I Have Iraq in My Shoe (22 page)

Back at the Erbil villa, I packed up two large suitcases for the two months I would be in Suli. Since I was no longer speaking to my hockey bags, I considered trying to shove the enormous microwave into a duffel bag, but that would have taken up shoe room. I was then whisked down to Suli, leaving a purportedly depressed Katherine in my wake. When I emailed her to wail about my unwanted relocation, she had immediately responded, “Is anything written down in your contract re: location? Am dismayed at this turn of events. Dismayed! Don’t leave me!” I was certain her dismay and depression would only last until the next happy hour, or Progressive Dinner, so I wasn’t too worried.

Once in Suli, I moved into the extra room in Jen’s villa. Jen had taught classes through the summer and was leaving for her six-week vacation a few days after I arrived. We had a little time to catch up and gossip about all the stuff that happened with the university over the summer. She said it had been rough.

Jill had hired a handful of new teachers for short-term, three-month contracts. While Warren didn’t have a knack for truthfulness, he was a quite gifted judge of character. Everyone Warren had hired for the regular term at the university all had some sort of personal connection to him (former coworkers, baby-sitters, etc.) and were all very solid, stable, easygoing-yet-hardworking, fun
and
funny people. I had to give him credit for that. I really liked the people in our department. Since Warren was back in Canada for his summer vacation, Jill had to do the last-minute summer contract hiring.

One of the people Jill hired was an older British woman named Virginia. Jen told me how Virginia would loudly and frequently proclaim how much she hated Americans, in addition to other random, unsettling outbursts. To put it in her preferred British vernacular, Virginia was barking mad. During one of her particularly bad episodes, she jumped out of the transport car and stood in the middle of a busy Suli street screaming, while everyone else in the car just sat in varied states of stunned paralysis. She was relieved of her teaching duties before I arrived, though, and I never saw her craziness up close.

I do not do well with Crazy. I am all about trying to rationalize things (international travel requires more than twenty kilos, total), and Crazy usually doesn’t pay any attention to reason (no, it’s twenty kilos total). Crazy screams and shouts and jumps out of cars, and all of that just takes far more energy than I have.

If Virginia was certifiable, Nina, another summer hire, was certifiable light. Jen warned me about Nina: she dominated conversations, made absurd comments, and frequently offended people. Dara and Kelly were two teachers in CED who were married and had brought their husbands and children to Suli with them. Nina informed them both that it was totally irresponsible to bring children there. She would proclaim to anyone who would listen that she was the only truly qualified instructor because she had completed a TOEFL teacher’s course. She piped bizarre revelations into everyday conversation: “The only reason I went to Korea [to teach] was because I couldn’t get laid in America.” And during a very awkward car ride she growled to a twenty-seven-year-old Bobby, “You’re just ripe enough for me.” Dara confided that on one trip to Zara, Nina wore shorts that were so short you could actually see bum cheek. Where was the Cultural Awareness pamphlet? Did I take the last one?

Nina was thirty-nine, pale skinned, and very thin, with a wiry blast of red hair. She was smugly proud of her birdlike frame. She was obsessed with talking about weight, and would declare, “I’m thin and hot!” and would yammer on about how there were twenty-year-olds who weren’t as thin or hot as she was. No one really knew how to respond to this.

She really didn’t seem like a bad person, but she definitely had some sort of mental imbalance that resulted in her floating around in an alternate reality, where she was the Queen: the most beautiful, most fascinating, most intellectually gifted incarnation of human-unicorn there ever was. It was nice that some people were perfectly content in their delusions; I just couldn’t find any common ground with them.

I felt bad for Nina but also suspected that she wasn’t all there as far as mental capacity went. The best I could do was be polite and try to avoid engaging in conversation with her. Especially when she said things like, “I definitely want to have a baby. The world needs more Ninas! Don’t you think?” I did not think. When Warren came back from his extended summer break and met the new hires, he said to me, “Oh my God, I feel like I need to shower after I talk to her. She is fucking weird.”

Suli was going to be an exercise in avoidance tactics for me. In addition to a mentally wobbly coworker, Jen had also warned me that she had seen a scorpion crawl out of the drain in the shower.

The faculty and staff villas in Suli were about a twenty-minute drive from the university. We had three Kurdish drivers, Karzan, Karwan, and Sirwan, who each commandeered an SUV, to transport us around. Karzan and Karwan were half brothers who used to live in Baghdad and drive for Saddam Hussein’s regime. “Saddam Hussein’s regime” has a dark and sinister sound to it, but the brothers were these two diminutive, smiley, jokey nuggets. They were the Iraqi version of Chelsea Handler’s sidekick, Chuy.

All three drivers were cheerful and funny, but Karzan was the one with
Rod Stewart’s Greatest Hits
on CD. It was the little things that made life entertaining there, and one of those things was a morning commute through the crazy, dusty roads of Sulaimani, Iraq, singing along to “Hot Legs.” It was almost too much when Karzan later got his hands on a Rihanna CD. We’d be speeding past old men on donkeys, belting out “Umb-e-r-ella, ella, ella, ey, ey, ey” in unison.

When his brother, Karwan, was driving, you had to keep your wits about you and prepare for crash position. Karwan had a lead foot and very little regard for weather conditions. On one rainy, slippery night he was barreling along at top speed, and several of us in the car were calling out for him to slow down. He grew indignant and said, “I drive for many, many years in Baghdad!” We responded, “That’s nice, drive slower.”

Karzan was probably the most entertaining conversationalist of all the drivers. He was the oldest, although probably still only in his thirties. One time, on the way from the university to the bank, Karzan asked, “You like chicken?” Steve was the only other person in the car, and neither of us was sure if Karzan meant the animal or the food. I asked, “Do you mean, to eat?” Karzan said, “NO no no, not eating, just animal,” and then proceeded to tell us about the love of his life, Biss-Biss the chicken.

