The American Granddaughter (13 page)

‘Generator. No electricity. No water. Traffic. Car bomb. Thief. Twenty litres. Three notebooks (notebook is street slang for thirty thousand dollars). Ration. Battle. Dead. Kidnapped. Escaped. Assassination. Iranian. Constitution.
Wawi
(jackal). Diesel.
A’llass
(informant).
Solagh
(ousted minister),
makhmoot
(abducted). Explosion. RIP. ID. Mortar. Bremer. Americans. Stoned. No reception. Kilowatts. Federalism. Good tidings.’

‘Didn’t I tell you that we ate it, Zeina dear?’

XXIV

My grandmother arrived in Amman on a snowy day in February. I stood on the pavement waiting for the car. My grandmother was lying on the back seat, and at first I thought the driver was Haydar. But when I drew closer to greet them, I realised that he looked like Haydar, but was older.

It was before five in the afternoon, but an early dusk had already descended on the snow, turning its white into a luminous blue. In that magical light I watched him get out of the car after hours on the road and stretch his slender figure. He opened the back door and took my grandmother’s hand to help her out. With his soft beard and a yellow scarf wrapped around his neck, he looked a bit like a medieval monk to me. Muhaymen, my other so-called brother, carried my grandmother’s suitcase upstairs to the flat I was renting in Deir Ghbar. It was quieter here than Shumaysany and Suwaifeya, not as crowded with other Iraqis. For the neighbours, I was one of many Iraqi exiles for whom Jordan had become a place for the scattered families to meet, a safe sky for the migrant birds of Iraq. For Muhaymen, I was just Batoul’s daughter, and Batoul was Rahma’s daughter. Rahma was sick and needed surgery, so her granddaughter had come all the way from Detroit to take care of her. It was the story that my grandmother and Haydar agreed on. Did they need to protect me from Muhaymen?

I didn’t even know Haydar well enough to trust him, but my grandmother thought of him as her own son. She confided everything in him and included him in her plans. And I had tired of scheming, of negotiating my way around endless security regulations whenever I wanted to get out of the camp. Interpreters and translators were especially vulnerable. They were being hunted down and slaughtered like animals. It wasn’t a fate I would choose, but I also wanted to spend some quality time with my grandmother without the soldiers sitting in the next room. I wanted to hear more of the family history that she’d been dripping into my consciousness like Tawoos dripped rose water into cold drinks. My grandmother told her stories, and I listened and memorised them. When she got tired of talking, she’d let out a sigh and look at me like someone waiting for a miracle. Did she expect me to suddenly get up and start shouting ‘Down with America’?

When the doctor told her that she needed an operation to replace a damaged knee joint, I quickly put a plan in place. Grandma would have her operation in Jordan, where there were probably more Iraqi surgeons than in Iraq anyway, hundreds of them who’d escaped death threats and settled in Amman, as well as Dubai and Damascus and Sanaa. I’d get my two weeks’ leave from the army and we’d make our way separately and meet there. Two weeks would just be enough to spend some quality time with my grandmother. As it turned out, it was also enough for Muhaymen’s name to become forever engraved on my soul.

I knew that he was the son of Tawoos, the woman who breastfed me when my mother fell ill with typhoid, and so he was another one of my milk brothers, but I hadn’t quite taken in this ‘milk brother’ thing. When Muhaymen appeared before me like a truly aimed arrow, I was still wondering how Grandma could put her trust in a man from the Mahdi Army to bring her to Amman. Apparently Haydar’s arak-drinking habits had got him into trouble after Sadr City became an ultra-conservative stronghold, and he’d gone into hiding for a while. So Muhaymen volunteered to step in for his brother and take the old Christian woman to Amman for treatment. They would cross the country road that passed through the Triangle of Death. He’d stay with Rahma until she got her treatment and saw her granddaughter who had come especially from America, then he’d drive her back to Baghdad. It was this last-minute arrangement that shook the tree of my life and chased away the ravens of gloom that had nested in its branches.

Muhaymen stirred some deep currents in my soul. I wasn’t young or naïve enough to fall in love at first sight, but his name – he who rules over everything – was a beautiful omen and accidental trap. Besides, my stay in Amman, away from army restrictions and safe from the life-threatening dangers of Baghdad, put me in a pleasant state of giddiness. I was making a game out of hiding my army job from my neighbours and from Muhaymen, enjoying the pretence of being simply an Iraqi exile, homesick for her country and her people.

