Between Two Worlds

by Zainab Salbi

  Was she kidding? Walk around the bed seven times displaying myself to Fakhri? What she was describing was slavery. I learned later that there apparently are places where this circumnavigation of the marital bed is actually practiced, but I doubted it was in my mother-in-law’s own bedroom; she complained constantly about her husband behind his back when I went with her to some women’s gatherings. So very different from my mother’s parties, these gatherings were all about religion and wifely duties. Sometimes I thought they were discussing a different religion than the one I was taught. Where was the dividing line between being a good wife and allowing your husband to control or abuse you? Were women worth less than men? How many men gathered to discuss their husbandly duties?

  Three months after our wedding was my twenty-first birthday. My present from Fakhri was $50 and a new bedtime accusation I didn’t even understand: I was now a “whore” who was no longer “tight” in my vagina. The next time we quarreled, I refused to have sex with him. He screamed at me and threw me down on the bed. Then he flipped me over onto my stomach and forced my head into the pillow. He held my head down and started penetrating me from behind, hurting me as he had never hurt me before. “Fuck you,” he cursed, again and again. I cried into the pillowcase until my voice disappeared. I couldn’t breathe, and I was afraid I was going to die of suffocation. I vividly remember how powerless I felt. Finally, I consciously stopped resisting and took my soul away, leaving my body an empty shell for him to abuse so he only had the illusion of power over me. In some painful faraway place, I counted each second until he finished. Then he got up, put on his clothes, and walked away as if I were a piece of dirt he was leaving behind.

  I hobbled out of bed and turned on the shower. I stayed in the white plastic enclosure for an hour, sobbing and trembling in pain. Ightisab, I thought in Arabic. Rape.

  When I finally came out, Fakhri told me to get dressed because we were going out to dinner with his mother. That was when I broke. I hated him! I would never love him! I screamed at him. I flailed at him with my fists, and when he tried to hold my arms down again, I bit him on his forearm. “Domestic violence!” he shouted and called 911. He really did. I didn’t know what domestic violence meant. It just seemed ludicrous that a grown man, much larger than I, would call 911 and say, “My wife bit me” after what he had done to me. I ran into the bedroom, locked the door behind me, and packed one bag with my best clothes, my mother’s jewelry, and my $400 in cash. When the police arrived and I finally came out of the bedroom, his mother was actually sitting in the living room, waiting for us to go out to dinner. Fakhri tried to tell them I had attacked him, that he was the victim.

  “Look, she bit me here,” he said, trying to show the police a bite mark on his arm that hadn’t even pierced the skin. “You need to take her to the station so she can learn a lesson.”

  “Yes, I bit him,” I told the police. “I’m ready to go with you.” On the way out to the police car, the policeman asked me gently if I was in love with someone else. “No” I answered. “Did he hurt you, then?” he asked. I didn’t answer immediately, then murmured a soft no. I wasn’t about to tell a strange man, let alone a policeman, about my sex life. It never occurred to me to talk to police; the only police I had ever met terrified me. I just asked to call my mother’s friend when we arrived at the station, and she came to pick me up. The next day, while Fakhri was at work, she drove me back to the apartment. We packed my clothes, my Persian rug, and the wedding china my mother had given me. Everything else, including all the wedding gifts, I walked away from.

  “Take the bedsheets,” she said.

  Why do I laugh remembering this when it was really so tragic?

  “What am I going to do with the bedsheets?”

  “Okay, just take the pillowcase,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “To be mean to him, to remind him when he comes home that you’re gone and that it was you that left him.”

  A small, satisfying act of revenge only a woman would think of. I liked it. I walked over to the bed and stripped my pillow of its beige-flowered pillowcase and green border. Taking it was the only act of my marriage that honestly gave me pleasure. I still have it. A reminder that I had learned the lesson my mother had taught before I left Baghdad: never let any man abuse you; always be a free spirit.

