Between Two Worlds

by Zainab Salbi

  At first we took her on trips around the city in a wheelchair, but everywhere we went, people just stopped what they were doing and stared. We had visitors at the beginning too, but they found it hard to even look at her without breaking down and crying. The last thing she wanted was pity, so the final few months of her life came down to her family, her correspondence, and a Tanzanian caregiver named Fatima who took care of her when Amjad and I were out. Amjad was in his last year of law school and came home to put on Beanie Baby puppet shows for her. He bought her an aquarium that he filled with goldfish she could watch during the day, and if one would die, he would replace it before she could see. It became a kind of nightly tradition for me to read her Rumi poems. Haider, the brother I had remembered as an annoying computer nerd, had recently gotten a visa to work in Detroit and came to see her whenever he could, bathing her, brushing her hair, and revealing an amazing depth of kindness and love. Mama had not seen my little brother Hassan for nearly a year by this time, and she worried about him. No matter how much we begged U.S. officials to allow him to visit, we couldn’t get him a visa. When we managed to reach him on the telephone, I would hold the receiver to Mama’s ear, and she would listen to him speak and I would lower the receiver and she would use a finger to tap on the mouthpiece—tig, tig, tig—to let him know she had heard.

  This was not a fate any of us ever could have wished for her. Yet she wrote to me that these were the happiest days of her life. How sad, I thought, and yet I understood. There was no struggle to wage, nothing we could do, and that brought its own kind of peace. We had time to plan, and we set up a signal that would tell me she was thinking of me after she died—the feeling of a gentle brush of the back of her fingers against my cheek. We were on the seventh floor and had a view of Virginia that stretched to the horizon. Mama had become more religious, as had many Iraqis in the 1990s, and it was odd at first for me to see her holding prayer beads, praying without moving her lips or making a sound. Yet there was a kind of beauty in these days. The fear she had lived with for twenty-five years was gone, and it felt like a blessing for me just to witness the humility and dignity with which she went about wrapping up her life. She marked the Surah, the passages from the Quran she wanted me to read after her death, and began writing notes to old friends in Iraq, telling them how much she loved them, and asking forgiveness and forgiving others for any differences that had arisen in their lives. When I came home from work, there would always be something new for me to see, a vibrantly colored watercolor of the face of an aunt that she had painted from memory, a letter for me to mail to an old friend, an Iraqi dish she had somehow managed to instruct her caregiver to cook for me.

  In Baghdad, Mama used to complain that her hands were too chubby. Now they were oddly elegant—tools of grace bestowed on her by a belatedly compassionate God. She knit two blankets, a yellow one for me and a white one for the baby I had pledged never to have—“in case you change your mind,” she said on paper. With every knot she prayed for God to forgive her: “Forgive me God, forgive me God, forgive me God,” she prayed. She became a different sort of role model to me now. The beauty she used to have on the outside had been replaced by a column of beauty and strength inside. She was an example to me in this, and I tried after that to clear up any misunderstandings in my own life in case death took me by surprise.

  After so many years of trying to erase my past, I finally realized how much I needed to understand it. How much had she kept from me when I was growing up? I was afraid, selfishly, that she would lose control of her hands before she talked with her only daughter, so one night I asked her to write to me too, and she agreed.

  It was only then, when she could no longer speak, that she began to open her life to me.

  She started with the night she and Baba had first met Amo. I was three. She had told me about Pig’s Island when I was young, but it had sounded like a fantasy story to me then. Now, though her notes reflected a certain devil-may-care quality, I began to see it as darkly portentous of what was to come, a guerrilla operation planned by a ruthless strategist who chose his weapons well: guns and champagne. I tried to imagine Mama as she was then, five years younger than I was now, a beautiful young socialite a few years out of college, dancing with a debonnaire young husband to a live band on a party boat alongside younger versions of Aunt Layla and Uncle Mazen, Aunt Nada and Uncle Kais. I felt the engines turn against the current of the Tigris and slide onto Pig’s Island, discharging them directly into the welcoming, outstretched arms of a handsome young man dressed all in white like an actor on a moonlit stage. As they stepped down, wondering at this surprise their host apparently had planned for them, this figure in white snapped his fingers, and boats appeared from out of the darkness, surrounding them. Soldiers came forward bearing trays of champagne. Who was this man? friends asked each other. But even after he was introduced, they didn’t recognize the name. Everyone knew the president, but who knew his cousin Saddam Hussein, who was merely the vice president? Certainly not my parents. It was Mama who had asked, no doubt more carelessly than she would ever refer to him again, “And who is Saddam Hussein?”

