Between Two Worlds

by Zainab Salbi

  I started with Aunt Nahla, the woman at the potluck dinner I remembered talking about going to People’s Consultation Day with Amo.

  “Zanoooooooooooooba!” she screamed when she saw me and hugged me. “He is gone! Oh, I wish your mother was here with me to celebrate!”

  She invited me in and I found myself surrounded by her husband and daughters and grandchildren. We laughed and drank Turkish coffee and ate gliche and baklava. It was a happy visit. It took a while before I could find a way to be alone with her.

  “Aunt Nahla,” I said, “I wanted to ask you about some things about Mama.”

  “Oh, honey, your mother and I went through so much! I am glad I can forget it all now. I miss your mother so much. There were days when Saddam was still ruling that made me wish I could join her in her death.”

  She talked about all kinds of crimes committed during Saddam’s time, but she didn’t mention women. I pushed her gently about helping me fill in the gaps of Mama’s life.

  “We can sit down one day and talk about the past,” she said, setting a tray down in front of me. “But now, let’s have some fruit and celebrate your visit!”

  Don’t bring that past back her eyes begged me as she looked at her family gathered around her.

  When I went to visit Aunt Nada, Luma was there too. I was astonished to find they were still living in denial.

  “I don’t understand why everyone is celebrating Amo’s removal, Zainab,” Aunt Nada said. “He never hurt us.”

  What about other people? I asked myself but didn’t say. Doesn’t it matter that other people got hurt and the whole population suffered?

  “He did nothing wrong!” Luma declared in the same self-righteous tone of voice I remembered. “They’re even blaming him for bombing the Kurds!”

  Being with them felt like our kitchen talks at the farmhouse. Sitting across a tray of coffee cups from Amo’s close friends, I could still feel the fear. After weighing the odds of learning anything helpful, I decided I didn’t feel comfortable talking to them.

  “How is Sarah?” I asked.

  “Oh, that crazy sister of mine!” Luma said. “I don’t know what happened to her once she got to England!”

  We talked politely for a while and then I left. It turned out that Sarah had married for love. I later looked her up on one of my visits to the U.K., and we timidly tested each other out. She told me then that she had discovered what Amo was really like only after she went to live abroad. Her anger at her parents was so profound that she didn’t know how to deal with them for several years. They had reconciled, but she told me she still couldn’t penetrate their denial. She had found peace with her husband and children, she said, but she didn’t want to dig up the past. We haven’t tried to meet again. We are a reminder to each other that the nightmare was real.

  Every “aunt” I visited treated me like my mother, serving me cigarettes, though I didn’t smoke, and Turkish coffee as Mama liked it, with no sugar. But, they didn’t talk to me as they talked to her.

  “You look so much like your mother!” Aunt Layla told me. “I miss her so much!”

  She was the most open of all my mother’s friends. I remembered a time we had been on an escalator once in a mall outside the country and she had said, “Let’s talk about Amo!” But by that time, Amo had robbed Mama of her trust in her own friends, and I remember her looking away.

  I asked her something I had always been curious about. “Aunt Layla,” I said, “Do you know what happened to Mama’s Abbasid coin?”

  That was an easy question, given other subjects I wanted to broach, and she told me she had been there the night Mama had given it to him.

  “Amo walked off and forgot it after he opened the package,” she said. “Your mother had to go after him and remind him to take it with him.”

  “Aunt Layla, I want to talk with you about some things that you and my mother and the other aunts lived through,” I said. “Can you help me?”

  “I just want to live in peace, honey,” was what she said.

  I persisted. I needed her to talk with me.

  She warned me to be careful of Raghad and Rana. What would they do if they heard we had been talking about Amo?

  “I’m still afraid of them,” she said. “Why bring all this up now, Zainab? They’re still out there. Maybe later we can talk.”

  “How much later, Aunt Layla?” I asked. “When his daughters die or when his grandchildren die or when his whole clan dies? How long are we supposed to let ourselves be held prisoners by our fear?”

  I was disappointed and frustrated when I left Aunt Layla’s house. It seemed to me that my aunts had grown comfortable with their fear the way people grew comfortable with bad jobs and bad marriages. I understood that talking about private family matters, especially anything involving a woman’s sexuality, was hard; I knew that that could bring on gossip or even dishonor. But, I had also grown up thinking of my aunts as liberated, independent women. I knew them. We spoke the same language. Most of the women I worked with in other countries were socially and economically marginalized, and as I thought about it more, I realized that some of my aunts’ hesitation was related to class. They were worried about the name of their family, their honor, and social prestige. Social prestige was not a concern of women who had lost everything, including husbands, children, family, homes, and sometimes entire communities.

  There was a part of me that wanted to bow down in awe at the courage of the women I had met around the world. I thought of Nabito, a displaced woman from a small village in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Four million people had died there in an ongoing war, and tens of thousands of women were raped. Even among courageous women, Nabito had a special sense of dignity. A white-haired mother of twelve, she had seen the most brutal side of humanity. She had been gang-raped by men who cut her legs and arms and belly with knives and machetes as they raped her, and broke her arm so badly her forearm is permanently bent. They ordered one of her sons to rape her and when he refused, they shot him. All the while, she could hear the screams of her daughter being raped nearby. I was shaking inside as she told me what had happened.

