Between Two Worlds (15 page)

“Why do I have to go?” I would demand of Mama in quarrels that often led to tears. “I
hate
it! I don’t like them and they don’t like me.”

“Look at me, Zainab,” Mama told me. “I have to dress up. I have to smile. I have to go. What else can I do? All the other women bring their daughters with them and brag about them. When you don’t come, it is very awkward for me to be the only mother without her daughter. It triggers questions. What is wrong with my daughter? What kind of a mother am I for not having my daughter with me? You need to come, Zainab. You need to dress up and start putting some makeup on. You often look too pale.”

So I went, my mother’s daughter, and I would kiss his daughters on both cheeks with delight, as if we had just met by surprise on the street, and say, “How
are
you, Rana?” or “Oh, what a beautiful dress you’re wearing tonight, Raghad!” But, in small ways, I registered my protest. I wore straight gray or white dresses instead of the frilly 1980s styles the other girls wore. I refused to wear makeup or waste my time blowing my curly hair dry. Most of the time, I would find a seat on the side and watch for hours, the different one, wondering why I was invited at all and hoping I didn’t look as miserable as I felt. The women would dance together as they used to at my mother’s garden parties, and my mother kept trying to get me to join in like Sarah and Luma and Tamara. Once she came over to me and ordered me to smile and clap when a patriotic song came on.

“But, I am already smiling, Mother!” I told her as I gave her my big artificial smile.

“You look more like you’re smelling something bad,” she said. “Smile as if you mean it, Zainab.”

“Yes, Mother,” I said. And I stood and danced and clapped.

Between the farmhouse and the palace, I felt like a model pasted into one pose after another for some jet-set magazine, all dressed up with a permanent smile on my face, yet completely voiceless. In my head, I started referring to our existence as “this artificial life.”

 

Aunt Sajida and her daughters came to visit us just once. It was at the farmhouse. My mother spent all day cooking and making our house look as nice as she could. She was a great cook when she took the time, and she made Bibi’s
sabazi
that day, a recipe Bibi was famous for. Rice was the base of almost every Iraqi meal, and it was usually accompanied by a sauce flavored with vegetables and meat and spices, herbs, or dried lemon, or, like
sabazi,
spinach. That night, as we were seated around the dining table, Mama was serving dinner to Aunt Sajida as a proper hostess was supposed to, and Aunt Sajida looked at Mama with the implacable gaze of someone who knew she could not be questioned.

“Oh, Alia, you made the
sabazi
the Iranian way,” she observed.

I could see the droplets of sweat forming on my mother’s upper lip that always gave her away when she was nervous or embarrassed. She had made a mistake.

“Well, no, not really,” Mama said nervously as she continued serving the now-suspicious dish to Rana and Raghad and Aunt Nada and her family. “I just added some other vegetables to it beside the spinach.”

I caught Aunt Sajida’s look of authoritative dismissiveness. She knew what she had said was enough to petrify my mother. All she had to do was remind Mama that she was a “special file.” I felt so bad for my mother. After all her work, the evening was stolen from her by surprise. I knew we weren’t supposed to listen to Persian music or call my favorite nuts “Iranian” pistachios. But was even my mother’s wonderful
sabazi
forbidden?

Well, I like it this way, Aunt Sajida! I lashed out at her inside my head, silently, the way I had at Mohammed when he humiliated me for being Shia. It tastes a whole lot better than that bland stuff you serve at the palace!

It was a perfect day all around: Raghad and Rana and I didn’t like one another well enough to spend time alone, so we had remained with our mothers. Aunt Sajida had cut down Mama. And Hala had ordered her bodyguard to toss my little brother around like a soccer ball as other kids watched, afraid to intervene for fear of making matters worse. I found Hassan crying in his room after Sajida and her entourage left. He was only five or six at the time, but he knew he could not barge into the salon when everyone was there, so he had just locked himself in the bedroom and cried. When I heard the story, I was so angry I wanted to do something to teach that spoiled Hala a lesson. But I knew I couldn’t. She was the daughter of the president and everyone was as much afraid of her as they were of her brothers, her sisters, and her parents.

