SOMETIMES I THINK I remember the pomegranate. Its tannic sweetness, the sticky juice running down my chin. But to this day there is an instant Polaroid of the moment taped to our refrigerator in Bay Ridge and again I cannot be certain whether if there were no photograph there would be no memory.
In both, Rania is wearing a blue hijab. The way she’s holding me, the way the fabric flows down over her shoulders and around my diaper and into her blouse, make it look like we are posing for a Maestà. How many times does a boy open the refrigerator of his youth? Six thousand times? Nine thousand? Whatever the number, it was plenty to make an indelible impression. Every glass of milk, every swig of juice, every leftover slice of maqluba . . . And of course my brother would have seen it every day for a good many formative years as well.
The following December, my parents returned to Baghdad on their own. I stayed in Bay Ridge, under the pretense that I did not want to miss Junior Varsity Swimming tryouts, and was supervised by the parents of a classmate whose bedroom contained a lumpy trundle bed and a life-sized poster of Paulina Porizkova. I did not try out for the swim team and when my parents returned at the end of January they did not ask me how it had gone. They were preoccupied with the news that my brother wanted to marry Rania.
He had also mentioned wanting to move to Najaf in order to study at an Islamic seminary there. When my father told me that, my mother covered her face with her hands.
That Rania was our first cousin was not inherently the problem. Nor was the problem the heightened risk of offspring with a recessive gene disorder—although my parents had long made clear their opinion that clan fidelity is not worth burdening a child with something that might be avoided with a little genetic testing. The problem was that marrying Rania clearly indicated a broader intention to resettle in Iraq, whose values my brother had claimed to prefer over the rather less decorous ones on display in America. And yet, to be valid in Sami’s own mind—to accord with the more decorous values he claimed to prefer—the engagement required our parents’ blessing. Rania’s parents had already given theirs; they had even waived a dowry. But my mother and father were not so ready to sanction Sami’s rejection of the life they had strenuously uprooted themselves to grant us. What they decided was that their blessing would be contingent on Sami and Rania marrying in New York and Sami earning his graduate degree from an American university. He could study religion instead of medicine if he wanted. He could return to Iraq afterward if he wanted. But if he wanted to marry Rania with full parental endorsement, these were the conditions, and my brother agreed.
We expected him to arrive in New York with Rania and our grandmother the following July. At the airport, however, we found my father’s mother waiting outside the Arrivals gate alone. She had flown with them as far as Amman, where they were to catch a connecting flight to Cairo, but the Jordanian authorities had stopped Sami and Rania on the basis that they did not believe they were going to America in order to be married. What is your real reason for traveling to America? To get married, said Sami. That is a lie! said the authorities. You would not be traveling together if you were not already married. No, Sami insisted. Really. We are not yet married; we are going to be married in the States, where my parents live and are expecting us. Then you must be a whore, one of the officers said to Rania. A slut. How else do you explain this traveling with a man who is not your husband?
At this, Rania had fainted, which the officers gladly took as confirmation of their suspicions.
As a result Sami and Rania returned to Iraq while our grandmother flew alone on to Cairo, London, and New York. She was meant to visit us for seven weeks, my grandfather having stayed behind in order to recuperate from a hip operation. But then Iraq invaded Kuwait and seven weeks became seven months. My grandmother was not the only one displaced: I had moved into Sami’s bedroom and given her mine, owing to my mother’s concern that Sami’s room was too drafty, by which I think she meant contains a piano, which my grandmother had been raised to regard as a frivolous invention, although apparently not so frivolous as to be resisted when she thought no one else was home.
From time to time, Zaid would call to tell us that everyone was fine. Jiddo’s hip was getting better. Alia was taking care of the fruit trees. There was no mention of air-raid sirens, or cruise missiles whistling across the sky, for life in a panopticon had long conditioned Iraqis to believe that the walls have ears and the windows have eyes and you never know when the watchmen are off duty so you assume they are always on. Less convincingly, the panopticon was also blamed for my brother’s long silences. Sami had never been a letter writer, so I had no right to expect in-kind replies to the loquacious novellas I typed up and mailed off to him roughly once a month. However my brother did not even acknowledge those letters, not in his breezy Greetings from Baghdad! postcards and not when he called, which I seem to remember him doing only twice. The first time was on New Year’s Eve, when our parents would have been back in Iraq themselves had there not been a war on. Ostensibly, the call was to wish us a Happy 1991, inshallah, but then Sami went on to say that he and Rania were not going to be married, after all. He did not sound disappointed. Instead, he sounded perfectly sanguine: sanguine and maybe even a little relieved. Rania was going to study art history in Paris and he too had reconsidered his plans to move to Najaf and was looking into applying to Baghdad Medical School instead. What’s wrong with the medical schools in America? I asked when it was my turn on the phone. Nothing, Sami said blithely. What’s wrong with the medical schools in Iraq?
The second call came about three months later, by which time America had begun to withdraw its troops and my grandmother was packing up to go home. This time, Sami spoke only to our father, who, after hanging up, immediately took his jacket off the coatrack and went out for a walk. When he got home he went into my bedroom, where my grandmother’s suitcase was three-quarters full and her boarding passes to London, Cairo, and Amman were propped up against my fishbowl of dice. He sat her down on my bed and took her hands in his. Then he told her that Ahmed, her husband of fifty-seven years, had had an embolism that morning, and died.