The American Granddaughter (16 page)

But my army years passed and I didn’t have to face a situation like that. The only time I felt threatened was when I passed a cell occupied by one of the dangerous detainees on my way to the bathroom and he looked out through the bars of the tiny window, gesturing with his thumb across his neck, threatening me with slaughter. I didn’t respond, but continued on my way, peed, washed and then called two particularly tough soldiers and asked them to teach him a lesson. I didn’t bat an eyelid.

The brutality of our soldiers increased in direct proportion to our losses. The sight of stretchers carried in and out of the clinic became a daily routine, but I still couldn’t get used to it. It was in this atmosphere of fear, with death lurking around every corner, that the case of Abu Ghraib dropped on us.

I was busy interpreting at the airport prison when I saw the pictures on TV. Fox News was on, and I saw the footage without sound. I abandoned what I was doing, walked to the TV and turned up the volume. I felt much like I’d done on the day I’d seen the attack on New York. I experienced a few moments of paralysed shock. I looked around and saw a few soldiers and officers, all nailed to the spot and watching. The news report came to an end. We looked at each other, as if we were seeking reassurance that we were far away from that prison and had nothing to do with what was happening there. I was searching my brain for the right term. Military honour. I used to be moved to tears when I read about it in novels or saw it in movies, in a scene of a victorious military leader saluting his defeated enemy, or a soldier sacrificing himself for the flag, doing all he could to prevent it from touching the ground.

Abu Ghraib was a far remove from
The Bridge on the River Kwai
, and military honour was no longer just a male issue. There were women offenders too, and that made my anger more bitter. How did that bitch, who was dragging a prisoner behind her like a dog on a leash, get into our army?

Prisons were not suitable places for cinema, despite all the movies that were set in them. The real protagonist wasn’t pain; it was humiliation. I thought about my father at Saadoun Security Complex, and imagined Private Lynndie England tying him by his neck with a dog leash and dragging him naked behind her. The gorge rose in my throat and my nose. How would I be able to face my dad?

The soldiers commented on the images that were being repeated over and over on TV, but I didn’t take in everything they said. Some were resentful, and others were trying to find justifications. They said that such things were done by ignorant, low-ranking soldiers. Someone called them ‘stupid’ for allowing photos to be taken. Another answered in a deep voice that those prisoners must’ve been violent criminals to be treated that way.

I listened, but felt unable to take part in the debate, until Shikho, one of our local translators, said something that struck me like a poisoned arrow.

‘Guys, this is nothing compared to what used to happen in the Baathist prisons.’

‘Shikho, just shut your mouth,’ I found myself saying.

‘Why are you so angry,
Sitt
Zeina?’

‘Because our job here is not to replace torture with torture.’

I addressed him in Arabic first, then I stood up and repeated what I’d said in English in a voice loud enough for others to hear. They turned and looked at me like I was the spokesperson for the enemy, or for Amnesty International, at best. I retreated into the metal cage that was my bedroom and stayed there until the following morning, a prisoner of my fury.

XXX

Christmas 2005 came and went while I was away from my grandmother. The big holidays were the markers by which I divided my years. My mood remained gloomy, in spite of the strings of shiny paper and glo-stars that decorated our green prison. Every evening I updated the hurried diary I was keeping on my laptop and wrote long emails to Calvin and my mother in Detroit. Occasionally I sent kisses to Dad in Arizona, to which he replied that e-kisses did not count. He worried because of the rising casualties among our soldiers in Iraq and wrote to me, ‘Come back on your own two legs before you are returned in a box. I wouldn’t be able to bear it.’

I wrote to Jason asking how he was doing in college, where he’d started a course in mechanical engineering, and he replied, ‘I thought about taking over your room to set up a ping-pong table. But I want you to come back. Do you think I’d be happy if I finished college and became an engineer, with your money, while you were lying under a marble cross, or dancing at your wedding with a wooden leg?’ Even Jason, my stoner little brother, feared for my life. My absence had mellowed him, and he became emotional like my mother. My mother’s letters drowned me in misery. She seemed to be conspiring with my grandmother and Muhaymen against me. She wrote long essay-like letters that were like history lessons from the national education curriculum. But which of the two nations?

