There is a trick to colour, the problem is I don’t know what it is.
Here are the basics, two themes, the black and the white. I am at an entry and an exit. The entry is the United Nations, the big blue and white, the blue smurfs, the Dark Continent and all that international jazz. The exit is my marriage, from the day of white dresses and black suits to an age of more or less greying photos.
It is, or it was, the day of my divorce. I have just been loaded onto a plane, US army green. We are leaving Baghdad and in the collection of hastily downloaded emails is her last statement. The definitive comment, right there in living colour. There will be no second act, no rebuttal, no other chance. We are over. It’s time to take off the rose-coloured glasses.
I had known this was coming when I left Austria, her country of green valleys and white-tipped peaks, cold blue skies. I had known it was over when the wide yellow desert of Iraq’s western provinces appeared, glimpsed from the gunmetal portals of the transport plane. For the whole month, as I lived in the haze of Baghdad, skirting red zones, basking in a false sense of safety, I had thought of our colour. We were so blonde, tall and pale but where my eyes were the concrete blue of an overcast day, hers flashed green, a bizarre kind of green. I saw those eyes again and again in the faces of agitated Kurds who stared down at their Iraqi ‘colleagues’ and us ‘pink ones’ in between. I saw that blonde again in the squat Bulgarians who patrolled closest to our dirty silver bunker. I saw her in Iraq and I knew she was gone. I knew I had faded.
The evacuation, thankfully, occurred with a swiftness I was not afforded in marriage. I was only a month in and had barely grown accustomed to the dirty brown sky and the construction grey of protective walls and I still noticed the stark whiteness of our armoured cars. I could still see a multitude of rabbits hopping with their large ears, in the desert camouflage pattern of, first, the American soldiers, then the Iraqi recruits, and then, most recently and most disturbingly, the host of red-skinned Peruvians or black-blue Ugandan ‘contractors’.
Still, in our marriage, I knew when the end was coming. Where once she had gone out in risqué red leather and gold laminated leggings, now it was all drab pink tracksuits and dirty mauve slippers. In that last month in Vienna, even I had changed. I, who used to relish rich chocolate browns, stylish sweaters and bomber jackets, cigar auburn like my hair. I used to pretend, that like her, I was a central European, too. My complexion suggested German and passersby would often speak to me in this language. But towards the end, as she had dimmed, so had I. My white collars became drab and slightly stained, yellowish. Everything I owned seemed to have a hole somewhere, a splash of red wine or a pollen-orange rash from an unfortunate brush with some spring blossom.
In Baghdad too, there were signs. The summer was approaching and against rules, I would follow staff after hours to nearby rooftops. What little breeze there was cooled the sweat glaze on our skin. As we lay there on carpets in the dusk, the blood red sunset and squid ink pall of night made me yearn, for the first time in years, for my Antipodean childhood. This was not my first desert summer, it wasn’t the first time I had lived without electric blue air conditioning. We would smoke arguileh and drink milky pleasures. It was on those rooftops, on those nights, when the sky was alight with fingers of fire that I saw the signs. The slow rise of the green flags, in response to the black banners with their bone-like scripts. I saw these flapping beasts coalesce and begin snaking through the neighbourhoods of Baghdad. They reminded me of childhood, of fairytales and descriptions of dragons. I thought, in another time, they wouldn’t be green and black, but vermillion.
That last day at the airport, a flight from Vienna to Frankfurt, Amman and, of course, to Baghdad’s International airport, everything was muted. It was raining and everything was drained. She had left, for Ireland ironically, that Emerald Isle, nearly a week before.
The green and black dragons were converging; they had found themselves in the labyrinth of Baghdad. On the last evening my rooftop dalliance was permitted, before men with tanned faces and stony eyes had finally forbidden my wanderings, I had seen them merge. Each coloured flag appeared to me as a wondrous scale and for just a moment, I could see the chimera form, its emergence a burst of glowing green starlets and white-hot stars of light. It was beautiful. Then I realised, stupidly, I was looking at tracer fire and grenade flares, or worse, and all the while I stood there entranced by the ‘beauty’. I am such a stupid white-y.
My flight was delayed in Amman. I tried to sleep on the airport seats. I imagined that they were that brown to hide the stains. A man with tobacco-stained teeth endeavoured to keep me company. He refused to believe I couldn’t speak Arabic and I refused to disappoint him, even when the truth was evident to us both.
Our landing in Amman was far more pleasant and calm then our hurried Baghdad takeoff. None of the sound and the fury here, just plain and simple bureaucracy. The rainbow of multinational staff shuffled towards Immigration. I had read her email an hour earlier, perhaps more, and had promptly shut my laptop. No need to punish it for my mistakes. I stopped at the yellow line. ‘Blue passport, please’.
