The American Granddaughter (12 page)

Dil dil dilani

To Baashika and Bahzani

Baba went to old town stall

Brought us chickpeas and raisins . . .

The girl steals her grandmother’s lullaby. Out of the same memory well, she pulls the words, the tune and the rhythmic movement and claims them for herself. Two women in a familiar pose, and the roles are reversed. Rahma fights with the little strength left in her, but soon surrenders to the hands that caress her head and face and wipe the tears from her many wrinkles.

‘Shame on you, Zayyoun. You’re lost, my child. My heart is broken over you.’

‘Grandma, listen to me, don’t take it like this.’

‘And how do you want me to take it?’

‘We’re doing a good job in this country. Believe me.’

The old woman pulls her head away and looks contemptuously at her granddaughter.

‘Don’t you dare say these things in the room where your grandfather’s soul ascended. Have some respect for his memory at least.’

‘He died here?’

‘Here on this bed. It was a mercy from God that he died before witnessing the occupation, before witnessing you.’

Zeina can’t see the old woman’s tears in the dark, but she can smell them. She can see her grandmother’s voice, and it’s pale and trembling.

‘Here on the same bed, where you used to play as a child. When they took you away from us, it made us ill and old. Your grandfather and I felt like orphans.’

‘Why do you cry now, when I’m here with you?’

‘If only they’d known how to raise you properly when they took you away, my daughter’s daughter.’

‘I’m the way you made me. I haven’t changed.’

‘You have changed. You belong to the Green Zone now.’

Zeina continues to wipe the tears away from the tired face. She passes a hand over the bedspread that’s weighed down by the heat of the room. That pillow over there, by the window, that’s where her grandfather used to lean while reading the newspaper. She can only remember him with his glasses and the newspaper. He read aloud and made sarcastic comments about the news. His voice lives on in the room. Her grandmother would listen to his comments, put her finger to her lips and whisper in real fear, ‘Shh . . . you’ll get us all into trouble, man!’

Zeina looks over to the far corner of the room where a candle burns before a picture of Mary, the mother of miracles. The candle flame has been flickering since she left it fifteen years ago. The picture is settled in its place on the small table, propped against the wall, with the same white crocheted tablecloth under it. But something is missing. Where’s the gold that was sacrificed on the Virgin’s altar? The jewellery that used to adorn the frame is gone. Nothing sparkles in the picture. Zeina gets up and moves closer, to be sure. She asks her grandmother, ‘Has someone stolen the Virgin’s gold?’

‘No. I sold it.’

‘Grandma! You sold the Virgin’s gold?’

Life returns to the old woman’s voice. ‘Did the Virgin, bless her name, need the gold when we were suffering under the sanctions? I sold it to pay for Tawoos’s dentures.’

The returning granddaughter suddenly remembers that dark years have passed here. She’s heard how families sold their furniture and sat on the floor, how even the wood of the doors and the iron of the window frames were sold. But those days are gone now. She looks tenderly at her grandmother, as if to say, ‘Don’t worry. We’ve come and we’ve brought salvation.’ But the old woman, who sees the hidden glow of eyes in the dark, who reads minds like the fortune-tellers of Babylon, shakes her head and murmurs, ‘The worst is yet to come. We can only ask God for protection.’

On the wall above the bed Zeina sees a white crucifix adorned with seashells and framed on a red velvet background. The room is more like a chapel than a place to sleep. Above the crucifix an empty black nail sticks out from the wall, with a faded rectangle where a picture must’ve been recently removed. ‘Whose picture was it that used to hang here?’ Zeina asks. Rahma looks to where Zeina’s pointing. That girl doesn’t miss a thing.

‘Tawoos came one day and said that Saddam was visiting people in their homes. He just knocked on the door and walked in like fate with his bodyguards. He wandered through the rooms, lifting the lids off cooking pots to see what ordinary people were eating. She said it was best we get a picture of him and hang it somewhere prominent. Your grandfather refused at first, but we argued over it until he reluctantly gave in. Haydar got us a framed picture for a few hundred dinars. He said it was best to put it in the front room, to ward off evil. We put it here, above the cross. But he never came. And after the war we took it down.’

