I Have Iraq in My Shoe Read online

  My doorbell rang at 10:30 p.m., and it stopped me in my tracks. Suddenly, I was Scarlett again, sitting alone in the living room knitting (watching TV) while menacing Union soldiers pounded on the door. The doorbell startled me into a state of wide-eyed paralysis. I mentally ran through my new, standard defensive opener, “I am totally having my period right now!” The doorbell rang again, and I was finally able to mobilize myself, and crept to the stairwell and yelled, “ADAM?” A muffled voice from behind the door answered, “No, it’s Tom Pappas from the university.”

  Who?

  I opened the door to find one middle-aged, bespectacled American man, one short Kurdish man smoking a cigarette, and one short Kurdish Buddy Hackett bodyguard (who had escorted me to immigration and now stood outside my front door with a rolling suitcase). I was one startled, bespectacled girl, and I was in my pajamas.

  Bespectacled American Man held out his hand and said, “Hi, I’m Tom Pappas, you must be Gretchen.” I had no idea who Tom Pappas was, why he knew who I was, or, most importantly, why he had brought his suitcase to my house. In situations where I’m bewildered, my reaction times are a bit slower than usual, but I did manage to extend my hand for a greeting, all the while looking from Tom Pappas, to Buddy Hackett, to the cigarette, to the suitcase, then back to Tom Pappas.

  Tom Pappas said he was the chancellor of the university. He then asked if anyone had told me he would be coming, and I slowly responded, “Noooooo…” while wondering if I was supposed to invite him in for a slumber party. I’m sorry, but we can’t have a slumber party, because I’M TOTALLY HAVING MY PERIOD RIGHT NOW! Although, I wondered if that diversionary tactic might not work on American men the same way.

  I had not been briefed on this type of situation. What was the protocol when the chancellor of the university showed up on your doorstep at 10:30 at night, while you were wearing your jammies and he was toting a rolly suitcase and an entourage? After an uncomfortable silence, he finally asked, “Is this the girls’ villa?” and with relief I answered, “Yes, Adam is next door.” I was still in slow-motion bewilderment as the trio turned to walk to the next villa and I closed the door.

  Then it sunk in: Tom Pappas was the chancellor of the university, and I had just had my first meeting with him in my pajamas, and it had been extremely awkward. And once they had gotten the chancellor situated in Adam’s villa, the two short entourage members would be returning to spend the night in my villa.

  Adam came over ten minutes later, looking for an extra towel for his slumber party guest. My language gets really bad when I’m angry, and I blurted out, “WHAT THE FUCK?” to which Adam just shrugged. “Did you know they were coming up here?” I asked it as an outraged rhetorical question, in a conspiratorial manner, as I was sure no one thought to let either one of us know what was happening.

  Adam said, “Oh. Yeah. Warren sent me an email a few hours ago.”

  My eyebrows were scraping the ceiling at this point. “And you didn’t tell me because…”

  Adam just shrugged again and said, “I didn’t think they’d come to your villa.” I thought Adam could probably skip the next few gym workouts with all the shrugging he was doing.

  An exasperated “Pffft!” came out of my mouth. Our villas were on a dead-end street. There was one villa at the very end (that belonged to some oil company), then Adam’s villa, then mine. If you were driving to the villas, mine came first. Of course they would go to my villa first. I had to explain to Adam that he needed to tell me things like this, so I would be prepared for them and would not be wearing jammies the next time someone came up from the university. If Adam were actually my brother, I would have demanded our parents ground him for a week. Honestly. It was times like those when I really could have used a drink.

  Adam did not agree with my shrugging-as-workout idea and went to the gym every day at 10:00 a.m. The next morning I decided to hitch a ride with him and Chalak, and then have Chalak help me track down some wine and hopefully Diet Coke. I was given reason to hope during our adventuresome lunch at the Darya Hotel.

  Adam had thus far been the one doing all the communicating with Chalak. If Chalak had questions about anything, including my villa, he would ask Adam. It was like I was invisible. I was convinced it was the Middle Eastern man/female-aversion thing, and Chalak didn’t want to deal with me directly. So I thought this excursion would be interesting. We dropped Adam off at the gym, and as I climbed into the front passenger seat, I said, “Okay, so the liquor store?” Chalak looked confused and I had to run through other ways to say “liquor.” “Wine? Wine and beer? Alcohol?”