  “What should I do, Nabito, when I hear stories like yours?” I had asked her. “Should we tell the world about the injustice you faced so we might help bring a stop to what is happening to other women, or should we keep our secrets to ourselves? What should we do?”

  Nabito had looked me in the eyes and said, “If I could tell the whole world about what happened to me to bring justice to the men who did this to me or to prevent other women from being hurt, then I would. But I can’t. You go ahead and tell the world my story, but just don’t tell the neighbors.”

  I kept traveling to other countries as Iraq’s destiny lay open, and on my next visit to Congo I sought out Nabito. I did something that day I had never done before. I put my head into the lap of a woman I was trying to help and I cried. Nabito let me draw strength from her without ever asking me why. She somehow helped me realize that in Iraq, I was the neighbor. I had been trying to force “the truth” out of my aunts and whatever their own truths were, they belonged to them, not to me. How arrogant I had been to demand they tell me their stories in order to find my own peace and satisfy my curiosity! What right did I have to persist in my quest to find the answer to a question my mother could not tell me when she was alive? And these thoughts led me to another: I had the right to only one story, and that was my own. What had happened to me with Fakhri was nothing compared to what other women I met had experienced, yet I was afraid of telling anyone about it, in part because it made me feel weak and I wanted to seen as strong. Maybe because others had said so, I had come to think of myself as a courageous woman who was willing to tell the truth. But I realized I had gone around the world talking about other women’s courage. Had I, too, grown comfortable in my fear?

  There was an afternoon when I sat outside my uncle’s house and watched the sky over the Tigris turn a deep coral with an approaching dust storm at
sunset. Thousands of river gulls flew in and out of the gathering cloud, appearing, vanishing, and reappearing. What was courage about? I had been helping other women talk and then telling their stories to the rest of the world so others could understand what they were going through. But never once had I opened up to the women I worked with the way they had to me. I head preached to them about breaking their silence, yet I was afraid to break my own. I preached against fear, yet I was afraid. I preached rising up against injustice, yet I had never acted upon the injustice in my own country for my own people.

  Courage wasn’t about facing other people’s injustice, but about revealing our own deepest secrets and risking hurting the ones we love. I didn’t want to be like my mother and my grandmother who died silent and took their stories with them to their deaths. I didn’t want to be like generations of women who died in silence because they didn’t want to hurt their family honor or their men’s feelings. But, did I have the courage to taint the image I had worked so hard to create for myself of a strong, independent woman who advocates women’s rights? To reveal that I was vulnerable and had been an abused wife in an arranged marriage? Did I have the courage to speak out if it caused a single tear in my father’s eye?

  My thoughts kept returning to a poem written by Rumi, the medieval Sufi poet Amjad and I often read aloud to each other. The poem is about three fish in a lake that watched fishermen as they approached with their nets. The first fish was the intelligent fish. When it saw the fishermen it said, “I’m leaving” and decided against consulting the other two. “They will only weaken my resolve because they love this place so,” the intelligent fish said. “They call it home. Their ignorance will keep them here.” And the first fish set out immediately on the long difficult voyage to the safety of the sea. The second fish was the semi-intelligent fish. “My guide has gone,” it thought. “I ought to have gone with it, but I didn’t, and now I’ve lost my chance to escape.” So it played dead and floated belly up to avoid being eaten. A fisherman pulled it out by the tail, spat on it, and tossed it on land. Quietly, it rolled over back into the lake and survived. The third fish, the dumb one, jumped about trying to show how clever it was as the net closed around it. As it lay in the pan, it thought, “If I get out of this, I’ll never live again in the limits of a lake. Next time, the ocean! I’ll make the infinite my home.”

  Ever since I first read that poem, I had thought of my parents as the middle fish. Was I the middle fish as well?

  Fate has its own way of dealing with each and every person. Fate turned up for me a DVD containing footage from looted videos found in Saddam’s palaces.

  “Zainab, we saw you in one of the DVDs they’re selling on street corners,” Dawood’s wife told me at Uncle Adel’s one day; one of the best things about Baghdad was seeing my cousins and their children. “My nine-year-old recognized you.”

  “What?”

  She handed me a disc with cheaply copied pictures of Amo and his daughters on the cover. In the rubble of one of Amo’s palaces, someone had found a videotape of a palace party, copied it on disk and was selling it as the inside story of palace life. I couldn’t bear to look at it until everyone else in my uncle’s house went to sleep that night. I sat close to the television and put it on. The video jumped about erratically, attesting to the speed with which the looters had mass-produced the DVDs. It started out in black and white, then shot into color as women I hadn’t seen in years danced to traditional music in the outlandishly overdone sequined dresses of the 1980s. I saw them whirl by with all my old prejudices intact. There was Sajida, disdainful under her heavy makeup and her youngest daughter, Hala, whose bodyguard tossed Hassan around like a soccer ball. I saw Raghad and Rana and tried to muster sympathy for them, knowing that their father would one day have both their husbands killed, but I still couldn’t manage.

