Between Two Worlds

by Zainab Salbi

  They did talk about fleeing Iraq, especially when I was in my early teens. I used to sit on the staircase late at night, staring at the shattered shapes of black-and-white mosaic, trying to make sense of painfully whispered arguments that were laden with names I didn’t know and a future that scared me no matter what they decided. “I feel like a bird in cage,” Mama kept saying. “Let’s get away, let’s go to America! Mahmood got out—why can’t we?” Then Baba, the voice of logic, would say something like “You know we can’t just leave, Alia. This is our home. What would we do? Where would we live? Do you think we can afford the same lifestyle if we move? Do you want me to fly freight? Be practical, Alia! Are you willing to live in a small apartment and struggle to make ends meet? What about our family here? What do you think will happen to them if we leave? You know how family members get punished if someone leaves. Are you willing to take that risk? They’re watching everybody, especially me. Do you really think they’d let me go?”

  It scared me to hear Mama talk about being a bird in a cage, but Iraq was my home. I loved Baghdad. I loved the sound of the muezzin and the river gulls and all the familiar places of my childhood. I couldn’t imagine leaving my cousins and all my relatives and friends. There were too many good memories, despite Amo. Hadn’t we fought to be allowed to stay? Were we supposed to just give up and leave him our country? What would happen to us if we left? Would we have to leave our house behind and have all our belongings taken by the Mukhabarat? Where would I go to school?

  I remember my parents arguing as they swung back and forth between escape and the illusion of safety that came with submission. I don’t remember any formal decision to stay; we just didn’t leave. My father would fly away, and I would be left to watch my mother beat her wings against the bars around her, alternately trying to escape her cage and feather her nest. There were times I physically grabbed her wrists as she reached for pills in the medicine cabinet in our kitchen. “Stop, Mama,” I would say. “You can’t do that, Mama. You have got to stop.” And I would do the best I could to shield my brothers from seeing her at those times. I would take her to her bedroom and we would hug each other until we fell asleep. I learned to will myself to sleep. Sleep was the easy way out, and there was always the hope that when I woke up, things would be different.

  When I was entering high school and Baba was entering his third year as Amo’s pilot, he and a copilot completed a record-setting flight across the globe. I still have a brittle, yellowed copy of Boeing’s employee newspaper, Boeing News, headlined: “Iraqi Airways 747SP May delivery flight nears SAA record.” The story says:

  The delivery of a Boeing 747SP to South African Airways in April, 1976 is still the longest nonstop flight ever made by a commercial jetliner, but on May 20, an Iraqi Airways 747SP on a non-revenue flight came close. The Iraqi flight, from Tunis to Tokyo, covered 9.676 statute miles in 16½ hours, and is now considered in second place. The SAA flight lasted 17 hours 22 minutes and covered 10,259 statute miles from Seattle to Capetown, South Africa. The Iraqi flight was under the control of . . .

  They managed not only to make the flight without refueling, but to land with an hour’s fuel to spare. It was the sort of thing that earned Baba the respect of other pilots. Yet he looked terrible when he returned. He stayed home from work and complained of heart palpitations. Other pilots and crew members gathered in our parlor, whispering with each other, reminding me of the family meetings my mother and her family had had when they were afraid they were going to be deported. Was I at risk of losing my father now too? I wanted to ask him what was wrong, but my father wasn’t approachable in the same way Mama was. This clearly had to do with his work, but Baba never would talk to me about Amo. Mama kept avoiding my questions until one day she lost her temper and told me what was going on: Baba was under investigation because the water had run out in the plane’s toilet.

  “Ignorant bastards!” she said, in one of those moments I remember clearly because she was so blunt. “They thought he had let the radiator run dry, so they’re investigating him for endangering the safety of the plane!”

