Between Two Worlds

by Zainab Salbi

“Don’t you love me anymore? Do you want to get me killed?”

  “Of course I love you. Of course I don’t want you to get killed.”

  “I can’t believe my own wife is telling me this! Other women are trying to help their husbands escape the draft, and you’re telling me I should go to the front lines?”

  “You saw him the other night. He was looking straight at you when he said city men were spoiled. All that talk about how you don’t know what hardship is, what it means to grow up without shoes, that men from Baghdad need to toughen up and this war will teach them how. You know Amo expects you to go, Basil.”

  “So what? What if I get shot? Is that how I’m supposed to prove I’m tough? By getting myself killed?”

  And I heard Baba get up, open the front door, and stalk out into the night. I just sat there in my pajamas in the silence that followed. I was scared. Was I now at risk of losing Baba? Why would Mama even think of such a thing? Was she trying to be one of those “glorious Iraqi women” they were always talking about on television who sent their husbands and sons off to war? I hesitated for a minute, then went downstairs to find her. There had to be an explanation.

  “Did you hear us arguing?” she asked, looking up when she saw me come in. “I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

  “Mama, does Baba really have to go to the front? What if something happens to him?”

  “Nothing will happen to him, honey. They won’t send him anywhere dangerous. He’ll just go away for a while to fulfill his national duty, then come home. It’ll just feel as though he’s away on a long trip.”

  She made it sound almost routine. She seemed to think that my father would go off to a safe area, prove his loyalty, and be back in a matter of months—which is exactly what happened. I later learned that Saddam Hussein was the one who had called him home and that he had complimented Baba in private for his courage. But for the first time I saw a crack in my parents’ marriage. Except to say that he thought Iraq would win because our army was stronger than Iran’s, I don’t remember Baba saying much at all when he came home. I just remember that when he returned, his boots left mud on the terrazzo tile, and he wouldn’t look at Mama, though she went out of her way to be nice to him. My father loved my mother. I am certain of that, but I don’t think he ever got over her imprecations to risk his life for show.

  While men were under pressure to donate their time and even their lives for the war effort, women were asked to donate gold. Baath Party members began going door-to-door in suburban neighborhoods asking women to donate jewelry, and some felt pressured to give away even their wedding rings in the name of supporting our troops. In the Arab world, a woman’s wealth is often displayed in public by her gold. Under Sharia, Islamic law, men inherit twice as much from their parents as women, because they are responsible for paying for household expenses. A woman’s portion of her inheritance, however, is hers alone. As far as I know, my father never asked my mother about her inheritance; that was hers. Along with properties and other assets, when a woman marries, her women relatives and friends slip twenty-four-karat necklaces over her head and rings onto her fingers until, by the end of the evening, she is often adorned with jewels, and these are hers to keep even if the marriage ends in divorce.

  When I was twelve, we got an invitation to donate gold at a televised ceremony as I was finishing seventh grade. Mama didn’t like the idea of appearing on television and, in her own way, was shy about such publicity. I suspect the whole concept seemed gauche to her, but participation was not optional, so my parents asked me to go instead. When I arrived, I found women lining up in front of the camera to make their donations. I believe I was the only child. I said my name clearly, as they had, so my family would be given proper credit, and handed over the bag of jewelry my mother had given me so they could weigh it and announce the exact weight on television. I don’t remember how much it was, but the point was that everyone in the country knew exactly how much everyone else gave, so that, even as everyone quietly complained, they wound up competing to see who could donate most. A few months later the president held a private ceremony in which he pinned a silver pin on my lapel as a donor. He talked for a long time, praising or criticizing specific families by name. He knew exactly how much each family had donated. One family had been “stingy,” he said, naming them and adding that they loved their dogs more than their country. Later, I found out that their assets had been confiscated and the couple, childless, was imprisoned.

  The summer before I started eighth grade, a huge convoy of black Mercedes and police vehicles roared into the Airlines Neighborhood and parked under the basketball hoop in our cul-de-sac on an otherwise quiet Friday, the Muslim day of rest.

