by Zainab Salbi
Our first stop was at a fishing house, if that’s the proper term for it, which was built out over one of the larger lakes. We stopped the car, and reached the house by walking across a long walkway above the water and into a huge circular room over the lake. Inside, upholstered easy chairs were arranged in a semicircle in front of the windows, which opened so he and his guests could sit inside, with their fishing poles out through the windows, and fish in comfort. Next to each chair there was a small table for food and drinks. “I like to work out here,” he said, and for a moment I was jolted back to reality. Was it here, in this laid back setting, that Amo had made my father read Hussein Kamel’s report?
Polite and friendly, Amo was that perfect host who made our day by giving his full attention to three teenagers and talking to us like adults. He was just Amo that day, not someone to be nervous around, just a normal guy who happened to be enormously wealthy and enjoyed showing off his real estate. He told us he had helped design many of the buildings, and he seemed proud to show them off. One of the buildings he took us inside looked like a cottage, with casual furniture. Then he took us downstairs and we wound up underground in a whole separate living area with a bedroom, living room, and small kitchen.
“This is a bunker in case of emergency,” he explained casually. “I can hide in here if I ever need to. There is enough food to last for weeks.”
He went into the kitchen and started showing us his food, opening each cabinet door, revealing stashes of food ranging from pistachios to potato chips to whiskey. Then he opened the refrigerator, which was filled with soda and juices, and offered us each a drink and snacks. He opened the soda cans for us himself—no servants. We spent perhaps two hours with him on our leisurely tour. His lakes were filled with boats, and he took us onto one of the biggest ones, an enormous yacht with a very ornate, fancy bedroom downstairs.
“Girls, remember this when you get married,” he said, looking at us. “You can use this on your honeymoon.”
Not in a million years, I thought to myself. There was no question in my mind that there were cameras behind those upholstered stateroom walls. Yet as we were driving back toward our farmhouses, I thought to myself how much I was enjoying Amo’s company. It was probably about five in the afternoon when we got back. We had been gone a few hours and all of our parents were standing in front of Aunt Nada’s house looking worried about us. Had we done something wrong? Weren’t we supposed to have gone out with Amo? We thanked him, jumped out of the car, and ran to tell our parents how much fun we’d had on our adventure.
One trip we took started out in Amo’s private helicopter, a converted Sikorsky so big it had separate rooms. For the kids, at least, this was a novelty: there was a television set, a minibar, a bathroom, a flight attendant. Less than an hour later we descended into an open field that was staged with tents to look like a hunting safari. Sarah was airsick and threw up as soon as we landed, but she managed to pick herself up, dry off her mouth, and put a big smile on her face for Amo, who greeted us in a safari outfit. He told the women and children to look for truffles and watch the exciting hunting, then directed each of his three friends and my brother Haider to a different waiting Sikorsky. The rotors spun into action with hollow whumping sounds, and the five gunships lifted into the air with their hunters. I had a stick and was dutifully poking bumps in the earth looking for the walnut-sized truffles when I heard this horrible screaming over the noise of the Sikorskys. I looked up to see a flock of wild ducks surrounded by the huge circling helicopters. The birds were trapped in the middle and flapping around recklessly, flying desperately in all directions at once. I saw Amo laughing through an open door of his helicopter as he raised his rifle and began firing, and the other men started shooting too.
“This is a massacre!” I half-screamed. I was shaking, looking up at the sky. “This is nothing to laugh at! This is a massacre!”
The ducks were crying. I remember thinking to myself that they were crying from the inside out, and Amo was laughing at them. Not just hunting, laughing! It was the cruelest thing I’d ever seen. I started sobbing. I must have known how dangerous and stupid it was, but I couldn’t help myself. My mother heard me and ran over to me and forced my face down into her chest to muffle the sound so the security guards wouldn’t hear.
“Shhhsh, Zainab, shhhsh,” Mama said, holding my head down as I cried. “Please stop crying. Please stop crying, honey. Be strong for me! Do it for me, please, Zanooba? Please, remember where you are!”
