Between Two Worlds

by Zainab Salbi

  I took my seat between them and served Turkish coffee as Ehab’s mother began the traditional appeal requesting my hand in marriage. I had heard these appeals before. Strangers had come to our house before asking for my hand, and Mama and I had politely entertained them because we were expected to, only to laugh later at the thought I would consider marrying a man I didn’t know. As Ehab’s mother promised to guarantee my happiness, spoil me like her own daughter, provide whatever I needed or wanted, and support me in the lifestyle to which I was accustomed, I noticed Ehab’s eldest sister surveying the furniture and staring at the family photographs on the wall. She had never been in a house such as ours before, and it was clear to all of us that our family would have to support us if we were to live in the manner to which I was accustomed. Aunt Samer looked over at me quizzically, and we exchanged surreptitious glances. See? I told her with my eyes. I heard what you were telling me in the pool at the Hunting Club; Amo didn’t poison my values after all.

  Aunt Najwa came up to me afterward and asked me a single blunt question: “What on earth are you getting yourself into, Zainab?”

  A few weeks later, a caravan of cars drove up into our cul-de-sac and out stepped a dozen men, including tribal sheikhs. They strode into our house with a sense of command, in traditional dishdashas, shoulder abayas of fine handmade wool woven with gold, and white head cloths held in place with black bands. They shook hands with the men of my family, all in suits, and seated themselves in a circle in the garden. I watched nervously with the other women through the parlor window as Ehab’s father and the highest ranking tribal elder completed the men’s part of the ceremony that would seal our engagement. Each man recited poetry and Quranic verses about marriage that he knew by heart, including the Quranic phrase “And among his signs is that he has created spouses from among yourselves so that you may rest in them and initiate love and mercy among all of you.” Baba, looking polite but ill at ease, wasn’t equipped with memorized verses. Instead, he told them that I was dear to his heart and that he wanted nothing but my happiness and for God to bless my marriage with Ehab. When they finished, all the men ran the palms of their hands over their faces, read Al Fateha, the first chapter of the Quran, and shook hands, which was my signal to go out to serve each one a special juice from a large tray. As I served Baba, I saw on his face how hard it had been for him to go through with this. When I smiled at him reassuringly and gave him a kiss, he looked away.

  For the engagement party, our garden filled with the smell of cooking and flowers reminiscent of my childhood. Radya came back to help. We had become good friends over the years, and I had been excited for her as she told me about the neighbor she had fallen in love with. She had finished high school, gotten married, and asked my father to help her husband get a job as a clerk at the airport. My mother was so excited about her wedding that she gave Radya her own wedding gown to be married in. Yet when I saw her that day, she was pregnant with her first child and was struggling with her-in-laws in the small house where she and her husband lived with his siblings. “Love is beautiful but life is hard when you and your husband don’t have money,” she told me.

  The engagement party is traditionally a woman’s event, and when it began, I stood with my aunts and friends in the garden as children came in bearing a Quran and my engagement ring, as well as a necklace, earrings, bracelet, and ring that Ehab had chosen for me as an engagement gift. Then came Ehab himself, handsome and elegant, followed by seven women from his family, each bearing traditional baskets of symbolic gifts for me of fabrics, perfumes, flowers, and sweets. Ehab and I danced together that night for the very first time, in front of everyone. Then he picked up the microphone and recited a love poem he had written for me. He looked over at me as he spoke, and I welled up with love and emotion. All my girlfriends were in tears at how handsome and romantic he was.

  “Zainab, you did it!” Sarah said, congratulating me with a real hug. “You’re marrying for love!”

  On the other side of the garden, past the women in the black abayas, I took in the looks of disapproval on the faces of my mother and her friends. Ehab’s poem had scandalized them. It was virtually a public admission of illicit dating. Nothing about him—his family, his financial prospects, his lack of a university degree, his seemingly backward tribal ties—matched their expectations. I didn’t care. I will not be like you, I told them with a look. I will not live my life as you live yours.

  I was happy that night. Mama was miserable.

