Sisters in War

by Christina Asquith

  Zia drew in a breath. “Keith, no. You can’t just meet my father casually. That would be very insulting.”

  Keith didn’t understand. “What are you talking about? Let me talk to him.”

  “No. Keith, stay where you are. Promise me.”

  Zia called Mamina, who warned her, “Hide from him, Zuzu. Don’t let him find you or Keith. He is coming to threaten Keith to stay away from you.”

  Baba stayed for an hour or so, and then left without seeing either of them. When Zia returned home that night, she waited nervously for him to say something, but Baba ignored her. She wondered how much longer she’d be able to sustain this careful equilibrium between her Iraqi traditions and her new “American” freedoms.

  WHILE IT WASN’T yet causing real problems at home, by December her and Keith’s relationship was starting to make things complicated at the office. They had done their best to hide their feelings for each other, but the merest hint of friendliness between a man and woman started the rumor mill going. Zia’s office was next to the office for IMN security, and Iraqi men constantly came and went, peering into her office each time, and noting Keith’s lunchtime presence. Closing the door would only fuel more speculation.

  Some friends were happy for her, but others were nasty, and the workers who didn’t know her well were even worse. Zia continued to rise at IMN and was now one of the most senior Iraqi employees; her position provoked envy from the women and sneers from her male underlings. Many of IMN’s blue-collar jobs were filled by poor Iraqi men from conservative Shia neighborhoods such as Sadr City. They smiled at the Americans and said “Welcome!” and “Bush good!” But in Arabic, Zia heard them cursing their employers and speaking of the humiliation of having foreign soldiers in the Arab homeland. They called them “kafirs” and “traitors,” even as they accepted paychecks from them.

  As angry as these men were at the Americans, they were even more upset by Iraqi women, like Zia, who dressed in Western clothes. They whispered “whore,” and worse, as she passed. Once, Zia passed a group sitting on a blanket on the ground having lunch, and the men leered up at her.

  “When you wear those pants I can see your pussy. I am thinking of you naked and I can imagine everything.”

  At first, the women complained, and a few of these men were fired. But Zia feared making enemies who might wait outside the gates of IMN for her. So she said nothing.

  All of this made Zia nervous. There were too many reasons for others to dislike her—her job with the occupiers, her position as manager within the office, and now her taboo relationship with an American man. Her heart, however, didn’t give her much choice: she and Keith grew closer each day. In the evenings, instead of drinking with his contractor buddies, he returned to his trailer and called her at her parents’ house. They talked for hours each night. Zia suspected he was falling in love with her, but he showed no signs of moving their relationship forward formally. An Iraqi man and woman wouldn’t dare spend so much time together before getting formally engaged, but Keith seemed comfortable. He said they were dating.

  They didn’t have the luxury of waiting forever, though, even if Zia had wanted to. Events were already conspiring to bring their relationship to a head. One afternoon, a call came in from Mamina’s youngest sister, a conservative, traditional woman who liked to meddle in family affairs. She was the self-appointed family matchmaker. She had found two Iraqi brothers living in London who were looking for wives, and who preferred two sisters. She had sent photos of Zia and Nunu. Liking what he saw in the photo, the elder brother had dispatched his extended family to make a formal offer. First they would propose to Zia, then, after a few months, if that marriage went well, a second offer would be made to Nunu.

  When Mamina called with the news, Zia had been at the Republican Palace, entering a meeting with senior American officials from IMN. Among her new, Western friends, an arranged marriage looked backward, and she felt embarrassed at her mere involvement in it. Moments later, her aunt called, clearly thrilled with herself over the news. “Well, what do you think of this offer?” she asked her niece. Zia was noncommittal.

  “I think it would be best if you gave him my email and told him to contact me first.”

  Her aunt was indignant at the suggestion. “Who do you think you are—Brooke Shields?” she fumed. The call ended quickly.

  Judging by Mamina’s face when Zia walked in the door that evening, her aunt had not let the matter drop, despite Zia’s lack of enthusiasm. Nunu, by contrast, was beside herself with excitement.

  “Am I going to London?” she sang excitedly.

