Between Two Worlds

by Zainab Salbi

  In Baghdad, my mother was a whirlwind of appointments and social obligations; we were always hurrying somewhere. But in Karbalā’ with Bibi, Mama calmed from the moment we walked in the door and Bibi greeted her a full embrace. The love between them was obvious, the differences in lifestyles and dress irrelevant. I couldn’t imagine living like Bibi any more than a city child could imagine making a living behind an ox and a plow, yet when she hugged me, I felt myself collapse into a rustle of unquestioning love. She was the symbol of premodern women my generation revered even if we didn’t choose to follow in their footsteps, the only human being in my life who never changed. Gentle, soft, and strong in the way people of unveering faith are strong, she seemed the same from the time I was born until she died.

  Oddly, the first time I heard about her childhood, I thought of Cinderella. Her parents and siblings had died, one at a time, when she was very little, until finally she was an orphan. An uncle was assigned to be her guardian and manage her inheritance for her until she grew up, but the guardian handled that responsibility badly and lost most of her fortune—a grave misdeed under Islamic law. So, when she was just thirteen, he arranged for her to be married to a wealthy businessman in Baghdad and reportedly emigrated to Iran. Bibi was not old enough for the marriage to be consummated, so she was commended into the care of her future mother-in-law, my mother’s paternal grandmother. That grandmother was a storied matriarch in our family, a woman who established her own sewing factory at the dawn of the twentieth century and died decades before I was born. For some reason, the one detail I remember hearing about her was that she ordered her own factory supplies from London, which was apparently remarkable at the time. This matriarch was determined never to lose control of her household, so she raised her young daughter-in-law to be subservient to her and her daughters, who in my mind played the role of Cinderella’s evil stepsisters. Bibi thus grew up passive and subservient, remaining at the beck and call of her mother-in-law, sisters-in-law, and husband, until she outlived them all. She sought her solace in religion and later her children. When her husband died a few years before I was born, she moved out of their sixteen-room mansion on the Tigris in Baghdad, where they had lived with a staff of Farsi-speaking servants, and into a small house in Karbalā’, where she found a spiritual adviser named Ruholla Khomeini, a new circle of friends, and a courtyard she planted with rosebushes.

  Bibi lived within walking distance of the two mosques that were built on the site where the prophet’s two grandsons had been massacred in the seventh century. The mosques, with towering golden domes and minarets, were always full of people, including pilgrims from all over the Muslim world. Because women and girls wore abayas at the mosque, Bibi would lend me one of hers, and as a child, I remember hiking up the long folds of black cloth around me so they wouldn’t drag on the ground. Then one day she made me my own little abaya. We were invited to a picnic with Bibi’s friends at the Al-Hussein mosque that day, and when I walked into the enormous courtyard surrounding the turquoise-and-blue tiled mosque, I felt I was being ushered into a world of women who knew the secrets of spirituality and dolma—grape leaves stuffed the Iraqi way, with onion peels and minced meat and rice and lots of sour lemon. Around us, flocks of pigeons cooed and poor pilgrims who could not afford hotels rested in the shade.

  When we went inside, I held my new little abaya under my chin so my hair wouldn’t show as I took in the huge crystal chandeliers hanging from the towering ceilings and the prone bodies of men and women scattered praying on an expanse of enormous red and burgundy Persian rugs. At one end of the mosque, surrounded by enormous silver bars, was the place where Ali’s martyred son was buried, and everyone gathered around it, tying green threads or pieces of fabric in the grillwork, each representing a wish they asked to be granted. I remembered the basic line I was taught to say when called to prayer, “I believe that there is no God but one God, and Mohammed is his Messenger, and Ali is his Friend.” But that was about all. I watched Bibi and my mother and emulated them as best I could. When Bibi bowed, I bowed. When she prayed, I prayed. Bsm Allah Al Rahman Al Raheem. By the name of God, the most merciful, the most gracious.

