Between Two Worlds Read online

  “The neighbors were deported to Iran,” he said. “That’s what happened to Aunt Ishraq and her family too, Zainab. That’s why they didn’t say good-bye. They didn’t have time.”

  He explained it to me in the way he said everything—facts only. The government was deporting Iraqis “of Iranian origin.” Nobody knew how many people had been deported, or exactly what happened to all those who had gone. Uncle Adel was staying at our house so he wouldn’t be taken away too. I listened with growing fear and confusion as I realized that my parents must have planned this conversation together. Why hadn’t Mama told me herself? Why was Baba the one to tell me these things, sitting here in the car in the rain outside Uncle Adel’s house?

  Then he broke the unthinkable news.

  “Zainab, it’s possible your mother may have to leave the country too,” he said. “The government is giving two thousand dinars [six thousand dollars] to Iraqis to divorce their spouses if they’re of Iranian origin.”

  Until now, I had sat still, staring at my feet in petrified silence.

  “You’re not going to divorce Mama, are you?” I said in a sharp, accusing voice. Of everything he had said, that scared me the most.

  “No, no,” he said gently. “But you’re an adult now, so I thought you should understand what is happening.”

  Then he opened the car door and got out. When Mama and I talked, I could usually ask questions, even if I didn’t always get answers. With Baba that was impossible. I got out and followed him with my head full of questions. Was I going to lose Mama? If Baba wasn’t going to divorce Mama, why did he say that? Would he even think of divorcing Mama? Didn’t he love her anymore? If she left, what would happen to me? Could I go with her? What about my brothers? What would happen to them?

  When Aunt Najwa opened the door, I hardly recognized her. A tall, beautiful woman who ran one of Uncle Adel’s factories and always had her hair done at a salon, she looked haggard and thin. There was no makeup, no elegant business suit. The aunt I knew as almost imperious had been replaced by a frightened woman who kept running her hands through her hair. She started talking fast to Baba without even saying hello. I found my cousins in the living room looking as scared and pale and ignored as I had been feeling for weeks. They told me they hadn’t seen their father in days.

  “Two Mukhabarat agents came an hour ago asking for our citizenship papers to prove we weren’t Iranian,” Dawood said. “Mama told them Baba had them and he was out of town.”

  “But how can you be Iranian!” I said. “You’ve never even been to Iran! You’re Iraqi! Your parents are Iraqi!”

  “The neighbors are all Iraqi too, and we woke up one day and they were gone,” said my littlest cousin, near tears. “And now we’re the very last house on our street left with people in it!”

  Why was this happening? Why was the Mukhabarat coming to their house and not my house? Why were my mother and their parents in danger, but apparently not my father? What about me and my brothers? Were they trying to deport us too?

  “If Mama and you guys get deported, I’m going with you,” I declared.

  “I don’t know if you would be allowed,” Dawood told me.

  “If anybody tries to pull us apart, I hold on and I just won’t let go,” I vowed. “They’ll have to take me too.”

  We sat there for a long time, listening to bits and pieces of our parents’ conversation in the next room. This apparently wasn’t the first time the Mukhabarat had come; it was the second, and Aunt Najwa said they had told her they would be back again. I looked around at the big dining room table, the backgammon board, the wedding pictures, the baby pictures, the pictures of us on the Tigris in their boat last summer. I’m sure we were all thinking the same thing. Were the secret police going to take all this away from them? Would we ever be able to play together in this house again? I felt great, nauseating, roller coaster loops of fear in my stomach.

  When Baba came over to tell me it was time to leave, Aunt Najwa was pleading with him, holding his shoulder.

  “Please do something, Basil!” she said. “I don’t know how much more time I can buy. They will take us if you can’t manage to do something!”

  My cousins all turned and stared at me.

  Baba? What could my father do?

