by Zainab Salbi
While I was secretly falling in love with Ehab, I knew Luma’s parents were evaluating suitable husbands for her, and she would accept without question whomever they selected. Sarah was a different story. She wanted to run and dance and break with tradition when it came to social rules.
“When I marry, it is going to be for love,” I declared one day as we were sitting around Aunt Nada’s kitchen table.
“Zainab, love comes after marriage—don’t you know that yet?” Luma said, taking it upon herself to reprove me, as if my liberal mother hadn’t managed to get into my brain the mantra that Iraqi women had handed down to their daughters for generations.
“I don’t care if he’s poor,” I went on, speaking of this theoretical future husband. “We are going to build a life together from scratch, starting from the ground up, brick by brick.”
“Marry someone rich and you won’t have to bother!” Luma retorted.
“Well, I want to marry for love,” Sarah said. “But I am not willing to marry a poor man. Living comfortably is very important. It would be dumb to marry a poor man, Zainab. How would you eat? Love someone rich. That’s how you can have your cake and eat it too.”
I could almost see Sarah’s brain, as sharp as a lawyer’s and just as calculating, reasoning that surely it was possible to find a rich man to fall in love with.
At that time, wealth presented itself almost as a trap to me. I was reading Wuthering Heights for an English literature class, and I escaped the farmhouse to the wild moors of Emily Brontë’s nineteenth-century England, where her star-crossed lovers, the brooding dark-haired Heathcliff and the fair-haired, impulsive Catherine Earnshaw, struggled with issues of class. Young Cathy was privileged and educated. Heathcliff was poor and swarthy; he had been abused as a youth and grown up ignorant. Instead of following her heart and marrying Heathcliff, however, Cathy did what was expected of her; she married an insipid, landed young gentleman. Heathcliff, brokenhearted and obsessed with jealousy, took his revenge by abusing everyone around him. She married for money, and everyone in the book lived—or died—in misery.
The differences between us made Ehab more compelling to me, not less. For me, true love was all wrapped up in overcoming obstacles, especially those imposed blindly by religion or class. The Iraq I had grown up in tolerated intermarriage, and intermarriage went on despite the anti-Shia sentiment whipped up by the Iran war. People I knew didn’t ask each other what their religion or sect was when they first met, any more than people did in Europe or America, though sometimes it was obvious. There were several Sunni-Shia couples in my family. The two friends I had initially met at the French Institute with Ehab were a Muslim man and Christian woman who wound up falling in love and getting married. Naim fell madly in love with a Kurdish woman, and at this time I was playing the romantic role of go-between because her parents opposed the idea of her marrying a non-Kurd. I would call up and ask for her, then pass the phone to Naim, or cover for them on secret dates.
My favorite new university friend was a Kurdish girl named Lana, the daughter of hardworking professional parents. We were together on campus one day when another student made a silly joke about the vice president, Ezzet Al-Douree. Another quickly hushed her, pointed at my earring as if it were a secret recording device, and started singing one of the patriotic songs we had learned in school. “May God protect the president!” she sang, using the chant like an amulet to ward off evil. “May God prolong his life!” The others laughed at the joke, but I couldn’t. I was more afraid of them than they were of me. I wanted so badly just to tell them how I really felt, but I couldn’t, and I knew I never could. That was the way informers worked. They played Devil’s advocate and got you to say something you weren’t supposed to. I knew I wasn’t an informer, but as I looked around that day, I realized that one of my new friends might well be. So I buried my feelings and stayed silent, letting them think what they would.
One of the things I liked about Lana was that she found it hard to filter her emotions. She was one of the three or four students I was friendly with whose homes I was able to visit, and we were sitting on her bed one day studying for an exam when she leaned over and whispered very fast in my ear.
“Zainab, I have to tell you a secret,” she said. “It’s so awful! The government dropped chemical weapons on the Kurds in the north and thousands and thousands of people are dead. They just fell where they were standing. A whole town was killed in a matter of minutes.”
She told me what she had heard, and pictures flashed across my mind of Kurdish families fallen in narrow streets, children heaped on one another, babies without breath, in their mothers’ dead arms, a whole village of people inhaling gas so poisonous they died while they were moving. A father was found dead with his children around the kitchen table, killed in the middle of a meal, as they were eating. I heard her describe these awful things, and yet I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t say anything to her at all. I just went stiff, and I remember her almost jumping backward on the bed at my silence. I always suspected she reacted that way because she suddenly remembered she was talking to the daughter of a “friend” of Saddam’s.
We both looked back at our books and made a pretense of resuming study of our English composition. But later, when I was alone, the images kept assaulting me, a hail of arrows shooting over the walls I had built up around that part of my brain that I had hidden off so I wouldn’t have to think about the horrendous things Amo was doing to his own people. Thousands of people died? Thousands? Lana probably had relatives in the Kurdish region, so she must have heard it from someone there. I doubt even my father had heard about this; he was in civil aviation, not the military. This was the most dangerous thing I had ever heard. I knew I could not repeat it to anyone, not even my mother. I had seen how desperately Mama pleaded with Bibi, scared to death that she wouldn’t be able to hide one more horror story from Amo. But every time I closed my eyes, I kept seeing that father and his children. I couldn’t cry for them. I couldn’t be angry for them. I couldn’t keep their pictures in my mind. I had to disinfect my brain of their existence. Finally, I just stepped into that painfully bright white space in my brain that had the power to burn them away like overexposed film.
