Nunu paid for her time on the computer and left. She was disappointed she hadn’t gotten any email from friends. She had been distant lately, she knew that, and she had to keep her distance because of Zia. The other week, Nunu had been accosted by a group of female classmates. “Oh, hello, Nunu,” they said sweetly. “How is your sister? We haven’t seen her lately. We will be looking for jobs and we’re curious where she is working.”
The classmates knew Zia had worked for the Americans—by now everyone did—and they surrounded her like dogs sniping for scraps of gossip, not caring about Nunu’s obvious discomfort. Nunu hated lying and saying her sister was in Kuwait, because that led to so many other questions. Why Kuwait? Did she get a job? How did she get a visa? Nunu was a terrible liar, and she knew that attention to detail was important. She had seen girls’ lives endangered due to small slips. At the university she had overheard a female security guard conducting a routine search of a student’s purse. “What is this?” the guard said, fingering a small manila business card. “Why do you have a card with an ajnabi name on it?” She spoke in a loud voice in front of all the other guards. “Do you work for the Americans?” The terrified young student pleaded ignorance, and they eventually let her pass. But Nunu had no doubt the woman had dropped out of college by now.
When she did summon the courage to attend classes, she avoided the student center. In class, she sat in the back. What was the point of socializing, anyway? She couldn’t talk openly about her situation to anyone. And no Iraqi man would propose to a girl with a fallen sister.
NUNU FELT EXHAUSTED from even the short walk back from the Internet café to the apartment. She never got any exercise anymore. The family used to spend Fridays at the park or driving to the countryside. Mamina used to take them to the pool on women-only afternoons once a week to swim. But such small pleasures were impossible now. Baghdad hotels with pools were targeted by terrorists because they housed foreigners. Crowded public places were dangerous. Shia families had to think twice before leaving the city if the route took them through a Sunni neighborhood, and vice versa.
Suddenly, she noticed a young man following her. Her heart froze. He was closing in on her quickly, and his eyes looked at her hungrily. Nunu didn’t know what to do. As she was contemplating trying to make a run for home, he was already upon her. “Whore,” he said, leering grotesquely in her face. He grabbed her by the hair. Panic rose in Nunu’s throat as she gasped for air.
“These are the jeans of a dirty, naughty girl.” As Nunu struggled, he reached around and grabbed her crotch. Nunu gasped in revulsion and began to sob. She kicked and punched as hard as she could. She tried to claw his face with her hands as he fondled her. Finally, he released her and walked off laughing. Nunu crumpled to the sidewalk, her hair tangled and her face blotchy and tearstained. Her shirt hung unevenly. She was sobbing so hard she could barely stand, and she had no idea what to do.
The sun beat down on her. As soon as she realized he was gone, and she was not hurt, she brushed herself off and stood up, wheezing as she tried to regain her composure. She looked around. The weather was cool, and it was a bright afternoon. Many people were on the street, and her screaming had attracted their attention. She knew they saw her, and saw what that man had done to her. They hadn’t moved to help, nor did they come to her now.
She walked unsteadily home.
When Mamina saw her, she rushed forward. Nunu explained the attack.
“He attacked me because I was wearing jeans. No one defended me, Mama. Maybe they were scared, but he didn’t have a gun!”
“They are cowards, Nunu,” Mamina said.
“He was Sunni, I know it. They think I am just a Shia and because I have no veil I’m worthless. They think it’s their right to rape and kill me.”
“Don’t talk like that, Nunu.”
She sobbed. “Only God the Merciful will stop this.”
There was no question of calling the police—it was too trivial an incident; better to try and keep it quiet.
Mamina and Nunu didn’t tell Baba, but he found out about the attack from a neighbor anyway and was furious; not at the neighbors for just standing by, but at Nunu for being outside, for wearing jeans. She wouldn’t leave the house again, he declared. Mamina argued with him, but she agreed that it wasn’t safe for Nunu to be alone outside. She had escaped lightly this time.
