Between Two Worlds (11 page)

4

THE PILOT’S DAUGHTER

MY FATHER WAS THE CAPTAIN of Boeing 747s, then the largest commercial airliners on earth. The jets he flew were enormous shining planes with “IRAQI AIRLINES” written in green and white on the side. When we flew with him when I was little, the flight staff treated me like a princess. I would climb up the spiral staircase to the first-class lounge on the upper floor, and a stewardess would bring me an orange Fanta, and tell me how lucky I was to have a father like Captain Basil. I could see they weren’t just trying to be nice. They liked him, they looked up to him, and I was sure everybody knew he was the best airline pilot in Iraq.

When I was allowed to step inside his cockpit, I was able to glimpse the world as he saw it, and I understood why he felt compelled to leave us so often. Here, high above the earth, the sky itself was round, and it was the color of the inside of a sapphire. There were no streets or boundaries. There was no nationality. We were in a free space between heaven and earth. When I saw Baba’s face as he was flying, I knew this was where he belonged. Surrounded by hundreds of buttons and switches and lights and dials that would terrify most people, he was completely relaxed, master of this incredibly complicated universe. When I heard his voice on the speaker system welcoming passengers aboard, I knew hundreds of people trusted him with their lives.

“I want to be a pilot like you when I grow up, Baba,” I told him once from my small seat behind his copilot.

“Then I’ll have to teach you to fly someday,” he said, and he took off his captain’s hat with all the gold braid, turned around, and put it on my head.

Early in 1982, I began to feel tensions rise again in our home as the background sounds of our household changed. Mama stopped singing, there was no roll of backgammon dice—backgammon was a skill she considered one of the secrets to a happy marriage—and the nervous whispers were back. When Baba and Mama called a family meeting, I was afraid they were going to tell us there was another wave of deportations. Instead, they announced that Baba was getting a promotion: he was going to be the pilot of the President of Iraq. He didn’t sound happy about it.

“This is not something that should be talked about outside the family,” Baba said sternly. “This is not something you should brag about to your friends. This is not something that should go to your heads.”

My parents were always telling us not to let things go to our heads, to be thankful for what we had, but never to brag or show off.

The best part of Baba’s new job for all of us was that we were going to go to Seattle that summer to pick up a new plane for the president. We loved Seattle. We had spent several summers there when my father was attending his pilot training classes, but hadn’t been able to go the year before because a foreign travel ban had been imposed as a result of the war with Iran. That summer of 1982—the last time we would go together as a family, as it turned out—was the best of all. My father was allowed to select his own presidential flight crew, and some of them brought their families, so there was a group of about fifteen of us who got to know one another well. We had picnics and barbecues together, with sparkling Puget Sound sunsets behind us. The adults made up slightly raunchy beer songs that made them double over laughing.

We spent our days sightseeing or going to the beach or shopping. We always took advantage of our summer vacations to buy clothing and whatever else we needed for the foreseeable future, because selection was limited in Iraq. My mother rented a car, and she and I and Amel, the wife of the flight engineer, went shopping together. Amel was blond and blue-eyed and talked baby talk, which I couldn’t stand even then in grown women. But her husband, Amo Qusai, was one of my favorite people on the trip. A big macho bear-hug kind of man who wore his heart on his sleeve, he was madly in love with her and their little daughter and never stopped showing it. They had met when they were both in high school, and he talked about how for years he had been too shy to approach her. They were from a lower-middle-class family, and they had struggled to build a life together. This promotion was a major step forward for them, and I could see how indebted Amo Qusai felt to Baba for getting him this job.

Amel didn’t know how to drive and had never been abroad before, so Mama kind of adopted her and brought her along on some of our shopping trips, translating for her and introducing her to American products. We wandered through the American department stores, buying more dresses for me than I ever thought I could wear, putting makeup on Amel, and getting clothes for my brothers. We spent a long time in one lingerie department, where Amel bought lots of lacy lingerie to bring home as a present for her sister, while I took Hassan’s hand and tracked down the old lady boxer underwear that was the only thing Bibi ever asked us to bring us back except for tea rose perfume. One day we went to the Ethan Allen store to buy new furniture for the living room and parlor, and the saleslady asked how we would get it back to Iraq.

