Between Two Worlds

by Zainab Salbi

  “Yes, I’m sure. I love him very much. He would never hurt me.”

  “What about work, or school?”

  “I’ve got A pluses. I just got an award from the White House.”

  “I don’t understand, honey. You can tell me. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing is wrong,” I kept saying. “Nothing is wrong. Everything is going right in my life. I just don’t know how to stop crying!”

  From Alia’s Notebook

  He never ceased to enjoy using women for his pleasure. He talked about Baghdad as if she were a woman whom he was in love with. He talked about Baghdad’s palm trees, its rivers, its sands, and its women. He claimed that he loved Baghdad so much that he couldn’t imagine living away from it.

  He never had enough women no matter how many he had access to. He would explain this by saying that he was trying to make up for the hard days in his youth and his political activism. In one of our evenings, he told us that when he was in prison he would get excited even by seeing two birds mating. Thus, there was no limit for him on how many women he could have, starting with city women and ending with women from rural areas.

  Iraq and its people were violated so many times by so many forces, but nothing compares to what Saddam has done to the country and its people. Nothing compares to his atrocities. We had to be silent witnesses to these crimes. I am left like a traumatized child at what I have seen in my life.

  10

  SETTING ME FREE

  I DIDN’T SEE MY MOTHER for five years.

  We spoke, but international calls were hard to place and strained by my unresolved anger. Even if I’d wanted to, how could we have had a heart-to-heart conversation when I knew there was at least one intelligence agent listening in from Iraq and possibly another in America as well? What conversations there were took on a predictable pattern in which we would edge briefly into emotional topics, then back away, often ending with Mama asking me to come home for a visit and telling me about all the parties she would have for us. The last thing I wanted was a party to prove to her friends that I had made a good marriage after all. Iraqi intelligence was done the old-fashioned way, with someone listening in, and one time our monitor spoke up and took her side. “Be a good daughter, come home for a visit,” he said. Even in America Amo’s secret police interrupted my phone calls. After that, I always had a perverse urge to speak to our eavesdropper directly and say, “How are you today? How are things in Iraq—everyone still terrified?”

  One day in 1997, Mama called to say she wasn’t feeling well and had developed a limp that doctors in Baghdad couldn’t diagnose—could I help set up doctors’ appointments for her in America? Medical care in Iraq, once among the best in the Arab world, was another casualty of sanctions—another punishment for the punished. I helped arrange her visa, set up appointments, and suddenly she was back in my life, sitting in an airport wheelchair in her Nina Ricci mink. Given the limp, it didn’t surprise me that they had wheeled her off the plane, but when I hugged her, her old vitality seemed missing. She was no longer the beauty I remembered. The skin around her lips sagged when she smiled, and I realized she had aged.

  Amjad and I had bought a one-bedroom condo in Alexandria, Virginia, that we thought of as our “nest.” We had a quiet balcony that opened up onto trees and a pool, and friends from around the world had stayed with us. Until now, it had been a refuge from my past. I was nervous as we walked in the door, full of conflicting feelings.

  Mama was exhausted from the long flights and went to bed early.

  “Noah’s Ark?” she asked.

  Noah’s Ark. I felt that old flutter of love for her. That was what we used to call her king-sized bed when I was little. “Noah’s Ark!” she would shout out sometimes when my father was away, especially during the war, and my little brothers and I would all run and jump in her big bed for a sleepover. I tried to sleep with her that night, in hope of bringing back some of the trust lost between us, but I found no comfort being near to her anymore, only anxiety. I lay there thinking of all the things I wanted to say to her, then slipped away when she fell asleep, and joined Amjad on the sofa bed.

  “I can’t even hug her,” I said, crying softly into his chest. “I just can’t.”

