by Zainab Salbi
We signed the standard marriage contract, a form with blanks for the dowry and signatures and, ten days later, on the arm of my new husband, I walked into our wedding reception. Two hundred people celebrated in a rented hall. I knew very few of them. I put on my plastic smile, greeted them, and danced with my husband. He had a victorious look on his face, as if he had caught a big fish.
We had a suite in a hotel that night and planned to have breakfast with our parents the next day before leaving for a honeymoon in Hawaii. I was nervous about the wedding night. I went to him in my new nightgown feeling shy. I had never had sex before, but I also knew how a kiss can melt the heart. He asked me to lie on the bed and spread my legs apart. I did. Then he suddenly was on top of me, an uncomfortable stranger pressing into me. He didn’t say anything. There was no kiss, no caress at all, no tenderness or effort to help me relax. There were just humiliating shoves and then he stopped. I felt hurt and invaded, but there was no blood on the sheets; we each looked. I knew that in some parts of rural Iraq, men still had to produce the marital bedsheets with virginal blood or the bride’s entire family was shamed. Our family was far more sophisticated than that, and my mother the biology teacher had explained to me that there isn’t always blood.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “Come on, open up! I’m sure you know how.”
“What? What are you talking about?” I said. “How could you say that to me, Fakhri?”
“Well, you’re not a virgin,” he said. “No blood came out.”
“I am a virgin, Fakhri,” I said. “But, just so you know, there doesn’t have to be blood to show you’re a virgin. It depends on the woman.”
“Well, I don’t know what you are, but you are not a virgin,” he said, and he turned over. “I’m going to sleep.”
I can’t even describe all the feelings that passed through me in waves that night. Alone, wide awake, I lay there in the dark trying to figure out what I had done wrong. My mother’s anatomical drawings had not prepared me for this. I was a virgin. The closest I had come to sex was kissing Ehab. But I remembered hearing stories of girls losing their virginity through sports accidents, and I searched back through my memory, trying to think of a time I might have injured myself without knowing it. Was there something else I was supposed to do? I moved as far away from the man next to me as I could and curled up on the edge of the bed like a child, holding my confusion and fears within as I realized that this was only the first of thousands more nights to follow.
The next morning, when our parents came to have breakfast with us and take us to the airport, I managed to take Mama aside.
“Are you sure what you have told me about blood is correct, Mama?”
“Yes, honey, but from what you are describing, I don’t think you had sex.”
Only a virgin would have failed to understand that her husband had impugned her innocence to cover up his own inability to perform.
We flew to Hawaii for our honeymoon, but the only beauty I saw there was a deep blue horizon that made me wish I were far away. Other newlyweds, langorous and in love, celebrated with tropical drinks and intimate hugs in the Jacuzzi. Their happiness only made me feel sad and isolated. Almost the only time Fakhri was kind to me was when we were in front of others and they took pictures of us and made ooh and ahh sounds when he told them we were on our honeymoon. When we were alone, I felt as though I had married an entirely different person than the man who had listened to me so attentively before the religious ceremony. They had buffets at the hotel, and he lied so we could eat free, claiming he had lost complimentary tickets that came with some show. Then he told me to eat as much as I could at the buffet so I could get all the food I needed for the day. I was shocked and embarrassed. This was not the world I had come from. I had been taught honesty since birth and trained never to lie or steal. Now I was married to a man who did both of these things and was rude and cheap as well. At night, he started telling me I wasn’t “womanly” and didn’t know how to please a man.
The third or fourth night of my honeymoon I couldn’t even stay in the same bed with him. I lay on the sofa and cried. Love comes after marriage, I kept reminding myself. If Luma and others had managed to be happy, I told myself, why couldn’t I? It was just getting to know each other that was hard. I tried and tried to think of a way out of my quandary. I contemplated my own failure to be womanly. What was I doing wrong? I felt none of the pleasure my mother had told me about, and I certainly wasn’t wearing the kind of smile on my face that I came to recognize on hers after I knew she’d had sex with my dad. I thought that if I could just prove to him that I was a virgin, he would treat me better. I tried imagining that this painful trial period was over and that I had somehow learned to love him. What would I do when that day came? How would I behave? A small, logical answer came to me: I would kiss him. The next night, I went to the bed, kissed him, and tried as hard as I could to imagine that I loved him. By the end of the evening I had my proof; there was blood on the sheets.
