Between Two Worlds (35 page)

“But I want to be with you before you leave me, Mama,” I said. “I don’t want to risk being away.”

“I will not die before you come back, Zainab,” she said. “I promise.”

I came back a week later, exhausted from travel and work and sharing the pain of shattered strangers. Mama had kept her promise, and she looked through the photographs of the women I had met, asking me about them and staring at some of the pictures for so long I felt she was trying to learn the life story behind each face. She had painted a series of watercolors while I was gone, of determined young women, in colors so vivid no one would imagine they had been applied by a dying woman. She had painted them on cards, like greeting cards. The last one she made was for me.

Shortly after I returned, Mama’s caregiver told me she was going on vacation. I couldn’t trust Mama with a replacement when I knew she was so close to death, so I began caring for her almost around the clock. By the time the hospice nurse came for her weekly visit five days later, I was an emotional and physical wreck, surviving on coffee and exhausted by the physical and emotional demands of keeping Mama alive. The nurse suggested Mama go into the hospice for a few days, to allow me to rest so I could resume her care, and Mama reluctantly agreed.

Haider came and stayed with her in the hospice. But two days later, when Amjad and I went to bring her home, it was too late. I saw her try to pick up a pencil, but her hand faltered and I couldn’t read what she wrote. Haider and I each held one of her hands as Amjad read the Quran for her. I saw her try to catch just one more breath, and she was gone. I couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t be dead. I had to bring her home to die. I had promised her she would die at home. That was the one thing she had asked of me. I kept on telling the doctor over and over again to check her pulse because she had come so close to death before.

“Your mother is dead,” he told me finally, softly, a kind man. “But she will always be with you, and there will be times in which you will feel her touch. I know about this. My mother died ten years ago and there are still times in which I would be driving or something and there would be her touch on my hands. She will always be there for you.”

I washed her body with the help of local Muslim women, feeling not only grief as tears streamed down my face into the white shroud we wrapped around her body, but an overwhelming guilt as well. As I read the Surah she had selected, I kept thinking that in the one thing she had asked of me, to die at home, I had failed. I had failed her.

She had asked to be buried next to Bibi in Najaf, but it took me almost a week to arrange the paperwork to take her back to Iraq. Because of sanctions, there were still no direct flights, so after twelve hours of flying to Jordan, we had another twelve-hour drive to Baghdad. My father met me at the airport and had hired a driver to take us to Baghdad. I hadn’t seen my father for nine years. He looked much older and carried prayer beads in his hand like so many other Iraqis who’d been encouraged by Amo to turn to God for relief from the hardship of sanctions. I had been running nonstop for a week trying to make the arrangements, and I was exhausted and grieving and just wanted to fall into his arms and have him comfort me and tell me he would take care of everything from then on. Instead, he was the one who collapsed in my arms, sobbing. “I loved your mother very much, Zainab,” he kept saying. He expected me to be there for him to pick up the pieces, and I felt once again like the adult, the parent, rather than the child. It felt unfair to me after all I’d been through. Baba slept through the night on that long desert road, and it was during that long night that I bid my farewell to Mama and felt her soul leave me.

“Don’t you recognize our neighborhood?” Baba asked as we drove toward our house.

I didn’t. I had been away nine years. During that time, nearly a decade of sanctions had taken its toll. Iraqis had paid the price of Saddam’s tyranny. Everything had aged and been drained of color. The streets were painted with resignation. Our cul-de-sac was filled with family members waiting for me in front of our home, all in black. I looked for my baby brother, Hassan, who was eleven years old when I last saw him, and found myself hugging a twenty-year-old man in a full beard of mourning. There were people crowding around me, cousins I was trying to recognize, everyone kissing me and crying. In the middle of it all, a stranger introduced himself as the head of our tribe. What tribe? I thought, distractedly, as we prepared to take my mother’s body immediately to Najaf for the long-delayed burial. Aunt Samer sat with me in the car as she directed me to read the passages of the Quran to bless my mother in the final leg of her journey.

For centuries, Shia families have sent their dead to be buried in that holy place in the middle of the vast yellow sand desert of southern Iraq, until it has become one of the largest cemeteries in the world. When we had gone for Bibi’s funeral, I remembered walking for perhaps fifteen minutes through the eerie city of the dead, past young men reciting the Quran and women sprinkling rose water on the graves of their loved ones, until we finally arrived at the mausoleum of my mother’s family. The cemetery was so jammed with war dead then that it was difficult to walk without bumping into small white stones in front of the tombs. Now we drove straight up to the mausoleum. The cemetery seemed half the size it used to be, yet surely more people had been buried here in nine years. Where were the rest of the graves? When I was little, I had been afraid of this place the way children are afraid of vampires and zombies. Now I felt a different fear, as if even the dead were too scared to talk.

“What happened here?” I asked Aunt Samer. She looked around, the familiar look of worry and fear on her face.

“Saddam ordered that the cemetery be paved over to punish the Shia for rising up against him back in 1991,” she told me quietly. “But, as the bulldozer came, a guard ran up and said, ‘Stop, that mausoleum belongs to friends of the president’s.’ And that is how our dead were spared.”

Saddam Hussein had spared our dead, but not our living.

Hot and exhausted, feeling someone had twisted my heart out of my chest, I watched my mother’s body being lowered into the yellow sand next to Bibi: the hardest thing I had ever done. My mother’s life was finally over. You never were afraid of death, Mama, were you? I asked her. Was it rest you were seeking, Mama? Is it rest you have now? Are you at peace now, Mama?

