From the front gate, Zia could see Humvees passing on the main avenue, followed by gangs of children waving and trying to play with the American soldiers. She was glad the troops were here, but she was growing angry that they weren’t policing the streets, arresting thieves, or enforcing traffic laws. We must be patient, Mamina assured her. Difficult times will be followed by peace.
THE PHONE SERVICE had been knocked out during the bombing, along with the electricity supply, so even the doorbell didn’t work. One day, Mamina heard a neighbor’s voice calling Baba’s name from outside the gate. She quickly fetched a scarf to cover her head and bustled around the simple apartment, making sure it was tidy for the guest. By May, the sisters had been trapped inside for almost two months, and were glad for some small relief from the tedium of their days, even if it was just a visit from a neighbor. They disappeared into the kitchen for tea and a bowl of sweets as Baba went to the door.
Umar, an old friend of Baba’s, greeted the family warmly and settled comfortably onto the sofa across from Baba. The two men heaped sugar into their teacups as they exchanged the latest news, a blend of radio reports, eyewitness accounts, and unsubstantiated rumors. By May 2003, Bush had declared “Mission Accomplished” and much of the looting had ceased, but the country was in shambles and it was still unsafe for women to be outside on their own. Umar confirmed reports that most of the hospitals, universities, and government ministries, except for the Ministry of Oil, were looted beyond recognition or outright destroyed—including the Ministry of Education. Mamina, a teacher, slumped onto the couch, devastated by the news. Employment, health, and salary records for the nation’s sixteen thousand schoolteachers had vanished? How could the Americans ever fix that?
Baba and his friends blamed Saddam, not the Americans, for the insecurity and mayhem that had replaced Saddam’s tightly controlled police since the invasion. Saddam had intentionally placed antiaircraft missiles in schools and residential neighborhoods, they said, to provoke Americans into attacking civilians. He’d encouraged the looting and ordered the oil fields torched, the bank coffers emptied, and the universities unguarded, with the nefarious intention of leaving the country bankrupt, impossible for the Americans to manage.
“Saddam had ordered his defense minister to encircle the city and destroy it, but the minister refused,” Umar confided knowingly, though it was just a rumor. The men settled back into the couches briefly, shaking their heads at Saddam’s cruelty. Zia clenched her teeth in familiar hatred.
Umar lightened the mood. The headquarters of the Mukhabarat had been bombed, he said. Saddam’s laws banning free speech and foreign travel were being ignored, and the UN sanctions that for a decade had sealed Iraq away from the rest of the world were as good as lifted. The borders were wide open and the highways were packed with truckloads of incoming goods—satellite dishes, cellphones, computers, CDs, DVDs—the likes of which few Iraqis had ever seen.
“The ajnabi are living in Saddam’s palace,” Umar added, using the Arabic word for foreigners. “Sleeping in his bedrooms and walking in their boots in his dining room.” At this, Baba raised his eyebrows. The world ought to see Iraqis in the palace, not Americans. As happy as he’d originally been to have the Americans arrive, he now felt a twinge of shame at the idea of being rescued from Saddam by foreigners. But he pushed his pride aside. The truth was that Iraqis had needed the Americans to get the job done, and now they must tolerate their presence until the mission was complete and peace was restored.
Umar had been to the palace to see the Americans, he said, announcing that he had already met a captain and landed a contract to do the unit’s laundry. The foreigners don’t understand Arabic and need translators, he said. Suddenly, Umar nodded thoughtfully toward Zia and looked Baba in the eye.
“My friend, I am signing the laundry contract tomorrow and I would feel more assured if I had an English-speaking translator with me,” he suggested.
Zia’s heart rose in her throat. She spoke English fluently: her recent degree from Baghdad University was in English translation. This was her chance to get out of the house, meet the mysterious Americans, and maybe even land a job with them that paid in U.S. dollars.