  Zia ignored her and went straight into the bedroom to have her nightly conversation with Keith. She told him about the proposal and tried to laugh about it.

  “He knows only my weight, my height, and my appearance, and he wants to marry me? What, does he think I’m a cow at the market?”

  Nunu had been hanging around the bedroom with a long face during the phone call. After Zia hung up, she bristled. “You’re being very hasty.”

  “Things are different since the Americans arrived,” Zia said. “We should know our husbands beforehand and talk to them.”

  “They’re not different,” Nunu argued. “You can talk with your husband after you’re engaged.”

  Mamina arrived, closing the door and shushing her daughters.

  “Zia, what are you thinking?”

  “I want to marry Keith.”

  “Yes, habibti. But what does Keith say about this?”

  Zia looked annoyed by the question. Mamina’s joy at her daughter’s heady feeling of love had recently hardened into more practical questions: When would Keith propose? Where was the ring? And what was the plan to convince Baba? Zia had given only vague answers, because that’s all she had. The Americans said things would improve, and Zia believed them, and she dreamed of living in Baghdad with Keith as her husband, both of them working for the U.S. embassy.

  “Insh’allah,” Mamina had said, “God willing.” Everyone wanted to believe these dreams. But Mamina and Nunu had their doubts, since they never went inside the Green Zone; for them this American world felt much less real. They saw what the rest of the country saw: unemployment, insecurity, and the rising influence of violent religious gangs like Muqtada al-Sadr’s. Mamina wanted Zia to be happy, but she also wanted a resolution, quickly, for both daughters, who were already well within the age that they should be married. Two highly educated brothers, living abroad, was a dream offer. Nunu agreed. She reminded Zia about Aunt Huda, Mamina’s oldest sister, who had refused several proposals when she was in her twenties. She had been in love with a Christian doctor, but he married another woman, and she never got over him. When she finally married at forty, it was too late to have children.

  Nunu volunteered an idea: “I will marry this older brother, to save you for Keith,” she said. “Then, if Keith doesn’t marry you, you can marry the younger brother.”

  Zia liked this idea. But the plan soon fell apart. How could they explain to their aunt in London why Nunu would marry first? It was no use: their stubborn aunt had made it clear that the family wanted both of the sisters, or neither.

  “Oh, Mama, I don’t know what to do.” Zia sighed, exhausted.

  “Okay, habibti, go to sleep. I will delay your aunt.”

  Lying in bed, Zia felt torn between her love for Keith and her duty as a daughter. She knew her mother feared a big family fight. This aunt was a proud, forceful woman, who labeled herself a conservative Islamist, although Zia considered her a hypocrite. In London, she drove a fancy car and sent her children to good schools. She embraced conservative Islam only because she lived in a Western country, far from the reality of such extremism. From her life of luxury, she preached to everyone else about the dangers of romantic notions and about a woman’s obligation to marry for duty. If she didn’t get her way, her aunt invoked Islam to shame the entire family.

  Should she discover Zia’s relationship with Keith, she might convinc
e the uncles to force Zia to marry this man. Perhaps they would conspire with the suitor’s family to abduct Zia. Once Zia was in London, he would probably force himself on her on their wedding night, and then she’d have no choice but to be his wife. Zia shuddered at the thought. This had happened to other girls, and Zia was not sure Baba would stand in the way.

  A FEW DAYS later, Nunu was home from university in time for lunch. She flipped on her battery-powered radio and sang along with one of her favorite Lebanese artists as she chopped some parsley, tomatoes, and onions. She ate quietly by herself, and left food for Baba and Mamina. After lunch, Nunu shuffled through the tiny hallway with the two doors leading to the bedrooms, flopped onto her bed, and pulled her pink notebook from the side table. She opened to a clean page, and her thoughts turned to her future husband. “I am going to get married!” she wrote. These last few weeks had been the most exciting of her life. She had completely ignored her university classes, giving herself over to fantasies of her new role as a wife and writing in her journal: “Soon I will be married and have a husband and a house before all my classmates. Oh, how they’ll envy me! Will I go to London?”