As night descends, the rooms of the big house feel more desolate than ever. Zeina worries about her grandmother. ‘Aren’t you afraid of the lack of security in the city, Grandma?’

‘Who would I be afraid of? Tawoos comes to me every day, and the people of the street have known me for forty years. As for those new militant riffraff, they don’t bother me. Muhaymen has told his group to look out for me.’

‘Who?’

‘Muhaymen, Tawoos’s third son. Haydar’s brother. He was a prisoner of war in Iran. Now he’s with the Mahdi Army.’

It’s no longer just the lack of light in the room. A dark mist has veiled Zeina’s eyes, and fever rises in her cheeks. What would Captain Donovan do if he found out that his favourite interpreter had a brother in the Mahdi Army?

XXIII

I didn
’
t repeat that visit to my grandmother in her home. As she hugged me at the door and choked on her tears, she said that she’d break my legs if I ever came back with ‘those lowlifes’. She threw me out, crying and thanking God that my grandfather’s eyes were closed for ever before seeing ‘the shame’ that his American granddaughter had brought upon them.

Back at the Zone, the place that defined me now, I found a commotion at the checkpoint and raised female voices. There were three veiled women from the parliament, protesting at our dogs sniffing their clothes. I didn’t want to get involved in interpreting and slipped quietly away. What the hell was going on here?

I found Shawn, Hamilton and Bill doing what looked like a sketch in the middle of a laughing crowd of male and female soldiers. Army soldiers would do anything to combat boredom, including waking up volcanoes and bringing meteors down from the sky. One of the boys was holding a baseball bat and aiming it vertically at his forehead. Another was making wailing noises and raising his right hand and bringing it down on his chest in a steady rhythm. The third was jumping up and down and repeating, ‘Hey da. Hey da.’

I didn’t get it right away. But when I was told that they’d just come back from a patrol in Kadhimiyah, where they’d seen and were mimicking the rituals of Ashura, I understood that Bill was supposed to be saying ‘Haydar’. He pronounced it as he heard it and didn’t know that it was one of the names of the Shia Imam. I don’t know what got into me. A joke is just a joke, at the end of the day. They were tired, and the summer was hot, and a little distraction couldn’t hurt anyone. But their laughter irked me, even though the religion they were mocking wasn’t my own. Let’s say that I’d just grown up to the sound of its muezzins. So I acted like any religious fundamentalist.

‘Okay, Shawn. Let’s do the sketch of worshippers by the Wailing Wall. You know the ones who move their heads back and forth like clockwork toys.’ It wasn’t even my voice coming from my lips. It might’ve been the voice of my father, the TV presenter, or maybe the voice of Tawoos, or my writer alter ego who’d learned to imitate the pitch of my tone . . .

Everybody looked at me in astonishment. As if I’d just spilled a bucket of water over somebody’s head. The sketch ended and the laughter faded away. Hamilton came over and put a hand on my shoulder, ‘We were just messing. Whose side are you on, anyway?’

‘I’m not on the side of morons.’

‘Let me buy you a cup of coffee.’

We went to the canteen and sat at a table where some newly arrived recruits were sitting. Hamilton went and stood in line. I was absent-minded. I remembered my Aunt Jawza. One day she crawled across Jumhuriyya Street on all fours. Her son had polio and she vowed to crawl from Khellany Square to the Miskanta Church near Midan Place, in the hope that the Virgin would take pity on her and heal her only son. When she got there, the skin on her legs was peeling off, but she was optimistic as she abandoned herself to the hands of Manoush, the old churchwarden, to complete the ritual. Manoush was a short, fat old woman, who carried the tools of her trade with her at all times: a thick metal chain with a hook and catch at the end.

