by Zainab Salbi
The adults, particularly the men, spent far more time with Amo than with us children. There is an odd picture somewhere of Baba and other men in Bavarian-style tweed hats with little feathers in them bicycling behind Amo on compound grounds with security guards all lined up on bicycles behind them. Amo always changed outfits to match the activity he had planned. At the farmhouse, he favored blue denim overalls, a red-and-white checked shirt with a bandanna tied around his neck, and an occasional cowboy hat. The fathers were expected to be farmers. Each had a plot of land in front of his farmhouse, and by the time we arrived, Uncle Kais and Uncle Mazan already had groves of established trees—olives, I think—in back of their houses that I believe were tended by the compound staff. Baba hired two farmhands of his own and a small tractor, and together they plowed the empty desert land and planted row after row of knee-high olive saplings. He always liked gardening and had actually bought a small farm a few years earlier and registered it in my name as a gift. But when we got the farmhouse, the real farm was abandoned. Over the next few years, I watched Baba’s new olive trees slowly wither and die. I’m not sure what happened. Perhaps the small irrigation ditch that went to his patch of desert didn’t deliver enough water to allow them to live. Perhaps he was away too often to tend them—or just gave up trying. I’m not sure. After a while, I couldn’t always tell the difference between the people my parents were and the people Amo was making them pretend to be.
Perhaps half a kilometer away from our three farmhouses was the inner wall that encircled, hid, and protected Amo’s farmhouse. Inside that wall was the iris that defined the eye. The men went there often, and the three women did occasionally as well, but it would be three years before that eye opened to me. I have exactly one photograph taken at the farmhouse. It happens to be of me. In it I am standing slightly off balance in dressy pants and a shirt, on the water pipe bridging the open canal ditch. I spent countless hours at that spot, and I can turn my mind’s eye even now like a remote-controlled camera and see in each direction. Below me, beneath my dangling feet, were white ducks that liked to congregate in the water under the pipe. Ahead of me, across a small expanse of empty desert, was the high, impenetrable inner wall that encircled Amo’s compound. Right behind me, abutting the outer compound wall and facing it in obeisant imitation, were our farmhouses. Those two walls defined our margin for error, the space in which we were allowed to live. There was a ten-minute walk between one set of guards that kept me in and a second set of guards who, had I dared approach them, would have kept me out. I sat on the bank of the canal and listened to the ducks and learned to quack with them. I thought of them as silent allies I could complain to who would never tell on me. Quack, quack, quack, I went. Quack, quack, quack.
One morning I noticed that Mama’s Abbasid coin was missing from her neck. I asked her where it was.
“I gave it to Amo,” she said.
I was stunned.
“Why, Mama?” I demanded. “Why?”
It had never occurred to me to tell her how much that coin meant to me. It was virtually my first memory of her, and I had assumed I would wear the coin when I grew up and some of her beauty and grace would rub off on me. It was part of her.
“It was his birthday,” she said, looking down. “I had to give him something important.”
Important? How could Mama’s coin possibly be important to Amo? He had everything he could ever want. People stood in line to give him gifts he would never, ever use, let alone say thank you for. He could snap his fingers and get literally any thing on earth he could ever wish for. Why did he need the one physical object that probably mattered the most to me—the essence of my mother? Why had she given it to him?
“But, why your Abbasid coin, Mama?” I asked.
“Because I needed to give him something special, and that was the most special thing I could think of,” she said awkwardly. “I did what I had to do.”
I let the subject go. I had brought on the abashed look she wore sometimes with Amo, and the only thing I hated more than seeing her helplessness was seeing her embarrassed by it in front of me.
When television covered Amo’s birthday live that night, we watched at home as hundreds of children sang to him. All of a sudden, it struck me as silly and stupid. Here he was, the president, all dressed up in a white suit, white socks, and white shoes sitting on a gold chair like a throne with a great big smile waiting to blow out his candles.
“He looks so childish!” I said. “He’s acting more like a child than an adult.”
I had said it without thinking.
“Never say that!” my father reprimanded me. “Don’t you dare, ever, to say anything like that again!”
Baba’s voice was loud and sharp, and his expression changed with an instantaneous snap, like a pilot throwing an emergency switch. I wasn’t used to him speaking to me that way, and it hurt. But I got the message: I was never to criticize Amo, even in my own home, and never to question anything he said or did.
Later, my mother came to me and soothed my hurt feelings.
“You have to be careful, honey. The walls have ears,” she said, consoling me. “If you really need to say anything sensitive, it is best to go into the garden.”
She made me think of Radya and Abu Traib, and I got this picture in my mind’s eye of the walls around me insulated with live human ears. After that day, whenever I slipped and forgot, I would look around at the houseplants or the pictures on the wall or at my mother’s furniture and hope they hadn’t heard me. It was as if ordinary things we had brought into our house could turn on us or remember that Amo had been here. I had seen him at our home only once, but he had a capacity unlike any other person I have ever known to leave something of himself behind in physical space after he left it. During the course of an average day, I could sense it, on the sofa where he had sat in our parlor, in the smell of afternoon coffee, even in the way our neighbors looked at us. It had taken up residence inside our home, and only later was I able to identify it. It was fear, incarnate.