“Don’t worry about shipping, we have a plane,” Mama answered. She was trying to sound suave, but she couldn’t quite pull it off. She turned to me, burst into giggles, and started clapping with excitement.

We didn’t just have a plane. We had a brand new 747 jumbo jet. There were only four families on it when we headed back to Iraq. My father gave us a quick tour before we took off. The interior was amazing. The floor was covered in a green-and-white carpet with presidential emblems. There were separate rooms, all with ultramodern furniture: a bedroom with a huge bed, a conference room and office, a bathroom with a shower at the rear. I had never seen such a plane before. As we came in for a landing in Baghdad, I could see the huge new airport, one of the most modern buildings in Iraq, with its arched white ceilings I knew were hung inside with thousands of candle-like lights. All over the country, buildings and institutions were being renamed for Saddam Hussein—Saddam’s Children’s Hospital, Saddam’s Theater, Saddam’s Elementary School, Saddam’s High School, even Saddam’s City. Our airport was no longer Baghdad International. It was Saddam Hussein International Airport, and Saddam Hussein was there to meet us when we touched down.

If I were to place a marker on the moment our freedom vanished, it would probably be when that heavy jet door swung open and the hot desert air of Iraq rushed into the pressurized compartment. I watched my father step out of the cockpit and saw his expression change when hard-faced security guards with black mustaches entered in their pressed khaki uniforms with berets and guns. The happy-go-lucky look I had gotten used to in Seattle vanished and was replaced by nervous attentiveness. Saddam Hussein was coming to inspect the plane my father had helped design, negotiate the purchase of, test, and accept delivery of, the plane he had flown home. We had been instructed to remain in our seats while my father gave Amo a tour of his new acquisition, which he had named the
Al Qadisiya,
after his favorite battle against the Persians. When Baba led him down the aisle and introduced him to crew and family members he hadn’t yet met, Saddam stopped to tousle my hair and say warmly, as if he really knew me, “Hello, Zanooba!” Then he looked on to the next row, and Baba introduced him to Amel.

“Ah, now this is true beauty, isn’t it?” he said, looking at her and then around at the rest of us for confirmation.

Amo was pleased with the plane.

My brothers and I were grafted onto Amo’s life the following year the way Baba grafted new branches onto his citrus trees: we would grow, but there would always be a scar at the joint. We would reach for the sky, mistaking our angle of vision for freedom. Then something would happen, and we would have only to look down to remember that it was an illusion, that we were not free at all, not for a minute. Our parents had known this all along, and that is why Baba never wanted to be the president’s pilot.

Amo apparently wanted us to move into a house on palace grounds, but Mama said Baba used the distance from my school as a reason for us to stay in our home. None of us wanted to move, and Amo gave us a weekend farmhouse instead. Interior decorating was one of Mama’s many talents, and she set about furnishing the farmhouse; she wanted to surprise us. Baba often brought her back bolts of cloth from his travels, which she kept all over the house, in various stages of progress. She was always sewing clothes or beading something or recovering cushions. Not one for patterns, she would unfold the new cloth along the designated sofa or chair and just start cutting. Or she would drape the new fabric on me and snip away, and somehow the vision in her mind would take shape on me. It was part of her magic. Then she would put a book on my head and instruct me to walk like a model in my pinned-together couture. “Always stand tall with your head raised high,” she said. “Don’t be shy and weak. I hate weak women. You need to be strong and confident.”

Before we went to the farmhouse the first time, Baba and Mama sat all three of us down for another family meeting.

“You may see the president from time to time when we’re at the farmhouse,” he said. “You will call him Amo if you see him, just as we do, and you will behave as your normal polite selves. But you are never to say a word about him to anyone else. You are never to talk about how often we see him,
if
we see him at all. Not to anyone. Not even to your cousins.”

