Between Two Worlds (21 page)

 

Sometime in my sophomore year, my father told us that we were to pack for two days—bring tennis shoes, bathing suits, and homework if you’ve got it. The driver was on the way, so my brothers and I rushed upstairs to pack. I opened my top drawer and stared at my three bathing suits. I picked up the red one, then told myself I wasn’t going to swim. It wasn’t proper. I put the bathing suit back, packed the rest of my things, and ran back downstairs.

I don’t remember where we wound up that weekend except that the house was enormous, and each family had its own wing. We had dinner by the lake—almost all Amo’s palaces had lakes—and he said, “Okay, everybody get their suits, let’s go swimming.” It was a beautiful night, and the water of the lake was a midnight blue, as smooth as a mirror until everyone came back a few minutes later and jumped in. Amo came back in his bathing suit, and I watched as he stood at the edge of the water and waited for a servant to remove his swimming robe and the group formed a semicircle so he could dive in. He stood there for a moment, and I remember thinking he was heavier than my father, who was still trim and athletic. Then, with a small flourish, he dove in. He was a strong swimmer. Everyone was splashing around in the water; then he turned around and looked back at me standing there on the shore in my long skirt.

“Zainab, why aren’t you swimming with us?” he said.

“I forgot my bathing suit!” I called back, using my planned-out excuse.

“How could you forget your bathing suit, Zainab?” Sarah said. “How silly of you! We were told to bring them!”

“Doesn’t matter, Zanooba, just go up to my room and put on one of mine with a T-shirt!” Amo said.

That stopped me. The thought of going into his room and putting on Amo’s swim trunks made my skin crawl. I couldn’t imagine pulling his clothing on my naked body, then coming back out with everyone looking at me.

“No, thank you, Amo.” I kept my resolve and called back politely, “I’ll just watch tonight.”

“Well then, just put on my dishdasha if you’re shy about wearing mine! It’s beautiful out here, isn’t it, everyone?
Yala!
”

“Yala! Yala!”
everybody chimed in. Come on! Come on!

I saw my parents’ apprehensive faces in the water behind Amo. They were the only ones who weren’t calling to me, and I appreciated their silence. I’m not going to fall for this, I thought. I am not going to wear his clothes, not even an ankle-length dishdasha. A bathing suit was respectable for swimming. A dishdasha or a T-shirt would cling to me in the water. I was a young woman now, and I knew what that meant. I was not going to wear Amo’s clothes.

“Amo, I just really can’t swim today,” I called out finally, coming up with the only way I could to end the conversation. There was nothing he could say to a woman’s excuse.

But after the swimming was over, he came over to me later as he toweled off. “You missed a very nice experience tonight, Zainab. The water was beautiful.”

 

In August 1988, Amo declared victory against the Persian enemy, and eight years of war with Iran ended.

“So we got our territory from Iran?” I asked my mother.

“No, not really,” she said. “The borders are the same.”

“So nothing changed? What was the point of all those people dying?”

She made her opinion clear with a raised eyebrow.

Still, that was the most joyful day I ever saw in Baghdad. The city forgot to be afraid. People flooded out of their homes and into the street. There was music everywhere. People were dancing. You could hear the din all over the city. We drove downtown, and women were throwing water on the ground to usher in safety and
baraka.
A stranger from the crowd splashed water on our windshield and said, “I’ll wash windows all my life if I have to, anything not to go to the front! Thank you, God! Thank you it’s over at last!”

There was an official victory celebration at the palace, where two separate areas had been set up in the garden, one for the men’s celebration hosted by Amo, and another for the women’s celebration hosted by Aunt Sajida. There were huge long tables of food—stuffed meats, Iraqi dishes, and exotic fruits like mango, kiwi, and pineapple that I hadn’t seen in Baghdad in years. I happened to be standing near Amo’s daughter Raghad at the table, watching the entertainment and eating
bourak,
a famous Iraqi pastry filled with cheese that is a mix of Persian, Turkish, and Arab cuisine. Gypsy women were singing and dancing onstage in brilliant dresses of shiny greens and reds and yellows and purples. Their hair was black and straight and hung to their thighs as they danced to the music of drums and tambourines and string instruments I couldn’t name. Plump, with rounded bellies, they wore the heaviest makeup I had ever seen. Their cheeks were very red, and their lipstick thick and dark. Their eyes were almost black with shadow and mascara. Heavy gold earrings hung from their earlobes, and their arms and necks were ringed with bangles and jewelry that clinked as they danced.

