Weekend Escape: Part I

Febrary 13, 2009

“It says here that you “brushed her shoulder” as you walked past her.”

“I did what?”

“You gave her an attitude and brushed her sh-”

“She wrote you an email about how I brushed her shoulder??”

This is about the time I cracked. Almost. Before I re-enacted the scene from 2nd grade when I suddenly turned my head to the left and projectile vomited across the aisle, right onto the kid's desk next to me, I excused myself from the principal's office, half-blindly made my way out the admin building and, despite the fact that school was still in session, I found myself marching past the security gate, down the hill, and right off the school grounds. I was seething. So tired of the bullshit that goes on around here with my “superiors” who so love to go on their little power trips. So tired of the culture of spying and professional tattle-taling that the school has developed through the sickest managerial style I've ever encountered. I crossed the street to the gas station side and hailed a cab. Inside there was a man in shotgun and two men in the back, and normally I would think twice about getting in a cab filled with local Kurdish men, but I was not feeling the slightest bit normal at the time. I did not even tell the driver where I wanted to go because I didn't know. I just wanted to get away from this damn school and their petty games. 

It was a quiet ride. I stared out the window, my mind reeling. How strange that things could seem to be going so well for so long, and then one event makes the entire simulation of well-being come crashing down. This term was going especially well. I was getting the hang of this teaching gig, and my students were doing well for the most part. But now, sitting in the car, fuming, I could only think how tired I was of playing their petty little games. I could only think of all the horrible events that had occurred this term that seemed to all come together and weigh so heavily on my angry, reeling mind. One of my KG's mother had burned herself alive over Christmas. He never came back. One of my other KG's older brother- who'd worked briefly for the school and had just gotten married to the love of his life for 9 years- had shot himself in the head and was now in the hospital, blind and paralyzed from the waist down. The poor kid brother has been absent for the past two days. One of the teachers has effectively gotten fired because she gave the school an undesirable image. Forget that her teaching had been improving drastically, and that she's had no further incidents since that one last December. Other incidents that revealed ineptitude, lack of respect, and the cold, careless nature of business- for that was how this school was run- like a business. I was suddenly so tired of playing in their bullshit, being part of their bullshit, being a victim of the little power trips that these self-important people love to go on, watching my fellow teachers and helpers take their abuse. I won't be a party to their games any longer. I won't answer to anyone who does not deserve my response, and they will have to simply trust that I'm doing my job correctly. I will have has little to do with this school as possible beyond teaching my adorable, happy, oblivious kids.

These are all decisions I came to in the past two days of trying to resolve my sudden hatred of the school with the binding nature of contracts, loans, and teacher-student relationships. In the taxi though, nothing was gelling in my head, and it was simply mired in angry feelings and thoughts. I got off randomly at Sami Abdulrahman Park and wandered around its curved paths. This was my first time at this huge park. It was no beauty, but trees and other flora being a rarity in Kurdistan, I was struck by the tranquility of leaves hanging over my head as I walked beneath the branches, and refreshed by the sight of open grassy fields, despite how artificial they appeared. I passed by a plot of cement that was apparently intended to be a rollerskate park because there was a crowd of teenage boys there in their rollerblades rolling about, standing around in circles, and sitting on the high cement ledges that surround the plot of smooth, gray surface. I passed by a swing set where a grown man with down-syndrome swung with one hand holding onto the seat between his legs, the other on one of the chains, making a continuous Krusty-the-Klown noise. Having recently read up on anthropology, I couldn't help thinking how he seemed more ape than human in behavior, and wondering about neural circuits and where his had gone wrong. 

I passed by “restaurants” and a “lake”, and a group of college-age students. We took pictures with each other, and left the park together. I got on the bus with them, and laughed as four of them in the back started clapping and whooping the way Kurds do (Xena warrior princess style) at weddings and parties. We got off at the adap (university) and they showed me around their campus- worn-down, non-descript square, white buildings, a lecture hall with 140 seats and no stadium seating, and a couple whiteboards up front, an outdoor café where students sat at red plastic tables eating strange Kurdish snacks (huge boiled beans and square, dark brown pieces of something with the consistency of turnip, slightly sweetened), and an indoor cafeteria where we had tea and nescafe. Being college students, they spoke English okay. It was quite nice to meet Kurds in their twenties, unmarried, and childless- Kurds like me in other words- who could speak decent English.

