Between Two Worlds (12 page)

Between them, Aunt Nada and Aunt Layla had three daughters who were roughly my age, and these were my designated new friends. Each was beautiful and stylishly dressed. Luma was the oldest, the perfect daughter at sixteen, a vision of her mother, Aunt Nada. Her long chestnut hair was perfectly styled and sprayed. When she smiled, it was with thin lips pressed together. Following in her mother’s footsteps, she had exquisitely manicured hands, and she seemed very aware of them as she spoke, gesturing with a practiced femininity. Following in her father’s footsteps, she held herself stiffly and was active in the student Baath Party. I was between Luma and her younger sister, Sarah, in age. Sarah was already gorgeous and clearly knew it. She had golden brown hair, huge almond-shaped eyes, a small nose, and a beautiful mouth. Whereas Luma was proper, Sarah seemed like the younger and more daring sister who deep down inside wanted to wear her skirts short and dance all night. She was also a good Baathist, that was clear, but she seemed to have a mind of her own. More beautiful still was Tamara, Aunt Layla’s daughter, whom I came to refer to with my mother as Brooke Shields. Tall, light-skinned, European in manner, she had lived for a while with an aunt in England and punctuated her Arabic with perfectly accented English words. She was the most fashionable of all, the one who turned heads. Dressed in designer-label clothing, she seemed more interested in what was trendy than what was proper, more attuned to Europe than to Iraq. Tamara lacked the air of entitlement the other two girls wrapped themselves in. Or, at the very least, she seemed less interested in flaunting it.

How would they have described me? Perhaps as a quiet girl with dark curly hair like her mother, someone who didn’t pay enough attention to her appearance, someone suited to stand in the background, but not quite in their class. They traveled in the right circles. I didn’t. They lived at the palace. I didn’t. Luma and Sarah were best friends with Amo’s daughters, and Tamara knew them too. I hadn’t even met Amo’s daughters. The difference in our status was clear. With every word they said, I was meant to understand that, like my parents, like our farmhouse, I was third. Only much later did I comprehend that what had brought us together was exactly the same as what divided us: our parents had met Amo the same night at a place called Pig’s Island; only their parents had welcomed his friendship while mine had resisted it.

 

 

It is hard now for me to distinguish that first weekend from the ones that followed—they were all so much the same. I can’t remember for certain if I even saw Amo the first time we went. He typically dropped by late in the afternoon for drinks with the adults at one of the other two houses. Sometimes weekends would go by and we would wait, all dressed up, and not see him at all. We would be instructed to sit and talk quietly in an adjacent room until and if we were summoned. Then we would go inside, welcome him with enthusiastic kisses and greetings, and array ourselves around as he convened what we referred to as our “family gatherings,” though none of us were part of his family and his own family members never joined us.

“Shlounkum ya halween,”
Amo would say to us children, taking Hassan or one of the other little kids onto his knee. “How are you doing, beautiful ones?”

“Very well, Amo, we are doing very well!” we would chorus.

A few steps behind him, always, stood his personal guard Abed, a man with intensely focused eyes and lips pressed tight under his bushy black mustache, who went with Amo everywhere. Of all the hours I spent in his presence, I don’t remember once hearing Abed laugh or even speak, except into Amo’s ear. I never saw his beret off his head—it was forbidden for Iraqi soldiers to wear military berets tucked through shoulder straps on their uniforms allegedly because Israeli soldiers wore them that way—and I was surprised when Abed was arrested on charges of war crimes in 2003 and turned out to be partially bald.

There was nothing natural about the way we sat or spoke at our “family gatherings.” We remained perfectly still, actors in a scene that I understood even then was about the ideal family Amo had never had growing up poor in rural Tikrit. Later, historians would debate the facts, but portray Saddam Hussein as the offspring of a father who vanished from his life, a mother who married a man who abused him, and an uncle who filled him with dreams of military glory. Even my little brother, who was always so full of energy, knew better than to squirm or interrupt when we were with Amo. The other girls and I were the perfect image of young Iraqi women—utterly polite, immaculately dressed, and attentive to his every word. We were highly aware that anything we did wrong, even a wrong inflection, a hint of anything
ayeb,
would reflect on our parents.

