The American Granddaughter (19 page)

‘Oh, don’t worry, you’ve done your best. You plucked the ripe along with the withered, and the blood you spilled has reached our knees.’

He spoke to me as if I was the Pentagon, not Zeina ‘my dear sister’. It hurt.

‘Listen, I’m not staying here long. My contract ends in two months.’

‘But you should stay till the end. Didn’t you say that you like movies?’

‘This is not the time for jokes.’

‘You can’t run away now, before the scene of your exit from this country.’

‘Muhaymen, I don’t appreciate your tone.’

He ignored my protests and started to describe scenes that seemed familiar from another war. The Vietnamese who worked for the US Army hanging on to the wheels of helicopters that took off with the American soldiers and embassy staff. Leaving the Vietnamese to their fate.

He didn’t call me ‘dear sister’ any more. Tawoos’s milk was spilled in the mire. The war came and sat between us. So the opening scenes were over now, and the real plot was starting. I looked away from him as he continued, ‘Have you prepared enough helicopters for all the collaborators?’

‘Please stop. This hurts.’

‘That’s okay. It won’t kill you to hurt a little. Do you know Talib Shannoun? Hassan Abdul-Amir? Muzaffar Al-Shatry? Qais, Hatif, Raad and Abdul-Hussein Al-Nadaf? Those were my friends. They died under your bombs.’

Muhaymen had deceived me with his conciliatory emails, and now he came to exact revenge. It wasn’t like me to stay quiet, but I was choking on my replies. Should I ask him about Brian and Jessica and Michael, my friends who were torn apart by mortar shells and roadside bombs?

Muhaymen was attuned to my pain. He could read me, and he showed no mercy.

‘Why did you come?’

‘We rid you of Saddam.’

I knew it was a cliché. I heard myself, and I sounded like a Fox News reporter. The writer would certainly edit this out.

Muhaymen came back with a slightly more original line, ‘You drove King Kong out of the city and claimed the whole of Iraq in return.’

XXXV

I wasn
’
t at her house to receive the mourners when she died.

I missed my grandmother’s wake while I was stuck in the Zone. It was dangerous outside. The city was on fire. Going to her house, and mingling with all the mourners there, would have been an unforgivable breach of security regulations. So I focused on trying to convince Captain Donovan to let me go to the Chaldean cemetery. I said I would follow the funeral procession from a distance. He refused, because the new cemetery was in a faraway suburb.

I played on his emotions. I was aware of how close he’d been to his grandmother, who had died a few months back while he was in Baghdad. He’d spent most of his childhood with her after his parents’ divorce. We used to listen as he made his phone call to Orange every Sunday after dinner, where it would still be Sunday morning in Connecticut. If he dialled the number and didn’t get an answer right away, his face would go pale. He always feared she’d die in her sleep. But Captain Donovan’s grandmother didn’t die in her sleep. She died a three-hour drive away from her house, by a roulette table at a casino. The little golden ball had stopped on the number she’d put fifty dollars on, and her heart stopped with it. When the news reached Donovan in the Green Zone, so many miles away, we watched him cry and laugh at the same time. The small phone was nearly crushed in his hand as he squeezed it the way Calvin crushed his beer cans.

Donovan finally gave me permission to attend the funeral mass in the church, on the condition that I sit at the back and leave before the ceremony was over. He added that I should take a few soldiers with me and go in a convoy of armoured Humvees. But I put my hand up and interrupted him for the first time, ‘No, sir, forgive me. You gave me permission to go, and I’m not taking anyone with me. I’ll take a taxi from the gate. I’ll be wearing civilian clothes. I won’t attract attention.’

As if the roles were reversed, the enlisted interpreter gave orders and the officer obeyed. I wouldn’t be able to explain why Donovan agreed. Except that my visible grief seemed to give me a kind of power that superseded military rank. Everyone around me felt it, I think, because they were treating me as if I was some sacred but breakable object, one of those stolen Assyrian sculptures that we sometimes found during the raids. The soldiers would bring it back to the camp, put it on the captain’s desk and walk around it, whispering in awe, worried that if they got too close or spoke too loudly the thing would crumble before they’d taken it back to the museum. In a way, I too was a rare object for them. They knew no one else with an Iraqi grandmother who had died in Baghdad, because of the heat and the curfew, a half-hour drive away.