Across the living room, Baba was still. Zia was certainly the cleverest of his children—and his brothers’ children, as well. In school she had easily risen to the top of her class and earned acceptance into a gifted school, and he was secretly delighted when she graduated with honors and announced she intended to become a doctor. When the Ministry of Higher Education refused her medical-school application, because most spots were reserved for the spoiled sons of Ba’athists, and instead assigned Zia to the translation program that was nothing but a training ground for dead-end secretarial positions, he knew how crushed she had been. Here was an opportunity for her to prove her worth and make her training useful. He wanted her to be happy, and knew she had determination and an urge to succeed that was at least as strong as that of any young men he knew. “Zia equals seven boys,” Mamina often said, and Baba agreed. Although he seldom expressed emotion, he had always been proud of Zia’s intelligence and spirit. It made him chuckle to see the way she put her uncles in their place with a steely look and a quick retort. Baba didn’t encourage her rebelliousness, but he never reprimanded her, either. He was sorry she was not a son. “You’d make a much better boy,” he always told her.
Now, though, as Umar and Zia looked at him expectantly, Baba shook his head.
“No, it’s too dangerous.” He took out a Pine cigarette, lit it, and inhaled slowly. “We will not be quick to judge the ajnabi. They are people of the book, they have prophets, and they saved us from Saddam. For this, we will support them. But we must not act hastily. The ones here now are soldiers, and Zia doesn’t know their ways. Wait until the civilians arrive.” Soldiers were young, aggressive, uneducated men, he believed, and he couldn’t expose his daughter to such dangers.
Across the room, Zia sighed, not daring to challenge her father but barely bothering to conceal her disappointment in front of his guest. Still, once Umar was gone, Zia disappeared sulkily into her bedroom. She was angry and feeling more confined than ever before, during what everyone had expected would be a period of great freedom. She threw herself onto her bed and pounded the pillow with her fists. One thing at least was certain: if she had been a son, Baba would have made a different decision.
A FEW DAYS later, Mamina pushed open her daughters’ bedroom door, carrying a Pepsi and a banana on a silver tray, two delicacies that had been unavailable during the sanctions. It was small consolation, she knew, for her despondent daughter, but it was the best comfort she had to offer right now.
“Will Umar come back to ask for me?” Zia asked her mother, hopefully.
“Habibti,” Mamina said gently, meaning “my dear.” “Be patient. Perhaps soon Baba will change his mind.”
Baba had always tended to be more liberal than other Iraqi fathers. He didn’t expect his daughters to wear the Islamic headscarf, the hijab, and didn’t consider them un-Islamic or indecent if they wore T-shirts that exposed their bare elbows and wrists. He even let them wear American-style pants and sneakers, while most of their girlfriends had to wear traditional loose skirts that concealed the outline of their legs. Zia and Nunu had grown up listening to Baba complain about the cruel and corrupt ways Islamic strictures were enforced upon women in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and under the Taliban in Afghanistan. For a brief moment, therefore, Zia had thought her father might say yes to Umar’s offer, but it was hardly a surprise when he said no.
Mamina padded into the room in her slippers and nightgown, and rested the tray on the wooden dresser littered with nail polishes, lipsticks, and eyebrow pencils. The bedroom’s thick velvet curtains were always drawn closed over the windows to the courtyard. A tray filled with gold rings, bangles, and earrings glittered from the bedside table, and a few undisturbed university texts were scattered on the bed. She sat down beside her eldest daughter and, placing Zia’s hea
d in her lap, gently stroked her hair until she felt Zia’s body relax. Mamina’s perfume mingled with kitchen scents of cilantro and onion, and her thin gold bangles clinked softly as she moved. Mamina believed gold increased the blood flow through a woman’s body, so she rarely took off her bangles and necklaces.
As her mother and sister talked, Nunu skipped around the room restlessly, full of pent-up energy. “If you go work for the Americans, you will meet a prince charming!” she teased. “But Zia, imagine how people will talk.”
“So what?” Zia said. “Go ahead and let them.”