  Except for the limp, she seemed much better the next day. The image of the dutiful daughter, I served her breakfast in bed and told her about the appointments we had lined up and the sights we were planning to see. This was the first time we had been together in nearly seven years without a marital crisis facing us, but it was obvious from that first day that we had different needs. She wanted to bring back the loving daughter I had been, and I wanted to bring back the strong, independent mother she had been. So we politely danced and parried with each other as Amjad looked on in discomfort. We went to the Smithsonian Institution, and Mama silently made her point by lingering at a portrait of a mother and daughter. We went to the Kennedy Center to see Phantom of the Opera, the story of a young opera singer held captive by a hideously deformed phantom in a mask. “Those who have seen your face draw back in fear,” the young singer told her tormentor. “I am the mask you wear.” There it is Mother, look! I wanted to say. That’s the nightmare of my life you created for me. Can’t you see it? I was the mask Amo wore. I still have this nightmare that my face will disintegrate and people will see his face underneath mine. Can’t you feel it, Mama? But all she said was how much she enjoyed the show. Except for one emotional invective against Saddam Hussein by Amjad’s father, who had no idea we knew him, no one mentioned the man who had formed, or rather deformed, my life.

  One night Mama invited to dinner an Iraqi couple who also happened to be visiting their children in Washington, D.C. My mother got all dressed up for the evening, and as we sat down to eat, I felt the same surge of anxiety I used to feel every time we walked into one of Aunt Sajida’s palace parties together, when she would try to show me off and I would have to smile and pretend to be happy to please her. But it was different now. I was twenty-seven years old. This was my house. I had worked so hard to break out of those old habits, and I was not going to let her make me snap right back into them. I stood up politely, went to the stereo, and put on Persian music by a singer named Quoqoosh. Instantly, our dinner table conversation stopped. My mother’s face flushed, and drops of sweat formed on her upper lip as they always did when she was angry or embarrassed. Mama gave me a look I would not forget for a long time. Amjad looked puzzled. He was the only non-Iraqi at the table. He didn’t know our vocabulary of fear. He didn’t understand what it meant to play the music of the enemy. Finally, the tension was broken when the Iraqi man said, “Ahhh, I’ve missed this music. It has been so long.” We all laughed then, recognizing for a brief moment how silly it was to be terrified of a song thousands of miles from Baghdad, years after the war had ended. Yet, after that brief acknowledgment of common ground, we moved to safer topics about the old days in Baghdad. I cringed inside, realizing how insensitive and cruel I had been. I did not know if these visitors were Baathists. They might have been informers, and Mama would have to go back and deal with the consequences of my arrogant disregard for her safety. Instead of sharing my new freedom with her, I was rubbing her face in it and risking her life.

  One of the things on my agenda was to show her what I had accomplished despite what she had done to me. I wanted to show her the new me, the women’s advocate who had founded an international women’s organization, the expert on women survivors of war who published papers on the subject, appeared on television, and was doing her best to make a difference in people’s lives. Between doctors’ appointments, I took her to our office and explained our program and what we were trying to accomplish. I taught her about the rape camps in Bosnia and the mass rape in Rwanda and showed her pictures of women I had met there. She listened to everything I said and began working as a volunteer, reading and filing letters from women in Bosnia, Croatia, and Rwanda. When I saw how she responded, I knew the mother who had taught me to care about wom
en and their issues was still there inside her. She was the one who had inspired me to do this work, both through her example and through the feminist books she had given me. I decided to give her my own selections of feminist work, some of it about mother-daughter relationships, and I stacked them in the order I wanted her to read them: Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, and Fatima Marnissi’s The Forgotten Queens of Islam.

  After a single chapter of Amy Tan, she got it.

  “Are you trying to tell me that I have not been a good mother to you?” she asked.

  It was the opening I wanted, but it was a sunny afternoon, and she had taken me by surprise. For a moment I doubted my resolve.

  “La, la, la, Mother,” I answered in the traditional Iraqi way of repeating things three times. “No, no, no. You are a wonderful mother, and I love you very much.”

  But Mama knew my plastic smile when she saw it.

  “Something is wrong, Zainab,” she declared a few days later. “What is wrong? What have I done, Zainab? Why are you so angry with me?”

  She was sitting in a chair that she and I had upholstered together. I was sitting on the floor next to her. I felt all the anger, rage, and disappointment rush out in a stream of bitterness and accusations.

