Free Between Two Worlds by Zainab Salbi

she looked herself again, and I sensed the crisis was past. Something had been resolved. The streets were too narrow in that neighborhood for cars, so she suggested we get out, and we walked along the river until we stopped in front of a very old house. I had heard about it, but never seen it: the house where Mama grew up. In the fourteen years since Bibi had moved out, it had been given over to Boy Scouts, health clinics, a watchman’s family, and now stood empty. Mama went over and unlocked the old-fashioned door, and we stepped into an airy interior that seemed to have come from another time. There was an inner courtyard lit by shafts of diffuse sunlight from high overhead, which gave the whole place the feeling of an unused sanctuary. High above, wrapped around the inside of the second and third floors, were walkways with wrought iron railings and doorways that led to rooms beyond. We passed an empty, tiled fountain covered now with pigeon droppings and dust. Mama said she and Aunt Samer use to play in it when they were little.
    I heard the flapping of wings somewhere above as she led me up one of several staircases. Running her hands along the old walls, she told stories as we entered each room, recalling the Farsi-speaking servants, the strong patriarch who had been her father, a brother who had died, and Uncle Adel, the big brother fifteen years older than she was, who always watched out for her. Finally, we reached the third floor, and she led me into a room that had been hers and Aunt Samer’s, overlooking the river. She walked across the dusty floor and opened the high old wood-framed windows, and we stepped out onto a sagging wooden balcony. Laid out in front of us were the Tigris River and a centuries-old skyline of domes and minarets beyond. We stood there for a while, just staring at history and the boatmen ferrying passengers back and forth across the river. I wondered how many generations of Iraqis had stood on the earth right beneath where we stood, how many peoples led by how many different rulers had passed over this precise spot, what they wore, what they believed, how much of their blood I had in me now, how different they looked from me.
    “First, habibiti, I want to let you know that our family is safe,” she said. “No one is going to be deported. I want you to know that.”
    “So they won’t take you away?” I said.
    “No, honey, nobody’s going to take me away. Or Uncle Adel or your cousins.”
    I hugged her and almost cried.
    “I was so scared, Mama!”
    “I know. Baba and I had hoped we would be able to resolve this without worrying you, but at one point . . . Well, we decided that you would rather be prepared in case we couldn’t work things out.”
    “So no one will ever take you away from me?”
    “No, honey. No one’s taking me anywhere. Everything is going to be all right. It just got very complicated there for a while.”
    The sun was warm on our faces, but the wind was brisk. Mama kept her hands in her coat pockets as she looked out over the river, then back at me, her long black hair blowing away from her face and the slightly bent Abbasid coin around her neck glinting. Her large brown eyes, rimmed with kohl, filled with nostalgia.
    “I remember standing on this balcony waiting for my father to come home for lunch,” she said, looking out over the narrow river road where men and women and children went on about daily things. “Every afternoon when he walked up this street for dinner, he’d bring somebody with him. A porter, a driver, somebody he had just met somewhere. How I resented it! Why did he have to bring a total stranger to eat with our family? It was our family. But he explained to me that charity was mandatory in Islam.”
    She talked about how Bibi used to supervise the preparation of enormous tubs of fesenjoon and durshana for Ramadan, and they would open the house to the poor, who would come from all over the neighborhood with pots to fill and take home to