I Have Iraq in My Shoe (38 page)

I tried to get him to tell me the “something important” immediately after he opened the gift, as he turned the pages and pointed at the photos of the soccer star, but he shook his head and said, “Maybe later.” The Kurds use “maybe” when they mean “definitely,” which I have tried to correct on numerous occasions. Like when I would ask a student, “Will you be in class on Sunday?” and they would say, “Maybe.” So I would ask, “Why might you
not
be there?” and they always looked confused and said, “Yes, I be there!”

So I would wait until “maybe” later for Awat’s grand announcement but thought I might be leading into it by asking him about his new girlfriend.

Oh no. Maybe he hadn’t grown up quite as much as I had hoped.

He meant “all the time.”

He then pulled out his cell phone to show me all the messages and logged calls from her. I told him that I believed him, and then continued prodding him about why he didn’t like her as much as she liked him. I think people should only be in relationships with those they truly adore. They should want to be around them all the time. They should be excited to see them. They should be thrilled to hear from them. It shouldn’t be a chore receiving texts from them “every time.”

The conversation wandered into even more bothersome territory when Awat complained, “My life so complicated. With job, with school, with girls.” I demanded, “What do you mean ‘girls’? I thought you just had the one girlfriend?” He went on to explain that yes, he had only one girlfriend, but there were two other girls who called him all the time. He got all worked up, whining about how it was so inconvenient.

He continued to talk about these “other” girls who called him and told him that they loved him and wanted to be with him. I asked him how he would respond when they said things like that. He claimed that he told them he did not return their feelings, but they would just respond with “That’s okay!”
^*

I found myself back in full teacher/lecturer mode and tried to explain to Awat that he needed to take some responsibility for this. I said, “I think you
like
having these girls call you all the time. You
like
the attention.” He tried to shake his head slowly to disagree, but I could tell he was considering what I said. I continued, “If you really don’t want these girls calling you, block their numbers, or just don’t answer the phone when you see it’s them calling.”

Honestly, this all just seemed like basic common sense to me. But where was all this common sense when I thought I was in love with him? I stared across the table, at the excessive hair gel, and the bad suit (carefully avoiding the hole in the crotch), and listened to him ramble on incessantly about how many women were in love with him, and thought, “Oh. My. God. Had I really thought
I
was in love with him?”

He was a good-hearted person, but he really was just a child. In countries where boys and girls are basically separated from each other from adolescence until their twenties, the emotional development is stunted. Men in their twenties here were similar to teenaged boys in Western countries. Even as we sat there, discussing other topics, at one point he stopped me in midsentence to point out to me that two girls, sitting at a booth behind me, were watching him. I tried hard to keep my eyes from rolling. My disappointment deepened.

What happened to him? His moral convictions had seemed so strong before. That was one of the things I had found so attractive about him. He had walked the walk. Oh, heavy sigh.

We had been sitting and talking for two hours and we were both starting to yawn, but I still hadn’t heard the “big news” he had. It clearly wasn’t that he was engaged. He paused, grinning at me.

Oh wow. Did he mean me? This was a very different tune he was singing. When we used to have our after-class conversations, he would say that he hated Kurdistan and wanted to move to Europe. Then on other days he would talk about trying to find a bigger house in Suli. He was kind of all over the place with his future plans. The United States idea was a very new development.

I did not offer to help him. The creeping suspicion that his entire motivation for spending time with me was driven by ulterior motives made me feel ill. I suddenly realized that while I did care for him, I didn’t want to
take care
of him. I had instant flashes of his whole family moving to the United States and being entirely dependent on me. It wasn’t even as if they were refugees. Awat’s family was one of the wealthier families in Suli, and from what he had told me, it sounded like they had a pretty good life. Where was this coming from? My head hurt. I felt dirty.

That last little bit of the conversation had kind of soured the afternoon for me; it was more disappointing than the crotch-hole suit. It really had been good to connect with him again, but I felt used. Embarrassingly, had that same conversation happened three months ago, in the throes of my delusion, I probably would have giddily (read: stupidly) considered it.

Awat paid for our tea and then walked me down the stairs and out to the street. I smiled, shook his hand, and said, “Good-bye.” My crush on him was absolutely a thing of the past, and that conversation had guaranteed, 100 percent, that it would stay there.

