The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf: A Novel

by Mohja Kahf

  That again. "I'm not American!" she yelled in Arabic, kicking dust at Afaaf. Then, because the worst insults she knew in Arabic were what her parents blurted when she or her brothers misbehavedbrat or at worst, churl-she launched into a torrent of English: "I hate you-you're a FILTHY girl, with FILTHY friends-you take me home-you take me home RIGHT NOW. You-you-you goddamn bitch."

  Ghazi whistled and said, "Listen to her go off in American!" and Ghalya giggled like it was a fine joke.

  But Khadra gasped and covered her mouth with her hand because she'd just cussed. In Mecca. On Haj. Although she didn't think they were still inside the Holy Precincts. Wait: did that mean she had to do ihram again at the miqat before she got back in the city? Had she violated ihram? But what did it all matter-she had done so many wrong things here, was under such wave upon towering wave of darkness, like someone in a crashing night-storm, who can only clap her hands to her ears at every thunderbolt, and see only a handspan before her at every lightning strike-it was hopeless to dream of absolution. So it was all for nothing: she hadn't even finished Haj, and she'd already blown it. She would never emerge pure as a newborn babe.

  She went through the rest of the Haj motions feeling hollow, feeling like a hypocrite. On the plane home, she said, "I'm glad we're through with that place."

  "Aunt Saweem's?" her mother said.

  "Yeah. It creeps me out."

  Ebtehaj fixed Khadra with a stare. "She only says things like this to irritate me," she said, turning to her husband.

  Khadra was glad to be going home. "Home"-she said, without thinking. She pressed her nose against the airplane window. The lights of Indianapolis spread out on the dark earth beneath the jet. The sweet relief of her own clean bed awaited her there-and only there, of all the earth.

  If you were to fill the lamps to overflowing with fat Their glow would point the way to every acquisition of knowledge And if their oil is wanting, their wicks go dry Where is the light of a thread not immersed?

  -Aisha Taymuria, nineteenth-century poet of Egypt

  Khadra was elated when she got an acceptance letter from Indiana University, Bloomington. She didn't have to go to IUPUI or community college. Which would have been her fate had she not had a mahram, Eyad, driving to IU every day in a little used Gremlin she could share with him.

  Her parents were as excited as they'd been when Eyad started college. Almost too much so: they covered the kitchen table with course catalogs and schedule forms and pored over her distribution requisites and major requirements. Ebtehaj, who'd never had such parental help in her college years, was glad to spend several very efficient late-night sessions mapping out a course plan for all four years and Wajdy, who loved a time-and-logistics management problem, worked out how Khadra could fit in the classes she needed and those she wanted in her first semester, given the parameters of what was offered when.

  She was assigned work-study in the entomology department. Damselflies pinned in shadowboxes dotted the wall behind her. And in the top drawer of her worktable, there was a little dish of spare beetle legs. How fine is that, she marveled, a dish of spare legs.

  She thought it was cool that instead of a job requiring her to say "Would you like fries with that?" she had one where she could say, "Will that be the aeshna cyanea naiads'-those were the nymph stage dragonflies-"or the adult plathemis lydia?" Bug taxonomy was so different in each phase-yet the cells of one stage produced the cells of the next, and somehow it was the same creature.

  Khadra and Eyad were not a part of the mainstream campus scene of frat houses and tailgate parties. Most of the "practicing" Muslim students stayed away from all that. The CMC (Campus Muslim Council) was the heart of the Muslim scene in Bloomington. CMC had a little ratty cubicle with a file cabinet with the overblown name of office amid the equally tatty offices of other student groups. They met twice a week, once for juma in a carpeted off campus basement and once in a classroom for organizational stuff. Eyad was vice-president. Of course Khadra joined. The club had a mix of South Asians and Arabs (all engineering and pre-med majors), and increasingly teemed with big-bearded religious male Gulfies, men from the Arab Gulf states. The other Arab men on campus, Palestinians and Egyptians and Iraqis and Algerians, and most of the Arab women foreign students, generally belonged to the more secular Arab Students Club or the African Students Unity Organization, with its pan-African leanings.