Mamina quietly agreed. “Working for the Americans would be a good thing. Your father worked for a German company and those were the best jobs. But we must give Baba time to get comfortable with the idea.” After all, it was easier for him to work with them because he was a man, and it was different to send a twenty-one-year-old girl into that kind of unpredictable environment. As she soothed Zia, Mamina reminded them how damaging such contact between men and women could be for a girl’s reputation. Hadn’t the sisters just gone to a lot of effort to help Nunu’s classmate Defaf carry on a secret relationship with her cousin? Defaf and her cousin were deeply in love, but their courtship had to be hidden because he had yet to formally ask her father’s permission. If her family had caught her meeting him alone before they were married, the consequences would have been devastating—no matter that he was a trusted member of the family. They might have beaten her and withdrawn her from college. But the family never found out, and, in Defaf’s case, it all ended happily: shortly before the war, the cousin proposed formally, and they were married. In all of this, Mamina had freely co-conspired with her daughters and the young lovers. She detested the old-fashioned belief that a couple should meet at the altar, as most do in Iraq. “It’s good for you to know his personality before you marry him so you can be relaxed with him,” she always said.
So few of these stories like Defaf’s ended happily, however, when women challenged the cultural norms. Mamina told them a story that had happened in her Basra neighborhood when she was a teenager, when a man down the street murdered his wife and daughter. Mamina heard later from neighbors what had happened: the young woman was married, but on her wedding night, her husband discovered that she wasn’t a virgin; furious, he returned her immediately to her father. Eventually she confessed that she had lost her virginity to one of the young men in the neighborhood, and her father flew into a rage and killed her. When he found out the mother had known about it, he killed her as well.
Sixteen-year-old Mamina had been aghast. Nothing in Islam condoned this sort of barbaric practice, these so-called honor killings, yet some tribes still encouraged them as a way to punish and control women. Most of the neighborhood hated the father, both for the killings and because he orphaned his other children. But the father was not charged with a crime, and nothing happened to the young woman’s lover or husband. The double murder sent a chilling message to all the girls in the neighborhood. This was a lesson to be careful, because justice still favored men.
Zia and Nunu had heard horror stories like this before; they nodded as Mamina talked. Though she wasn’t trying to scare them, she emphasized how careful young Iraqi women would have to be about any contact with the American soldiers, since the pressure for these honor killings was even greater if the lovers were from different backgrounds. Mamina told them about the man who had rented their home in Basra from them after she and Baba married and moved to Baghdad. He was fifty-five years old and was always in poor health. One day, he told Baba his story:
Many years ago his cousin had fallen in love with a man from a different tribe. But the family forbade the relationship because any sons produced in the marriage would go to the husband’s tribe. The two teenagers, however, continued to meet secretly. Eventually, she lost her virginity to him and got pregnant. When the family found out, the father, brothers, and uncle were livid. “She must be punished!”
But although all the men in the family agreed she must die, no one wanted to execute the gruesome task. They stayed up for hours discussing this, shouting at one another and wailing over the tragedy. The next day, they took the issue to the tribal elders, where there was a brief effort at reconciliation.
“Will someone from the tribe marry her?” the tribal leader had asked. But not even the old men wanted such a loose woman as a second wife, and no man would agree to raise another man’s baby. There was nothing left to do.
“Then who will slay her?” the tribal elder asked the brothers, uncles, and cousins. Everyone had an excuse. Finally, this man accepted the task, because he was young and needed to prove his strength. He told Baba he slit her throat, but spared him any more bloody details.
“I killed my cousin with the acceptance of my tribe and the family,” he confessed miserably to Baba. “But my whole life I’ve felt guilty and regret what I have done.”
Though Baba felt his remorse was sincere, he took no pity on him. “How could you have dared to do something like that?”
“I was young and I didn’t know better. Now after many years I realize I should have handled the situation differently. I could have married her.”
“Yes, you should have. You were young but you had a mind. Your soul should have rejected the idea of killing her. It’s too late now. You killed her and the baby inside her.”
The man stood up heavily and walked to the door. “It’s a curse that runs after me.”
