Between Two Worlds Read online

  We attended Al-Ta’aseeseya School, a modern school run by the British when they ruled—or tried to rule—Iraq in the early 1900s. The school, with its vast grounds and elite student body, was considered the best grade school in Baghdad. Basma sat in the front row where teachers tended to seat kids with prominent parents. I used to tease her about the way teachers sweetened their voices with honey when they spoke to her, “Oh Basma, dear, just bring your homework in tomorrow.” I never got such treatment. My family was well-to-do, but we weren’t famous or important; I would get yelled at if I forgot my homework.

  There was a great religious diversity among Iraqis then, and our schools, which had been nationalized in the mid-seventies to ensure we all followed the same government curriculum, were secular. Islam was one of the subjects we studied, but students who weren’t Muslim could leave class during those periods if they chose. One day when I was in fourth grade, shortly before Saddam Hussein became president, our religion teacher told us we were going to learn Islamic prayers. She told us to bring a white dishdasha to school and to ask each of our parents how they preferred to pray because different families prayed in different ways. On the day we were to learn our prayers, I happened to arrive early—the lights weren’t even on yet in the classroom. There was only one other person in the room, and my heart sped up when I saw him. Mohammed, the smartest boy in class, was standing on the other side of the room by the windows. I can still see him, bathed in sunlight in his white dishdasha with very black hair that contrasted with his snow white skin and hazel eyes. I had a crush on Mohammed, but had never been bold enough to talk to him. As I nervously put my books on my desk, we talked about our homework and I showed him how we prayed, holding my hands to my side as my mother had taught me the night before. He screwed up his face and stared at me as if he had just seen something repulsive. “Oooh,” he said. “You’re Shia.”

  I wanted the ground to swallow me up. I felt humiliated and I didn’t even know why.

  When the other students arrived, the girls with white head cloths and the boys with white alakcheen, or woven hats, the teacher took us outside and we lined up on the grass in front of the garden faucet to learn the ablution, the ritual cleansing required before prayer in Islam. We lined up before the faucet as each one of us practiced. It was a beautiful day. The school yard was full of flowers, and I loved watching the water from the faucet as it reflected the sunlight. When it was my turn to practice ablution, I took my time as I rinsed each hand, my face, the top of my hair, each ear, and each foot as the teacher taught us. It was a hot day, and the water felt not only cooling, but spiritual. I was enjoying that moment until Mohammed belittled me again, this time in front of everyone.

  “This isn’t bathing, Zainab,” he said. “This is ablution! Don’t you know the difference?”

  Afterward, when we went into the gymnasium where we were going to practice praying, I looked around and saw that some kids were holding their hands at their sides like me and others were holding their hands over their stomachs like Mohammed, and I remember feeling newly drawn to those who prayed like me, if only because I had been judged inferior by someone who prayed like Mohammed.

  I asked my mother about this when I got home, and she gave me the standard schoolteacher answer: “In Iraq, we have people who are Shia and people who are Sunni, but we’re all the same, we’re all Muslims.” That was the first time I can remember thinking my mother wasn’t exactly telling me the truth. I knew there was a difference. I had seen it in the sneer on Mohammed’s face. I thought about Mohammed’s behavior before I went to sleep that night and came to the conclusion he had been rude to me, a major transgression in Arab culture, and I privately decided to penalize him by not liking him anymore. It would be years before I dared to let myself have a crush on another boy. Only later when I was living in America did I come across an expression that described exactly how he made me feel. He made me feel like I had cooties. If I had to come up with a way to describe a child’s first premonition of danger, that would be it: she would feel as if she had cooties, and she would fight the instinct to hide.

