I Have Iraq in My Shoe (40 page)

In spite of the deluxe new accommodations in Suli, things with the school were slowly unraveling, and morale was low. Jill had explained to our department that despite what Warren had told us (that we were wildly profitable, and making “millions” for the university), we were actually in fairly dire financial straits. Warren had lied about all the money that was coming in and left Jill with an enormous mess to clean up. An image of Jill’s baby-sitting days unfolded in my head. I saw Warren as a misbehaving seven-year-old, guiltily caught standing in the middle of a jumbled pile of crap, with Jill, hands on hips, standing over the pile, ruefully shaking her head. This was bigger than broken Legos or spilt Cheerios, though. Everyone began worrying about losing their jobs.

Even though things with the CED were bad, I still wanted to be in Suli. I explained this to Jill, who claimed she would do her best to bring me down there, depending on whether or not she could find another female to trade places with me. All of the female teachers in Suli knew how bad the Erbil living situation was, and none of them wanted any part of it. Hey! Who wants to live where they work, and be subjected to unfair rumor-spreading and constant privacy invasions? Anyone? Are you sure? No one? Bueller? I was stuck. I knew I was teetering on the edge of insanity when, after everyone left the villa at the end of the day, I would rush around, slamming and locking each door and yelling, “MINE!” with the click of each lock.

One sunny Saturday morning I woke up at 11:00 a.m. and thought, “Wow, it is late,” and then proceeded to lazily stay in bed, reading. At 11:15 the doorbell rang. I had developed a Pavlovian response to the unwelcome doorbell-ringing and door-knocking that occurred on the weekends, when I was supposed to have my perpetually diminishing me-time. My immediate response was to quietly say, “No. Fuck off,” to the empty room and then return to whatever it was I had been doing when the interruption occurred.

The doorbell rang again at noon, a double-ring this time, and again I responded without thinking, “No. Fuck off.” I then heard the door handle rattle. MOTHERFUCKER! Are they trying to get in? It was the bedraggled, unscrupulous Union soldiers, descending on Tara to pillage and plunder and steal Mrs. O’Hara’s rosewood sewing box. I silently cursed Jill for not bringing me down to Suli. No one in Suli ever had to deal with potential students or Union soldiers knocking on their doors in their deeeee-luxe apartment in the sky.

I was in my room, clad in nothing more than somewhat transparent, pink summer shortie pajamas. It was hot. Was it Steve? Or Dadyar? Both had keys to the villa. Although they would have at least tried to call first, wouldn’t they? My cell phone was on the dresser, silent, sans any indication of missed calls or text messages. I then heard chatter outside my window. I couldn’t discern whether it was English or something else over the whir of my air conditioner. I crept to the window and carefully peeled back one of the hanging vertical blinds to peek out at the shared deck between the villas. There, at one of the deck tables, sat a Kurdish man, woman, and ten-ish-year-old child, who had made themselves comfortable. There were papers on the table, and I momentarily wondered if they were here to take a placement test? But I would have been told about that beforehand—wouldn’t I? I looked around for Steve but couldn’t see anyone else. Someone was now aggressively knocking on my front door.
Dammit!
Whoever it was they were being fairly relentless, considering all the villa blinds were closed: kitchen, living room, classroom.

The large billboard out in front clearly stated, “If interested in English courses, call the number below.” It did not say, “If interested in English courses, please aggressively ring doorbells and knock on the villas, especially on the weekends.”

So, I continued to answer, “No. Fuck off,” to the knocking, and decided to abandon ship for the day. In the past, I would have had no place else to go. But now? Ha HA! Costa Coffee! I could walk there! I could escape the forced entrapment of “my” villa, while Kurds rang my doorbell incessantly. I didn’t care why they were there. I hadn’t been advised of any official school business happening today, and it was Saturday for crying out loud. I needed my weekend!

I quickly pulled on yoga pants and a billowing Maximall top, and tucked a few necessities into my purse: money, sunglasses, sunblock, and my little writing pad and pen. I crept down the stairs, past the hulking copy machine, carrying my flip-flops, so as to approach the door stealthily, like the Pawnee hunting Tatonka. The last knock had rapped roughly five minutes ago, so I deduced the coast was clear. I swiftly unlocked the door, whipped it open, and immediately closed it behind me and locked it again. No Kurds. The deck was on the opposite side of the house, so I could quickly stroll down the driveway before turning a sharp right into the street and away from the villa. I made it. During my escape I noticed three unfamiliar cars now parked in front of the villa. What was going on here today?

I continued slowly down the street, walking through the oppressive, ovenlike heat of midday, turned right, and walked the remaining three blocks to Costa Coffee, every step releasing a bit of the tension and anxiety that had built up with each ring of the doorbell, each aggressive knock on the door.

Ahhhh, Costa Coffee. I heart you. This was clean, untainted air-conditioning. Smoking was not allowed. The men had to go outside and stand under the overhang with their cigarettes. Traditional coffee shops in Iraq had the unwritten rule of being men only. They were starkly furnished and usually packed with cigarette-smoking men. This coffee shop was identical to other Costa Coffees, with the comfortable living room chairs and cherry wood tables, and the glass counter full of paninis and muffins. It was heaven. Heaven’s prices were fairly high, in that you’d drop $12 on a sandwich and froufy coffee drink, but it was absolutely worth it.

