Between Two Worlds (33 page)

Later, someone who never lived under Saddam Hussein posed questions to me that I found hard to answer. Wasn’t there another way out for me besides an arranged marriage? Couldn’t Mama have simply told me the truth, especially after I had left Fakhri? I knew that part of the answers to such questions lay in logistics, such as restrictions on travel and money transfers and even university credits, but the questions themselves showed a fundamental lack of understanding of what we all knew we needed to do to survive. We simply never had the freedom to think that way in Iraq. Terror had carved out the narrowest of safe passageways in our brains, and those were the ones we took. If Mama had told me why she had married me off to Fakhri, she would have destroyed any hope for what had seemed to her a good marriage. Instead, she preserved the illusion, gave me a chance, and limited the likelihood that Amo would sense her motives and punish her and my family. Whatever other theoretical escape routes there might have been, this was the only one many Iraqi mothers perceived that could spare their daughters from rape by Uday and, apparently, Amo himself. How many others like me were there? I wondered. How many of us had been married off to pictures or to voices at the other end of the telephone?

Mama had done what desperate mothers had done down through the centuries. Like Moses’ mother putting her son in a basket of rushes and trusting him to the currents of the Nile, like Vietnamese mothers desperately flinging their babies to departing American soldiers at the end of the Vietnam war, like women I had met in refugee camps who pleaded with me to take away their daughters, she had cast me off.

And I had punished her for loving me so much.

 

Mama was diagnosed with clinical depression, a conclusion hard to argue with except for her obvious symptoms of a more physical problem. Though they could not pinpoint the cause, doctors felt the limp was a separate issue that could be later addressed in Iraq. I tried to convince her to stay with us, but she felt she had to return to my little brother, who was still in school in Baghdad. This time, it was with deep misgivings and pain that I finally put her on the plane, along with a supply of Prozac.

She did not get better. Instead, over the next few months, she underwent more tests and procedures that culminated seven months later in near-fatal and probably unnecessary surgery in Amman. By the time I managed to clear the immigration hurdles to bring her back home with me, there was no doubt she was gravely ill, though no one knew why. She spent months off and on in American hospitals and more months in what was euphemistically called “rehab” before she was finally handed one of the most terrifying diagnoses imaginable: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—Lou Gehrig’s disease. ALS is a progressive neurological nightmare that is often described as a “living prison” because the body deteriorates steadily around the brain until it finally shuts down altogether. Mama’s muscles, already so weak she could barely move, would become completely flaccid. But her mind would remain perfectly intact and aware of every moment until her death. Though there was no way to know if there was a connection in her case, ALS had recently been tied to the “Gulf War Syndrome” afflicting British and U.S. soldiers who had served in the Middle East.

She was fifty-one years old. The disease was incurable. She had perhaps two years, or if she was lucky—or, some would say, unlucky—ten. The fear of losing her that I had lived with all my life was coming true.

“I want to die at home,” she told me. “That is my only wish.”

 

Amjad and I moved into a two-bedroom apartment, bright and homey and handicap-accessible. Mama wanted to sleep in a regular bed, sit in a regular chair, and live as normal a life as it is possible to live if you cannot move your own body without assistance. I re-covered an antique chair she had bought me with burgundy fabric from Pakistan and surrounded it with plants. I furnished her bedroom in her favorite colors of burgundy and green and hung paintings on the walls of old Baghdad that used to hang in our living room. By the time she came to live with us—to die with us—she could not walk or even turn her head unless someone did it for her. Her beautiful smile was gone. The muscles in her body and lovely face were slack, and her skin hung over her face like a curtain over a closed window. Her face, once so expressive I worried for her, was dead except for her huge brown eyes, made even more huge by illness. I couldn’t even hug her for fear of disrupting her breathing; we kept a respirator in her room. She could not talk, but oddly, fortuitously, she could still move her hands, so if we put a pen into her hand, she could communicate with us through notes she jotted down in a drugstore spiral notebook.