As Amo’s acts of despotism increased, virtually unrecorded inside Iraq for lack of independent media, I went on about my life as normal. I took pottery lessons, tennis lessons, painting lessons, and piano lessons with a French Catholic nun named Massier Camel. “Sabah al-kher!” my mother would say cheerfully at 7 A.M. “Good morning!” She was almost always happy in the mornings, before the events of the day would remind her of our cage. She would breeze in, open the curtains, brush the back of her hand lightly against my cheek, and kiss me awake. Sometimes she would sing, and if I complained about the farmhouse or a palace party, she would remind me to be grateful for what I had and suggest I look harder to see the beauty that was all around us. I had taken piano lessons since I was twelve from Massier Camel, and I took to practicing the piano for hours when I was home. Tick, tick, tick, tick, the rhythm of the metronome numbed me, yes, yum, yes, yum, and I was able to find escape in music as Baba did in his cockpit and Haider did in his computer games and household electronic appliances, which he patiently took apart and put back together. It was my mother’s dream that I learn to play the piano, which she had never studied, and she brought me stacks of sheet music, romantic songs mostly. Her favorite was “Love Story.” She asked me to play it over and over again.
Sometime in my sophomore year, my father told us that we were to pack for two days—bring tennis shoes, bathing suits, and homework if you’ve got it. The driver was on the way, so my brothers and I rushed upstairs to pack. I opened my top drawer and stared at my three bathing suits. I picked up the red one, then told myself I wasn’t going to swim. It wasn’t proper. I put the bathing suit back, packed the rest of my things, and ran back downstairs.
I don’t remember where we wound up that weekend except that the house was enormous
, and each family had its own wing. We had dinner by the lake—almost all Amo’s palaces had lakes—and he said, “Okay, everybody get their suits, let’s go swimming.” It was a beautiful night, and the water of the lake was a midnight blue, as smooth as a mirror until everyone came back a few minutes later and jumped in. Amo came back in his bathing suit, and I watched as he stood at the edge of the water and waited for a servant to remove his swimming robe and the group formed a semicircle so he could dive in. He stood there for a moment, and I remember thinking he was heavier than my father, who was still trim and athletic. Then, with a small flourish, he dove in. He was a strong swimmer. Everyone was splashing around in the water; then he turned around and looked back at me standing there on the shore in my long skirt.
“Zainab, why aren’t you swimming with us?” he said.
“I forgot my bathing suit!” I called back, using my planned-out excuse.
“How could you forget your bathing suit, Zainab?” Sarah said. “How silly of you! We were told to bring them!”
“Doesn’t matter, Zanooba, just go up to my room and put on one of mine with a T-shirt!” Amo said.
That stopped me. The thought of going into his room and putting on Amo’s swim trunks made my skin crawl. I couldn’t imagine pulling his clothing on my naked body, then coming back out with everyone looking at me.
“No, thank you, Amo.” I kept my resolve and called back politely, “I’ll just watch tonight.”
“Well then, just put on my dishdasha if you’re shy about wearing mine! It’s beautiful out here, isn’t it, everyone? Yala!”
“Yala! Yala!” everybody chimed in. Come on! Come on!
I saw my parents’ apprehensive faces in the water behind Amo. They were the only ones who weren’t calling to me, and I appreciated their silence. I’m not going to fall for this, I thought. I am not going to wear his clothes, not even an ankle-length dishdasha. A bathing suit was respectable for swimming. A dishdasha or a T-shirt would cling to me in the water. I was a young woman now, and I knew what that meant. I was not going to wear Amo’s clothes.
“Amo, I just really can’t swim today,” I called out finally, coming up with the only way I could to end the conversation. There was nothing he could say to a woman’s excuse.
But after the swimming was over, he came over to me later as he toweled off. “You missed a very nice experience tonight, Zainab. The water was beautiful.”
In August 1988, Amo declared victory against the Persian enemy, and eight years of war with Iran ended.
“So we got our territory from Iran?” I asked my mother.
“No, not really,” she said. “The borders are the same.”
“So nothing changed? What was the point of all those people dying?”
She made her opinion clear with a raised eyebrow.
Still, that was the most joyful day I ever saw in Baghdad. The city forgot to be afraid. People flooded out of their homes and into the street. There was music everywhere. People were dancing. You could hear the din all over the city. We drove downtown, and women were throwing water on the ground to usher in safety and baraka. A stranger from the crowd splashed water on our windshield and said, “I’ll wash windows all my life if I have to, anything not to go to the front! Thank you, God! Thank you it’s over at last!”