Amo was the only one who seemed relaxed. Fastidiously groomed and impeccably aware of every person and every movement around him, he had an enormous charisma that is hard to convey if you never met him in person. I can think of no neutral adjectives for him. In these settings, he was compelling, not just affable, charming rather than nice. Maybe, like the best politicians, he just had that knack for making people, including children, feel they were being singled out for special attention. When he looked at you, it was as if he were really listening. It took me a while to realize that when he gave you his most affectionate, lingering smile, he was using that time to look behind your eyes.

My very first survival skills were manners, and I learned what I didn’t know already by taking cues from my mother. When you were with Amo, you were always polite and pleasant. You had no opinions or personal preferences except those that matched his own. There was nothing you’d rather do than spend time with him. You listened to him with rapt attention, always. If you were a child, you never spoke in his company unless he asked you a direct question, and you always arranged your face to look up at him in adoration. If he showed you something new he had gotten and said, “Isn’t it nice?” you would answer, “Oh, yes, Amo, it is verrrrrrry nice!”

Always, always, you would smile. With my mother, the only person I could ever talk to about Amo with any honesty at all, I called it my “plastic smile.” Without her constant reminders, I’m not sure I ever would have been able to put it on as I did. Sometimes today when I’m talking in public, people compliment me on my smile, and I wonder how much of it is really mine. There is a certain way the muscles in my mouth feel sometimes when I smile before an audience that takes me back to that farmhouse, when I knew a smile wasn’t enough; I had to stretch those muscles so as to
beam
.

Weekends were Amo’s designated downtime, and we were his entertainment. Part of our job was to make him laugh at the right moment. I can still imitate Amo’s laugh. He would tuck his chin slightly under and let out a deep-throated, guttural
heh . . . heh . . . heh
. If it had been a little higher-pitched or a little more spontaneous, you might have been inclined to call it a chuckle, but it had a kind of sinister undertone, like the bad guy character that always chased the good guy characters in a cartoon. When he laughed, we laughed, and every now and then I had this feeling the other girls and I, particularly Sarah, were secretly laughing at his laughter. I never felt free enough to talk to them about this, but I have a feeling they would know what I mean even today.

What I remember most from these gatherings, actually, is my parents’ faces. Both of them looked nervous and helpless to me, and I understood immediately why they were so determined that we never mention Amo’s name or describe ourselves as his friends. All of these adults were “friends,” but I knew this wasn’t the way they behaved with their
real
friends. I remember all the adults looking at Amo far more than they ever looked at the person sitting closest to them, and there were subtle—sometimes not so subtle—jibes at each other as they jockeyed for Amo’s approval. In time, I came to see that each adult had a specific role to play. My father was the straight man, Uncle Mazan the joker, and Uncle Kais the parliamentarian. Aunt Layla was the spontaneous one, Aunt Nada the proper one, and Mama the ebullient one whose job it was to lighten these proceedings with laughter. Mama’s eyes would fill up when she laughed for real, and the muscles in her face would tense when it was forced. Mostly, in these gatherings, it was the latter, but sometimes she would just laugh because she couldn’t help herself, and she would laugh more loudly than what the culture proscribed for women. “Good God, get a grip on yourself, woman!” Uncle Kais would say, rebuking her. Yet I could see that Amo liked my mother’s laugh just as he approved Uncle Kais’s criticism of it, the director able to relax because each of his players knew their roles so well.

I used to wonder sometimes whether Amo had other sets of friends like this one, which he would group and regroup in repertory over the years. Only he knows the real reasons he pursued a relationship with my parents. I know that if he wanted to become a world leader, and that is what he clearly planned and craved, even when he was still a rural tribesman on his way up the military-political ladder, he needed validation by the educated opinion-setters of Baghdad, including people of money and social influence. He also needed to understand Western culture, which was second nature to my parents and their set of friends. There were other people in Baghdad who were wealthier and more powerful. But I suspect many such people—Basma’s father, for example—had political opinions or ambitions of their own that presented a threat to Amo’s authority. My parents were naïve to the point of ignorance about politics, a lesson in the danger of civic apathy, and presented no challenge to his career or security risk to his life. But whatever other reasons he had for seeking their friendship, I believe he genuinely liked Basil and Alia, as many people did. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have kept them around. He might not have let them live.

