Between Two Worlds (17 page)

6

BOXES

I NEVER WITNESSED what he did to people. I never had to put together the body of one of my family members like a puzzle after it had been hacked apart. I never had to spend years going from prison to prison in hopes of finding alive a son who had been snatched away from our dinner table by the Mukhabarat. I was one of the lucky ones, one of his “beloved ones.” I was guarded by the very secret police Amo used to terrorize others. There are times I cannot stop sobbing when I think about the crimes he committed against the Iraqi people. But I couldn’t cry then. I couldn’t even imagine being able to express any feelings at injustice. I just processed such horror stories as information. We were surrounded by stories of people going to prison for simply making a joke about someone in Amo’s family or for criticizing a single thing he did.

Any society that stops questioning its leaders is vulnerable to dictatorship, and Amo used our own traditions against us to help instill and perpetuate fear. To the traditional concept of
ayeb,
which dealt with things that were forbidden by cultural courtesies, and
haram,
which dealt with things that were forbidden by religion, Amo seemed to add a third,
mamnu’a,
which just meant forbidden. Forbidden by government? Forbidden by Saddam Hussein? Forbidden by law? It didn’t matter. We couldn’t tell the difference. We lived
in
fear. Fear had spread through our society the way color does when you put a single drop of tint into water to dye eggs for Norouz or—a better metaphor—the way a single drop of blood does when it drips from your finger into a dishpan.

I remember one perfect cloudless winter day at school when I was sitting outside, leaning against a volleyball pole in the sun with four other girls, and one of them started telling us with very wide eyes a story that could have put her and her family at risk had we repeated it. It was about a man who had been executed in the street the night before in a poor neighborhood. A semicircle of men with rifles had gathered around him, and they were cheered on somehow by someone else, and they all started firing at the man and kept on firing
until his blood was spurting out of his body like fountains
. I knew I couldn’t show sympathy for the person who had been executed because I could have been associated with whatever it was that had gotten him killed. So I remember listening with no expression on my face at all, impassive on the outside, as I took in this awful image of blood squirting out in all directions from a man’s living body. As I got older, there were more stories. I remember hearing about a businessman who had been executed for raising his prices in violation of a law no one understood. The amazing part was not his murder, but the fact that the Mukhabarat had apologized to the family afterward, saying they had made a mistake because he hadn’t violated the law after all. This gave the family the right to mourn him and give him a proper public burial, because such things were normally denied to families of persons who had been executed.

My private hell and that of my family was that we spent so much time with Saddam Hussein himself. Amo could never know I had heard such things—neither could his daughters or even the girls who were my friends at the farmhouse. Never having mastered the art of making such dangerous thoughts fly out of my brain as my mother had tried to teach me, I learned to hide them. Each time a horror story came in, I put it in a box and locked that box away in my brain—I could almost hear the sound the box made when it clicked closed. The good “Amo” things stayed in the front of my brain; I needed access to those. The bad “Saddam Hussein” things I buried in those boxes deep in the back of my brain behind a wall so thick Amo couldn’t see through it.

My mother’s way of staying alive under the gaze of the man who caused all these horrors was to shut off her mind, and I learned from her example.
Thinking
was dangerous, so I learned not to think or form an opinion. I learned to numb myself with novels and forced sleep and mental tricks. As for my emotions, they got checked into storage like so much baggage I would have to pay to claim later. But, every now and then, those boxes would rise to the surface and pop open and I would see the spatter of a man’s blood on a neighborhood wall. Or the body of the husband of a friend of Mama’s that had been left at her front door after she had begged Amo to release him from prison, and Amo had promised he would be home the next day. I tried to push these thoughts back down into my brain, only sometimes they wouldn’t stay there and I couldn’t stand it and I would step into this room of buzzing white light that was so blinding it was like walking straight into one of those lights over your head in a dentist’s chair with your eyes wide open. And finally I couldn’t see anything anymore.

It was hard for Mama to hide her feelings. Amo had known her for a long time, and her large, wonderfully emotional eyes, and a generous mouth that tended to give her away. When Aunt Samer kept telling Mama horror stories about Amo and complaining to her about the way Tikritis were taking over Baghdad, Mama finally had to ask Bibi to intercede. I remember going to Bibi’s apartment and seeing Mama lying with her head on her mother’s lap, the supposedly liberated daughter seeking comfort from an old woman who smelled of tea rose perfume.

“Please tell her to stop, Mama, she’ll get us all killed!” my mother pleaded to her mother. “She doesn’t understand that Amo is the Devil in all its meaning. He charms people, he seduces them, and then he harms them.”

Bibi just listened. So did I.

“Samer doesn’t understand,” Mama said. “Amo knows how to read eyes!”

Amo would stare at you with such intensity, even as he smiled, that I instinctively got into the habit of casting my eyes down, knowing my gesture would be taken for a young girl’s modesty. After watching her with Bibi that day, I became even more protective of Mama. I still asked her questions that came as a result of our family gatherings. (“Mama, why does Amo have pierced ears?” “Because in his tribe first sons were coveted and sometimes disguised as girls in early childhood to protect them from the evil eye.”) We were best friends, and sometimes we had only each other to talk to. But I spared her the horror stories I heard from time to time at school, as I knew she had spared me hers.

Bibi died in 1986, not long after that afternoon, when I was not quite seventeen. With the help of a woman at the cemetery who performed such services, her three daughters washed her body and wrapped her in a white shroud as Islam requires, and we buried her in the sand outside our family mausoleum in the vast cemetery in Najaf. I remember how many headstones there were, many of them marking new graves of young soldiers who had died in war. The headstones were jammed chock-a-block in the sand, thousands and thousands of them, and it seemed like we had to walk around them forever through scorching desert to reach the mausoleum that had been in our family for years. Finally, rose water was spread over Bibi’s grave. Candles were lit as we cried and listened to recitation of passages from the Quran. I had thought of her as the tent under which we found shelter. Now, she was gone.