  If you were a Campus Muslim Council type of student, you wren't the type of Muslim that dated. You could say, as Tayiba had said to Khadra and a gaggle of CMC girls who'd given her the of snake-eyes when they caught her walking around easy as you please with Danny Nabolsy, "we had a study group at the library but everyone else left and then we went for coffee but only because we were both thirsty." But you didn't call it dating.

  One of the most delicious things about the campus Muslim scene for the earnest young brothers and sisters was the Muslim modesty dance. Its basic move was the lowering of the gaze. Who can lower their gaze more? Who is the modestest one of all? The more attractive a "brother" found a "sister," he more sternly he kept his gaze lowered before her at the Divest from South Africa protest, staring hard at the ground with furrowed brow. I'm a modest guy, his lowered gaze said, and I find you worth showing how modest I am. His lashes trembled on his cheeks with the effort. For if she was some middle-aged auntie, or a mere unripe kid-sister girlchild, why would he bother? Having a male gaze lowered before you said, You are a Woman to me, with a capital W. What a thrill for a woman newly hatched from her egg of girlhood, what a delicious gut-tightening flutter of confusion and power. Her gaze lowered too, and her eyelashes lay down on her flushed cheeks. Or she may on purpose roughen her voice and find some important Islamic point to make or, stepping into the role of girl-next-door Muslim sister, something in the setup of the event that needed brisk tending to, to help her pretend she didn't feel the shimmer in the air between them. And then, in the next round, she may lower her hemline even more, and tighten her headscarf, and make her hijab stricter-lo, she has found someone worth being the queen of modesty for. And how that thrilled the young brothers, for it meant they were not little boys anymore but Men. Watch out then. Danger, sexy danger, Muslim flirtation-via-modesty-games danger, was in the air. It was worth never missing a CMC meeting to be part of this.

  Bizarre rumors circulated among the Campus Muslim Council kids about the local Sufis. "They swim naked together in Lake Monroe" was one of them. "Because they think they're so spiritual they're above gender. You know, like Gandhi sleeping with the naked girls!"

  "And one of them is gay. The Sufis."

  "But he's married."

  "But he's gay."

  "And he goes to class in his bathrobe."

  "It's a kimono."

  "It looks like a bathrobe."

  The supposedly gay married man in the kimono was actually a Finnish professor and his wife was a Japanese woman who was an adjunct lecturer in thermodynamics and also part of the whole mysterious (to the regular Muslims) Sufi cabal. They were rumored (by the regular Muslims and the general populace) to hold esoteric Sufi rituals in Nashville, Indiana, a nearby artsy-fartsy smudge on the map where yet more Sufis existed among the glassblowers, longhaired sculptors, and budding Georgia O'Keeffes and Jackson Pollocks who congregated there.

  "They don't look Muslim to me," Khadra said to a classmate.

  "You don't have a `look' that determines whether you're Muslim," Joy Shelby retorted.

  But Khadra knew that you did, no matter what her new friend said.

  "So it's Shalaby, originally," Eyad said when Khadra mentioned Joy's last name. "Why did she change it to sound more American?"

  "She's from Mishawaka."

  "Oh," Eyad said. That explained it. The Muslims who lived in that northern Indiana town were the assimilated kind, second- and thirdgeneration Americans descended from turn-of-the-century Arab immigrants. They had failed to preserve their identity-they'd caved.

  "Hey-it was a different era when my
grandfather came over," Joy said when Khadra mentioned Eyad's comment about her family name. "He was just a farm boy. Immigrants were more afraid back then, okay? Less educated. They did whatever the Ellis Island officer said, okay? If he told you Anglicize your name, you did. Sorry it doesn't meet your standards of ethnic purity."

  Joy's family album was part of the American landscape in a way that Khadra did not think it possible for her family ever to be. Her brother and her father, like his father before him, worked in a steel factory, helping to make one of America's basic building blocks.

  Khadra and Joy biked to a Kierkegaard study group, Joy in shorts, Khadra in baggy trousers and a long-sleeved tunic top that reached her knees. Dogwoods were in bloom along the avenue. The sun shone on puddles left by the previous night's rain in ruts and chuckholes that splashed as they biked through them, dispersing clusters of midges and gnats. Their destination was a Japanese restaurant where the group was meeting.

  Khadra stopped cold outside the restaurant and said, "I can't go in there."

  "Why not?" Joy said, her Pat Benatar mullet a little windwhipped.

