I Have Iraq in My Shoe

by Gretchen Berg

  So, they just talked on the phone, the relationships weren’t physical, and none of the three girlfriends were sexy.

  The following week, Awat told me he ended things with all three girlfriends. Ruh? He explained that he did a “test” over the weekend. He bought a new SIM card for his cell phone and called each girlfriend, pretending to be a friend of his. (He said he covered the phone with a T-shirt to disguise his voice.) He claimed to be Awat’s friend who was “richer than Awat,” and then asked each girl if they would leave Awat and be his girlfriend instead. They all said, “Yes.” Oh my God. What? WHAT?! I didn’t know why I was so shocked and surprised by everything, but really? All three of them? That was profoundly discouraging, and not only because these girls were so gullible, but also because it completely confirmed Awat’s saying “never trust a woman.” Believe me!

  How did not one of them recognize Awat’s voice? I really couldn’t believe it. I also couldn’t believe that a small part of me was thinking, “Sooooo, you’re saying you’re single now?”

  Since these were conversation classes, when some of the students would come into the classroom early, I would conversate with them (and teach them not to say “conversate” since it wasn’t a real word). One day I was talking with Bawan about some of his extended family, who were living in England. He said, “My fiancée live in England,” and I said, “Oh, congratulations! You’re getting married?” to which he replied happily, “Yes! She is my cousin!”

  According to the Internet (and the Internet is always sort of right), approximately 42 percent of marriages in Middle Eastern countries involve first cousins. There had been some recent studies (conducted by a genetics researcher at the University of Washington, not just Wikipedia this time) that said cousins marrying each other wasn’t as risky (as far as reproduction went) as was originally thought. I thought they needed to do more studies on this. If first cousins were repeatedly marrying and reproducing in the same family, that had to exaggerate risks of birth defects or other genetic messiness. Plus, reproductive risk or not, yuck.

  The more I delved into this issue as it related to Kurdistan, the more I began to understand the culture, or at least pretend to understand it. My brilliant, totally unscientific “in a nutshell” breakdown, based on my brilliant, totally unscientific, haphazard Google research, was that families there were so closely tied, through both birth and marriage, that they had developed a fundamental wariness of outsiders. Why would you marry a complete stranger when you have several perfectly good cousins to choose from? Keep the money and the secrets in the family.

  In one of our earlier conversations Awat said that he would “probably” end up marrying one of his cousins. He said it so casually, like it was just an inevitability. After several weeks, the subject came up again. Awat was complaining about Kurdistan and saying that he wanted to move to Europe. I said, “Well, don’t you have to live here? Aren’t you marrying your cousin?” and he shrugged and looked pointedly at me and said, “Maybe not.”

  Day after day, Awat and I would sit and talk, about relationships, about family, about travel, and even about religion. I asked if he thought I was going to go to hell because I wasn’t Muslim. He looked at the floor, shaking his head, and answered, “I hope not.” He would stay until I kicked him out, right before my second class was to start. Several students from my second class were usually waiting outside the classroom-trailer for me to let them in, and Awat would nod to them, and they would nod back.

  I discussed this new, odd friendship situation with Jen, who had spent a great deal of time with her Kurdish students and seemed to have a fair grasp on the culture. Her opinion was, “He is definitely pursuing you.” She went on to explain that everything he had been doing—the early flattering, the after-class chats, the personal topics of conversation—were actions of a Kurdish male courting a female. I felt like a subject on Animal Planet. This should not have surprised me, because the “relationships” he had with his girlfriends seemed to consist entirely of phone calls and texting. Jen went on to point out that those students in my second class, who saw Awat leaving the classroom long after his class had ended, were probably fully aware that he was pursuing me but thought that I was too naïve to realize it. I do believe they are correct.

  One day, after class, Hawkar and Peshang had hung back with Awat and were chatting with me and discussing the meaning of names. “Teacher, what your name mean?” I explained that, as far as I knew, “Gretchen” meant “little pearl” or something like that. Peshang said, “My name mean ‘Leader.’” “Means,” I corrected him. Hawkar joined in with, “Yes, my name ‘Helper.’” I then looked at Awat, who smiled at me when he said, “Awat means ‘Hope.’”

  When we returned home to the villas, after class, Ellen and I would usually exercise by walking and running for forty-five minutes around the compound. Ellen was a new teacher I had instantly bonded with. She was an easy-breezy California girl in her late twenties who peppered her sentences frequently with “like” and “ohhhhh, I don’t knowwww.” Some people assumed she was a ditz, but they were wrong. She could tilt her head and smile and singsongily whip a razor-sharp observation out of nowhere. She came to Iraq directly from two years of teaching English in Istanbul, Turkey, and was very much over Muslim men and the Muslim culture in general. She was the perfect person to discourage my burgeoning crush on Awat.

  I told her all about our daily conversations, and what Jen had said, and then listed all the reasons why it was an impossible and ridiculous situation, other than the obvious fact that he was one of my students:

  He was twenty-four (fifteen-year age issue).

  He was Kurdish (cultural issue).

  He was Muslim (religious issue).

  He was not allowed to drive (freedom issue).