It hardly mattered. Nunu didn’t want to go anywhere anymore. She had constant nightmares in which she was not only molested, but kidnapped and raped. She refused to leave the house. She stopped getting out of bed. “I’m so tired, Mama,” she would say when Mamina fretted over her.
Baba said it was too dangerous for her to drive to the clinic, and all the doctors were fleeing Iraq anyway. “If she’s tired, she can sleep,” he said.
MONTHS PASSED AND the violence spiraled. By late spring, Nunu was struggling to finish her final year at the university. All that mattered to her anymore was obtaining her degree. Everywhere, militias roamed, bombs detonated, and more and more women quit their jobs, donned the hijab, and feared for their lives. If only I can graduate, Nunu thought, at least I will always have my college degree.
News reports estimated that at least four thousand professors had left Iraq since the beginning of the war; at least three hundred more had been murdered. Many, it was rumored, were killed by an Al Qaeda-led campaign to eradicate Iraq’s professional class. Lawyers, doctors, and English teachers had also been targeted at random. But no one knew for sure. Entire departments, running on a skeleton staff, had been shut down. Some of Mamina’s colleagues had been murdered, too, and some had escaped to Germany. Most of Nunu’s classmates weren’t at graduation when the day finally came. Nunu estimated that at least half of her freshman class had disappeared. Of those still remaining, few felt they could stay much longer. They feared being targeted as professionals, and despised the prospect of living under radical Islamic law. The medical students, the engineers, the teachers, the scientists—they all wanted to go elsewhere. Lately, Zia had been bringing up the idea of Mamina and Nunu leaving. Baba would never go for it, Nunu knew, but Zia said they should leave without him. But how? And where would they go?
Still, it was something to consider. Nunu herself had received two threats in the last few months. The first came while she was sitting in her living room with Aunt Ilham and Mamina. Her cellphone rang. “Can I speak to Nariman?” asked a male voice. Nariman was Nunu’s full name.
“This is she,” she answered, wondering who the strange voice belonged to. Since cellphones had become popular in the past couple of years, boys had developed the habit of randomly dialing numbers in the hope that a girl would answer. But this man’s voice was older, and he had used her name. “Yes,” she repeated into the silence on the other end. “This is Nariman. Who is talking?”
“This is your last year in college. Do you want to be just like your sister?”
His voice was casual, as though they were friends. She was too shocked to answer.
“Take care,” he said, and hung up.
When she told Mamina and Baba, they debated what the caller had meant by “just like your sister.” Was he warning her not to work for the Americans, as Zia had? Or was he warning her to veil or she’d end up dead, as many believed Zia was? How did he know her phone number? Many girls had received similar threatening calls, and Nunu didn’t know if this was a serious threat or just one of her friends’ brothers, a kid who just liked to hear himself sound dangerous. There was no way to know.
Then, after classes one day in the early spring of 2006, Nunu was standing outside the gates, waiting for her father. Many students mingled outside in a crowd. A car passed, and someone threw something out that hit her on the shoulder.
“Nariman, this is for you,” he yelled.
She looked down and saw an envelope at her feet. She hadn’t had time to recognize the car or any of the passengers. She picked up the envelope. She knew there was something bad in it. It was a single h
andwritten page, a quote from the Quran followed by a threat.
“Don’t dress or put on makeup like the ignorant people from the past. Guard your modesty and cover yourself or we will kill you.” It wasn’t signed.
Baba arrived and read the letter. As they drove away, Nunu could see that Baba was nervous that they were being followed. “These are not men,” Baba muttered. “If their mothers had raised them better, they’d be men.”
They took the note to court, and the judge read it and documented it, but he could do nothing else. “My advice would be for her not to go to college every day” was all he said.