  She laughed at herself for being so vain, though she couldn’t help but admit that this was what she truly wanted. She was scared to end up a spinster. Mamina always said, “All the women born in the 1960s are spinsters, and all the women born before then are widows.” It is said that 100,000 Iraqis died in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s—most of them bachelors—and many more single men were killed in the Shia uprising in the early 1990s. After that, all the smart, successful men fled Saddam’s regime. For this, many mothers hated Saddam: he killed the women’s sons and made their daughters spinsters. She didn’t have to look far for an example. Nunu had five uncles. All but one had fled Iraq.

  Nunu felt her sister going in the opposite direction. American women this and American women that … Zia would go on. Nunu wished for her sister’s happiness as much as her own. May Zia reach the great destiny that she was denied during Saddam’s time. If she loves Keith, may they marry and be given the greatest blessing of children. But Nunu was secretly annoyed with Keith. Why had he not yet asked Baba’s permission? Maybe he would wait a long time, in the unhappy American custom of “dating,” and then change his mind. This was not acceptable in Iraq. Some Iraqi men asked women out on “dates” just to test their character. If the woman said yes, he considered her dirty and would never propose, but a no meant she had purity and deserved a proposal. Yet Zia had already been out on a date with Keith to a restaurant; they had even been alone together in his car. Nunu flushed at the thought. Although she knew her sister would not give in to temptation, she felt Zia was taking too many risks. If word spread of her relationship with Keith, she would never receive a marriage proposal from another Iraqi man, and neither would Nunu. The gossips believed that if one sister is dirty, the other one probably is too.

  At the same time, though, she knew how precious it was to be in love, and couldn’t believe her sister was wrong for chasing that dream. We are all weak in the face of love, Nunu felt. She had been in love once, with a young man at her university. When it went sour, the experience hurt Nunu like no physical pain she had felt before.

  It all began one afternoon on campus shortly before the war, when she looked up and noticed a young man staring at her. He was movie-star handsome, with gelled short black hair and wide, soulful eyes. She had shyly averted her gaze. A few days later, she saw him staring at her again. They never spoke, but his attention had thrilled her. Each day, she rushed home to tell Zia everything.

  Then, one morning, between classes, she saw him break away from his friends and walk toward her. Her heart galloped wildly. She felt her face turn red and her hands were trembling. When he reached her, all of Nunu’s girlfriends fell silent.

  “I want to propose to you,” he said to Nunu. “If I do, will you agree?”

  Nunu kept her gaze lowered. “Yes,” she managed. He walked back to his friends.

  All of her girlfriends had broken into feverish whispering as they congratulated Nunu. She had flown home on wings. That evening, she and Zia had sketched out designs for wedding dresses and imagined different bridal hairstyles. For weeks afterward, Nunu peered past the curtains to the courtyard, awaiting his arrival with his friends and relatives to see Baba.

  But he never came.

  When Nunu saw him at college after that, he looked once or twice at her, but then stopped looking. Nunu was shocked. She lay like a zombie on the bed at night. “Why didn’t he ask Baba?” she wondered. She replayed in her mind the way she had said “Yes.” Perhaps she had been too forward, and should have said “Maybe.” She wondered if he had inquired in the neighborhood about her reputation, and learned something shameful that he didn’t approve of. Impossible, Zia assured her: Nunu had nothing to hide.

  Eventually, the shock was replaced by a deep depression. “I loved him,” she moaned. “My heart is broken now.”

  Such memories saddened Nunu. At nineteen years of age, and having had no contact with men, she succumbed easily to romantic fantasies of destiny, fate, and pure love. She imagined Zia would feel the same if she lost Keith, and she couldn’t wish that on her sister, no matter how much she wanted to marry the younger brother in London, whom she felt certain would be handsome, kind, and generous. If God wills me to marry him, then I will cook and clean for him, keep a garden with roses, and be a good wife, she vowed to herself. Destiny will decide, she thought. When she was done writing, she lifted herself off the bed and carried her journal into the kitchen. Nunu always burned her journal pages just after she finished writing them. She carefully ripped them out, turned on the gas, and lit them with a match. She held each of the pages as her curling script disappeared into black embers, and then dropped them into the sink before the flames singed her hand.