  As I read, I saw Amo’s white shoes muddied in the silty sand of Pig’s Island. I had played in that sand, and with a child’s sense of transgression, I regretted that it was that place that he had chosen to invade our lives. I remembered Baba water-skiing around Pig’s Island, trim and elegant, a perfect arc of spray flying out behind him, making funny faces and sticking one leg out now and then just to be silly and show off to me and my cousins. What would my parents have been like today, I wondered, if Saddam Hussein had just left them be? When was the last time my father had done anything silly? Would my mother still be here now, locked in her body even as she went about freeing her soul?

  Amo pursued my parents with the cunning of the hunter I knew he was. For two years, he had sent them invitations, and they made excuses to avoid him. By 1974, his patience had waned, so he devised a trap: he asked Mahmood, the mutual friend who had arranged the initial meeting at Pig’s Island, to throw a party and not tell my parents he was coming. When they rang the bell, Mahmood answered it, and warned them Saddam Hussein was inside. Standing on the front porch, they pondered their options and saw only one. To leave would have been a dangerous act of ayeb.

  “So we stayed,” Mama wrote, “and that changed our lives.”

  They chose survival, cloaked in courtesy, and it became our prison. I tried to imagine myself standing there on that doorstep in my mother’s heels, nervously fingering the old coin at my throat, exchanging glances with my husband and hurriedly weighing the consequences that might befall us and our child if we were rude. And, I knew, I would have stepped inside too. That was the first step they took in their deal with the Devil. Mama herself had called him the Devil once. What would the Devil be but just another fallen angel, without his charm and power to damn the living little by little, until he took away what you thought you were at your core?

  “At first, we thought we could manage the relationship if we were careful,” she wrote to me. I wanted to scream, Impossible, Mama! Look at the consequences we’ll all pay!

  Yet I recognized in her words the unwittingly arrogant undertaking of the innocent. They had stayed in Baghdad, naïvely unaware of what lay ahead. Mahmood, who apparently knew better, fled the country. I had never met their friend Mahmood, but as I read her writing, I imagined him a smart risk-taker who was bold enough to venture into the unknown while my parents stayed behind. They had been afraid to take that step and naïvely assumed they could somehow stay safe and protect our home. Why hadn’t they been bold enough to leave like Mahmood? Why did some people leave and others stay? It was hard to look at Mama and not see how battered and bruised she was from all her attempts to escape, and yet when I was reading her journal, I felt I could still see a little of that innocent young mother in her eyes.

  Each night, I came home from work and read what she had written, like a series. Sometimes there were just
a few sentences, sometimes more. She showed me Saddam Hussein as a young despot on the rise, before he attracted much international attention. In cinematic validation of my own fears, her memories helped me conjure scenes of Amo as a night owl predator prowling the streets, rousting my parents and others out of their beds to party or just to listen to him for hours on end. Familiar moments came to mind framed in disturbing new contexts: Mama hurriedly searching the cupboard for pistachios to set out for him on our rosewood table; Amo with his charm smile on striding into our front hallway with his box of Chivas Regal; Baba drinking it on our blue sofa, resentful of this “unequal friendship” as he and Mama called it, yet drinking more; and Mama judiciously turning down the volume on the stereo so as not to wake her young children who were upstairs asleep, Haider and me; the corrupt mixture of whiskey and cologne.

