The American Granddaughter (10 page)

I was based in one of the presidential palaces. ‘Like a figment of the imagination,’ as Rokuz, Candice’s husband, used to say when describing to us the wealth of the Gulf sheikhs that he worked with. In the palace I sat on a luxurious chair upholstered in olive-green leather, wide enough for three of me, and wrote at a Napoleon-something style table. At first we used to stop and gasp at every gilded settee or Chinese carpet. We used to go dizzy from looking up at the inlaid Andalusian ceilings and Bohemian chandeliers. But in less than a week we had grown used to the palace and its furnishings, as if we had been born in the arms of such riches. Sometimes we even felt hard done by when soldiers in the Green Zone emailed us photos that they’d taken in fancier palaces. They were the children of the capital, while we were the children of the provinces. Though the people of Tikrit were anything but provincial. To us, they were more like sophisticated riddles that we couldn’t solve.

Men and women came to the gate every day with claims, protests and demands. Our soldiers had burned down his shop; an army vehicle had run over her cow; the windows of his house had been broken; their whole house had been destroyed by a bomb. We were to blame for every single disaster in this pampered city. I listened and interpreted and filled in forms and gave advice. But I didn’t permit myself sympathy or displays of emotion. They came, in the mornings, having stood in long lines before the gate and submitted with resentment to the thorough and harsh search process. We recorded their losses and avoided getting into discussions. A week or two later, financial compensation would be issued, which ranged from a hundred to a thousand dollars. Those were the daytime visitors.

The night’s darkness provided the needed cover for other visitors, those who came to volunteer ‘useful information’. That’s how they usually described the rumours they passed on, in the hope of a job or a contract or a few greenbacks in return. One of them would come to tell us he knew the location of Ezzat Al-Douri, the King of Clubs in the ‘most-wanted Iraqi playing cards’. ‘Believe me, he will be in such-and-such a village at such-and-such an hour,’ he’d say. I’d take down his statement, translate it and pass it to the commanding officer. Another day a young woman with big kohl-lined eyes came to the reception and asked for a private meeting. She wasn’t from Tikrit but was studying at the university here. She entered, disguised by her
abaya,
and stood in the line for compensation claims. As soon as we entered my office, she threw off her
abaya
and said that she had ‘useful information’. I took her to a back room and called the intelligence officer and interpreted her words to him. The student said that a group of her colleagues were planning an anti-occupation meeting at such-and-such an hour. She gave us some details then went on about how much she admired the West, how she loved rock music. She was pretty, witty and gregarious, and her English was okay. But I felt uneasy in her presence. I estimated she was less than twenty years old. A fledgling collaborator.

The young informer fell in love with our intelligence officer, Lieutenant Frankie, an African-American from Chicago. He liked her in return and was easy prey for her pointed stares. It got to the point where they were planning to get married. She used come to visit him twice a week. As standard precaution, none of us trusted her completely. For how were we to know that she wasn’t planted by the resistance? Even Frankie sometimes had his doubts, and enlisted my help – on the basis that I must know the mentality of women here – to test her out by drawing her into conversation and finding out if she really loved him or if she was pretending. I didn’t at all mind being a consultant in matters of the heart. It was like having a part in a movie along the lines of
Juliet in Tikrit
.

Once their relationship reached the stage of holding hands, I left them to it. I didn’t really care about what went on between them. I wasn’t the vice police. I think he promised to marry her once his service in Iraq came to an end. She believed that he would come back for her and take her to Chicago.

A story that happens in all wars and between all nations. But the young informant was found one morning, dead on top of a mound of garbage, with her throat slit and her eyes gouged out. This was the first real shock that put an end to my reckless sense of adventure and placed me near the heart of the tragedy. The first drop, as my father would say.

