Between Two Worlds (34 page)

Women for Women International was growing at this time. We had four offices now, and war was starting in Kosovo that had all the earmarks of another human disaster. I was reading letters from women in war zones, then going home and reading Mama’s journals, and there was much about them that was similar. The same fact-based recitation, the same stoic bearing of witness to wrongs, the same curious juxtaposition of mundane details and horrors. I thought of the hundreds or thousands of faces of women I had met who had been traumatized by war or rape or both. Except for Ajsa, their faces had been numb, but none was as numb as my mother’s.

She rarely wrote about her own feelings. Often, she started stories she didn’t finish. She mixed trivia with historic events, and her observations about Amo’s dress and his palaces and his childhood received almost as much attention as his confessions of murder. Much of what she wrote I either knew or had supposed. Some of her stories I had heard from Amo myself, or had even been taught in school. But, as I read on, I realized that Mama and Baba had understood his capacity for murder almost from the beginning. He had made no secret of his public execution of political opponents, so there was no reason for me to be surprised by the fact that he had bragged about killing friends in private. But what hit at some soft spot inside me, whatever was left of the little girl in me, was that Mama had heard his boastful confessions one night, then driven me to school in the morning. Just a few days after she had told me to make the thought of “Amo” fly like an arrow out of my brain, she had had to listen to him boast that he had just killed a friend with his own hands and murdered an old fortune-teller as well. He had murdered a woman he loved as she slept with her mother and three-year-old daughter, who would first scream that he killed her mother and then reportedly stop speaking altogether. “We had to be silent witnesses to his crimes,” she wrote. “We were among the victims for no one can survive his atrocities. And we kept on being imprisoned by our own fear, afraid of saying no to him or even of showing our horror at his acts.”

I had barely learned how to deal with the stories of the women I was working with in war zones. I didn’t know how to deal with the stories my mother was telling me about what she had witnessed in Iraq. Breathe like a fish, I told myself. Remember to breathe.

“Why did you stay, Mama?” I finally asked. That was the question that may have mattered to me more than any other, and I tried to ask it without blame. In response, she only looked at me with round, open eyes. She laughed with her eyes and cried with her eyes, though there were no more tears. Don’t tell me you don’t understand, that you have forgotten the arguments your father and I used to have, she said with her eyes. Have you been gone so long you have forgotten what it was like, Zanooba?

As I read her journal, I realized Amo’s appetite for sex was as strong as for violence.

I don’t think my mother ever would have told me about this aspect of him if she hadn’t seen my work. He had told my parents about Hana’a, the mistress he had loved, then murdered with his own hands. Then there was Amel, whose husband resisted being “friends” with Amo and wound up dead on the airport road, and her sister Samira, the mistress-wife whose snub by my father had caused Amo to scream at my mother that night. What struck me as I read my mother’s notes was how tawdry it all was, as Amo, over whiskey, justified his need for women by claiming he had missed out on sex during a stay in prison, when he had gotten excited just watching birds touching out a window. I remembered the slow dithering of Samira’s fingertips on Amo’s thigh that night in Mosul. No wonder Baba wouldn’t let her into our home.

Mama looked at me with her big eyes full of questions and curiosity, and I knew she wondered what I was thinking. Calling on every lesson I had learned in refugee camps, I offered only sympathy and understanding. I kissed her or held her hands and told her I loved her. Nothing else. I did my best to show no judgment at all. Be strong so she won’t worry you can’t handle this, or she will stop explaining, I told myself. Be there for her, don’t make her have to be there for you. What she did not know was that when I had a moment for myself, I would go into our walk-in closet, close the door, and cry into the clothes.