  It was both riveting and painful to read what she wrote, like watching a disaster movie in which everyone but the heroes can see the coming disaster. I hadn’t seen Aunt Nahla in years. She had been one of Mama’s best friends. Now, through Mama’s writings, I saw her slow dancing with Amo after Amo had given her husband so much whiskey he was sick and needed help, and yet he kept Aunt Nahla dancing with him, slow dance after slow dance. I imagined the expression on her face over Amo’s shoulder, a portrait of quiet fear, as she kept on dancing, unable to stop to help her own husband. She was an artist who got together with Mama for Turkish coffee in the afternoons, and I remembered the sound of the little cups being flipped over onto the saucers so they could study the finjan and try to foretell the future. Then Mama came crying one day, and when I asked her what had happened, she told me Aunt Nahla had gossiped about her in front of Amo. She never told me what Aunt Nahla had said, but I saw it had hurt her deeply. There had been many disappointments like this, I knew, and I had seen her grow bitter as, one by one, so many of my aunts disappeared from our lives during the farmhouse period. Now, some fifteen years later, she handed me a letter to mail to Aunt Nahla telling her she loved her, forgiving her and asking her for forgiveness. For what, I didn’t know and didn’t ask. I had seen erasures sometimes on the notes she left me at night. I knew how hard it must have been for her to manage the strength to erase.

  Women for Women International was growing at this time. We had four offices now, and war was starting in Kosovo that had all the earmarks of another human disaster. I was reading letters from women in war zones, then going home and reading Mama’s journals, and there was much about them that was similar. The same fact-based recitation, the same stoic bearing of witness to wrongs, the same curious juxtaposition of mundane details and horrors. I thought of the hundreds or thousands of faces of women I had met who had been traumatized by war or rape or both. Except for Ajsa, their faces had been numb, but none was as numb as my mother’s.

  She rarely wrote about her own feelings. Often, she started stories she didn’t finish. She mixed trivia with historic events, and her observations about Amo’s dress and his palaces and his childhood received almost as much attention as his confessions of murder. Much of what she wrote I either knew or had supposed. Some of her stories I had heard from Amo myself, or had even been taught in school. But, as I read on, I realized that Mama and Baba had understood his capacity for murder almost from the beginning. He had made no secret of his public execution of political opponents, so there was no reason for me to be surprised by the fact that he had bragged about killing friends in private. But what hit at some soft spot inside me, whatever was left of the little girl in me, was that Mama had heard his boastful confessions one night, then driven me to school in the morning. Just a few days after she had told me to make the thought of “Amo” fly like an arrow out of my brain, she had had to listen to him boast that he had just killed a friend with his own hands and murdered an old fortune-teller as well. He had murdered a woman he loved as she slept with her mother and three-year-old daughter, who would first scream that he killed her mother and then reportedly stop speaking altogether. “We had to be silent witnesses to his crimes,” she wrote. “We were among the victims for no one can survive his atrocities. And we kept on being imprisoned by our own fear, afraid of saying no to him or even of showing our horror at his acts.”

  I had barely learned how to deal with the stories of the women I was working with in war zones. I didn’t know how to deal with the stories my mother was telling me about what she had witnessed in Iraq. Breathe like a fish, I told myself. Remember to breathe.

  “Why did you stay, Mama?” I finally asked. That was the question that may have mattered to me more than any other, and I tried to ask it without blame. In response, she only looked at me with round, open eyes. She laughed with her eyes and cried with her eyes, though there were no more tears. Don’t tell me you don’t understand, that you have forgotten the arguments your father and I used to have, she said with her eyes. Have you been gone so long you have forgotten what it was like, Zanooba?

  As I read her journal, I realized Amo’s appetite for sex was as strong as for violence.

  I don’t think my mother ever would have told me about this aspect of him if she hadn’t seen my work. He had told my parents about Hana’a, the mistress he had loved, then murdered with his own hands. Then there was Amel, whose husband resisted being “friends” with Amo and wound up dead on the airport road, and her sister Samira, the mistress-wife whose snub by my father had caused Amo to scream at my mother that night. What struck me as I read my mother’s notes was how tawdry it all was, as Amo, over whiskey, justified his need for women by claiming he had missed out on sex during a stay in prison, when he had gotten excited just watching birds touching out a window. I remembered the slow dithering of Samira’s fingertips on Amo’s thigh that night in Mosul. No wonder Baba wouldn’t let her into our home.

