Between Two Worlds (7 page)

“Congratulations, you are a woman now,
habibiti
!” he said, using the arabic term for “my beloved” or “honey.”

Mama was a biology teacher; she had an embryo in a jar in her high school classroom of a baby that had died in utero. She was also a natural artist. After I got my period that day, she took me into the kitchen and took out the pencil and white notebook she kept by the telephone. Mama always sketched when she was on the phone. She sketched on the margins of books as she read. Her hands were always drawing, always in motion. She drew graceful, lifelike nudes on the walls of her bathroom, then periodically painted over them over and drew more and painted over those. Curious, Haider left his Legos and followed us into the kitchen. She didn’t send him away. She began drawing sketches of men’s bodies and women’s bodies and explained how each worked. Art and science came together in her graceful diagrams with all the curving lines. There was an elegance inside me, inside all women, I never could have imagined. She drew a circle that was a woman’s egg and a small creature that was a man’s sperm, and said that when the sperm met the egg, a cell was formed. She drew pictures of cells dividing and of those cells dividing until finally a baby was created.

“But how does the sperm find the egg?” I asked.

“When a man and a woman love each other the way Baba and I do, they get married, and they start having sex, and the man puts the sperm into his wife,” she said, and she drew a diagram of this.

I started giggling. My parents didn’t exactly talk about sex in front of us, but I somehow knew it was something secret that they did in private that made them feel good, a forbidden thrill that I would understand one day when I got married.

“There’s no need to giggle about this word, Zainab,” Mama said. “Sex isn’t silly. It is a beautiful thing. It is a time when a man and a woman come very close to each other and produce beautiful children like you and Haider and your baby brother.”

I remember Haider staring at her drawings through his long dark bangs. Haider was very smart for a second-grader. He was smart in the way my father was smart, in math and science. He didn’t say much unless he was arguing with me, but he didn’t just memorize new information, he processed it inside his brain until it made sense. I learned by observing and asking whatever questions popped into my mind until I was satisfied I had figured things out.

Before we finished talking that afternoon, Mama put her physiology lesson into a spiritual context. God had arranged men’s and women’s bodies to complement each other perfectly, she said. The pleasure that came with sex was one of God’s gifts to each of us, like the gift of being able to have a baby. Men and women were equal in marriage and equally entitled to the gift of that pleasure, she said, but they had to wait until after they were married. So that was why only married women had babies, I thought to myself. It was
haram
to have sex before you were married.

Three years later, when I was in ninth grade, they taught us these things in school. I was the only one who raised my hand to answer questions without shyness, the only one who didn’t giggle. “It should not be
ayeb
to talk about sex,” I said. “Sex is a natural thing. It is one of God’s gifts to us.”

 

Like all Iraqi children, I was raised to obey my parents, tell the truth, respect my teachers and other adults, and do nothing to dishonor my family. These are complex concepts, but to break any of those rules was essentially
ayeb,
which means “rude” or “discourteous.” To whisper in front of anyone or to interrupt an adult or question their judgment was
ayeb
. To enter a room of adults without being invited was
ayeb
in a culture where adults and children usually socialized separately. Women in particular had to be careful not to do anything
ayeb,
because any behavior that was less than modest and courteous could draw shame or
aar
not only upon themselves, but on their whole family. Even in our home, the most liberal I knew, curiosity was encouraged, but questioning the judgment of adults was not. My parents were as secular as any I knew, but it was still
haram
to cause them even to sigh with concern, because that was written in the Quran. So I asked many questions, sometimes to the point of impertinence, but when I felt my world begin to turn upside down, I couldn’t ask what was wrong.

Uncle Adel began spending the night at our home, and I assumed at first that he had had an argument with his wife. Then Aunt Samer, Uncle Adel, and my parents began gathering in our living room and closing the door nervously behind them so we wouldn’t hear what they were saying. I looked to Mama for an explanation, but the expression on her face told me I was not to ask. Something was clearly worrying them, yet every time I tried to approach anyone I would be asked if I had finished my homework, or told to please watch my baby brother. I spent so much time with Hassan during that time that when he began to speak, he sometimes called me “Mama.” My initial reaction to their rebuff was hurt. I was supposed to be an adult, and they were still treating me like a child, or maybe a ghost that everybody just looked straight through. One day, I lay down on the sofa and covered my head with a sofa pillow in hopes I could make myself faint so someone would pay attention to me the way they did to Mama when she fainted. But nobody noticed. I fell asleep and woke up an hour later, tired and sweaty. Didn’t adults realize a child doesn’t stop observing what’s going on around her? Didn’t my parents understand how lonely it was being inside my own brain with all these questions it was
ayeb
to ask?