Around us bloodied ducks plopped to earth. But, like Sarah, I managed to wipe my tears, wash my face, and smile for Amo when the hunters returned.
From Alia’s Notebook
He often told us that rifles are the closest thing to the Arabian man’s heart. After that comes his woman and after that comes his horse.
As he was arming the country, he bought all kinds of guns, rifles, knives, etc. He would show us his collection and brag about his love of them. He started sharing this hobby with his friends by sending them different weapons. I think we must have had about ten rifles in our home, each of a different kind, in addition to all kinds of knives and guns. We never used them nor did we have the interest to use them. We would thank him for sending his gifts and put them in storage. We knew how important these collections were to him.
He had many hobbies. There was a time he got into cooking. He would invite us for different dishes, mostly traditional ones. He wanted lots of compliments for everything he made, from his dishes to his palaces. If he didn’t get them voluntarily, he would ask, and we would all make sure to respond with excitement about how much we liked what we were seeing or tasting. But, there was nothing that compared to his infatuation with fashion. One day he invited us to Mosul to stay with him in one of his palaces. We noticed that there were several bags following him, and in the process of transporting these bags, one fell out and opened. It was a windy day, and to our astonishment, tens of hats of all kinds starting falling and flying away down the road.
We saw him go through many phases There was the time he was into architecture and psychology. There was the time in which he was a military strategist and spent hours talking to us about his strategy and how he would kill generals who suggested alternative strategies or commented that his strategy might lead to the loss of many lives. After he visited a different Arab country, he would come from that trip inspired to build a palace better than what he had seen. He loved decorating his bedrooms, each in a different color and design. He spent millions on Italian furniture.
6
BOXES
I NEVER WITNESSED what he did to people. I never had to put together the body of one of my family members like a puzzle after it had been hacked apart. I never had to spend years going from prison to prison in hopes of finding alive a son who had been snatched away from our dinner table by the Mukhabarat. I was one of the lucky ones, one of his “beloved ones.” I was guarded by the very secret police Amo used to terrorize others. There are times I cannot stop sobbing when I think about the crimes he committed against the Iraqi people. But I couldn’t cry then. I couldn’t even imagine being able to express any feelings at injustice. I just processed such horror stories as information. We were surrounded by stories of people going to prison for simply making a joke about someone in Amo’s family or for criticizing a single thing he did.
Any society that stops questioning its leaders is vulnerable to dictatorship, and Amo used our own traditions against us to help instill and perpetuate fear. To the traditional concept of ayeb, which dealt with things that were forbidden by cultural courtesies, and haram, which dealt with things that were forbidden by religion, Amo seemed to add a third, mamnu’a, which just meant forbidden. Forbidden by government? Forbidden by Saddam Hussein? Forbidden by law? It didn’t matter. We couldn’t tell the difference. We lived in fear. Fear had spread through our society the way color does when you put a single drop of tint into water to dye eggs for Norouz or—a better metaphor—the way a single dro
p of blood does when it drips from your finger into a dishpan.
I remember one perfect cloudless winter day at school when I was sitting outside, leaning against a volleyball pole in the sun with four other girls, and one of them started telling us with very wide eyes a story that could have put her and her family at risk had we repeated it. It was about a man who had been executed in the street the night before in a poor neighborhood. A semicircle of men with rifles had gathered around him, and they were cheered on somehow by someone else, and they all started firing at the man and kept on firing until his blood was spurting out of his body like fountains. I knew I couldn’t show sympathy for the person who had been executed because I could have been associated with whatever it was that had gotten him killed. So I remember listening with no expression on my face at all, impassive on the outside, as I took in this awful image of blood squirting out in all directions from a man’s living body. As I got older, there were more stories. I remember hearing about a businessman who had been executed for raising his prices in violation of a law no one understood. The amazing part was not his murder, but the fact that the Mukhabarat had apologized to the family afterward, saying they had made a mistake because he hadn’t violated the law after all. This gave the family the right to mourn him and give him a proper public burial, because such things were normally denied to families of persons who had been executed.