There was an official victory celebration at the palace, where two separate areas had been set up in the garden, one for the men’s celebration hosted by Amo, and another for the women’s celebration hosted by Aunt Sajida. There were huge long tables of food—stuffed meats, Iraqi dishes, and exotic fruits like mango, kiwi, and pineapple that I hadn’t seen in Baghdad in years. I happened to be standing near Amo’s daughter Raghad at the table, watching the entertainment and eating bourak, a famous Iraqi pastry filled with cheese that is a mix of Persian, Turkish, and Arab cuisine. Gypsy women were singing and dancing onstage in brilliant dresses of shiny greens and reds and yellows and purples. Their hair was black and straight and hung to their thighs as they danced to the music of drums and tambourines and string instruments I couldn’t name. Plump, with rounded bellies, they wore the heaviest makeup I had ever seen. Their cheeks were very red, and their lipstick thick and dark. Their eyes were almost black with shadow and mascara. Heavy gold earrings hung from their earlobes, and their arms and necks were ringed with bangles and jewelry that clinked as they danced.
Then they finished their routine and packed up their instruments and headed for the men’s area for their next performance.
“God only knows what they’ll do now,” Raghad commented as she watched the women walk off.
“Sing and dance?” I asked.
Raghad gave me a look that made me feel more naïve than I ever had in my life.
“Men like gypsy women, and my husband is in that men’s party,” she said. That was the only confidence she ever shared with me, though we had been together many times and were enrolled in the same college.
Amo had married her off to Hussain Kamel, the Tikriti man who tormented my father and terrorized much of Iraq, when she was just sixteen or seventeen. Everyone knew she had conditioned the marriage upon being able to complete her education. The uneducated Kamel had agreed, adding a condition of his own: a child a year for every year she spent in school. She was only two years older than I was, but she already had three children. I felt sorry for her that day. I asked my mother about the gypsy women later, and she explained to me that gypsies were nomads, so Amo had granted them citizenship. They too were “special files” open to a special kind of intimidation, I thought. He had sent the men to the front lines and kept their women in Baghdad to sing and dance in the palace.
One night when we were talking as usual on the back balcony of the French Institute, Ehab slowly pulled me toward him by the hand and hugged me. I looked up at his face, and he kissed me. It was my first kiss, and I had never experienced anything like it before. His lips were soft and incredible, and I felt almost weak with my first sense of what passion could bring. We had been together a year and a half before that first forbidden kiss. After that evening, we started talking about marriage, the children we would have and the life we would build together. We made a plan: I would open a translation service as soon as I finished school, and he would open a fabric store like his father, next to my office.
Baba, who had not even known about my relationship, was instantly and vehemently opposed once he heard. I was too young, the contrast between our two backgrounds was too large, Ehab couldn’t support my lifestyle. He hadn’t even finished his first year of university, though he was older than I was and I was now a sophomore. To my surprise, Mama failed to back me up. I cried for days on end. I refused to eat. I told Mama and Baba they would never see my smile again because without Ehab I would never find happiness.
“You always told me that I should marry for love, Mama!” I told her angrily after a month of suffering. “Now that I’ve found the man I love, you’ve changed your mind. Tell me, Mama, do you believe in love or not? Do you still want me to marry for love, or have you turned into Aunt Nada and want to marry me off to a rich man like Luma?”
I must have hurt her terribly with that. I had seen how hard she struggled to keep something of the old Alia alive inside her, and a part of that core was a belief in love.
Finally, she changed her mind, and though it took two months, she somehow managed to get Baba to invite Ehab to our house. I waited nervously for Baba’s verdict after they had tea together alone in our garden.
“He wears way too much cologne,” Baba declared. “I don’t like him. I think he is the wrong man for you, but if you’re going to kill yourself if I don’t approve, then you give me no choice.”
Hardly a resounding endorsement, but I had his approval. He said he had to ask Amo for his approval, and Ehab and I had to wait nervously for six weeks before he cleared a security investigation.
In Iraq, the engagement process starts with the women of the groom’s family paying a formal visit to the
home of the bride and asking her mother and other women of the family for the bride’s hand in marriage. Special pastries called klache, made of dates and cardamom, are served by the future bride, who is expected to be demure and polite and represent her family with dignity. Mama ordered the klache and flowers and made a freshly squeezed pomegranate juice for the occasion.
When the day came, my aunts arrived in their latest fashions, perfect makeup and hairdos and perfumes. Ehab’s mother and three sisters and several aunts whooshed into our house in old-fashioned black, baggy clothes, full abayas, and no makeup. Ehab’s mother, a chubby, not very tall woman with a bland face, rushed forward and grabbed me in her arms. I fumbled as I tried to kiss her politely on each cheek, while she blanketed my face with unrestrained kisses. She was far more expressive than my mother and my aunts, who welcomed my future in-laws with greetings that were polite, but reserved. There could scarcely have been a bigger difference between women who spoke the same language, I thought, while I watched glances darting back and forth across the room, as the two sets of women studied each other.