He was happy when he saw that blood.
“So you are a virgin after all,” he said with a laugh.
I was relieved, but confused. I actually looked at the bedsheet with spots of blood and considered taking it with me as proof, doing the same thing that my mother and I always ridiculed Amo’s village family for doing. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. He never mentioned the subject of my virginity again, and he began treating me more nicely.
We talked for a while about how to make marriage work. I was nervous about the impact his parents, particularly his mother, might have on our marriage. I had often heard stories about in-laws interfering in a couple’s life, and I wanted to make certain that didn’t happen to us. Fakhri agreed, and we promised each other that we would abide by a rule in our marriage: to keep our problems to ourselves and not involve our families. But I was surprised when we got back to Chicago to find he had other rules in mind as well. He informed me as he was dressing to go to work for the first time that I was to get up with him, make him breakfast, and press a shirt for him each morning. He brought the iron into the bedroom and began to recite my wifely duties as he plugged it in. He gave me a twenty-dollar bill and told me that was my allowance for the week.
“Twenty dollars?” I asked, staring in shock at the bill in my hand.
“That should be more than enough for your needs.”
He kept the keys to the car he had presented me at the airport and handed me keys instead to a car that turned out to be so old and battered it barely ran. We also had an argument about my education. I told him that I wanted to enroll in certain classes to help me prepare for my exams in Iraq, and he told me he thought it was a waste of time for me to get a college degree and recommended that I get a real estate license instead so I could start making money.
He was going back on everything he had promised in our little talk before the religious ceremony, and I had no proof it had ever even happened. I reminded him of our agreement, and he responded that he was abiding by it; I was welcome to do whatever things I chose to do as long as I performed first the wifely duties that we both understood superseded them. I was to be his wife, keep his house, and start giving him children as soon as I got my real estate license. I argued and I protested, but what was my alternative? If I called my parents, they would just get into more fights with each other and suggest I at least give the marriage a chance. We compromised on the education front. He agreed to give me enough money to enroll in two classes at a local community college, and I agreed to take a real estate course along with an English writing course in preparation for my finals in Baghdad.
Finally, I theorized that if I could prove I could do the house-work the way I had proved I was a virgin, he would meet me halfway. My shirts never looked like Radya’s, but I ironed. I cooked, though he ridiculed my painstaking efforts every night at the dinner table, sometimes in front of guests. I felt poor and vulnerable and utterly dependent on him, both financially and emotionally. When I
asked him for more money midweek, he made me recite everything I’d spent the first twenty dollars on and criticized me for wasting money on two greeting cards for friends in Iraq.
I began to feel I had escaped prison in Iraq only to wind up in solitary confinement in Chicago. I felt depressed and trapped. I looked around my apartment and thought of the farmhouse and did now what I had done then: I read. With no money and no one to talk to, I turned to Danielle Steel. There were so many of her paperbacks in the used bookstore near our house, I could only hope they would last me until I learned the secret of how to love a husband who didn’t seem to care about loving me. Danielle Steel wrote about women in abusive relationships, and in the end she rewarded them by setting them free. Actually, I’m not sure now if that’s what her books were about; I do know that is what I read into them.