Muhaymen!

I fell in love with his name before I fell in love with him. His name was the hook and, with his intensity and his special way of talking, he pulled me into the unique weave of his character. When I wrote about him, words came to me naturally, without need of the writer’s help! Did I love him for his qualities or was I simply testing myself to challenge my capacity to get close my enemy? What film was it where the hostage fell in love with her abductor?

But I wasn’t his hostage. I sleepwalked to his deep river and dived without fear into its silty waters. I was putting my trust in my enemy and falling in love with my brother. What would I write to Calvin now that this wave had overtaken me?

XXV

‘Muhaymen, where did you get this strange name?’ I asked him, before taking a puff from my nargileh at Kan Zaman Café in Amman. My legs were stretched on a low wicker chair.

‘What’s so strange about it, dear sister? Muhyamen is one of the ninety-nine holy names of Allah. Our father chose for each of the six of us a name with a religious meaning. It was my destiny to get Abdul-Muhaymen.’

Muhaymen didn’t smoke, but his very words were like flames rising from his chest. I wasn’t used to hearing a man speak of destiny, the decreed, fortune, fate, the written. It was something that belonged to my mother and my grandmother and Tawoos. His faith and his words were against me, standing between me and my fantasy, aborting my hopes. Did I need destiny to explain that I came to this part of the world, that I met Muhaymen and fell for him? I came here of my own volition, walking on these two legs that were as strong as the legs of mountain women.

‘You could be one of Gaugin’s models, you know,’ Calvin had said one day as we skimmed through a book about the French painter in Detroit Public Library. I looked at the paintings with the bright colours spread on the pages before me and knew what he meant. The dark-skinned legs of the women in these paintings looked as if they were cast in a straight mould, without curves that start soft-fleshed at the thighs and end up narrow at the ankles. I felt a flash of gratitude for Calvin for putting an arty slant on something that I considered one of my faults, for creating a lineage for me that I hadn’t been aware of.

So, with legs fit for a model from a tropical island, I walked to Muhaymen, waving the leaf of my seduction in his face, knowing full well it had thorny ends. I didn’t hide my feelings, but pursued them, expecting their blossoms of delight to start growing slowly from the pores of my skin. But Muhaymen didn’t see my leaf or my blossoms. He just saw the thorns and shuddered, reacting as if we were partners in a crime of which I was ignorant.

‘No way. It’s impossible. You are my milk sister.’

‘What if I tell you that I don’t believe in any of that milk nonsense?’

‘So what? To me you’re still my sister.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘
Shnou
?’

I was relieved he didn’t understand, and instead of repeating the insult in Arabic, I bit my lip and went quiet. He was probably the first man in my life to make me feel shy. With others I’d felt bolder, swearing and talking dirty as much as they did or more. He possessed a kind of dignity that made me check myself. That nervous, slender, bearded man who marched under the flag of a backward sectarian movement had managed to confuse me and exercise over me the power of love. One look from him was all it took for me to swallow my voice and rein in my loose tongue.

There was no doubt that it was my army job that armoured me with my lexicon of obscenities. His brother Haydar had a point when he reluctantly confronted me with what my grandmother had said: that I was, God forbid,
tarbiya siz
. The reason, according to her, was that that faraway country had taken away my good manners and made me into someone else. Haydar said he disagreed, but promised out of courtesy to help her put me back on the righteous path.

Poor Haydar. The old woman wanted his help to return me to her Iraqi righteous path, not to my American one. To the righteousness of what was proper, of modesty, shyness and tradition. She believed those values were hers alone, particular to her nation and excluding all others. A kind of blind Bedouin patriotism that celebrated with gunshots when she saw me taking my brother’s side against my cousin, and my cousin’s side against a stranger.