  MAMINA HAD ALWAYS bent her will to the desires of her family in order to keep the peace, and she could do little to dissuade her bossy older sister. Eventually, her sister arranged for the suitor’s family to arrive and propose to Zia. As the women raced around readying the house for the guests, Baba turned on the television and lit a cigarette, indicating his intention to be left out of his daughters’ love lives until all the details had been sorted out and only his final approval was needed. The women disappeared into the bedroom and whispered furiously. Nunu wanted Zia to accept. Zia wanted to wreck the imminent proposal by turning off the suitor’s family so they would rescind the offer; Mamina wanted the proposal to proceed to the point that Zia could use it as leverage with Keith.

  Neither Zia, Mamina, nor Nunu knew for sure what would happen, but Zia was determined to scare them off if she could, even though she knew that would make things difficult for her mother, aunt, and sister. Before the guests arrived, Zia plucked a denim jacket out of the closet and slipped it on. She knew the suitor’s family would recoil at the sight of her in Western clothing.

  Mamina clucked her tongue in disapproval.

  “Zia, think of your interests. This boy lives in London, and is getting his PhD.”

  But Zia kept the jacket and the tennis shoes on. She even smeared white powder all over her face so she looked pale and unhealthy. As she was looking at herself with satisfaction in the mirror, the doorbell rang.

  A half dozen uncles, aunts, cousins, and close family friends crowded the small space of the living room, filling the hard-backed sofas lining the walls. Chairs were pulled in from the dining room, and nearly ten minutes of greetings, introductions, and blessings ensued. “Salaam aleikum,” they all said, kissing one another lightly on the cheek.

  “This is the bride!” an uncle exclaimed, clasping Zia’s hands as Mamina smiled. Zia admired her mother’s composure, as she herself could barely hide her nerves.

  Finally, everyone settled in, and Baba and the men lit cigarettes.

  “Did you arrive here without any problems? Did the American soldiers stop you at any checkpoints? Were any roads closed?” Mamina asked
.

  Thanks to God, their travel was smooth, the family replied.

  “This is good,” Mamina said. “You know, the situation …”

  “Yes, the situation …” the uncle said. No one spoke further, not wanting to introduce any biases or affiliations into the new relationship. On everyone’s mind was Saddam, as he had just recently been captured in a spider hole after nine months in hiding. Zia’s family had gathered around the television to rejoice in the images of the Americans inspecting Saddam’s teeth and picking through his filthy hair. But the most obvious topic of conversation was the one most likely to be avoided. Sensitive political subjects such as Saddam, the Americans, and Sunni or Shia would be avoided for fear of disagreement.

  Zia and Nunu disappeared into the kitchen to prepare coffee. As Nunu arranged a dozen tiny, gold-rimmed glass cups on a silver tray, Zia said to her sister, “You will serve coffee, Pepsi, and then bitter coffee.” It was a loaded choice. If the meeting ends with coffee instead of juice, it is usually a sign of the bride’s refusal. Once the coffee was poured, Zia pushed the tray at her sister.

  “Zia, no!”

  Serving the suitor’s family was the first important indication of a potential daughter-in-law’s temperament. Would she be eager, obedient, and hardworking, or a lazy princess? Sending Nunu out with the tray would send a strong message to the family that Zia was the latter.

  Nunu stumbled out the kitchen door with Zia’s hand on her back. As Nunu served the coffee and Zia settled comfortably onto a couch, the aunts exchanged looks. One swept her eyes over Zia’s jeans and tennis shoes, and her face turned to stone.

  “She doesn’t really look like her photos,” the woman remarked casually to everyone. “If she marries my nephew, she shouldn’t expect to live the kind of life she has now, wearing tennis shoes and this ajnabi jacket.”

  Mamina cut in, explaining that Zia had returned to the house late because of “the situation.” “She had no time to change,” Mamina lied. Zia realized that mentioning her work was dangerous territory. If the suitor’s family knew she worked with the Americans, not only would the proposal be promptly rescinded, but Zia’s family would likely never receive another one for her, or for Nunu.