There were times in our gatherings when Amo would get very emotional, and we were expected to show our sympathy for his sadness when we saw tears in his eyes. Usually this happened when he was talking about his love of Iraq. He practiced some of his speeches on my parents and the other adults, and when they were broadcast, Mama would look up at the television from her sketch-pad or her knitting and say, “Okay, here comes the part where he’s going to cry.”

I loved my mother. I wish I could talk with her now.

Unless something else was planned for us or there was a good reason—a school graduation, a funeral, or a trip out of Baghdad—I would generally be expected to spend my teenaged weekends—nearly six years of weekends—at the farmhouse. Except for talking to the other girls, usually about fashion, there was almost nothing to do and nowhere to go. There were two television stations in Baghdad, one of them a Farsi-language station run by government-authorized Iranian dissidents. The Arabic language station showed only Japanese cartoons, Egyptian films and soap operas,
Dynasty,
and hours and hours of Amo’s speeches before the Revolutionary Council or his generals or at other events. One afternoon, we were watching an Egyptian movie on television at the farmhouse, and the TV went dead, then switched to another show in the middle of a kissing scene. It turned out that Baba had been with Amo when that movie was on, and Amo had called up the director of Iraqi television and ordered him to stop it because it was exposing Iraqi youth to immoral trash. My cousins would have laughed at stories like this, but it never would have occurred to me to tell them. I missed my cousins desperately. I missed just hanging out and feeling normal. Haider, for whom no playmates were available, would lock himself in his room with his video games and slowly isolate himself from everyone except my father, who, I suspect, understood. I began to think of the farmhouse as my prison, and my escape was reading. I started with the longest book I could find,
Gone with the Wind,
and kept on reading through all the familiar themes: cousins killing cousins in war, widows asked to donate wedding rings, dark-skinned people destined to live in poverty while white-skinned people danced and pretended not to see.

The adults, particularly the men, spent far more time with Amo than with us children. There is an odd picture somewhere of Baba and other men in Bavarian-style tweed hats with little feathers in them bicycling behind Amo on compound grounds with security guards all lined up on bicycles behind them. Amo always changed outfits to match the activity he had planned. At the farmhouse, he favored blue denim overalls, a red-and-white checked shirt with a bandanna tied around his neck, and an occasional cowboy hat. The fathers were expected to be farmers. Each had a plot of land in front of his farmhouse, and by the time we arrived, Uncle Kais and Uncle Mazan already had groves of established trees—olives, I think—in back of their houses that I believe were tended by the compound staff. Baba hired two farmhands of his own and a small tractor, and together they plowed the empty desert land and planted row after row of knee-high olive saplings. He always liked gardening and had actually bought a small farm a few years earlier and registered it in my name as a gift. But when we got the farmhouse, the real farm was abandoned. Over the next few years, I watched Baba’s new olive trees slowly wither and die. I’m not sure what happened. Perhaps the small irrigation ditch that went to his patch of desert didn’t deliver enough water to allow them to live. Perhaps he was away too often to tend them—or just gave up trying. I’m not sure. After a while, I couldn’t always tell the difference between the people my parents were and the people Amo was making them pretend to be.

Perhaps half a kilometer away from our three farmhouses was the inner wall that encircled, hid, and protected Amo’s farmhouse. Inside that wall was the iris that defined the eye. The men went there often, and the three women did occasionally as well, but it would be three years before that eye opened to me. I have exactly one photograph taken at the farmhouse. It happens to be of me. In it I am standing slightly off balance in dressy pants and a shirt, on the water pipe bridging the open canal ditch. I spent countless hours at that spot, and I can turn my mind’s eye even now like a remote-controlled camera and see in each direction. Below me, beneath my dangling feet, were white ducks that liked to congregate in the water under the pipe. Ahead of me, across a small expanse of empty desert, was the high, impenetrable inner wall that encircled Amo’s compound. Right behind me, abutting the outer compound wall and facing it in obeisant imitation, were our farmhouses. Those two walls defined our margin for error, the space in which we were allowed to live. There was a ten-minute walk between one set of guards that kept me in and a second set of guards who, had I dared approach them, would have kept me out. I sat on the bank of the canal and listened to the ducks and learned to quack with them. I thought of them as silent allies I could complain to who would never tell on me.
Quack, quack, quack,
I went.
Quack, quack, quack.