I took my BBQ chicken quesadilla and coffee mocha frescato and parked myself in one of the overstuffed, striped chairs, next to an Iraqi girl who was busily typing away on her pink Mac laptop. I had only been sitting and writing for a few minutes when the Iraqi girl stood up and leaned over my table. “Hello!” she said pleasantly. “Hello,” I answered, smiling. “Is there anything I can do for you?” she asked. I knew she didn’t work for Costa Coffee, so my resulting facial expression must have said “Hanh?” She explained herself, “You looked a little lost, and I just wanted to know if you needed anything.” Her name was Heba, and she was from Baghdad. I asked why she was in Erbil, and she happily replied, “I’m on vacation! Just for the weekend.” She was very cheery and friendly. I wanted her to have a better vacation option. She went on to tell me that she worked for such-and-such company (something I had never heard of and quickly forgot the name of) and asked what I did. I said I taught English for the university, and she seemed excited. Heba explained that she was interested in getting her MBA, so I wrote down the school’s website and my email address and said there would be a link to the MBA program on the site. She thanked me, then went back to her little pink Mac. There were Kurds sitting and having conversations, in English, and Westerners enjoying snacks, and best of all, no one was smoking. It felt familiar and safe.

It finally dawned on me that the only things that made me happy here were things that reminded me of home. I no longer wanted to read
The Kite Runner
, or
The Poet of Baghdad
, or
A Thousand Splendid Suns
. I had completely lost my objectivity and my political correctness. It took an observation from a total stranger, a woman from Baghdad, for me to acknowledge that I really was lost. I didn’t want to be in Iraq, or Kurdistan, or Erbil, or really even Suli. I wanted to be home, and home wasn’t here.

The very next week, when I went down to Suli to do my banking, Jill called me into her office and quietly informed me that I had to be laid off.

Ever since Warren left, and we were made aware that CED was losing money, being laid off had been a distinct possibility. We had all been living on pins and needles for a while, and the overwhelming sense of foreboding was something everyone tried to ignore. I was the first to go. The one with the highest salary, who was a “pain in the ass” of the chancellor and the provost, was an easy first choice, and my recent “rebellious” uncooperativeness was probably just the extra shove they had needed.

After being told I would have to be out of the Erbil villa within a week, I went into a bit of a tailspin. My Excel budget spreadsheet wasn’t ready for me to go, and the daunting task of making spur-of-the-moment travel plans from Iraq was not easy, but I did not make a dress out of living room curtains and go swanning into the administrative offices in order to manipulate or guilt them into keeping me on. Mostly because the living room curtains were cheap Venetian blinds. There was no begging, or attempted manipulative guilting, but there might have been some crying, some hyperventilating, some hand-slapped-to-the-forehead wailing coupled with despair.

There was maybe a half hour of the above before there was some clarity. I didn’t want to be there. That was the bottom line. Four hours after my conversation with Jill, I was sitting in Carey and Ellen’s
Elle Décor
living room, with at least six other Americans and Canadians, wearing shorts, playing Cranium, and drinking a strong vodka cocktail that Carey had lovingly poured for me. The vodka helped quell the vacillating emotions of relief and wistfulness.

In life, it is important to find where you fit in, where you feel comfortable, where you feel home. I was not home in The Iraq. While I never expected to stay longer than my original signed contract, I also hadn’t expected to so desperately need to be somewhere I was openly accepted and welcomed. I longed to be back in a place where bacon was consumed freely, and out in the open, and where I could drink a glass of wine without worrying that the waiters were judging me, or that I was sitting in the “wrong” section of the restaurant. I longed to be back in a place where the TV series
Dirty, Sexy, Money
was not censored down to
Dirty Money
, and where
Mad Men
and
Big Love
were not considered to be lifestyle recommendations. I longed to be back in a place where kissing scenes were aired in their entirety and where smiling in photographs wasn’t considered a “stigma.” I longed to be back in a place where I would only be considered a whore when I wore provocative clothing
and
asked to be paid for sex. There was a lot of longing. I didn’t care about the loss of salary; I didn’t need any more shoes. I needed to be
home
.

The university worked with the Qalawa Refugee Camp and would periodically take donated goods to the families in need. I wanted to donate a good portion of the clothing I had brought, including some of my completely impractical footwear. The camp was composed of roughly forty to fifty families of Iraqis who migrated to Kurdistan from Baghdad in 2007 and was located just outside of Suli. I wasn’t sure they would actually benefit from platform espadrille wedges or grommetted stilettos, so I spoke with Dashnye, a British-educated Kurdish woman at the university, who coordinated the donations. I explained, “I want to donate some shoes, but most of them are silly, impractical high heels. Would the refugee camp even want these?” Dashnye assured me that there were a number of young girls at the camp who would be thrilled with high heels. Just because people are displaced doesn’t mean they don’t want pretty footwear. Plus, variety is the spice of wardrobe. I donated nine pairs.

If nothing else, Miss Teen South Carolina 2007 would be pleased. I had helped The Iraq with their education system and had also helped with their fashion sense. Never judge a person until you have walked a mile in her shoes. Or, if you have more than enough of your own shoes, let the person walk a mile in the shoes you donated. That’s a lesser-known idiom, sure, but just as true.

One of my students had once said to me, “Teacher, I must know how you think about Kurdistan? What you think of the city, the people, the place?” It was sort of unfair for me to truthfully answer a question like that. I had seen some astoundingly spectacular things. According to the “Where I’ve Been” feature on Facebook, I had been to over 182 cities in 41 countries, now including Turkey, Greece, and The Rest of Europe. I could say I loved the mountains or that the city was…sprawling? Or that the place was exotic-ish? I could say I found the mosques beautiful, or the markets entertaining, but the physical aspect of Kurdistan was not what had most impressed me. What most impressed me was the people. Their sense of community, their resiliency, their collective sense of humor, and their capacity not to take anything too seriously. While they seemed frustratingly lazy or apathetic at times, the silver lining of that was an admirable carefree attitude that corresponded to a preferred coping strategy for tougher times. Everything will work out, inshallah.