Eventually, I left the group of college students and took a taxi to the bazaar near the citadel. Night had fallen by now. I wandered aimlessly through the bazaar streets and bought some da-hay-nee- that sweet, starchy dessert I first tasted at Lenga bazaar. I came out of the bazaar from its right-most side, facing the citadel, and discovered a café at the citadel's base that I had never seen before. It was closing down for the night, so I continued on along the citadel's base and discovered an unofficial stairway entrance a few steps from the cafe. I took a few tentative steps and perceiving that it was indeed unguarded, climbed all the way up to the top of the hill. At the plateaued top where the giant statue of the literary figure sat with his giant open book, a security guard stood chatting with a women with a British accent. He was apparently her last customer and the citadel was officially closed for the night. In fact, it should have closed a whole hour ago at 5 pm, but “official” is really a Western concept, yet to be fully imposed onto and grasped by the Kurds, thank god. The guard, who spoke surprisingly decent English, offered to give me a tour. I was wary because it was dark and he was a man, but I was also feeling reckless so I said “Ok, why not” and followed him through the archway and into the old, old fortress-city. 

He showed me along Citadel street, and we passed by a lone gun-toting member of the peshmerga heading in the opposite direction, out of the citadel. We turned and followed the path leading to the textile museum and antique shop. The textile museum was closing for the night; the antique shop had burned down in a bad fire last November. Shadows of its charred remains littered the dusty ground outside the shop. I recognized a baby's crib that I'd seen before on my first citadel trip that had somehow escaped the deadly flames. We stepped around these shadowy remains and he pointed out the modern German-style house and the modern Czechoslovakian one next to it- both finished products of the renovations that the citadel was undergoing as a UNESCO World Heritage site. I was confused as to why UNESCO would raze down the slums and replace them with German and Czechoslovakian houses, which are not in the least Kurdish, or Median, or Akkadian, or...I followed him up the narrow staircase of the Czech house, steep and slightly spiraling. Stumbling in the dark, I climbed up and up until suddenly I stepped out onto a flat open rooftop. Wow. How did he know I loved rooftops? To the northwest, I saw the Erbil skyline, and to the east, looking downward, I saw the shadowy forms of slum roofs extending like a playground before me. 

Rooftop views like this always make me think of the chimney-sweepers scene in Mary Poppins. I think that's when the idea of rooftops as another firmament- as another world besides land, the deep sea and deep space- first took hold. I was enamoured by the smoky blackness arising from chimneys and polluting the skies, by the soot-faced chimney-sweepers bounding and balancing on ledges, and by that smoke-staircase created with a push of Julie Andrews' umbrella, and the fireworks and the music. Then in summer 2006, I spent half my summer nights watching the Philadelphia skyline on the rooftop of Pi Kapp, sometimes alone, sometimes with a housemate, with or without my ipod, with or without my camera. And now here I was in 2009, standing on a rooftop within an 8000-year-old fortress in Iraq, admiring the view of shabby slum roofs extending lopsidedly before my gaze, enveloped in darkness so that they were but shadows of shabby rooftops. Impossibly romantic. I wondered what this view would look like in the brightness of day. I was glad, after all, that I'd followed this stranger into the depths of this ancient city within a city. 

Eventually we climbed back down, and instead of leaving right away, he showed me the house next door- the Mufti House. Hey I have a kid in my 2nd grade class who belongs to the Mufti tribe! This miniature palace probably belonged to his great-great-great-...-great grandfather. We entered the courtyard, crossed it, and as we passed under the arched entrance, the security guard (Yasir was his name) pointed out the year in Arabic numbers engraved over the archway: 1231. That was pretty old (although quite young when compared to the rest of the citadel!). Later, a friend suggested that maybe 1231 was the house address, not the year it was built. Whatevs- at any rate, it's old. Yasir led me to the wrought-iron balcony overlooking the shabby old roofs adjacent to the bazaar outside the citadel. He said the city had plans to raze down all those shops and homes and build a park in its place. So many changes to come in the near future of Erbil! We talked on the balcony for a bit, and eventually I stumbled my way out of the Citadel and onto the streets below.