Bibi’s death changed Aunt Samer. She gave up complaining about Amo, and she began to pray.

 

 

Baghdad has always been a city of political intrigue, a trading crossroads that was fought over by armies of invading ethnicities for centuries. Amo inflamed these ancient rivalries, tipping the delicate balance among autonomy-minded Kurds in the north, with their own culture and language, fearful Shia in the south, whose loyalty was always questioned, and a mostly tribal area north of Baghdad that Americans would later reduce to “the Sunni triangle.” By the late 1980s, the entire atmosphere of Baghdad had changed. As Amo’s cement palaces crept out over our riverbanks, he distributed to Tikritis jobs and whole neighborhoods of apartments around his palaces, a sort of protective tribal moat. Baghdad used to be a city of riverside parks in the 1970s, and our family used to stroll along the Corniche, eating
masgoof
fresh from the Tigris as children played and women in
abayas
sat comfortably next to women in short skirts. But Amo and his tribesmen transformed those riverside cafes into male drinking hangouts. Pig’s Island was no longer a quiet sandbar where we had family barbecues; it was a tourism casino complex called “Bride’s Island,” with townhouses for honeymooners forbidden to travel abroad.

I remember playing slot machines once when I was a teenager. Gambling, smoking, and drinking were encouraged in the name of modernization. Later, when I went to America, I saw that Amo had actually won points in the West for these changes. American obsession with the way women dressed helped dupe Americans into believing that because Iraqi women looked more like them, they also had greater freedoms. Behind this façade there was almost no freedom to travel or speak or pray, zero tolerance for any public views at all that conflicted with Saddam Hussein’s. Informers were everywhere. Women were reportedly raped by the Mukhabarat on videotapes that police threatened to release to blackmail women into informing on family members. Neighbors informed on neighbors. Children informed on their parents as they innocently answered their teachers’ questions like “What does Baba say about Uncle Saddam?”

War was the inexorable backdrop of our lives. As I drove back and forth across the city, between palace and school, thoughtless wealth and working class fear, the streets of Baghdad reflected Iraqi militarism. There were men in uniforms everywhere. Baath party members, soldiers, young men in Civil Defense who had been trained in “defense” and issued Kalashnikov rifles. Iraqi television was filled with images of dead Iranian soldiers, and Baghdad’s streets were lined with black cloth as families hung up the traditional banners announcing the Iraqi war dead and women assumed the black of mourning that is traditional for forty days and up to a year following the death of a family member. Mourners strapped caskets to car rooftops and one day we found ourselves waiting in traffic behind a car with a wooden casket covered with an Iraqi flag. But the casket wasn’t fully closed, and I let out a scream as I recognized that the dirty bluish thing hanging out of it was a foot. “Calm down, honey,” Mama said, though she was clearly shocked at the sight as well and immediately began reciting prayers from the Quran asking for God to have mercy on his soul, as was our custom when we passed by anyone who was dead.

The war was very personal to girls I went to school with. Many had fathers and brothers who were being sent to the front. I remember in particular when a tall girl who had been nice to me came to school wearing black and told me her oldest brother had been killed at the front and her mother could not stop crying. I comprehended my privilege when I realized that no one in my family was fighting in the war. As in families of means everywhere, my teenaged male cousins managed to avoid the draft. But even they paid their own special price. Dawood, Uncle Adel’s oldest son, was sent to study in England. He was cut off for years from everyone he had known and loved, because his family was not allowed to travel abroad, and if he had come home, he would have been drafted. Our family managed to visit him once when we were abroad, and it touched my heart that he asked about so many simple things: what his sister looked like, whether his little brother had a girlfriend, what everyday life was like for his family.

Most Iraqi families didn’t have that option, of course. I remember the sun-browned fingers of Radya’s mother hanging onto the windowsill of our car one day when we picked Radya up for work as her mother sobbed and begged my mother to intercede to save her son. It was her oldest son who had been drafted, the one on whom they had pinned all hopes for a brighter future for their family. “Everything will be okay,” my mother tried to reassure her. As we drove home, I in turn told a sobbing Radya, “Please don’t cry, he’ll be okay.” But the truth was no one knew it would be okay. He was headed for the front lines. Hundreds of thousands of families like theirs would lose sons; our family would lose none. The unfairness was implicit, but as gaping as fate. I came to see the poor less as living in poverty than as marginalized, shut out of the options that allow human beings to shape our own lives. If you were Shia, religious, and working class, there was always a whiff of suspicion about you. For security reasons, Radya was not allowed to come to our farmhouse even to clean. We passed Radya’s neighborhood when we drove to the farmhouse, but I never mentioned to the other girls that I had spent time there with a servant’s family.

 

 

There were times I felt that not the smallest, most ordinary event in my life was free of Amo. I wanted nothing more than to be just an ordinary teenager doing ordinary teenaged things. When I was in high school, my cousin Naim invited me to go with him and his friends to a disco party for teenagers at the Hunting Club, a large private club where middle and upper middle class families went to swim, play tennis, watch movies, and eat. My cousins and I practically grew up there. It was the place where my father first whirled me around a dance floor and my mother sneaked extra servings of hummus when she thought no one was watching after lights went out for movies. It was in the middle of the noisy Hunting Club swimming pool that Aunt Samer criticized Amo. Excited at the prospect of an evening free with people my own age to just enjoy myself, I put on a purple disco dress with huge earrings and let my curly hair down, and I let Mama put a little makeup on my face for the first time that night. She was surprised, but this wasn’t a palace party.