by Zainab Salbi
“Ah, now this is true beauty, isn’t it?” he said, looking at her and then around at the rest of us for confirmation.
Amo was pleased with the plane.
My brothers and I were grafted onto Amo’s life the following year the way Baba grafted new branches onto his citrus trees: we would grow, but there would always be a scar at the joint. We would reach for the sky, mistaking our angle of vision for freedom. Then something would happen, and we would have only to look down to remember that it was an illusion, that we were not free at all, not for a minute. Our parents had known this all along, and that is why Baba never wanted to be the president’s pilot.
Amo apparently wanted us to move into a house on palace grounds, but Mama said Baba used the distance from my school as a reason for us to stay in our home. None of us wanted to move, and Amo gave us a weekend farmhouse instead. Interior decorating was one of Mama’s many talents, and she set about furnishing the farmhouse; she wanted to surprise us. Baba often brought her back bolts of cloth from his travels, which she kept all over the house, in various stages of progress. She was always sewing clothes or beading something or recovering cushions. Not one for patterns, she would unfold the new cloth along the designated sofa or chair and just start cutting. Or she would drape the new fabric on me and snip away, and somehow the vision in her mind would take shape on me. It was part of her magic. Then she would put a book on my head and instruct me to walk like a model in my pinned-together couture. “Always stand tall with your head raised high,” she said. “Don’t be shy and weak. I hate weak women. You need to be strong and confident.”
Before we went to the farmhouse the first time, Baba and Mama sat all three of us down for another family meeting.
“You may see the president from time to time when we’re at the farmhouse,” he said. “You will call him Amo if you see him, just as we do, and you will behave as your normal polite selves. But you are never to say a word about him to anyone else. You are never to talk about how often we see him, if we see him at all. Not to anyone. Not even to your cousins.”
Haider and I looking at each other nervously and wondered what we were in for.
“Understood?”
He looked at each of us. We each solemnly promised Baba we would do as he asked, and he seemed satisfied that we understood the seriousness of our commitment. It was a promise not only to him, but to one another. I would never violate that promise, and as far as I knew, no one else would either—even little Hassan, sitting on my lap, who was only three. Hassan had barely learned to speak, and already there were things he was being told he could not say.
Mama was excited when she took us to the farmhouse for the first time, which to the best of my recollection was shortly before I turned fourteen. It was on the airport road, and to get there we had to pass my favorite statue in Baghdad, of Abbas Ibn Fernas, our counterpart of the Grecian Icarus, who Mama told me gave human beings the idea they could fly. Abbas Ibn Fernas had been a prisoner trapped behind enormous walls, and the walls around him were so high that there was no way to escape, and he longed to be a bird so he could fly over them and escape. He began collecting feathers that fell from birds overhead and finally managed to collect enough to make himself wings. But he could not fly high enough to escape his prison when he tried, and he fell back to his death. Every time we drove by, I looked up at that statue and tried to imagine what it would feel like to be a bird with wings flapping quietly, surely, around me, and pillows of air under my arms.
A long wall lined the airport road that I had never thought about much before. Behind it was Amo’s farmhouse compound. We turned into a security gate in the wall and were signaled through. We drove a short distance and stopped in front of one of three houses sitting all by themselves on a vast stretch of empty, scrub-brushy desert with a small irrigation ditch running through it. I had expected a farmhouse, something small and rustic that maybe had animals we could ride. Uncle Adel’s farmhouse had gazelles, birds, sheep, cows, even a monkey. Not ours—this wasn’t a farmhouse at all, I thought as we parked, it was a regular house, only surrounded by walls. When we walked inside with our overnight bags, I remember trying hard to be enthusiastic for Mama’s sake, but I hated it. She had done her best to make everything look just right. She had bought new furniture downtown and upholstered it with bright fabrics. There were new dishes, a new TV set, Superman bedspreads in my brothers’ room and a flowery one in mine. But, despite all her work, it felt sterile and lifeless—a little like a model home looking for buyers. I put my bag down in the closet in my new bedroom and saw that Mama had already hung up some of the new dresses I had gotten in Seattle. Where was I supposed to wear these at a farm? What were we going to do here for two whole days? Mama came in and cheerfully told me to get dressed up because we were going to meet our new neighbors. I did as she asked and walked out in a new dress and fancy shoes. There were only two neighbors to call on.
