The American Granddaughter (11 page)

Come back here, don’t go. Restart the computer. And don’t interrupt.

XXI

We were told that he was an evil son of a bitch.

He was a security official in the former regime. It was people like him that we were supposed to be holding to account for their crimes against humanity. There was no pity for someone like him. As long as he, and others like him, were free, Iraq could not rise up and give its rendition of the hymn of democracy. It was midnight when we headed in three vehicles to the house of that contemptible man. Twenty soldiers got out and surrounded the house. They were armed to the teeth, but to me they looked like panthers moving in the dark. I waited in the Humvee with two soldiers guarding me. I wasn’t scared but I was nervous. It was my first real raid.

Four of the soldiers broke the iron garden gate, went into the yard, kicked the wooden door and were inside. Inside, a family was sleeping; a woman woke up and started screaming. Then a man appeared in his white
dishdasha
, holding out his open hands towards the soldiers and saying, ‘Yes . . . Yes.’ They shouted and gestured at him to lie face down on the floor, and he immediately understood. He dropped down quickly as if he’d been trained for situations like this. They ordered him to extend his arms to the sides and he did so. A soldier stepped forward and tied the man’s hands behind his back with a nylon wire. Then they called me over from the vehicle to do the interpreting.

I looked at the ‘target’ and the M16 aimed at his head, and I noted his good looks: green eyes and a tall figure whose dignity was emphasised by the white
dishdasha
. Not everyone could continue to look dignified while lying face down on the floor.

The unit’s sergeant brought out a piece of paper from his pocket and told me to ask the man his name.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Mohammad Khalil.’

‘Your full name.’

‘Mohammad Khalil Mohammad Ayash Al-Abeedy.’

He sounded as if he was choking on his pride. From an inner room we heard children crying. The name that the ‘target’ had just given didn’t match the one written down on the sergeant’s piece of paper. From the open door a woman appeared with uncovered hair and a light-coloured
dishdasha
. She addressed me directly, her voice full of panic, ‘Sister.
Wallah
, my husband’s done nothing. He’s done nothing,
wallah
.’

My lips trembled and I struggled to keep my composure. On my own initiative, and without double-checking with the sergeant, I reached out and gently pushed aside the weapon that was aimed at her husband’s head. I said, ‘It’s nothing to be scared of. Just a simple investigation.’

The sergeant was asking me, ‘It this the man we want?’

‘Not according to his name.’

He told me to ask him for ID.

‘Where’s your ID?’

He’d barely lifted his head towards his wife when the sergeant shouted and aimed the weapon back towards the man’s skull. ‘Face down on the ground!’

The ‘target’ did not need my interpretation to understand what was required of him. He swiftly stuck his cheek to the bare yellow and black tiles. I intervened again and whispered to the sergeant, ‘Take it easy. He’s asking his wife to bring his ID.’

I received a look of gratitude from the green eyes before they returned to the floor. The man said to his wife, ‘Quick, bring the ID quickly, from the drawer under the TV.’

The woman went looking for the ID but couldn’t find it. She was panicking and confused, yelling from next door, ‘I can’t find it! Where the hell is it? Where did you put it?’

I interpreted what she was saying for the sergeant, while the man on the floor was grinding his teeth as he yelled back to his wife, ‘Check the cupboard by the TV, woman!’

A few moments later, the wife returned with the ID. I read it and handed it to the sergeant, pointing to the name that didn’t match the paper at all. Neither the first name or the father’s name, nor the grandfather’s or the family surname. Under profession, it said ‘teacher’. Again I confirmed to my colleague that this was not the wanted man. The sergeant, who had three sharp-angled lines on his arm, relaxed and ordered the soldier to cut the hand ties. They helped the man up and sat him on a chair, before the sergeant asked him one more time for his full name to confirm that he was the owner of the ID. The man repeated the name. I directed my colleague’s attention to the fact that the man was a teacher, so he asked him about his profession. The man replied, ‘I am a professor at the University of Tikrit.’

