Between Two Worlds (19 page)

I left that night with a better sense of what my parents had given up in their struggle to resist Amo. Aunt Nada and Uncle Kais publicly exhibited their relationship with Amo and had taken advantage of their contacts to start businesses and grow wealthy. They could afford extravagances our family couldn’t on the salary of a professional pilot, even with my mother’s inheritance offsetting the growing expense of keeping up appearances. We were a professional middle class family caught between two worlds. The people who watched us walk in that night considered us palace insiders, and palace families considered us just part of the people. We were members of Amo’s circle of friends, and yet members of the Shia community he persecuted. We didn’t belong to either the world of the powerful or the world of the powerless. I traveled between them, unable to talk to either about what I had witnessed in the other.

 

 

The financial pressure to keep up was enormous, and one night my parents had such a huge fight over how to deal with it that my mother took me and my little brother and moved to the farmhouse while Haider stayed home with Baba. I was almost eighteen, ready to start college, and I found myself living in the farmhouse, utterly trapped in the middle of the parched desert compound, in summer. Mama and Baba hadn’t talked for a month when we finally drove home to get more clothes, and they started fighting again almost immediately. As if on cue—did the walls really have ears?—the phone rang and it was the palace saying Amo wanted to see them both at the farmhouse immediately. I hadn’t even unpacked and couldn’t stand the thought of turning right around and going back. So my parents left immediately in separate cars, and my mother promised to send a driver back to pick me up. Alone in the house that had once been so happy, I looked around at the familiar surroundings I hadn’t seen for a month and felt that nothing was the way it used to be. We hardly had friends anymore. I hardly saw my cousins now—we had to be at the farmhouse, and I was beginning to feel some of them were looking at us as if we were truly “friends of Saddam.” I just wanted to escape. I missed Bibi and I got her
abaya
out of the closet and put it on and walked down to a crossroads near our house. I signaled a taxi and got in. As we drove off, I felt a small, scary thrill of adventure. I was breaking the rules. I was disobeying my parents. I was a young woman going out to a public place by myself; my palace friends, even Mama, would be scandalized. I told the driver to go to the Kademiya Mosque, which was one of the emblems of Baghdad itself, the holy site we had been driving by when I first heard my mother mention Amo.

When I arrived, I walked inside the courtyard and stayed there for two hours in the comfort and anonymity of hundreds of other women dressed just as I was.

“Please God, do something, please save my family, please do something,” I prayed. “Please get me out of my prison, God.”

While I was at the mosque, Amo was trying to save my family. As it turned out, the reason he had called my parents to the farmhouse was to try to get them back together. Amo, who went through many phases, saw himself as a marriage counselor. When the driver my parents sent called them to say I was missing, Amo immediately told them, “Zainab is trying to send you a message. She ran away to get your attention. She wants you to be back with each other. You need to do it for her if nothing else.”

All I wanted that day was to be with other people and free of Amo, free of the guards and the scrutiny. But I learned later that Amo had sent search parties out for me. Police apparently even searched the mosque, but didn’t pick me out. Later, I wondered how many times Amo’s soldiers had been in that mosque picking up poor Shia young men to deport them to Iran or draft them into the army, or put them in prison and torture them for praying. Had the search for me caused pain for anybody else? Had I put anyone else at risk as my father had put the boy in our neighborhood at risk the night Amo came to visit? Was my privilege a blessing that saved me from losing loved ones like my classmates, or a curse that made it impossible for me to simply disappear like other people?

When I finally came home on my own, my parents were both there waiting for me. They started hugging me and apologizing for their arguments and said we were all moving back home. At the end of the day, was mine the act of a spoiled kid? I wasn’t sure whether I had brought my parents back together or whether Amo had, but they never reprimanded me for running away that afternoon.

Amo never said anything to me about it at all, but I apparently scored points with him for daring to make myself vulnerable to save my parents’ marriage. Mama told me he liked my “spirit.”

 

7

A WHITE HORSE

THE IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION had been drilled into me ever since my father used to squeeze fresh juice for me and bring it to my desk so I wouldn’t have an excuse to interrupt my homework for a snack. By the time I was ready to graduate from high school, I also saw university not merely as education, but as a way out of the life I was living. All the young women I was spending weekends with were going to college—that was a given—but they seemed to see it as a personal ending point. Our mothers all went to university and pursued careers. Many had continued to work all their lives; even Saddam’s wife worked after her husband became president. Yet most of the young women I knew seemed to see university as a place to find husbands, after which they would settle into lives that revolved around children and social schedules.

That was not what I wanted. By the time I was a senior in high school, I dreamed of a career that I was not only good at, but that I could be passionate about, something that would allow me to travel, meet people from around the world, and be exposed to foreign literature, arts, and cultures. Thanks to travel and years of study, I was fluent in English and knew a little French, so I planned to major in translation in college, take my father up on a longstanding promise to send me abroad to study for my doctorate, and perhaps work for the Iraqi foreign ministry or a United Nations agency. A Ph.D. in languages would be my passport to freedom, and I made a vow to myself to have it by the time I was twenty-six.

High school students couldn’t simply apply to the universities of their choice or even choose our majors. We could express preferences, but our fate was based on a strict numeric system that awarded bonus points for Baath Party membership and family members killed or disabled in the war. I qualified for no bonus points at all, so I was relieved when I tested high enough to qualify for my first choice: the language school at Mustansiriya University, the second largest university in Iraq. I would specialize in Arabic, English, and French.

