Between Two Worlds

by Zainab Salbi

  When did it all start? I suspect the answer to that question is this: the moment a mother is afraid to answer a young child’s question honestly. By the time I left for America at age twenty, so many silences and half-answered questions had accumulated between Mama and me that I blamed her for certain ugly turns my life had taken. Only when she was dying, and I had learned how to listen to women who had survived other despots, did she tell me secrets she had kept from me for most of my life. I still cry when I think how young she was, just fifty-two. She was unable to speak, and the only means she had of communicating was by writing. I asked her then about what her life was like during the two decades she and my father lived under his thumb and she wrote her thoughts to me in a drugstore notebook. Writing was very difficult for her, and her observations were often short and dispassionate. I include some entries here to give a sense of how much she spared her children. I keep her notebook in a white carry-on bag I used to sit on in airports. I open it rarely because it is the only thing I have that brings back the smell of her.

  Iraqis have a saying about Saddam Hussein. They say he wooed us in the 1970s, we endured the 1980s, and we paid the price in the 1990s and beyond. I have always thought of myself as the lucky one, and one of the many reasons is that I grew up in modern Iraq’s most promising decade. While the West struggled with the oil embargo of the early 1970s, petrodollars poured into our nationalized oil monopoly. The Iraqi dinar soared, electricity lit up mud villages, modern schools and hospitals mushroomed, Japanese cars sped across new highways, and whole office buildings rose up while we were away on summer vacation. Iraqi students went abroad then on government scholarships and Saddam’s socialist-based Baath Party instigated a massive compulsory campaign to combat illiteracy (and spread his ideology) that taught so many people to read so fast that Iraq became a model for the developing world and won a UNESCO prize. I try not to dwell on how Iraqi faith was squandered or how my parents’ generation deluded itself into assuming it came with no price tag.

  My parents were married on the cusp of all this progress in 1968, shortly after my mother graduated from college and my father graduated from a pilot’s academy after studying in Scotland. My favorite picture of the two together is a black-and-white snapshot taken at their engagement party that shows them standing against a garden trellis with white wrought iron furniture in the foreground, my father trim and debonair in a suit and my mother a dark-haired beauty wearing Piccadilly makeup and a 60s miniskirt. An English term springs to mind for which I can think of no adequate Arabic equivalent, and it almost breaks my heart when I think of it. They were happy-go-lucky.

  I was born the year after they were married, the same month my father was promoted to captain by Iraqi Airways. New subdivisions were being laid out in Baghdad at the time, with names like the Professors Neighborhood and the Engineers Neighborhood (as well as neighborhoods with smaller lots for blue-collar workers) and government incentives were offered to people in those fields to move there. My parents took advantage of his promotion to build a home in the Airlines Neighborhood and were proud that they were able to do so without help from their families. Because my birth coincided with my father’s promotion, my parents referred to me as “the child who brought blessings,” baraka, to our family, and that small superstition would follow me as I grew. Whenever there was a new moon, Mama would ask me to smile at her, saying my smile would bless the upcoming month as my birth had blessed their first year. Five years later, they would have a son, Haider, and five years after that another, Hassan. With each birth, my father would plant a palm tree in our backyard, and they would name the palm tree after the child. My father was the gardener in our family. Our backyard was filled with his gardenias and narange, limes and sweet lemon—native citruses I often crave and rarely find outside Baghdad.

  Mama started a scrapbook for me when I was a baby, a white quilted volume I still have, with a glittery stork and a lavender puppy on the cover. Inside are pictures of our family, my childhood birthday parties, and casual snapshots of friends like the Christian neighbor who used to ask my mother for advice on her daughter’s Muslim boyfriends—all defined for whatever reasons by their inclusion in this album as relevant to my birth. I noticed after she died that there is not one picture of Amo in this book, though many were taken, and I wonder if she took them out or never included them in the first place. She was always selective in her choice of memories to preserve for me.

  I sometimes forget how close my father and I were then and how easily he made me laugh. In one photo of us together we are modeling twin dishdashas, long cotton tunics that are worn by both sexes. How many fathers have matching outfits made for them and their two-year-old daughters? I called him Baba, the word for “Daddy” in Arabic, but his name is Basil. Most of his pictures show him on vacation, mugging for the camera with a child’s plastic swim tube around his waist at a tropical beach, perched atop a statue in Thailand, chatting like an old friend with the statue of a bearded miner at Knott’s Berry Farm. To cool off on scorching late summer afternoons we used to go swimming at the Hunting Club or go with my cousins on my uncle’s boat to Pig’s Island, a large sandbar in the Tigris that must have been named for wild boar. My father had spent time there as a boy and our outings seemed to bring out the little boy in him. Some of my fondest memories are of calm summer nights in that place filled with the peaceful sound of the Muezzin calling evening prayers, and laughter; my mother’s strong and engaging, my father’s mischievous as he dropped ice down my mother’s bathing suit, and the normal shouts of a gaggle of children. After sunset, the lights from the riverside cafes on the Corniche would come on and reflect in lazy lines of blue, green, white, and red on the river. The colors would sparkle if the breeze picked up and I imagined fairies were dipping their wings into the water.