  On July 22, 1979—Saddam Hussein made sure his cameramen were there to record the date—my mother was sitting at the kitchen table staring at the screen of our little black-and-white TV. I stood at her side and watched over her shoulder. A tall man in a suit with a large black mustache, our new President Saddam Hussein was standing on the stage of a large auditorium filled with men I would later understand were ruling Baath Party members and government officials. Looking very stern and sad, as if one of his children had disappointed him by doing something very bad, he announced that he had come upon “disloyal” people in the government. He brought out onstage a stiff-looking official who confessed to taking part in a plot to overthrow him. He began announcing his “co-conspirators,” and as he called out their names, armed guards went into the audience, found them, grabbed them by the elbows, and walked them out the door. I remember the faces of only two men of the hundreds who were present in that hall. Once was a man who was screaming his innocence as he struggled with guards as they took him away. The other was the man I later came to know as Amo, who watched it all onstage with a paternal expression on his face. He was smoking a cigar.

  After the president had the last of these “traitors” taken into custody (effectively eliminating his principal political opponents) he praised everyone left in the hall for their loyalty. The men shifted uncomfortably in their seats. I could see how scared many of them looked. Then, group by small group, they stood to applaud him. Whether they approved of his actions or were just terrified of being next, they gave a standing ovation to the man who was about to execute friends and colleagues who had been sitting next to them just minutes before.

  The event was broadcast and rebroadcast around the world. Saddam Hussein never tried to hide what he did that day. He wanted those men and others like them to be afraid. I have seen the tape since then, so it is hard for me to distinguish what I saw then from what I have factored in as an adult. I know I didn’t fully grasp as a nine-year-old that those men were about to face a firing squad—or understand that the man who was ordering their execution was the “Amo” my mother and Aunt Layla had been talking about a week before. But I felt fear stream out of that small television screen and chill our kitchen, where until that moment I had always felt safe. I remember exactly the look on my mother’s face. I remember her eyes growing very round and fixing hard on the screen. I had never seen that look on her face ever before, but I recognized it anyway: it was horror.

  When the session ended, Mama sat there, still, before turning off the television. I could see her trying to gather her thoughts before she looked across into my eyes and spoke to me. I was small enough then that when she was seated and I was standing, our eyes were at the same level.

  “Honey, things are going to be different with Basma’s family from now on,” she said. “You can still be friends. You can see her at school, but I’m afraid you can’t go to her house to play anymore and she probably won’t be able to come here.”

  “Why not, Mama?”

  She took both my hands in hers and leaned close.

  “Zainab, her father was one of those men who was grabbed and taken away,” she said.

  I wonder if I cried for Basma—or for myself at the restriction on our friendship. I don’t remember. We flew to Seattle, as we often did in the summer, for my father’s two-month pilot’s training at Boeing. The next time I remember seeing Basma was when school started in September. She was sitting at the back of the classroom. Teachers avoided calling on her. Other kids avoided her altogether. We spent recess walking around the playground holding hands and looking down at the ground. A terrible thing had happened, but I don’t think either of us named it. One day Basma didn’t come to school, and I never saw her again. By the time I met the man who had ordered her father’s execution three years later, I had taught myself to forget her last name.

  From Alia’s Noteboo
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  We weren’t excited about this friendship. We did not accept his invitations many times and managed to be away from him for two years while he befriended other families we knew, but we couldn’t avoid him forever.

  We stopped by a friend’s house after leaving a party around 11 P.M. and Saddam was in his living room. We spent three hours that evening listening to what he was saying. I will always remember his eyes. They focused on each one of us, examining each person very closely. We talked about many things, including different hobbies and particularly hunting, as it was one of his favorite. When we arrived home that night, we were surprised to find a hunting rifle that was sent by him as a gift. This was his invitation to friendship.

  In the days before he was president, he would visit us alone or with the company of only one guard. He often spent the nights roaming in the streets of Baghdad visiting one family after the other. It wasn’t unusual to get a call from him in the middle of the night to say that he is coming in a few moments and to ask us to invite so many friends to join us. One had no choice but to invite him and manage to entertain him even if one was in the middle of sleep.