I would spend dozens, perhaps hundreds, of weekends at that farmhouse, but I absolutely cannot recall what it looked like from the outside. I only know that it was nothing like the neighbors’. The other two houses were surrounded by lush gardens that had obviously been professionally designed and maintained. These were substantial, rambling homes of red brick that looked as if they belonged in magazine layouts of desert resorts or dude ranches. They had been built by palace architects and decorated by palace decorators with lavish Italian imports. Shiny new black Mercedes were parked outside both.
A couple named Aunt Nada and Uncle Kais lived in the slightly more luxurious of the other two houses. Uncle Kais was an active Baath Party member, a man obviously accustomed to wielding influence, who seemed very rigid and aloof, at least to me. His wife was elegant and proper, the sort of woman who not only follows etiquette, but believes in it. The other couple, Aunt Layla and Uncle Mazan, were professionals who seemed more accessible and less judgmental to me, as well as less interested in politics. I had met Aunt Layla before but I didn’t know her well. She was tall and gracious, far more spontaneous than Aunt Nada, and it was clear that she and Mama were close. When I saw the three women together, I was struck by how beautiful they all were. Aunt Nada and Aunt Layla were fair-haired with light eyes, and Mama was the dark-haired exception people often said looked like Sophia Loren. I was also struck by the fact that the three of them obviously knew one another well.
Between them, Aunt Nada and Aunt Layla had three daughters who were roughly my age, and these were my designated new friends. Each was beautiful and stylishly dressed. Luma was the oldest, the perfect daughter at sixteen, a vision of her mother, Aunt Nada. Her long chestnut hair was perfectly styled and sprayed. When she smiled, it was with thin lips pressed together. Following in her mother’s footsteps, she had exquisitely manicured hands, and she seemed very aware of them as she spoke, gesturing with a practiced femininity. Following in her father’s footsteps, she held herself stiffly and was active in the student Baath Party. I was between Luma and her younger sister, Sarah, in age. Sarah was already gorgeous and clearly knew it. She had golden brown hair, huge almond-shaped eyes, a small nose, and a beautiful mouth. Whereas Luma was proper, Sarah seemed like the younger and more daring sister who deep down inside wanted to wear her skirts short and dance all night. She was also a good Baathist, that was clear, but she seemed to have a mind of her own. More beautiful still was Tamara, Aunt Layla’s daughter, whom I came to refer to with my mother as Brooke Shields. Tall, light-skinned, European in manner, she had lived for a while with an aunt in England and punctuated her Arabic with perfectly accented English words. She was the most fashionable of all, the one who turned heads. Dressed in designer-label clothing, she seemed more interested in what was trendy than what was proper, more attuned to Europe than to Iraq. Tamara lacked the air of entitlement the other two girls wrapped themselves in. Or, at the very least, she seemed less interested in flaunting it.
How would they have described me? Perhaps as a quiet girl with dark curly hair like her mothe
r, someone who didn’t pay enough attention to her appearance, someone suited to stand in the background, but not quite in their class. They traveled in the right circles. I didn’t. They lived at the palace. I didn’t. Luma and Sarah were best friends with Amo’s daughters, and Tamara knew them too. I hadn’t even met Amo’s daughters. The difference in our status was clear. With every word they said, I was meant to understand that, like my parents, like our farmhouse, I was third. Only much later did I comprehend that what had brought us together was exactly the same as what divided us: our parents had met Amo the same night at a place called Pig’s Island; only their parents had welcomed his friendship while mine had resisted it.