Karzan pulled up in the Pathfinder, and I climbed in. We both waved to Awat as Karzan drove off toward the villas, and I thought, “There’s closure, and then there’s
cah-low-zhure.
” Three syllables.

*
 The university was always accepting donations of books, for the library. I was going to donate
He’s Just Not That into You
. These girls needed to read that.

Since my Crocs class was learning the course material at a slower pace, we did not have enough time to complete Unit 10. However, it was still to be part of the final exam, so I wanted to introduce as much of the grammar as possible. It may or may not have been a coincidence that Unit 10 in the textbook was “Ethics and Values.”

I passed out the Unit 10 exam and explained that we would go over the exam as a class, but then I needed everyone to return them to me when we were finished. We have to be very careful about keeping our exams, so they aren’t leaked to other potential future students.

We spent all day Tuesday studying possessive pronouns: mine, yours, his/hers, ours, theirs. I flipped through the exam and found the pertinent sections, and we reviewed those multiple choice questions. At the end of class I collected the exams.

Wednesday I redistributed the exams, and we proceeded to attempt to tackle factual and unreal conditionals, and the concept of the moral dilemma.

Example:

The students took some time to understand the moral dilemma, as they were confusing it with a standard dilemma/decision to make. I asked the class for an example of a moral dilemma, and Hawall said, “If it is raining, I take umbrella.”

Um, no. I mean, yes, you should probably take the umbrella, but that—oh never mind.

I tried to expand on the idea by saying, “Usually a moral dilemma is something that you wouldn’t want anyone to know about…” I then told them about the time I ordered the ski bag from the company online, and how, when the package arrived there were two ski bags inside. My
moral dilemma
was, do I:

1. Do the “right thing” and alert the company to the error (which would more than likely result in my having to go to the trouble of sending one bag back to them), or
   
2. Keep the bag and say nothing to the company.
   

I told my students I had just said “thank you” out loud to the empty room where I had opened the box and gave the extra bag to my sister, but I pointed out this was actually not the “right thing” to do.

By the end of class, the students were exhausted and still mostly confused. They complained, “Teacher, we think Unit 10 no on test.” I had to explain I couldn’t control what was on the test, they were already printed, and that yes, Unit 10 would be on the final exam. They all appeared semidistraught.

After I dismissed them, everyone gathered their things to leave when Rabar said, “Teacher, you need this?” and held up his copy of the Unit 10 exam. I gasped. “YES!” and then looked accusingly at everyone else, who had all surreptitiously tucked the exams away in their respective belongings. On their faces were varying looks of sheepishness and annoyance (directed at Rabar). I was shocked, appalled, dismayed, and confused. In the first place, Rabar was the one student who would undoubtedly fail the class (his exam scores never exceeded 60 percent) and was in the most need of sneaking the exam home. In the second place, this was the Ethics and Values unit! We had spent at least fifteen minutes discussing moral dilemmas, and then here we had a real-life moral dilemma.

I should have lied about keeping the ski bags.

Moral dilemmas were clearly the theme of the day. Katherine called me to go running in the park and intimated that she had excellent gossip. We had finally discovered a large family park across the road from English Village. From the street it didn’t look like much; however, once you made it beyond the gates and down one of the dusty paths, it opened into a lush, green, well-manicured extravaganza, which was the prime spot for many Friday weddings and general family merriment. Only the occasional Westerner used it for exercise, so we were frequently the subjects of gawks and stares and pointing from children.

Katherine’s gossip was good. Apparently Married Ashton had been home over Christmas break, with his “unhappy family” of beautiful Russian wife and one-year-old child. He suffered through the charade to keep up holiday appearances, but then rushed back to Erbil to be with his true love, the Spanish Gabriela. He had confided to Katherine that this time he was serious about Gabriela and was really going to ask his wife for a divorce. I was amazed. He had been complaining about his situation for such a long time, without actually making any changes or trying to do anything about it.

“Really?” I said. “Good for him!”

Katherine replied, “Just wait.” She said that when Ashton called his wife, presumably to have the divorce conversation, before he could say anything, she told him she was pregnant with their second child. The child that had been conceived over Christmas break.