Once I knew the “farmhouse crowd,” as I came to think of them, I occasionally accompanied my mother to visit Aunt Nada or Aunt Layla at their homes in the main palace compound in Baghdad. I was upstairs in Tamara’s room one evening, sitting on the floor with clothes spread out all around us, picking out outfits, when we heard Amo’s voice downstairs. We hadn’t even known he was in the house. Aunt Nada and Aunt Layla were downstairs, and I could tell that he had surprised them too. He was talking loudly, in a voice I had never heard before. He was very angry, and I could almost feel the silence around his anger get very strong and stiff. Tamara and I both knew it was strictly forbidden for us to hear anything like this; this was way at the top of the scale of those things that were supposed to go in one ear and out the other. We started picking up clothes and talking about outfits and pretending to each other that we weren’t really hearing what was going on downstairs, or maybe thinking that if we could just keep talking it would go away or somehow wouldn’t count.
But Amo’s voice got louder. I heard him say a name, Samira, and his tone was as sharp as a butcher knife.
“Jurba!” he shouted, and his voice rang out through the house.
It was an ugly word, an angry, crude street epithet for a foreigner that means something dark-skinned and ugly. It was reserved for women, and I suddenly knew that it was my mama he was screaming at. Tamara knew it too. She stopped pretending and stared back at me. I will never forget the look on her face, her fear validating my own. Then, abruptly, the yelling stopped, and there was this awful silence. We tiptoed over to the edge of the stairs, and I breathed again when I heard my mother’s voice. Amo was gone, but I could feel the cold afraidness he had left behind. Looking down below from the landing upstairs, I saw Aunt Layla put her arms around Mama and try to comfort her. They didn’t see us.
“Zainab, come down please, your mother’s leaving,” Aunt Nada called up at us, trying to sound normal.
Tamara and I wa
lked down the stairs trying to pretend we hadn’t heard a thing. My mother’s face was bright red, and her eyes were brimming with tears. She couldn’t hide how upset she was, but she didn’t break down until after we had driven through the palace checkpoint. Then she began sobbing as she held onto the steering wheel and I tried to comfort her from the passenger seat. My father was away, and she was so upset that for once I don’t think she held very much back. Amo was mad at her because of Samira, she said, as my mind raced to make sense of this. Amel’s sister? The one she had bought the lingerie for in Seattle?
Mama said Samira was Amo’s girlfriend now, and Amo wanted us all to be friends. But my parents couldn’t stand Samira. She was different from her sister, and they didn’t want to see her. Samira had apparently said something very mean to Baba. Though Mama wouldn’t tell me what it was, it must have been terrible because Amo had sent Samira to our house to apologize. Baba was so stubborn, Mama told me, that he would not go to the door. He refused to allow Samira to step foot inside our house, so Mama had to stand on our front porch and fail to invite Amo’s girlfriend inside. Not inviting a guest into one’s home was one of the worst examples of ayeb for Iraqis, who pride themselves on their hospitality, and that’s why Amo was mad at Mama. She had taken the blame for Baba. If Amo had yelled at Mama like that, what would he have done to a man? Still, I wondered, couldn’t Baba have set aside his pride and accepted the apology instead of risking Mama’s life and flying off?
I listened to Mama that night like the best friend she needed. I was just grateful she was alive as I comforted her and kissed her good night when we got home. But my feelings were all mixed up. I felt more like her mother than her child, and a small voice inside me said I wasn’t ready for this. I had wanted to be an adult so I could understand what was going on. But now that I was beginning to understand, part of me wanted to go back. It wasn’t right for Mama to tell me what she had about Baba. He was my father, and I was his child.
I never talked about that night with Mama again, and I never talked with Baba about it at all. I just buried it somewhere deep in my brain.
The telephone rang one day when we were getting ready for school. We were in the kitchen, and Mama and Radya were making sandwiches for our school snack. Baba answered the phone, and I looked up when I saw him say, “No, no, no!” We all stopped and looked at him. When he hung up, tears were streaming down his face.
“Qusai is dead,” he said, staring at Mama.
“What happened?” Mama asked.
“He got into a car accident when he was driving home from the airport,” he said. “They say he probably hadn’t slept all night and fell asleep at the wheel.”
Mama looked at him and went pale, and I caught a meaningful glance between them.
“They say a truck hit him,” Baba said. “Hit-and-run. They just found his body. They say they’ll never know who did it.”
And he left the kitchen. I wasn’t used to seeing Baba cry, and I could see the agony on his face. Amo Qusai was not only a crew member, he was his friend as well.