A woman would come to Manoush praying and weeping, overcome with emotion and fear. Manoush would try to calm her down as she fastened the chain around her neck and locked it, the audible sibilants of her murmured prayers mingling with the woman’s sighs and the ringing of the church bells. Then Manoush would attempt to take the chain off with one swift movement. If it resisted, it was a bad omen, and the chained woman left pale and distraught. But that day the chain around my aunt’s neck slipped off right away. She cried tears of gratitude and thanked God, who cared to look upon her distress and include her in His mercy. Manoush pushed her chest towards my aunt for a handful of dinars to be placed into her cleavage.

Whose side was I on?

Hamilton returned with the coffee and knocked on the table to wake me up. I told him my aunt’s story. Others at the table listened too, and thought my Aunt Jawza’s story was ‘incredible’, ‘fantastic’, as if I was telling it for their entertainment. The only one who understood was Manuel, the dark-haired soldier of Peruvian origins that Deborah was crazy about. He was jumping up and down in his seat as if I were telling a story that he was only too familiar with. Then he told us about the Good Friday procession that took place in the poor neighbourhood where he grew up in Lima. Every single time, the priest selected José the postman to play Jesus as they re-enacted the crucifixion.

‘What? Because his name José means Jesus?’ someone asked.

‘No, not that. Half the town was called José. But because he was the only one who had blue eyes.’

They took the post bag off José’s shoulder and appointed him their personal Jesus for the day. On Good Friday, the deacons lifted him onto the cross, punched holes through his palms with the nails and mercilessly pushed the crown of thorns down on his forehead. He bit his lip obediently and suppressed his cries of pain. Crying was for children, not prophets. After the ceremony was over, they spent the whole year treating his wounds, and by the time they’d healed he was ready for another crucifixion the following Easter.

‘Manuel, are you on the deacons’ side or on José’s?’ I asked.

‘José’s.’

‘And I’m on my aunt’s side, who returned from that church with bleeding legs and peace of mind.’

When the order came to transfer me to Mosul, phone calls between my grandmother and I became few and far between. Terrorists were getting more active in the cities, and more interpreters were needed everywhere. Arrests were being made by the thousand, and they needed us to interpret at interrogations. It was hard work, but the general mood was actually calmer than in the capital. In Baghdad, the city itself was burning, but the Zone remained safe. ‘The master’s house is always safe,’ as Nuri Al-Said had believed. As we too believed, for as long as we lived within its walls.

In Mosul my life changed. Public relations entered it, and social expectations. I got to know a few young women from the neighbouring villages. University graduates who were on the lookout for husbands. Who dreamed of going to America and getting married there. ‘Amreeka’ they pronounced it. They imagined all the men there were millionaires. I also met other interpreters who worked for the Marines. One of them was a young man from Basra who’d lived in Boston and spoke English with the superiority of a British lord.

‘Where did you learn such birdsong, Malek?’ I asked.

‘In Oxford.’

Malek had a PhD in Comparative Literature from Oxford University. His thesis was on the use of myth in Shakespeare’s plays and Sayyab’s poetry. Why had this singing nightingale left the fine silver of literary tropes and opted instead for the cheap tin of security interrogations?

We became friends. He used to call me Zen Zeina, and I called him Malek the Sad, which was the Arabic name for a type of heron that lived in Iraq and was said to sing beautifully when injured. Malek suffered from boredom and chronic depression, and we had long talks about how bad things were getting in Iraq. He ended every discussion on the same note: ‘We ate shit, Zeina my dear.’ The army even corrupted Shakespearean virtues.

My closest friend, however, was still the laptop. I wrote my emails to Calvin on it, and received an outpouring of bitter political jokes every day. Iraq became a joke factory. There were jokes about the Kurds, about people from Deleimi, Mosul and Nasiriya, about the potheads. Every sect had its skilled jokers who specialised in mocking the other sects. There were also jokes featuring the president and the politicians who came on our coat-tails. Everyone was equal in the eye of the joke. That seemed to be the only democracy we had brought.

I found Malek the Sad to read him the latest of my online finds: a list of the terms most used in Iraqi conversations since the start of the war. It was supposed to be a kind of joke, but Oxford boy listened to me with a grave look on his face.