The American Granddaughter (17 page)

‘Why did he go?’ I asked.

‘He went with his comrades. The world is on fire over there. May Allah protect them.’

I had brought her presents from my mother, so I asked her to come and meet me. I was still jet-lagged when I greeted her at the gate. She had something of Muhaymen’s scent. How could I see him? Did I dare invite him to the Zone?

My stay in Detroit hadn’t been a holiday. I was impatient to get back to Iraq and searched frantically for another contract with a translation agency. I had to undergo the security checks and fill out the various forms all over again. I flew to Virginia and finished all the paperwork and met a new batch of translators. They were beginners and I was now the veteran.

I couldn’t adapt to life without danger, couldn’t adapt to my relationship with Calvin, and I couldn’t stand by the window and contemplate the snowflakes falling outside. Contemplation wasn’t for soldiers.

The plane that had taken me to my ‘home, sweet home’ was delayed in Frankfurt. We were told there was a snowstorm in Detroit. I shivered and was already overcome by a yearning for the Baghdad sun. We waited for a few hours before we could fly. I passed out in my plane seat, the exhaustion of all the past months suddenly catching up with me. It was a comfortable civilian plane, nothing like the hideous whale that had carried us in its belly to Iraq. I only woke up when the flight attendant tapped me on my hand. When I arrived, I had looked for Calvin behind the barrier but couldn’t see him. I borrowed the phone of one of my fellow passengers and called him, told him I was here, in Detroit. He answered as if I had just nipped out to the supermarket. What was wrong with him? I was returning from Hell. He knew what time I was arriving. Why was he yawning at the other end of the phone? Why couldn’t he find anything more than ‘hi’ to say?

‘I thought you would come to the airport.’

‘My car is out of gas, and snow is blocking the roads.’

I felt cold and lonely. I felt the same desolation that must eat into a soldier returning on crutches and dragging a damaged leg. There was nothing damaged in my body: the pain was in parts of my memory, and my green cloth bag was too heavy. People around me were running to their relatives and loved ones and hugging. Christmas decorations still dangled from the airport ceiling. I heard a familiar voice say my name.

I hadn’t expected Jason to come and meet me, nor had I expected to see my father in Detroit. They walked over and showered me with hugs and kisses. I broke into tears, forgetting all about military stiff upper lip. I wasn’t crying out of longing but out of gratitude. They rescued me from my loneliness, from the pain of the unresolved love I had left behind.

That evening my father opened a bottle of sparkling Italian wine as we gathered around the dinner table with my mother. She kept touching me to make sure I was really there and in one piece. She piled food onto my plate and sat there smoking and watching me. She ate nothing herself and avoided looking at Dad. We were gathered at home like we used to before their separation. This was the Christmas I had missed in Baghdad.

Dad had come for me and for news from the country he loved. He longed to hear it from me, straight from my mouth, as if I knew more than what was in the media. He asked me about his old friends. Did any of them still read the news on TV? My father didn’t realise that an earthquake had shaken everything over there. He spoke of Iraq as if it had been preserved in aspic since he left it. How could someone feel this longing for a country that had cruelly broken his teeth?

I told him about government buildings that had turned to ash and black ruins. How poverty-stricken women who had been widowed in earlier wars had taken their children and gone to squat in the empty buildings of the Ministry of Defence. Iraqi military camps that were deserted. The palaces of the government becoming the headquarters for opposition parties. Security forces collapsing and their informers escaping back to their villages. I told him how our army took charge of whole cities and started building everything from zero. On ground zero.

My father drank in silent sadness, finished the bottle and had a further two glasses of whisky. He listened to me until my mouth went dry and my voice went hoarse and he had grown tired of drinking. Then he stood up and, waving his finger in the Najaf style of recital, announced in his broadcasting voice, ‘Beware, beware the people of Iraq.’ Then he fell back on the sofa and passed out.

The following morning he said goodbye to us and headed back to Arizona. Jason drove him to the airport. I stayed with my mother, her eyes pursuing me, trying to get to the heart of the matter. She didn’t buy what I had told them the previous night.

