Between Two Worlds by Zainab Salbi Read Free Book Online Page A

men would lose their lives for nothing.
     
    I turned eleven a few days after the war started, too young to understand what lay in store for our family, let alone to comprehend what impact that war would have on the Middle East and global politics. When the opening of school was delayed, my first thought was more cartoons, more summer. The first time I saw antiaircraft fire in the night sky, I ran out into our garden, jumping up and down, thinking it was like the Fourth of July in Seattle. My father was stuck outside the country when the fighting started and wasn’t able to get back until a few weeks later, so it fell to Mama—as so many things would—to help her three children cope with war. There were frequent air raids at the outset, and many of my friends spent nights huddled together with their parents under stairwells when the sirens went off. My mother didn’t want us to live that way, so if the electricity went out for a blackout, she closed the curtains, lit candles, and made puppet shows with her hands for us on the walls. Then she would kiss us good night and put us to sleep in our own beds.
    “Life moves on,” she declared. “You can’t just freeze it—not even for war.”
    My brothers were so little, I knew she was talking to me.
    After school started, an Iranian missile landed on the house where a friend of my brother’s lived. Half the family died that night and the other half lived. I remember watching my seven-year-old brother sitting on his bed, looking through his stuff for pictures of his friend because his mother had come to school to say she had lost not only her son, but every single likeness of him. Later I heard about another house being hit by an Iranian bomber, and the entire family died. I had never seen their house, but I imagined it was on a corner, like ours. And I imagined the children’s bedrooms were upstairs, like ours.
    Life got scarier after that. When Baba left on his trips, I remember him kissing and hugging Mama as if he were afraid he would never see her again. Bibi would come stay with us, and so would Radya’s whole family, though I never understood how Radya’s father’s rifle could protect us from Iranian bombers. I would lie in bed at night and wonder if the Iranian pilots who were bombing us knew they were killing children they couldn’t see. Sometimes a missile would cross the night sky outside my bedroom window. I would pray it wouldn’t land on our house, and feel guilty when it landed, in a half circle of intense light, on someone else’s house. I could feel the ground shake if the missile landed close, and there would be a sliver of perfect stillness before the shattering of glass reached my ears and the haunting wail of ambulances began. It never occurred to me to wonder whether children in Iran were wondering the same thing about Iraqi bombers. Iran was our enemy.
    One day early in the war something happened that was in equal parts terrifying and amazing. Mama and I were driving home from the grocery store one day when an Iranian jet suddenly zoomed down so low over the street we were on that we could see the pilot. Iraqi television had broadcast footage of some captured Iranian soldiers a few days earlier, and my mother and a friend of hers had whispered about how beautiful their Iranian faces were. Time froze. I remember looking through the windshield at the pilot to see if they were right. As he zoomed over us, I saw his face, and I know he saw ours. He had a mustache. He was just an ordinary man. What was he thinking as he looked at Mama and me? Was he going to kill us? Did he hate us? Had he meant to come to this part of Baghdad, or was he lost? They said on television that the Iranian mullahs were so ignorant that they sent their pilots to Iraq without any maps. Was he going to bomb a house like ours? Was I going to lose friends because of his bomb?
    Logic tells me there was no time for all those thoughts to pass through my brain in that second or