Sitt
Batoul sent her letters by post, because she still didn’t take email seriously. She wrote on the paper of the hotel where she used to work. At the start of our life in America, she used to customise trousers for Wal-Mart, shortening the legs according to customers’ demands, for two dollars a pair. It was a job she was forced to take on after my father had suffered a heart attack, five months after we arrived in the country. The former TV presenter couldn’t bear carrying beer boxes at a storehouse owned by relatives. Millionaires who hadn’t finish school.

At the hotel, Mom worked in the kitchen for three years, then was transferred to reception. She cursed her bad luck every day, until she ran into the former head of the philosophy department at the University of Baghdad arranging vegetables at Farmer Jack’s. Dr Yaqoub explained to her, not without some pride, how he preserved lettuce heads by trimming the outer leaves and dipping the tips in cold water. His efforts earned him the praise of his supervisor and a raise of fifty cents per hour. After that encounter,
Sitt
Batoul stopped complaining and was content with her job. But then she lost it when the hotel was turned into a ‘smoke-free zone’, her cigarette being a sixth finger on her right hand.

So she wrote to me on the old hotel paper asking me to go and visit the convent school. It was in a yellow stone building at the Eastern Gate, built on a piece of land that the king of Iraq had presented to a French mission in the twenties. That’s how she described it in the letter. But I didn’t need directions to find the school where we, both my mother and I, had studied. She wrote about the nuns at the school and about the girls they taught who went on to serve the country. I thought I could detect the fingerprints of my Grandmother Rahma between the lines. Had my mother, too, been recruited to the project of my re-education?

There was a greeting card accompanying the letter, with a picture of a snow-covered field. The snow was glittering specks decorating the card, like sugar that tempted you to lick it. It was nothing like that white messy substance that gathered outside the front doors in Detroit, which we had to sweep away every morning before starting the car. The cards I got from my parents didn’t lessen my loneliness at Christmas, nor did the emails from Calvin and the rest of the gang. I went out in my armoured vehicle and saw the Christmas trees being sold on the pavements of Elweyya and Palestine Street. The cedars were carried away in cars’ half-opened boots to homes I knew nothing about.

The cars slowed down when the drivers glimpsed us approaching in their rear-view mirrors. They pulled in off the road, onto the pavements, to let us pass, and waited with anxious eyes. They said nothing, their hearts remaining closed. Could they enjoy the festivities, those eyes that went to sleep on terror and awoke to terror?

I told myself it wasn’t me they feared but my uniform. It wasn’t by chance that I felt something like masculinity the first time I put on the army uniform. It added dimensions to my character that disappeared when I took it off. I stood taller, held my shoulders back and felt my chest grow broader. I put on the helmet with the patterned net and the mirror sunglasses and turned from a slightly built, dark-skinned woman into an alien from outer space. The aliens moved around in groups, rode in Hummers and carried the latest guns. Everything in the street made way, pedestrians and ambulances and horse-drawn carriages. People watering their gardens shrunk back into their houses.

The scene froze while our convoy drove past, like someone had pressed the pause button. Boys squeezed the brakes on their bicycles and stopped with one foot on the ground. Cars stuck to the dusty edge of the road. Pedestrians stood still. It was as if everyone was observing a minute’s silence. Who were they mourning?

At first I used to smile at people on the street. Some children smiled back, but the adult faces revealed something else. Then facial expressions changed. They wore something like a look of disgust. Did we smell? The garbage was piling up on every corner, and with time, disgust turned into hatred. Someone had distributed theatre masks with evil faces to everyone in the city.

‘They hate us,’ my companions in the car said from behind the helmet straps that covered their mouths, but I refused to believe it. I convinced myself that I was exempt. I was born in Iraq, and I had the same skin colour, the same language and the same fiery temperament as these people. They couldn’t hate me. ‘Can’t you see that they hate you even more than they hate us?’ Deborah was telling me only half the truth. The whole truth was that Iraqis thought of my comrades as the foot soldiers of the occupation, merely performing their military service and following orders. They had no say in the war. In a way they were like Iraqi soldiers in the Iran–Iraq War and the Kuwait invasion. But they saw me as a traitor.