One night when I heard my parents talking in their bedroom downstairs, I tiptoed out of my room and sat down on the terrazzo tile staircase to listen to what they were saying. I had never eavesdropped on anyone before, and it was a sign of how scared and left out I felt that I would even consider it. But I learned something important that night as I stared down at my bare feet on the step: my mother’s cousin, Aunt Ishraq, and her family were no longer living in Iraq. Aunt Ishraq had an enormous house in Al-Mansour with girl cousins my age and older boy cousins I had kind of practiced flirting on.

“Mama, why didn’t Aunt Ishraq and my cousins say good-bye to me before they moved away?” I asked Mama later. My feelings were hurt.

“How did you know about this?” she demanded.

“I just figured it out from what everybody was saying,” I said.

“You must erase this from your memory, Zainab,” she instructed. Her voice was firm and clear. There was no room to play around here.

“But, I can’t, Mama,” I confessed.

“Well, don’t mention this subject again, not even to your cousins,” she said. “We’ll talk about it later. Not now. You must
not
say anything about this to anyone. Do you understand?”

I knew all the looks on my mother’s face. When she was angry, her face grew very red, and drops of sweat appeared on her upper lip. When she was serious about something, her skin would pale noticeably, and her face would set, her lips taut. That day, I took her by surprise, and I saw her scared. Something about Aunt Ishraq’s move had scared her. She was more afraid because I knew about it, and that made me feel not only guilty, but sad. I adored my mother, and the last thing on earth I wanted to do was to cause her pain.

 

It was cold and pouring rain in Baghdad when Baba asked me if I wanted to go with him over to Uncle Adel’s. We rarely spent time alone together, so I jumped at the chance. It had rained so long that our cul-de-sac had filled up with water. Baba always complained when that happened because the government had been promising to fix the drainage, but I loved it. If Baba happened to be home when this lake appeared in our front yard, he would make a fleet of boats out of newspaper and my brothers and I would set them sailing. But that was obviously far from his mind as we got in the car to drive to Uncle Adel’s. He put on a tape of the Egyptian singer Abdul Haleem Hafez and tried to chat with me as we drove. I don’t remember what he talked about. I just remember feeling that he was trying to make a special effort to reach out to me and that he wasn’t comfortable chatting with me the way Mama was. Casual conversation didn’t come naturally to him. When he came home from a long trip, we would rush in, open his suitcase to see what he had brought us, jump all over him, get our hugs, and then let him alone. He was a little like a cat when it came to emotions. He needed his space.

The short street leading to Uncle Adel’s house was muddy and empty and dreary. I noticed a large stack of crates half-covered with blue plastic tarps in front of the house of one of his neighbors. I was surprised to see them still there. There were only four houses on that street, and I knew the neighbors well enough to know that the crates contained valuable factory equipment.

“Why did they leave the equipment out?” I asked Baba. “It’s going to rust in the rain.”

He waited to answer until he had parked the car in front of my uncle’s house. Then he turned to me, and I realized this drive had been building to something. He was trying to find the right words, and I could see it wasn’t easy for him. I remember staring down at the floor and thinking I wasn’t actually an adult yet because I couldn’t drive. My legs weren’t long enough to reach the pedals.

“The neighbors were deported to Iran,” he said. “That’s what happened to Aunt Ishraq and her family too, Zainab. That’s why they didn’t say good-bye. They didn’t have time.”

He explained it to me in the way he said everything—facts only. The government was deporting Iraqis “of Iranian origin.” Nobody knew how many people had been deported, or exactly what happened to all those who had gone. Uncle Adel was staying at our house so he wouldn’t be taken away too. I listened with growing fear and confusion as I realized that my parents must have planned this conversation together. Why hadn’t Mama told me herself? Why was Baba the one to tell me these things, sitting here in the car in the rain outside Uncle Adel’s house?

