Between Two Worlds (25 page)

All I could think was What? Another war? We just finished one! So many people were dead, so
many.
I believed you when you said loved Iraq, Amo. But if you do, why are you taking your people into another war? What’s the point? Why are you doing this?

Almost immediately, the White House began issuing ultimatums. Iraq was on the news almost every night, and Fakhri and I were watching television when a news report came on talking about a secret gassing that had killed thousands of Kurds a few years before. As the scenes I remembered from Lana’s description flashed across my mind, Fakhri pointed a finger at the television set and stared at me as if I were responsible. “Look what a criminal
your
Amo is!” he said. I didn’t say anything. I was fresh from Iraq. Fakhri still did not understand—or did not care to find out—that I called him “Amo” not out of affection, but because I was afraid to say his name—
Saddam Hussein
—out loud. I knew Amo had spies everywhere. I didn’t know who his spies were in this community. I didn’t trust anyone, including, for that matter, my husband.

A few weeks after the invasion, my father was able to call me when he was on a trip outside Iraq. Fakhri answered the telephone and immediately began complaining about me to him, about how I wasn’t a good enough housewife or something to that effect—as my anger boiled. It felt as if he were complaining to a merchant who had sold him bad produce. How dare he do that to my father? To me? What had happened to our agreement to work out our marital issues on our own?

I had never heard anything as gentle and warm as Baba’s voice when Fakhri finally handed me the phone.

“Are you all right, honey?” he asked me. I just wanted to fly into his arms for protection. If only I had taken his advice and refused to marry Fakhri, this nightmare wouldn’t be happening. But I couldn’t tell him how miserable I was. Fakhri was sitting nearby, and I felt strongly that I had to take responsibility for making my marriage work. There was nothing Baba could do to help me.

“I miss you a lot, Baba,” I said. “I wish I could come and visit you in Baghdad.”

“You can’t right now, honey,” he said. “They’ve closed the borders. You can come visit once things have calmed down again.”

Then he paused and said, “All new marriages are hard, Zainab. Just be patient and take care of yourself until we see you again.”

Then, to lighten things up, he jokingly added a comment he used to make about marriage in Iraq.

“You know what I always say, Zainab. Marriage is like a barrel that is filled half with honey and half with shit,” he said. “You can start by eating the honey and then deal with the shit part later, or you can start with the shit and end up with the honey part. I suggest you mix them up. That’s the secret of a successful marriage.”

I giggled politely. He was famous for that bit of advice, which often made adults laugh. Now he was giving it to me. When I hung up, I tried to remember to be patient and look for the honey. How patient, though? Love may come after marriage, but how long does it take? I set a deadline: a year. I would give the marriage one year. If it didn’t work then, no one would say I hadn’t tried.

 

 

Looking back on it, I realize I was also in culture shock. I had assumed the transition to America would be easy; I felt comfortable with Americans, and after all my father’s summer training at Boeing, I considered Seattle my second home. But the people in Fakhri’s community were like neither the Americans nor the Iraqis I knew. They were Shia businessman and professionals like Uncle Adel’s neighbors, who had been deported, leaving their dreams behind to rust in the rain with boxes of factory machinery. Some had lost everything. Others, like Fakhri’s family had managed to flee before being dispossessed. A decade later, this was where they had wound up, heels dug into round-the-clock jobs, doing their best to educate their children, and embracing, more fervently than most ever had in Iraq, the religion for which they had been persecuted.

The only person I found to talk with was a young Iraqi woman about my age who had come to America from Iran. Also lonely, also married to a much older man, she came from a prominent family that had been deported from Baghdad not long before the Mukhabarat came after my mother’s family. This was the first time I had ever heard a firsthand story of what had happened to a deportee, and I absorbed her tears like a sponge. Secret police had shown up at their door at midnight and given them fifteen minutes to pack a suitcase. In the dark they were boarded onto buses for the Iranian border along with hundreds of other Baghdad residents “of Iranian origin.” They were force-marched for days in freezing weather so they could be “returned” to Iran. When they bedded down at night in the freezing desert, Iraqi soldiers sauntered among them with rifles, singling out young girls and women to rape. The young woman’s parents tried to hide her and her sister under blankets. Soldiers found them anyway, and her father bribed them to spare his daughters. After leaving her family penniless, the soldiers just moved down the line and raped other girls whose fathers weren’t rich enough to save them. Faced with a sudden refugee crisis ignored by the outside world, Iran housed the Iraqis in makeshift refugee camps for months before finally allowing them to go to Tehran to try to make a life for themselves among Iranians who saw them as citizens of the country with which they were at war. This young woman’s family had scrimped for years to send their daughter out of Iran. Her salvation was an older man she still barely knew who was about to be the father of her child. She might have been me, I thought. Amo had saved us and punished her instead.