  The bastards she was referring to were Amo’s tribesmen from Tikrit and others like them that Amo had rewarded with government jobs and high-ranking positions. These were the black mustache prototypes, the secret police sent along on all Baba’s flights to guard him and the crew, as well as to watch all of us whenever we were around Amo. I feared these men; Mama also despised them, both for their brutality and for reasons of class that revealed her own urban elitism. Baba was facing an investigation by Hussein Kamel, one of Amo’s cousins. Amo assigned one of his most trusted advisers, usually a relative, to watch each of his closest friends, and Kamel happened to have been assigned to my father. He didn’t even have a high school diploma, but Amo had put him in charge of his weapons programs and military-related manufacturing. Kamel would later become infamous when he defected to Jordan in 1995 with crates of files revealing biological, nuclear, and chemical warfare programs he had overseen. I knew Kamel then only by his reputation for cruelty: he was known to carry a whip to his office and use it on engineers and Ph.D.s he supervised.

  Once, earlier in his career as Amo’s pilot, Amo had handed Baba an official report signed by Kamel and instructed him to read it out loud while they were fishing at a lake inside the farmhouse compound. The report called my father a “threat to national security” because he was both close to Amo and traveled abroad frequently.

  “I know I am at your mercy,” Mama told me Baba told Amo. “You can execute me if you want. But you know I would never do anything to hurt my country.”

  Amo laughed.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I know you didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Amo was the good cop. Kamel was the bad cop. The point was to keep everyone scared and always on his or her toes. Kamel was known not only for his cruelty, but for his jealousy of anyone else who was close to Amo. Now Amo had proposed that Kamel investigate the charges of an inconsequential washroom leak, and I could see fear suffuse our household. Even Baba’s friends looked terrified when they came to visit. Finally, Amo sent for my parents to attend a social gathering, and I remember how nervous they were as they whispered to each other while they were getting ready. Mama later told me that when Amo asked him what was the matter, Baba choked up.

  “I have no interest in politics,” Mama said he told Amo with great emotion. “I cannot handle politics. I have done nothing wrong, yet they want to investigate me for a technicality that has nothing to do with politics or national security. I know how to do my job very well. I am just a pilot, sir, and I just want to be able to do my job.”

  “You have a choice,” Amo said. “You can choose my friendship or you can choose to be my pilot. If you remain my pilot, then you must undergo Kamel’s investigation.”

  I imagined my father, the proud captain of a 747, standing next to Amo, petrified and near tears, completely at his mercy. Baba, who never wanted anything except to fly, chose friendship and survived. He went back to just being a captain and eventually wound up as head of Iraq’s civil aviation. He had made the right choice, but it was of the Devil’s making. If he had said he wanted to remain his pilot, Amo would have let Kamel proceed with the investigation, and Baba would have been at the mercy of a vengeful maniac whose word Amo could not easily ignore. On the other hand, when he chose friendship, Amo could easily have turned on him, saying, What are you afraid of, Basil? Are you trying to use my friendship to escape wrongdoing? There was no right answer, only painful life-altering decisions that were anyone’s guess because they ultimately came down to whatever Amo felt like at the moment.

  All of the men watched one another and were watched by Kamel or one of Amo’s most trusted insiders. Amo would grow angry at them in turn, as he did at my father, and cast them out, where they would fear for their lives for a few months before being welcomed back into the relative safety of his good graces, blubbering and thankful to be alive. The lesson: no one was
safe. Ever. At the end of the day, he had even Hussein Kamel, his adviser, his cousin, his son-in-law, and father of his grandchildren, murdered.

  While Baba was facing investigation by Hussein Kamel, I was attending parties given by Kamel’s fiancée, Amo’s daughter Raghad. Amo had decided to marry her off to Kamel for political tribal reasons even though she was just sixteen or seventeen. Once they married and she had her own house on palace grounds, I found myself invited to her events the same way my mother was invited to events given by her mother, Amo’s wife, Sajida. She and Amo had practically grown up in the same house; Aunt Sajida was Amo’s cousin, the daughter of the uncle who had inspired Amo’s political career and given him an education. She was a teacher like my mother, a strong-featured, sturdy woman who had grown distant from her husband by the time I met him. I never saw her and Amo together; they simply carried on parallel lives on palace grounds.