My grandmother didn’t suffer from a specific illness. ‘It was grief that killed her,’ according to Tawoos’s prognosis, which brooked no doubts. She was rubbing henna into my hair as I sat cross-legged before her on the warm tiles at the entrance to the bathroom in my grandmother’s house when she said, ‘Nana Rahma will die out of grief.’

‘She has more strength than both of us. Don’t bring her bad luck.’

‘May she live long, but can’t you see how she’s wilting? It’s out of sadness and humiliation.’

Was Tawoos possibly right? Did my grandmother die from the humiliation of my job and my army uniform? Did she die of shame? The shame of an American granddaughter?

Tawoos told me that Rahma had a half-filled bottle of Mistiki arak that had been my grandfather’s. She kept it carefully wrapped in a pillowcase and didn’t touch it except in extremity.

‘My grandmother drinks arak?’ I asked.

‘No, but she’d bring the bottle to her nose and breathe in, because the smell reminded her of her husband, then she’d cry and feel better,’ Tawoos said, then swore by Imam Abbas Abu Fadhil that Rahma drank the whole bottle the day she saw me ‘wearing American clothes and riding a tank’. She spent the whole night wailing like she was mourning a beloved daughter that death took for a bride.

Tawoos must’ve lost it. She too was getting old and didn’t know what she was saying any more. My grandmother died because she was over eighty years old. Her time was up. It wasn’t my fault if someone’s time was up.

I put on the black trousers that I wore on the way out of Detroit and a black cotton shirt. I wrapped myself in a long raincoat and hid my hair under a generous headscarf. Deborah smiled when she saw me. She waved to me and teased me with a newly acquired Arabic word, ‘Hello,
Hajja
.’ I waved feebly back and walked outside, with her voice behind me saying, ‘Take care.’

It was almost eight in the morning. The overcast sky was the same colour as the big concrete barriers at the gate. I hailed a taxi and asked the driver to take me to Saint Joseph Church in Eastern Karada. He drove off, and I sat in the back covering my face with my hand and letting my tears flow like rain after a drought.

The driver shouted, ‘It’s the American bastards, isn’t it? I wouldn’t want anyone to be at their mercy.’ He must have thought I was disappointed by a failed petition or something. I didn’t reply. I wiped my face and nose with the edge of my headscarf and asked him to hurry because I had to be at a funeral. He didn’t seem moved, as if the people of Baghdad only left their homes to go to funerals. It was daily routine, no different from going to the cinema in happier lands.

I thought about what I’d find when I got there. Who would come? Would the funeral proceed in peace? If it was up to me, I would have arranged for military protection, but Rahma would have risen from her coffin and spit on us. My love for her shouldn’t tarnish her last moments on this earth.

I started crying again, and the driver continued pouring his curses on the head of the occupation and the ‘black day’ that brought the Americans to the country. ‘Sister, don’t cry. Thank your God that you’re walking on two legs. Yesterday I carried two women to emergency, and they’d both lost their legs in an explosion on the bus. One of them died before we’d made it to the hospital.’

When I got to church, the body was already there. I saw the funeral car outside the high iron gates. My tears wouldn’t stop. I walked over a pond of slippery mud, leapt onto the pavement, then ran up the steps to the church’s main door. There was a power cut, and the churchwardens probably didn’t want to use the generator for a quick minor ceremony. None of the old woman’s children were here to pay generously – they were all abroad. So candles were both cheaper and more atmospheric.

The darkness helped me. I walked on tiptoe down the side aisle and settled between the black-clad women in the first two rows. The other rows were empty. I wasn’t going to sit at the back. I was the only granddaughter she had present here. I stayed focused on the shiny wooden box and the gold crucifix that adorned it. I didn’t look at the faces of the women around me. There was no time for social pleasantries. The coffin was placed on a plinth draped in blue velvet, three wreaths of plastic flowers leaning on either side of it. I tried to pierce the wood and get to my grandmother’s skin. I didn’t like it when they tied the hands of the dead to their sides. If she were free she would have hugged me.