At night I had to take part in patrols and in raids on houses where we suspected terrorists might be hiding. Those were long nights of anticipation, full of voices yelling and pleading and wailing, and looks that were sharper than daggers. Strangely, what I felt wasn’t fear, as much as an awareness that I was going through experiences that nobody would have guessed that I’d see. Yes, there were those who bragged about making history. And we were indeed making a new future for the country that held my ancestral bones and had, once, held me in its arms.

The difficult raids took place after 10 p.m. Our evening in Tikrit started around six, dinner time, the hour when young people in America would be back from work or university and getting ready to go out to the gym or to a bar or club. Our dinner at the camp was shit. Dried food in plastic packs. You opened the bag and poured hot water onto the powder inside. The energy released by the reaction between the water and the powder heated up the food and turned it into outer-space dishes of chicken with pasta or meatballs with vegetables. There was also a yellow powder, which turned into something resembling fruit juice when you added water. When they wanted to spoil us, an army cook was sent, twice a week, to prepare hot American meals – sliced ham with mashed potato, for example. I generally preferred the shit bags.

We dealt with our constant hunger by sending one of the local interpreters to a local restaurant once in a while to bring us some roast chicken or tasty kebab. The local interpreters were our envoys to the outside world. They didn’t enter the camp, but stood at the outer gate to interpret between the guards and members of the public, who were then escorted to the next gate to be handed over to an American interpreter. That would be me.

The first time I scoffed the market kebab, I hadn’t yet built up my immunity and I suffered severe stomach cramps and even worse diarrhoea. But I didn’t give up. I carried on craving the local kebab, which was pure fat with a hint of meat. And therein lay its tastiness. The diarrhoea lasted about a week and I lost three kilos.

We had a lieutenant who was more than two metres tall. His name was Benjamin Green and we called him ‘Big Ben’. One day, he came down from his high tower to look upon us, and I was sitting cross-legged on the marble floor of the palace, my sleeves rolled up, before me a spread of kebabs, leeks, spring onions and garlic pickles on an old newspaper. He looked down at me with contempt, like he was a white colonialist talking to a savage native, and said, ‘What are you putting into your mouth?’

‘Kebab.’

‘How do they allow food in from outside? Couldn’t it be poisoned by insurgents?’

‘That’s why you have to eat garlic with it. It’s strong enough to stop the effect of any poison,’ I said, extending a clove of garlic pickled in date vinegar to him, the smell of which alone could knock an elephant out. He took it in his fingertips like he was holding a scorpion, cautiously brought it to his nose and suppressed a sneeze. He threw the scorpion back on the newspaper and hurried away on his long legs. I yelled after him, ‘Don’t be scared, Big Ben. It doesn’t explode under your tongue.’

Then came salvation. Two women from the northern villages came to the camp looking for work. They’d been cleaners at the Tikrit High School for Girls and had lost their jobs when the school closed because of the war. Their husbands were disabled Iran War veterans, and they were sole providers for big families. Captain Dixon’s heart softened, and he decided to employ them as cleaners and to make tea. As I was constantly craving edible food, I studied the women and chose the fatter of the two. ‘Do you know how to cook
dolma
?’ I asked her in all seriousness, as if it were a security interrogation. She smiled with peasant cunning and answered, ‘
Dolma
,
biryani
,
teshrib
, everything your heart desires. You name it and I’ll bring it.’ I gave her twenty dollars and asked her for a pot of
biryani
. She came the following day with a relative helping her carry a pot that was big enough for a whole army unit. That day, I ate till I was full, as did Dixon and ten more of the inveterate starving soldiers. It was a meal the likes of which they’d never even imagined. From that day on, Nahrain became my personal cook. She also started taking my clothes to wash and iron in return for a few dollars.

We ate by day, and by night, as the city slept and anxiety and fear abated, we raided. I went out on my first night raid ten days after my arrival in Tikrit. They called me to accompany the unit raiding a house in which we were told Al-Douri was hiding. We didn’t come across him there. We found an underground tunnel that led to a vehicle of the type that’s attached to the back of lorries, big as a mobile home. We later found out that he’d left before we arrived. We always arrived after they’d left. An Iraqi-produced version of
The Fugitive
.