  He was a heavy drinker. Chivas Regal Scotch Whiskey was his favorite. He always made sure to bring boxes of it to all the parties he attended. He loved dancing, particularly to Western music. He never got tired of dancing despite the fact that he was not a particularly good dancer nor drinker. He was a strong man with energy equal to ten men. I don’t deny his strong personality. While we liked him for his charming personality, we were also afraid of him for we couldn’t say no to any of his requests.

  He often told us his youth stories during these nights. He talked about his childhood and how he escaped his stepfather’s torture one night in his uncle’s house: how the dogs followed him, how the darkness of night did not manage to scare him as a ten-year-old child. He was determined to go to school and he knew only his uncle could help him accomplish that. He started first grade when he was ten years old. He often talked about how excited he was wearing underwear for the first time in his life. That day in school, he kept on lifting his dishdasha to show his schoolmates his underwear. He thought that it was the best thing anybody had and he wanted to brag about it. He also talked about his days of political activism and these stories took hours of narration as we sat around and listened to him carefully.

  We were not sure how things would change when he became president. He surprised us with a visit to our home at 8 P.M. one night in July 1979. I remember he told us, “I got rid of the old man” (referring to the president at the time, Ahmed Hassan Al-Bakr). He was very happy and merry that night. Saddam despised the fact that Al-Bakr used to consult with his fortune-teller before he held his meetings. He hated the fact that this blind fortune-teller, who lived in an area known as Al-Doubjee, had so much influence on political decisions. He told us that he had sent for her at the palace and killed her himself. “She knew too many secrets and I had to get rid of her,” he told us.

  He talked about friendship that night and how death would be the punishment for any friend who betrays a friend. We were silent and focused on what he was telling us. It was both a threat to us as well as a reference to his killing of one of his best friends, Mahmoud Al-Hamdanee, who was the Minister of Education at the time. Saddam had had dinner with Mahmoud the night before he killed him.

  2

  STRINGS

  WHEN MAMA BEGAN WRITING to me in her notebook in 1999, there was so little affect in her entries that they felt more like footnotes in a history book than the story behind my parents’ relationship. However, I understood the missing emotional context because for years that was all I had; it was facts I was missing. I was twenty-nine years old then, and that was the first time we were able to discuss Amo more or less openly. Iraqi parents never had the luxury many parents do of telling their children, don’t worry, honey, there’s nothing to be afraid of. My mother was perpetually caught between telling me the truth, which was her natural inclination, and holding back because simply knowing the truth was dangerous.

  There are probably four recurring themes in my life—women, war, family, and religion. I learned about them first through stories and overheard conversations, then wove in my own observations. I grew up with two great storytellers, my grandmother, Bibi, and her youngest daughter, my mother. Mama, a Pisces, spun utopian fantasies that wandered off into green fields and rainbows. Bibi, a traditional Muslim mother, favored fables from 1001 Arabian Nights that were studded with princesses and swashbucklers who galloped in on white horses to save them. It was from these stories that I drew my earliest lessons about women and men, about being Muslim and being secular, and about war and whatever you call life between wars, which I never knew to be peace.

  Mama’s utopia was the Women’s Village, a place she and my aunts—particularly Aunt Samer when she was arguing with her husband—would slip into conversations over the years. I heard about the Women’s Village for the first time when I was still little enough to sit on Mama’s lap on field trips with her students to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and ancient Hatra. She and her fellow teachers would find a shady spot for a picnic, open Tupperware full of grape leaves, burak, and tabouleh, and wind up sharing complaints about their husbands the way wives often do. How moody men could be, how demanding! How carefree life would be without them! How much better the world would be if women ran it! And so they conjured up an idyllic village filled with cottages and farmhouses that were close together so their children could grow up like cousins. The skies were always bright over the Women’s Village and the river that ran through it glinted with sunbeams. There were birds and flowers everywhere, and women spent their time singing and dancing with lovely children. There was no poverty and no war, for in this lovely meeting place between real life and fantasy, women were smart enough to talk with each other and find answers to those problems. Men were admitted to this paradise only for weekly visiting hours which, I innocently assumed at the time, were for fathers to visit their children the way Baba visited us when he was home. Like all utopias, the Women’s Village probably revealed as much about the teller’s reasons for escaping the present as of any idyllic view of future, but I didn’t grasp that then.