My private hell and that of my family was that we spent so much time with Saddam Hussein himself. Amo could never know I had heard such things—neither could his daughters or even the girls who were my friends at the farmhouse. Never having mastered the art of making such dangerous thoughts fly out of my brain as my mother had tried to teach me, I learned to hide them. Each time a horror story came in, I put it in a box and locked that box away in my brain—I could almost hear the sound the box made when it clicked closed. The good “Amo” things stayed in the front of my brain; I needed access to those. The bad “Saddam Hussein” things I buried in those boxes deep in the back of my brain behind a wall so thick Amo couldn’t see through it.
My mother’s way of staying alive under the gaze of the man who caused all these horrors was to shut off her mind, and I learned from her example. Thinking was dangerous, so I learned not to think or form an opinion. I learned to numb myself with novels and forced sleep and mental tricks. As for my emotions, they got checked into storage like so much baggage I would have to pay to claim later. But, every now and then, those boxes would rise to the surface and pop open and I would see the spatter of a man’s blood on a neighborhood wall. Or the body of the husband of a friend of Mama’s that had been left at her front door after she had begged Amo to release him from prison, and Amo had promised he would be home the next day. I tried to push these thoughts back down into my brain, only sometimes they wouldn’t stay there and I couldn’t stand it and I would step into this room of buzzing white light that was so blinding it was like walking straight into one of those lights over your head in a dentist’s chair with your eyes wide open. And finally I couldn’t see anything anymore.
It was hard for Mama to hide her feelings. Amo had known her for a long time, and her large, wonderfully emotional eyes, and a generous mouth that tended to give her away. When Aunt Samer kept telling Mama horror stories about Amo and complaining to her about the way Tikritis were taking over Baghdad, Mama finally had to ask Bibi to intercede. I remember going to Bibi’s apartment and seeing Mama lying with her head on her mother’s lap, the supposedly liberated daughter seeking comfort from an old woman who smelled of tea rose perfume.
“Please tell her to stop, Mama, she’ll get us all killed!” my mother pleaded to her mother. “She doesn’t understand that Amo is the Devil in all its meaning. He charms people, he seduces them, and then he harms them.”
Bibi just listened. So did I.
“Samer doesn’t understand,” Mama said. “Amo knows how to read eyes!”
Amo would stare at you with such intensity, even as he smiled, that I instinctively got into the habit of casting my eyes down, knowing my gesture would be taken for a young girl’s modesty. After watching her with Bibi that day, I became even more protective of Mama. I still asked her questions that came as a result of our family gatherings. (“Mama, why does Amo have pierced ears?” “Because in his tribe first sons were coveted and sometimes disguised as girls in early childhood to protect them from the evil eye.”) We were best friends, and sometimes we had only each other to talk to. But I spared her the horror stories I heard from time to time at school, as I knew she had spared me hers.
Bibi died in 1986, not long after that afternoon, when I was not quite seventeen. With the help of a woman at the cemetery who performed such services, her three daughters washed her body and wrapped her in a white shroud as Islam requires, and we buried her in the sand outside our family mausoleum in the vast cemetery in Najaf. I remember how many headstones there were, many of them marking new graves of young soldiers who had died in war. The headstones were jammed chock-a-block in the sand, thousands and thousands of them, and it seemed like we had to walk around them forever through scorching desert to reach the mausoleum that had been in our family for years. Finally, rose water was spread over Bibi’s grave. Candles were lit as we cried and listened to recitation of passages from the Quran. I had thought of her as the tent under which we found shelter. Now, she was gone.
Bibi’s death changed Aunt Samer. She gave up complaining about Amo, and she began to pray.
