by Zainab Salbi
Amo was very careful about eating anything prepared by anyone else, but he made an exception for my mother’s stuffed lamb. Once, she prepared a whole dinner for Ramadan at his request, and we were all waiting for him at the farmhouse when he sent word he couldn’t make it, but could she please send him her stuffed lamb? So she sent it on, and we broke our fast that night with side dishes. He had an enormous appetite for meat and had a fresh sheep slaughtered daily. When he joined us for dinner at one of our farmhouses, he brought his own cooks, food, pots, tableware, personal taster Hanna, and kitchen staff, most of whom were Christian. Like many leaders down through history, he trusted minorities with his personal care because they were unlikely to conspire with majority populations to betray him.
One evening after Amo had been at our farmhouse for dinner, my mother whispered to me with a gleeful little smile on her face, “Look what I found!” and whipped out Amo’s dinner fork. His eating utensils were at least a third larger than normal and featured a crest with a taloned Iraqi eagle on the handle. This fork was nearly the size of a serving utensil you would stick in a large roast to transfer it to a serving platter. I still have it, a lone tangible souvenir in my kitchen drawer of the endless weekends I spent in that farmhouse.
Food was often a matter of controversy more than comfort. At one family gathering with Amo, Aunt Layla got really excited when grapes were presented at the table. “I haven’t seen these grapes in such a long time. They remind me of the days in England!” she said.
Amo glared at her with no mercy whatever.
“What do you mean you haven’t seen such grapes?” he demanded, obviously having no idea that most Iraqis didn’t enjoy such luxuries. “They are from the Iraqi market. All Iraqis have access to this grape.”
The vulnerability just below her lovely face surfaced. Aunt Layla was scared—over a grape.
I’m convinced if you understood the way he managed the competition of his “beloved ones” you would understand how he stayed in power for thirty-five years even though millions of his people hated him and there were ongoing domestic and international plots to assassinate him. Our “family gatherings” were a microcosm of how Amo not only spread but maintained fear inside the Baath Party and his Republican Guard and even our classrooms at school. He took pleasure in pitting people against one another—couple against couple, spouse against spouse, child against child. If you wanted to stay in the game—and my parents saw no choice—you had to compete for his favor just to stay even—the fathers with their obedient yes sire, the mothers with their coquettishness, the children with their adoring smiles. This included constantly eyeing one another and tattling on one another. I eventually came to like the other three girls, yet I remained lonely because the central ingredient missing in our friendship was trust.
Even children were encouraged to tattle on one another. One afternoon at the farmhouse when Hassan was no more than five or six, he blurted out, “There is no God but one God, Mohammed is his Messenger, and Ali is his Friend,” and Sarah’s little sister immediately ran to her mother, Aunt Nada, who was a Sunni and thus taught her children that it was forbidden to say the part about Ali.
“Mama, he said the wrong shahada!” the little girl told her.
Hassan looked up at my mother, confused.
“I got it right, didn’t I, Mama?” he asked.
But, in the tense, awkward mental shuffling that went on in the kitchen between my mother and Aunt Nada, Mama was unable to give him that reassurance. Finally, the mothers each told their children they would explain later, and Aunt Nada politely excused herself and took her children back to her farmhouse. I ran to Hassan to hug him and assure him that he had said the right thing and Sunni and Shia were all Muslims in the end; we just expressed ourselves differently. I felt so protective of him. I didn’t want him to be hurt the way I had by Mohammed.
Mama and Aunt Layla were very close at one point, and Aunt Layla had told her that another of my aunts, a woman Mama adored, had said something critical about her to Amo. Mama came home crying that day, and in time, she pulled back and trusted people less. I didn’t like seeing her that way, but as was the case with so many other things, I later came to understand her reasons.
“Can you believe what your father did today?” Mama asked me one afternoon when she was coming back from Aunt Nada’s farmhouse. “We were just sitting around and Amo went around the circle asking everyone to say who their first love was, and your father said you! Can you believe it! It was you! It was his daughter! It wasn’t me, it wasn’t even a girlfriend!”
