by Zainab Salbi
There were times I felt that not the smallest, most ordinary event in my life was free of Amo. I wanted nothing more than to be just an ordinary teenager doing ordinary teenaged things. When I was in high school, my cousin Naim invited me to go with him and his friends to a disco party for teenagers at the Hunting Club, a large private club where middle and upper middle class families went to swim, play tennis, watch movies, and eat. My cousins and I practically grew up there. It was the place where my father first whirled me around a dance floor and my mother sneaked extra servings of hummus when she thought no one was watching after lights went out for movies. It was in the middle of the noisy Hunting Club swimming pool that Aunt Samer criticized Amo. Excited at the prospect of an evening free with people my own age to just enjoy myself, I put on a purple disco dress with huge earrings and let my curly hair down, and I let Mama put a little makeup on my face for the first time that night. She was surprised, but this wasn’t a palace party.
When Naim picked me up, my parents were happy to see their daughter’s first night out on her own as a teenager. To me, it felt as if it were a reward after all my weekends at the farmhouse. When we entered the Hunting Club hall, it was full of teenagers our age, disco lights were flashing on and off in different colors, and everyone was dancing. Midway through the evening, a friend of my cousin’s I thought was cute asked me to dance. I was thrilled to be out dancing, both trying to look cool though we were too shy to even get close to each other. When we finished dancing and I sat down next to my cousin, a murmur spread through the hall. The music kept pounding, but people began turning around in their seats at the far end of the room to find out what was happening. We were at one of the far tables in the hall, but word eventually reached us. Something was wrong.
“Uday just arrived,” someone from the next table whispered. “He has ordered that no one can leave the party.”
Uday was Amo’s son, who dominated the social pages of the newspapers with his ridiculous outfits, fancy cars, and womanizing. Naim and I looked at each other. I had promised my parents I would be home by 11:30, so had he, and we were both worried that on my first night out, we wouldn’t be home on time. He got up to check out what was happening and came back a minute later.
“Uday ordered every door to be locked,” he said. “Get your purse and coat, but don’t put your coat on. Just put it over your arm as if you’re strolling. I think I found a way out.”
He led me to a small window near the floor of the hall, and I bent down and squeezed myself through it, wishing I were wearing pants instead of my new purple dress. It was a good thing we knew the layout of the Hunting Club so well, because Uday’s guards were everywhere. We located a back door, crossed the frighteningly huge backyard and found a way through the outer wall to our car, and escaped, victorious. When we got to my house, I noticed that my father’s car was not in the garage. When I told her how we had gotten away, my mother looked very upset with me, even though we had gotten home on time.
“But, Mama, I didn’t do anything wrong! I’m not late! Why are you mad at me?”
That’s when she started crying and screaming.
“Can’t you understand, Zainab? We were really worried about you! Baba went crazy when he heard Uday was at that party. He drove to the club to look for you. He’s still there now.”
Why was she yelling at me? I had done nothing wrong. I only knew that Uday had taken away my one night of freedom. All I wanted was to just be a teenager, and Amo and his family were taking over our lives. I cried myself to sleep that night as Baba questioned everyone at the club to see if they had seen me. Mama told me later that he drove home trembling with fear and went into my room after I was asleep to make sure I was really there. The next morning the phones did not stop ringing as my aunts and my mother’s friends called one another petrified that the notorious Uday had invaded the one space everyone had thought of as “safe.”
The women of Baghdad knew what I did not fully comprehend at fifteen or sixteen: Uday, the elder of Amo’s two sons, would later become infamous worldwide for his “rape palaces” where he raped and tortured women. He had finders who tricked young women into going to his parties. Some were drugged and ordered to strip and dance naked for him before being raped. In Iraq, a virgin is no longer considered marriageable material if she is raped. If she has an understanding family, they will embrace her and help “cover her honor” by arranging for her to marry the man who raped her. But if the rapist was Uday, no such negotiation was possible. The woman would be completely at his mercy, forced to join the “harem” of other rape victims who would be handed down to his friends and bodyguards and remain forever vulnerable to his wishes and fantasies. About a year after that incident at the Hunting Club, Uday invited the daughter of a friend of my mother’s out on a date, and her parents were so upset they arranged overnight for her to be married to a cousin in Dubai. She left the country almost immediately. At her engagement party her fiancé was just a picture on a chair next to her.
I was taking tennis lessons at the Hunting Club one day when Uday stopped and watched me from the sidelines. My father was an excellent tennis player and had given me the lessons, along with a racket and tennis outfit, so we could play together. I remember becoming suddenly conscious of my short tennis skirt as my instructor tried to figure out the rules of what to do. If we stopped the game, that meant we could be accused of fearing him. If we ignored him and continued playing, however, that would be impolite. So we continued hitting briefly, then my instructor called me to the net under the guise of giving me a tip and quietly told me to go back inside after the next rally. He went over to talk to Uday while I avoided his eyes and walked safely off the far side of the court.