  “Alcohol” was the magic word, and Chalak’s eyes registered recognition. He drove me to a small, shabby-looking shop that was markedly different from the nice little liquor store Warren had shown us in Suli. The Suli shop had a really nice Chilean Sauvignon Blanc; this shop had only Chateau Kefraya. I guess we would be indulging in some Lebanese wine. It was worth a try. They did have a lot of “spirits” at the shop, but I really wanted wine. “Spirits” seems like a misnomer for hard liquor. “Spirits” seems light and sparkly and fruity, much like wine. I never describe Jim Beam or Captain Morgan as “light,” “sparkly,” or “fruity.”

  Chalak could sense my disappointment at the shabby shop and said, “Okay, I take you better place. Ainkawa.” I thought Ainkawa must be the name of another liquor store, but apparently Ainkawa was a neighboring town. Exciting! New Iraqi town! My mom would be wringing her hands at the idea of a new Iraqi town. She had seen one of my photos of the road signs that said “to Baghdad—to Mosul” and had declared, “No exploring, Gretchen!”

  Chalak explained, “Here? Liquor store? Only two. Ainkawa? Two hundred!” Ainkawa sounded like my kind of town. It was a short five-minute drive from English Village. It took less time to drive to Ainkawa than it did to drive to the Erbil grocery stores. Ainkawa was predominantly Christian, and as we turned off the vast, wide roads of Erbil onto Ainkawa’s narrow residential streets, we passed at least one church and many beloved liquor stores. God bless and praise Jesus. I bought Jacob’s Creek Chardonnay, and Chalak bought cigarettes. All the men here smoke like their mustaches depend on it for growth, and he was no exception.

  Back in the car I asked, “Can we find Diet Coke? Or Diet Pepsi?” Chalak looked confident and said, “Yes!” We were having such a fun errand day! And I had been worried about communicating with him. We stopped at five different stores with no luck though. The last place we tried, Chalak spoke to the store manager, who said, “Don’t even bother looking.” He meant anywhere in Ainkawa. I thought I might have to drown my sorrows in Jacob’s Creek.

  I then had a caffeine epiphany and told Chalak about the hotel/restaurant where Adam and I had eaten the previous week, explaining that they had Diet Coke. So we found our way back to Erbil and the Darya Hotel. I approached the front desk and with a friendly smile and a pantomime asked if they had Diet Coke. The woman behind the desk did speak a little English and gradually understood what I wanted, so she called the manager over. They agreed to sell me some Diet Coke from their restaurant supply. They loaded twelve cans of Diet Coke into a plastic bag while I clapped my hands in sheer glee. The manager was the same man who had helped Adam and me and recognized me as the shrieking crazy. Both the manager and the front-desk receptionist were totally amused with how excited I was about Diet Coke, and I had to explain, “You just can’t find it anywhere here! Thank you so much!”

  I wasn’t so much assimilating into Iraqi life as bringing some of my culture to Iraq.

  My “culture” was brought to me via the Diet Coke and the TV. We had five stations that broadcast a myriad of Americana: syndicated sitcoms, dramas, and even Jeopardy!, as well as movies. One night, Adam indulged me and we watched 27 Dresses. He agreed to forgo Call of Duty or Warcraft IV or whatever testosterone-y video games he had been playing, and have some good girl time with me. I was so excited about watching 27 Dresses, which I had already seen, and remembered there were very attra
ctive people, bright colors, and excellent New York locations, not to mention all the dresses. I needed a frothy, froufy escape.

  It was guilty-pleasure satisfying, up until the point where I realized (and Adam confirmed) that they cut out all the kissing scenes in movies.

  Me: WHAT?

  How can they not show kissing on TV? How were these people ever going to learn how to kiss properly if they had no TV or movie kissing references? Wasn’t that how everyone learned? I suppose the no-kissing rule made sense, as #3 on our Cultural Awareness pamphlet did specifically say “no kissing,” but I didn’t realize that would extend to the pretend world of television.

