Read Online The American Granddaughter by Inaam Kachachi - Free Book Online

grandmother to the guardroom. I completely surrendered myself to her embrace and her smell. We hugged and cried while the soldier looked on sympathetically and the Iraqi translator wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. But when I invited her to enter the camp she refused, resolutely shaking her head. It was her Kurdish stubbornness that she carried like a birthmark from the day she was born in Bikhal, and which had been passed on to her daughter Batoul, who in turn passed it on to me. Stubbornness was genetic for the women in our family, like the mule. ‘I came to this world under the waterfalls,’ my grandmother took pride in saying, when I was a little girl sitting on her lap, by way of explanation for her natural steadfastness, telling the story of my great-grandfather, the pistachio trader who moved between the Kurdish villages and roamed the borders of Turkey and Iran. A determined and stubborn man, the legacy passed on by the women of the family. It was a story that crossed continents, as the details had reached me when I was older in Detroit.
    As we hugged, I cried tears of love and nostalgia, and she cried tears of love and frustration, and maybe shame. She must have seen the male and female soldiers coming and going around us, the army vehicles entering through the gate, the interpreters receiving the terrified folk and mediating the rising anger. But things were still unclear during those chaotic first few months. People were still recovering from the earthquake-like shock, still unsure whether to welcome those who’d arrived in tanks or to spit on them.
    It was, of course, out of the question for me to leave the base unguarded, so I stayed with my grandmother in the guardroom, tissues drenched with snot, sweat and tears piling up between us. I was lost for words, so I said, ‘Is there anything that you need? Do you need money?’ She shot me a glance that made my tongue freeze and replied in her wonderfully metaphorical dialect, ‘ Wallah , now you can fart from a big ass.’
    I looked around, embarrassed that any of the translators might have heard her, and my grandmother smiled for the first time since she’d entered the poorly air-conditioned room. She stretched out her swollen legs and smoothed her long dress. She was wearing a pair of new black clogs with thick black stockings, the standard footwear for Iraqi women of her age. She’d arrived from Baghdad in a car driven by a broad-shouldered young man who had long hair, a thick moustache and a deep cleft in the middle of his chin. He was Haydar, she told me, the son of Tawoos. And while I was used to hearing the name Tawoos – Tawoos did this, Tawoos said that, Tawoos cooked this – I still wondered at the strangeness of the name – which meant ‘peacock’ in Arabic – every time I heard it. Tawoos had been with the family since the days before my mother was married. She had dedicated her life to their service and become one of them.
    ‘Have you forgotten Tawoos?’ my grandmother asked me as I searched my memory for a face to put to the name. I shook my head and reassured her that I hadn’t forgotten. How could I? But I was seeing her son for the first time and had never heard his name. ‘Haydar. His name is Haydar, Zeina. He’s your milk brother.’ That strange phrase didn’t stop me in my tracks at the time. I didn’t quite take it in. How could he be my brother when I didn’t know him and hadn’t heard his name before? But the young man was there in front of me, standing next to the car with a bottle of water in his hand and watching me like I was a riddle he was trying to solve. It wasn’t until later, when I moved to Baghdad, that Haydar would solve my riddle and I would get used to his presence in my life.
    I sat for two hours or longer with my grandmother, talking and exchanging news. She asked about our many relatives who were dispersed in different countries, forgetting the names of children and mixing up the names of