One night she wrote about how much Amo enjoyed “People’s Day,” a day in which citizens would go to him seeking help for their problems. People’s Days were highly publicized when I was a teenager. Amo would travel around Iraq in his trailer wearing a white doctor’s coat like a therapist and hold private audiences with citizens, then make a public show of waiving a law, giving someone money, or granting a woman a divorce from a reluctant husband to show his generosity. Mama wrote that he would invite women in and try to charm the most beautiful ones into sex. If his charm failed, he would simply rape them. When they were released, often with some small favor granted, they would be expected to express their gratitude. “
Shokrun jazeelan sayyed al ra’aees,
” they would say, sometimes before television cameras. Thank you very much, Mr. President. His favorite place for People’s Days, Mama wrote, was a village in Samarra, near Ehab’s home, that was known for its beautiful women.

Mama had the other half of my memories, the half that made mine make sense. Her writing jolted a memory in my mind of a time Mama and I went to a potluck dinner at one of my aunts’ houses. I was probably nine or ten. I was sitting around with the adults in the living room. Aunt Lamya’a was talking. She was a beautiful widow, and she was telling the other women about how she had gone to see the president about a problem she had had—financial, I think. She had to wait with several other women in an outer office, and when the president came out, they went around in a circle, and each named her problem. When Aunt Lamya’a named hers, Amo told her it was “complicated”—
muaqada
—I remember this word because it seemed so laden with meaning. He asked her to join him in his private office to discuss it further. Mama and her friends all leaned in very close to Aunt Lamya’a, and she began to whisper. Minutes before the room had been filled with laughter and noise, then there was near silence and I remember sitting there feeling alone and left out, wondering whether I should stay or go into the other room as the women all wrapped their arms around Aunt Lamya’a the way they sometimes did with other aunts in our garden when they went outside to say things they didn’t want me to hear. And I could hear her crying inside this circle of arms. When the women finally pulled back, Aunt Lamya’a was wiping tears away. All the women, including Mama, looked very sad.

“Is Aunt Lamya’a all right?” I asked her on the way home.

“She will be all right,” Mama said, adding, “Zainab, honey, please leave this subject alone.”

I couldn’t leave it alone. It had become my life’s work.

I knew that most rapes are committed by family members and friends, yet in Iraq and much of the Arab world, women are still seen as innocent in rape only if they are assaulted by armed strangers. I had heard rumors in high school that the Mukhabarat subjected women to rape and made videotapes in order to blackmail them into becoming informers. If they admitted to rape, they opened themselves up to abandonment by their husbands and separation from their children because women carried the family’s honor, or
aar
. In conservative Arab cultures and in other parts of the world as well, I knew that a family’s honor is
judged
by the behavior of women, but it is effectively
owned
by men: her husband or father or brothers, or even her sons. To protect a man’s honor, then, it is his right to marry an unmarried woman off to her rapist or even to kill her. If the rapist is a family member, it is overlooked or buried. If the rapist is a criminal, the woman is judged unmarriageable. But when the rapist is the government itself, the woman is victimized and the man is emasculated because there is nothing at all he can do. It was said that husbands had committed suicide over these rapes or abandoned their wives and children—all in the name of saving their family honor.

Saddam Hussein had institutionalized rape just as he had institutionalized the hatred of Persians and Shia—I was sure of it. He was using the same tactics as Milǒsević, and Stalin before him, using women to send political messages to men to consolidate his own power. The more I thought about it, the more I felt the evil, the horror, of the man I had been trained to call Amo, and the more certain I was that he had used sex to glue together his network of fear, insinuating himself into every human relationship he touched, including marriage. Except for Kuwait and part of Iran, Amo had simply taken everything he ever wanted, from gold to pomegranates. Why not women?

“Mama, what did you mean when you told me I didn’t know how Amo could be?” I asked her one day. She looked at me with her huge open eyes and I knew what she was asking: are you sure you want to hear this, Zainab?

Yes.

She talked about the gypsy women and women bused in for parties from villages. Sometimes women were simply stopped on the street and pulled over by secret police because Amo or his brothers or sons, apparently, had seen them and wanted them. There was a woman who would call up women and invite them to her apartment for “tea,” who was apparently his madam. One woman my mother knew who got an invitation for tea was afraid to reject her invitation. So she dressed in very tight jeans and a big belt and extra clothing in hopes that if Amo did arrive, the clothes might deter him. Instead, he only treated her more roughly and forced himself on her.