  "It's a bar."

  Joy looked up. The sign read "Japanese Restaurant and Sushi Bar." "It's just a sushi bar, Khadra." She was already threading the lock ring through her front wheel.

  "Well I don't know what sushi is, but a bar is a bar. I can't go inside a bar."

  "It's not a bar-bar! Like, not a pub or a tavern or a beer house. Sushi is seafood, okay? Christ, I thought I was the hick, coming from Mishawaka," Joy said. She snapped her bike padlock shut. As part of the first generation in her family to go to college, she had enough to deal with, without some little Arab girl from a privileged college-educated family trying to tell her what was acceptable and what was not in the "Islamic lifestyle." As if Islam was a lifestyle. Instead of a faith.

  It was moments like this, and things like Joy's casual blasphemous use of "Christ" that made Khadra doubt the whole "it's okay for Islam to adapt to new locales" argument Joy put forth. It seemed to Khadra that her friend was just an assimilated Muslim, plain and simple.

  "Do they serve alcohol?" Khadra pressed.

  "God, I don't know. Look, we're gonna be late for the study group. I can't believe I'm out here debating this with you. I'm going in." Joy abandoned Khadra to her doubts.

  Khadra hoisted her bookbag off her shoulders and squinted up at the sign again. She had a Fear and Trembling exam coming up in Intro to Existential Thought. The material mystified her and she really needed the study group. Whispering a prayer for guidance, she entered the sushi bar.

  Khadra resented the way Joy always seemed to assume, as if it were a given, that succumbing to white, middle-class, middle America's norms on all things-proms, birthday parties, eating out, clothing, and a thousand other things-was not only the unavoidable destiny of pathetic newcomers like Khadra and her family, but was somehow morally superior.

  "McDonald's Muslim," she once accused Joy hotly.

  "What?" Joy said.

  "McMuslim" Khadra repeated, sniffing. "It means you believe by default in the typical American lifestyle of self-indulgence, waste, and global oppression." She loved listening to her leftist college professors. They gave her a language to critique America that fit with her parents' stance, or with the social justice part, anyway. This was a revelation, that some of the things she'd learned at home not only stood up to outside scrutiny, but actually coincided with the views of some of her professors. Not the religion part, though.

  Say, "He is Lord of the East and of the West and of all that is between the two, " if you have intelligence.

  -Quran: The Poets, 27

  "Why don't you come up and visit?" Joy said one day.

  Going up by herself on that far a drive with just some other girl from college was not going to happen. But Khadra persuaded Eyad to come along (he'd get to visit some of his old CMC buddies in the area), making it okay with her parents that she'd be spending the night away from home.

  As they drove down joy's tree-lined street of small white houses with postage-stamp front yards and big porches, someone yelled out her name.

  "Your mom said to tell you-she at Im Litfy's."

  "Okay, Donnie!" Joy called. "That's our next-door neighbor," she explained to Khadra and her brother.

  Khadra was overwhelmed with a sense of home as she entered Im Litfy's kitchen. Maybe it was the garlic and cilantro smell, or maybe it was the scene of kibbeh-making that greeted them. Khalto Im Litfy presided over a Moulinex meat grinder just like the one the Shamys used at home-in fact, Moulinex simply translated as kibbeh machine in Arabic. Here too was the giant bowl of peeled onions, here was the pile of ground lamb meat. Behold, the mountain of bulgur. Into the maw of the Moulinex were poured these three, whose fates would be forever ground together, though they knew not each other before that hour.

  A pear-shaped woman came out from around the table with a heavy, comfortable gait. Her short, coarse black hair was partially covered by a snatch of bandanna to keep it out of the meatwork. To Khadra and Eyad she said, "I'm Rose, Joy's mom. I'd shake hands, hon, but as you can see . . . " She was up to her elbows in raw meat and onions. "But I'm glad you're here! You're right on time!"

  Im Litfy, gray-haired and jolly, explained, "She means right on time to help out." She had a thick accent in English but a pure native inflection in Arabic.

  "Wash your hands! I need stuffers!" Joy's mother said. "Stuff those holla kibbehs for me. Pull up that chair, kiddo," she nodded to Khadra. "You too, slugger," she said to Eyad, who clearly expected to be escorted to the living room to sit with men. And "Slugger?" No Arab woman had ever referred to him with a baseball epithet.

