Free The American Granddaughter by Inaam Kachachi

already crossed over into the land of old age and were now used to its pangs of melancholy. Then Zeina descended on them like a bright ray of sunshine, like confetti, as the creative Tawoos used to say. They raised her from the time she was still in nappies, watched over her with prayers and sheltered her under their watchful gaze. Unlike the rest of the family, the child wasn’t leaning towards blondness, but had kissable skin the colour of roasted almonds.
    Batoul would arrive in a hurry, leaving her car running outside while she threw the girl onto their bed and dashed off to work. With Zeina, the wide bed that was stretched on a solid wooden plank turned into a joyful meadow of playfulness and laughter. They delighted in her as she grew up and floated around them, answering their calls and serving them like a brunette guardian angel. They hadn’t imagined that life would be so cruel as to deprive them of Zayoun. But Batoul could not stay in the country after what had happened to her husband. How could anyone in their right mind believe the allegation that Sabah Behnam, the soft-spoken TV presenter who was scared of his own shadow, had conspired against the ruling party and the revolution?
    They had knocked on their door in the neighbourhood of Al-Amin at three in the afternoon. Batoul was washing lettuce at the kitchen sink, her husband sitting by the fridge in his pyjama bottoms. When Yazan opened the door, solid hairy arms pushed him aside. Their swearing came in before them. ‘Where’s the handsome nightingale? Where’s your pimp of a father?’ Sabah sprang up and in one leap was standing before them. ‘Yes . . . wha . . . what is it? Is everything all right?’ He received a slap on the face in lieu of a reply. They dragged him away as he tripped over his pyjamas that had slipped down and gathered around his feet.
    He was gone for just three weeks, but they passed like three eons for Batoul and the rest of the family. If his father-in-law hadn’t sought the help of a friend from the old regime, who happened to have a son who was important in the new regime, the poor fellow wouldn’t have reappeared on the face of the earth. When he returned he was unable to speak, his teeth were broken and he cried non-stop, as if they had inserted a reservoir of tears under his eyelids. It was days before he dared to tell his wife what had happened to him. She took him north, to her aunt’s house, to get away from the tension in Baghdad. There, under a pistachio tree in Einkawa, he told her that the denouncement came – by God I swear – from his closest colleague, his crime being that he’d protested about the news bulletins being too long and had said that the news was merely recycled leftovers from the day before.
    Before they beat him up, urinated on him, broke his teeth, pulled his tongue with pincers and extinguished their cigarettes on his skin, they had sat him down naked at a table, set up a TV camera in front of him and given him a news report to read. The first item on the report was the execution by hanging of TV presenter Sabah Shamoun Behnam after his having been convicted of conspiring against the party and the revolution. Batoul, who had been brought up in a house where values of truth, justice and dignity were upheld, couldn’t let what had happened to her husband pass. She decided to launch an official complaint and went to ask her superior at the university for advice regarding the legalities. ‘They tortured my husband, Professor!’ she told him.
    The university dean listened to Batoul’s complaint, and, being a senior party member himself, laughed embarrassedly and told this staff member who’d come seeking his help, ‘Tortured him? My dear, that wasn’t torture. They were just messing with him.’
    So it was all a game then, when they broke Sabah’s teeth, clipped off the tip of his tongue and electrocuted him. The dean himself assured her that real torture would have been something else