It is hard now for me to distinguish that first weekend from the ones that followed—they were all so much the same. I can’t remember for certain if I even saw Amo the first time we went. He typically dropped by late in the afternoon for drinks with the adults at one of the other two houses. Sometimes weekends would go by and we would wait, all dressed up, and not see him at all. We would be instructed to sit and talk quietly in an adjacent room until and if we were summoned. Then we would go inside, welcome him with enthusiastic kisses and greetings, and array ourselves around as he convened what we referred to as our “family gatherings,” though none of us were part of his family and his own family members never joined us.
“Shlounkum ya halween,” Amo would say to us children, taking Hassan or one of the other little kids onto his knee. “How are you doing, beautiful ones?”
“Very well, Amo, we are doing very well!” we would chorus.
A few steps behind him, always, stood his personal guard Abed, a man with intensely focused eyes and lips pressed tight under his bushy black mustache, who went with Amo everywhere. Of all the hours I spent in his presence, I don’t remember once hearing Abed laugh or even speak, except into Amo’s ear. I never saw his beret off his head—it was forbidden for Iraqi soldiers to wear military berets tucked through shoulder straps on their uniforms allegedly because Israeli soldiers wore them that way—and I was surprised when Abed was arrested on charges of war crimes in 2003 and turned out to be partially bald.
There was nothing natural about the way we sat or spoke at our “family gatherings.” We remained perfectly still, actors in a scene that I understood even then was about the ideal family Amo had never had growing up poor in rural Tikrit. Later, historians would debate the facts, but portray Saddam Hussein as the offspring of a father who vanished from his life, a mother who married a man who abused him, and an uncle who filled him with dreams of military glory. Even my little brother, who was always so full of energy, knew better than to squirm or interrupt when we were with Amo. The other girls and I were the perfect image of young Iraqi women—utterly polite, immaculately dressed, and attentive to his every word. We were highly aware that anything we did wrong, even a wrong inflection, a hint of anything ayeb, would reflect on our parents.
Amo was the only one who seemed relaxed. Fastidiously groomed and impeccably aware of every person and every movement around him, he had an enormous charisma that is hard to convey if you never met him in person. I can think of no neutral adjectives for him. In these settings, he was compelling, not just affable, charming rather than nice. Maybe, like the best politicians, he just had that knack for making people, including children, feel they were being singled out for special attention. When he looked at you, it was as if he were really listening. It took me a while to realize that when he gave you his most affectionate, lingering smile, he was using that time to look behind your eyes.
My very first survival skills were manners, and I learned what I didn’t know already by taking cues from my mother. When you were with Amo, you were always polite and pleasant. You had no opinions or personal preferences except those that matched his own. There was nothing you’d rather do than spend time with him. You listened to him with rapt attention, always. If you were a child, you never spoke in his company unless he asked you a direct question, and you always arranged your face to look up at him in adoration. If he showed you something new he had gotten and said, “Isn’t it nice?” you would answer, “Oh, yes, Amo, it is verrrrrrry nice!”
Always, always, you would smile. With my mother, the only person I could ever talk to about Amo with any honesty at all, I called it my “plastic smile.” Without her constant reminders, I’m not sure I ever would have been able to put it on as I did. Sometimes today when I’m talking in public, people compliment me on my smile, and I wonder how much of it is really mine. There is a certain way the muscles in my mouth feel sometimes when I smile before an audience that takes me back to that farmhouse, when I knew a smile wasn’t enough; I had to stretch those muscles so as to beam.
Weekends were Amo’s designated downtime, and we were his entertainment. Part of our job was to make him laugh at the right moment. I can still imitate Amo’s laugh. He would tuck his chin slightly under and let out a deep-throated, guttural heh . . . heh . . . heh. If it had been a little higher-pitched or a little more spontaneous, you might have been inclined to call it a chuckle, but it had a kind of sinister undertone, like the bad guy character that always chased the good guy characters in a cartoon. When he laughed, we laughed, and every now and then I had this feeling the other girls and I, particularly Sarah, were secretly laughing at his laughter. I never felt free enough to talk to them about this, but I have a feeling they would know what I mean even today.