  “Zainab, do you know what Aunt Nada told me?” she said the next day. “She said, ‘Alia, how could you even think of marrying your daughter to such a man? What are you doing? You’ve gone too far with your liberal ideas. It’s your daughter’s life we’re talking about.’ ”

  She smiled at me, then asked one more time, “Zainab, are you sure?”

  I took it as just another sign she was capitulating to the farmhouse crowd.

  A week after the party, a palace guard drove up with a new light green Mitsubishi. Baba brought in the keys in and registration papers and gave them to me.

  “Your engagement present from Amo,” he said. “The only pistachio-colored car in Iraq.”

  Automobiles were imported by the government, and almost every one of them except the black Mercedes was white. No one except my family and Ehab knew who had given the green car to me, and I loved driving it around Baghdad; it quickly felt like my signature. When I took Ehab out for a ride one day, however, he told me we should sell it and use the money to open his fabric store.

  “But I don’t want to sell it, Ehab,” I said. “It is a gift to me.”

  “I will buy you a smaller, older car and we can use the money to invest in our future,” he said.

  “But it would be impolite to sell it so soon after receiving it,” I insisted.

  After our engagement was formalized, we were now expected to appear together as a couple, and Ehab grew more assertive in his role as my future husband. The first night we went out to a social engagement together, with a Cuban doctor sent to Amo by Fidel Castro, he got suddenly jealous and insisted on sitting next to me. He wasn’t accustomed to seeing me laugh with another single man. He wasn’t accustomed to seating arrangements.

  He had simply been brought up differently than I had. One evening we got into a serious discussion about Sunni and Shia history and who had the right to rule Muslims after the death of the Prophet Mohammed, and I said I didn’t understand why an event that happened thirteen hundred years ago should continue to be a source of hatred between Muslims. My mother had taught me—and Shia believe—that Ali, a cousin of Mohammed and his favorite son-in-law, had been tricked out of his right to lead all Muslims and later killed so the trickster could take over.

  “If Ali got tricked by politicians, then it was his fault,” Ehab told me. “All politicians play tricky politics, and how you win doesn’t matter. If Ali lost, then he just proved he didn’t deserve to lead Muslims. You know, lots lot of people think Shia have tails.”

  Tails? I couldn’t believe I was hearing this from him. Just as some Christians in the West used to think Jews had horns, some Sunni apparently thought Shia had tails. Aunt Samer had just told me she had been in the sauna with friends at the Hunting Club and one woman, who had no idea she was Shia, casually mentioned that Shia were known to have tails. Aunt Samer stood up, dropped her towel, and bent over.

  “Here’s my butt,” she said. “Take a good look. I am Shia. Look! Do I have a tail?”

  I didn’t understand such hatred and ignorance. Shiites were the ones who had been oppressed and victimized, and they didn’t hate Sunnis with the same sort of passion some Sunnis hated them. Ehab obviously didn’t believe such stories, but he had little respect for Shia. Samarra was a tribal Sunni stronghold that was best known, ironically, for a historic Shia mosque. The mosque is dedicated to Al Mahdi, the only one of twelve descendants of Ali and Fatima who was not believed to have been murdered. He is a Messiah-like figure to observant Sh
ia, who make pilgrimages to the mosque to pray for his return. Some Samarra Sunni resented the constant pilgrimages of Shia into their midst, and Ehab apparently was one of them.

  “I hate the Shia!” Ehab said in an outburst one afternoon. “They should all be killed! I’d like to go to Najaf someday and just kill them all off.”

  His sudden expression of hatred shocked me. I had spent time with many Sunnis, and I had never heard anything like it. I knew Amo hated Shia, but even he didn’t talk this way, at least not around me.

  “I am a Shia, Ehab,” I said angrily. “So, you think I should be killed too?”

  He immediately took my hand and said, “Oh no, my darling. Not you, you are different. You are special.”