Fakhri’s community had good reason to hate Amo, and his family in particular was very bitter. To them I was a “friend of Saddam” who had shared his palaces while they suffered. Fakhri never let me forget that. He would pick up one of my things and sneer in a whiny voice, “Oh, did you get
this
as another perk of being Saddam’s friend?” The sad part was that I could see other professional couples who had made successful, loving marriages out of engagements facilitated by their parents or elders. Fakhri, on the other hand, seemed to see me as a kind of mail order bride, like the lonely girl from Iran, like thousands of other young immigrant brides streaming into the United States from oppressed countries worldwide. I was supposed to be not only obedient and amenable to spousal training, but grateful for the opportunity—a toxic mix of American arrogance and Arab machismo.

I sometimes felt that when he looked at my face, he saw Saddam Hussein’s instead. I began to suspect he was using our marriage to make up for that inequity.
Your friends are your friends because of who I am,
I thought one night as my tears dropped into the dishwater, making a crinkling sound in the suds. My enemies are my enemies because of who you are too, Baba, I thought bitterly. I was the daughter of the pilot of Saddam Hussein, and Fakhri was doing to me in bed what the whole exile community wanted to do to Amo. I tried to put out of my mind the short ugly English swear words he used each night as he
fucked
me.
Fuck you, fuck you,
he would say as I prayed for morning. To him I might have been a piece of wood, stiff and dry.

I understood the concept of a wife meeting her husband’s sexual needs. That was culturally Arab. I later found out that there is enormous confusion between cultural and religious issues and that Islam is very explicit about sexual pleasure being the responsibility of both marital partners, which was what my mother had told me. I tried to talk with Fakhri about sex, but he only got angry. Finally, I called his mother, feeling that if he had violated our one marriage rule, I could too, especially if it was in the name of helping our marriage succeed. I thought that as a woman she would understand and explain to him that a woman needs to be treated gently. She invited me to tea, and I broached the topic obliquely after the traditional courtesies. But my woman-to-woman tact yielded only an outburst of exclamations accompanied by arm waving. “What are you
talking
about?” she scolded, gesticulating dramatically over the teacups, her voice sliding up and down. “It is your wifely
dooo-ty
to satisfy my son’s needs! As a good wife, you must be prepared to satisfy your husband’s sexual needs at any time. His needs come first—did your mother not teach you this? Tell me, do you bathe before bedtime and put on perfume? Do you do up your hair and put on sexy lingerie before you walk around the bed seven times to offer yourself to him?” This went on for two hours, until she finally ran out of breath. The only thing I could think of to say as I left, as politely as I could manage, was “I’m sorry, but I disagree.”

Was she kidding? Walk around the bed seven times displaying myself to Fakhri? What she was describing was slavery. I learned later that there apparently are places where this circumnavigation of the marital bed is actually practiced, but I doubted it was in my mother-in-law’s own bedroom; she complained constantly about her husband behind his back when I went with her to some women’s gatherings. So very different from my mother’s parties, these gatherings were all about religion and wifely duties. Sometimes I thought they were discussing a different religion than the one I was taught. Where was the dividing line between being a good wife and allowing your husband to control or abuse you? Were women worth less than men? How many men gathered to discuss their husbandly duties?

Three months after our wedding was my twenty-first birthday. My present from Fakhri was $50 and a new bedtime accusation I didn’t even understand: I was now a “whore” who was no longer “tight” in my vagina. The next time we quarreled, I refused to have sex with him. He screamed at me and threw me down on the bed. Then he flipped me over onto my stomach and forced my head into the pillow. He held my head down and started penetrating me from behind, hurting me as he had never hurt me before. “Fuck you,” he cursed, again and again. I cried into the pillowcase until my voice disappeared. I couldn’t breathe, and I was afraid I was going to die of suffocation. I vividly remember how powerless I felt. Finally, I consciously stopped resisting and took my soul away, leaving my body an empty shell for him to abuse so he only had the illusion of power over me. In some painful faraway place, I counted each second until he finished. Then he got up, put on his clothes, and walked away as if I were a piece of dirt he was leaving behind.