  When I walked out of Fahkri’s life, I was injured and angry and I hated men. All men. I swore to myself that I would get into no more relationships with men. Both of the men I had become involved with had promised to love and care for me, and I had trusted them. But they both had hidden agendas. Neither was what he appeared at first. Both were hypocrites who had lied to me to trap me and control me. The other two major male figures in my life were Amo, who had controlled and abused millions of people, and my father, who was a loving man, but whose wife felt so caged in that she had tried to kill herself to escape. Did I mention that there were more suicide attempts than just that one when I was little? That I worried about her sometimes when she went near the medicine cabinet?

  I really, really, really wanted to go home. I felt so homesick it hurt. I just wanted to go back to school where I belonged and pretend these awful months never happened. But I couldn’t even contact my mother to tell her I had left Fakhri. All communications had been cut off. I tried to call home hundreds of times, but the calls wouldn’t go through. Mail service was cut off too, so I couldn’t write. I still had my return business class ticket, but no international flights were permitted into Iraq. (Baba, I later found out, had flown his fleet of civilian airliners to Tehran for safekeeping in case the airport was bombed.) The only way I could get home was through Jordan, but I knew no one there and was afraid of being stranded with no money. With nowhere to go, I finally called an uncle of my father’s in Los Angeles, and he invited me to stay with his family. I wrote a letter then to Mama telling her I had left Fakhri and where I was going. I sent it the only way I could think of: with an address in Amman, Jordan, on the front in English and a message on the back in Arabic saying, “To the people of Jordan: I ask for your generosity and kindness for delivering this letter to my beloved mother at this address in Baghdad, with many thanks from her loving daughter, who is stranded in America.”

  When I arrived in Los Angeles, I went to the Immigration and Naturalization Service because my tourist visa, acquired on the assumption I eventually would be admitted as the spouse of a green card holder, was about to expire. After hours in many lines, I wound up talking to an African-American INS agent who was so gentle and motherly to me I can still remember her face. She listened to me and made me feel I would be okay. “You can get a job,” she said, and when I walked out that day I had a temporary work permit available to foreigners caught in America due to political crises. I got two jobs, one selling clothes at The Limited and another as a cashier at a Hallmark stationery store run by a kind Italian family my father’s uncle knew. As soon as I got a paycheck, I filed for divorce and bought a car. The car was a battered two-tone 1978 Chevy that cost $600. It was the first thing I’d ever bought with my own money, and I was ecstatic driving it off the lot.

  Meanwhile, the United States and Iraq were on the brink of war. Amo was on the news constantly. I remember watching a little British boy who was one of hundreds of people taken hostage as human shields in the days leading up to the war. Amo allowed cameras in to document how well he was treating them. The little boy was on his lap, and Amo patted his head. “Did Stuart have his milk today?” he asked. And I thought of poor Hassan watching this in Baghdad; he had been made to sit on Amo’s lap, looking as scared as little Stuart did now. I cringed as I remembered Amo holding a glass of whiskey to Hassan’s lips and forcing him to drink, thinking, no doubt, he was helping make a man of him.

  American news commentators recoiled at the way Amo treated this little British boy—an affection which, incidentally, I saw as genuine. (I knew that Amo saw no conflict between feeling fondness for people and killing them.) They talked abou
t the perversion of a man who would pat a child on the head one moment and send him off for use as a human shield the next. They were right, but why couldn’t they take it one more step? If Americans could feel so much sympathy for that one child, why didn’t they even mention the millions of Iraqi children who didn’t have their milk today? Or take the logical next step? All Iraqis were that little boy. All of us were hostages. By the time I had met Amo, I was too big to sit on his lap, yet I was there for ten years. So were my mother and my father. Americans were a generous and empathetic people. Why had they remained silent about all the crimes Amo had committed when he was one of America’s best friends and the U.S. government was sending him money? There had been years of torture, years of ethnic cleansing and corruption and mass deportations. Why, now that everyone was aware of his tyranny, was the White House talking about bombing his victims? Why was the FBI harassing Iraqi-American children at school? Sending agents into Iraqi-American homes and questioning their loyalty to America? Even considering putting exiles into internment camps as they had Japanese-Americans during World War II? The way the U.S. government was demonizing Iraqis reminded me of the way Amo had demonized Iranians, dehumanizing them in preparation for war. “Never tell anyone you’re Iraqi,” one Iranian-American I met advised me. “Trust me, you’ll just be harassed. Say you’re from Saudi Arabia.” I decided I would rather be harassed. My family had suffered too much trying to prove its Iraqi citizenship. I was a citizen of Iraq. I was proud to be Iraqi.