Then they finished their routine and packed up their instruments and headed for the men’s area for their next performance.

“God only knows what they’ll do now,” Raghad commented as she watched the women walk off.

“Sing and dance?” I asked.

Raghad gave me a look that made me feel more naïve than I ever had in my life.

“Men
like
gypsy women, and my husband is in that men’s party,” she said. That was the only confidence she ever shared with me, though we had been together many times and were enrolled in the same college.

Amo had married her off to Hussain Kamel, the Tikriti man who tormented my father and terrorized much of Iraq, when she was just sixteen or seventeen. Everyone knew she had conditioned the marriage upon being able to complete her education. The uneducated Kamel had agreed, adding a condition of his own: a child a year for every year she spent in school. She was only two years older than I was, but she already had three children. I felt sorry for her that day. I asked my mother about the gypsy women later, and she explained to me that gypsies were nomads, so Amo had granted them citizenship. They too were “special files” open to a special kind of intimidation, I thought. He had sent the men to the front lines and kept their women in Baghdad to sing and dance in the palace.

 

 

One night when we were talking as usual on the back balcony of the French Institute, Ehab slowly pulled me toward him by the hand and hugged me. I looked up at his face, and he kissed me. It was my first kiss, and I had never experienced anything like it before. His lips were soft and incredible, and I felt almost weak with my first sense of what passion could bring. We had been together a year and a half before that first forbidden kiss. After that evening, we started talking about marriage, the children we would have and the life we would build together. We made a plan: I would open a translation service as soon as I finished school, and he would open a fabric store like his father, next to my office.

Baba, who had not even known about my relationship, was instantly and vehemently opposed once he heard. I was too young, the contrast between our two backgrounds was too large, Ehab couldn’t support my lifestyle. He hadn’t even finished his first year of university, though he was older than I was and I was now a sophomore. To my surprise, Mama failed to back me up. I cried for days on end. I refused to eat. I told Mama and Baba they would never see my smile again because without Ehab I would never find happiness.

“You always told me that I should marry for love, Mama!” I told her angrily after a month of suffering. “Now that I’ve found the man I love, you’ve changed your mind. Tell me, Mama, do you believe in love or not? Do you still want me to marry for love, or have you turned into Aunt Nada and want to marry me off to a rich man like Luma?”

I must have hurt her terribly with that. I had seen how hard she struggled to keep something of the old Alia alive inside her, and a part of that core was a belief in love.

Finally, she changed her mind, and though it took two months, she somehow managed to get Baba to invite Ehab to our house. I waited nervously for Baba’s verdict after they had tea together alone in our garden.

“He wears way too much cologne,” Baba declared. “I don’t like him. I think he is the wrong man for you, but if you’re going to kill yourself if I don’t approve, then you give me no choice.”

Hardly a resounding endorsement, but I had his approval. He said he had to ask Amo for his approval, and Ehab and I had to wait nervously for six weeks before he cleared a security investigation.

In Iraq, the engagement process starts with the women of the groom’s family paying a formal visit to the home of the bride and asking her mother and other women of the family for the bride’s hand in marriage. Special pastries called
klache,
made of dates and cardamom, are served by the future bride, who is expected to be demure and polite and represent her family with dignity. Mama ordered the
klache
and flowers and made a freshly squeezed pomegranate juice for the occasion.