  After we came out of the mosque that day, we went into a candy shop that sold imported Soviet chocolates.

  “What a pretty little girl you are!” the shopkeeper told me. “You have an Iranian beauty.”

  “I’m not Iranian,” I said. “I’m Iraqi.”

  “You’re from Baghdad, aren’t you?” he said.

  “How did you know that?” I asked.

  “Because you’re holding your abaya so tight, you look like you’re afraid it’s going to fall off.”

  I didn’t think it was funny, but Bibi laughed, a warm laugh that was somehow devoid of all pretense and judgment.

  I remember her laughing like that when Mama and Aunt Samer teased her about the cleric she sometimes consulted named Khomeini, a fiery, Iranian-born religious scholar they thought was just plain weird because he seemed on a mission to send women back centuries. Khomeini had settled in Karbalā’ after being deported by the Shah of Iran for fomenting revolution in the 1960s. In 1978, at the request of the Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran, Iraq deported him too because he was deemed a destabilizing influence in the region. My father happened to be the pilot who flew him westward that day, toward Paris, but Khomeini didn’t stay put. A year later, in early 1979, he was swept into power in a popular uprising in Iran that shook the Muslim and Western worlds. Shah Reza Pahlavi had ruled Iran for nearly four decades. His openness to Western business, culture, and military interests had netted him the support of the West. But, in a classic and profound backlash, millions of Iranians who had been marginalized by the corrupt and brutal dictatorship behind the Western façade rose up and demanded change. The revolution was the work of nationalists, communists, student unions, women’s groups, and others, but it was hijacked by religious extremists who put Khomeini in power and named him the Grand Ayatollah. Arab leaders, especially Saddam Hussein right next door, began to fear this revolution would spread.

  I was at an amusement park for an end-of-summer outing with my cousins the day we went to war with Iran. I always counted myself fortunate to have lots of cousins my age, and there were seven of us that day between the ages of ten and thirteen, most of them boys. Several of my parents’ siblings had children about the same time as my parents, and because my own brothers were five and ten years younger than I was, these cousins were like siblings and friends combined.

  Naim was the son of my father’s brother, and he lived in our neighborhood. A straight-A student a year older than I, he was thin and interesting, the sort of friend you could talk to and play with at the same time. I remember filling a plastic bag with race cars my father had brought back for me, picking dozens of limes from our garden, and heading over to his house, where we would stick holes in the fruits, fill them with salt, and suck on them all day as we raced toy cars and argued and shared confidences.

  “Can I tell you a big secret?” I asked him when he was over at our house for a barbecue. It was Friday, the Islamic weekly holiday.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “I think about God in the bathroom,” I said.

  “Me too!” he whispered. “I can’t help it. Every time I go to the bathroom, I think about the fact that I’m not supposed to think about God in the toilet, so I think about God.”

  “But, it is haram!”

  Haram was an all-purpose word that applied to anything that was forbidden by religion. It was haram to think of God in the toilet because cleanliness is so much a part of Islam. It was also haram to think of God as an image. God was everywhere. He was on earth, on the sky, behind us, everywhere. Yet I sometimes committed the sin of trying to imagine God too.

  “Is there such a thing as double-haram?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Dawood, the oldest son of Uncle Adel, my mother’s brother, was the eldest of the cousins, the one the adults alwa
ys put in charge of minding the rest of us. I spent so many hours hanging out at his house on the Tigris that he and his brother treated me like a little sister. He had the large round eyes like my mother’s side of the family, and slightly pudgy cheeks that gave him a friendly look. He was always cool and fashionable—for some reason I remember him in a sweater with stripes of gray, green, and burgundy. He was studying the oud, a ten-stringed Arab instrument, and I was taking piano lessons, so we occasionally played together. He was always kind and gentle toward me, even when we were in elementary school and I would run over to him on the playground and ask him to tie my shoelace when it came loose. Then one day he taught me to do it for myself.