What was I supposed to do? Sympathize with her because my father said he loved me? I had no idea if that was Amo’s own personal kind of truth or dare or a perfectly innocent question among friends. I just knew that whatever he did was creating conflict in my parents’ marriage that wasn’t there before. Since no one could criticize him, he could then play the good guy as well: the patient mediator, the peacemaker. My mother later told me the term she thought of for Amo’s strategy was “divide and conquer.” But, if she understood it so well, I ask myself with the advantage of hindsight, why did she fall for it?
After Baba was forced to choose Amo’s friendship over being his pilot, he had to cut back on his flying because he was expected to accompany Amo to public events, though he would still lean out of newspaper photos or TV cameras as other men leaned in. I would be on the phone with a friend, and the voice of a palace operator would interrupt and order me to hang up because the president wanted to talk to my father. Or the phone would ring during lunch, and my father would get a set of brief instructions for a family trip. “Be ready in fifteen minutes, pack for three days,” the voice might say, and we would drop everything and get ready. A black Mercedes with darkened windows would drive up into our cul-de-sac, and we would jump in and join a small convoy of other black Mercedes speeding down the highway at more than 120 miles an hour. I have never driven so fast at any other time in my life. For security reasons, we were never told where we were going. Most of the time I didn’t even know the names of the places we wound up, many of them newly constructed palaces, some lavish, some like regular houses, each decorated in different styles Amo never seemed to tire of showing off.
At one of the palaces, I saw ornamental helmets over doorways that reminded me of an enormous monument in Baghdad of a human hand, based on Amo’s own, that held a net full of helmets of dead Iranian soldiers. These ornaments hung in clusters of three, like cherries, above the doorways, only they were life-sized helmets made of gold. As I stared at them, I suddenly realized that our gold donations had been melted down to make them, I was certain of it. I saw that he had forged those trinkets in the pain of the Iraqi people. Don’t you know people are suffering and dying in this war? I found myself asking Amo in my head. How can you turn our donations into obscene curios? Take the Abbasid coin off my mother’s neck that her grandfather had given her that bore the marks of history? Melt down wedding rings women had taken off their hands as a sacrifice to help our soldiers?
I ultimately came to understand that he took from us with uncanny precision what was so intimate to us that it hurt. Not just the Abbasid coin, which mattered nothing to him, but the qualities about us he claimed to value most: my mother’s laugh, my father’s wings, and very nearly what Mama said Amo sometimes called my “spirit.” In return, he gave us gifts that signified only his wealth and control of the national treasury. My father had a closet full of guns he used only when he was hunting with Amo. My mother got boxed jewelry sets made in Italy—lovely, but I would have traded them all to see that Abbasid coin around her neck again.
He was running a country, a war, an army, a political party, and one of the world’s largest oil economies, but he found time to keep meticulous accounts of our emotional peonage. I remember one trip we took to the old city of Mosul, gateway to Kurdistan in the north, when I was seventeen or eighteen. We drove up a winding mountain road to a modern mountain lodge with a beautiful view over
looking the city. I remember a bottle of Chivas Regal sitting in the middle of a table on an expansive modern porch and adults drinking heavily the night we arrived. When Amo drank, they were forced to drink too. Mama disliked drinking to excess, and she looked as if she wanted to cry, which was how alcohol always affected her. My father came to seek his escape in drinking as years went on, and he looked ever more tense and serious. The other adults were getting loud and slurring their words, and the men were eating pistachios with their mouths open like Amo, grossing us kids out. Exchanging glances, we older ones tried to divert the attention of the younger ones so they wouldn’t have to see our parents this way.