  I loved watching movie kissing, so this was a devastating development for me. James Franco and Sophia Myles in Tristan & Isolde; Keira Knightley and James McEvoy in Atonement; Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain—all good kissing. I found myself wondering if the spaghetti scene from Disney’s Lady and the Tramp would be cut.

  Not even The Simpsons was safe. One of the English-language channels was Fox Series, which showed back-to-back episodes of The Simpsons. There was one episode where Apu, the Kwik-E-Mart owner, has an affair with the Squishee lady. The Middle Eastern, romance-hating censors cut that scene. If I hadn’t seen the episode before, I would have been really confused as to why Manjula was so pissed at Apu. Here, even animated infidelity had to be hushed.

  The more time I spent here, the more I was convinced it was exactly like Victorian England:

  No public affection was allowed.

  Women had to be covered from neck to ankle.

  Unmarried women and men could not be seen in each other’s company without a chaperone.

  No kissing on TV.

  Exactly like Victorian England.

  One night, about a week after Chancellor Tom Pappas’s unannounced visit, Adam and I were hanging out and attempting to drink the horrible Lebanese wine. I was finding notes of Borax and hints of turpentine, and Adam was laughingly relating the details of how Tom had accidentally walked into Adam’s room while clad in his sassy tighty-whities. I shrieked a loud “Noooooooo!” both in regards to the story and the mental image that mercilessly burned itself on my delicate brain. Then Adam said, “Yeah, I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but Tom asked if you were whiny.”

  Me: What?

  Adam: Yeah, he was talking to Warren and said, “So, is Gretchen kind of whiny?”

  I was whiny because I wasn’t Little Miss Welcome Wagon when a strange man showed up at my door at 10:30 at night, in Iraq, two weeks after I had arrived. It might be more of a challenge to assimilate into the university culture than into the Middle Eastern culture.

  Chapter Twelve

  Escaping Erbil

  When I signed my contract, back in November, I was given a calendar of the school’s upcoming breaks. The Kurdish people celebrated Nawroz, which was a sort of New Year/Welcome to Spring celebration, and this equaled a ten-day paid holiday at the end of March. Even before I left the United States, I thought, “It would probably be smart of me to go somewhere Western, to alleviate the inevitable culture shock of the Middle East.” So I coordinated a trip with my old college roommate, Ellie, and picked what I considered to be the absolute polar opposite of Iraq: Paris, France.

  Ellie said, “Seriously, you arrive there, work for three weeks, then get ten days off, paid?” Yes, and I absolutely deserved that, because I had committed to spending two years living in Iraq. I hadn’t known it would be more like “I arrive here, pretend to work for three weeks, then get ten days off.” The start date for my classes kept getting pushed back.

  I had been putting off traveling to France because of all the clichéd stories about how the French hate Americans and mock them and treat them poorly. Given the option, I would choose not to be mocked or treated poorly on vacation. But considering I would be traveling from a place where women were treated poorly in general, being mocked by the French might not be all that bad. I am okay with mockery if it occurs while I’m comfortably lounging at a sidewalk café, drinking wine and eating brie.

  Erbil had an international airport, as Warren had explained to me, from which a number of different airlines provided service. None of them was familiar. I was still not speaking with Royal Jordanian and had no desire to test out anything called Zozik Air, or Zagros Air, or, God forbid, Iraqi Airways. Although I desperately wanted a boarding pass from Flying Carpet Airlines. That was a real airline; I’m not kidding. In my mind Aladdin was the captain, and they flew straight onto Ali Baba’s property and employed the forty thieves as ground crew and baggage handlers…so, on second thought, maybe no.

  One of the dangers of flying with an airline with devout Muslim pilots was their commitment to “inshallah.” Warren explained to me that all Muslims subscribed to the idea of “inshallah,” which means “If God wills it.” He claimed that the Muslim pilots, when faced with violent turbulence or sudden aircraft malfunctions, would simply release their grips on the controls, throw their hands heavenward, and cry, “Inshallah!” assuming that if it was God’s will for the plane to crash, they shouldn’t try to interfere.

  I chose Austrian Airlines. It was the most comforting-sounding of the options. Arnold Schwarzenegger was Austrian, and who wouldn’t feel safe and secure with…okay, maybe not Schwarzenegger. Ferdinand Porsche was Austrian! The guy who created both the Volkswagen and the Porsche. Reliable and sexy.