The first day of school felt like a fresh new beginning to me. I had a new uniform, my mother gave me her old car, and I drove myself to school. I felt a rush of independence pulling into the big, modern campus with thousands of new students I had never met before. New students were assigned to older students as guides, and my guide, known by his Baathist title Rafeeq, which means a friend or comrade, was a handsome young man who turned out to be a leader of the student Baathist Party. The party was active on campus, and when I got a call “inviting” me to a Baath Party meeting, I knew I had to attend. When the teacher started talking about the Baathist slogan, “Implement, then discuss,” I raised my hand, smiled, and asked a question.

“Why?” I asked in a pleasant voice. “I need to know what I’m implementing before I can implement it, don’t I?”

The room hushed. The teacher tensed and smiled a rigid smile. I could see he was trying to be patient with me. I was new.

“If everyone needs to discuss every order, then we will never get anything done,” he said. “We have to trust in our leaders to make decisions, so we implement their orders quickly and avoid delaying important actions.”

I had assumed that there would be some opportunity for discussion on a university campus, but I was wrong. I soon learned that there were at least two Baathist spies in each classroom; many university professors, including the one who lectured me that day, would wind up fleeing the country. Still, for the first time in years, I felt the world was opening up to me. There were new possibilities at school and a new sense of calm at home now that we were all living together back in the Airlines Neighborhood. Mama relaxed. Baba wasn’t away as often, and we hired a cook, ending a low-level source of friction between my parents stemming from the fact that Mama always wanted to go out when he was home from a trip, and Baba wanted to stay in and eat home-cooked food. When I came home from school, I walked in the door to the smell of wonderful food and lunch served with garnishes and table linen.

One day over
timen bah gillah,
I was babbling on about all my classes and all the new friends I was making when Baba started quizzing me testily. Where did these new friends live? Who were their parents? Had I given anyone my phone number? For a few blissful weeks, I had allowed myself to forget the rules. I should have known better.

“Remember, your friends are your friends because of who your father is,” he said.

We were at the end of the meal, and he said that over his shoulder, almost as an afterthought, as he left the table. I put my fork back down on the plate and could feel Mama look away, knowing instantly how I felt but unwilling to meet my eyes. I will never forget that one sentence. He really hurt me with that, all the more so because he spoke so casually. Just when I was beginning to think there was a chance I could create my own identity, he was stealing it back from me. People liked me at the university, and I thought it was because I was cool or because I was a good student or maybe even just because I was me. But he erased those silly assumptions with a single remark. Was it naïve to think people liked me for myself ? How could I tell the difference? And as I thought about it, I realized with a sinking heart that it was no accident that I had gotten a Baath Party leader as my student guide. He knew who my father was. They knew who everyone was.

It didn’t matter that my father was no longer Saddam Hussein’s pilot, or that he had only been his pilot for a few years in the first place. The sobriquet had stuck. People still called him the “pilot of Saddam.” They referred to Mama as the “pilot’s wife,” and they called me the “pilot’s daughter.” An awful wave of fatalism washed over me. No matter how hard I worked, no matter who I became, I would always be defined by my father’s passenger, or former passenger, the man millions of people feared.

I have a picture of me in my university uniform at a ceremony in which Amo honored Iraqi women who had donated gold my first year in college. In it, he is smiling at me warmly with his hands on both my shoulders. I am smiling as well, but my hands are at my side, clenched into fists. I knew what a sham it was this time; the very pin he put in my lapel that day for donating gold was itself made of gold. The next day at college, everyone was pointing at me and checking me out as I walked through campus. They had seen how he had greeted me, and seen me smile back. “There’s the one, the pilot’s daughter,” people whispered.

 

 

I had seen the change come over my parents as they had become more and more like the farmhouse crowd. Would that happen to me too? Would I finally give up fighting and find a way to fit in? I knew they would never be true believers like Uncle Kais and Aunt Nada. But the more they seemed to accept their fate, the more determined I became to fight my own. Studying seemed the only way out. French was the newest and weakest of my languages, so I signed up for intensive lessons three nights a week at the French Institute in addition to my full load of classes at the university. I was focused intensely on the teacher’s lesson the first night when a young man sitting next to me kept nervously shaking one leg, and the movement made it hard for me to focus because our desks were connected. I poked him politely with my pen and said with a smile, “Please stop that.” He did. Over the break, he and I and two other students, an older man and woman, started chatting with one another in a small patio where an Egyptian man ran a little refreshment stand.

The young man’s name was Ehab. By the end of the first semester, the older two started drifting off, clearly interested in each other, and Ehab and I found ourselves continuing the banter by ourselves. He was tall and thin, with chestnut hair, a few years older than I was, and he carried himself with utter confidence. He was good-looking and dressed well, not because he wore designer jeans or had the money to buy fancy labels, but because he had an instinct for what looked good on him and how to wear it. We sat on our white plastic chairs in the little patio and discussed literature and poetry. He always carried a book of poetry, and we started reading poems together aloud. I couldn’t help but look at his lips, which were sort of pouty-looking and naturally deep red. There was an incredible intensity about him. He lived in the world of books, and I did too. Now we shared this precious world with each other. He was enchanted by British romantic poets like Byron and Shelley, novelists like Gabriel García Márquez, and Arab writers like Mahmoud Darweesh and Najeeb Mahfouz. He loaned me his books, which I devoured at the farmhouse, and we began having regular discussions that fed my lonely brain. While Luma and Sarah and Tamara chatted about Luma’s latest prospects for a proper husband, I read
Love in the Time of Cholera
.