Nunu was depressed. She had only a few months left in a college experience that had been a struggle from the beginning, and now it would be even worse. After the letter, she went only when she had an exam, sometimes a few days a week and sometimes not for a few weeks. Her professors understood. This time, she veiled. She would go to collect the lectures, then read them at home. When Baba picked her up, she waited inside the college until he called her and said, “I’m here now in front of the gate.” Nunu would hurry out into the car, her veiled head bent down, indistinguishable from the dozens of other women around her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
ZIA’S EMAILS AND phone calls continued to be cheerful, but not everything was perfect, even in the States. The immigration officer had granted her a six-month tourist visa, but after the first heady month she confided to Nunu that, as time went by, she was constantly worried about her next step. Where would she go and what would she do? Plus, she said, she was lonely. She really missed Nunu and Mamina.
At first she had made friends quickly, since people her age were fascinated to hear she was from a country they had seen so much about on the news. But young people in D.C. were antiwar and they hated George Bush, she discovered. Although they knew little about the reality on the ground, they couldn’t handle her casual mention of suicide bombers, assassinations, beheadings, and rocket attacks—and her wish that the troops would stay in Iraq was met with awkward silence. “I make people uncomfortable, Mama,” she said in her nightly calls home. She said she had stopped talking about Iraq at all, but it didn’t mean she could forget about what was happening in her homeland. She talked to Keith for hours each day, transporting herself back to the Green Zone from her bedroom in Washington. Though Nunu and Mamina decided not to tell her about the attack on Nunu, she still heard grisly stories about the world she was trying to escape. She called crying one night after Keith told her that Enaas, the young woman who had replaced Zia in her job at IMN, had been attacked. “They got her as she was leaving her house. Shot her nine times right on her street.” Amazingly, she was still alive. But Zia knew that could have been her.
Eventually, things started to stabilize. She had some friends from Iraq who had worked at IMN. Soon she found an internship at the offices of the Independent Women’s Forum, which described itself as a Republican women’s organization, a characterization that meant little to Zia. Unlike most Washingtonians, the women at IWF could listen to her praise George Bush all day. They reminded her of the White House people in the CPA. Even though it was unpaid, the job got her out of the house and gave her much needed distraction from thoughts of home.
I am starting over, she told herself. She researched applications for university scholarships and State Department programs that could keep her in the USA. Best of all, no one knew her past, or could define her future. This was her new beginning. As such, she was determined to be independent and not lean on anyone. As a part of that new philosophy, she decided it was time to break off her relationship with Keith for good. Nunu and Mamina agreed that, if he was never going to leave Iraq, she had to move on without him, and make a new life. As much as it pained her, Zia slowly took fewer of his calls and responded less often to his email.
ONE AFTERNOON, ZIA’S Iraqi colleague from IMN came to the house with a letter for Mamina. When she opened it, she saw it was from Keith.
“Dear Mamina,” it began. “I’m stupid and I hope you will forgive me. I have been in love with your daughter since the first day I met her. It took me a long time to realize this.”
He explained to Mamina how he had first understood how much he loved Zia when he was stuck at the airport in Mosul during Christmas 2003. He told her he had kept all of Zia’s emails, and that he had loved her ever since.
Mamina cried over the letter. She thanked God for making Keith see the light.
She called Zia immediately. The next day, Nunu pleaded with Baba to accompany her to the Internet center, where she secretly scanned the letter into the computer and sent it to Zia. Mamina had worried night and day that Keith had not been serious about Zia, but the letter convinced Mamina that he truly loved Zia. “He will act now, Zuzu,” Mamina assured her. “Tell him he must come to America to be with you.”
Nunu downloaded a song about two lovers from different countries and sang it for Zia. “Who gives you the right to come across the ocean and to my country and steal my heart?” They all laughed.
That evening, Zia received an email from Keith. “I’m coming to America, and I’m going to marry you.”