  “You destroyed everything you had helped me build, Mama!” I said. “Why did you do that to me? Yank me out of my last year of college? Take me away from my family and my friends and marry me off to a man I barely knew—a man who hurt me? Why did you abandon me, leave me here in a strange country all alone?”

  I burst out in sobbing.

  “Oh, Zanooba, you don’t—”

  “Understand? What is there not to understand, Mama? You used to make fun of people who married strangers! You taught me to finish college, get a career, be a strong woman, and then look what you did to your own daughter! I believed in you, Mama, and you sent me halfway around the world into the arms of a man who had no respect at all for anything you brought me up to care about. I trusted you with my life, Mama! You were the one who kept preaching to me that I should never let myself be abused by any man, and then what did you do? You married me to a cold, horrible man who didn’t think twice about raping me!”

  I don’t know how to describe the look she gave me. It was a look of devastation, of irredeemable failure. I think I saw her fall apart. Her shoulders collapsed. She leaned over, looking down at her hands, and began crying too.

  “I had to get you out, habibiti!” she finally said. “I had to! He wanted you, Zainab. I didn’t see any other way.”

  “He? Who was he?”

  I had been in America too long. There was only one he in Iraq. He was Amo.

  So Mama hadn’t sent me off to America to live her dream? She had married me off to Fakhri because she was afraid Amo was going to rape me? Me? The enormity of this revelation wouldn’t sink in.

  “But, Mama, I was only nineteen,” I said, realizing how naïve that sounded.

  “In his eyes, you were a woman, Zainab,” she said. “You had been engaged to be married. Then you broke off your engagement. You were a woman.”

  She beseeched me to understand and went back through times I had spent with Amo that I had tried to put out of my mind, hoping to make me see them as she had.

  “Do you remember that night when you were standing out on the balcony by the lake and he and I were watching you? The wind was catching your hair in the moonlight, and he just stood still staring at you, as if he was breathing you in. I was standing next to him, habibiti. I knew that look. He didn’t even turn around when he said to me, ‘Your daughter is so beautiful.’ I knew that night I had to keep him away from you until I could get you out.”

  “But, Mama,” I stammered, trying to understand the one crime it had never occurred to me he was capable of. “We were like his family, he couldn’t—he wouldn’t have hurt me, would he?”

  “Oh, honey, I hoped never to have to tell you all this! But I could see his infatuation with you. He started using his smile on you, you know the one, his charming smile. I knew that damned smile. Trust me, Zainab. You don’t know how he can be.”

  And I remembered the first night I saw him after I had broken off my engagement, how he had gazed into my eyes for a long time with what I read as sympathy. That was the same night he gave me that shining-eye look for playing the Blue Danube, and I had assumed he was punishing Sarah. Had there been more to it than that? Yes, I suddenly knew, there had.

  I looked at Mama’s beautiful eyes, so red and wrenched in pain from how unfairly I had treated her. I felt such an outpouring of trust and love that I fell into her arms, and we sobbed together at what he had done to both of us and at the years we had lost. I felt her pain and her ragged releasing of it. That was one of the most powerful moments of my life. It was the time I became her daughter again, and the moment she regained her ability to comfort me. I asked for her forgiveness and she asked for mine. How could she possibly have known that to save me from rape, she was sending me into the arms of a rapist?

  After we both calmed down, she told me she and the other parents had started to worry about their daughters that day Amo took us off in his sports car without telling them.

  “How worried we were for you girls! When you got back, he saw the look on our faces and sent you off. Then he took us aside and lectured us and said, ‘How dare you think I’d do anything to your daughters!’ ”

  I heard his voice in hers. I knew the intonation, and it chilled me to the bone.

  No wonder they were scared, watching Saddam Hussein drive up with their daughters, all in the bloom of young womanhood. They were totally impotent. He could have done anything to us he pleased, and there was nothing they could have done about it. I was totally unaware of any danger. There were only two times I could remember that I had actually enjoyed his company, and that afternoon was one of them. After all these years and all my education, I realized, I had never reconciled the Saddam Hussein who committed genocide with the Amo who drove us around that day in his red sports car. Intellectually, I understood, but emotionally I didn’t. The wall between the two was still there in my brain, sturdy as fear.