We had been married a little over a month when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, whose oil fields Iraq had historically laid claim to, setting off an international showdown that would lead to the Gulf War five months later, in January 1991. I found out about the invasion over dinner at Fakhri’s parents’ house. Instead of launching another invective against Amo across the dinner table in my direction that night, my father-in-law announced that he had just called the Iraqi embassy and left a message saying congratulations! Kuwaitis are the Arabs that Iraqis and many other Arabs love to hate. In Baghdad, what we saw of Kuwait was arrogant rich sheiks who came to Baghdad to spend their ill-gotten gains on Iraqi prostitutes and Iraqi property, driving up the prices for both. This resentment of Kuwaitis was so ingrained, it trumped even Fakhri’s father’s hatred of Saddam. There would be time enough to get rid of Saddam after he did the dirty work of retrieving Kuwait.
All I could think was What? Another war? We just finished one! So many people were dead, so many. I believed you when you said loved Iraq, Amo. But if you do, why are you taking your people into another war? What’s the point? Why are you doing this?
Almost immediately, the White House began issuing ultimatums. Iraq was on the news almost every night, and Fakhri and I were watching television when a news report came on talking about a secret gassing that had killed thousands of Kurds a few years before. As the scenes I remembered from Lana’s description flashed across my mind, Fakhri pointed a finger at the television set and stared at me as if I were responsible. “Look what a criminal your Amo is!” he said. I didn’t say anything. I was fresh from Iraq. Fakhri still did not understand—or did not care to find out—that I called him “Amo” not out of affection, but because I was afraid to say his name—Saddam Hussein—out loud. I knew Amo had spies everywhere. I didn’t know who his spies were in this community. I didn’t trust anyone, including, for that matter, my husband.
A few weeks after the invasion, my father was able to call me when he was on a trip outside Iraq. Fakhri answered the telephone and immediately began complaining about me to him, about how I wasn’t a good enough housewife or something to that effect—as my anger boiled. It felt as if he were complaining to a merchant who had sold him bad produce. How dare he do that to my father? To me? What had happened to our agreement to work out our marital issues on our own?
I had never heard anything as gentle and warm as Baba’s voice when Fakhri finally handed me the phone.
“Are you all right, honey?” he asked me. I just wanted to fly into his arms for protection. If only I had taken his advice and refused to marry Fakhri, this nightmare wouldn’t be happening. But I couldn’t tell him how miserable I was. Fakhri was sitting nearby, and I felt strongly that I had to take responsibility for making my marriage work. There was nothing Baba could do to help me.
“I miss you a lot, Baba,” I said. “I wish I could come and visit you in Baghdad.”
“You can’t right now, honey,” he said. “They’ve closed the borders. You can come visit once things have calmed down again.”
Then he paused and said, “All new marriages are hard, Zainab. Just be patient and take care of yourself until we see you again.”
Then, to lighten things up, he jokingly added a comment he used to make about marriage in Iraq.
“You know what I always say, Zainab. Marriage is like a barrel that is filled half with honey and half with shit,” he said. “You can start by eating the honey and then deal with the shit part later, or you can start with the shit and end up with the honey part. I suggest you mix them up. That’s the secret of a successful marriage.”
I giggled politely. He was famous for that bit of advice, which often made adults laugh. Now he was giving it to me. When I hung up, I tried to remember to be patient and look for the honey. How patient, though? Love may come after marriage, but how long does it take? I set a deadline: a year. I would give the marriage one year. If it didn’t work then, no one would say I hadn’t tried.
Looking back on it, I realize I was also in culture shock. I had assumed the transition to America would be easy; I felt comfortable with Americans, and after all my father’s summer training at Boeing, I considered Seattle my second home. But the people in Fakhri’s community were like neither the Americans nor the Iraqis I knew. They were Shia businessman and professionals like Uncle Adel’s neighbors, who had been deported, leaving their dreams behind to rust in the rain with boxes of factory machinery. Some had lost everything. Others, like Fakhri’s family had managed to flee before being dispossessed. A decade later, this was where they had wound up, heels dug into round-the-clock jobs, doing their best to educate their children, and embracing, more fervently than most ever had in Iraq, the religion for which they had been persecuted.