At first we took her on trips around the city in a wheelchair, but everywhere we went, people just stopped what they were doing and stared. We had visitors at the beginning too, but they found it hard to even look at her without breaking down and crying. The last thing she wanted was pity, so the final few months of her life came down to her family, her correspondence, and a Tanzanian caregiver named Fatima who took care of her when Amjad and I were out. Amjad was in his last year of law school and came home to put on Beanie Baby puppet shows for her. He bought her an aquarium that he filled with goldfish she could watch during the day, and if one would die, he would replace it before she could see. It became a kind of nightly tradition for me to read her Rumi poems. Haider, the brother I had remembered as an annoying computer nerd, had recently gotten a visa to work in Detroit and came to see her whenever he could, bathing her, brushing her hair, and revealing an amazing depth of kindness and love. Mama had not seen my little brother Hassan for nearly a year by this time, and she worried about him. No matter how much we begged U.S. officials to allow him to visit, we couldn’t get him a visa. When we managed to reach him on the telephone, I would hold the receiver to Mama’s ear, and she would listen to him speak and I would lower the receiver and she would use a finger to tap on the mouthpiece—
tig, tig, tig
—to let him know she had heard.

This was not a fate any of us ever could have wished for her. Yet she wrote to me that these were the happiest days of her life. How sad, I thought, and yet I understood. There was no struggle to wage, nothing we could do, and that brought its own kind of peace. We had time to plan, and we set up a signal that would tell me she was thinking of me after she died—the feeling of a gentle brush of the back of her fingers against my cheek. We were on the seventh floor and had a view of Virginia that stretched to the horizon. Mama had become more religious, as had many Iraqis in the 1990s, and it was odd at first for me to see her holding prayer beads, praying without moving her lips or making a sound. Yet there was a kind of beauty in these days. The fear she had lived with for twenty-five years was gone, and it felt like a blessing for me just to witness the humility and dignity with which she went about wrapping up her life. She marked the
Surah,
the passages from the Quran she wanted me to read after her death, and began writing notes to old friends in Iraq, telling them how much she loved them, and asking forgiveness and forgiving others for any differences that had arisen in their lives. When I came home from work, there would always be something new for me to see, a vibrantly colored watercolor of the face of an aunt that she had painted from memory, a letter for me to mail to an old friend, an Iraqi dish she had somehow managed to instruct her caregiver to cook for me.

In Baghdad, Mama used to complain that her hands were too chubby. Now they were oddly elegant—tools of grace bestowed on her by a belatedly compassionate God. She knit two blankets, a yellow one for me and a white one for the baby I had pledged never to have—“in case you change your mind,” she said on paper. With every knot she prayed for God to forgive her: “Forgive me God, forgive me God, forgive me God,” she prayed. She became a different sort of role model to me now. The beauty she used to have on the outside had been replaced by a column of beauty and strength inside. She was an example to me in this, and I tried after that to clear up any misunderstandings in my own life in case death took me by surprise.

After so many years of trying to erase my past, I finally realized how much I needed to understand it. How much had she kept from me when I was growing up? I was afraid, selfishly, that she would lose control of her hands before she talked with her only daughter, so one night I asked her to write to me too, and she agreed.

 

 

It was only then, when she could no longer speak, that she began to open her life to me.

She started with the night she and Baba had first met Amo. I was three. She had told me about Pig’s Island when I was young, but it had sounded like a fantasy story to me then. Now, though her notes reflected a certain devil-may-care quality, I began to see it as darkly portentous of what was to come, a guerrilla operation planned by a ruthless strategist who chose his weapons well: guns and champagne. I tried to imagine Mama as she was then, five years younger than I was now, a beautiful young socialite a few years out of college, dancing with a debonnaire young husband to a live band on a party boat alongside younger versions of Aunt Layla and Uncle Mazen, Aunt Nada and Uncle Kais. I felt the engines turn against the current of the Tigris and slide onto Pig’s Island, discharging them directly into the welcoming, outstretched arms of a handsome young man dressed all in white like an actor on a moonlit stage. As they stepped down, wondering at this surprise their host apparently had planned for them, this figure in white snapped his fingers, and boats appeared from out of the darkness, surrounding them. Soldiers came forward bearing trays of champagne. Who was this man? friends asked each other. But even after he was introduced, they didn’t recognize the name. Everyone knew the president, but who knew his cousin Saddam Hussein, who was merely the vice president? Certainly not my parents. It was Mama who had asked, no doubt more carelessly than she would ever refer to him again, “And who is Saddam Hussein?”