‘Listen, Zeina. Everything you said yesterday, we already know from TV. Get to the point.’

‘Okay. Grandmother is very upset. She didn’t accept my going back this way.’

‘Your grandmother doesn’t accept anything.’

‘She thinks you failed in bringing me up.’

‘That’s how she is. Nothing ever pleases her.’

‘Can you believe that she concocted a plan with Tawoos and her son Haydar to brainwash me?’

‘Tawoos? May Allah reward her and her children! If it wasn’t for them, your grandmother would’ve died of loneliness.’

‘Did she really breastfeed me when I was little?’

‘Oh yes, for two months, when I had typhoid and couldn’t feed you myself. Her sons became your milk brothers.’

My mother had gone straight to the point. Without realising it and with the simplicity of stating my personal data. Birthplace: Baghdad. Hair colour: black. Special characteristics: one brother in Detroit, six brothers in Sadr City.

XXXII

The exposed stone staircase hadn’t changed. I climbed it lightly, as if my legs still belonged to that twelve-year-old girl. The wind blew in my face, and Sister Marie-Noelle walked in front of me without saying a word, as if she had taken a vow of silence. The rattling of her long prayer beads and her key chain, both hanging from her belt, lent their rhythm to our footsteps. How many schoolgirls had walked up these stairs before an exam, to pray at the small dark chapel on the school’s rooftop? How sweet life was when exams were its main predicament. Things had got a bit more complicated since.

I stopped by the high concrete platform outside the chapel door. The railing around the rooftop came up to my waist. I gulped the fresh air as my eyes lingered on the view before me, cancelling out the past twenty years since I had last stood there. I looked at the school buildings, with the windows of the nuns’ rooms to the right and beyond them the city. The sun was beautiful, but the ruins in the centre of Baghdad were depressing. I recognised the film:
King Kong in the City
.

On this terrace we used to crowd for a view of the real world outside, that world from which our parents struggled to protect us. They wanted to keep their daughters beyond the reach of experience and anguish. When our supervisors weren’t looking, we would slow down at this spot, to look out over the whole area surrounding the Taqdomah Convent School at the Eastern Gate, which became known as Al-Aqida High School after nationalisation. The pulsating traffic of Tahrir Square, the symbolic Liberty Statue, the grandness of the Ministry of Planning, and, over there, the magic of the Tigris with its rich mud colour, the wooden boats and fishing nets, and all those men who walked hurriedly or strolled slowly by, only a reckless shout away. When one of us called out, the men would incline their heads towards the girlish voice, delicious anticipation in their eyes. I didn’t like the phrase ‘those were the days’, but that was what went through my mind as I stood on that spot.

Everything had changed in Baghdad except the churches. The smell of incense was the same, as if the stick I had lit myself fifteen years ago was still burning, or even the one lit by my mother twenty years earlier still. The nun confused me with my mother and called me Batoul. Wait here, Batoul. Kneel here, Batoul. Mind the step, Batoul. What difference would it make if I explained that Batoul was my mother and that I was her daughter Zeina? Ma Soeur Marie-Noelle lived largely in her own head, and my name did not feature there because I had been taught by another nun, whose name was Melena and who later left the convent for a man’s love. She was visiting her village in the north of Iraq when she discovered that the new baker was more attractive than Jesus. She married him and left her long black habit to another woman who had never smelled the sweat of a man.

Accompanied by dread, I knelt before the Virgin’s statue. She hadn’t aged, nor had her white marble dress frayed. Its folds were still wavy, and the sky-blue belt still fluttered in the playfulness of an invisible wind. I marvelled at myself reciting the prayers in Arabic without mistakes or forgetfulness. I thought that praying was like cycling or swimming. We could abandon it for years but found the motions came back as soon as we entered the water.

Ma Soeur Marie-Noelle watched me with a suppressed smile. She whispered, so as not to disturb the silence of the saints hovering in the place, ‘Do you remember
The Praying Hands
, Batoul?’