The sergeant asked him if he knew so-and-so – the man whose name was on the piece of paper – and he answered, in English, ‘No’.

‘Oh, you speak English?’

‘Yes, I do.’

But then the man seized this moment of calm to address me in Arabic, ‘Sister, please, explain to them that I’m not from this city and don’t know anyone here. This is my first academic year at the university.’

The sergeant stepped forward, bowed before the man, shook his hand and said in a theatrical tone, ‘Sir, please accept my apology.’

The man of the house, whose door we’d broken fifteen minutes before, replied, ‘No problem, it’s okay.’ He repeated it a few times, his eyes watering in disbelief at the fact that he’d survived. I too could not believe it. I was finding the scene before me very moving.

We gave the man a compensation claim form and left through the broken door. But we didn’t return to the base right away. That night, we went and broke the outer gate of the neighbouring house. Then we knocked on the inner door and a stooped old man came out, also wearing a white
dishdasha
and carrying an inhaler, and behind him stood a woman of the same age. There was no one but them in the house. After examining the ID, we confirmed he was not the ‘target’ either. We apologised and gave him a form for the cost of the outer gate before leaving to break someone else’s door. But before our soldiers aimed their boots to kick the third door in, we heard the sound of a car speeding through the parallel street. The curfew had started at 9 p.m. and not even a fly would dare move at this hour. We dropped everything and ran back to the vehicles to chase after the fleeing car, but we only caught up with it when it stopped outside casualty at Tikrit hospital. The driver was helping an old man out of the car and supporting him through the hospital doors. We followed them inside and confirmed that the old man had suffered a heart attack and needed urgent treatment. We examined their IDs and the name of that son of a bitch we were after wasn’t among them.

So we returned to the base a little before dawn, and I didn’t sleep that night. When I got up for work at 6 a.m., I was still carrying a mental image of the university teacher with his cheek pressed to the floor, and his attempts to hide his humiliation in front of his wife and children, and even worse, asking us to excuse him. That image would be responsible for many nights of insomnia to come.

The three months I stayed in Tikrit were depressing on more than one account. The summer heat was unbearable. On nights when I slept on the terrace to get some air (the air-conditioning was broken), the mosquitoes tormented me, and the tanks and Humvees passed by my head on their way to the raids. To add insult to injury, there was no bathroom where I slept, whether with hot or cold water. What a miserable life for a palace!

I was deprived of the basic God-given right of having a toilet nearby. ‘Use a plastic bag,’ was the advice I received from one of the kitchen workers. I used to follow it when desperate. Other times I would walk to the other palace and jostle in line with the soldiers for their restrooms, which were like high-school toilets. Filthy and with obscene graffiti on the walls. There was always someone standing outside and peeking through the cracks or pestering you with questions or protesting that your shit was taking too long to come out.

For all these hardships, I let out a scream of savage delight when I was told that I’d be leaving Tikrit and transferring to the Green Zone in Baghdad.

XXII

‘What do you say we raid her house?’ said Donovan, my new captain in the Green Zone, one hot July evening. I thought he was joking.

In July, water boils in the jug, as the Baghdadi saying goes. That’s why we were sitting on the edge of the artificial lake with our feet in the water. The lake was no longer fit for swimming now that weeds had started growing in it and green-blue spots were floating on its stagnant surface. The soldiers who’d arrived here at the beginning of the war told us that the palaces were like something out of the
Arabian Nights
. There used to be an army of horticulturalists whose job it was to cultivate and maintain the garden, and they’d brought rare flowers and plants from all over the world. The lakes used to be as clear as glass; wild geese and river fish roamed in them. Then the new government officials and the members of the new ruling council arrived with their guards and wreaked havoc in the place. Gone were the specialists in roses and jasmine. The waterfowl were barbecued.