When the day came, my aunts arrived in their latest fashions, perfect makeup and hairdos and perfumes. Ehab’s mother and three sisters and several aunts whooshed into our house in old-fashioned black, baggy clothes, full
abayas,
and no makeup. Ehab’s mother, a chubby, not very tall woman with a bland face, rushed forward and grabbed me in her arms. I fumbled as I tried to kiss her politely on each cheek, while she blanketed my face with unrestrained kisses. She was far more expressive than my mother and my aunts, who welcomed my future in-laws with greetings that were polite, but reserved. There could scarcely have been a bigger difference between women who spoke the same language, I thought, while I watched glances darting back and forth across the room, as the two sets of women studied each other.

I took my seat between them and served Turkish coffee as Ehab’s mother began the traditional appeal requesting my hand in marriage. I had heard these appeals before. Strangers had come to our house before asking for my hand, and Mama and I had politely entertained them because we were expected to, only to laugh later at the thought I would consider marrying a man I didn’t know. As Ehab’s mother promised to guarantee my happiness, spoil me like her own daughter, provide whatever I needed or wanted, and support me in the lifestyle to which I was accustomed, I noticed Ehab’s eldest sister surveying the furniture and staring at the family photographs on the wall. She had never been in a house such as ours before, and it was clear to all of us that our family would have to support us if we were to live in the manner to which I was accustomed. Aunt Samer looked over at me quizzically, and we exchanged surreptitious glances. See? I told her with my eyes. I heard what you were telling me in the pool at the Hunting Club; Amo didn’t poison my values after all.

Aunt Najwa came up to me afterward and asked me a single blunt question: “What on earth are you getting yourself into, Zainab?”

A few weeks later, a caravan of cars drove up into our cul-de-sac and out stepped a dozen men, including tribal sheikhs. They strode into our house with a sense of command, in traditional dishdashas, shoulder
abayas
of fine handmade wool woven with gold, and white head cloths held in place with black bands. They shook hands with the men of my family, all in suits, and seated themselves in a circle in the garden. I watched nervously with the other women through the parlor window as Ehab’s father and the highest ranking tribal elder completed the men’s part of the ceremony that would seal our engagement. Each man recited poetry and Quranic verses about marriage that he knew by heart, including the Quranic phrase “And among his signs is that he has created spouses from among yourselves so that you may rest in them and initiate love and mercy among all of you.” Baba, looking polite but ill at ease, wasn’t equipped with memorized verses. Instead, he told them that I was dear to his heart and that he wanted nothing but my happiness and for God to bless my marriage with Ehab. When they finished, all the men ran the palms of their hands over their faces, read
Al Fateha,
the first chapter of the Quran, and shook hands, which was my signal to go out to serve each one a special juice from a large tray. As I served Baba, I saw on his face how hard it had been for him to go through with this. When I smiled at him reassuringly and gave him a kiss, he looked away.

For the engagement party, our garden filled with the smell of cooking and flowers reminiscent of my childhood. Radya came back to help. We had become good friends over the years, and I had been excited for her as she told me about the neighbor she had fallen in love with. She had finished high school, gotten married, and asked my father to help her husband get a job as a clerk at the airport. My mother was so excited about her wedding that she gave Radya her own wedding gown to be married in. Yet when I saw her that day, she was pregnant with her first child and was struggling with her-in-laws in the small house where she and her husband lived with his siblings. “Love is beautiful but life is hard when you and your husband don’t have money,” she told me.

The engagement party is traditionally a woman’s event, and when it began, I stood with my aunts and friends in the garden as children came in bearing a Quran and my engagement ring, as well as a necklace, earrings, bracelet, and ring that Ehab had chosen for me as an engagement gift. Then came Ehab himself, handsome and elegant, followed by seven women from his family, each bearing traditional baskets of symbolic gifts for me of fabrics, perfumes, flowers, and sweets. Ehab and I danced together that night for the very first time, in front of everyone. Then he picked up the microphone and recited a love poem he had written for me. He looked over at me as he spoke, and I welled up with love and emotion. All my girlfriends were in tears at how handsome and romantic he was.

“Zainab, you did it!” Sarah said, congratulating me with a real hug. “You’re marrying for love!”