I hobbled out of bed and turned on the shower. I stayed in the white plastic enclosure for an hour, sobbing and trembling in pain.
Ightisab,
I thought in Arabic. Rape.

When I finally came out, Fakhri told me to get dressed because we were going out to dinner with his mother. That was when I broke. I hated him! I would
never
love him! I screamed at him. I flailed at him with my fists, and when he tried to hold my arms down again, I bit him on his forearm. “Domestic violence!” he shouted and called 911. He really did. I didn’t know what domestic violence meant. It just seemed ludicrous that a grown man, much larger than I, would call 911 and say, “My wife bit me” after what he had done to me. I ran into the bedroom, locked the door behind me, and packed one bag with my best clothes, my mother’s jewelry, and my $400 in cash. When the police arrived and I finally came out of the bedroom, his mother was actually sitting in the living room, waiting for us to go out to dinner. Fakhri tried to tell them I had attacked him, that
he
was the victim.

“Look, she bit me here,” he said, trying to show the police a bite mark on his arm that hadn’t even pierced the skin. “You need to take her to the station so she can learn a lesson.”

“Yes, I bit him,” I told the police. “I’m ready to go with you.” On the way out to the police car, the policeman asked me gently if I was in love with someone else. “No” I answered. “Did he hurt you, then?” he asked. I didn’t answer immediately, then murmured a soft no. I wasn’t about to tell a strange man, let alone a policeman, about my sex life. It never occurred to me to talk to police; the only police I had ever met terrified me. I just asked to call my mother’s friend when we arrived at the station, and she came to pick me up. The next day, while Fakhri was at work, she drove me back to the apartment. We packed my clothes, my Persian rug, and the wedding china my mother had given me. Everything else, including all the wedding gifts, I walked away from.

“Take the bedsheets,” she said.

Why do I laugh remembering this when it was really so tragic?

“What am I going to do with the bedsheets?”

“Okay, just take the pillowcase,” she said.

“Why?”

“To be mean to him, to remind him when he comes home that you’re gone and that it was you that left him.”

A small, satisfying act of revenge only a woman would think of. I liked it. I walked over to the bed and stripped my pillow of its beige-flowered pillowcase and green border. Taking it was the only act of my marriage that honestly gave me pleasure. I still have it. A reminder that I had learned the lesson my mother had taught before I left Baghdad: never let any man abuse you; always be a free spirit.

When I walked out of Fahkri’s life, I was injured and angry and I hated men. All men. I swore to myself that I would get into no more relationships with men. Both of the men I had become involved with had promised to love and care for me, and I had trusted them. But they both had hidden agendas. Neither was what he appeared at first. Both were hypocrites who had lied to me to trap me and control me. The other two major male figures in my life were Amo, who had controlled and abused millions of people, and my father, who was a loving man, but whose wife felt so caged in that she had tried to kill herself to escape. Did I mention that there were more suicide attempts than just that one when I was little? That I worried about her sometimes when she went near the medicine cabinet?

I really, really, really wanted to go home. I felt so homesick it hurt. I just wanted to go back to school where I belonged and pretend these awful months never happened. But I couldn’t even contact my mother to tell her I had left Fakhri. All communications had been cut off. I tried to call home hundreds of times, but the calls wouldn’t go through. Mail service was cut off too, so I couldn’t write. I still had my return business class ticket, but no international flights were permitted into Iraq. (Baba, I later found out, had flown his fleet of civilian airliners to Tehran for safekeeping in case the airport was bombed.) The only way I could get home was through Jordan, but I knew no one there and was afraid of being stranded with no money. With nowhere to go, I finally called an uncle of my father’s in Los Angeles, and he invited me to stay with his family. I wrote a letter then to Mama telling her I had left Fakhri and where I was going. I sent it the only way I could think of: with an address in Amman, Jordan, on the front in English and a message on the back in Arabic saying, “To the people of Jordan: I ask for your generosity and kindness for delivering this letter to my beloved mother at this address in Baghdad, with many thanks from her loving daughter, who is stranded in America.”