Between Two Worlds (20 page)

I have never been flirtatious. I’m too focused on my goals. But before I returned
Love in the Time of Cholera,
I went into my room and sprayed my perfume on the pages. The next time he lent me a book, he tucked in a poem on a piece of paper. One thing led to another, and we began skipping that last hour of class after the break in order to continue our literary discussions. Then one night he read a love poem describing the features of a woman, her beautiful eyes, her mouth, the smell of her. It was one of the most romantic things I had ever heard.

“I wrote it,” he said shyly.

He didn’t say it was for me, but I knew.

“Oh, thank you, Ehab,” I said. I reached over and put my hand on his and felt the warmth of his hand under mine. It was a very daring move, and I kept my hand there, touching him for the first time, feeling my heart flutter. We looked into each other’s eyes for a very long time. We both knew we were in love.

Technically, a proper young Muslim girl wasn’t even supposed to be alone with a man. Dating was not sanctioned in Iraqi culture and Arab culture at large—it still isn’t—until the couple is betrothed. Most of my friends were dating anyway—“underground dating” I sometimes called it. Boys and girls would find places to meet in private or in groups, politely getting to know each other, though stopping short of sexual relations because virginity was still expected of brides. No one I knew told their parents about such dating. But as soon as I got home that night, I ran to Mama’s room, excited. She was still my best friend, and I knew she believed in love, in bending rules. All through high school, she had asked me if I had a crush on anyone and always seemed disappointed when I said no.

“Mama, I think I am in love!” I told her.

“Oh, how exciting,
habibiti,
” she said. “Tell me! Tell me all about it!”

“He wrote a poem for me and it was so romantic!” I said. “He is very good-looking, Mama, and very smart . . . and I held his hand.”

She was happy for me. Later that week, she dropped me off at the institute as students were going in, and eagerly asked me to point him out. “Which one is he, Zainab? Tell me!” she asked, giggling, more like a girlfriend than a mother. When I pointed to the tall young man going up the steps, she said, “Oh, he’s cute!”

I’m sure she thought it was a passing infatuation.

 

 

It was assumed I would grow up to marry a prosperous, secular, university-educated, cosmopolitan man. Ehab was none of those things. His father was a shopkeeper, and his family was large—eight brothers and sisters. Neither of his parents had a university degree, and though he was adamant he would one day, he still had not finished his first year of college. He was a practicing Sunni from Samarra, an area northwest of Baghdad that Americans would later dub the “Sunni Triangle,” and through him I was exposed for the first time to the tribal culture that still dominates much of rural Iraq. His tribe was one of the most powerful in the region, and he had been raised to give utter loyalty to the sheikh and tribal elders who resolved disputes, determined policy, helped arrange marriages, protected their own from outsiders, and negotiated alliances (and, historically, wars) with other tribes or governments. His tribe’s principal rival was in nearby Tikrit, and this generations-old rivalry had been inflamed by its most prominent member, Saddam Hussein, who had poured government resources into Tikrit’s infrastructure while ignoring Samarra, which was far larger and boasted an internationally known historic site. Ehab hated Amo. For the first time I had met someone who felt more strongly about him than I did.

“They are all crazy criminal idiots!” he said of Saddam and his tribesmen. “Vulgar, stupid, all of them! They have sex with their own animals!”

I had never in my life heard anyone talk like this, and soon realized that Ehab was a closet dissident who trusted me enough to say things that could easily have gotten him killed. He had a friend, a disenchanted Baathist like Aunt Samer, who had been imprisoned for eight years over a policy difference with Amo, and he knew another man who had been imprisoned because he objected to Mukhabarat flirting with his wife. I listened intently to everything he said, but dared utter no criticism of Amo. When it came to Amo, I trusted no one, not even Ehab. I said nothing of our relationship to Amo, but there were times the palace operator interrupted our telephone conversations, and after a while Ehab put two and two together.

“You are friends of Saddam’s, aren’t you?” he said. “Your father was his pilot.”

I was scared at what he would say, but I finally nodded and waited to see if he would still love me.

“Please be careful when you’re around them,
habibiti,
” he said, taking my hand. “The Tikritis know no boundaries. They are rapists! They are known for rape,
igh tisab.
When they see meat, they are like dogs! They’re not used to women in these short sleeves and skirts. They will jump on any woman! They will take a sister, take a wife. They feel they can just take any woman because they have power. Saddam is so powerful, he thinks he is Pharoah!”

