Free The American Granddaughter by Inaam Kachachi Page A

completely, something that went beyond a few playful tickles and the dislodging of teeth. If it had been anything more serious, she wouldn’t have found a trace left of her husband. In the distinguished dean’s opinion, she should thank God for her husband’s safe return, ‘smelling of roses’ and walking on his own two feet.
    Batoul left everything she owned, the house, the car and the university job, and took Yazan and Zeina and escaped with her husband, that black night, out of the country. A relative forged a passport for the fugitive TV presenter, under the name Korkys Shamoun, occupation spare parts dealer. Sabah grew a heavy moustache and hid his eyes behind thick glasses, to more closely resemble the photo in the new passport. Though he didn’t really need the disguise, because no one, seeing the shambles of a ghost that he’d become, would have recognised the formerly handsome presenter.
    They arrived in Jordan and submitted their documents to the UNHCR, then waited their turn. Although bribery could have bought the whole of Iraq, Batoul wasn’t carrying any testimonies or medical reports or warnings of job dismissal. Sabah’s tongue, perforated by a stapler and clipped with pincers, was the only supporting evidence for his family’s asylum application.
    The grandparents’ hearts were broken as they said goodbye to Zayyoun, and they drenched her face with their tears. She was not the first or only member of the family to leave, but she was the sweetest and dearest. And it wasn’t going to be a normal journey from which the departed may later return to be reunited with their loved ones, but an escape to a faraway land that felt like death, no later reunion expected or hoped for.
    But fifteen years later, Zeina did return.
    All homecomings are cherished except this one. It burns the soul.

XVIII
    In my black abaya , which covered my body and part of my face, I got out of the taxi that carried me to the old house. The midday sun was as bright as it usually was on winter days in this part of the world. My woollen top was making my neck itch, and I could feel the drops of sweat between my breasts.
    It occasionally clouded over. The weather would darken and rain would pour down as if a water tap had suddenly opened in the sky. Then a few minutes later an angel’s hand would reach over and turn the tap off. The sky would instantly clear and regain its brilliance, while people down below staggered in the mud and swamps that formed in the twinkling of an eye. The transformation would be so sudden that it looked like it was part of a movie set, with ready-made cinematic props wheeled in from the warehouses of Universal Studios.
    I’d been missing my grandmother.
    I hadn’t seen her since her visit to the base a few months before. I’d heard her voice on the phone and talked to her. Her voice was that of an inconsolably lonely woman. She told me about spending a depressing Christmas on her own with the sound of gunshots and mortar shells, talking to the television whenever she had electricity, and waiting to return to God’s embrace. Hearing her, I was possessed by a familiar little jinni that I knew couldn’t be stopped. Calvin, who’d suffered his share of my extreme moods, used to ask me the name of this jinni and I would tell him it was called khannas . I laughed as he kept trying and failing to pronounce the ‘kh’ until his throat ached. ‘From the roof of the mouth, sweetheart. Kha . Kha . Not from the throat.’
    I celebrated Thanksgiving at the base with my colleagues. They’d brought us all the dishes we craved – turkey, legs of lamb, stuffed chicken and masgoof fish. Everything was cooked by the Bengali and Turkish cooks who’d been contracted by the US Army. They laid out the tables and we lined up, like at school, to fill our plates. We were served by the colonels and generals, as army tradition for Thanksgiving dictated. The ingredients had been brought by trucks from Turkey via Zakho. We