  Austrian Airlines had figured out, though, that Westerners in Iraq would want to fly with them, and therefore felt justified in charging $1,400 for a round-trip between Erbil and Vienna, a four-hour flight. Yes. Escaping from The Iraq, in a modern aircraft, with a civilized, professional flight crew who knew they had the ability to avert an unnecessary crash, would cost you. I didn’t even care. Just to have the option of getting to Europe, in just a few hours, was absolutely worth it to me. The retail price of one week of freedom and glee was $1,400 (plus a little $200 flight from Vienna to Paris).

  Before rolling around in all that freedom and glee, I would have to actually get there. Enter the Erbil International Airport security maze. Chalak, with cigarette dangling from lower lip, loaded my suitcase into the car and then drove me to the airport. The drive was approximately five minutes from English Village; however, there was another five minutes of driving once we turned onto the airport property. The airport road narrowed to an almost-tunnel, with low cement walls that jagged left and right before reaching the first armed checkpoint. Chalak yammered, “Choni, bash, choni” at the guard, gestured to me, and we were waved through. He then pulled up to a small, one-story brick building, got out of the car, and unloaded my suitcase. “Oh, is this it?” I asked hesitantly. This couldn’t possibly be the airport. I couldn’t even see any airplanes or a runway or… Chalak, nodded and gestured toward the building and to my suitcase. “Um…okay then, thanks!”

  I was so excited to be going to Paris that I was grinning and giddy, and the Kurdish airport officials smiled right back. They may have thought I was mentally disabled. Who cares? I was off to Paris! I had to put my suitcase on a conveyor belt, which ran through a standard-issue luggage scanner, while I walked under the metal-detecting arch. The arch beeped, because I was wearing my boots, belt, watch, and all the other clangy crap I usually place in the tray in other airport security lanes. I had been carefully observing the people in line ahead of me, and the women did not remove any boots, belts, or clangy crap. Rather than having to arduously remove all of those things, and walk through the arch again, I was directed toward a door, which led into a tiny room where there was a female airport official, sitting at a desk, looking bored.

  She gave me a physical once-over—and basically felt me up—to determine I wasn’t packing any ammunition. It was the most action I had had in a few years. I didn’t enjoy being molested, she actually cupped both breasts, hello, but it was convenient not to have to take off all the accessories and then put them on again. I made a mental note to wear an industrial-weight bra the next
time I flew. My frisky date finished looking through my purse, smiled, and said in halting English, “Have a nice flight.” Handsy, but friendly.

  From that building I had to climb into a small shuttle bus, dragging my suitcase behind me, to be driven the additional two miles to the main building of the airport. “Rigamarole” is not a word I frequently use, but it was the only one that came to mind during this experience. The shuttle bus dropped me at the front entrance to the airport, which did look like an airport, and I entered through the sliding glass doors only to be confronted with yet another security lane, another conveyor belt, another metal-detecting arch, and another cringe-inducing molestation. I did not want anyone else touching me after this. But, again, all the airport security people were as nice as pie—or, as nice as baklava (which was, thus far, the only local dessert I had encountered—very flaky and tasty).

  You would think that would be the end of the detecting and searching, no? No. After checking in at one of the two counters, and releasing my Tumi to the Gods of Baggage Handling (inshallah, they would not rummage through my belongings), I had to take my boarding pass, passport, and residency card through the customs window, where I was squinted at and photographed by a small webcam. “Have a nice flight,” the customs agent said. I really did like this airport, aside from all the mistrust and inappropriate touching.

  But there was more.

  After sitting in the smoky waiting room with a bottle of water and peanut M&Ms, the Austrian Airlines flight number appeared on the television screen suspended from the ceiling, and people began to line up to go through another metal-detecting arch, after placing their carry-on luggage on a small conveyor belt. This was exhausting. And what could I possibly have acquired between the last checkpoint and this one? And I had to go into the little private room for my third date of the day. No more touching, please! I decided, at that point, to invest in a steel tank top and matching girdle. I was sure Paris had a lingerie shop with something similar.