Throughout the three-day mourning period, our home was filled with people. Women gathered separately from men, and our house was filled with women wearing black, reading the Quran for my mother and crying. Some brought hired “mourners” as offerings, whose job it is to recite religious stories and eulogize the dead, inducing everyone to cry to purge their sorrow. We emptied all the furniture from the main part of our house and filled it with cushions so there would be enough space for the visitors, setting only a few chairs aside for VIPs, like Amo’s sisters, who came to give their condolences.

No one expected me to be polite to anyone. “Cry as much as you can, honey,” my aunts told me. And for three days I did. All the women seemed so bereft, I remember wondering if they were crying for Mama or for themselves. It was as if the entire country were in mourning for what had been lost.

It is traditional for the family of the person who has died to provide a feast for mourners on the third evening. Hundreds of women came that night, many of them aunts I hadn’t seen since Mama’s potluck dinners and my school years. They had organized the feast for us, and when I was asked to lead the women into our garden, I found it full of lights and my mother’s favorite foods—stuffed lamb,
fesenjoon, tourshana,
dolma. The garden was decorated so beautifully it felt like a wedding, and the moment I stepped outside and saw what the women had done, I stopped crying. I felt the beauty of the Iraqi night and a gentle desert breeze on my face, like the back of Mama’s fingers against my cheek.

“Your mother’s soul is so clearly here, Zainab,” Aunt Samer said, kissing me. “She is all around us. This is a blessed night. I can feel it.”

 

 

Amo sent a driver to our house during the mourning period. He asked for my father, but he wasn’t there, so the driver handed me Amo’s condolences along with an envelope containing the equivalent of $500 to cover burial costs. I stiffened, and without thinking, my old fear returned, unsummoned and utterly intact. I smiled my plastic smile, thanked him, and left Iraq a few days later with no plans to return.

The wait was long at the Jordanian border. Throngs of people were trying to leave the country, and there were full body inspections. It turned out that it was forbidden to leave Iraq with any art or more than fifty dollars. Everything of any value was confiscated, including a small sketch my mother had done. It was there, at the Iraqi-Jordanian border, that my mother made her last gold donation: a small box of necklaces she had entrusted to my aunt to give to me in case of her death. Inside was a small sapphire pendant that had been given to her by Saddam Hussein.

 

11

THE MIDDLE FISH

I PUT MAMA’S NOTEBOOK into the white carry-on bag I used to sit on in crowded airports and I put the bag away. I took time to mourn her and to spend time with Amjad. I realized after her death that Amjad and I needed to take care of ourselves, and we went on vacations together as she had made us promise we would. I began to heed the advice she had been giving me ever since I was small: to enjoy life, to sing, to dance, to live in the moment and to see the beauty around me. In time, I began to think of myself as the “free spirit” she had always wanted me to be. “Who is this woman?” Amjad asked me one night as we were dancing. “Where had you hidden her before?” It was almost as if Mama had passed on to me the spirit of her youth and the gift of laughter that had been locked inside her for years. A year after her death, I decided to work on my master’s degree. I may not have accomplished my dream of a doctorate, but I got my master’s degree from the London School of Economics while Amjad went to the Middle East to begin work involving the Palestianian-Israeli peace talks. When we moved back to Washington, D.C., after a year of living abroad, I was looking at the future, not the past.

Women for Women International was growing rapidly amid what sometimes felt to me like a global epidemic of violence and genocide. Everywhere I went to assess the need for our services—Nigeria, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo and other violence-ravaged countries where we set up offices—I heard women speaking in different languages about the same stories of sexual violence. So often when brutal armies invaded, it didn’t matter whether they called themselves rebels or soldiers, they claimed women along with disputed territories. It wasn’t a matter of politics, but of patriarchy. Yes, it had been happening since the beginning of time, but it outraged me that this violence against women was still somehow expected. Rape was practiced even at times by armies representing the United Nations. It was as if mankind had conditioned itself to expect such violence. Instead of recognizing violence against women as a reflection of the society in which it occurred, and often as an early indicator of genocide, the world seemed to respond with indifference and passivity.

Amjad and I were on our long-delayed honeymoon in Spain on September 11, 2001, the day the World Trade Center in New York was attacked. Thousands of Afghan refugees streamed over the border into Pakistan in anticipation of U.S. retaliation against the Taliban for its role in supporting the terrorists. I was meeting with a group of Afghan women leaders of non-governmental organizations that were working with refugees when word came to us that the Taliban had been overthrown. The Taliban had been one of the most oppressive regimes for women in modern history, and I was thrilled for the Afghan women. I imagined them helping write a new constitution, free to work again, educate their daughters, and throw off the shroud-like burqas the Taliban had required them to wear.

“Isn’t this exciting?” I said. “It is all yours now that the Taliban are no longer ruling!”

Of course they were excited about the Taliban’s overthrow. But they also had reservations about what would replace it. “We are Muslims and that is the most important part of our identity,” one woman told me. “No one should confuse our hatred of Taliban with Islam.” The women I was meeting with that day said they wanted Islamic law, Sharia, to regulate their society and planned to continue to cover their hair, although not with burqas. I understood and respected their identity as Muslims, but it took me a moment to recognize my own disappointment. I had wanted them to reach out for secular laws that I thought would help free them. Instead, I was reminded that my own political burka, like that of the West, was as blinding in its way as the robes these women had been compelled to wear. My job was to help them achieve their own goals, not impose mine. Living in a culture in which women and men talk about intimate parts of their lives on television, I had to remind myself not to become desensitized to the struggle of Afghan women and all women who have lived under different forms of despotism their entire lives. For them, freedom isn’t the next step after tyranny, it is often a long and arduous personal journey.