 

 

Amo was very careful about eating anything prepared by anyone else, but he made an exception for my mother’s stuffed lamb. Once, she prepared a whole dinner for Ramadan at his request, and we were all waiting for him at the farmhouse when he sent word he couldn’t make it, but could she please send him her stuffed lamb? So she sent it on, and we broke our fast that night with side dishes. He had an enormous appetite for meat and had a fresh sheep slaughtered daily. When he joined us for dinner at one of our farmhouses, he brought his own cooks, food, pots, tableware, personal taster Hanna, and kitchen staff, most of whom were Christian. Like many leaders down through history, he trusted minorities with his personal care because they were unlikely to conspire with majority populations to betray him.

One evening after Amo had been at our farmhouse for dinner, my mother whispered to me with a gleeful little smile on her face, “Look what I found!” and whipped out Amo’s dinner fork. His eating utensils were at least a third larger than normal and featured a crest with a taloned Iraqi eagle on the handle. This fork was nearly the size of a serving utensil you would stick in a large roast to transfer it to a serving platter. I still have it, a lone tangible souvenir in my kitchen drawer of the endless weekends I spent in that farmhouse.

Food was often a matter of controversy more than comfort. At one family gathering with Amo, Aunt Layla got really excited when grapes were presented at the table. “I haven’t seen these grapes in such a long time. They remind me of the days in England!” she said.

Amo glared at her with no mercy whatever.

“What do you mean you haven’t seen such grapes?” he demanded, obviously having no idea that most Iraqis didn’t enjoy such luxuries. “They are from the Iraqi market.
All
Iraqis have access to this grape.”

The vulnerability just below her lovely face surfaced. Aunt Layla was scared—over a grape.

 

 

I’m convinced if you understood the way he managed the competition of his “beloved ones” you would understand how he stayed in power for thirty-five years even though millions of his people hated him and there were ongoing domestic and international plots to assassinate him. Our “family gatherings” were a microcosm of how Amo not only spread but maintained fear inside the Baath Party and his Republican Guard and even our classrooms at school. He took pleasure in pitting people against one another—couple against couple, spouse against spouse, child against child. If you wanted to stay in the game—and my parents saw no choice—you had to compete for his favor just to stay even—the fathers with their obedient
yes sire,
the mothers with their coquettishness, the children with their adoring smiles. This included constantly eyeing one another and tattling on one another. I eventually came to like the other three girls, yet I remained lonely because the central ingredient missing in our friendship was trust.

Even children were encouraged to tattle on one another. One afternoon at the farmhouse when Hassan was no more than five or six, he blurted out, “There is no God but one God, Mohammed is his Messenger, and Ali is his Friend,” and Sarah’s little sister immediately ran to her mother, Aunt Nada, who was a Sunni and thus taught her children that it was forbidden to say the part about Ali.

“Mama, he said the wrong
shahada
!” the little girl told her.

Hassan looked up at my mother, confused.

“I got it right, didn’t I, Mama?” he asked.

But, in the tense, awkward mental shuffling that went on in the kitchen between my mother and Aunt Nada, Mama was unable to give him that reassurance. Finally, the mothers each told their children they would explain later, and Aunt Nada politely excused herself and took her children back to her farmhouse. I ran to Hassan to hug him and assure him that he had said the right thing and Sunni and Shia were all Muslims in the end; we just expressed ourselves differently. I felt so protective of him. I didn’t want him to be hurt the way I had by Mohammed.

Mama and Aunt Layla were very close at one point, and Aunt Layla had told her that another of my aunts, a woman Mama adored, had said something critical about her to Amo. Mama came home crying that day, and in time, she pulled back and trusted people less. I didn’t like seeing her that way, but as was the case with so many other things, I later came to understand her reasons.

“Can you believe what your father did today?” Mama asked me one afternoon when she was coming back from Aunt Nada’s farmhouse. “We were just sitting around and Amo went around the circle asking everyone to say who their first love was, and your father said you! Can you believe it! It was you! It was his daughter! It wasn’t me, it wasn’t even a girlfriend!”

