Still, I was not up for returning home, so I moseyed on down the street, studying the murals on the bomb wall, crossed the street and climbed up the shallow stairs of the small fountain park next to the Citadel. At the top was a giant mosaic-mural which I had never taken a close look at. I plopped down on the edge of a fountain and stared at it and the ground for the next hour or so, with water shooting up behind my back and on either side. I'm not much of an interpreter of art, but this one was clear and artless in its message: looking from left to right, I saw turbaned men with shields and weapons- warrior men, a couple speared in the heart and dying in the creek in the foreground of the mural, and one on horseback riding to the right. As my gaze swept further to the right, I saw more men on horseback riding in the opposite direction, toward the warriors on the left. Sweeping even further to the right, the path of warriors on horseback curved upward, growing smaller and less detailed to convey distance, and led to an image at the top right-hand corner of a citadel- the very citadel that sat perched on top of the hill next to the mural/fountain park! So (according to the mural) sometime in history, a battle had been fought on these very grounds, and one band of warriors had stemmed from the Citadel of Erbil. The riders had surged from the fortress walls and rumbled with their horses and bows and arrows down the steep hill to meet their enemies, and these Citadel-dwellers were the victors, it appeared- or at least they had a lot more man-power, an intimidating factor during wartime, unless you've got Thomas Paine to boost up morale with some pretty words.
At the foot of the mural on the side of the victors was a patch of grass, with flowers and shrubs and a very low fence around it. There were two young guys laying in this quartered lawn just a few feet away from me that made me wonder once again about the nature of intimacy- how humans seemed to need it, and it did not really matter from which sex they got it from. If society banned a person from intimacy with one sex, he would naturally turn to the other to get it. These two men were lying intimately close to each other on their sides on the slightly declined lawn, propped on their elbows and facing each other like lovers do. They were in that position when I came, and they were in that position when I left an hour later, numb-fingered and hungry. With the help of the cab driver, I discovered a restaurant located near the big mosque, called Abu Shahab, that served cheap, yummy Kurdish food. Afterward I went home because I really had to go pee, but didn't want to use their hole-in-the-ground toilets. That was the only reason I finally went home, really!
The next day, I had lunch at little Doe's house (her real name means “doe”, a deer, a female deer; I told her this, and now she whispers in my ear every day, “my name is in the doe!”) in English Village- a beautifully furnished house (the father works in the interior design business) with soft carpets, bright, cheery colors, beautiful sheer curtains and a wonderful family inside. After lunch they took me to Shaqlawa- a remote village about an hour away in the mountains past our school in Khanzad. In Shaqlawa, we wandered through the main road of the bazaar and they bought me tons of sweets at the sweetshop- dried, candied fruits, glutinous Korean rice cake-like desserts filled with pistachios, sesame sticks, date-ropes stuffed with walnuts, and other Turkish Delights-type sweets. As we walked through the bazaar, the father told me about how in 1996 (?), he walked barefoot for hundreds of miles to Iran in order to escape Saddam's death wish for all Kurds. I was just beginning high school then. Jesus, the things that go on in the world while you're growing up, sitting in class, laughing with friends, worrying over papers and exams.
Doe's mother is quiet and serious, which I like. She is pregnant and Doe has already named the child growing inside her, Nishan. Doe, though, takes after her father in form and function- she's quite the chatterbox, animated, wildly imaginative, with the same baby cheeks and narrow, twinkly eyes. That day, she was dressed in an adorable pale pink skirt and pink boots over her white stockings, her long semi-curly dark hair tied up in pigtails which bounced up and down as she trotted shyly with her head down as we headed to her father's car from my room at school. At her house, she took me excitedly to the bathroom where she lifted the toilet seat and showed me the bleached, blue toilet water, her eyes shining. “Why is it blue?” I asked her. “Because Mommy put medicine in it. It was not clean.” Hehe- medicine. Perhaps her mother had more of a hand in Doe's crazy imagination than I thought. During the very Kurdish lunch (dolma, Middle Eastern soups and salads), she let out a tiny burp, which made her mother and I to laugh in amusement as the little girl grinned slyly. “Say 'excuse me' after you burp,” I taught her. “What is 'excuse me'? Why do we say that?” Good questions.
In her room, as we were getting ready to go to Shaqlawa, I helped her put on her poofy red coat, which she called her “magic coat”, just like I call mine “Miss Angie's Magic Coat” because the kids pull out balloons and other prizes from its pockets. Visiting Doe, I realized how much of everything I said or did in class was brought into the kids' homes. Teaching was like stamping a portion of my self into 50 other little selves. They were like carriers of my soul- of the stuff of my mind. Today, for instance, I was studying a picture that one of my KG's- the midget- had drawn. He'd drawn a happy face and angry face list, divided by a line. On the happy face list, he'd written his name 5 times, with 4 or 5 stars next to each name, and on the angry face list, he had written (or tried to write) “Aland”. Around this chart he'd drawn a sun, as most kids do, some random scribbles which I could not make out, and a train of numbers 1-9 followed by the letter f. These were the contents of the little midget's head, the majority of which originated from my classroom. Gee, and from these childish crayon scribbles, I could surmise that what the little dude thought about day in and day out was my stupid little happy face/sad face list*. Well, I call it stupid, but without it, I confess, I would be powerless; the kids would run over me like a buffalo stampede. Ever thought about what most centrally occupies your own mind, day in and day out? Think it's something more important than a silly happy/sad face list? Thinking about thinking...thinking about thinking about thinking...makes my brain hurt.
Anyway, on the way back from Shaqlawa, we ran into some of Doe's family's friends, and they followed us back to Doe's house, where we had dinner and played a Kurdish card game until it was time to head home. I sat in the back of their jeep with Doe's head in my lap. For a while, as the jeep drove on down the road to Khanzad, she played at sleeping, but eventually she really did fall asleep, and I stroked her dark hair from her smoothe white forehead to soothe her dreams. She was a luckier girl than most in Kurdistan for many reasons. For one, Saddam was dead. She need not walk barefoot hundreds of miles to escape chemical attacks and other forms of ethnic cleansing. For another- “What do you hope she will do when she grows up? Where do you hope she will go?” I had asked her father during lunch. He had replied, “Whatever she wants. She is free.” Despite the rapid changes occurring in Erbil every day, women here are still living under the old rules. They are still powerless, forced to be submissive and to stay home after hours, and always under the watchful, judgmental stare of men.
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