still practiced in many of the smaller towns and villages in this region (probably the ones we passed, made out of brown Play-Doh), and if I had experienced a horror like that, I would demand a chastity belt made out of granite, equipped with biometric fingerprint and retinal scan, that only my gynecologist could access, so that nothing could get close to that area. And the women who didn’t have their lady flowers brutally maimed? I had serious doubts that they even enjoyed sex. Did conservative Muslim men go down on their wives?

  I had too much free time (when would classes start?!), much of which I spent scouring Google, typing in phrases like “oral sex and the Koran.” I’m sure this was sacrilege, but Islam dictates all areas of life for the Muslim, and my curiosity was killing me.

  The first link I clicked on said that oral sex is permitted, according to the Koran. But then it had this paragraph about women and “their courses,” with an opening quote from the Koran.

  They ask thee concerning women’s courses. Say: They are a hurt and a pollution: So keep away from women in their courses, and do not approach them until they are clean. But when they have purified themselves, ye may approach them in any manner, time, or place ordained for you by God. For God loves those who turn to Him constantly and He loves those who keep themselves pure and clean. (The Noble Quran, 2:222)…

  It is obvious from the Noble Verse that intercourse is prohibited d
uring the woman’s period. Oral sex is also prohibited because the vagina would contain germs in it, and any physical contact with it, whether through the penis, tongue or finger, will not only bring pain to the woman, but also could and would hurt the man through the harmful bacteria. Allah Almighty in Noble Verse 2:222 clearly ordered men to stay away from any physical contact with the women’s vaginas during the monthly period.

  This was fascinating, not to mention valuable information. I didn’t need a handgun, or mace, or pepper spray, or even that fancy granite chastity belt to protect myself here. All I had to do was tell any potential attacker that I was experiencing the diabolic menses and they’d go screaming into the woods, a la Scooby Doo when faced with an evil, wax-faced villain. I would be smug in the knowledge that the diabolic menses was just my highly efficient self-cleaning uterus, and that the wax-faced villain was really just Old Man Murphy trying to protect his property from those meddlesome kids.

  * Adam was not to become the Love of my Life—in case you were thinking about that Tish Durkin article. He was engaged to a really adorable girl back in Canada, and I just wouldn’t want you reading too much into our interactions. Adam was absolutely hilarious and fun to be around, though. Warren was the brother I never wanted, and Adam was the awesome brother I never had.

  Chapter Eleven

  Assimilation Speed Bumps

  Two weeks had passed. I was working on my assimilation, but it was still a very strange, unfamiliar place. When one finds oneself in a very strange, unfamiliar place, and one is female, in a female-unfriendly region, one is not terribly inclined to open one’s door should one’s doorbell ring at 10:30 p.m.