IN KEITH’S RENTAL car, they drove down to the waterfront in Georgetown, one of Zia’s favorite places. The sunlight glinted off the Potomac River as they strolled along the dock. This kind of casual time together in public was a new experience for them. Their two-and-a-half-year courtship had occurred entirely behind barbed wire, under rocket attack, in one of the most heavily guarded fortresses in the world. The last six months of their relationship had been conducted by cellphone and email. Now there were no belligerent security guards, no Iraqi groundskeepers snapping cellphone photos to post on Islamic websites, no checkpoints to remind them that he was an “occupier” and she was a “local.” It was Keith and Zia holding hands, as unremarkable as any other American couple.
Zia cried, finally releasing months of tension. Keith cried too. Away from Iraq for the first time in years, he felt like someone had splashed cold water on his face. He was in shock, feeling as out of place as he had initially in Baghdad. He had forgotten about the rest of the world.
He told her about his colleague Mike, who had fallen in love with an Iraqi poet. After their relationship was revealed she’d had to flee the country for Jordan. She’d waited for him for a year, but Mike refused to leave Iraq. So she gave him up.
“Mike is heartbroken,” Keith recounted. “And I just saw that happening to me.”
He got down on his knee and properly proposed. Then they walked to a jewelry store and bought rings.
ZIA SPOKE WITH Mamina and Nunu every three or four days, telling them about the proposal, about all the paperwork that Keith was getting to finalize his divorce, about her own meetings with immigration lawyers, in which she had decided to apply for asylum. She told them that she and Keith were moving to California, where his family was.
“California!” Nunu gasped with excitement. Zia’s life really was just like the movies.
They knew she’d have to be married before she and Keith moved in together, but it was still a shock when she finally broke the news one night on the phone. “I’m getting married in a few days.”
Mamina went quiet and began to cry. She passed the phone to Nunu, who didn’t know what to say. She had never imagined that the sisters wouldn’t be together on their wedding days. Zia explained that Keith said this would just be a civil ceremony, and that they would have a big wedding later, when Nunu and Mamina could be there. But Nunu knew it wouldn’t be the same. After a few minutes, Mamina took the phone back. “It’s okay,” she said to Zia. “Don’t think about us or miss us.”
Nunu heard Zia begin to cry. “I’m sorry, Mama.”
“No no no, Zuzu. You must be tough and hold in any tears,” Mamina said. “Think about your future with Keith and be grateful for it.”
Then, for two hours, she talked to Zia about the wedding night. Mamina explained in graphic detail everything that would happen. For som
e portions of the conversation, Nunu was allowed to listen in. But for most of it, Nunu excused herself to go into the other room. She didn’t want to hear it yet, but she also couldn’t help thinking about the box in the bedroom closet where Mamina had been collecting pieces of racy lingerie for her daughter since Zia had turned eighteen. Nunu remembered shyly watching her big sister examine the lingerie with fascination, trying on the lace thongs, scarlet red teddies, and peekaboo nighties, and deciding which styles best flattered her figure. Mamina believed that titillating lingerie—and a bride’s savvy know-how in pleasing her man—signaled that the mother was educated and reflected well on the entire family. A woman’s sex appeal could also afford her incredible power to influence her husband both in the bedroom and outside it, but only if she knew how to wield it.
But, Nunu thought sadly, how could they give these slips to her now, all the way in California? What if something went wrong—who would Zia go to? In the other room, she could hear Mamina finish explaining what would physically happen on the wedding night. The Quran encouraged pleasurable sex between a husband and wife, so Mamina was matter-of-fact about preparing her daughter for it. “Your wives are your fields, so go into your fields whichever way you like,” said the holy book. Mamina told Zia how to enjoy sex and to “do it this way” and “that way” in specific detail, so it would bring her pleasure as well. “It will hurt more because you are older now, but you must hide your pain. Don’t let him know because it will ruin the mood.” Zia giggled a little. “How it happens the first time sets the tone for the future,” Mamina advised her. “You must not let him rush. Make it all go as slowly as you can. Stay relaxed.”
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