Between Two Worlds

by Zainab Salbi

  When I arrived, I walked inside the courtyard and stayed there for two hours in the comfort and anonymity of hundreds of other women dressed just as I was.

  “Please God, do something, please save my family, please do something,” I prayed. “Please get me out of my prison, God.”

  While I was at the mosque, Amo was trying to save my family. As it turned out, the reason he had called my parents to the farmhouse was to try to get them back together. Amo, who went through many phases, saw himself as a marriage counselor. When the driver my parents sent called them to say I was missing, Amo immediately told them, “Zainab is trying to send you a message. She ran away to get your attention. She wants you to be back with each other. You need to do it for her if nothing else.”

  All I wanted that day was to be with other people and free of Amo, free of the guards and the scrutiny. But I learned later that Amo had sent search parties out for me. Police apparently even searched the mosque, but didn’t pick me out. Later, I wondered how many times Amo’s soldiers had been in that mosque picking up poor Shia young men to deport them to Iran or draft them into the army, or put them in prison and torture them for praying. Had the search for me caused pain for anybody else? Had I put anyone else at risk as my father had put the boy in our neighborhood at risk the night Amo came to visit? Was my privilege a blessing that saved me from losing loved ones like my classmates, or a curse that made it impossible for me to simply disappear like other people?

  When I finally came home on my own, my parents were both there waiting for me. They started hugging me and apologizing for their arguments and said we were all moving back home. At the end of the day, was mine the act of a spoiled kid? I wasn’t sure whether I had brought my parents back together or whether Amo had, but they never reprimanded me for running away that afternoon.

  Amo never said anything to me about it at all, but I apparently scored points with him for daring to make myself vulnerable to save my parents’ marriage. Mama told me he liked my “spirit.”

  From Alia’s Notebook

  Saddam got into building mountains in Baghdad during that time. He built about three mountains. He would compare these mountains to the Nebuchadnezzar’s mountains in Babylon. He built a new palace every three or so months, and we would be invited to parties opening each of these new palaces so he could show them off. There was a point where he claimed that he designed 150 of his palaces. He built new lakes all around his palaces and ensured that they were filled with fish. If he couldn’t catch a fish, he would throw a hand bomb into the lake to kill as many fish as possible.

  During that time, he often talked about the universe and God. He claimed that God was not fully satisfied with his creation of mountains, trees, and even animals. So, God created humans and ordered them to worship Him day and night. God’s satisfaction increased more and more as He ordered humanity to call his name and pray for him day and night. Saddam compared God’s feelings with that of a leader. A leader without people to follow him and worship him is not a master, he claimed. A leader needs his people to worship him so he can exercise his power and his strength and finish perfecting the earth.

  7

  A WHITE HORSE

  THE IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION had been drilled into me ever since my father used to squeeze fresh juice for me and bring it to my desk so I wouldn’t have an excuse to interrupt my homework for a snack. By the time I was ready to graduate from high school, I also saw university not merely as education, but as a way out of the life I was living. All the young women I was spending weekends with were going to college—that was a given—but they seemed to see it as a personal ending point. Our mothers all went to university and pursued careers. Many had continued to work all their lives; even Saddam’s wife worked after her husband became president. Yet most of the young women I knew seemed to see university as a place to find husbands, after which they would settle into lives that revolved around children and social schedules.

  That was not what I wanted. By the time I was a senior in high school, I dreamed of a career that I was not only good at, but that I could be passionate about, something that would allow me to travel, meet people from around the world, and be exposed to foreign literature, arts, and cultures. Thanks to travel and years of study, I was fluent in English and knew a little French, so I planned to major in translation in college, take my father up on a longstanding promise to send me abroad to study for my doctorate, and perhaps work for the Iraqi foreign ministry or a United Nations agency. A Ph.D. in languages would be my passport to freedom, and I made a vow to myself to have it by the time I was twenty-six.