  Soon it was Christmas. Shopping season. Lights twinkled in Southern California malls. Children sat in Santa Claus’s lap and made wishes. Sometimes a mother would sneak back into the Hallmark store and buy her daughter something she had had her eye on when they had been in together. I was so lonely for my mother. It had been three months since I’d had any communication with home. I was so, so lonely. Finally, on January 2, 1991, my mother got a call through to me. Someone in Jordan had forwarded my letter to her, and she said she just stared at the message on the outside in tears before opening it. She sounded drained and hurried, as if she had just managed to stop crying and didn’t know how long we had. I could only imagine what she had to do to get that call through.

  “Our garden is dry, honey,” she said, talking very fast and crying.

  That was the secret code we had decided she would use to get past Amo’s listeners to let me know something was wrong. She talked fast. “There are some things you need to know in case anything happens to us in this war, because you are the only one who is safe outside the country. You need to know what we own so you will know what to do.”

  She told me to get out a pencil and paper, and she began telling me about her inheritance and what was registered in whose name. Tears streamed down my face. I didn’t take notes. I didn’t care what we owned. I just listened and cried and wished I were there, no matter what sort of war was going to happen. We’d been through it before, right? She had been the brave one who made us laugh and feel normal. But now she was afraid, and I was afraid I would lose her. I told her I loved her. I told her again that I loved her. Then the connection was lost. I was afraid I would never hear her voice again.

  The Gulf War began the next night. Like many Iraqi exiles, I watched the war on television aching because I wasn’t there with my family. For Iraqi exiles, every building that exploded in bursts of light had a name, military targets had civilian employees, and bridges blown up were routes we took to school and home. It all looked more like a video game than what I knew war to be. I saw nothing on CNN of the people who waited at the other end of this war, ordinary people wondering if they were going to die; nothing of the families whose lives were being shattered by death or disrupted by the destruction of the power grid that allowed them to cook their food and light their houses and keep their schools and hospitals and businesses running. I went through my days at work like a zombie, worrying about my family as the war went on. When the Pentagon finally acknowledged “collateral damage,” we feared that the people under the rubble were people we knew. The irony for many Iraqi-Americans was heart-sickening; many were Republicans who had voted for President Bush and lobbied for years to get the U.S. government to do something about Saddam Hussein. Now that Washington had finally gotten the message, it was their families who were suffering, not Saddam. But this message didn’t seem to be getting out to the American people. If they only understood, I kept thinking, we could find another way to change the dictatorship and spare our families. I kept wishing there was some way I could help the people in Iraq.

  I was asked to join a friend at a press conference that the Iraqi-American community was holding at a mosque in Los Angeles, to ask for a cessation in the bombing. The mosque was just a converted house with no gold or Quranic calligraphy, but as I waited for the press conference to start, I prayed as intensely as I ever have in my life. I asked God why he was keeping me away from my family when we needed each other the most. I started crying and couldn’t stop. Why are you doing this to me? How could you do this? You’re supposed to save me. Why did you leave me here all alone? Why won’t you let me be back home with my family? But I didn’t hear an answer, and I got so angry I stopped praying.