Until that day, I had felt I was immune. I was a “friend” of Uday’s sister. My mother was a “friend” of his mother. And, most important, my father was a friend of his father. I spent time with girls who fantasized about marrying the man. I know Luma thought that marrying the president’s son would mean power, wealth, and permanent residency at the palace. I don’t know how many times I saw young women at the palace gatherings blushing as they talked about Uday. Hadn’t they heard about his cruelty? Did they actually like the idea of imprisonment in the palace? Did they care so much for power that they were willing to sacrifice their own freedom for it? I didn’t know, and I couldn’t ask. I could only try to hide the horrified look on my face when I heard the other girls talking about him.
One night my family was going to meet another family for a Thursday night party with an Iraqi and a Western band playing. I got dressed and went downstairs to tell my parents I was ready.
“That’s too revealing, you need to change,” Baba told me when he saw what I was wearing.
I had on a perfectly decent dress with cap sleeves, but I was accustomed to doing as my parents asked, so I went upstairs and changed into something more conservative still. When I came back down again and he told me crossly to change again, a switch in me flipped.
“What is wrong with you?” I demanded. “You bought me these clothes. You are the liberal father who brought me up this way. You are the one who taught me to eat with a knife and fork and keep my mouth closed when I eat, and now you even eat like them and drink like them. What is happening to you, Baba? You’re a hypocrite! You’re becoming someone else!”
That was an enormous act of ayeb, if not haram, because the Quran did not allow us to disrespect our parents, and I ran upstairs with him asking me how dare I talk to him like that. I had never talked to my father that way. I remember Mama explaining to me that he was just trying to protect me from Amo’s Tikriti police who were going into the Hunting Club and ordering waiters and patrons around at gunpoint. In fact, the next time we went out of the country, I noticed that Baba didn’t care a thing about what I wore. But I barely recognized this other man as my father. It was as if he had walked deeper and deeper into a desert of sand until he was buried by it. Baba used to insist on proper table etiquette. He w
as the one I remember teaching me how to set the table. Now, with Tikriti tribal power on the rise in Baghdad, he was beginning to eat with his hands. What had happened to the Baba who used to rock and roll with me? Who swam with me, tickled me, and promised to teach me to fly? I could hardly see that man anymore. He was becoming someone else, someone conservative who no longer smiled or told jokes or sang funny songs, but was always strict and afraid. Mama explained all this by saying that Amo had ridiculed Baba for growing up as a spoiled city boy who went to the best schools and spoke fluent English, and that Baba was just trying to fit in because it was safer that way. I’m sure she was right. I could almost see him struggle with this new image he was trying to create for himself. But what I also saw was this: after so many years of resisting, he had finally surrendered to Amo.
I think I remember the day it happened. We were at the farmhouse. Instead of greeting Amo with kisses on both cheeks as Middle Eastern men do, Baba kissed Amo on each of his shoulders instead. I had noticed that officials had started greeting him this way in public ceremonies on television, but it was so degrading to see old friends treated like this. Had anyone looked, I’m sure they would have been able to tell by the look on my face how upset I was. Was this some new order by Amo? Or had Baba volunteered to kiss Amo in this way?
“Why did Baba kiss Amo on his shoulders instead of his cheeks?” I asked Mama later.
“Amo’s afraid of germs, so he made it a requirement to have everyone kiss him on the shoulder,” she said, a weak answer.
I knew Amo was always washing his hands and sometimes made strangers wash with antibacterial soap before meeting him. He was a fanatic about washing. But that didn’t explain why he still let women and children kiss him on the cheeks. Amo screamed at women, but he needed to degrade and emasculate men, even in private. It was almost as if he thought he were some sort of god who stood above them.
I caught a small glimpse of his hubris one night at Aunt Nada’s farmhouse during Ramadan. The weather was nice, and the guards and cooks set up the iftar, the Ramadan feast table, in her garden. We all recited the opening prayer around the table, “God, I have fasted for you, I have depended on you, and I have made the intention to fast tomorrow. God, please forgive the men and women believers and Muslim men and women and forgive my own sins, oh, please God.”
Then, before we could break our fast with lentil soup and dates dipped in yogurt, we had to wait for Amo as he said his prayers in front of us. I always viewed prayer as a reminder of our own humility. We had to take off our shoes, do our ablution, and wear clean clothes when we prayed. Every time I have ever kneeled to pray and leaned my head down to the floor, I have tried not only to thank God, but to remind myself of my own insignificance, as if I were an ant in the presence of God. Bibi taught me that everyone is equal in front of God. Yet as Amo prepared to pray, he stood in his military uniform and raised his foot to Hanna, who removed first one shoe, then the other. I saw no humility at all. Didn’t having a servant waiting on you contradict the very notion of prayer? He reminded me of the way I used to pray in front of the family with the television set on, in front of the mothers laughing and the other children playing, showing off that I knew my prayers, instead of focusing on God. Was that what Amo was doing? Putting on a show? What sort of man was it, I wondered, who didn’t need to be humble even before the magnificence of God?