What was I supposed to do? Sympathize with her because my father said he loved me? I had no idea if that was Amo’s own personal kind of truth or dare or a perfectly innocent question among friends. I just knew that whatever he did was creating conflict in my parents’ marriage that wasn’t there before. Since no one could criticize him, he could then play the good guy as well: the patient mediator, the peacemaker. My mother later told me the term she thought of for Amo’s strategy was “divide and conquer.” But, if she understood it so well, I ask myself with the advantage of hindsight, why did she fall for it?

 

After Baba was forced to choose Amo’s friendship over being his pilot, he had to cut back on his flying because he was expected to accompany Amo to public events, though he would still lean out of newspaper photos or TV cameras as other men leaned in. I would be on the phone with a friend, and the voice of a palace operator would interrupt and order me to hang up because the president wanted to talk to my father. Or the phone would ring during lunch, and my father would get a set of brief instructions for a family trip. “Be ready in fifteen minutes, pack for three days,” the voice might say, and we would drop everything and get ready. A black Mercedes with darkened windows would drive up into our cul-de-sac, and we would jump in and join a small convoy of other black Mercedes speeding down the highway at more than 120 miles an hour. I have never driven so fast at any other time in my life. For security reasons, we were never told where we were going. Most of the time I didn’t even know the names of the places we wound up, many of them newly constructed palaces, some lavish, some like regular houses, each decorated in different styles Amo never seemed to tire of showing off.

At one of the palaces, I saw ornamental helmets over doorways that reminded me of an enormous monument in Baghdad of a human hand, based on Amo’s own, that held a net full of helmets of dead Iranian soldiers. These ornaments hung in clusters of three, like cherries, above the doorways, only they were life-sized helmets made of gold. As I stared at them, I suddenly realized that our gold donations had been melted down to make them, I was certain of it. I saw that he had forged those trinkets in the pain of the Iraqi people. Don’t you know people are suffering and dying in this war? I found myself asking Amo in my head. How can you turn our donations into obscene curios? Take the Abbasid coin off my mother’s neck that her grandfather had given her that bore the marks of history? Melt down wedding rings women had taken off their hands as a sacrifice to help our soldiers?

I ultimately came to understand that he took from us with uncanny precision what was so intimate to us that it hurt. Not just the Abbasid coin, which mattered nothing to him, but the qualities about us he claimed to value most: my mother’s laugh, my father’s wings, and very nearly what Mama said Amo sometimes called my “spirit.” In return, he gave us gifts that signified only his wealth and control of the national treasury. My father had a closet full of guns he used only when he was hunting with Amo. My mother got boxed jewelry sets made in Italy—lovely, but I would have traded them all to see that Abbasid coin around her neck again.

He was running a country, a war, an army, a political party, and one of the world’s largest oil economies, but he found time to keep meticulous accounts of our emotional peonage. I remember one trip we took to the old city of Mosul, gateway to Kurdistan in the north, when I was seventeen or eighteen. We drove up a winding mountain road to a modern mountain lodge with a beautiful view overlooking the city. I remember a bottle of Chivas Regal sitting in the middle of a table on an expansive modern porch and adults drinking heavily the night we arrived. When Amo drank, they were forced to drink too. Mama disliked drinking to excess, and she looked as if she wanted to cry, which was how alcohol always affected her. My father came to seek his escape in drinking as years went on, and he looked ever more tense and serious. The other adults were getting loud and slurring their words, and the men were eating pistachios with their mouths open like Amo, grossing us kids out. Exchanging glances, we older ones tried to divert the attention of the younger ones so they wouldn’t have to see our parents this way.

As for Amo, the more he drank, the merrier he got. Yet I never saw him act drunk. Drinking seemed to lighten him up a bit. His merciful moments sometimes came when he was drinking, and there was the smallest opening to say something honest to him. Once, when he was talking about how he much he enjoyed his “People’s Days,” the days he helped resolve the problems of ordinary citizens, such as women who were having a hard time with divorces or inheritances, Aunt Layla spoke up and asked why he didn’t just change the laws to protect women instead. He seemed to actually listen, and she takes credit to this day for improvements he made in family laws for women in the 1980s, though he legalized honor killings in the 1990s that allowed men to kill women family members deemed guilty of causing dishonor to their family name.