  He did not work; he just spent hours playing PlayStation (that was just annoying).

  Dear Mary Kay Letourneau,

  You seemed to be able to make things work, and I was wondering if you had any advice…

  And if those five reasons weren’t enough, Awat also lived with his mother. This was not uncommon for unmarried men and women in Iraq, but he told me that he and his mother shared a bedroom. I seriously hoped that was not common.

  A few years back, one of Awat’s older brothers was killed in a car accident. His oldest brother and older sister were both married, so Awat was the only one left in the house (although the house was a duplex, and the oldest brother and his wife lived right next door). The car accident explained why Awat’s mother would not let him drive, and I could kind of understand her clinging need to have him close by. Kind of. She wasn’t really subscribing to inshallah if she thought she could control whether Awat crashed his car. He told me he used to try to sleep in other rooms in the house, but his mom would find him and make him sleep in her room. They were so close, Awat explained, that when they would go to friends’ or relatives’ homes for dinner, everyone knew that Awat and his mother would share a plate. There are red flags, and then there are red flags, and I was suffering from temporary color blindness.

  I noticed in conversations with Kurds that they were always very quick to point out that their culture was superior to Western culture where family was concerned. When the weather was nice, most Kurdish families would spend their weekends having family picnics in parks or in the mountains. They were always doing family stuff. They would say things like, “We are very close to our families. We do not move away from our parents after university.” I moved in with my parents for two months right before moving here, so I felt like I had some street cred. But when I had told some students I was going to Paris during Nawroz (the Kurdish New Year), they looked confused and said, “But your family is not in Paris.” All family, all the time. At one point, I asked Awat, “Doesn’t that make it really easy to get sick of your relatives?” He only hesitated a second before admitting, “Yes.”

  Spending every weekend with your family, living with your family, sleeping in the same room with your mo
m when you were a twenty-four-year-old man, and then marrying your cousins.

  I could not entertain the idea of a crush on him. Absolutely not.

  The day I decided I had to find out Awat’s astrological sign, to see if we were horoscopically (probably not a word) compatible, should have been an indicator that my common sense was broken. It was not one of my most sensible moments. Determining astrological compatibility was of primary importance, if I was interested in someone: When is his birthday? What is his sign? I didn’t make all my decisions based on my horoscopes; just most of the romantic ones.

  Water signs were compatible: Cancer, Pisces, Scorpio. It was an easy process of elimination. I foolishly ignored the process once and dated a Gemini. Things did not go smoothly. I took all the horoscope stuff with the grains of salt around a margarita glass, but would still feel like the universe was green-lighting my crush if the guy I liked was a Pisces or a Scorpio.

  I went around the room asking everyone their birthdays. It wasn’t a complete waste of valuable English-teaching time; it did require them to recite a month and a date, which most of them needed practice with anyway. Awat was, unfortunately, a Pisces. What happens when you mix a green light with a red flag? I don’t know, but it’s probably going to end up the color of shit.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Virginity Soap

  Six months had passed since I began my contract and moved to Iraq. I had finally stopped marveling at the spelling discrepancies in the street signs, I had finally stopped staring at wandering women in abayas, I had finally stopped gaping at pickup trucks carrying fifteen people and a donkey in the flatbed, and I had finally stopped noticing the locals noticing me.

  I had finally, also, understood that I wasn’t really living in Iraq. Kurdistan was a completely different place. So different and so separate from the rest of Iraq, in fact, that Awat made an emphatic statement that put it into perspective for me: “I HATE Iraq. I HATE it! When Iraq football [soccer] team play? I hope they FAIL!” That was serious. Kurdistan versus Iraq.

  It was like the Yankees–Red Sox rivalry.

  The next “match” was Kurdistan versus Canada, when Warren had to observe my class for a performance review. Warren took a seat in the back of the room, but I knew his personality, and this wouldn’t merely be an observation. He couldn’t help himself. His ego was driven to be the center of attention at all times, and it was killing him to try to stay quiet while I attempted to teach a lesson. To his credit he did try, but my students were entertained by his gregarious personality, and the men wanted to discuss soccer with him, so I waited politely for several minutes while Warren and Awat good-naturedly argued about Real Madrid and Manchester United, blah blah blah, how was I going to be evaluated on this? I finally held my hand up and shouted, “Enough!” then smiled and reminded Warren he was supposed to be evaluating, and I was supposed to be teaching.

  Warren later asked if I wanted to discuss the evaluation casually at the villas and I said, “No.” Whether or not he realized it, I really took my teaching seriously and expected a professional evaluation, to be discussed in his office at the school. I didn’t want him to just snort through a bunch of jokes about it over beers on the front porch.

  He obliged, and the following week I had a meeting with Warren in his office to discuss my performance. He took a sip of his Turkish coffee as I sat across from him expectantly. He began with, “Okay, I don’t want you to get a huge head about this…” Great. Nice, professional start to a performance review. I smiled wanly as he continued, “but you’re one of the best, if not the best English teacher we have at this school.” Wow. That wasn’t what I had been expecting. I didn’t want him to think my ego had exploded, so I cautiously said, “Thank you,” while thinking that after all his supreme bullshitting, I couldn’t truly enjoy that praise anyway. Who knew if he was telling the truth? What I could enjoy was how I was simultaneously annoyed and entertained by his visible struggle to compliment me. This wouldn’t have been the case with Old Warren, but New Warren had been feeling the rift between us as much as I had. He was nothing if not observant, and since he had returned from his summer break, I had been carefully avoiding him.