Haider and I looking at each other nervously and wondered what we were in for.

“Understood?”

He looked at each of us. We each solemnly promised Baba we would do as he asked, and he seemed satisfied that we understood the seriousness of our commitment. It was a promise not only to him, but to one another. I would never violate that promise, and as far as I knew, no one else would either—even little Hassan, sitting on my lap, who was only three. Hassan had barely learned to speak, and already there were things he was being told he could not say.

 

 

Mama was excited when she took us to the farmhouse for the first time, which to the best of my recollection was shortly before I turned fourteen. It was on the airport road, and to get there we had to pass my favorite statue in Baghdad, of Abbas Ibn Fernas, our counterpart of the Grecian Icarus, who Mama told me gave human beings the idea they could fly. Abbas Ibn Fernas had been a prisoner trapped behind enormous walls, and the walls around him were so high that there was no way to escape, and he longed to be a bird so he could fly over them and escape. He began collecting feathers that fell from birds overhead and finally managed to collect enough to make himself wings. But he could not fly high enough to escape his prison when he tried, and he fell back to his death. Every time we drove by, I looked up at that statue and tried to imagine what it would feel like to be a bird with wings flapping quietly, surely, around me, and pillows of air under my arms.

A long wall lined the airport road that I had never thought about much before. Behind it was Amo’s farmhouse compound. We turned into a security gate in the wall and were signaled through. We drove a short distance and stopped in front of one of three houses sitting all by themselves on a vast stretch of empty, scrub-brushy desert with a small irrigation ditch running through it. I had expected a farmhouse, something small and rustic that maybe had animals we could ride. Uncle Adel’s farmhouse had gazelles, birds, sheep, cows, even a monkey. Not ours—this wasn’t a farmhouse at all, I thought as we parked, it was a regular house, only surrounded by walls. When we walked inside with our overnight bags, I remember trying hard to be enthusiastic for Mama’s sake, but I hated it. She had done her best to make everything look just right. She had bought new furniture downtown and upholstered it with bright fabrics. There were new dishes, a new TV set, Superman bedspreads in my brothers’ room and a flowery one in mine. But, despite all her work, it felt sterile and lifeless—a little like a model home looking for buyers. I put my bag down in the closet in my new bedroom and saw that Mama had already hung up some of the new dresses I had gotten in Seattle. Where was I supposed to wear these at a farm? What were we going to do here for two whole days? Mama came in and cheerfully told me to get dressed up because we were going to meet our new neighbors. I did as she asked and walked out in a new dress and fancy shoes. There were only two neighbors to call on.

I would spend dozens, perhaps hundreds, of weekends at that farmhouse, but I absolutely cannot recall what it looked like from the outside. I only know that it was nothing like the neighbors’. The other two houses were surrounded by lush gardens that had obviously been professionally designed and maintained. These were substantial, rambling homes of red brick that looked as if they belonged in magazine layouts of desert resorts or dude ranches. They had been built by palace architects and decorated by palace decorators with lavish Italian imports. Shiny new black Mercedes were parked outside both.

A couple named Aunt Nada and Uncle Kais lived in the slightly more luxurious of the other two houses. Uncle Kais was an active Baath Party member, a man obviously accustomed to wielding influence, who seemed very rigid and aloof, at least to me. His wife was elegant and proper, the sort of woman who not only follows etiquette, but believes in it. The other couple, Aunt Layla and Uncle Mazan, were professionals who seemed more accessible and less judgmental to me, as well as less interested in politics. I had met Aunt Layla before but I didn’t know her well. She was tall and gracious, far more spontaneous than Aunt Nada, and it was clear that she and Mama were close. When I saw the three women together, I was struck by how beautiful they all were. Aunt Nada and Aunt Layla were fair-haired with light eyes, and Mama was the dark-haired exception people often said looked like Sophia Loren. I was also struck by the fact that the three of them obviously knew one another well.