  To this day, I am angry at myself for letting that moment pass and not standing up to his zealotry, but I was so in love I didn’t see that the man I was engaged to was not quite the student poet I had fallen in love with. In our romantic trysts at the French Institute, he used to condemn Amo and the palace insiders I was anxious to escape. Now he was anxious to meet them. I had been willing to overlook the class differences between us, but he clearly hadn’t. As I prepared to leave for America with my mother to buy my wedding dress, he handed me a long list of gifts I was to buy for all of his family members, neighbors, friends, and colleagues. While we were in Chicago, Ehab kept calling and asking me to stay home rather than go out with my family. He kept adding to the list of gifts he wanted me to buy, even including presents for friends’ wives. He seemed to think he was entitled as my future husband to tell me what to do even though I was thousands of miles away, and I began to resent it. When he called and I wasn’t there, he would leave angry messages on the answering machine.

  When I stepped up to model a wedding dress in a three-way mirror, Mama kept needling me about him.

  “Such a pity for all of this beauty to go to a man who does not deserve you,” she said.

  “Please, Mama, leave me alone,” I begged her. But inside I was starting to feel afraid. Did he really think he had the right to control my movements? What about my thoughts? What was the point of marrying him if the freedom I so desperately wanted would be taken away in the name of love?

  “He’s crazy, Zainab,” she said. “He’s obsessive. You’ve got to break this off! Never let any man control you or abuse you!”

  I had been hearing that line ever since I was small and a cook’s daughter had confided to me that her stepfather had molested her. As I grew older and Amo’s control over our lives became ever stronger, Mama had become more adamant. One afternoon, when we got back from shopping, I finally heard Ehab’s obsession on the answering machine. This time there were seven messages, the last one ordering me to return home immediately. His tone of voice actually scared me. I imagined what it would be like to have a husband who talked to me like that for the rest of my life. He was like Heathcliff after all, obsessive and controlling and jealous.

  I told Mama I was calling off the engagement and burst into tears. Had I been so desperate to escape Amo that I had run from one captor into the arms of another? That I had allowed myself to love a man who hated if not me, people like me, people like my grandmother? I couldn’t believe how bad my judgment had been. When I called Ehab from Chicago to tell him of my decision, he went mad and refused to accept a breakup. I agreed to meet him in person to give back his engagement presents, but when I met him in Baghdad, he threatened to take me to a cleric near Samarra who would perform the wedding ceremony against my will. Then he started stalking me around Baghdad. Everywhere I went, he would follow me, and my family grew worried for my safety. Baba decided to ask for help. He gave up only after Baba went to talk to him with one of Amo’s security guards.

  I have never been so grateful for loving, supportive parents as I was after that breakup. I was devastated after the engagement fell through. I was so despondent I didn’t want to leave the house. I had publicly humiliated myself, my mother, and my father. Nobody ever said I told you so, but that’s what everyone else I knew was thinking. People were polite enough, but they looked at me as if to say, Okay, you had your fun, your little experiment, and it didn’t work. We knew it wouldn’t all along, but you had to learn the hard way and embarrass your whole family as well. Now you’ve come back, and you realize you’re just like us—which made me feel lonelier than ever. The only escape route I knew had turned out to be a mirage, and I completely lost faith in my own instincts. I was tired of arguing and tired of being the one who didn’t fit in.

  “Mama, will you help dress me up for Uday’s engagement party?” I asked her. I planned those words out in advance so as to make her happy, and it worked. Baba had brought me a bolt of yellow silk from Thailand, and we took it to a dressmaker. It was the late 1980s, and excess was fashionable. When I put on the yellow dress the night of the party, I felt the big pouffy sleeves sticking out from my shoulders and the stiff new fabric of the waltz-length skirt sticking out around my legs. I sat down at my mother’s vanity table for her to put makeup on me, and I remember looking at her in the mirror the way another woman might, appraising her carefully applied foundation, her dark eye shadow, her shiny dress, and her freshly set hair. Why had she stopped wearing her hair long? I missed her long free-swinging hair. I felt her hand steady my chin as she applied mascara on my eyes and blush on my cheeks and a touch of lipstick on my mouth. I looked at myself in the mirror, but the smile I saw was hers, not mine. I felt I was taking the first step toward my own surrender.