As for Amo, the more he drank, the merrier he got. Yet I never saw him act drunk. Drinking seemed to lighten him up a bit. His merciful moments sometimes came when he was drinking, and there was the smallest opening to say something honest to him. Once, when he was talking about how he much he enjoyed his “People’s Days,” the days he helped resolve the problems of ordinary citizens, such as women who were having a hard time with divorces or inheritances, Aunt Layla spoke up and asked why he didn’t just change the laws to protect women instead. He seemed to actually listen, and she takes credit to this day for improvements he made in family laws for women in the 1980s, though he legalized honor killings in the 1990s that allowed men to kill women family members deemed guilty of causing dishonor to their family name.
After they had been drinking for what seemed like a long time outside, Amo stood up and indicated we should move indoors. No one asked why. “Implement, then discuss”—that was the Baathist motto, after all. Once we were seated in the two-level living room, he informed us we were going to have a family piano recital. He called on me first and sat back and relaxed, ready to be entertained by his beloved ones. I had memorized the Blue Danube Waltz, and I played it that night. Surrounded by my fifteen or twenty members of this artificial family, I was nervous, but I played without a mistake. When I finished, Amo didn’t just clap—I remember this vividly for some reason—he clapped slowly, with respectful pauses between each clap: clap . . . clap . . . clap. When you did something to cause Amo’s admiration, he would shine his eyes on you. We all knew that shining-eye look and sought it out. It was the prize, the deposit you put in the bank against a dry spell. That night I got it, the best shining-eye I’d ever seen. After I finished, he called on Luma and Tamara and complimented them too. Then he stood up, signaling he was ready for dinner, and the recital was over.
But one other pianist, Sarah, was left behind on the sofa. Amo might as well have slapped her. Why had he deliberately snubbed her? Sarah had grown up with Amo. He was almost like a real uncle to her, and I always thought she genuinely loved him. She competed more enthusiastically for his favor than any of the other kids; she was inevitably obedient and prepared. I could count on one hand the times I had won our competitions. My most important victory was at a gold donation when I was sixteen. Sarah had stayed up all night memorizing an original poem written by her father and delivered it perfectly for the cameras. I pulled out my plastic smile, enunciated the name “Salbi” clearly for the microphone to get proper credit for my family, and spontaneously added a bit of heartfelt personal enthusiasm for the country, our soldiers at the front, and Amo. Later, Amo told Sarah that she was “good.” But he told me, with that same slow syncopation, that I was “very . . . very . . . good.”
I had seen her slip up just once, when we had been together a few months earlier. Her father had been publicly criticized in the newspaper, and Sarah understood nothing could appear in the paper without Amo’s approval, so she had shown him how she felt by shaking his hand instead of kissing him. And it dawned on me that he had set up this whole recital as his revenge for that slight. It occurred to me, at some cost to my ego, that even his praise for my waltz was directed not at me, but at poor Sarah. Here he was, the president of a country of sixteen million people, and she was a fifteen-year-old girl! How cruel, I thought, a despot manipulating a kid—the one who probably cared for him the most.
As everyone headed out of the living room for dinner, I went to look for her and found her crying outside on the balcony. Everyone had seen her shamed, but she was all alone. Where was her mother? But I knew the adults could not leave Amo’s company without his permission, and Sarah and Luma had their own competition for Amo’s attention. As I walked outside onto the porch, I saw that there were soldiers nearby, and I was afraid they would see her this way and report her behavior to Amo.
For just once, I wanted this painful charade to end. I wanted something to be real. I walked over and put my arms around Sarah, and tried to comfort her as Aunt Layla had comforted Mama after Amo had screamed at her. I held her for a few minutes, until her sobbing subsided.
“It’s not fair,” she said when she stopped crying. Then, knowing exactly where our boundaries lay, she turned her grief into an acceptable youthful complaint and added: “I can’t wait until I’m older so I can drink too.”
I can’t remember if it was on that trip or a later visit to the same spot that Sarah reprimanded me loudly for sipping my tea before Amo had tasted his. Amo only smiled at her and commented that Zainab was family and wasn’t it nice that I felt comfortable enough to drink my tea when I felt like it? If we were all horses in his stable, which is actually not a bad analogy, I think he might have described me as the mare with the independent streak. It was to be expected that I would occasionally rear up. Unfortunately for Sarah, she had positioned herself as the steady obedient one. If she reared up, he would beat her back down.