The old priest encircled the coffin with an incense holder swinging at the end of a thick chain and releasing puffs of white smoke. The fragrance reached me quickly.

‘
Qadisha Alaha
,
Qadisha Hilthana
,
Qadisha Lamayotha
. God’s mercy be on her,’ went the Chaldean prayer the priest was chanting.

Women were blowing their noses loudly into their handkerchiefs, their chests rising and falling with each sigh, their bodies swaying back and forth to the rhythm of the chant. The two young deacons followed the priest and repeated the prayers after him. To be here they’d had to get up early and venture into streets that had turned into human traps. Their eyes scanned the mourners for a young face that might have made the risk worthwhile.

My sobs were getting louder. A chubby older woman turned towards me. Her face was still pretty despite her age, and the memory tape turned in my head until I realised she was my Uncle Munir’s wife. Apparently a similar tape was turning in her head, because she peered at me closely and with growing surprise. Then, in a heavy Mosul accent that rolled the ‘r’, she said, ‘Who? Zeina? Batoul’s daughterrr? When did you arrrrrrive from abrrroad? Come herrre, my dearrr, and let me kiss you! May Allah have merrrcy on your grrrandma’s soul. It would have made herrr so happy to see you.’

One by one the women forgot about the body of my grandmother laid out by the altar. They left their places on the narrow benches and came to me, repeating my name in whispered tones and taking turns hugging and kissing me. Their kisses were properly wet and noisy and left their mark on my skin, not going to waste in the air. Their lips were like suction cups that stuck to my cheek and absorbed my grief. Their tears caressed my face, and my tears moved to their tired cheeks that were so used to wetness, as if they’d long been addicted to the saltiness of tears. Women here took their crying seriously. It was a way of life, an exercise they did regularly, individually and in groups, to stay spiritually fit. Crying strengthened the heart muscle and lowered the blood pressure. It sometimes had an intoxicating effect not unlike that of beer. I watched the teardrops suspended at the tips of their noses and remembered that I hadn’t had a proper cry since childhood. I’d had a moderate life, with no extremes of sadness or joy.

The priest spoke sternly, ‘Shush. Some respect for the dead, please.’

The commotion caused by my magical appearance in the church subsided. The two young deacons resumed their chanting and kept looking at me with pleasant curiosity. I was a new face in the congregation. Stories would be woven around me, speculation and gossip. Soon the link would be made to the story of my parents. The Chaldean girl who opposed her family to marry an Assyrian. The man was later arrested and then they fled to America. But what brought the daughter back?

As if by a miracle, like the ones that Grandma used to order from her saints, I was turned into a member of the congregation under the gaze of the women and the deacons. There were so many sects springing up in the country nowadays. You had to be with one or the other. But if you asked Tawoos, she’d tell you that I was a dog with two homes.

Eventually I’d have to slip out of the church and away from the sect, leaving Rahma Girgis Saour asleep in her wooden box. My sadness was like a presence that walked out with me, protecting me from the rain and humming in my ears.

I wanted Muhaymen to be here so I could cry on his shoulder like women do.

He and Tawoos were probably trapped in Sadr. Was the massacre there not over yet?

XXXVI

It tasted like vinegar. Freedom in this country tasted like vinegar.

Bush was sad about the four thousand American soldiers who were killed in Iraq. He said that he thought a lot about every single one of them. Our poor president. How could he possibly hold four thousand distinct thoughts in his head? I didn’t want to add to his intellectual difficulties by becoming number four thousand and one. No, I hadn’t come to my birthplace to die, just to fall in love with a Mission Impossible man. Well, unrequited love was another kind of death.

It was the 25th of March 2008. The date appeared on the corner of my laptop screen. My second contract with the army had come to an end and I hadn’t renewed it. Here’s what I’d brought back from Baghdad: a sadness like pure honey, thick and sticky and translucent, good for insomnia and poetry, bad for my ageing skin and my aching joints. It was a kind of suffering that lifted me up then weighed me down again. It took me by the hand, led me to a forest of grey trees and left me there.