Then he broke the unthinkable news.

“Zainab, it’s possible your mother may have to leave the country too,” he said. “The government is giving two thousand dinars [six thousand dollars] to Iraqis to divorce their spouses if they’re of Iranian origin.”

Until now, I had sat still, staring at my feet in petrified silence.

“You’re not going to divorce Mama, are you?” I said in a sharp, accusing voice. Of everything he had said, that scared me the most.

“No, no,” he said gently. “But you’re an adult now, so I thought you should understand what is happening.”

Then he opened the car door and got out. When Mama and I talked, I could usually ask questions, even if I didn’t always get answers. With Baba that was impossible. I got out and followed him with my head full of questions. Was I going to lose Mama? If Baba wasn’t going to divorce Mama, why did he say that? Would he even
think
of divorcing Mama? Didn’t he love her anymore? If she left, what would happen to me? Could I go with her? What about my brothers? What would happen to them?

When Aunt Najwa opened the door, I hardly recognized her. A tall, beautiful woman who ran one of Uncle Adel’s factories and always had her hair done at a salon, she looked haggard and thin. There was no makeup, no elegant business suit. The aunt I knew as almost imperious had been replaced by a frightened woman who kept running her hands through her hair. She started talking fast to Baba without even saying hello. I found my cousins in the living room looking as scared and pale and ignored as I had been feeling for weeks. They told me they hadn’t seen their father in days.

“Two Mukhabarat agents came an hour ago asking for our citizenship papers to prove we weren’t Iranian,” Dawood said. “Mama told them Baba had them and he was out of town.”

“But how can you be Iranian!” I said. “You’ve never even been to Iran! You’re Iraqi! Your parents are Iraqi!”

“The neighbors are all Iraqi too, and we woke up one day and they were gone,” said my littlest cousin, near tears. “And now we’re the very last house on our street left with people in it!”

Why was this happening? Why was the Mukhabarat coming to their house and not my house? Why were my mother and their parents in danger, but apparently not my father? What about me and my brothers? Were they trying to deport us too?

“If Mama and you guys get deported, I’m going with you,” I declared.

“I don’t know if you would be allowed,” Dawood told me.

“If anybody tries to pull us apart, I hold on and I just won’t let go,” I vowed. “They’ll have to take me too.”

We sat there for a long time, listening to bits and pieces of our parents’ conversation in the next room. This apparently wasn’t the first time the Mukhabarat had come; it was the second, and Aunt Najwa said they had told her they would be back again. I looked around at the big dining room table, the backgammon board, the wedding pictures, the baby pictures, the pictures of us on the Tigris in their boat last summer. I’m sure we were all thinking the same thing. Were the secret police going to take all this away from them? Would we ever be able to play together in this house again? I felt great, nauseating, roller coaster loops of fear in my stomach.

When Baba came over to tell me it was time to leave, Aunt Najwa was pleading with him, holding his shoulder.

“Please do something, Basil!” she said. “I don’t know how much more time I can buy. They will take us if you can’t manage to do something!”

My cousins all turned and stared at me.

Baba? What could my father do?

 

 

For the life of me I can’t remember the next few days. I can’t remember running to Mama, though I must have when I got home. All I remember is that a few days, maybe even a few weeks, later, Mama drove me to an old neighborhood in downtown Baghdad. She stopped to buy fresh fish for dinner and chatted with the fishmonger. The worry was gone, she looked herself again, and I sensed the crisis was past. Something had been resolved. The streets were too narrow in that neighborhood for cars, so she suggested we get out, and we walked along the river until we stopped in front of a very old house. I had heard about it, but never seen it: the house where Mama grew up. In the fourteen years since Bibi had moved out, it had been given over to Boy Scouts, health clinics, a watchman’s family, and now stood empty. Mama went over and unlocked the old-fashioned door, and we stepped into an airy interior that seemed to have come from another time. There was an inner courtyard lit by shafts of diffuse sunlight from high overhead, which gave the whole place the feeling of an unused sanctuary. High above, wrapped around the inside of the second and third floors, were walkways with wrought iron railings and doorways that led to rooms beyond. We passed an empty, tiled fountain covered now with pigeon droppings and dust. Mama said she and Aunt Samer use to play in it when they were little.