  In Baghdad, people often drop by to visit in late afternoons—not between the hours of one and four, because that is a time for meals and naps—but later on, for tea or coffee. It was apparently in that tradition that the president decided to drop in on us for a surprise visit. My parents were playing backgammon at the time, and they jumped up as soon as they heard all the noise outside. It was Radya’s day off, so Mama nervously sent me into the kitchen to make coffee while she and my father answered the door and invited the president into the parlor. I peeked outside as the water was boiling and was overwhelmed at the sheer military power I saw through the grill on the kitchen window. The cul-de-sac was filled with automobiles and men in uniforms and guns and black mustaches.

  I got out our special pot for Turkish coffee and set three little gold-embossed cups and saucers on my grandmother’s engraved silver tray from Iran—a political faux pas I would have known better than to commit even a year or two later. I prided myself on knowing how to make Turkish coffee even though I was too young to drink it. I carefully measured every ingredient and made certain to take the coffee off the heat at exactly the right moment so there would be froth on top. No froth meant mediocre coffee and a neglectful hostess.

  Then I nervously carried my tray into the parlor. My parents were seated together on the small sofa. Saddam Hussein was seated alone on the big sofa, with one arm draped casually over the back and the other resting near the gun at his waist. I immediately knew by the way they spoke that they were more than just acquaintances; they knew one another well. He looked very much at home in our house—more so at the moment than my father did. Baba was smiling and trying to look relaxed, but I could see he was nervous as well. I set the tray down very carefully, focusing on the cups to make sure nothing spilled.

  “And here is our Zainab,” Baba said, his face lighting up when I walked in. My father’s love for me could feel like sunshine. I remember feeling it in particular that day. I could see how proud he was to present his daughter to the president of Iraq.

  “Ah, so this is Zanooba!” the president said, as if he’d been hearing about me for years.

  I was instructed to call him Amo, just Amo, as my parents did. Later, Mama told me this was a kind of a code name he had asked his friends to call him.

  “Good afternoon, Amo,” I said politely. I smiled and leaned down to kiss him three times, as Iraqis do in greeting, once on one cheek, then on the other, then back to the first cheek again. He had surprisingly soft cheeks, as if he had recently shaved, and he smelled of cologne. He gave me a beautiful smile, a wide smile with very white, even teeth. When he picked up the cup, I noticed a small tribal tattoo on his hand.

  After serving the coffee, I smiled and politely left the room as was expected of me. Then I went back to the kitchen to look through the window to count how many more people were outside that I was supposed to make coffee for, and counted tens of guards standing in the cul-de-sac. I recognized one of them. It was Uncle Arshad, Aunt Nawal’s husband, and Aunt Nawal was Amo’s sister. I knew them. I had even been to their house a few times. How had my parents gotten to know Amo, and why hadn’t they ever talked about him before? I carried the biggest tray of coffee cups outside I could manage, only to learn guards couldn’t drink anything while on duty.
At the far end of the street, I noticed the entry to our neighborhood had been blocked off; and there was some sort of disturbance. It turned out that the entire neighborhood had been cordoned off as a security measure for this visit, but a teenaged neighbor was unaware of the blockade and had been arrested for trying to get to his house after curfew. Mama told me later what had happened when the security guard came in to tell the president about him.

  “What would you like us to do with him, sir?” the guard had asked.

  “He’s just a kid, he lives down the street,” Baba said. “Don’t worry about him.”

  “Should we put him in jail just to scare him?” the guard persisted. “He was arguing with us.”

  Amo decided to take my father’s recommendation and let the boy go, which spared him and his family the terror of a prison stay. Because my father was a friend of Amo’s, he was allowed to intervene to help the boy. Of course, if he hadn’t been a friend of Amo’s, the boy wouldn’t have been in danger of arrest in the first place. Friendship and fear went hand in hand.

  After Amo left, I went into the parlor to clear the dishes. I was all alone, and I saw Saddam Hussein’s cup—Amo’s cup—sitting there. I remembered Mama and her friend Shaima reading coffee grounds, and I went over and picked up his cup and swirled the last bit of liquid around in it as they did. Then I flipped it over onto the saucer to see if I could make out any shapes in the coffee grounds that could foretell the future. A bird meant someone would bring you news. A fish meant you were about to get money. But all I could see in Amo’s saucer was grounds.