  High school students couldn’t simply apply to the universities of their choice or even choose our majors. We could express preferences, but our fate was based on a strict numeric system that awarded bonus points for Baath Party membership and family members killed or disabled in the war. I qualified for no bonus points at all, so I was relieved when I tested high enough to qualify for my first choice: the language school at Mustansiriya University, the second largest university in Iraq. I would specialize in Arabic, English, and French.

  The first day of school felt like a fresh new beginning to me. I had a new uniform, my mother gave me her old car, and I drove myself to school. I felt a rush of independence pulling into the big, modern campus with thousands of new students I had never met before. New students were assigned to older students as guides, and my guide, known by his Baathist title Rafeeq, which means a friend or comrade, was a handsome young man who turned out to be a leader of the student Baathist Party. The party was active on campus, and when I got a call “inviting” me to a Baath Party meeting, I knew I had to attend. When the teacher started talking about the Baathist slogan, “Implement, then discuss,” I raised my hand, smiled, and asked a question.

  “Why?” I asked in a pleasant voice. “I need to know what I’m implementing before I can implement it, don’t I?”

  The room hushed. The teacher tensed and smiled a rigid smile. I could see he was trying to be patient with me. I was new.

  “If everyone needs to discuss every order, then we will never get anything done,” he said. “We have to trust in our leaders to make decisions, so we implement their orders quickly and avoid delaying important actions.”

  I had assumed that there would be some opportunity for discussion on a university campus, but I was wrong. I soon learned that there were at least two Baathist spies in each classroom; many university professors, including the one who lectured me that day, would wind up fleeing the country. Still, for the first time in years, I felt the world was opening up to me. There were new possibilities at school and a new sense of calm at home now that we were all living together back in the Airlines Neighborhood. Mama relaxed. Baba wasn’t away as often, and we hired a cook, ending a low-level source of friction between my parents stemming from the fact that Mama always wanted to go out when he was home from a trip, and Baba wanted to stay in and eat home-cooked food. When I came home from school, I walked in the door to the smell of wonderful food and lunch served with garnishes and table linen.

  One day over timen bah gillah, I was babbling on about all my classes and all the new friends I was making when Baba started quizzing me testily. Where did these new friends live? Who were their parents? Had I given anyone my phone number? For a few blissful weeks, I had allowed myself to forget the rules. I should have known better.

  “Remember, your friends are your friends because of who your father is,” he said.

  We were at the end of the meal, and he said that over his shoulder, almost as an afterthought, as he left the table. I put my fork back down on the plate and could feel Mama look away, knowing instantly how I felt but unwilling to meet my eyes. I will never forget that one sentence. He really hurt me with that, all the more so because he spoke so casually. Just when I was beginning to think there was a chance I could create my own identity, he was stealing it back from me. People liked me at the university, and I thought it was because I was cool
or because I was a good student or maybe even just because I was me. But he erased those silly assumptions with a single remark. Was it naïve to think people liked me for myself ? How could I tell the difference? And as I thought about it, I realized with a sinking heart that it was no accident that I had gotten a Baath Party leader as my student guide. He knew who my father was. They knew who everyone was.

  It didn’t matter that my father was no longer Saddam Hussein’s pilot, or that he had only been his pilot for a few years in the first place. The sobriquet had stuck. People still called him the “pilot of Saddam.” They referred to Mama as the “pilot’s wife,” and they called me the “pilot’s daughter.” An awful wave of fatalism washed over me. No matter how hard I worked, no matter who I became, I would always be defined by my father’s passenger, or former passenger, the man millions of people feared.

  I have a picture of me in my university uniform at a ceremony in which Amo honored Iraqi women who had donated gold my first year in college. In it, he is smiling at me warmly with his hands on both my shoulders. I am smiling as well, but my hands are at my side, clenched into fists. I knew what a sham it was this time; the very pin he put in my lapel that day for donating gold was itself made of gold. The next day at college, everyone was pointing at me and checking me out as I walked through campus. They had seen how he had greeted me, and seen me smile back. “There’s the one, the pilot’s daughter,” people whispered.