My eyes were suddenly opened to a depressing picture. Was that how my grandmother saw me? And Tawoos? And Haydar? What about Muhaymen? Would he hate me and wish me dead? I had a dream about him the other night. He kidnapped me and took me to an unknown place, not into the forest on a white horse like a knight who had eloped with his beloved, but to his group in the Mahdi Army with my hands tied and my mouth gagged in the trunk of a white Toyota. I was blindfolded, so I couldn’t see him, but I recognised his smell in their midst. Even scents came to me in my dreams. I woke up thirsty and suffocating with grief.

I didn’t mind when my contract with the army came to an end soon after Christmas. It was time for me to go back to Detroit. But I saw it as just a break. I didn’t think my life in Detroit would resume normally. My life was broken in two: ‘before Baghdad’ and ‘after Baghdad’. I was confused and felt that this wasn’t yet the end of the story.

I wasn’t sad, but I didn’t have a happy Christmas. We were inventive with our parties and gave each other unusual presents. I gave Captain Donovan an old Elvis disc that had belonged to my Uncle Munir and which I had found at my grandmother’s house. He gave me a coloured dish plaited out of palm leaves, with a blue eye design at the centre. Deborah gave me a scarf made of soft black cotton, like the ones Iraqi women used to cover their heads, that she had embroidered herself with red and yellow flowers. But all that did nothing to improve my mood.

On Christmas morning I got an email from Sad Malek saying that Condi was coming to visit Ghazlany camp, that she might share the traditional turkey meal with the soldiers. In the evening, he wrote again saying that the Secretary of State had come, but had had lunch with the leaders of the Kurdish zone and just quickly passed by the soldiers. Then Rumsfeld arrived on another ‘surprise’ visit. It was one Santa after the other. We knew about his presence from TV and were told that he was meeting with the officers upstairs, in a part of the camp where interpreters weren’t allowed. A Lebanese colleague left his position and managed to sneak upstairs and get his photo taken with the Secretary of Defense. In the days that followed he kept showing off the photo.

‘If you’d come with me upstairs, you’d have had your own photo,’ he told me.

‘I don’t need it. You can stick it up your ass.’

XXXI

‘A dog with two homes
’
was how Tawoos described me when I returned from Detroit to Baghdad. I couldn’t get my old life back, and I couldn’t adapt to my life in the Zone. I was a dog with two homes but unable to feel at home in either. Tawoos might have been crazy and unpredictable, but she sometimes spoke with wisdom, especially when it came to diagnosing what I was going through. Her milk that ran in my veins guided her to the source of my problem. My grandmother said that I came to the world into the hands of Tawoos. She was the one who received me from Batoul’s womb, tied the umbilical cord and washed away the blood. My mother used to say that Tawoos was a good person, but that she was ignorant. She couldn’t read or write and used her fingerprints to sign documents. So she never fully trusted her with me.

Tawoos had gone and enrolled for adult literacy classes, where she had to pay five dinars if she missed a day. Following the teacher’s advice, she started to buy newspapers and was always seen with the
Jumhuriyya
under her arm. She sat in the front yard with her textbook and read out loud, ‘Rashid and Zeinab planted a tree.’ She studied for months, but then got bored and stopped, and the letters she’d learned flew out of her head. She kept buying the newspaper anyway, saying it was still useful for non-readers. It could be used to protect the head from the sun, placed at the edge of the pavement to sit on while waiting for the bus and spread on the table at mealtimes. Who could object to Tawoos’s wisdom?

I returned to Baghdad after a few months of feeling completely lost in Detroit. Tawoos came to visit me in the Green Zone and didn’t like the state I was in. ‘A dog with two homes.’ I had called and asked her about Muhaymen. His phone was switched off and he didn’t reply to my emails. She probably didn’t know what email was. She told me that he’d gone to Najaf and that she was worried about him. Things were dangerous, and his group was wanted.