I knew no Tikriti I happened to meet would rape a friend of Saddam’s—at least not without his approval. But, out of respect for Ehab and the interest in Islam he was rekindling in me, I began to dress more conservatively, in line with Islamic belief that both women and men should wear modest clothing that is not revealing. Many young people were growing more religious at this time, though I was never sure if it was in reaction to secular parents or part of a low-key rebellion against the corrupt and dissolute regime. A friend of mine decided to wear the
hijab,
a head scarf, and this simple decision was an ordeal for her family because they were afraid her decision to cover her hair would categorize her as being “too religious” and therefore open to being accused of affiliation with a religious party and thus government prosecution. I have often found it curious that many Western women fail to notice the forces that make them dress as they do, yet they pity Muslim women wearing the
hijab,
unaware that covering their heads is sometimes a choice that educated women make on their own.

I didn’t want to cover my head, but I started wearing long sleeves and skirts that fell mid-calf, and my father now feared I had gone too far the other way. The point was that in the regime that ruled Iraq, our freedoms were so limited that a head scarf, a prayer, a long skirt, a single word of Farsi dropped into an Arabic conversation—all could be taken as proofs of disloyalty to the state. The Mukhabarat conducted surprise sweeps of mosques, arresting young men on suspicion they belonged to the outlawed Dawa religious party. During this time, an older cousin of mine was swept up this way with some of his friends and tortured before his family was able to negotiate to allow him to leave the country, and we later heard reports that some of the friends arrested with him had been executed. One night my cousin Naim had gone to a mosque to pray, and his father, Baba’s brother, called him in a panic. Naim later told me Baba and my uncle took him straight out to a bar, bought him beer, and finally convinced him it was too dangerous to go back to the mosque.

 

 

While I was secretly falling in love with Ehab, I knew Luma’s parents were evaluating suitable husbands for her, and she would accept without question whomever they selected. Sarah was a different story. She wanted to run and dance and break with tradition when it came to social rules.

“When I marry, it is going to be for love,” I declared one day as we were sitting around Aunt Nada’s kitchen table.

“Zainab, love comes
after
marriage—don’t you know that yet?” Luma said, taking it upon herself to reprove me, as if my liberal mother hadn’t managed to get into my brain the mantra that Iraqi women had handed down to their daughters for generations.

“I don’t care if he’s poor,” I went on, speaking of this theoretical future husband. “We are going to build a life together from scratch, starting from the ground up, brick by brick.”

“Marry someone rich and you won’t have to bother!” Luma retorted.

“Well, I want to marry for love,” Sarah said. “But I am not willing to marry a poor man. Living comfortably is very important. It would be dumb to marry a poor man, Zainab. How would you eat? Love someone rich. That’s how you can have your cake and eat it too.”

I could almost see Sarah’s brain, as sharp as a lawyer’s and just as calculating, reasoning that surely it was possible to find a rich man to fall in love with.

At that time, wealth presented itself almost as a trap to me. I was reading
Wuthering Heights
for an English literature class, and I escaped the farmhouse to the wild moors of Emily Brontë’s nineteenth-century England, where her star-crossed lovers, the brooding dark-haired Heathcliff and the fair-haired, impulsive Catherine Earnshaw, struggled with issues of class. Young Cathy was privileged and educated. Heathcliff was poor and swarthy; he had been abused as a youth and grown up ignorant. Instead of following her heart and marrying Heathcliff, however, Cathy did what was expected of her; she married an insipid, landed young gentleman. Heathcliff, brokenhearted and obsessed with jealousy, took his revenge by abusing everyone around him. She married for money, and everyone in the book lived—or died—in misery.

The differences between us made Ehab more compelling to me, not less. For me, true love was all wrapped up in overcoming obstacles, especially those imposed blindly by religion or class. The Iraq I had grown up in tolerated intermarriage, and intermarriage went on despite the anti-Shia sentiment whipped up by the Iran war. People I knew didn’t ask each other what their religion or sect was when they first met, any more than people did in Europe or America, though sometimes it was obvious. There were several Sunni-Shia couples in my family. The two friends I had initially met at the French Institute with Ehab were a Muslim man and Christian woman who wound up falling in love and getting married. Naim fell madly in love with a Kurdish woman, and at this time I was playing the romantic role of go-between because her parents opposed the idea of her marrying a non-Kurd. I would call up and ask for her, then pass the phone to Naim, or cover for them on secret dates.

