Between Two Worlds (23 page)

“Are you kidding, Mama? He’s thirteen years older than I am!”

“Zainab, you tried the love route and it didn’t work,” she said. “Has it occurred to you that maybe that was for the best? You deserve more out of life than the future you can have here. You want a career, you want to see the world, you want freedom to do what you want to do and to say what you want to say. How can you ever find any of those things here? Trust me,
habibiti
. Take this chance, Zainab. Live the life I can’t.”

And I felt tears of confusion come into my eyes.

“Just promise me you will seriously consider it, all right, honey?”

Because she was Mama, I told her I would.

Luma had gotten married by this time, and she had met her fiancé only once, in her parlor, before agreeing to marry him. Now all she talked about was furnishing her new house. Was that what lay in store for me if I stayed? A rich husband and a big house to decorate? Yet she did seem happy in her marriage, and I found myself wondering if maybe the old ways were best. Maybe there was a reason for daughters to trust their parents’ judgment when it came to something as important as marriage. Should I just listen to Mama and do what she asked of me? Fulfill her dream? Be a good daughter and make her happy for once? Where was I supposed to draw the line between being a good daughter and being true to myself? I couldn’t tell. I had failed so completely at love that I didn’t trust my own judgment anymore. I couldn’t imagine falling in love again. And yet what if I did, and I got it wrong again? Mama was right. I had tried the love route, and it didn’t work.

The only good part of the whole Ehab fiasco was that it had brought Baba and me closer than we had been for years. Baba had been kind and gentle to me during that time. He had always shown his love for me with gifts; one night he brought over a new tennis coach to the house, along with a new racket, in hopes of drawing me out of my depression and getting me out of the house. He had been right about Ehab since the very beginning. I wasn’t used to talking over personal things with Baba, but I honestly wanted his opinion.

“I want to ask for your advice, Baba,” I told him. “What do you think about this marriage proposal? Should I accept it?”

“It is your choice, Zainab,” he said. “Not mine and not your mother’s. You choose.”

“No, Baba, I tried that before,” I told him. “I failed, and I embarrassed you and Mama too. I don’t want to do that again. You two make the decision for me. I trust your judgment to do what is best for me, and I will go along with it. I want to be a good daughter to you and Mama. I was so wrong before. I don’t want go through that again and repeat the same mistake. Please, Baba. I want your advice. I really do. Tell me what to do.”

“I could never do that, Zainab,” he said, though it was clear he didn’t want me to leave Iraq. “I can only tell you that you should not let your mother pressure you into accepting it. If you want to accept it, accept it because you want to. You need to live your own dreams and not your mother’s.”

I stayed up the whole night weighing my parents’ arguments. Baba was right. I should not try to live my mother’s dreams, but Mama was also right. I didn’t want to stay here and live in her prison, either. I had been a witness to her suicide attempts, her tears, and her flights to her mother in Karbalā’. I had witnessed her pain. Was that what lay ahead for me?

So many things good and bad have happened to me as a result of that proposal that I cannot look back on it clearly and say why I ultimately made the decision I did. I loved visiting the United States, but it was not home. I loved Iraq and couldn’t imagine leaving my family and my whole life behind. But years of weekends at the farmhouse had taken their toll. I was deathly afraid of being trapped like my mother, both physically and emotionally. In the end, I didn’t say yes to Fakhri, I said yes to Mama. She had been right about Ehab when I had been wrong, and I trusted her far more than I trusted myself to do what was best for me.

“Hamdelillah!”
Mama said when I told her. “Thank God!”

Things moved quickly this time. Amo apparently gave grudging approval, and Fakhri’s mother flew from the United States to formally request my hand. I served her Turkish coffee and
klache
. A small woman with a bony nose, she raved about her son, and handed me his picture. I studied his face. He looked very thin, with hollow cheeks and thin lips and a nose like his mother’s. There was something cold about him, I thought, but then photographs were often misleading. One day the phone rang, and the face in the photograph had a voice, formal but friendly. Then there was a small engagement party with a few of my aunts and cousins in our parlor. I felt completely defeated that day—I, who had argued so vehemently for love, at my own engagement party had an empty seat next to me where my fiancé should have been.

Mama spent hours designing my dress, buying gifts for the wedding guests, and planning my trousseau. Mama and my brothers would fly over with me for a couple weeks, and Baba would come as soon as his schedule allowed. I surprised my teachers when I told them I was dropping out; I was one of their best students. But I explained that I had already bought my textbooks for the following year, and would return for finals. I already had a return ticket and planned to graduate on time.

“You will not come back, I know it, you won’t come back!” Lana told me, crying.

“I’ve got to finish my fourth year,” I told her, hugging her. “Of course I’ll be back! I’m not even taking my albums or journals with me. When I come back, I’ll be staying for a couple months to visit, and we’ll see lots of each other then.”