  I was loved, educated, and spoiled. Thanks to airline perquisites and the fact that my parents were descended from the same line of prosperous merchants, we traveled the globe—Brazil, Greece, Japan, and a dozen other countries. Culturally I was probably as much Western as Middle Eastern. Harrod’s was purportedly the source of my first solid food when I was a baby. I knew the theme song to Happy Days and informed my father that Wonder Woman could beat the Six-Million-Dollar Man because, well, she was a woman. When my father returned to Baghdad from flying passengers to foreign capitals, he brought me back the latest toys, clothes from foreign boutiques, chocolate you could never get in Iraq, and Big Macs he kept fresh in the galley refrigerator. Because he was away from home so much, he came to take on, in my mind, qualities of the mythic Santa Claus, another romantic figure in a uniform who flew through the skies bearing gifts.

  But it was Mama and her friends who showed me what life meant and how it should be lived. There was a network of women in Baghdad who, in the Iraqi tradition of respect for all elders, I grew up calling aunts or khala. There were many dozens of them over the years, friends and extended relatives, mothers of my friends, artists and teachers, wives of other pilots, women from the Hunting Club and overlapping social circles. While post-World War II socioeconomic forces pressured American women to retreat into their homes, inverse pressures created by Iraq’s socialist industrial models gave my mother’s generation the opportunity to leave them, breaking molds that were centuries old. Rooted in ritual Islam, my mother and most of her friends were nonetheless culturally secular. Photographs I have of these women, hands encircling each others’ waists, remind me how invincible they seemed, allies out to define womanhood, stylish and independent, who spoke two or three languages and saw no reason they couldn’t have it all: advanced degrees, fulfilling jobs, children, travel, a good time, and husbands who loved them.

  No law spelled it out but Saddam’s Baath Party discouraged women from wearing the traditional abaya, the long black robe worn by my grandmother and more traditional women in rural areas. Many of my “aunts” pushed the envelope and wore miniskirts. My mother and her friends preferred London to Paris and either to the new Bagh
dad boutiques that were stocked with the identical red-haired, industrial-strength Russian mannequins that seemed designed to inspire the “glory of Iraqi womanhood.” Amo loved that phrase. Iraqi women were all the more glorious, of course, because they continued to run their households while they manned his factories and ministries, and organized political meetings.

  Our home was the site of frequent potluck dinners, where fifteen or twenty women would gather at any given time, filling the air with laughter and chatter, steaming casseroles, and foreign perfume. Ripping tiny cellophane strips off their packs of Kents or Virginia Slims, they would light up and a blue-gray haze, which seemed romantic to me then, would hover just below the ceiling. I wandered among them, listening to their laughter and stories, knowing I was welcome unless they adjourned to our aromatic garden, where they gathered in a tight circle and passed on in whispers whatever new gossip or secrets seemed to bind them. Irreverent, spontaneous, sometimes a little profane, Mama was inevitably the one to break things up so the dancing could begin if the talking went on too long. “Life is like a cucumber,” she might say. “One day it’s in your hand, the next day it’s in your ass.” Everyone would laugh and the tension would ease. Mama always laughed louder than what was considered polite for women in Iraqi society. Her laughter was like a geyser that started deep down and fairly erupted.

  In Iraq, as in much of the Arab world, men and women socialize separately. Women dance together throughout their lives, a joy most Western women miss out on. One of the most enchanting images in all my memory, the one that symbolizes for me carefree moments now lost, is of my mother handing out dozens of exuberantly colored scarves to her friends. Then, with Arab music turned all the way up on the stereo, these professional women would belly dance in their ridiculously heavy platform shoes and Vogue outfits, pull bright strips of chiffon against their hips and shoulders, and ululate at the top of their lungs. Aunt Samer, my mother’s tall and graceful older sister, moved her hips in slow classic patterns of seduction. Mama was the most raucous and fun to watch. Her body shimmied faster than a tambourine in tight little waves no one else could match, her long dark hair shining as it whipped around her head like a halo playing catch-up.

  My father was a fabulous dancer as well, and particularly adept at bop and rock. Popular and outgoing, he and Mama were famous for hosting “couple parties” that were considered Bohemian in conservative social circles. Observant Muslims refuse alcohol, as it is forbidden by the Quran. At our house, drinks were passed to men and women who mingled easily over the sounds of Western and Arabic music and plates of fresh pistachios, almonds, and pomegranate seeds. Baghdad’s famous masgoof fish from the Tigris would cook slowly on tall sticks over open fires and the carved rosewood table we brought back from Thailand would fill up with great quantities of rice, lima beans and dill, lamb stuffed with almonds, and fruits and chestnuts. Watching these parties from our roof in the arms of my grandmother, my only fear was that I would never live up to the standards my mother had set, never emerge from my shyness to learn to dance like her or laugh with such unadulterated joy.

  Iraqi heat is so intense that much of Baghdad slept on the roof during the summer. The sound of heavy mattresses being brought upstairs and thumped out onto specially made metal bed frames each night is one of my clearest memories of childhood. Because the main meal of the day is served midday in Iraq, we always ate lightly at night. On summer nights, you could look across the Airlines Neighborhood and see families with children eating watermelon or cheese and bread before bedtime on their rooftops.