  I had seen the change come over my parents as they had become more and more like the farmhouse crowd. Would that happen to me too? Would I finally give up fighting and find a way to fit in? I knew they would never be true believers like Uncle Kais and Aunt Nada. But the more they seemed to accept their fate, the more determined I became to fight my own. Studying seemed the only way out. French was the newest and weakest of my languages, so I signed up for intensive lessons three nights a week at the French Institute in addition to my full load of classes at the university. I was focused intensely on the teacher’s lesson the first night when a young man sitting next to me kept nervously shaking one leg, and the movement made it hard for me to focus because our desks were connected. I poked him politely with my pen and said with a smile, “Please stop that.” He did. Over the break, he and I and two other students, an older man and woman, started chatting with one another in a small patio where an Egyptian man ran a little refreshment stand.

  The young man’s name was Ehab. By the end of the first semester, the older two started drifting off, clearly interested in each other, and Ehab and I found ourselves continuing the banter by ourselves. He was tall and thin, with chestnut hair, a few years older than I was, and he carried himself with utter confidence. He was good-looking and dressed well, not because he wore designer jeans or had the money to buy fancy labels, but because he had an instinct for what looked good on him and how to wear it. We sat on our white plastic chairs in the little patio and discussed literature and poetry. He always carried a book of poetry, and we started reading poems together aloud. I couldn’t help but look at his lips, which were sort of pouty-looking and naturally deep red. There was an incredible intensity about him. He lived in the world of books, and I did too. Now we shared this precious world with each other. He was enchanted by British romantic poets like Byron and Shelley, novelists like Gabriel García Márquez, and Arab writers like Mahmoud Darweesh and Najeeb Mahfouz. He loaned me his books, which I devoured at the farmhouse, and we began having regular discussions that fed my lonely brain. While Luma and Sarah and Tamara chatted about Luma’s latest prospects for a proper husband, I read Love in the Time of Cholera.

  I have never been flirtatious. I’m too focused on my goals. But before I returned Love in the Time of Cholera, I went into my room and sprayed my perfume on the pages. The next time he lent me a book, he tucked in a poem on a piece of paper. One thing led to another, and we began skipping that last hour of class after the break in order to continue our literary discussions. Then one night he read a love poem describing the features of a woman, her beautiful eyes, her mouth, the smell of her. It was one of the most romantic things I had ever heard.

  “I wrote it,” he said shyly.

  He didn’t say it was for me, but I knew.

  “Oh, thank you, Ehab,” I said. I reached over and put my hand on his and felt the warmth of his hand under mine. It was a very daring move, and I kept my hand there, touching him for the first time, feeling my heart flutter. We looked into each other’s eyes for a very long time. We both knew we were in love.

  Technically, a proper young Muslim girl wasn’t even supposed to be alone with a man. Dating was not sanctioned in Iraqi culture and Arab culture at large—it still isn’t—until the couple is betrothed. Most of my friends were dating anyway—“underground dating” I sometimes called it. Boys and girls would find places to meet in private or in groups, politely getting to know each other, though stopping short of sexual relations because virginity was still expected of brides. No one I knew told their parents about such dating. But as soon as I got home that night, I ran to Mama’s room, excited. She was still my best friend, and I knew she believed in love, in bending rules. All through high school, she had asked me if I had a crush on anyone and always seemed disappointed when I said no.

  “Mama, I think I am in love!” I told her.

  “Oh, how exciting, habibiti,” she said. “Tell me! Tell me all about it!”

  “He wrote a poem for me and it was so romantic!” I said. “He is very good-looking, Mama, and very smart . . . and I held his hand.”

  She was happy for me. Later that week, she dropped me off at the institute as students were going in, and eagerly asked me to point him out. “Which one is he, Zainab? Tell me!” she asked, giggling, more like a girlfriend than a mother. When I pointed to the tall young man going up the steps, she said, “Oh, he’s cute!”

  I’m sure she thought it was a passing infatuation.