  A reporter from the Los Angeles Times noticed my tears that day and asked to interview me. I told her my family was in Baghdad, and I didn’t know if they were dead or alive. She asked how I had come to be in the United States. It was a simple question with such a complicated answer I didn’t know what to tell her. I didn’t even know how to describe myself. I wasn’t a refugee. I wasn’t a tourist. I had come here as a bride, but I wasn’t a wife. I couldn’t tell her that I had wound up here because my parents were friends of Saddam Hussein’s and my mother had sent me here to try to make a better life for myself. So I told her half of the truth, which was that I had come to the United States on vacation, on a tourist visa, and gotten stranded when the borders were closed. She wrote a story and told a friend of hers from CBS News about me, and I wound up as a kind of national poster girl for the “Iraqi side” of the story, innocent victims caught up in war. People would recognize me in the Hallmark store and say, “Oh, you’re that poor girl from Iraq, aren’t you? Have you heard from your mother yet?” I was the lucky one, the innocent, nonthreatening Iraqi who got to see only nice, kind people while other Iraqis I knew were being called “sand nigger” and having their cars smashed and houses attacked, even though some of them had been born in the United States. The harassment brought back memories of our passports, stamped generations later with “of Ottoman origin” or “of Iranian origin.” Why were these people being demonized?

  No one had any reason to connect me with the man who had been Saddam Hussein’s pilot. In these stories, my name was Zainab Rasheed, not Zainab Salbi. I didn’t lie about it; Amo had changed it. People were upset that he had been giving top jobs and properties to his tribesmen from Tikrit, but instead of stopping nepotism, he ordered everyone to start using their grandfathers’ surnames on the premise that then nobody would know who the favored people were. I’m sure the official pronouncement sounded more reasonable than my recollection of it, but the result was the same. Our last names were officially changed to our grandfathers’ first name—the paperwork alone must have been enormous—and by the time I came to the United States, my passport said Zainab Rasheed.

  In the waning days of war, I saw the bombed tanks and troops that lined the highway leading back to Baghdad from Kuwait. Many bodies were burned to a crisp, and I thought of Radya. How many of her cousins or neighbors had been forced to fight this time on Amo’s pointless battlefields, only to be seen as enemies and killed by Americans? What choice had those young men ever had? Thousands of young men were dead, many of them no doubt conscripts whose mothers and wives would probably never know for sure what had happened to them.

  I got word my family was alive just as the war was ending. Mama had managed to send a letter with a British doctor who was leaving Iraq for Jordan. He had mailed it from London.


  My lovely daughter,

  I wish I could see you now and kiss you. You are the light of my life. What a misery we are in. We thank God that, to this day (Saturday), we are safe. Perhaps somehow, the best can come of things that are the hardest for us to bear.

  Thank God you are not here. We do not wish for God to show the face of this misery to anyone else. I worry and cry continuously. I don’t know what the future bears for us. But you know me; I always worry about everything. There were other ways; it is so sad there had to be war.

  I last talked to you on the 15th. On the 16th, the bombing began. We left Baghdad for a Al Khalis [a town about 60 miles from Baghdad] to stay with a relative of a relative. The room was very, very cold—like ice. We had the radio on all night. Then, because that home was full of people fleeing Baghdad, we left and stayed in an abandoned building.

  There was no toilet. The place was full of roaches and bugs. The smell was terrible, the smell of animal things. Dirty, filthy, rotten, smelly. We used the broom to sweep away the human waste. It was dark, it was cold, but for a while we felt safe and free from the threat of the war. Then bombs fell around us there too. We stayed one terrible week. I had a nervous breakdown and we came back to Baghdad. I prefer to die in my house than to live as we were. The war with Iran was nothing compared to this one.

  Now we have been in Baghdad 10 days. Every morning and every evening the sky is full of fire. It looks like Star Wars: airplanes, jets, rockets, missiles. Every second the house shakes. We get used to the shaking, but not to the being afraid. We are living back one full century now. At night we use the lantern. We forgot about the refrigerator. All signs of civilization have been forgotten. There is no electricity, no water, very, very little gas, and no heating oil.