XX

The writer opened her desk drawer and brought out a bundle of newspaper cuttings and human rights reports that she tossed in my direction. ‘Read these,’ she said.

I know what’s in them. Every night I sit cross-legged on my bed, place the laptop in front of me and criss-cross continents. I read about false intelligence and cooked-up reports, about resignations from the president’s advisors, about the president’s slips of the tongue, about his lies, about controversies between the Pentagon and the CIA. I read about protests in America, about numbers in the billions. I read online and see with my own two eyes what the screen cannot show. I watch army coffins being shipped home. Friendly fire; Al-Qaeda; Zarqawi; corruption; systematic plundering; sectarianism; mass exodus. Reporters murdered. Iraqi scientists murdered. University professors. Women.

‘Yes. What do you need me for now? You have piles of documents to help you finish the novel.’

‘It’s not me who’s writing. It’s Rahma. Haven’t you figured that out yet?’

Has my grandmother put her up to this? What use was it to Rahma if she managed to pry my head open and fill it with all her own values and life experiences? My grandmother was as mad as Tawoos. Just a different kind of madness. Tawoos once told me, ‘When I die, don’t bury my hands with me.’

I winked at my childhood nanny and said, ‘Have you heard of an
afreet
dying?’

‘We all die in the end. And I don’t want these hands to be eaten by worms. So when I stop breathing, take my hands and wear them over yours, like gloves.’ Tawoos opened her palms between us and mourned her manual skills that would be buried with her. ‘Have you ever seen hands like mine, Zeina? Hands that are skilled in everything? They can cook and mix dough, embroider and sew and sweep the floor and wash clothes and beat rugs, they can iron and plant and harvest and milk the cows and pluck chickens and feed birds, they can saw wood, bandage wounds, hammer nails and give the finger. What more do you want?’

Just as Tawoos wanted me to inherit her hands, my grandmother wanted me to inherit her memory. And the writer was happy with the decision because it served her novel. She’s only good at writing, the only work that defied Tawoos’ capable hands. It was noble work, in people’s eyes. Unlike sweeping and polishing glass. But it also had the power to bend the truth.

Every time I tried to escape from her, I saw her shadow behind me, attached to my own. They merged until I couldn’t tell them apart.

Even my grandmother feared what the writer was doing. She didn’t want the words being taken out of her mouth and confined to paper. Paper was incapable of conveying the hoarseness in her voice or the heat of her breath. What my grandmother was after was a direct channel from her memory into my consciousness, without the writer’s mediation. That was the only thing my grandmother lived for now. I don’t know what gave her the idea that my family history would redeem me. She would use it to put me back on the righteous path and to correct the directions of my compass. The stories she told me mirror the history of the homeland. Her characters were perfumed with the scent of Iraq, and her education programme took no shortcuts. It was full of committed employees and loyal craftsmen, teachers who dedicated their lives to the blackboard, integrity being the real protagonist. Wasn’t there a single person in the whole family who was idle or corrupt? Could a movie be suspenseful without villains?

I would be the villain, then. I would be the element of suspense, the foundation of conflict that made any drama possible, the hook that held the writer’s interest in the story. I didn’t know how far she’d got in the novel she stole from my reality. Did she still hate me and take Rahma’s side, stereotyping me as the traitor and her as the epitome of authenticity? How did she know my grandmother wouldn’t slip from between her keyboard-hitting fingers and go to meet her God, anyway?

So Rahma would die. And the writer would kill me off, too, in the end. She would arrange an abduction, or a mortar, or a roadside bomb under an army vehicle. If I had the choice, I would go for friendly fire. With my own hand, not my enemies’. I didn’t feel like satisfying the blood thirst of any Mujahideen. I knew she wanted to have a black bag placed over my head and have me shot at close range. That’s how treason was supposed to be punished. But I refused to die a coward’s death. I demanded the chance to fight back.