  For the life of me I can’t remember the next few days. I can’t remember running to Mama, though I must have when I got home. All I remember is that a few days, maybe even a few weeks, later, Mama drove me to an old neighborhood in downtown Baghdad. She stopped to buy fresh fish for dinner and chatted with the fishmonger. The worry was gone, she looked herself again, and I sensed the crisis was past. Something had been resolved. The streets were too narrow in that neighborhood for cars, so she suggested we get out, and we walked along the river until we stopped in front of a very old house. I had heard about it, but never seen it: the house where Mama grew up. In the fourteen years since Bibi had moved out, it had been given over to Boy Scouts, health clinics, a watchman’s family, and now stood empty. Mama went over and unlocked the old-fashioned door, and we stepped into an airy interior that seemed to have come from another time. There was an inner courtyard lit by shafts of diffuse sunlight from high overhead, which gave the whole place the feeling of an unused sanctuary. High above, wrapped around the inside of the second and third floors, were walkways with wrought iron railings and doorways that led to rooms beyond. We passed an empty, tiled fountain covered now with pigeon droppings and dust. Mama said she and Aunt Samer use to play in it when they were little.

  I heard the flapping of wings somewhere above as she led me up one of several staircases. Running her hands along the old walls, she told stories as we entered each room, recalling the Farsi-speaking servants, the strong patriarch who had been her father, a brother who had died, and Uncle Adel, the big brother fifteen years older than she was, who always watched out for her. Finally, we reached the third floor, and she led me into a room that had been hers and Aunt Samer’s, overlooking the river. She walked across the dusty floor and opened the high old wood-framed windows, and we stepped out onto a sagging wooden balcony. Laid out in front of us were the Tigris River and a centuries-old skyline of domes and minarets beyond. We stood there for a while, just staring at history and the boatmen ferrying passengers back and forth across the river. I wondered how many generations of Iraqis had stood on the earth right beneath where we stood, how many peoples led by how many different rulers had passed over this precise spot, what they wore, what they believed, how much of their blood I had in me now, how different they looked from me.

  “First, habibiti, I want to let you know that our family is safe,” she said. “No one is going to be deported. I want you to know that.”

  “So they won’t take you away?” I said.

  “No, honey, nobody’s going to take me away. Or Uncle Adel or your cousins.”

  I hugged her and almost cried.

  “I was so scared, Mama!”

  “I know. Baba and I had hoped we would be able to resolve this without worrying you, but at one point . . . Well, we decided that you would rather be prepared in case we couldn’t work things out.”

  “So no one will ever take you away from me?”

  “No, honey. No one’s taking me anywhere. Everything is going to be all right. It just got very complicated there for a while.”

  The sun was warm on our faces, but the wind was brisk. Mama kept her hands in her coat pockets as she looked out over the river, then back at me, her long black hair blowing away from her face and the slightly bent Abbasid coin around her neck glinting. Her large brown eyes, rimmed with kohl, filled with nostalgia.

  “I remember standing on this balcony waiting for my father to come home for lunch,” she said, looking out over the narrow river road where men and women and children went on about daily things. “Every afternoon when he walked up this street for dinner, he’d bring somebody with him. A porter, a driver, somebody he had just met somewhere. How I resented it! Why did he have to
bring a total stranger to eat with our family? It was our family. But he explained to me that charity was mandatory in Islam.”

  She talked about how Bibi used to supervise the preparation of enormous tubs of fesenjoon and durshana for Ramadan, and they would open the house to the poor, who would come from all over the neighborhood with pots to fill and take home to their families.

  “I stood right here on this balcony and saw a man stuff rice in his pocket once when I was a little girl and felt so fortunate for the baraka that had been bestowed on us, Zainab. Those were good days. It is so sad, habibiti. Now we can’t even give away food on Ashura without endangering the lives of our children.”

  Many parents have the freedom of handing down ancestral history without fear, but when my mother began telling me the history of our family that afternoon, I had to stand very close to hear her as she entrusted me with the story of our family.

  “Everything started with my grandfather—our fortune and our problems,” she said. “He was born in Baghdad in 1865. We even have his birth certificate. He is Iraqi! How could anyone think he was Iranian!”

