Noor wanted to go first but she’d forgotten the command. I asked the class what she could say and they told her. She shook her finger at Ramesh.
Fill the pot with water, she said.
He picked up the pot, placed it under the tap, and turned on the water.
Noor and Zana came to my office after class. Zana did all the talking, even though she was the younger one.
My sister want divorce, she said. You can help us?
I was shocked. I’d done their intakes only a few months before. They’d told me they were from Jordan and I hadn’t questioned it; young women from Baghdad often said this. What they didn’t say, but explained to me now, was that their uncle had been murdered for working as a phlebotomist for the Americans inside the Green Zone, and that their father had been injured in a car-bomb blast outside a mosque. That’s when the family fled to Amman, draining their savings on a one-room apartment on the outskirts of the city, Noor and Zana keeping themselves busy by studying for A levels they would never take.
It was during this time that Noor began emailing with Ahmed, the son of her father’s former business associate. Ahmed was an enterprising young man who’d owned an internet café in Baghdad. He and his family had been resettled to the United States.
They corresponded for a year and then Ahmed asked her father for her hand in marriage. He had to do it over the phone, in defiance of Iraqi custom, but given the circumstances—there were no longer any paternal cousins who were eligible candidates—her father gave his consent.
Two years later their family was resettled to the United States, and when they arrived Noor couldn’t wait to see Ahmed. They got married in a mosque and had their reception at the Lions Club. She went to live with his family, and that’s when the trouble began.
He angry all time, Zana said. He yell. His mother yell. Noor want get apartment, but he say no.
Have you talked to your caseworker?
She no help. She say my sister stay with him.
Noor said something to Zana in Arabic, but Zana didn’t translate.
I know a good lawyer, I said.
When I came in the next day Sabeen was waiting for me in the hallway outside the classroom.
My husband he want go back Iraq, she said.
But it’s so dangerous, I said.
I no go. My children love the life here. Anyway, he wait for green card.
She turned away, looking down the hall in the direction of the water cooler, and for a moment I felt the panic I’d felt when I first moved the program here. It was the perfect space for us: a former parochial school inside a Neo-Gothic church close to downtown, with no iconography in the public spaces, except for one red cross around the corner from the cooler, outside the transept of the main sanctuary. That cross had me so worried: I was afraid they wouldn’t want to come into the building if they saw it. But it turned out they didn’t care.
I unlocked the classroom door and we went inside. Sabeen took a piece of paper out of her pocket and unfolded it.
I bring for you, she said.
She showed me a picture of a tool, but I had no idea what it was. Since we were learning words for kitchen utensils, I assumed it was a kitchen utensil:
She asked me what it was called and I told her I didn’t know. She explained to me in Arabic, even though she knew I didn’t speak Arabic.
ضع العجين في الآلة. اختر التصميم. اضغط على المكبس. ضع ملفات تعريف الارتباط على ورقة الخبز.
When everyone arrived I gave them each a sheet of notebook paper. I performed the actions silently and they told me the command. I wrote the command on the board and they copied it on their paper. When we were finished I had them read each command off the board before I erased it.
Sabeen stayed after class. She wanted to talk some more.
You are Jew, she said. Yes?
I nodded.
Iraq people no believe, she said.
I was the first Jew many of them had ever known. They didn’t realize there was a difference between a Jew and an Israeli.
We are same, she said.
I still remembered the first day she came to class. She wasn’t covered, which was striking enough, but then she had the nerve to talk about it, telling everyone how she’d been a journalist in Baghdad, how when she rode her moped to her bureau office to file a story she had to wear a hijab or she could get killed, but that she took it off as soon as she got inside. She was so glad she didn’t have to worry about this now. When women from Iraq asked her why she didn’t cover, when they said she should be ashamed of herself, she told them she didn’t care, because she knew God was in her heart.
Someday I take you Baghdad, she said. When safe.
I would love to do that, I said.
We go Amarah. I born this city, you know.
Usually when a student said something like this I took it as an expression of gratitude; I was teaching them English and they wanted to reciprocate in some way. But this felt different. I thought Sabeen might be serious.
For a moment I imagined us walking along the banks of the Tigris. She pointed to the sky and said ﺳﻤﺎء. She pointed to a tree and said ﺷﺠﺮة. She pointed to the water and said ﻣﺎء. It never occurred to me that she could be indicating anything different, that what I took to be sky could instead be the word for the color blue, or that what I took to be tree could be the word for leaf, or that what I took to be water could be the word for river.
I was only able to understand what she was pointing at because I had a language—English—that I spoke and thought in, and because I’d engaged in this kind of activity before. Without this I wouldn’t have had a clue.
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