  Later, someone who never lived under Saddam Hussein posed questions to me that I found hard to answer. Wasn’t there another way out for me besides an arranged marriage? Couldn’t Mama have simply told me the truth, especially after I had left Fakhri? I knew that part of the answers to such questions lay in logistics, such as restrictions on travel and money transfers and even university credits, but the questions themselves showed a fundamental lack of understanding of what we all knew we needed to do to survive. We simply never had the freedom to think that way in Iraq. Terror had carved out the narrowest of safe passageways in our brains, and those were the ones we took. If Mama had told me why she had married me off to Fakhri, she would have destroyed any hope for what had seemed to her a good marriage. Instead, she preserved the illusion, gave me a chance, and limited the likelihood that Amo would sense her motives and punish her and my family. Whatever other theoretical escape routes there might have been, this was the only one many Iraqi mothers perceived that could spare their daughters from rape by Uday and, apparently, Amo himself. How many others like me were there? I wondered. How many of us had been married off to pictures or to voices at the other end of the telephone?

  Mama had done what desperate mothers had done down through the centuries. Like Moses’ mother putting her son in a basket of rushes and trusting him to the currents of the Nile, like Vietnamese mothers desperately flinging their babies to departing American soldiers at the end of the Vietnam war, like women I had met in refugee camps who pleaded with me to take away their daughters, she had cast me off.

  And I had punished her for loving me so much.

  Mama was diagnosed with clinical depression, a conclusion hard to argue with except for her obvious symptoms of a more physical problem. Though they could not pinpoint the cause, doctors fel
t the limp was a separate issue that could be later addressed in Iraq. I tried to convince her to stay with us, but she felt she had to return to my little brother, who was still in school in Baghdad. This time, it was with deep misgivings and pain that I finally put her on the plane, along with a supply of Prozac.

  She did not get better. Instead, over the next few months, she underwent more tests and procedures that culminated seven months later in near-fatal and probably unnecessary surgery in Amman. By the time I managed to clear the immigration hurdles to bring her back home with me, there was no doubt she was gravely ill, though no one knew why. She spent months off and on in American hospitals and more months in what was euphemistically called “rehab” before she was finally handed one of the most terrifying diagnoses imaginable: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—Lou Gehrig’s disease. ALS is a progressive neurological nightmare that is often described as a “living prison” because the body deteriorates steadily around the brain until it finally shuts down altogether. Mama’s muscles, already so weak she could barely move, would become completely flaccid. But her mind would remain perfectly intact and aware of every moment until her death. Though there was no way to know if there was a connection in her case, ALS had recently been tied to the “Gulf War Syndrome” afflicting British and U.S. soldiers who had served in the Middle East.

  She was fifty-one years old. The disease was incurable. She had perhaps two years, or if she was lucky—or, some would say, unlucky—ten. The fear of losing her that I had lived with all my life was coming true.

  “I want to die at home,” she told me. “That is my only wish.”

  Amjad and I moved into a two-bedroom apartment, bright and homey and handicap-accessible. Mama wanted to sleep in a regular bed, sit in a regular chair, and live as normal a life as it is possible to live if you cannot move your own body without assistance. I re-covered an antique chair she had bought me with burgundy fabric from Pakistan and surrounded it with plants. I furnished her bedroom in her favorite colors of burgundy and green and hung paintings on the walls of old Baghdad that used to hang in our living room. By the time she came to live with us—to die with us—she could not walk or even turn her head unless someone did it for her. Her beautiful smile was gone. The muscles in her body and lovely face were slack, and her skin hung over her face like a curtain over a closed window. Her face, once so expressive I worried for her, was dead except for her huge brown eyes, made even more huge by illness. I couldn’t even hug her for fear of disrupting her breathing; we kept a respirator in her room. She could not talk, but oddly, fortuitously, she could still move her hands, so if we put a pen into her hand, she could communicate with us through notes she jotted down in a drugstore spiral notebook.