At first I didn’t get Captain Donovan’s drift. I was asking him about the possibility of visiting my grandmother, whose house was just half an hour away by car from the Zone. So he suggested we raid her house, and it turned out he meant what he said. He didn’t oppose the visit, but worried about drawing the neighbours’ attention, and so implicating my grandmother and putting her in danger. He argued she’d become an easy target for terrorists if anyone suspected that her granddaughter worked with the Americans. ‘So what do you suggest?’ I asked.

‘If you want to see her, there’s only one way: we can raid two or three houses on the street. Her house will be one of them, and it’ll look like a normal search patrol.’

At dinner that same evening we discussed the plan with the rest of the unit. We would run investigations in the neighbourhood, under the pretext of looking for suspects, then we’d raid her house. A raid usually takes over two hours. So I’d have plenty of time to get my fill of my grandmother, while the soldiers rested on the sofas of the lounge, ate watermelon and looked at the icons of saints. We had our plan, set the date and carried on drinking Coke and devouring glasses of jelly in an attempt to cool down. The more we ate and drank, the more we sweated.

It’s time for me to step away from the keyboard and into the scene. I want to live this visit outside the text, play my true part, which lies beyond arranging words. So I’ll let the writer describe, in her high style, what happened during that pretend raid. She’s visibly relieved at my withdrawal and starts to write:

The turquoise ceramic piece still hangs in its usual place at the entrance of the house, warding off evil with its seven eyes. The smell of the oil lamp welcomes the arrivals and announces yet another power cut. The darkness of the night and the noise of the approaching armoured vehicles have turned the neighbourhood streets into a ghost town. The same darkness is a convenient cover for Zeina and her friends. One of the soldiers knocks heavily on the door, and it’s opened by Rahma herself. Three soldiers go in first, followed by Zeina, who quickly shuts the door behind her and, despite the darkness that is broken by nothing but a lonely candle, rushes to make sure the curtains are also drawn. The rest of the unit stay behind, in the safety of their armoured vehicles.

At the heart of the living room, a big picture of the grandfather hangs in the middle of the wall. A beautiful old picture, with him in his military uniform and his colonel’s stars. But because Zeina only knew her grandfather with white hair and a receding hairline, she thinks that the picture is of her youngest uncle, until she picks up the lantern and moves closer.

The grandmother has been prepared for the raid. Her American granddaughter explained the plan to her on the phone. She objected at first, couldn’t see what interpreters would have to do with the search operations of the occupation. Zeina replied that monitoring raids was an integral part of her job. Rahma’s longing to see her beloved Zayyoun blinded her into believing and accepting. But despite all the preparation and anticipation, the old woman screams and slaps her own cheeks the minute she sees her granddaughter in the distinctive light-coloured camouflage of the US Army. She doesn’t recognise her right away, not until Zeina has removed the helmet from her head. And Rahma still wishes that the woman standing before her was only wearing these clothes as disguise, that she’d only borrowed the helmet to protect her head from the stray bullets that fill the Baghdad air. But she knows that her eyes are only confirming what her heart has been telling her for some time.

‘
God damn you, Zeina, daughter of Batoul . . . I wish I had died before having to see you like this.’

The granddaughter squirms with embarrassment in front of her comrades, but none of them understand what the old woman is saying anyway. She goes up to her grandmother to embrace her, but Rahma pushes her away and goes inside. Zeina follows her to the bedroom, that large rectangular space that’s filled with memories and laughter, the echoes of family arguments, the prayers and lullabies of the past. Rahma has collapsed on the old low chair with the wide wooden armrests. With heavy eyelids she looks at the soldier standing in the doorway and wishes again that her eyes were deceiving her. She wishes she’d go blind, or the girl would point to something behind the curtain and say, ‘Smile, you’re on
Candid Camera
.’ But it isn’t
Candid Camera
. She knows it’s not. And Zeina isn’t removing her disguise. She just shuts the door behind her and becomes a ghost moving in the darkness of the room. She throws herself into her grandmother’s arms. Clings to her. Persists in holding her close. Even as the old woman resists the embrace like a sulking child. Zeina holds on to her grandmother and rocks her back and forth. She starts singing . . .