Between Two Worlds by Zainab Salbi Page A

midnight, after he had drunk about three-quarters of a bottle of whiskey, he responded in a loud voice to a bodyguard, “Hit them and let the game start, may God curse them all!” We didn’t know what he was talking about until the next morning when we learned that he had sent his ships sailing in Shat Al-Arab [the waterway dividing Iraq and Iran near the Persian Gulf] thus the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war.
    He was very happy the first few months of the war. As a matter of fact, we had never seen him as happy as he was these few months. He was partying almost every night. These nights were filled with village women who would dance and sing for him. A band often showed up in these parties known as Thubab’s band. Its lead singer was a woman known as Aneesa who used to sit by his feet as she sang traditional melancholy songs from rural areas that made him emotional as he remembered his past. He used to distribute about 2000 dinar for his friends at the party so they could throw this money to the dancers and the singer. Money was everywhere in these parties, flying around the dancers and filling the floors.
    We used to leave these parties with headaches from the Bedouin music and his war talks, but we had no choice but to attend. He wanted everyone around him in those days, so the parties were big and loud. Sometimes he would talk about his military plans at these parties and brag about different battles that he orchestrated. He enjoyed reviewing scenes from these battles, and he ordered the TV station to broadcast them for hours at a time so he could watch them. Your father and I couldn’t even look at these scenes, which were filled with images of dead Iranian soldiers. He, on the other hand, would talk about how these scenes would open his appetite for food.

3
    AFTER PIG’S ISLAND
    I ENTERED JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL a year after war began. In Iraq, boys and girls attend elementary school together and are separated in junior high and high school. I decided I didn’t want to attend the elite girls’ school with my friends who were suddenly into gossip and clothes, so I asked to go to Al-Shamella, the Comprehensive Experimental School, a model junior high-high school. My mother had a friend who was a teacher there, and she had gotten me excited about its nontraditional curriculum where home-making classes included budgeting, electricity, carpentry, and metal work. They also offered extracurricular music, pottery-making, and a variety of other subjects that other schools didn’t.
    I didn’t know anyone at my new school, and the adjustment turned out to be hard. The school wasn’t far from our home, but it was located in a marginalized neighborhood that was part of a whole different world than the one I lived in. The first day of school, I felt eyes from all over the schoolyard look at me when my mother dropped me off in our Toyota. It would never have occurred to anyone in our family to send me on the bus because public transportation was used only by people who didn’t have cars. Here, everyone walked or took the bus. It turned out I was the only rich kid in a school filled with kids from poor and working-class families.
    A fair number of students dropped out at fourteen or fifteen to be married. We all wore the same uniform, but mine was imported from Germany or England while my classmates made their own. I could go home and take a bubble bath and start classes the next day smelling like kiwi or lavender, while some of them went home to abusive parents. I began hearing about domestic violence for the first time and began to understand the price classmates paid for generations of endemic poverty and inadequate education. I remember one girl telling me about how her stepfather had beaten her, thrown her out of the house, and left her to spend the night all alone on the doorstep. I could not find the right words to say to her. There were none. Nothing I could say would matter. Her life was unfair. She had done nothing