That weekend was one of the few times I spent time with his mistress, Samira. Chairs had been arranged in a large circle for us on the lawn after dinner and each of us had a servant in full military uniform standing behind us in case we needed anything. Amo was in a jovial mood that night with Samira at his side. She was laughing and fawning over him, throwing her relationship with him in my parents’ faces. Behind their facade of courtesy, I could see disgust on the faces of all the adults. Samira flirted with him endlessly as we watched, reveling in her superiority over this supposedly elite circle as she whispered in his ear and ran her fingers along his thigh. Forced to witness this overtly sexual interplay, I thought about what it must be like to be her sons who were there watching it all. Unable to get up, unable to speak, each of us sat there in our own cells of silence. Inside, I could feel a scream churning. I wanted to jump up and scream and run away into the mountains around us that smelled like wild sage and the wind. Instead, I sat absolutely still, with my hands clenched in my lap, and I prayed for a hero on a white horse to gallop in and carry me away.
On some of the weekend trips we took with Amo, I was blessed to see Iraq’s stark natural beauty and some of the most magnificent physical settings I have ever known. I love the wind, and especially in those days when I thought I would never get enough air to breathe, there were a few times when I felt the wind blow against my face and it revived something inside me. My mother had a way of turning her face to the wind and closing her eyes as her long hair swirled around her, and I remember thinking how beautiful she was one impeccably starry night, and how perfect that night would have been if Amo had not been in it.
We were all fishing that night. Amo loved to fish. In a land where water is more precious than oil, he took water from our rivers and flooded the desert with dozens of private lakes so well stocked Mama and I used to joke he had SCUBA divers under the water putting fish on our hooks. We were having a “family fishing contest” in which he announced he would give a thousand-dinar prize, about $3,000 U.S., to the person who caught the biggest fish. We all lined up in our chairs with our fishing rods beside one of his lakes. Luma and Sarah were sitting next to me. I remember Luma holding the fishing rod in her ladylike way, with her perfectly curled hair and manicured nails, and Sarah relaxing beside her, understanding that her role was to enjoy her privilege. It was a beautiful night with a full moon reflecting on the lightly rippled water, and everything
felt very quiet and peaceful as I looked over the lake. But if I turned in my seat, I faced one man in a uniform with a huge black mustache staring at me and another ready to jump toward me to see if I was thirsty. Behind them was a swarm of soldiers, servants, and cooks, all there to wait on us or guard us. Suddenly, my line started to move around in the water, and the tug was so strong I didn’t have the strength to pull it back.
“I caught a fish!” I screamed. “Help! It’s heavy!”
Instantly there were three men around me, all in military uniforms, helping me reel it in. The fish was more than a meter long and so big that I started jumping up and down and screaming, “I caught a fish! I caught a fish!” I was so thrilled I forgot myself in front of Amo, the families, the guards, the servants, and everyone else. I remember Amo’s smile and his shining white teeth as he looked over at me. He seemed genuinely happy for me. “Zainab is the winner!” he announced later that night.
Luma, Sarah, and I were sitting in front of Aunt Nada’s farmhouse one afternoon when Amo drove up in a little red sports car. You couldn’t help but notice he was wearing a racing helmet. When he learned that our parents were taking their afternoon nap, he asked us if we wanted to go for a ride. I was about sixteen.
Yes, Amo, we would love that! we all said.
“Then come with me, girls, for a private tour of my private compound.”
We jumped in the car, he turned up the radio very loud, and we sped off, zipping across the flat desert road through that inner wall into a brilliant world of lush green lawns, shiny cars, and private lakes. There were security guards everywhere, but they weren’t following us around; I felt free. He seemed very relaxed as he drove us around enjoying the music and the sunny afternoon. It was fun to drive with him.