  From Alia’s Notebook

  I told you this story when you were little, remember?

  We first met him in 1972. We were a group of friends, mostly young married couples, having a night river party on the Tigris River. We had rented a big boat with a band and we were dancing and laughing the whole night. There was nothing on our minds except having a good time. Suddenly, one of our friends ordered the boat driver to stop by an island known as the Pig’s Island. We thought that we would start a barbecue there and continue our dancing.

  But, when we stepped onto the sand, we were surprised to see a young man waiting there to greet us. He was wearing a white outfit. His suit, his shoes, everything was white. He was practically shining under the moonlight. We kept turning around and asking each other. Who is this man? Why is he here? Behind him were two other men who declared that he was Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein? Who is Saddam Hussein? We looked around at each other again, but none of us knew him. I was the one who finally asked the question out loud, “And who is Saddam Hussein?” One of the two men behind him answered that he was the vice president of Iraq. But we did not know him because we had no interest in politics.

  He started shaking our hands one by one and invited us for drinks that were brought within seconds of his command from boats that had surrounded the island. He had a very charming personality that made an impression on anybody who met him. We end up having a nice time that night. He always makes sure to spend some time with each couple to get to know them on their own and part of his strategy is to start first on couples where the wife is particularly beautiful. He danced with all the blonds in the group. He drank a lot and filled the place with Champagne bottles.

  Telephone calls among our friends filled the next day. Everyone was asking about him, who invited him, how he knew about us, what he wanted, etc. It turned out that one of our friends on the boat that night, Mahmood, was his dear friend. Saddam’s arrival at our party was apparently in response to a request he had made to Mahmood: Would you please introduce me to the young elite of society?

  4

  THE PILOT’S DAUGHTER

  MY FATHER WAS THE CAPTAIN of Boeing 747s, then the largest commercial airliners on earth. The jets he flew were enormous shining planes with “IRAQI AIRLINES” written in green and white on the side. When we flew with him when I was little, the flight staff treated me like a princess. I would climb up the spiral staircase to the first-class lounge on the upper floor, and a stewardess would bring me an orange Fanta, and tell me how lucky I was to have a father like Captain Basil. I could see they weren’t just trying to be nice. They liked him, they looked up to him, and I was sure everybody knew he was the best airline pilot in Iraq.

  When I was allowed to step inside his cockpit, I was able to glimpse the world as he saw it, and I understood why he felt compelled to leave us so often. Here, high above the earth, the sky itself was round, and it was the color of the inside of a sapphire. There were no streets or boundaries. There was no nationality. We were in a free space between heaven and earth. When I saw Baba’s face as he was flying, I knew this was where he belonged. Surrounded by hundreds of buttons and switches and lights and dials that would terrify most people, he was completely relaxed, master of this incredibly complicated universe. When I heard his voice on the speaker system welcoming passengers aboard, I knew hundreds of people trusted him with their lives.

  “I want to be a pilot like you when I grow up, Baba,” I told him once from my small seat behind his copilot.

  “Then I’ll have to teach you to fly someday,” he said, and he took off his captain’s hat with all the gold braid, turned around, and put it on my head.

  Early in 1982, I began to feel tensions rise again in our home as the background sounds of our household changed. Mama stopped singing, there was no roll of backgammon dice—backgammon was a skill she considered one of the secrets to a happy marriage—and the nervous whispers were back. When Baba and Mama called a family meeting, I was afraid they were going to tell us there was another wave of deportations. Instead, they announced that Baba was getting a promotion: he was going to be the pilot of the President of Iraq. He didn’t sound happy about it.

  “This is not something that should be talked about outside the family,” Baba said sternly. “This is not something you should brag about to your friends. This is not something that should go to your heads.”

  My parents were always telling us not to let things go to our heads, to be thankful for what we had, but never to brag or show off.