 

My favorite new university friend was a Kurdish girl named Lana, the daughter of hardworking professional parents. We were together on campus one day when another student made a silly joke about the vice president, Ezzet Al-Douree. Another quickly hushed her, pointed at my earring as if it were a secret recording device, and started singing one of the patriotic songs we had learned in school. “May God protect the president!” she sang, using the chant like an amulet to ward off evil. “May God prolong his life!” The others laughed at the joke, but I couldn’t. I was more afraid of them than they were of me. I wanted so badly just to tell them how I really felt, but I couldn’t, and I knew I never could. That was the way informers worked. They played Devil’s advocate and got you to say something you weren’t supposed to. I knew I wasn’t an informer, but as I looked around that day, I realized that one of my new friends might well be. So I buried my feelings and stayed silent, letting them think what they would.

One of the things I liked about Lana was that she found it hard to filter her emotions. She was one of the three or four students I was friendly with whose homes I was able to visit, and we were sitting on her bed one day studying for an exam when she leaned over and whispered very fast in my ear.

“Zainab, I have to tell you a secret,” she said. “It’s so awful! The government dropped chemical weapons on the Kurds in the north and thousands and thousands of people are dead. They just fell where they were standing. A whole town was killed in a matter of minutes.”

She told me what she had heard, and pictures flashed across my mind of Kurdish families fallen in narrow streets, children heaped on one another, babies without breath, in their mothers’ dead arms, a whole village of people inhaling gas so poisonous they died
while they were moving.
A father was found dead with his children around the kitchen table, killed in the middle of a meal,
as they were eating.
I heard her describe these awful things, and yet I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t say anything to her at all. I just went stiff, and I remember her almost jumping backward on the bed at my silence. I always suspected she reacted that way because she suddenly remembered she was talking to the daughter of a “friend” of Saddam’s.

We both looked back at our books and made a pretense of resuming study of our English composition. But later, when I was alone, the images kept assaulting me, a hail of arrows shooting over the walls I had built up around that part of my brain that I had hidden off so I wouldn’t have to think about the horrendous things Amo was doing to his own people. Thousands of people died?
Thousands
? Lana probably had relatives in the Kurdish region, so she must have heard it from someone there. I doubt even my father had heard about this; he was in civil aviation, not the military. This was the most dangerous thing I had ever heard. I knew I could not repeat it to anyone, not even my mother. I had seen how desperately Mama pleaded with Bibi, scared to death that she wouldn’t be able to hide one more horror story from Amo. But every time I closed my eyes, I kept seeing that father and his children. I couldn’t cry for them. I couldn’t be angry for them. I couldn’t keep their pictures in my mind. I had to disinfect my brain of their existence. Finally, I just stepped into that painfully bright white space in my brain that had the power to burn them away like overexposed film.

 

 

As Amo’s acts of despotism increased, virtually unrecorded inside Iraq for lack of independent media, I went on about my life as normal. I took pottery lessons, tennis lessons, painting lessons, and piano lessons with a French Catholic nun named Massier Camel.
“Sabah al-kher!”
my mother would say cheerfully at 7 A.M. “Good morning!” She was almost always happy in the mornings, before the events of the day would remind her of our cage. She would breeze in, open the curtains, brush the back of her hand lightly against my cheek, and kiss me awake. Sometimes she would sing, and if I complained about the farmhouse or a palace party, she would remind me to be grateful for what I had and suggest I look harder to see the beauty that was all around us. I had taken piano lessons since I was twelve from Massier Camel, and I took to practicing the piano for hours when I was home. Tick, tick, tick, tick, the rhythm of the metronome numbed me, yes, yum, yes, yum, and I was able to find escape in music as Baba did in his cockpit and Haider did in his computer games and household electronic appliances, which he patiently took apart and put back together. It was my mother’s dream that I learn to play the piano, which she had never studied, and she brought me stacks of sheet music, romantic songs mostly. Her favorite was “Love Story.” She asked me to play it over and over again.