Between Two Worlds by Zainab Salbi Read Free Book Online

next door, began to fear this revolution would spread.
     
     
    I was at an amusement park for an end-of-summer outing with my cousins the day we went to war with Iran. I always counted myself fortunate to have lots of cousins my age, and there were seven of us that day between the ages of ten and thirteen, most of them boys. Several of my parents’ siblings had children about the same time as my parents, and because my own brothers were five and ten years younger than I was, these cousins were like siblings and friends combined.
    Naim was the son of my father’s brother, and he lived in our neighborhood. A straight-A student a year older than I, he was thin and interesting, the sort of friend you could talk to and play with at the same time. I remember filling a plastic bag with race cars my father had brought back for me, picking dozens of limes from our garden, and heading over to his house, where we would stick holes in the fruits, fill them with salt, and suck on them all day as we raced toy cars and argued and shared confidences.
    “Can I tell you a big secret?” I asked him when he was over at our house for a barbecue. It was Friday, the Islamic weekly holiday.
    “Sure,” he said.
    “I think about God in the bathroom,” I said.
    “Me too!” he whispered. “I can’t help it. Every time I go to the bathroom, I think about the fact that I’m not supposed to think about God in the toilet, so I think about God.”
    “But, it is haram !”
    Haram was an all-purpose word that applied to anything that was forbidden by religion. It was haram to think of God in the toilet because cleanliness is so much a part of Islam. It was also haram to think of God as an image. God was everywhere. He was on earth, on the sky, behind us, everywhere. Yet I sometimes committed the sin of trying to imagine God too.
    “Is there such a thing as double- haram ?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” he said.
    Dawood, the oldest son of Uncle Adel, my mother’s brother, was the eldest of the cousins, the one the adults always put in charge of minding the rest of us. I spent so many hours hanging out at his house on the Tigris that he and his brother treated me like a little sister. He had the large round eyes like my mother’s side of the family, and slightly pudgy cheeks that gave him a friendly look. He was always cool and fashionable—for some reason I remember him in a sweater with stripes of gray, green, and burgundy. He was studying the oud, a ten-stringed Arab instrument, and I was taking piano lessons, so we occasionally played together. He was always kind and gentle toward me, even when we were in elementary school and I would run over to him on the playground and ask him to tie my shoelace when it came loose. Then one day he taught me to do it for myself.
    Dawood was the leader of our pack the day war broke out with Iran. That day was special because it marked the first time we cousins were deemed old enough to roam the park more or less on our own, with just one adult chaperone in tow. I remember bright lights and laughter, cotton candy and ride after ride on the Tilt-O-Whirl before we left the park to cap the day off with a stop at a famous ice cream shop in Al-Mansour, the Beverly Hills of Baghdad. When we headed home, it was almost dark, and there seemed to be a power outage. I was the first to be dropped off, and all the lights were out when our noisy carload drove into the Airlines Neighborhood and pulled up in front of my house. My mother was waiting at the front door.
    “Where have you been?” she asked. “Haven’t you heard there’s a war going on?”
    War? What war?
    She hurried me inside and ran to call the other parents to tell them their children were safe. No one, possibly least of all Saddam Hussein, imagined then that the war would last so long that all my cousins in the car that day would find themselves of draft age before it ended, at risk of being sent to the front, where hundreds of thousands of young