Baghdad Honeymoon

"What I don't understand--" said the slim young mother from California as she sat cuddling her baby son in a Rome boarding house last week, "what I don't understand is he said he was a Christian, but when we got to Baghdad, I found he was no Christian. He was all Arab. When an Arab marries, he doesn't want a wife or a companion; he just wants a slave. They treat their women like dirt--worse than dirt. They slug them and spit in their faces and then go off and leave them at home while they go sit in these coffee houses. Even before we left Tacoma, he used to go out to a tavern some nights and leave me at home with baby. I told him I wouldn't stand for that, and I asked if he'd leave me at home alone when we got to Iraq. 'Oh no,' he said, 'I promise I'll never leave you one night alone.' But when we got to Baghdad, he was off almost every night, leaving me with his parents, who didn't speak any English--and I didn't speak any Arabic. Do you think that's any way to treat a wife?"

Off to Mother. With this torrent of words, redhaired, leggy Helen Johnstone purged herself of the romantic dream she had nurtured three years ago when she was a clerk in the accounting department of West Coast Airlines and met a sloe-eyed Iraqi student at the College of Puget Sound. Even the reservations of Helen's father, a retired Navy commander, were not strong enough to hinder the marriage, and with the blessings of both her parents, Helen became Mrs. Abdul

Jebbar Subbagh in a blossom-strewn ceremony at the First Methodist Church in Palo Alto. In time a baby son was born, and the local minister christened him Paul. Except for the homesickness in Abdul's heart, all might have been well, but at last (in Helen's words), "Nothing would do but we had to go and visit his mother in Baghdad."

One for You. "He said his family lived in a 14-room house," she recalled, "and that we'd be served by servants off gold plates. Well, you know, in the States a 14-room house means something, but there they didn't even have a sink. The place was filthy, and the food didn't agree with me. His parents expected me to sit on the floor and do the baby's washing by hand, but he didn't seem to care. I begged him to get us a house by ourselves, but he wouldn't do it. He just wanted to play around and live off his parents. We started having rows, and one morning he showed me a revolver with three bullets. 'One for you,' he said, 'one for me and one for the baby.' I decided he had pushed me around for the last time."

With the help of the U.S. vice consul, who intervened in her behalf at the Ministry of Justice, Helen Subbagh was at last able to get her baby (a U.S. citizen) away from her husband's family, but with the proviso from the court that she must not take the child out of the country. But, "as soon as I had Paul safe in my arms," she confessed, "I went to a suburban station where the family couldn't follow me, and I got the last second-class ticket on the first train leaving for Basra." Added Mrs. Subbagh, "I'm never going to leave the United States again as long as I live."

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