  No Arab men turned up to rescue him, either. He and Joy and Khadra were conscripted into hard labor by the Queens of Kibbeh. For kibbeh was a great and complex task, requiring a whole clan in the kitchen, way beyond the grasp of the lonely nuclear family in America, severed from the web of extended family. Down into the hot oil went the small, football-shaped ovals of stuffed kibbeh, bursting with ground meat and pine nuts. Out they came again fried, shiny and grainy and brown. Into the oven went tray after tray. The pan kibbeh was cut into diamonds, cut into stars.

  "For the Arab Pride festival tomorrow," Rose said. "In the morning, we take the food over to Im Litfy's church, St. George's. That's where the parade'll end with a banquet."

  You could see Khadra and Eyad do a mental double-take. Church? Im Litfy? Who felt as familiar as their own grandmother, whose kitchen felt like home?

  Khadra glanced at their hostess' face, her features so familiarly Syrian, her cadence and voice equally so. What other homes of similar sweetness and joy had they passed by all these years, insisting as they did on their separateness and specialness, then? What a waste. Something started to unravel in Khadra there in the kitchen, bringing her almost to the point of secret tears. Confused, she kept them in.

  "We saved some for ya, Baker," Rose said. A guy in a denim jacket suddenly filled the doorway, beefy and big and sloping, with wide hips and slow, heavy movement. He had a shock of coarse black hair and strong black eyebrows from ear to ear. Fresh cold air came in with him, and a smell of woodburning that made Khadra think of crackling logs on a fire and rustling piles of autumn leaves. Two more children appeared when he entered, girls about ten and twelve in soccer uniforms.

  "Baker, meet Joy's friends from college," Rose said. "And here's my youngest, Amalie, and this is Im Litfy's granddaughter Lisa."

  Baker shook hands with Eyad and then stuck out his hand to Khadra. It was such a big gentle hand; Khadra's little pudgy one instinctively homed into its big clasp and he covered it with his other hand. Eyad flashed her a glance-shaking a man's hand?-but she ignored it. "Hey, welcome to Mishawaka," Baker said. "How's my kid sister?" He ruffled joy's hair as she ducked her head uselessly.

  Later, after tea and baklava, the whole family smoked, except Joy. "Joy's our little crusader for anti-smoking," Rose said proudly, puffing a c
igarette out on the Shelby front porch, a generous space cluttered with plants and odd things, like what appeared to be a stuffed king cobra. Khadra started when she found it at her elbow.

  "That's Pete Seeger," Joy said, indicating the snake with a nod. "Baker beaned 'im, Dad stuffed 'im, and I named 'im."

  The Shalaby father had welcomed them with Arab-style effusions of `ahlan, ahlan wa sahlan, "and knew enough old-school ways not to offer his hand to Khadra but to place it on his heart to greet her. He now lit up a pipe. He had a square head, big bushy eyebrows, and thick coarse hair gone to iron gray. "Did you know," he said, puffing out his first cloud of smoke, "that Indiana was once covered so thickly with forest that a squirrel could go the entire state without ever touching the ground?"

  "Really?" Eyad said politely. "Just jumping from tree to tree?" He looked such an overly neat college boy in this setting. In any setting, really, but more so here.

  Joy nudged Khadra and whispered, grinning,"The long grasses line is next,"

  "Incredible, how fertile this land is, Amreeka," Joy's dad went on. "Once upon a time, a long time ago, the Middle East was that rich in greenness. But the kings of the old days-now, I'm talking preIslam, pre-Christianity, pre-Roman even, going way back-well, the kings, they cut down the cedar forests to finance war after war, see. And now we have what we have," he finished.

  Khadra looked at Joy. She was wrong. Her dad wasn't following the script.

  "And the long grass that covered Indiana," Bou-Baker went on, and Joy smiled at Khadra, vindicated. "Why, they were so tall that you couldn't see a rider on a horse come through them at full gallop. Ey, na'am. Yes, indeed." Puff, puff-puff. Irongray bushy eyebrows going up and down.

  Rose picked up a guitar from the corner of the porch and strummed it as the fireflies of evening came out. Khadra recognized an old Fayruz tune from her father's tapes, a song, she found out in college, which came from a Gibran poem. Something like,