There was no big send-off at the airport. What I remember most is sitting in silence with my family and our driver at the VIP lounge inside Saddam Hussein International Airport. My father had tears in his eyes. My brothers looked tense and downcast, and even our driver was trying to stop his tears. Everyone looked sad but Mama. She looked as if she were on a mission.

 

Baba was captain of the first leg of the flight that carried me out of his life. As he lifted his jet into the sky, a song played on the audio system that was a tribute by Lebanese singer Fairuz to Baghdad’s beauty and rivers and poetry. From the window seat I stared down at my city. It had been darkened for war for eight years. Now, just as I was leaving, it was all lit up. It looked like a beautiful carpet of twinkling lights, each with its own story. Down there somewhere were my cousins, my school, my home, and friends whose kisses had melted my heart when we said good-bye. I pressed my face into the window and tried to stop my tears as the lights turned to pinpricks and disappeared.

At least Amo was no longer going to be able to control my life. I had seen him just once since my breakup with Ehab. He had put a big hand on my shoulder and looked at me for what felt like a long time. That was one of those times I thought he was reading my eyes, and he seemed to see that I had been punished enough by the broken affair and said nothing about the breakup. Since my new engagement, there had been silence. No engagement present, no congratulations. Mercifully, I thought, I was being punished for leaving. Yet my sadness was profound. Was I crying because of where I had come from or because of where I was going? I didn’t know. I felt as if I were flying into a black hole, and I willed myself to sleep.

 

 

I stepped off into crowded American daylight. Fakhri’s family and some friends were there to greet us at the gate. I quickly scanned the crowd for Fakhri and recognized him from his picture. I greeted every other person first, beginning with kisses for his mother and his father, a nice-looking man who greeted me warmly, then a sister who looked me over the way Raghad and Rana did when I arrived for their parties, and other relatives and friends. Finally there was no one left.

“How long did you think you could avoid greeting me?” he asked.

I smiled politely and shyly shook his hand without responding to his question. I didn’t want to kiss him on the cheeks and feigned shyness. When I finally looked him in the face, I recognized that there was no chemistry between us. There was no skip of a heartbeat, no connection at all. There was no softness in his eyes, no invitation to love. Standing before me was a tall, older man who looked like his mother.

When he picked up my two suitcases off the baggage carousel, I felt as if he were literally holding my whole life in his hands. I sensed the power he held over me, and I felt vulnerable as I followed him out the airport door to the parking lot, where he opened the trunk of a big American luxury car, black.

“I bought this car in your honor,” he said. “What do you think?”

“It is very nice,” I said and smiled politely. Was he trying to impress me with money and a used luxury car? It had a broken side mirror. “It is very nice of you to buy it in my honor.”

“I bought it at auction,” he said, adding, “I can get the mirror fixed.”

 

8

COLLATERAL DAMAGE

I WAS TO BE A JUNE BRIDE IN AMERICA, but the wedding was to be conducted in the tradition of Iraq, in two parts. The first part is an Islamic religious ceremony, after which the couple is generally allowed to get to know each other more intimately than they would be permitted to do on their own, as a kind of sanctioned trial run. If this fails, the marriage is annulled. If not, the couple is deemed formally married when they are presented to their community at a large public reception—a wedding party. Often there are many months between these two events. In our case, the public ceremony would follow soon after the religious one.

On the morning of my Islamic wedding, I let my mother dress me in the gold-and-white creation she had designed for me in Baghdad, a stunning traditional Iraqi
sayya,
a full-length dress topped with a long vest that she had embroidered with flowers and poetry in gold thread. I don’t remember feeling much of anything as our wedding party set off on the highway in two cars for Fakhri’s house. I was a backseat passenger on my way from an Iraqi past to an American future. We had been driving for about thirty minutes when the car in front of us pulled over to the side of highway, and ours followed. My father got out of the first car and stalked back toward us as cars and trucks whizzed by at frightening speed to our left. My mother gave a heavy sigh of exasperation and lowered her window.

“This is wrong, Alia!” my father shouted angrily over the sound of traffic. “We cannot let this marriage proceed. We cannot do this to her!”

“I am
not
taking her back to Iraq!” my mother said, and burst into tears. “This is her chance at a future. This marriage must go through. I will not allow her to go back to Iraq! I am
not
taking her back there!”

It was a continuation of an argument that had started the night before. There had apparently been some disagreement over the terms of the dowry, and Baba felt Fakhri had treated him with disrespect. Baba said he didn’t trust Fakhri because he had gone back on his word. Mama’s argument had little to do with the bridegroom and everything to do with making sure the bride stayed in America. My mother fighting to leave Iraq, my father fighting to stay in Iraq—the same argument I’d heard since I was twelve. The only difference now was it was my life they were arguing over, not theirs. I thought about how heartbreaking it was, the two people I loved most, each convinced the other was trying to ruin my life on my wedding day. I was the only one who wasn’t crying. I remember just staring out at the shoulder of the road, a dirt strip littered with dried up weeds, and wanting desperately for them to stop.