The only person I found to talk with was a young Iraqi woman about my age who had come to America from Iran. Also lonely, also married to a much older man, she came from a prominent family that had been deported from Baghdad not long before the Mukhabarat came after my mother’s family. This was the first time I had ever heard a firsthand story of what had happened to a deportee, and I absorbed her tears like a sponge. Secret police had shown up at their door at midnight and given them fifteen minutes to pack a suitcase. In the dark they were boarded onto buses for the Iranian border along with hundreds of other Baghdad residents “of Iranian origin.” They were force-marched for days in freezing weather so they could be “returned” to Iran. When they bedded down at night in the freezing desert, Iraqi soldiers sauntered among them with rifles, singling out young girls and women to rape. The young woman’s parents tried to hide her and her sister under blankets. Soldiers found them anyway, and her father bribed them to spare his daughters. After leaving her family penniless, the soldiers just moved down the line and raped other girls whose fathers weren’t rich enough to save them. Faced with a sudden refugee crisis ignored by the outside world, Iran housed the Iraqis in makeshift refugee camps for months before finally allowing them to go to Tehran to try to make a life for themselves among Iranians who saw them as citizens of the country with which they were at war. This young woman’s family had scrimped for years to send their daughter out of Iran. Her salvation was an older man she still barely knew who was about to be the father of her child. She might have been me, I thought. Amo had saved us and punished her instead.
Fakhri’s community had good reason to hate Amo, and his family in particular was very bitter. To them I was a “friend of Saddam” who had shared his palaces while they suffered. Fakhri never let me forget that. He would pick up one of my things and sneer in a whiny voice, “Oh, did you get this as another perk of being Saddam’s friend?” The sad part was that I could see other professional couples who had made successful, loving marriages out of engagements facilitated by their parents or elders. Fakhri, on the other hand, seemed to see me as a kind of mail order bride, like the lonely girl from Iran, like thousands of other young immigrant brides streaming into the United States from oppressed countries worldwide. I was supposed to be not only obedient and amenable to spousal training, but grateful for the opportunity—a toxic mix of American arrogance and Arab machismo.
I s
ometimes felt that when he looked at my face, he saw Saddam Hussein’s instead. I began to suspect he was using our marriage to make up for that inequity. Your friends are your friends because of who I am, I thought one night as my tears dropped into the dishwater, making a crinkling sound in the suds. My enemies are my enemies because of who you are too, Baba, I thought bitterly. I was the daughter of the pilot of Saddam Hussein, and Fakhri was doing to me in bed what the whole exile community wanted to do to Amo. I tried to put out of my mind the short ugly English swear words he used each night as he fucked me. Fuck you, fuck you, he would say as I prayed for morning. To him I might have been a piece of wood, stiff and dry.
I understood the concept of a wife meeting her husband’s sexual needs. That was culturally Arab. I later found out that there is enormous confusion between cultural and religious issues and that Islam is very explicit about sexual pleasure being the responsibility of both marital partners, which was what my mother had told me. I tried to talk with Fakhri about sex, but he only got angry. Finally, I called his mother, feeling that if he had violated our one marriage rule, I could too, especially if it was in the name of helping our marriage succeed. I thought that as a woman she would understand and explain to him that a woman needs to be treated gently. She invited me to tea, and I broached the topic obliquely after the traditional courtesies. But my woman-to-woman tact yielded only an outburst of exclamations accompanied by arm waving. “What are you talking about?” she scolded, gesticulating dramatically over the teacups, her voice sliding up and down. “It is your wifely dooo-ty to satisfy my son’s needs! As a good wife, you must be prepared to satisfy your husband’s sexual needs at any time. His needs come first—did your mother not teach you this? Tell me, do you bathe before bedtime and put on perfume? Do you do up your hair and put on sexy lingerie before you walk around the bed seven times to offer yourself to him?” This went on for two hours, until she finally ran out of breath. The only thing I could think of to say as I left, as politely as I could manage, was “I’m sorry, but I disagree.”