12. SHADOW

SADDAM HUSSEIN cast a shadow over Ali’s childhood.

The highway to Saddam International Airport in Baghdad ran right by his family’s house. Standing in his front yard, Ali would watch the convoys of arriving world leaders on their way to see President Hussein. A few times, his teachers took their classes to the airport.

“They put us in a line, to welcome the presidents,” Ali said. “There would be 50 motorcycles, then all the limousines. They would slow down, open the roofs. I remember seeing Tito,” he added, referring to the former president of Yugoslavia.

It was brutally hot, standing outside in the sun. Afterward, Ali would invite his teachers and some classmates back to his house for “tea, water, and sometimes lunch.”

His parents, Shiites, were educated and secular; only his mother prayed. His mother—who was Iranian but had Iraqi citizenship through her marriage—worked for the Ministry of the Interior, in an ID office. His father, who owned a photography studio, “was one of the best black-and-white cameramen in the Mideast,” Ali said, proudly.

His father told Ali that as a child, he had lived in the same Baghdad neighborhood as Saddam, who was from a Sunni tribe.

“He thought he was a thug,” Ali said. “Sometimes, my father would curse him, call him names. I used to freak out. I thought we’d be arrested.”

But there was a larger source of anxiety for their family: Tensions with the Shiite-majority nation of Iran were always high, but in 1980 Saddam sent troops into Iran—initiating a devastating war that would last eight years. The government sent his father to the front lines to photograph battles.

This angered his father, Ali said. “But you cannot say no to Saddam.” The government began deporting tens of thousands of Iranians and people thought to be of Iranian descent.

“Kids came home from school, they couldn’t find their parents,” Ali said.

Ali hated the red mark on his mother’s government-issued ID card that indicated she was Iranian. It was unnerving that she herself worked in an ID office. “It was a very sensitive place,” Ali said. “She needed clearance to work there.” He knew the building where she worked was filled with government security forces and police officers.

“I felt at any minute, they could take our mom.”

In 1984, when he was 13, police showed up at his aunt’s house in Baghdad. It was before dawn; her family was asleep. They were not allowed to change out of their night clothes; the police pushed them into a car.

“They took my aunt, her husband, and her child to the Iranian border, and said, ‘OK, go!’ ”

After that, “we were afraid all the time,” Ali said.

This changed in March 2003, when the United States and allied forces invaded Iraq; nine months later, they captured Saddam. He was tried by an Iraqi court and executed in December 2006. “It was one of the happiest days of my life,” Ali said.

He regrets that his father—who died in 2000—missed seeing the dictator’s downfall.

Ali’s sense of unease has never left.

In Utica, he is careful: driving down Genesee Street, or walking to see a client.

“Ninety-five percent of Iraqis have cop phobia,” he said, sitting in his comfortable living room on South Street.

It does not take much: If Ali sees a young cop slowly driving by his old car, his heart races and he is on high alert.

There are only about 300 Iraqis in Utica. “I wish the city would bring in more Arab refugees,” Ali said. “The more, the better!”

He needs more Arab-speaking clients; many Iraqis who moved to Utica years ago now speak English. And their kids are fluent. Without an influx of refugees, he will be out of work.

But also—he longs to connect.

He treats his clients like family, visiting those who have left the hospital and no longer need his services; he attends the funerals of those who have died. A few weeks ago, he dropped off two trout fillets at the home of the Alsayfis, an Iraqi family he has known since they arrived 10 months ago.

On a clear September day in 2013, the Alsayfis’ small apartment was a pressure cooker.

The father, Sabah, a handsome man with a lined face, is disabled because of a back injury. The mother, Khoulood, who has warm, expressive eyes, rarely leaves the apartment.

But Ali was immediately comfortable: He was wearing a suit and tie—and had brought baklava.

The father lit up—and apologized for being in a sweatshirt. He had just come back from the dentist. “Back home, if I’m going outside the house, I wear gloves and a jacket.”

The mother pushed a plate of tangerines toward Ali and me. Her two sons, Anwar and Ehab—strapping young men—were worried about her. A third son, Suroor, was not home.

Ali leaned toward the mother.

“I have friends outside the family,” Anwar, 21, said. “But my mother has no one her age she can talk to.”

“She is just here,” he said, indicating the apartment. No pictures were on the walls—but there were a few chairs, blue curtains on the windows, and a table.

“It is very hard,” the mother said. Tears welled in her eyes.

“She could go to school,” Ehab, 27, said. “But my father needs help.”

“I have to take care of my husband,” the mother said.

“She didn’t go to school in Iraq,” Ehab added. “She had to stop after the second grade.”

The mother is focused on her boys: When they come home on their lunch break from ESL classes, she puts out potatoes, eggplant, tomato slices, rice, and yogurt. “Sometimes spinach soup,” she said.

Ali listened, appreciatively.

“I wish good things for my sons,” the mother said, smiling. “Maybe they will not be doctors, but . . .”

“She always says, ‘I wish for you to get married, and start a family,’ ” Anwar said.

“As long as I still have strength in me,” she said. “I want them to get married. Then I’m done!”

Ali smiled at this.

“I will choose!” Anwar told her. “I will choose.”

Anwar works hard in his ESL classes and has made progress. When he talks about his teacher, Jennifer, he smiles: “Every day is something different. Sometimes Jennifer brings her iPad and we can use it; sometimes she takes us to computer class.” His plan is to get his GED, attend college, then work in computer technology.

Ehab, the eldest, is less hopeful. For years, he was a waiter at a restaurant in Damascus that served Middle Eastern and Western food; he dreamed of one day opening a café. But he is frustrated by his limited English, despite seven months of classes, and feels cut off and lonely.

“I’m sorry!” he said, apologizing for being depressed. “But that’s the truth. Most of the time, I stay home and watch Arabic TV shows.”

In a city with thousands of Muslim refugees, they are one of the few Mandaeans, part of a religion that sprang up in the Middle East, probably in the first three centuries AD. Its followers revere John the Baptist.

There are only three families of their faith in Utica, Ehab said. “Each family worships by themselves.”

Almost a decade ago, the Alsayfis fled Iraq for Syria because of religious persecution.

Initially, Damascus, where they lived and worked for eight years, felt safe. But in 2011, about two years before they left, Assad’s government forces started battling insurgents. There were explosions, clashes in the street.

“There was no security,” the mother said. She spoke for a long time to Ali, who listened intently.

Finally, Ali said: “One day, she was with her husband in a cab. They were going to get new residency cards —you have to do this every three months,” he explained. But people in the cars around them—from the Syrian Army and the Free Syrian Army—started shooting at each other.”

After they got their cards stamped, the couple got in another cab to go home. But the Syrian Army stopped them at a checkpoint.

“Then members of the opposition drove up,” Ali said. “They pulled out their guns and started firing.”

No one in the living room spoke for a minute.

Then the mother said, “Before coming to Utica, it was very scary. We couldn’t go out.”

Later, Ali quietly drove past blocks of small porch houses that needed paint. I noticed that while his eyebrows and the small amount of hair on his head were black, his beard was stark white.

“Why is that?” I asked.

Ali did not take his eyes off the road.

“My brother and my two nephews were kidnapped by terrorists,” he said.

He was silent for a minute.

“When I heard that, I died,” he said. He had fallen into a deep, bottomless sleep.

“When I woke up,” he said, touching his beard, “it had turned white.”