  Mama looked at me with her big eyes full of questions and curiosity, and I knew she wondered what I was thinking. Calling on every lesson I had learned in refugee camps, I offered only sympathy and understanding. I kissed her or held her hands and told her I loved her. Nothing else. I did my best to show no judgment at all. Be strong so she won’t worry you can’t handle this, or she will stop explaining, I told myself. Be there for her, don’t make her have to be there for you. What she did not know was that when I had a moment for myself, I would go into our walk-in closet, close the door, and cry into the clothes.

  One night she wrote about how much Amo enjoyed “People’s Day,” a day in which citizens would go to him seeking help for their problems. People’s Days were highly publicized when I was a teenager. Amo would travel around Iraq in his trailer wearing a white doctor’s coat like a therapist and hold private audiences with citizens, then make a public show of waiving a law, giving someone money, or granting a woman a divorce from a reluctant husband to show his generosity. Mama wrote that he would invite women in and try to charm the most beautiful ones into sex. If his charm failed, he would simply rape them. When they were released, often with some small favor granted, they would be expected to express their gratitude. “Shokrun jazeelan sayyed al ra’aees,” they would say, sometimes before television cameras. Thank you very much, Mr. President. His favorite place for People’s Days, Mama wrote, was a village in Samarra, near Ehab’s home, that was known for its beautiful women.

  Mama had the other half of my memories, the half that made mine make sense. Her writing jolted a memory in my mind of a time Mama and I went to a potluck dinner at one of my aunts’ houses. I was probably nine or ten. I was sitting around with the adults in the living room. Aunt Lamya’a was talking. She was a beautiful widow, and she was telling the other women about how she had gone to see the president about a problem she had had—financial, I think. She had to wait with several other women in an outer office, and when the president came out, they went around in a circle, and each named her problem. When Aunt Lamya’a named hers, Amo told her it was “complicated”—muaqada—I remember this word because it seemed so laden with meaning. He asked her to join him in his private offi
ce to discuss it further. Mama and her friends all leaned in very close to Aunt Lamya’a, and she began to whisper. Minutes before the room had been filled with laughter and noise, then there was near silence and I remember sitting there feeling alone and left out, wondering whether I should stay or go into the other room as the women all wrapped their arms around Aunt Lamya’a the way they sometimes did with other aunts in our garden when they went outside to say things they didn’t want me to hear. And I could hear her crying inside this circle of arms. When the women finally pulled back, Aunt Lamya’a was wiping tears away. All the women, including Mama, looked very sad.

  “Is Aunt Lamya’a all right?” I asked her on the way home.

  “She will be all right,” Mama said, adding, “Zainab, honey, please leave this subject alone.”

  I couldn’t leave it alone. It had become my life’s work.

  I knew that most rapes are committed by family members and friends, yet in Iraq and much of the Arab world, women are still seen as innocent in rape only if they are assaulted by armed strangers. I had heard rumors in high school that the Mukhabarat subjected women to rape and made videotapes in order to blackmail them into becoming informers. If they admitted to rape, they opened themselves up to abandonment by their husbands and separation from their children because women carried the family’s honor, or aar. In conservative Arab cultures and in other parts of the world as well, I knew that a family’s honor is judged by the behavior of women, but it is effectively owned by men: her husband or father or brothers, or even her sons. To protect a man’s honor, then, it is his right to marry an unmarried woman off to her rapist or even to kill her. If the rapist is a family member, it is overlooked or buried. If the rapist is a criminal, the woman is judged unmarriageable. But when the rapist is the government itself, the woman is victimized and the man is emasculated because there is nothing at all he can do. It was said that husbands had committed suicide over these rapes or abandoned their wives and children—all in the name of saving their family honor.