What I remember most from these gatherings, actually, is my parents’ faces. Both of them looked nervous and helpless to me, and I understood immediately why they were so determined that we never mention Amo’s name or describe ourselves as his friends. All of these adults were “friends,” but I knew this wasn’t the way they behaved with their real friends. I remember all the adults looking at Amo far more than they ever looked at the person sitting closest to them, and there were subtle—sometimes not so subtle—jibes at each other as they jockeyed for Amo’s approval. In time, I came to see that each adult had a specific role to play. My father was the straight man, Uncle Mazan the joker, and Uncle Kais the parliamentarian. Aunt Layla was the spontaneous one, Aunt Nada the proper one, and Mama the ebullient one whose job it was to lighten these proceedings with laughter. Mama’s eyes would fill up when she laughed for real, and the muscles in her face would tense when it was forced. Mostly, in these gatherings, it was the latter, but sometimes she would just laugh because she couldn’t help herself, and she would laugh more loudly than what the culture proscribed for women. “Good God, get a grip on yourself, woman!” Uncle Kais would say, rebuking her. Yet I could see that Amo liked my mother’s laugh just as he approved Uncle Kais’s criticism of it, the director able to relax because each of his players knew their roles so well.
I used to wonder sometimes whether Amo had other sets of friends like this one, which he would group and regroup in repertory over the years. Only he knows the real reasons he pursued a relationship with my parents. I know that if he wanted to become a world leader, and that is what he clearly planned and craved, even when he was still a rural tribesman on his way up the military-political ladder, he needed validation by the educated opinion-setters of Baghdad, including people of money and social influence. He also needed to understand Western culture, which was second nature to my parents and their set of friends. There were other people in Baghdad who were wealthier and more powerful. But I suspect many such people—Basma’s father, for example—had political opinions or ambitions of their own that presented a threat to Amo’s authority. My parents were naïve to the point of ignorance about politics, a lesson in the danger of civic apathy, and presented no challenge to his career or security risk to his life. But whatever other reasons he had for seeking their friendship, I believe he genuinely liked Basil and Alia, as many people did. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have kept them around. He might not have let them live.
There were times in our gatherings when Amo would get very emotional, and we were expected to show our sympathy for his sad
ness when we saw tears in his eyes. Usually this happened when he was talking about his love of Iraq. He practiced some of his speeches on my parents and the other adults, and when they were broadcast, Mama would look up at the television from her sketch-pad or her knitting and say, “Okay, here comes the part where he’s going to cry.”
I loved my mother. I wish I could talk with her now.
Unless something else was planned for us or there was a good reason—a school graduation, a funeral, or a trip out of Baghdad—I would generally be expected to spend my teenaged weekends—nearly six years of weekends—at the farmhouse. Except for talking to the other girls, usually about fashion, there was almost nothing to do and nowhere to go. There were two television stations in Baghdad, one of them a Farsi-language station run by government-authorized Iranian dissidents. The Arabic language station showed only Japanese cartoons, Egyptian films and soap operas, Dynasty, and hours and hours of Amo’s speeches before the Revolutionary Council or his generals or at other events. One afternoon, we were watching an Egyptian movie on television at the farmhouse, and the TV went dead, then switched to another show in the middle of a kissing scene. It turned out that Baba had been with Amo when that movie was on, and Amo had called up the director of Iraqi television and ordered him to stop it because it was exposing Iraqi youth to immoral trash. My cousins would have laughed at stories like this, but it never would have occurred to me to tell them. I missed my cousins desperately. I missed just hanging out and feeling normal. Haider, for whom no playmates were available, would lock himself in his room with his video games and slowly isolate himself from everyone except my father, who, I suspect, understood. I began to think of the farmhouse as my prison, and my escape was reading. I started with the longest book I could find, Gone with the Wind, and kept on reading through all the familiar themes: cousins killing cousins in war, widows asked to donate wedding rings, dark-skinned people destined to live in poverty while white-skinned people danced and pretended not to see.