  Raghad was the eldest of Amo’s three daughters, about a year older than I was, a confident, determined young woman who taught Baathist ideology at a palace school. Rana was two years younger than I, the gentler middle sister. Hala was seven or eight years younger, the spoiled baby everyone knew was Amo’s favorite. They attended a private school on palace grounds with their friends Tamara, Sarah, Luma, and the daughters of other select families, including members of Amo’s tribe from Tikrit. Tikriti girls were not supposed to mix with others outside the palace, and a separate branch of a university was eventually established to educate them as they got older. I remember Raghad walking down grand hallways, expressing authoritative views on things I mostly considered silly, like fashion. The other girls and I would follow behind her just as if she were Amo and we were her bodyguards. Honestly, the body language was the same.

  Other than gossip, fashion was about the only topic of conversation. As they were never allowed to leave the country, his daughters never had the chance to shop in the boutiques of London or Paris or the malls of America. But they had access to every fashion catalogue on earth, not to mention the ability to simply point at whatever someone was wearing and say, “I like that,” and the wearer would be expected to give it to them. As the most fashionable young woman in this circle, Tamara found her dresses often borrowed, sometimes returned, sometimes not. One of her dresses was no longer wearable after it had been taken apart and reassembled by a dressmaker ordered to copy it. Sajida’s requests for clothing would often go to my mother or other women able to travel, though from what I heard Sajida was not always good at remembering to reiumburse the buyer. Everything in Amo’s life was about making up for something in his childhood—the gold, the clothes, the palaces. I almost understood that. But how did that justify the same behavior by his daughters who had grown up with nothing but luxury?

  Each visit to the palace felt like a fashion show in which we were supposed to compete. It was a scandal to wear anything twice, and I joked with my mother that I felt I should wear new underwear for every visit in case someone asked me what label I was wearing. In one of his merciful moments, Amo allowed my mother to go abroad for a medical appointment, and Aunt Nada and Aunt Layla looked so excited that he permitted all three women and their children to go. He handed all the women $10,000 for each of their family members and told them to shop and enjoy themselves. I was looking forward to buying jeans and T-shirts and some other ordinary teenaged clothing. Instead, my mother bought me stiff, preppy clothes and evening gowns from Mondi and Escada and other designers, including a plaid coat from Christian Dior I would keep for years.

  There were many perks, but the price was never on the tag. Every year, he would send us a new luxury-edition Toyota; every year, the other two families received new Mercedes. He tasted a pomegranate from a friend’s tree and commented how good it was, so the friend sent two crates of pomegranates, which Amo complained were insufficient, so the trees were stripped bare. Amo complained that Uncle Adel’s gold donation to the war effort wasn’t enough, so Uncle Adel donated more. A rich man could do better still, Amo said. Finally, Uncle Adel had to sell property to fulfill his “donation.” We gave Amo expensive gifts constantly, yet never saw him use or display anything we gave him except fishing tackle. Meanwhile, he was building new palaces every few months. The principal palace compound in Baghdad was a complex of hotel-like mansions that screamed money and ostentation, which Americans would later occupy as the “Green Zone.” The houses were enormous, with huge halls and chandeliers. Gold-leafed frames and gold-leafed furniture were everywhere. Expensive Persian rugs were spread across marbled halls, and coffee tables were covered with cut-crystal vases. Everything was sized inexplicably bigger than one would need.

  Aunt Sajida presided over palace events with a formal imperiousness. Her eyebrows were drawn up and out on her forehead like dark stabs of surprise that contrasted with her bleached blond hair. Guests would walk over to her, and she would nod with the indifferent air of someone who needn’t bother to smile back. Often she hired singers—I remember one named Suad Abedullah—who sang nationalistic songs as wives of ministers of state danced around Sajida with their marriageable daughters, displaying them in hopes they might appeal to her for her sons Uday and Qusay, who were seen in the palace circle as Baghdad’s most eligible bachelors. As the adult women danced around Sajida, her teenaged daughters danced around Raghad and Rana, and Hala’s little girlfriends danced around her.