  We stopped sleeping outside when Abu Traib, the “Machete Murderer,” began terrorizing Baghdad for a time in the 1970s in a crime wave that seemed to foreshadow some of the violence that was to come. A serial killer, he invaded wealthy Baghdad homes, reportedly along with his own wife and children, hacking families to death and stealing their belongings before disappearing into the night. Many of these homes had walls and guards, yet Abu Traib somehow outsmarted security measures. Rumor spread that he must have entered through the rooftops so we sealed the doors to our roofs and let fear drive us into our sweltering homes. Because I couldn’t imagine anyone in our social network doing such horrible things, I imagined Abu Traib as a peasant with scary, focused black eyes and a white head piece held in place by a black rope. In my mind’s eye, his wife wore a black headscarf and a peasant dress. Their sons dressed like him and their daughters dressed like their mother. While he and his wife murdered the adults, I imagined their children murdering other children—all as their victims slept peacefully in their beds.

  When Abu Traib was finally caught, he turned out to be a high-ranking member of the security forces, giving rise to plausible speculation later that the whole bloody rampage was a government experiment to instill fear and gauge its travel through the city. Except for his thick black hair and scary eyes, he looked little like what I had imagined. He was clean shaven with a huge black mustache, and appeared on television in a white shirt and sports jacket. He was later executed, yet he lived on in urban legend. It was Abu Traib who taught me that fear outlives its origins.

  “Abu Traib has chocolate-colored skin and coarse black hair,” our servant Radya told me authoritatively at least three or four years after he was dead. “He has very deep-set eyes—cat’s eyes—so he can see at night. And all his family has coarse black hair and deep-set eyes too. Even his children can see at night like little cats.”

  Radya was the daughter of a security guard who watched our house sometimes when we were away. She came to live with us when she was just fourteen, a common way of providing income and improving living conditions for poor girls. I wasn’t used to having a servant so near my age and one afternoon shortly after she arrived, I ordered her to bring me lunch. She snapped at me and we started arguing. “You’re the servant,” I told her. “That means you have to do what I tell you.” “No I don’t!” she screamed and ran out of the house crying. When my mother came home, she scolded me in front of Radya, made me apologize, and gave me my own household duties.

  Radya always wore long clothing that covered her arms, even in summer when I wore sleeveless blouses and shorts. One day I finally asked her why and she shyly showed me her arm. “I help my mother bake bread,” she explained, revealing a scar from wrist to shoulder. I felt bad for her that she felt so ugly she had to hide her body. She had very dark skin and I later told her that women in America who looked like her were beauty queens. Mama told me I was to treat Radya as a sister and we eventually became good friends, but I knew we would never be sisters. We went everywhere; she went nowhere. I played basketball in our cul-de-sac with my cousins; she worked in the kitchen. I went to school during the day; she went to school at night.

  Our family helped enable Radya to graduate from high school, but it wasn’t until I went with my mother to drop her off for a weekend that I saw how her family lived: eight people in a two-room house of yellow sun-baked mud on government land near the airport. There was no privacy. I wondered where she did her homework and where her parents had sex, which I had some knowledge of because I had peeked through my parents’ bedroom keyhole. Radya’s mother wore a black abaya and a small tattoo on her chin and spent her days baking bread in a mud oven to bring in a few extra coins. Radya’s salary was their family’s only steady income. It would take years of working with women in other countries for me to question what I had accepted as a given in my own home: that girls like Radya could be sent away to help pay for the education of a brother selected for his potential to help raise the family out of poverty. There were thousands of poor families like Radya’s living on government tracts. Abu Traib was famous for targeting wealthy areas of Baghdad, yet fear of him seemed to persist in her neighborhood. When she returned from her weekends at home, she often brought back ghoulish new stories about his exploits.

  “Do you know how smart Abu Traib is?” she whispered to me one afternoon when we were sitting together on the blue sofa in our living room. “He is so
smart he can hear through walls. He can probably hear what we’re saying at this very moment.”

  My parents gave their largest party of the year on my birthday when the worst heat of summer was past. Before the adults took over with their live bands, they would bring in a puppeteer with stringed marionettes for all my cousins and friends. One of the photos in my scrapbook is of my sixth birthday party. It shows the backs of little girls sitting on the grass with their heads tilted up toward a puppet stage: me in short, curly dark pigtails on the left, and a taller girl with a long, chestnut-colored braid reaching to her waist on my right. Basma, my best friend. I had dark skin and hair like my mother. Basma had the hazel eyes and fair complexion so prized by Iraqi society. She was shy like me, and when we found each other we became inseparable, often playing without even the need to talk. She lived in the prestigious Al-Mansour neighborhood, and her house was enormous, far more extravagant than our three-bedroom home with ranch-style kitchen and family room. Her father was a government minister, and armed guards had to open the gates for me before I could run up the stairs to her pink bedroom, which was filled with even more toys than my own. That year Basma gave me my favorite birthday present, a large doll I named after her that had the perfect combination of beauty: dark skin like my mother’s and hazel eyes like hers.