Free Between Two Worlds by Zainab Salbi Page B

grandfather on his father’s side had registered as being of Ottoman origin while my mother’s, the one who made strings, had registered as being of Iranian origin. My father was therefore considered to be of Ottoman origin and Uncle Adel of Iranian origin, which is why my brothers and I were safe from deportation, and my cousins weren’t.
    “They’re deporting the wealthiest people first,” Mama said. “That is why we think Aunt Ishraq and her family were among the first. I think they just want to steal our homes and businesses. Will this corruption never stop? They have no right! How many people are gone? Thousands, tens of thousands maybe. We are all Iraqi, and yet there are empty houses all over Baghdad!”
    So how come we were safe now?
    “We talked to the president,” she told me. “It just took us a while to reach him. But when we sat down with him, he was very good about it. We showed him my grandfather’s birth certificate—not that that means much, but it was something. So he made us a ‘special file.’ ”
    A special file. I mulled that phrase. I wasn’t sure if it was good or bad.
    “Don’t worry, honey,” Mama said. “Iraq will always be our home.”
    We had been standing on the balcony for a long time that afternoon. Mama drew me inside her fur coat to warm me, and I saw the bend in the graceful calligraphy of the gold coin where it had been dented. I wondered, as I did every time I looked at that dent, what force had been so strong as to cause it.
    Because of our special file, Aunt Ishraq and her family were eventually allowed to come home. Everybody brought food to their house and we had a picnic on the floor. There was no table. Everything in their house—the furniture, their dishes, their toys and school books—was gone. The house was empty. They said almost nothing about what had happened to them while they were gone.
    Being a “special file” was a threat that remained with our family all our lives. At any time a government official could request our citizenship papers and, because the papers were signed by a single recognizable officer in the Mukhabarat, anyone checking them knew immediately that my mother’s family’s “Iraqi” citizenship was in question, subjecting them to fear and intimidation. I happened to be at Uncle Adel’s house the night his younger son, Hussam, started a new school, and Hussam looked so dejected that I asked what was wrong. It turned out that Uncle Adel had been so afraid to send Hussam to school with his “special file” papers that he had told Hussam to tell the teacher he had forgotten them. His teacher sent him to the principal and, following Uncle Adel’s instructions, he told the principal that his parents were out of town but that he had an adult friend he could call who could come in and vouch for him. Hussam sat in the principal’s office for an hour until the friend, a high-ranking Baath official, showed up and registered him. “I felt as if the whole school was looking at me,” he told me, his face down. “What did we do wrong? Why do they treat us this way?” To this day, Hussam gets tears in his eyes remembering his fear and humiliation. When he tried to register his own son for school twenty years later, he was told, “Oh, your papers are in not in this office—you have to go the special file office,” and the nightmare was passed down to the next generation.
     
    There is only one memory I truly wish I could erase. It is of my mother.
    I was upstairs in my room doing my homework some months after we had secured our “special file.” It was late, and my brothers were already asleep. My father was downstairs watching television, and he called out to ask me to check on my mother. I went to their bedroom door and found it closed. I knocked, then knocked again. She didn’t answer. Finally, I went inside and was hit by a blast of very warm air. The heater was on high. All the lights were on. It seemed very bright, almost