‘The what hands?’

‘
The Praying Hands
, the
book of prayers and supplications.’

How could I forget? It was my story, not Batoul’s, or was Ma Soeur playing on our memories? The Mother Superior had pulled me by my sleeve to her room one day and handed me a copy of
The Praying Hands
,
telling me it was a new book she’d just received from Beirut. She said, ‘I was told you were good at Arabic and at recitation. I want you to read a prayer from this book every day at the morning prayer.’

The book crowned me the princess of morning mass. The schoolgirls and the saints’ icons stood in reverence, the sound of the rain and the ambulance sirens went quiet, the flames of the candles froze, while I delivered my recitation. ‘My Lord and my love. I longed for You and, in my loneliness, I prayed and beseeched You to have mercy upon me. You have not let me down, You whose mercy is vast, but took my hand through the dark maze, and it was suddenly flooded by Your light.’

As I advanced through the school years, my power over the other girls grew. The power of religion had a special dynamic that I had not understood at that tender age. Today I’d readily take apart the authority of bishops, rabbis and ayatollahs, all those who hold people by the weakest points in their spirits: fear of fate and fear of death. Faced with those, the scared children of Adam are incapable of anything but blind obedience, the kissing of hands to escape expulsion from paradise.

For a while I enjoyed my growing spiritual status in the school. Other girls wanted me to touch their foreheads with my blessed hand before each exam. One of them asked permission to bring a small cassette recorder into church in order to record my readings and memorise them, and the tapes started circulating in the bags of the girls from our school and reached the convent schools of Wardiyya, Saint Joseph and the Morning Star. As I approached the end of the book, my throne was threatened. So I didn’t tell the Mother Superior when I had gone through all the prayers in the book. Instead I started to compose my own prayers each evening, making sure they were similar in style to those of
The Praying Hands
. It wasn’t easy to give up power. I understood that now.

We had come here like a giant bulldozer to topple the throne of a single man. I understood the meaning of power, even when it came to my Grandmother Rahma giving orders to her saints, raising their status when her prayers were answered and blacklisting them when she got no response. After we had all left the country and flown away from under her wing, her saints were all that remained under her power. She told me once she was looking in her prayer booklets for the name of the patron saint of migrants and couldn’t find it.

‘Do you want to ask him to take care of us?’ I asked.

‘No, I want to denounce you to him and implore him to remove his protective cloak and leave you all to stand exposed under foreign skies, for only then might reason return to your heads and return you to me.’

That evening, after my visit to my school, I googled
The Praying Hands
. Did it really exist or was it all a childhood illusion? I found the answer on the website of the Arabic Christian Encyclopaedia: the book was written by Michel Quoist, Arabised by Father Hector Al-Douehy, published by Al-Mashriq Press, Lebanon.

My father had picked it up once from my pillow, leafed through its pages and smiled an indecipherable smile. I had looked at him expectantly, waiting for a comment about the beauty of the prayers, but instead he had pointed out a grammatical error on the cover. Well, to each his own.

XXXIII

Two bullets in the head and four in the still-hairless chest, which meant one bullet for every three years in the life of the young soldier. Deborah tied a yellow ribbon around the palm tree by the porch that we sat on to smoke. Most of the plants in the garden had died, but palm trees were made to live. Chris, our cook who knew nothing about cooking except how to fry chicken breasts, came over and sat on the dry grass hugging his guitar. He played the tune first then started to sing in a deep voice: ‘Tie a yellow ribbon round the ole oak tree.’

For two weeks we’d been waiting for news about three comrades kidnapped west of Mahmoudiyya. They’d been ambushed; four soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter had been killed in the attack and the rest had disappeared. Of those who were killed I only knew Younis the interpreter, a former English teacher at Farahidy School. Younis, Majnun Salma. He idolised Salma Hayek and carried a topless photo of her in his wallet, although he’d never seen any of her movies, since satellite channels were banned in Iraq and cinemas showed nothing but Indian movies.