  When we walked into the hall that night, I felt like a champion horse she was showing off to the world, saying, Here is my daughter. Look at her. She is beautiful. She fits in. She is not different from you after all. All around me, women were clapping to the music with lipstick smiles and hair-sprayed hair and shiny faces and dresses. I looked like them, but I felt like a gift package all wrapped up in bows, delivered to the wrong address. I could feel the weight of the makeup on my face, like a mask hiding the real me underneath. I saw Mama laughing and dancing and wondered whether she was really enjoying herself or just pretending. When Uday walked in wearing his white tuxedo, women flocked around him like fans around a rock star. His future bride looked beautiful and innocent as she danced around him. I knew her. I liked her. She was a decent person. But she was also the daughter of the vice president, and her father had arranged this engagement for political reasons. How could any man do that to his own daughter? I wondered, knowing my own father would never do such a thing. How could these people celebrate her betrothal to the rapist of Baghdad? I knew most of them were family, his aunts and sisters, but didn’t they take any responsibility for raising such a son? How could they ignore what a monster he was?

  Uday later broke off the engagement. I was silently grateful it had happened, for her sake. But what people gossiped about was this: what had she done wrong to lose such a catch?

  One day when I was still recovering from Ehab, my mother told me with a great deal of excitement that she had gotten a call from Fakhri’s mother in America: her son wanted to marry me. She was so excited. Her eyes were shining. I hadn’t seen her look this happy in a long time.

  “Fakhri? Who is Fakhri?” I asked. I had no idea who she was talking about.

  “Oh, you remember! You met him in Chicago!”

  She reminded me of an older man I barely spoke to at a large gathering I had attended when I had gone to America to get the wedding dress.

  “La, la, la, Mama,” I said, lightly at first. “No, no, no, Mama.”

  She couldn’t be serious. But she was.

  “Mama, I don’t want to go through that again,” I said. “I just want to focus on my studies and that is all. No men for now.”

  “Oh, habibiti, don’t let one bad experience color how you look at all marriage proposals, especially good ones like this,” she said.

  “What are you talking about, Mama? I can’t just jump into another engagement. I need a break, Mama. I was with Ehab for two years. I need some time for myself
before I can think of this whole marriage thing again.”

  “He lives in America, Zainab,” she reminded me.

  “But, Mama, I don’t even know him!”

  And it began to dawn on me how very serious she was. She looked at me imploringly, so very sadly. As if she had invested every ounce of energy in this offer to help save me from winding up as she was now.

  “Look around you, Zainab,” she said slowly. “Can’t you see the bars?”

  And I followed her eyes as she scanned the walls and the furniture and the glass patio doors leading out to our garden.

  “They’re invisible, but they are everywhere. It is a big country, but every day for the past ten years of my life I have felt the bars of this prison around me. This is your chance, honey. Take it. Don’t stay here and be like me. Escape. This is your chance to be free.”

  That was such a painful and confusing moment. She was urging me to go against everything she had ever taught me to believe about love and marriage, but she was also showing me that she hadn’t surrendered the core of her being after all. She had long ago stopped begging Baba to leave. But she was still aware of the hell we were living in. She had surrendered her own hopes of freedom, but she had never lost hope of helping me find mine.

  “Who is he, anyway?” I asked.

  And she started going on about how he was a successful businessman with a master’s degree who lived in Chicago, a man from a good Shia family who had fled Iraq in the early 1980s, when I was just starting junior high school.

  “How old is he?”

  “Well, he’s a little old,” she admitted. “Thirty-three.”

  “Are you kidding, Mama? He’s thirteen years older than I am!”

  “Zainab, you tried the love route and it didn’t work,” she said. “Has it occurred to you that maybe that was for the best? You deserve more out of life than the future you can have here. You want a career, you want to see the world, you want freedom to do what you want to do and to say what you want to say. How can you ever find any of those things here? Trust me, habibiti. Take this chance, Zainab. Live the life I can’t.”