“Ahh, Biss-Biss. Biss-Biss BEAUTIFUL!” and he did this thing where he touched all his fingertips together and held them up to his mouth. “BEAUTIFUL!” Steve and I were thoroughly amused by this. It was not common for Kurds, or other Middle Easterners for that matter, to keep pets (Section Five of the Cultural Awareness pamphlet). All the teachers had grown accustomed to the negative reactions of our students when we discussed keeping cats or dogs at home. (“But teacher, they are so
dirty.
”) Karzan was one of the few exceptions. Karzan told us all about his “chicken-man” Biss-Biss. He did say “Rooster? Chicken-man?” asking us which was correct, but Steve and I preferred “chicken-man” so we let him continue to say that.

He waxed poetic about how he had had Biss-Biss for over two years, and how his family threw birthday celebrations in Biss-Biss’s honor, and baked him cakes, and made him clothes to wear. Karzan told us how Biss-Biss had many girlfriends, and he was just so proud that I couldn’t help laughing about it.

Once, when Karzan was driving Warren and me from Erbil to Suli, Warren started joking about taking me to Baghdad and selling me. “How much you think we could get for her?” he asked Karzan. I did not want to hear how much money Karzan and Warren thought I was worth. But before I could block the answer with a loud “I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT THIS,” Karzan had said, “Twenty thousand.” I was mildly offended and blurted out, “Twenty thousand?!” at the same time Warren responded with a shocked, “REALLY?” He then said, very seriously, “Gretch, twenty thousand is a lot of money here.” I was still offended. Karzan probably paid more for Biss-Biss.

Karzan used the word “beautiful” to describe nearly everything, not just his chicken-man. He would say “beautiful” with his hand held in front of his mouth, with all his fingertips pressed together. Rihanna’s music? Beautiful. Random neighborhood children? Beautiful. The mountains of Kurdistan? Beautiful. The Black Moneeka? Beautiful. I’m sorry, the what?

The Black Moneeka was a car, specifically a large SUV. I did not understand the name. It was explained to me that “Moneeka” referred to Monica Lewinsky, because she was a “big girl” and the SUV was a “big car.” So whenever we would pass a large, shiny black SUV, the drivers would say, “Ahhhh, Black Moneeka.” I was mortified that Monica Lewinsky was infamous enough to have made such a lasting impression on the Iraqi people for this length of time. An ancillary thought snuck in: “Maybe her handbag line would sell well here.”

Since moving to the Middle East I had become hyperaware of how Western females were represented to the Middle Eastern community. We were, largely, assumed to be hos, and it was exasperating to be unfairly labeled. If the most action I’m getting is a couple of strategically placed squeezes from security at the Erbil airport, I do not deserve the “ho” label.

It didn’t help that while the television censors here removed any and all kissing scenes, they would leave in the “morning after” scenes with the naked couple in bed (covers pulled all the way up, mind you), which popped up all too frequently in most romantic comedies. It made me very aware that the common depiction of American women, via both movies and popular television programs (
Grey’s Anatomy, ER, Brothers & Sisters
, and others) is that we all slept with men on the first date, if not within the first ten minutes of meeting. While that was not a big deal to a Western man, it just reinforced “whore!” to the men in the Middle East. File under: Other Stuff That Makes Me Kick and Scream.

I finally had more than two students, and some of them were even female. Yay! I really, really wanted to get to know some of the Kurdish women, for a more well-rounded perspective on the culture. I was given two conversation classes of Level 2s, the same as Renas and Dalzar. I had seven students in my 3:00 p.m. class and twelve in my 6:00 p.m. class. On the first day, I spent a few minutes familiarizing myself with their names. This took a bit of work. “Dalzar” and “Renas” had been phonetic, and easy, and there were only two of them. Now I was faced with an avalanche of “Pshtewan” and “Kazhwast” and other names that begged the use of a sneeze guard.

I went around the room with my attendance sheet, and mentally pigeonholed my first class: AbdulKareem (the old one), Sarkawt (the smiley one), Peshang (the shy one), Awat (the cute one), Hawkar (the confused one), Solin (the young one), and Avin (the pretty one). Surface labels are awful, but they help me remember people before I get to know them. I have no idea how sanctimonious, politically correct people do it.

The classes were two and a half hours long, and the students got a fifteen-minute break in the middle to go outside and walk around, get snacks, and speak Kurdish. I refused to allow them to speak anything other than English once they set foot inside the classroom. On the second or third day of class, the cute one stayed behind and hung around my desk. By this time I was starting to see him more as the flirty-jokey-one-who-had-been-giving-me-the-eye, and I was wary of him. I narrowed my eyes.

He said, “Teacher, can I ask you personal question?”

I had been assured by my coworkers that the students would never ask anything about your marital status or dating situation, because it was not acceptable conversation in their culture.

Yep, that was pretty personal.

We have confirmed that Awat understood the meaning of the word “personal.” I tried not to roll my eyes.

He nodded his head, grinning, and looked thoughtful for a moment. He then said: “Teacher, you are very good teacher. We think you very good. Everyone respect you.” It was like the entire class had unknowingly designated Awat as class spokesman. That was really nice to hear, a mere three days into the class, but I thought it might have been more flirty sucking-up than a legitimate compliment. That would get him nowhere, but I still accepted it. And I was now frequenting the tearoom for my daily dose of “Hello, Flower” from Daroon.

There was at least one student in the second class who would not have agreed with Awat’s assessment and just stopped showing up after four classes. I can’t say I was sorry to see Behaz go. He was “the scary one” who referred to Saddam Hussein as “King Hussein.”