  But her grandfather was born at a time when Iraq was a battle-ground of two empires, the Safavid Empire of Iran, which was Shia, and the Ottoman Empire, administered in Iraq by Sunnis, that reached all the way to the Mediterranean Sea. This grandfather—my third grandfather, jeddo we call it in Arabic—married a wealthy woman and built a successful business fabricating strings—ropes, sausage casings, threads. He plied ancient trade routes while his wife managed the finances and raised their children, including Mama’s father, a man fluent in five languages who would expand the business into leather factories. This wife was the matriarch I had heard so much about.

  “My grandmother was a strong woman,” Mama said. “Your aunts and I couldn’t help but want to be strong like her. So competent. So commanding. Yet how little freedom she allowed Mama! I wonder sometimes if that is why Mama allowed us so much.”

  At some point, probably in the nineteenth century, Mama explained, our original family surname had been lost. Men marrying into wealthy families often adopted their wife’s name, and birth names were sometimes replaced by occupations. By the time Mama was born, the family surname meant “Maker of Strings,” which made our family records hard to trace. It was possible, she said, that her grandfather’s grandfather was born in Iran. Bibi had a vague memory of visiting Tehran with her guardian when she was very small, and Mama said she thought we had relatives there, somewhere.

  “I went to Tehran once when I was your age,” Mama told me. “It was a beautiful city. I’ve been thinking since all this happened that maybe I have cousins there. I always wanted to find them someday. But how is that possible? Now we are shooting each other.”

  The odd part about it, as Mama explained it to me that day, was that the deportations weren’t even based on birth. Iraq, a vast plain with two great rivers and fertile soil between them, had been invaded many times over the centuries—Bibi herself had lived under an Ottoman Empire, a British occupation, an Iraqi kingdom, a Communist government, and several Baathist regimes. At the end of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century, a census was taken in which heads of households were asked whether they were of Ottoman origin or of Iranian origin. This was not as innocuous a question as it seemed. Fearing induction into the Ottoman army and mindful of the importance of maintaining travel documents to conduct business across the border into Iran, my great-grandfather and many other Shia men registered as being “of Iranian origin.” All Iraqi citizenship papers still divided us that way, based on those grayed registration papers.

  But I still didn’t understand why my mother was at risk of being deported and my father was not. They were first cousins, marriage between cousins being permitted in Islam because inheritances are kept in the family and it is believed that a husband is likely to treat a cousin better than a stranger. But national origin apparently was deemed to follow the father’s bloodline, and it was their maternal grandfather they had in common. My father’s grandfather on his father’s side had registered as being of Ottoman origin while my mother’s, the one who made strings, had registered as being of Iranian origin. My father was therefore considered to be of Ottoman origin and Uncle Adel of Iranian origin, which is why my brothers and I were safe from deportation, and my cousins weren’t.

  “They’re deporting the wealthiest people first,” Mama said. “That is why we think Aunt Ishraq and her family were among the first. I think they just want to steal our homes and businesses. Will this corruption never stop? They have no right! How many people are gone? Thousands, tens of thousands maybe. We are all Iraqi, and yet there are empty houses all over Baghdad!”

  So how come we were safe now?

  “We talked to the president,” she told me. “It just took us a while to reach him. But when we sat down with him, he was very good about it. We showed him my grandfather’s birth certificate—not that that means much, but it was something. So he made us a ‘special file.’ ”

  A special file. I mulled that phrase. I wasn’t sure if it was good or bad.

  “Don’t worry, honey,” Mama said. “Iraq will always be our home.”

  We had been standing on the balcony for a long time that afternoon. Mama drew me inside her fur coat to warm me, and I saw the bend in the graceful calligraphy of the gold coin where it had been dented. I wondered, as I did every time I looked at that dent, what force had been so strong as to cause it.

  Because of our special file, Aunt Ishraq and her family were eventually allowed to come home. Everybody brought food to their house and we had a picnic on the floor. There was no table. Everything in their house—the furniture, their dishes, their toys and school books—was gone. The house was empty. They said almost nothing about what had happened to them while they were gone.