  Bibi had hazel eyes and long, ever-so-thin wispy white braids that she wore under an abaya when she went out and under a loose white kerchief when she was indoors. She had pale, moist skin that always felt cool to me, even in summer. She would gather her grandchildren around her in her parlor with rich rugs of burgundy and gold and red—wool on the floor, silk on the walls—and we would recline on cushions embroidered with poetry and scenes from the same age-old fables she recounted. Toothless in her old age, she would transport us into ancient worlds of shipwrecks and battles and magical happenings. When I was older and decided to read the stories myself, I was appalled by the violence and misogyny I found there. But Bibi’s sibilant tellings were always captivating and romantic. My favorite was the tale of the king with three daughters who asked each daughter whether his wealth belonged to him or to God. “Your wealth belongs to you, of course,” the two eldest daughters told him, and he rewarded each with a bag of jewels. But the youngest daughter told him that his wealth belonged to God, and her father expelled her from his palace. She was taken in by a poor servant whose son was so crippled and dependent he needed someone to help him to the toilet. The princess nursed him and taught him to be independent. They fell in love and married, and together they forged a new kingdom based on faith and true love and business acumen that prospered as her father’s old, corrupt one crumbled. Bibi always ended her stories with simple teachings. Everything we have belongs to God; be grateful. Take care of the weak; we are all the same under heaven. Believe in true love; you will be rewarded.

  From these two very different storytellers, my liberated mother and her traditional mother, I learned that men were born with power and women obtained it through sharpness of intellect and good hearts. If you were kind, wise, and did good works, yo
u could wind up being the princess who had it all.

  Karbalā’ is one of two holy cities in the south of Iraq. About fifty miles south of Baghdad, Karbalā’ was the site of the watershed battle in which both of the prophet Mohammed’s grandsons were massacred in 680. That battle caused the great schism in Islam. Those who believed that Mohammed’s legitimate heir and caliph was the slain father of the massacred brothers, Mohammed’s favored son-in-law, Ali, became known as Shia. Those who favored a caliphate established by the opposing Umayyad family after Ali’s murder became known as Sunnis. Over many generations, those political positions evolved into doctrines, as well as sectarian differences that are often stereotyped. Shia came to harbor suspicion of authority, believing that true justice on earth would be established only by the return of the Mahdi, a figure like the Messiah. Sunnis, in turn, developed a more accommodating attitude toward the ruling elite. In Iraq, Shia came to outnumber the Sunnis, yet the government was run predominantly by Sunnis. Today, the principal theological difference between the two sects is that Shia theologians tend to accept the necessity of continuously applying independent reasoning to contemporary life while Sunni theologians are more comfortable relying on doctrines established centuries ago by religious scholars who established four different schools of Sunni thought.

  For me, going to Bibi’s house in Karbalā’ was an adventure into an exotic past, a premedieval city that was also a commercial center. The streets were narrow, some disappearing into walkways lined with small shops selling prayer beads and sizzling kababs and pickles and window after window of gleaming gold jewelry. Outside our car window, vying for space with cars in the congested streets, were bicyclists and donkeys carrying people and supplies. Women bustled purposefully through the streets in black abayas, and many men wore traditional long dishdashas. The whole city seemed to glow golden from the surrounding sand, the gold jewelry in the shop windows, and the sun glinting off the gold-leafed domes of the two mosques that dominated the city. When we stepped inside Bibi’s house, we were met with the rich, steamy air of roses distilling and stove pots bubbling with the tang of sour-sweet Iraqi stews. Bibi had set up her own rosewater still in her kitchen, and I remember armloads of roses lying out on the counter, waiting to be fed into this laboratory of plastic tubes and glass flasks that would magically turn them into rosewater for cooking and religious devotions.