  Which party was it? I had no idea. It was in a large carpeted room somewhere in Baghdad, a palace maybe, though it was hard to tell where. Except for the singer, all I could hear was the background chatter of women talking to each other in the slightly elevated voices used everywhere at parties. Sometimes the soundtrack went out altogether and the women danced on in silence, arms and wrists crossing each other high in the air. Then, abruptly, I found myself face to face with the girl I had been hiding from, the pilot’s daughter, a girl of maybe seventeen, exactly half my age now. My hair was still long and curly. I was wearing a gray dress and was seated on one of a dozen sofas against a wall at a party. The photographer must have set up his tripod across the room from me because I was in the background, which was where I always tried to be. I clapped inattentively, slightly out of synch with the women around me, until that girl who had been me shyly stood up, put on her plastic smile, and joined the crowd as it danced to a patriotic song.

  All the old anxieties I associated with those parties came back. I had put all this away, not unlike the way my aunts had put away their old lives, but someone had invaded this hated past and made my “artificial” life real again. I had chosen to be in Iraq at that moment as president of an international women’s organization—not as a child who had been called a “beloved one” by the despot who had caused the chaos in which we were all living. Would anyone recognize me?

  I spent a nearly sleepless night in the same room where I had once held my mother because I was afraid of losing her after her attempted suicide. I was afraid. But I was even more afraid of the fear. I couldn’t live my life in pieces anymore. I couldn’t ignore the person I was, and I wasn’t willing to sacrifice the person I had become. I was that girl. I am this woman. I am both.

  I was in a conference in Jordan when we heard the news that Saddam Hussein was captured. I watched the television screen as Amo crawled up out of what American soldiers called a “spider hole.” There was no air-conditioned bunker. There were no closets of canned goods or stashes of whiskey or even a bodyguard or a bar of soap. He was living in the Tikriti dirt in a pit of his own making. As he crawled up out of that hole, looking dirty and disheveled in a way I could never have fathomed, I think the man I called Amo and the dictator I called Saddam Hussein finally came together for me. I was shocked to find myself shed tears of pity. My tears were more for me than for him; I didn’t want to enjoy another person’s humiliation even if he was my enemy. One Iraqi woman at the conference looked around as we were all watching his capture on television and said, “This is revenge for my father!” I learned that day that her father had been killed the same day as Basma’s father. “This is to avenge my brother!” an Iraqi man said. “For my mother,” I murmured quietly to myself. I could no longer justify being afraid. I wasn’t a government so I couldn’t charge Amo with crimes, but I could carry out my own personal truth and reconciliation commission.

  I wanted to talk with my father. I had tried, but he seemed caught between past and present, a lost soul searching for his own peace who spent evenings with his new wife and hours every morning walking in our old neighborhood or working in our garden. During the years I was gone, he had patiently clipped our hedges and trees into towering topiary sculptures. He was no longer able to fly, but when he stood in the middle of our backyard in the Airlines Neighborhood, he was surrounded with enormous leafy birds rooted in the soil and stretching their wings as if to take flight.

  Of all people, Baba, why didn’t you just fly us away to safety?

  Out of loyalty to Mama after their bitter divorce, I had never met his new wife. But, one day, I decided I wanted peace in our family, and I went to his new house to meet her for the first time. Baba embraced me with tears in his eyes as he welcomed me to his new home and introduced me to her. She was generous enough to give Baba and me time alone. He and I sat together in their garden drinking tea, eating fresh almonds and pistachios and smoking mint-flavored sheesha tobacco in my grandfather’s water pipe. It was a beautiful evening. I felt more relaxed around him than I had in a long time, and I could see the tension in his face beginning to loosen.

  It was wi
th new humility that I was able to ask him questions about the past.

  “I want to talk with you about Amo, Baba,” I said. “Mama told me many things. I finally have my peace with her with all that happened in the past, my marriage, my being left in America, all of that.”

  “You know I didn’t want you to leave, Zainab,” he said.

  “Yes, Baba, I know, and I always appreciated your position,” I said. “But now, I want the chance to learn from you about our relationship with Amo. Now that he is gone, I would like to talk with you about all the things we never could talk about before. More than anything else Baba, I want to know this: Why didn’t you leave?”

  He thought about that. I didn’t know if he would answer.

  “You know, Zanooba, I never wanted that relationship, nor did your mother,” he said. “We were not interested in politics or politicians ever and we kept telling ourselves he would never come that close. By the time he took over our lives, it was too late for us to leave and too dangerous for the family members we would leave behind.”

  My father was acknowledging his fear of Amo to me for the first time in his life. It made me wonder what he was processing in his daily walks.

  “Besides, Iraq is my home, Zainab. This is my country. I had three children. I was responsible for your education and well-being. How could I have provided for you if I had taken you out of the country? I couldn’t have given you the life you had if we had left, Zainab. And when an opportunity came, it came at a price I was not willing to pay.”