  Much to my surprise I was having a great time living in Suli. I had the privacy I desperately craved in the way-off-campus villas, loved my students, had adjusted to the new schedule, and was really enjoying the social life with the other teachers. We drank together, had game night with board games together, had Saturday brunches (sometimes with smuggled bacon) together, and commiserated together. There was much to commiserate about during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

  According to Wikipedia:

  It is the Islamic month of fasting, in which participating Muslims refrain from eating, drinking, smoking, and indulging in anything that is in excess or ill-natured, from dawn until sunset. Fasting is meant to teach the Muslim patience, modesty, and spirituality. Ramadan is a time for Muslims to fast for the sake of God and to offer more prayer than usual. During Ramadan, Muslims ask forgiveness for past sins, pray for guidance and help in refraining from everyday evils, and try to purify themselves through self-restraint and good deeds.

  There was a virtual meltdown at the villas when people discovered there was no alcohol being sold anywhere. “Oh my God! We should have stocked up!” Ellen practically screamed, brandishing a nearly empty bottle of vodka. I was more concerned with where I was going to eat during the day. No restaurants were open before sundown, including my favorite falafel cart, which was two blocks from the university and had been my main source of lunch since I moved down to Suli.

  Classes had to be moved up by two hours, so that students could all get home in time to break the fast and eat dinner. It also meant that they would be dehydrated and hungry during class. The instructors all had to be sensitive to this, and therefore could not eat or drink in front of the students.

  I could not make it through a two-and-a-half-hour class without having water (“I’ve seen her dehydrate, sir. It’s pretty gross.”), so when the students would leave for the fifteen-minute break, I would duck my head under my desk and drink from my water bottle. There were a few days when Awat and Peshang would stay in the classroom, so I had to ask, “Do you mind if I drink some water?” They were overly gracious and would gush, “No problem! No problem!”

  Awat later said to me that he had told his mother all about me and how I would ask permission to drink water. Awat’s mother had said, “She is very polite. She is better than some of the Muslims at the market.” Apparently, there were quite a few Muslims who didn’t take Ramadan very seriously and would openly eat and drink during daylight hours, which was beyond offensive to the Muslims who were observing the fast. I was just pleased his mother approved of me.

  I was in with the mom.

  Teaching in Suli was giving me an entirely new perspective, not to mention a window into the hypocrisy of the culture. The Cultural Awareness pamphlet had explained that there was no homosexuality in Islam and that it was a “cultural” thing to see men holding hands with other men. Except many of the men I saw holding hands with other men appeared to be gay. My gaydar is pretty strong, and there’s a marked difference between holding hands and lovingly caressing hands, or lower backs, or thighs. I was kind of glad the gay men had managed to create a loophole that rendered their behavior acceptable, but there didn’t seem to be any loopholes for the women.

  One afternoon I was browsing the beauty aisle of a random, run-down store, and came across something called Virginity Soap. There was only one bar (virginity was in high demand in these Muslim countries), and I grabbed it and shrieked with glee, at the same time thinking, “Ucchhh, this is pretty bad.”

  An apple-cheeked, pubescent blond smiled at me from the front of the package, which was written both in English and Arabic. Additional print indicated it was “Made in Thailand” and “Manufactured and Distributed by Young & Sweet Skin Care—Paris, France.” This was a wildly diverse, multicultural bar of soap if e
ver I had seen one. “Touch Me! Please” was etched in gold print above the words “Virginity Soap.” Also on the front of the box were the phrases “With Rose Extracts,” which was nice, “NEW,” which was also good, and “Skin Whitening,” which was deeply troubling. I know that many Asian countries were very big on skin-whitening beauty products, but most of those were to be used on the face. These were the directions on the side of the box: “Wash it over your sensitive area. Rinse well. Please apply gently everyday.” (This was before I had heard that anal bleaching was sweeping the nation back home. Possibly just the porn nation, but the fact that I was even aware of it made my stomach churn a little.)

  The instructions on the back of the Virginity Soap box:

  Touch Me! Please Virginity Soap enriched with herbal extracts for cleansing the most sensitive area of women without leaving any residue, maintains the proper natural moisture of the skin. Protect irritations and bacterial infections that cause inflammation, itching, burning sensation and unpleasant ordor. It also tightens the varginal muscel.

  Spell-check didn’t even know where to start with that.

  There was Virginity Soap for women, but no comparable product necessary for men. Ellen, Jen, and I would have furtive and somewhat reluctant conversations, where we admitted that we were starting to feel a little racist. Virginity Soap is bullshit! What is wrong with these people? We had also discovered that many of the restaurants in the Kurdistan region of Iraq had designated men-only sections. Women, with their loose varginal muscles and screaming children, could eat in the other section.