I was a stranger even to my grandmother, my mother’s mother. Haydar and Muhaymen and Tawoos were closer to her than me because, like her, they’d remained pure Iraqis, like pure gold. Their patriotism wasn’t tainted by a dual nationality, and the blood raced in their veins when they heard the name Iraq, their unique glimmering planet in the midst of dark galaxies. They sang for Baghdad with the transcendence of whirling dervishes, their voices going hoarse with prayer, like they were reaching out to a remote paragon, their souls gazing towards it: the City of Peace, the Circled One, the Powerful One, the Home of the Arabian Nights.
Baghdaaaaaad
, the Fortress of Lions.

I’d seen them at weddings in Detroit and Chicago and San Diego, the immigrants who still hung by an umbilical cord to their motherland, ready to sway their heads and shed a tear with the first tune of a patriotic song. ‘If you lose a homeland, where will you find another?’ They seemed to secretly enjoy this heartache. ‘Oh birds in the sky, fly to my people.’ Why had they come to America then? Why had they come with Iraq smuggled in their pockets like a drug that they couldn’t quit?

My mother would put the tape in the car stereo, her frown forming before the song even started. ‘Leaving wasn’t strange to you, no, no. It wasn’t unusual for you to go.’ She’d cry, tears clouding her eyes, making me concerned we’d have an accident. I’d tell her it should be illegal to sell this tape without a health and safety warning. She’d look away and continue to sing along and cry. ‘Your mother’s milk will lead you back home.’

But it wasn’t my mother’s milk that led me back to Baghdad. Tragedy drove me away, and tragedy took me back.

Who had the right to pass judgement on me?

My father was no wiser than my mother. He’d sit in his new car, the one he’d be paying instalments on for the rest of his life. As soon as he’d turned the key in the ignition he’d reach for the CD. ‘My country is dear to me even if it makes me suffer.’ And he’d sway his head in appreciation and yearning at that early hour of the morning. Why, then, did you leave the country that was dear to you and bring us here? How could it be dear to you, Father, when it made you suffer, broke your teeth, terrorised you and spied on you, and let its corrupt dogs cook up their reports against you?

They were all crazy about Iraq, like the myth of Majnun, who goes mad for the love of Layla. They said that Layla was sick in Iraq, an inherited phrase that they all repeated like a charm. But they were not cured of their love, and Layla didn’t die. And here he was, one of her crazy admirers sitting just an inch away from my desire in our flat in Deir Ghbar and calling me sister. He had all the qualities of Iraqis, who had been singed by the flame of eternity, half-gods and half-children, enchanters of women with their deep melancholy and their folk poetry, keepers of the secrets of the night, carriers of heavy burdens and the keys to paradise. Did he take me for an insensitive American who didn’t comprehend the obsessions of victims of the Arab condition, didn’t appreciate the eternal force of their message?

Muhaymen recited the first half of a verse from a pre-Islamic poem, and I surprised him by completing it for him. He talked to me about the Iraqi folk poet Muzzafar Al-Nawwab, and discovered that I had memorised his poems better than he had. He was happy that I shared his love of poetry, and hid his annoyance when I went beyond him to horizons he hadn’t reached. Every time he would ask, ‘Where did you learn all this?’

If he only knew how my father had taught me, what rhetorical elegance had graced my childhood!

I told him, resting my hand on his tense arm, about the enthusiasm of TV presenter Sabah Behnam for the Arabic language, about his passion for classical poetry and his store of love poetry that had turned my mother’s head until she could see no man but him. When she’d insisted on marrying him, my grandfather had told her, ‘But he’s an Assyrian. What business does he have with us Arabs?’

‘I don’t care if he’s Assyrian or Martian. I love him and I won’t marry anyone else.’

My mother, the daring one among the family’s girls, made her choice and paid the price. My attraction to Muhaymen hadn’t yet carried me to the heights that my mother reached when she fell in love with my father. I’d never loved a man to the extent of believing a pomegranate wasn’t a pomegranate unless I ate it from his hand. But this slender Iraqi wasn’t extending his palm to me with the red pearls of the fruit. He was stubbornly refusing to compromise his beliefs that meant nothing to me. How could this Sumerian sculpture with the vague features be my brother just because Tawoos took me to her breast when I was two months old? He rejected my love but had no objection to my helping his brother Haydar escape to America by marrying him on paper. For him, I was no more than an American lifejacket to rescue his drunk brother from the pious militias that hunted him and to which he belonged.