After we all broke our fast, Amo started drinking his Chivas Regal as usual. That shocked me even more. Even very secular people like my father who drank regularly didn’t touch alcohol during the month of Ramadan as a matter of respect for that holy period. Ramadan was supposed to be a contemplative time when one slows down and reflects and connects with one’s family and the community at large.
The next morning, as my mother and I were taking a walk, I asked Mama about why Amo didn’t take off his own shoes to pray.
“Amo has a back problem,” she said. “He can’t bend.”
But, in the end, he had bent over to pray, I thought. Could that sort of pain be any different than taking off your shoe?
“Why does Amo drink whiskey during Ramadan?” I asked.
“I don’t know, Zanooba, I just don’t know,” she said wearily.
People compare Saddam’s megalomania and terror to that of Hitler and Stalin, which I think he would like, since I know he kept their books on a rollaway trolley he sometimes had a servant bring out so he could read after dinner. Occasionally, he would drop their names into conversations, along with historic Arab figures like Saladin, who fought the Christians during the Crusades, and Hammurabi, the ancient Mesopotamian king famous for his code of law. Saddam had come to see himself as their equal and was trying to outdo them. He spent three years rebuilding King Nebuchadnezzar’s Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. He was really excited about this latest of his construction projects and couldn’t wait to show it to us.
We were invited to opening night. It was a huge event, like a premiere. Entertainers and musical troupes were invited from all over the world. Baba was away, and we went with Uncle Kais and his family. Television cameras were pointed at us as we walked into the Babylon Festival, with its Bulgarian dancers and Russian ballerinas, and were led toward seats in the front row. Uncle Kais was some sort of a celebrity, and his daughters walked ahead with their heads held high, as if they were used to walking on a red carpet and enjoyed the attention. I followed behind them, stunned to realize that we were supposed to be VIPs. My parents had so drilled into our heads that we should not tell anybody about our relationship with Amo or let anything at all “go to our heads” that I was surprised people stared at us. I didn’t want anybody staring at me like that. I would rather have been invisible.
But the most amazing part of that evening was Babylon itself. I had been to many historical sites, from Athens to Rio. I understood something of the importance of preserving history. I knew that the beauty of a historic site is in its age, in the accidental grace with which stones cling precariously to ruins, in the texture and even the smell of ancient bricks. But this city was entirely new. In his determination to one-up Nebuchadnezzar, Amo had destroyed the ancient ruins. As Mama and I walked through and realized what he had done, we didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. On top of the ancient bricks, which had a historic inscription on them saying “Built in the Time of Nebuchadnezzar,” he had cemented thousands upon thousands of bright new yellow bricks inscribed “Built in the Time of Saddam Hussein.”
I left that night with a better sense of what my parents had given up in their struggle to resist Amo. Aunt Nada and Uncle Kais publicly exhibited their relationship with Amo and had taken advantage of their contacts to start businesses and grow wealthy. They could afford extravagances our family couldn’t on the salary of a professional pilot, even with my mother’s inheritance offsetting the growing expense of keeping up appearances. We were a professional middle class family caught between two worlds. The people who watched us walk in that night considered us palace insiders, and palace families considered us just part of the people. We were members of Amo’s circle of friends, and yet members of the Shia community he persecuted. We didn’t belong to either the world of the powerful or the world of the powerless. I traveled between them, unable to talk to either about what I had witnessed in the other.
The financial pressure to keep up was enormous, and one night my parents had such a huge fight over how to deal with it that my mother took me and my little brother and moved to the farmhouse while Haider stayed home with Baba. I was almost eighteen, ready to start college, and I found myself living in the farmhouse, utterly trapped in the middle of the parched desert compound, in summer. Mama and Baba hadn’t talked for a month when we finally drove home to get more clothes, and they started fighting again almost immediately. As if on cue—did the walls really have ears?—the phone rang and it was the palace saying Amo wanted to see them both at the farmhouse immediately. I hadn’t even unpacked and couldn’t stand th
e thought of turning right around and going back. So my parents left immediately in separate cars, and my mother promised to send a driver back to pick me up. Alone in the house that had once been so happy, I looked around at the familiar surroundings I hadn’t seen for a month and felt that nothing was the way it used to be. We hardly had friends anymore. I hardly saw my cousins now—we had to be at the farmhouse, and I was beginning to feel some of them were looking at us as if we were truly “friends of Saddam.” I just wanted to escape. I missed Bibi and I got her abaya out of the closet and put it on and walked down to a crossroads near our house. I signaled a taxi and got in. As we drove off, I felt a small, scary thrill of adventure. I was breaking the rules. I was disobeying my parents. I was a young woman going out to a public place by myself; my palace friends, even Mama, would be scandalized. I told the driver to go to the Kademiya Mosque, which was one of the emblems of Baghdad itself, the holy site we had been driving by when I first heard my mother mention Amo.