I couldn’t focus on school that day. I kept replaying that conversation in my mind, and it was all I could do to hold back tears. I remembered Amo Qusai with Amel in Seattle and how happy they were. How could he be dead, just like that, on a road he knew so well? They say it was an accident, Baba had said. They say a truck hit him. Baba didn’t believe it was an accident, and from the horror on Mama’s face, I didn’t think Mama did either. I asked to be excused and went into the school bathroom. I hated the bathroom in this school and tried to avoid it. It was always dirty. It always smelled bad. But it was the only place I could be alone, and I went inside and cried and cried, staring at the gray, mirrorless walls. What had really happened to Amo Qusai? Had he been killed? Was an “accident” even possible anymore in Baghdad anymore?
When I went home that day, I asked Mama to go out into the garden with me.
“How is Baba doing?” I asked her.
“He’ll be all right,” she said. “He’s going to the funeral. I’ll go over and give my condolences to Amel in a bit. She’s pretty devastated. I heard she locked herself in a room and isn’t speaking to anyone.”
“Mama, was Amo Qusai killed, or was it really an accident?”
She looked at me as if assessing how much to tell me.
“We may never know, honey,” she said softly. “Amo wanted to be friends with him, and I think Qusai didn’t want to be friends.”
“So he could get killed for that?”
“Zainab, I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes there is nothing we can do, so it is better not to think about it. Just try to forget about this, okay? It doesn’t concern you.”
Of course it concerned me. Was that why Mama and Baba always looked so nervous around Amo? Because they could get killed if they didn’t want to be friends with him anymore?
From Alia’s Notebook
In the early years before he was president, he sometimes invited us to the Racing Club, where he would also bring his wife, Sajida, who was not particularly a social person. But most of the times we saw him, he was alone, or sometimes with a mistress.
Before Samira, there was Hana’a. He talked about Hana’a often. She was not only his friend, but the one he said who met all his desires and fantasies. In one of the evenings that we spent with him, he told us how he killed her. She had met another man, and Saddam got really jealous. He went to her home and killed her and her own mother, who was asleep in her bed. He killed them himself with his own gun, leaving Hana’a’s three-year-old daughter screaming and crying that Uncle had killed her mother. The girl did not say anything else for a long period after that incident. But the case was closed with no investigation.
His friendship was not an easy one. He always made sure to talk to each friend separately and to befriend his wife as well. He never trusted any man until after he got to trust the wife. Then, he would talk about other friends in their absence. Through divide and conquer, he made sure that all the friends were suspicious of each other, but that they each thought he was their best friend. The games he played between friends to spread fear and suspicion among all of us, his nightly visits, his flirting with the wives, the inability to refuse him any request for it may cost one’s life, among many other things led some to leave the country. The first of our friends to leave was Mahmood, who had introduced us to him in the first place. Mahmood was a wealthy man, but it wasn’t easy for us to leave. We kept thinking that we could manage the relationship as long as we were careful.
In one of our evenings with him, he asked Bahir, a friend of ours who is a highly educated and well-read individual, about his opinion of Napoleon. Bahir innocently replied with a saying about what led to Napoleon’s end was that he had no way to control his fast-moving courage. He described Napoleon as someone who never took others’ opinions, who acted on his own opinion without thinking about repercussions. Saddam gave Bahir an angry look and said, with a sharp voice, “What exactly do you mean, Bahir? Are you talking about Napoleon or someone else?” Bahir began sweating from his forehead and started swearing that he was only talking about Napoleon.
Such an incident could not be taken lightly. We were all nervous for Bahir at that moment. There were no rules and regulations to the relationship with Saddam except that we must always please him.
5
LEARNING TO CRY WITH DUCKS
I HAVE TRIED to identify a moment in which I first realized that the man I greeted with kisses on the hollows of his cheeks was a murderer, but I don’t think there was one. My parents tried to protect me from knowledge of his specific crimes when I was young, and as with Amo Qusai’s death, there was rarely proof. Our media was so controlled that I didn’t learn of his strategic campaigns of ethnic and religious genocide until I left Iraq, though every Iraqi knew how dangerous he was, so that was never in question. I can’t even remember fear as a first twinge; it was plain on my parents’ faces from the day I met him. The overwhelming feeling
I experienced was a deep, abiding vulnerability. Weeks would go by without incident. Sometimes, in what my mother used to call his “merciful moments,” he would bestow gifts on us, like permission to travel abroad. But I came to understand that these moments would be followed by months of excruciating, often mystifying, punishment.
Why did they stay? That question haunts whole generations of people from around the world whose parents tolerated the rise of dictatorship. Now that I’m finally able to face the horror of those years I spent with Amo, the most rational answer I can think of in our case was that my parents were trapped in an abusive relationship. I could never talk to them about this, but I spent countless hours observing them as they struggled with the relationship, trying in their own ways to maintain some inner dignity and sense of self in the face of the ultimate abusive master. Afraid of his brutality if they made a single misstep, even more afraid of his wrath if they fled, they behaved as abused spouses do. They walked on eggshells and did their best to survive.