  Dawood was the leader of our pack the day war broke out with Iran. That day was special because it marked the first time we cousins were deemed old enough to roam the park more or less on our own, with just one adult chaperone in tow. I remember bright lights and laughter, cotton candy and ride after ride on the Tilt-O-Whirl before we left the park to cap the day off with a stop at a famous ice cream shop in Al-Mansour, the Beverly Hills of Baghdad. When we headed home, it was almost dark, and there seemed to be a power outage. I was the first to be dropped off, and all the lights were out when our noisy carload drove into the Airlines Neighborhood and pulled up in front of my house. My mother was waiting at the front door.

  “Where have you been?” she asked. “Haven’t you heard there’s a war going on?”

  War? What war?

  She hurried me inside and ran to call the other parents to tell them their children were safe. No one, possibly least of all Saddam Hussein, imagined then that the war would last so long that all my cousins in the car that day would find themselves of draft age before it ended, at risk of being sent to the front, where hundreds of thousands of young men would lose their lives for nothing.

  I turned eleven a few days after the war started, too young to understand what lay in store for our family, let alone to comprehend what impact that war would have on the Middle East and global politics. When the opening of school was delayed, my first thought was more cartoons, more summer. The first time I saw antiaircraft fire in the night sky, I ran out into our garden, jumping up and down, thinking it was like the Fourth of July in Seattle. My father was stuck outside the country when the fighting started and wasn’t able to get back until a few weeks later, so it fell to Mama—as so many things would—to help her three children cope with war. There were frequent air raids at the outset, and many of my friends spent nights huddled together with their parents under stairwells when the sirens went off. My mother didn’t want us to live that way, so if the electricity went out for a blackout, she closed the curtains, lit candles, and made puppet shows with her hands for us on the walls. Then she would kiss us good night and put us to sleep in our own beds.

  “Life moves on,” she declared. “You can’t just freeze it—not even for war.”

  My brothers were so little, I knew she was talking to me.

  After school started, an Iranian missile landed on the house where a friend of my brother’s lived. Half the family died that night and the other half lived. I remember watching my seven-year-old brother sitting on his bed, looking through his stuff for pictures of his friend because his mother had come to school to say she had lost not only her son, but every single likeness of him. Later I heard about another house being hit by an Iranian bomber, and the entire family died. I had never seen their house, but I imagined it was on a corner, like ours. And I imagined the children’s bedrooms were upstairs, like ours.

  Life got scarier after that. When Baba left on his trips, I remember him kissing and hugging Mama as if he were afraid he would never see her again. Bibi would come stay with us, and so would Radya’s whole family, though I never understood how Radya’s father’s rifle could protect us from Iranian bombers. I would lie in bed at night and wonder if the Iranian pilots who were bombing us knew they were killing children they couldn’t see. Sometimes a missile would cross the night sky outside my bedroom window. I would pray it wouldn’t land on our house, and feel guilty when it landed, in a half circle of intense light, on someone else’s house. I could feel the ground shake if the missile landed close, and there would be a sliver of perfect stillness before the shattering of glass reached my ears and the haunting wail of ambulances began. It never occurred to me to wonder whether children in Iran were wondering the same thing about Iraqi bombers. Iran was our enemy.

  One day early in the war something happened that was in equal parts terrifying and amazing. Mama and I were driving home from the grocery store one day when an Iranian jet suddenly zoomed down so low over the street we were on that we could see the pilot. Iraqi television had broadcast footage of some captured Iranian soldiers a few days earlier, and my mother and a friend of hers had whispered about how beautiful their Iranian faces were. Time froze. I remember looking through the windshield at the pilot to see if they were right. As he zoomed over us, I saw his face, and I know he saw ours. He had a mustache. He was just an ordinary man. What was he thinking as he looked at Mama and me? Was he going to kill us? Did he hate us? Had he meant to come to this part of Baghdad, or was he lost? They said on television that the Iranian mullahs were so ignorant that they sent their pilots to Iraq without any maps. Was he going to bomb a house like ours? Was I going to lose friends because of his bomb?