“She was raped,” I stated with horror.

“You can call it rape or you can call it really bad sex,” she wrote, and I thought that was the saddest thing I had ever heard from a woman who had once described sex to her daughter as beautiful.

That night, when I went to bed, I lay there, unable to sleep. I started questioning my own judgment of Fakhri’s violation of me. Was that rape, or was it just “bad sex”? Had I been wrong in my judgment? I hated it when I doubted myself. I remembered the bed, the flowered pillowcase I still kept in my closet even now as a reminder. I remembered how I felt, violated in every way. Not one part of my body, not one ounce of my soul, was a participant in that act. He might as well have been raping a piece of wood. It was forced. It caused pain. I hated it. I fought it. It wasn’t bad sex. It was rape, and that was why I left him.

 

 

When I got home from the bus stop after work and opened the door, Mama looked proud and happy in her armchair. It was amazing, really, how much emotion she could convey through her eyes. She was all alone. Amjad was preparing for his bar exam. Her caregiver had gone.

“Where is Fatima, mother?” I asked, chiding her as I gave her a light embrace, drinking in the smell of her and allowing her, I think, to drink in mine.

“I let her go,” she wrote, clearly proud of herself. “We cooked
bamya
for you. Serve yourself and come sit with me.”
Bamya
was my favorite dish, okra cooked with garlic, tomato sauce and tamarind, lemony in the Iraqi style. I got my dinner and sat down with her to watch
Xena: Warrior Princess,
our nightly routine. Xena was a kind of female Hercules inspired by Greek mythology, a latter-day version of the Women’s Village fantasy my aunts used to talk about. Xena had a dedicated following among women prisoners, lesbians, teenaged girls, and one Iraqi mother living for the time being in Alexandria, Virginia.

“The hardest part of this disease is not being able to laugh,” she wrote.

We played backgammon for a while, the familiar sound of dice clicking away our limited time together. I was alone in my own home with my own mother. There was no one to scare us. No listening walls. No man at all at that moment in our Women’s Village. I knew that the opportunity had finally come, after so many years, to ask the questions I couldn’t as a child. It wasn’t Zainab Salbi who worked with women war victims, it was me, her daughter. I needed to know the price we had paid for his friendship.

“Remember when you called me in Sarajevo and you were crying over the phone asking me why would I bring myself to a war when you risked everything to take me out of Iraq? I have thought a lot about that, Mama. Here’s what think. I think I have been going from one war to another asking other women questions to find answers to questions that only you know, Mama, and you are sitting in front of me now. I have this pain inside me that won’t go away, Mama. You have had this pain inside you. And I wonder if it’s the same. I have to ask you, Mama, why were you so tormented all the time? Did he hurt
you,
Mama?”

She had her notebook in her lap and her knitting at her side. She tried to write, but her hands began shaking. She struggled for breath, and drops of sweat appeared on her face. Her face turned a deep red. I was afraid I was going to lose her. I ran to her bedroom to get her ventilator and oxygen to save her life, if only for a few more weeks or days. I cared about nothing else but keeping my mother alive in that moment. If I have to make choices, I choose you, Mama. And I never asked her again.

 

 

It was May 1999, and refugees were fleeing war in Kosovo in massive numbers, to Albania and Macedonia, most of them women and children. Mama, remote control in hand, kept watching this news. Women were being found half-naked and dazed in the middle of the street after being raped and released, and we talked about how vulnerable women were to rape in the midst of the chaos of war. If not for my mother, I would have gone to Kosovo in a heartbeat to start a new program there, but I couldn’t leave. Mama was the most important thing in my life.

“You need to go to Kosovo, Zainab,” she said. “Help those women,
habibiti.
”

“No, Mama. I need to stay with you. You are the most important person to me.”

“You need to go, Zainab—don’t worry about me,” she said. “I will wait for you.”