Zia and Nunu were silent, thinking about their father’s righteous anger, and about the boy who had killed his cousin to prove himself to his family. It was sobering to think that killing young women could be an heroic act to some people. But they felt sure that Baba, for all his stern façade, would never let anything like that happen to his own daughters.
“But Mama, everything is different now,” Zia said, her voice rising. The Americans were bringing a whole new kind of society to Iraq—full of freedom and opportunity like nothing she and her sister had seen before. She wanted to be a part of making that happen. She just had to get the job, and she couldn’t bear to wait while things were changing out there, without her.
“We have suffered thirty years of Saddam. What is a few more weeks?” Mamina said. “Have patience. If God wills it, you will have this job.” Lying on the bed, safely out of Baba’s earshot, the women fell into their routine of conspiring quietly to get what they wanted, a strategy played out in women’s bedrooms across the Arab world.
OVER THE NEXT few weeks, Mamina approached Baba again about the job for Zia. Her plan was to wear down Baba’s resistance gently, never telling him what to do, just pushing him persistently.
“Why not let her go for one day?” Mamina would suggest spontaneously as they were sitting in the living room.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen.” Baba sighed. He had heard from friends that Saddam’s secret police lurked around in plainclothes, keeping track of those who helped the Americans and intending to punish them after the Americans left. “We should wait and see.”
The power dynamic between them was a precarious one. Mamina knew not to openly demand her way or challenge his authority. When Baba felt she was too bold, he was not above opening up their marital squabbles to her brothers, who acted as a second level of authority. In such cases, the male bond was stronger than that of family—a wife simply had to obey. Mamina loved some of her brothers, but a few were controlling and bossy. Still, she couldn’t stand up to them, as that would bring shame on her and her daughters. Mamina’s standing in the family was important not only for her own honor, but also because her extended circle of aunts and sisters-in-law acted as informal “matchmakers” in finding Zia and Nunu husbands. If Mamina was bold, the logic went, surely her daughters would make disobedient wives.
Baba, however, felt he had good reasons to worry, and not to send his daughter out among the Americans. Not only was the city unsafe, but Baba was unconvinced by the Americans’ plans for instant democracy. Maybe they would t
ake Iraq’s oil and leave. Or perhaps they would change their minds, as they had in 1992. “Maybe they’re here now, but maybe the next day they will grow tired of Iraq,” he reasoned. “America is a great nation that knows democracy and freedom, but they don’t need Iraq. They’re rich and content with themselves. They come when they like and will leave when they like.”
Mamina pressured him by turning this argument around. “That’s why we must support them,” she said. It was true that, on the streets and in the cafés, Baba recognized a strongly pro-American mood. People talked with excitement about a Baghdad renaissance. So Mamina kept chipping away at Baba’s resistance.
“If things go wrong, you can blame me. If it goes well, you can take the credit,” she argued.
A few more weeks passed as they performed this gentle back-and-forth, with Zia and Nunu waiting eagerly in the wings. Eventually, Baba ran into Umar, who had just bought a new Japanese television and made clear that he was on his way to becoming a rich man.
“Don’t waste this opportunity,” Umar said. “The civilian contractors are here now. I spoke to them. They need translators, and they pay very well. But there are hundreds of men like us lined up outside the palace.”
After he saw Umar, Baba returned home to the apartment and thought for an hour. Perhaps he believed Iraqis should help the Americans; perhaps he was interested in the business connections Zia could drum up; or perhaps he was old and tired of listening to Mamina’s nagging. In the end, he never gave Zia a reason. He just said, “Go for one day and then we’ll see.”
CHAPTER FIVE
LESS THAN A month after the troops toppled Saddam’s statue, reports came in to Heather’s unit about a group of black-clad, gun-toting vigilantes who’d taken hostage several UN-run food warehouses in a Baghdad ghetto called Sadr City. U.S. troops had set up bases and begun patrols in Baghdad, but random gunfire still echoed across the city and dead bodies kept turning up on the streets. Heather felt gutted by the slow pace of law and order, but she had resigned herself to the army’s crushing bureaucracy and the complicated nature of reconstruction. She struggled to keep her spirits high.
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