Baghdad has always been a city of political intrigue, a trading crossroads that was fought over by armies of invading ethnicities for centuries. Amo inflamed these ancient rivalries, tipping the delicate balance among autonomy-minded Kurds in the north, with their own culture and language, fearful Shia in the south, whose loyalty was always questioned, and a mostly tribal area north of Baghdad that Americans would later reduce to “the Sunni triangle.” By the late 1980s, the entire atmosphere of Baghdad had changed. As Amo’s cement palaces crept out over our riverbanks, he distributed to Tikritis jobs and whole neighborhoods of apartments around his palaces, a sort of protective tribal moat. Baghdad used to be a city of riverside parks in the 1970s, and our family used to stroll along the Corniche, eating masgoof fresh from the Tigris as children played and women in abayas sat comfortably next to women in short skirts. But Amo and his tribesmen transformed those riverside cafes into male drinking hangouts. Pig’s Island was no longer a quiet sandbar where we had family barbecues; it was a tourism casino complex called “Bride’s Island,” with townhouses for honeymooners forbidden to travel abroad.
I remember playing slot machines once when I was a teenager. Gambling, smoking, and drinking were encouraged in the name of modernization. Later, when I went to America, I saw that Amo had actually won points in the West for these changes. American obsession with the way women dressed helped dupe Americans into believing that because Iraqi women looked more like them, they also had greater freedoms. Behind this façade there was almost no freedom to travel or speak or pray, zero tolerance for any public views at all that conflicted with Saddam Hussein’s. Informers were everywhere. Women were reportedly raped by the Mukhabarat on videotapes that police threatened to release to blackmail women into informing on family members. Neighbors informed on neighbors. Children informed on their parents as they innocently answered their teachers’ questions like “What does Baba say about Uncle Saddam?”
War was the inexorable backdrop of our lives. As I drove back and forth across the city, between palace and school, thoughtless wealth and working class fear, the streets of Baghdad reflected Iraqi militarism. There were men in uniforms everywhere. Baath party members, soldiers, young men in Civil Defense who had been trained in “defense” and issued Kalashnikov rifles. Iraqi television was filled with images of dead Iranian soldiers, and Baghdad’s streets were lined with black cloth as families hung up the traditional banners announcing the Iraqi war dead and women assumed the black of mourning that is traditional for forty days an
d up to a year following the death of a family member. Mourners strapped caskets to car rooftops and one day we found ourselves waiting in traffic behind a car with a wooden casket covered with an Iraqi flag. But the casket wasn’t fully closed, and I let out a scream as I recognized that the dirty bluish thing hanging out of it was a foot. “Calm down, honey,” Mama said, though she was clearly shocked at the sight as well and immediately began reciting prayers from the Quran asking for God to have mercy on his soul, as was our custom when we passed by anyone who was dead.
The war was very personal to girls I went to school with. Many had fathers and brothers who were being sent to the front. I remember in particular when a tall girl who had been nice to me came to school wearing black and told me her oldest brother had been killed at the front and her mother could not stop crying. I comprehended my privilege when I realized that no one in my family was fighting in the war. As in families of means everywhere, my teenaged male cousins managed to avoid the draft. But even they paid their own special price. Dawood, Uncle Adel’s oldest son, was sent to study in England. He was cut off for years from everyone he had known and loved, because his family was not allowed to travel abroad, and if he had come home, he would have been drafted. Our family managed to visit him once when we were abroad, and it touched my heart that he asked about so many simple things: what his sister looked like, whether his little brother had a girlfriend, what everyday life was like for his family.
Most Iraqi families didn’t have that option, of course. I remember the sun-browned fingers of Radya’s mother hanging onto the windowsill of our car one day when we picked Radya up for work as her mother sobbed and begged my mother to intercede to save her son. It was her oldest son who had been drafted, the one on whom they had pinned all hopes for a brighter future for their family. “Everything will be okay,” my mother tried to reassure her. As we drove home, I in turn told a sobbing Radya, “Please don’t cry, he’ll be okay.” But the truth was no one knew it would be okay. He was headed for the front lines. Hundreds of thousands of families like theirs would lose sons; our family would lose none. The unfairness was implicit, but as gaping as fate. I came to see the poor less as living in poverty than as marginalized, shut out of the options that allow human beings to shape our own lives. If you were Shia, religious, and working class, there was always a whiff of suspicion about you. For security reasons, Radya was not allowed to come to our farmhouse even to clean. We passed Radya’s neighborhood when we drove to the farmhouse, but I never mentioned to the other girls that I had spent time there with a servant’s family.