I Have Iraq in My Shoe by Gretchen Berg Page A

pigsty. Warren’s words, not mine.
    We had been walking for an hour, in ninety-degree heat, when we finally reached an area that looked as if it might have restaurants. It was a busy street with basic buildings that included dusty storefronts for furniture stores, a produce market, and a couple of hotels. Adam had been hoping to get us to Bakery & More, a Lebanese restaurant with a bakery on the ground floor. He thought we were headed in the right direction, but we had been walking a long time and were both losing steam, and my stomach was starting to eat itself. We stopped in front of something called the Darya Hotel and decided to see if it had a restaurant.
    We entered the lobby, where there were several men sitting on leather couches, smoking shisha pipes. They all turned and stared as we approached the front desk.
    With my previous traveling and experience living in a foreign country, my pantomime skills were pretty good, and Adam and I were able to mime “menus” and “eating,” so the manager led us to the restaurant area. It was empty, which usually isn’t a good sign, but then the manager motioned for Adam to go into the kitchen to take a look. For once, I welcomed the role of lowly female and collapsed into a chair, just relieved not to be walking and sweating profusely anymore.
    Adam came back from the kitchen, shrugging, and said, “Yeah, looks good. Clean.” We had a delicious meal of (da-da-da-dum) chicken kebab, hummus, and fatoush. I was noticing a distinct lack of variety in the cuisine. But here, I could completely ignore variety, if the trade-off was Diet Coke.
Diet Coke!
I had been looking for it since I got here! I squealed as the waiter brought it to the table.
    The waiter at the Darya Hotel was a lively young man who told us he came to Erbil to avoid the unrest in Mosul. Mosul was the notoriously dangerous city two hours west of Erbil; it was discussed in one of those Internet news stories I had carefully ignored prior to coming to Iraq.
    This waiter was the first one who had asked me what I wanted before asking Adam. Over the past couple of weeks, I had been ignored in most interactions with locals (even with Man-About-Town Chalak), and I was the last to be acknowledged and served at restaurants. The waiters at Assos, in Suli, spoke to and waited on the men first. The manager at the Bayan Hotel spoke to me only after conversing with Warren and the male drivers. When we were getting settled in Erbil, the university’s drivers directed all inquiries and comments to Adam. It was no surprise that men were treated better here, but it was a little unsettling to experience it, repeatedly, firsthand.
    One day, I was thinking out loud that it was annoying that they
really
didn’t respect women here. I was certain that Warren had been thoroughly brainwashed when he countered, “Gretch, they
totally
respect women here. They’re treated like gold.” Gold is a commodity. “They are like prized
flowers
.” Flowers, also a commodity, just slightly less valuable than gold. “That’s why they have to keep their heads covered, to shield their beauty…” Blah, blah, blah. I couldn’t believe he actually bought that. I later heard him say, “Yeah, they [Muslim men] basically think all women are whores. It’s why the women can’t be left alone. The men think they’ll just screw anything that walks.” I’m sorry, what?
    My brain veered off on a tangent, and I considered the likelihood of Muslim women
really
wanting even to have intercourse with their husbands, much less “screw anything that walked.” Female genital mutilation was still practiced in many of the smaller towns and villages in this region (probably the ones we passed, made out of brown Play-Doh), and if I had experienced a horror like that, I would demand a chastity belt made out of granite, equipped with biometric fingerprint and retinal scan, that only my gynecologist could access, so that nothing could get close to that area. And