  Being a “special file” was a threat that remained with our family all our lives. At any time a government official could request our citizenship papers and, because the papers were signed by a single recognizable officer in the Mukhabarat, anyone checking them knew immediately that my mother’s family’s “Iraqi” citizenship was in question, subjecting them to fear and intimidation. I happened to be at Uncle Adel’s house the night his younger son, Hussam, started a new school, and Hussam looked so dejected that I asked what was wrong. It turned out that Uncle Adel had been so afraid to send Hussam to school with his “special file” papers that he had told Hussam to tell the teacher he had forgotten them. His teacher sent him to the principal and, following Uncle Adel’s instructions, he told the principal that his parents were out of town but that he had an adult friend he could call who could come in and vouch for him. Hussam sat in the principal’s office for an hour until the friend, a high-ranking Baath official, showed up and registered him. “I felt as if the whole school was looking at me,” he told me, his face down. “What did we do wrong? Why do they treat us this way?” To this day, Hussam gets tears in his eyes remembering his fear and humiliation. When he tried to register his own son for school twenty years later, he was told, “Oh, your papers are in not in this office—you have to go the special file office,” and the nightmare was passed down to the next generation.

  There is only one memory I truly wish I could erase. It is of my mother.

  I was upstairs in my room doing my homework some months after we had secured our “special file.” It was late, and my brothers were already asleep. My father was downstairs watching television, and he called out to ask me to check on my mother. I went to their bedroom door and found it closed. I knocked, then knocked again. She didn’t answer. Finally, I went inside and was hit by a blast of very warm air. The heater was on high. All the lights were on. It seemed very bright, almost glaring. Their room was all white then, with white closets and white furniture and white walls. The bed was empty, unmade and messed up, as if she had been sleeping restlessly and gotten up to go into the bathroom. She didn’t answer my call. Then I caught sight of her on the floor on
the other side of the bed. She was sprawled awkwardly on the Persian rug in her white nightgown, her arms and legs and hair askew. Around her were pills—pink and blue, white, yellow—bright pastel colors on the burgundy pile of the rug, and empty plastic bottles.

  I was so scared. I ran to her and pulled her up into my arms. She was breathing, but her body slumped heavily as I tried to hold her up. “Mama, Mama! Wake up, Mama! Can you hear me, Mama?” I could see her eyes trying to open, but there was no focus. The skin on her beautiful face was slack, her face whiter than I had ever seen it. Was she going to die? “Baba!” I cried, but he didn’t answer, so I ran to get him. It was dark. The lights were out. All I could see was the shifting bluish light of the television and the sound of the TV coming from the family room. I found Baba sitting on the blue sofa, a glass of whiskey at his side. I ran over to him, but he seemed almost as numb with whiskey as Mama was with pills. Finally he came back with me and looked in a daze at Mama on the floor. I sent him to telephone for help while I stayed with Mama. I sat there with her head in my lap and kept her awake, cooling her face with a wet towel, brushing her long hair with her hairbrush, and telling her not to die, please not to die.

  Uncle Adel arrived and he and I managed to get Mama to his car. Baba stayed home. When we got to Uncle Adel’s house, I refused to let Mama out of my arms. I would not, would not, would not, let go of her. We took her into the bathroom, and Uncle Adel brought milk to force her to drink so she would vomit the pills. But she couldn’t seem to swallow, so Aunt Najwa brought me a funnel from the kitchen, and Uncle Adel held his baby sister, tears streaming down his face, as I poured milk down her throat. I had stopped crying. I was utterly focused on getting that milk down her throat. I was on a mission to save her life. I held the back of her neck as she had held mine when I was sick, and finally she vomited the awful pills.

  By the time the doctor arrived, Aunt Najwa and I had washed her and changed her clothing and put her to bed. I put on a clean nightgown Aunt Najwa gave me and crawled into bed with Mama. I put my arms around her and held her all night like a mother holding a sick child, listening to her breathing, afraid I might lose her again if I fell asleep. Mama had tried to kill herself. Why, Mama? Why? Don’t you know how much Haider and Hassan and I need you? Don’t you know how much I love you? By the time I finally slept, I felt like all the child had been wrung out of me. I had seen a side of adulthood I wasn’t ready for, something that reeked of sour milk and whiskey and pain, but I had no answers and no one would ever really explain what had brought it all on.