  It was assumed I would grow up to marry a prosperous, secular, university-educated, cosmopolitan man. Ehab was none of those things. His father was a shopkeeper, and his family was large—eight brothers and sisters. Neither of his parents had a university degree, and though he was adamant he would one day, he still had not finished his first year of college. He was a practicing Sunni from Samarra, an area northwest of Baghdad that Americans would later dub the “Sunni Triangle,” and through him I was exposed for the first time to the tribal culture that still dominates much of rural Iraq. His tribe was one of the most powerful in the region, and he had been raised to give utter loyalty to the sheikh and tribal elders who resolved disputes, determined policy, helped arrange marriages, protected their own from outsiders, and negotiated alliances (and, historically, wars) with other tribes or governments. His tribe’s principal rival was in nearby Tikrit, and this generations-old rivalry had been inflamed by its most prominent member, Saddam Hussein, who had poured government resources into Tikrit’s infrastructure while ignoring Samarra, which was far larger and boasted an internationally known historic site. Ehab hated Amo. For the first time I had met someone who felt more strongly about him than I did.

  “They are all crazy criminal idiots!” he said of Saddam and his tribesmen. “Vulgar, stupid, all of them! They have sex with their own animals!”

  I had never in my life heard anyone talk like this, and soon realized that Ehab was a closet dissident who trusted me enough to say things that could easily have gotten him killed. He had a friend, a disenchanted Baathist like Aunt Samer, who had been imprisoned for eight years over a policy difference with Amo, and he knew another man who had been imprisoned because he objected to Mukhabarat flirting with his wife. I listened intently to everything he said, but dared utter no criticism of Amo. When it came to Amo, I trusted no one, not even Ehab. I said nothing of our relationship to Amo, but there were times the palace operator interrupted our telephone conversations, and after a while Ehab put two and two together.

  “You are friends of Saddam’s, aren’t you?” he said.
“Your father was his pilot.”

  I was scared at what he would say, but I finally nodded and waited to see if he would still love me.

  “Please be careful when you’re around them, habibiti,” he said, taking my hand. “The Tikritis know no boundaries. They are rapists! They are known for rape, igh tisab. When they see meat, they are like dogs! They’re not used to women in these short sleeves and skirts. They will jump on any woman! They will take a sister, take a wife. They feel they can just take any woman because they have power. Saddam is so powerful, he thinks he is Pharoah!”

  I knew no Tikriti I happened to meet would rape a friend of Saddam’s—at least not without his approval. But, out of respect for Ehab and the interest in Islam he was rekindling in me, I began to dress more conservatively, in line with Islamic belief that both women and men should wear modest clothing that is not revealing. Many young people were growing more religious at this time, though I was never sure if it was in reaction to secular parents or part of a low-key rebellion against the corrupt and dissolute regime. A friend of mine decided to wear the hijab, a head scarf, and this simple decision was an ordeal for her family because they were afraid her decision to cover her hair would categorize her as being “too religious” and therefore open to being accused of affiliation with a religious party and thus government prosecution. I have often found it curious that many Western women fail to notice the forces that make them dress as they do, yet they pity Muslim women wearing the hijab, unaware that covering their heads is sometimes a choice that educated women make on their own.

  I didn’t want to cover my head, but I started wearing long sleeves and skirts that fell mid-calf, and my father now feared I had gone too far the other way. The point was that in the regime that ruled Iraq, our freedoms were so limited that a head scarf, a prayer, a long skirt, a single word of Farsi dropped into an Arabic conversation—all could be taken as proofs of disloyalty to the state. The Mukhabarat conducted surprise sweeps of mosques, arresting young men on suspicion they belonged to the outlawed Dawa religious party. During this time, an older cousin of mine was swept up this way with some of his friends and tortured before his family was able to negotiate to allow him to leave the country, and we later heard reports that some of the friends arrested with him had been executed. One night my cousin Naim had gone to a mosque to pray, and his father, Baba’s brother, called him in a panic. Naim later told me Baba and my uncle took him straight out to a bar, bought him beer, and finally convinced him it was too dangerous to go back to the mosque.