  “Why do I have to go?” I would demand of Mama in quarrels that often led to tears. “I hate it! I don’t like them and they don’t like me.”

  “Look at me, Zainab,” Mama told me. “I have to dress up. I have to smile. I have to go. What else can I do? All the other women bring their daughters with them and brag about them. When you don’t come, it is very awkward for me to be the only mother without her daughter. It triggers questions. What is wrong with my daughter? What kind of a mother am I for not having my daughter with me? You need to come, Zainab. You need to dress up and start putting some makeup on. You often look too pale.”

  So I went, my mother’s daughter, and I would kiss his daughters on both cheeks with delight, as if we had just met by surprise on the street, and say, “How are you, Rana?” or “Oh, what a beautiful dress you’re wearing tonight, Raghad!” But, in small ways, I registered my protest. I wore straight gray or white dresses instead of the frilly 1980s styles the other girls wore. I refused to wear makeup or waste my time blowing my curly hair dry. Most of the time, I would find a seat on the side and watch for hours, the different one, wondering why I was invited at all and hoping I didn’t look as miserable as I felt. The women would dance together as they used to at my mother’s garden parties, and my mother kept trying to get me to join in like Sarah and Luma and Tamara. Once she came over to me and ordered me to smile and clap when a patriotic song came on.

  “But, I am already smiling, Mother!” I told her as I gave her my big artificial smile.

  “You look more like you’re smelling something bad,” she said. “Smile as if you mean it, Zainab.”

  “Yes, Mother,” I said. And I stood and danced and clapped.

  Between the farmhouse and the palace, I felt like a model pasted into one pose after another for some jet-set magazine, all dressed up with a permanent smile on my face, yet completely voiceless. In my head, I started referring to our existence as “this artificial life.”

  Aunt Sajida and her daughters came to visit us just once. It was at the farmhouse. My mother spent all day cooking and making our house look as nice as she could. She was a great cook when she took the time, and she made Bibi’s sabazi that day, a recipe Bibi was famous for. Rice was the base of almost every Iraqi meal, and it was usually accompanied by a sauce flavored with vegetables and meat and spices, herbs, or dried lemon, or, like sabazi, spinach. That night, as we were seated around the dining table, Mama was serving dinner to Aunt Sajida as a proper hostess was supposed to, and Aunt Sajida looked at Mama with the implacable gaze of someone who knew she could not be questioned.

  “Oh, Alia, yo
u made the sabazi the Iranian way,” she observed.

  I could see the droplets of sweat forming on my mother’s upper lip that always gave her away when she was nervous or embarrassed. She had made a mistake.

  “Well, no, not really,” Mama said nervously as she continued serving the now-suspicious dish to Rana and Raghad and Aunt Nada and her family. “I just added some other vegetables to it beside the spinach.”

  I caught Aunt Sajida’s look of authoritative dismissiveness. She knew what she had said was enough to petrify my mother. All she had to do was remind Mama that she was a “special file.” I felt so bad for my mother. After all her work, the evening was stolen from her by surprise. I knew we weren’t supposed to listen to Persian music or call my favorite nuts “Iranian” pistachios. But was even my mother’s wonderful sabazi forbidden?

  Well, I like it this way, Aunt Sajida! I lashed out at her inside my head, silently, the way I had at Mohammed when he humiliated me for being Shia. It tastes a whole lot better than that bland stuff you serve at the palace!

  It was a perfect day all around: Raghad and Rana and I didn’t like one another well enough to spend time alone, so we had remained with our mothers. Aunt Sajida had cut down Mama. And Hala had ordered her bodyguard to toss my little brother around like a soccer ball as other kids watched, afraid to intervene for fear of making matters worse. I found Hassan crying in his room after Sajida and her entourage left. He was only five or six at the time, but he knew he could not barge into the salon when everyone was there, so he had just locked himself in the bedroom and cried. When I heard the story, I was so angry I wanted to do something to teach that spoiled Hala a lesson. But I knew I couldn’t. She was the daughter of the president and everyone was as much afraid of her as they were of her brothers, her sisters, and her parents.