As I read, I saw Amo’s white shoes muddied in the silty sand of Pig’s Island. I had played in that sand, and with a child’s sense of transgression, I regretted that it was that place that he had chosen to invade our lives. I remembered Baba water-skiing around Pig’s Island, trim and elegant, a perfect arc of spray flying out behind him, making funny faces and sticking one leg out now and then just to be silly and show off to me and my cousins. What would my parents have been like today, I wondered, if Saddam Hussein had just left them be? When was the last time my father had done anything silly? Would my mother still be here now, locked in her body even as she went about freeing her soul?

Amo pursued my parents with the cunning of the hunter I knew he was. For two years, he had sent them invitations, and they made excuses to avoid him. By 1974, his patience had waned, so he devised a trap: he asked Mahmood, the mutual friend who had arranged the initial meeting at Pig’s Island, to throw a party and not tell my parents he was coming. When they rang the bell, Mahmood answered it, and warned them Saddam Hussein was inside. Standing on the front porch, they pondered their options and saw only one. To leave would have been a dangerous act of
ayeb
.

“So we stayed,” Mama wrote, “and that changed our lives.”

They chose survival, cloaked in courtesy, and it became our prison. I tried to imagine myself standing there on that doorstep in my mother’s heels, nervously fingering the old coin at my throat, exchanging glances with my husband and hurriedly weighing the consequences that might befall us and our child if we were rude. And, I knew, I would have stepped inside too. That was the first step they took in their deal with the Devil. Mama herself had called him the Devil once. What would the Devil be but just another fallen angel, without his charm and power to damn the living little by little, until he took away what you thought you were at your core?

“At first, we thought we could manage the relationship if we were careful,” she wrote to me. I wanted to scream, Impossible, Mama! Look at the consequences we’ll all pay!

Yet I recognized in her words the unwittingly arrogant undertaking of the innocent. They had stayed in Baghdad, naïvely unaware of what lay ahead. Mahmood, who apparently knew better, fled the country. I had never met their friend Mahmood, but as I read her writing, I imagined him a smart risk-taker who was bold enough to venture into the unknown while my parents stayed behind. They had been afraid to take that step and naïvely assumed they could somehow stay safe and protect our home. Why hadn’t they been bold enough to leave like Mahmood? Why did some people leave and others stay? It was hard to look at Mama and not see how battered and bruised she was from all her attempts to escape, and yet when I was reading her journal, I felt I could still see a little of that innocent young mother in her eyes.

Each night, I came home from work and read what she had written, like a series. Sometimes there were just a few sentences, sometimes more. She showed me Saddam Hussein as a young despot on the rise, before he attracted much international attention. In cinematic validation of my own fears, her memories helped me conjure scenes of Amo as a night owl predator prowling the streets, rousting my parents and others out of their beds to party or just to listen to him for hours on end. Familiar moments came to mind framed in disturbing new contexts: Mama hurriedly searching the cupboard for pistachios to set out for him on our rosewood table; Amo with his charm smile on striding into our front hallway with his box of Chivas Regal; Baba drinking it on our blue sofa, resentful of this “unequal friendship” as he and Mama called it, yet drinking more; and Mama judiciously turning down the volume on the stereo so as not to wake her young children who were upstairs asleep, Haider and me; the corrupt mixture of whiskey and cologne.

It was both riveting and painful to read what she wrote, like watching a disaster movie in which everyone but the heroes can see the coming disaster. I hadn’t seen Aunt Nahla in years. She had been one of Mama’s best friends. Now, through Mama’s writings, I saw her slow dancing with Amo after Amo had given her husband so much whiskey he was sick and needed help, and yet he kept Aunt Nahla dancing with him, slow dance after slow dance. I imagined the expression on her face over Amo’s shoulder, a portrait of quiet fear, as she kept on dancing, unable to stop to help her own husband. She was an artist who got together with Mama for Turkish coffee in the afternoons, and I remembered the sound of the little cups being flipped over onto the saucers so they could study the
finjan
and try to foretell the future. Then Mama came crying one day, and when I asked her what had happened, she told me Aunt Nahla had gossiped about her in front of Amo. She never told me what Aunt Nahla had said, but I saw it had hurt her deeply. There had been many disappointments like this, I knew, and I had seen her grow bitter as, one by one, so many of my aunts disappeared from our lives during the farmhouse period. Now, some fifteen years later, she handed me a letter to mail to Aunt Nahla telling her she loved her, forgiving her and asking her for forgiveness. For what, I didn’t know and didn’t ask. I had seen erasures sometimes on the notes she left me at night. I knew how hard it must have been for her to manage the strength to erase.