  Logic tells me there was no time for all those thoughts to pass through my brain in that second or two, and yet I remember those and more.

  Mama did an extraordinary thing as the young pilot zoomed past us that afternoon. She raised her hand and waved at him. Then, after he was safely back up in the sky where he belonged, she looked over at me and took my stricken face in both her hands.

  “How cool was that?” she asked.

  When the war started, the atmosphere in Baghdad changed almost immediately. You could feel it in the air. Iraqi flags—red, white, and black with green stars—were everywhere and somehow intimidating, rather than reassuring to me as a child. Streets filled with Baathist marchers chanting anti-Iranian slogans. Anti-Iranian graffiti proliferated on public walls. Almost overnight, there were soldiers with guns and pictures of Saddam Hussein everywhere. Our state newspaper portrayed Iraqi military leaders as uniformed generals sitting politely in a round table taking instructions from the president; Iranians were shown as crazy mullahs in dirty beards who stood on chairs arguing and yelling at each other. These crazed zealots had attacked us because they wanted to spread their revolution throughout the Arab world, Saddam Hussein had told us, vowing to defend us. He titled this war the Second Qadissiya, after the First Qadissiya, which was fought in the seventh century to advance the progress of Islam into Persia, and compared himself to the great Muslim warrior of that war, Saad Ben Abi Waqaas. He didn’t call our enemies Iranians, but al furs Al Majoos, “fire-worshiping Persians,” a term I later realized must have been designed to revive ethnic hatred that had lain dormant since Persians, mostly Zoroastrians who worshiped fire, had converted to Islam many centuries earlier. By reviving ancient animosities and claiming that he was protecting Iraq from the spread of the Iranian revolution, he was able to portray this as a defensive war, not a war of aggression, which is forbidden by the Quran. Our media was so controlled that I didn’t find out until I left Iraq that Iran wasn’t the one that even started the war.

  At school, we learned to defend our country and our lives. We practiced hiding under our desks for air raid drills, took instruction in first aid, and found out that our enemies weren’t just Iranians, but unseen Iraqi collaborators who secretly supported Iranians. To combat these insidious traitors in our midst, we learned there existed a secret government agency called the Mukhabarat, which was described to us as men in civilian clothes who were working quietly to protect us from the danger these Iranian sympathizers posed to our safety. Mukhabarat means “informers” in Arabic.

  “I know who they are—the men with the big black mustaches!” Mohammed said, as always rea
dy to show off his superior knowledge.

  Funny how you forget so many things teachers try to teach you, but you remember the looks on their faces when they’re caught off guard. My teacher looked nervous when Mohammed said that. I remember. After a moment, she corrected him.

  “No one knows what they look like because they are secret,” she said. “That is the point.”

  But Mohammed was right. Even I knew what they looked like. Mama had just complained about them hanging around outside the ice cream shop the week before, a bunch of men with big black mustaches who looked as if they were entitled to just stand there and look us over from head to toe as we came out licking our pistachio ice cream cones.

  My parents had zero interest in politics. My father, the son of a prominent Ministry of Education official who had suffered censure for being frank about his political views, actively shunned politics. So, as I understand it, did many other educated Iraqis as Saddam Hussein brutally solidified his control of Iraq through his nationalistic pan-Arab Baath Party. Because both schools and airlines were nationalized, however, my parents had to join the Baath Party like most Iraqis just to hold a job. There were several levels of membership, however, and everyone came to know the difference between getting along and being a true believer. The entry level, moua’ayed, or endorser, was the least you could get away with. If you wanted a little more protection in your job then you could attend meetings for a few years and rise to naseer, or follower. Later, of course, it became clear to us all that to rise in the ranks of the Baath Party, you had to write reports on other people, in other words, become a spy.