  The best part of Baba’s new job for all of us was that we were going to go to Seattle that summer to pick up a new plane for the president. We loved Seattle. We had spent several summers there when my father was attending his pilot training classes, but hadn’t been able to go the year before because a foreign travel ban had been imposed as a result of the war with Iran. That summer of 1982—the last time we would go together as a family, as it turned out—was the best of all. My father was allowed to select his own presidential flight crew, and some of them brought their families, so there was a group of about fifteen of us who got to know one another well. We had picnics and barbecues together, with sparkling Puget Sound sunsets behind us. The adults made up slightly raunchy beer songs that made them double over laughing.

  We spent our days sightseeing or going to the beach or shopping. We always took advantage of our summer vacations to buy clothing and whatever else we needed for the foreseeable future, because selection was limited in Iraq. My mother rented a car, and she and I and Amel, the wife of the flight engineer, went shopping together. Amel was blond and blue-eyed and talked baby talk, which I couldn’t stand even then in grown women. But her husband, Amo Qusai, was one of my favorite people on the trip. A big macho bear-hug kind of man who wore his heart on his sleeve, he was madly in love with her and their little daughter and never stopped showing it. They had met when they were both in high school, and he talked about how for years he had been too shy to approach her. They were from a lower-middle-class family, and they had struggled to build a life together. This promotion was a major step forward for them, and I could see how indebted Amo Qusai felt to Baba for getting him this job.

  Amel didn’t know how to drive and had never been abroad before, so Mama kind of adopted her and brought her along on some of our shopping trips, translating for her and introducing her to American products. We wandered through the American depa
rtment stores, buying more dresses for me than I ever thought I could wear, putting makeup on Amel, and getting clothes for my brothers. We spent a long time in one lingerie department, where Amel bought lots of lacy lingerie to bring home as a present for her sister, while I took Hassan’s hand and tracked down the old lady boxer underwear that was the only thing Bibi ever asked us to bring us back except for tea rose perfume. One day we went to the Ethan Allen store to buy new furniture for the living room and parlor, and the saleslady asked how we would get it back to Iraq.

  “Don’t worry about shipping, we have a plane,” Mama answered. She was trying to sound suave, but she couldn’t quite pull it off. She turned to me, burst into giggles, and started clapping with excitement.

  We didn’t just have a plane. We had a brand new 747 jumbo jet. There were only four families on it when we headed back to Iraq. My father gave us a quick tour before we took off. The interior was amazing. The floor was covered in a green-and-white carpet with presidential emblems. There were separate rooms, all with ultramodern furniture: a bedroom with a huge bed, a conference room and office, a bathroom with a shower at the rear. I had never seen such a plane before. As we came in for a landing in Baghdad, I could see the huge new airport, one of the most modern buildings in Iraq, with its arched white ceilings I knew were hung inside with thousands of candle-like lights. All over the country, buildings and institutions were being renamed for Saddam Hussein—Saddam’s Children’s Hospital, Saddam’s Theater, Saddam’s Elementary School, Saddam’s High School, even Saddam’s City. Our airport was no longer Baghdad International. It was Saddam Hussein International Airport, and Saddam Hussein was there to meet us when we touched down.

  If I were to place a marker on the moment our freedom vanished, it would probably be when that heavy jet door swung open and the hot desert air of Iraq rushed into the pressurized compartment. I watched my father step out of the cockpit and saw his expression change when hard-faced security guards with black mustaches entered in their pressed khaki uniforms with berets and guns. The happy-go-lucky look I had gotten used to in Seattle vanished and was replaced by nervous attentiveness. Saddam Hussein was coming to inspect the plane my father had helped design, negotiate the purchase of, test, and accept delivery of, the plane he had flown home. We had been instructed to remain in our seats while my father gave Amo a tour of his new acquisition, which he had named the Al Qadisiya, after his favorite battle against the Persians. When Baba led him down the aisle and introduced him to crew and family members he hadn’t yet met, Saddam stopped to tousle my hair and say warmly, as if he really knew me, “Hello, Zanooba!” Then he looked on to the next row, and Baba introduced him to Amel.