by Mohja Kahf
"I can't have a baby now," she whispered to the nurse at the student clinic, sitting on the examination table in shock after the doctor had just told her. Her face was sallow, her eyes puffy. She had never known anything more clearly or more urgently. "I can't."
"You're going to have children sooner or later," Ebtehaj launched at her. "In two or three years, or now, what's the difference?"
"Your life is not in danger," her father said, beginning this line of argument for the fourth time that evening.
Khadra put a sofa pillow on her face to block out the attacks.
"My life is in danger," she said to the golden-eyed lacewings in the entomology lab. She stared at one on a twig, about half an inch long, with four pale green wings, antenna the length again of its body, and bulging shiny eyes. It remained motionless, except for the careful survey of its antennae. Khadra dropped right there and prayed another Consultation Prayer on the gritty floor of the specimen room.
She'd really thought her parents would support her, after she told them how much Consultation she'd prayed on the decision. That's why she told them, expecting them to support her against Juma, help him see why this was okay for her to do. Why it was not haram. What about all those teachings where abortion was allowed in shariah? One hundred and twenty days, and all that. It turned out that nothing she'd read described the real Muslim gut reaction to the question of abortion. Imam Ghazali could have an abortion, maybe, but she, Khadra, could not.
Tayiba came over, with her baby girl Nia on her hip. She was, in Ebtehaj and Wajdy's eyes, a voice of reason from Khadra's generation. She was a part-time student, wife, mother, and mosque volunteer.
"It's not so bad? That's what you're here to tell me?" Khadra said. "Be the Muslim Superwoman?" Like Zuhura, she could have added, but didn't.
"Don't put words in my mouth," Tayiba said sharply. "I never said be Superwoman. I never said it was easy." Zuhura's shadow loomed over both of them. Zuhura the martyr.
Khadra's father said, "My mother died having me. They told her it was risky, but she went ahead and had me." He paused. He seemed to lose his train of thought. "She died having me. A woman who dies in childbirth is considered a martyr-goes straight to heaven."
"Well, I don't want to die in childbirth," Khadra said sarcastically.
"I'm not suggesting you do so," he said quietly. "I'm saying, my mother sacrificed everything for a child. Sacrificed her own self."
"Well, I am not your mother," Khadra shot back. "I don't want to be your mother."
"I didn't raise you to speak to me in that tone," he snapped, as he rarely ever did.
Yeah, you did, Khadra thought sullenly. You raised me to go out and learn, but deep down you still want me to be just like your mother. So where did you think all these contradictions would lead me if not to this frustration, this tone of voice? But I am not going to kill myself to fit into the life you have all mapped out for me.
The medicine for heart's pain is the death of your tarnished soul
-only this: the homeopathic cure: a bit of poison
-Attar
Khadra puked a trail to the toilet. It was taking her over, gnawing out her insides, the clot. The bloodclot that glommed to the wall of her womb. The zygote. It was not a fetus yet. Not even an embryo. It certainly was not a baby. It was a growth, invading her body, reaching out its tentacles, even up her throat. It was a possibility, one she could not entertain. It would lock her into a life, a very specific kind of life with Juma, that she was no longer certain she wanted. She knelt on the tiles with a wet rag mopping up the vomit. Seven times, once with Ajax powder.
No. She had been here too many times, kneeling, her face low to the floor, taking dust mites up her raw nose. Hands coarse with scouring powder, scrubbing the filth of two worlds. Scrubbing away some taint she could never escape.
No, enough, no. Her back was up against the wall, the bathroom small, mewing her in. She beat the floor with the Ajax canister over and over with the force of her will, no no no, no no no no, scattering the powder seven times. Where was it, this will of hers, this misshapen self? She needed to know it. Hello, self. Can we meet at last? It was not vainglorious to have a self. It was not the same as selfish individualism, no. You have to have a self to even start on a journey to God. To cultivate your nafi whom God invites to enter the Garden at the end of Surat al-Fajr. She had not taken even a baby step in that direction. Her self was a meager thing, scuttling behind a toilet, what she hadn't given over of it to Mama, to Juma. Too much, she has given away too much. She will not give the last inches of her body, will not let them fill her up with a life she does not want. Feral, it was not a word but a spasm, the snarl of a fanged thing gnawing at a trap: no. No, no, no, no, no, no.
Juma's face looked like it was going to break, just get cracks all over it and crumble. She told him she had prayed Consultation on it three times and was set and determined. And that if it meant divorce, so be it. He went away. Got in the car and screeched away. Went deep into the cave where wounded men go when they walk around not talking to anyone about what's happening to them on the inside. Otherwise known as Terre Haute.
Khadra steeled herself not to worry about Juma. Or the hurt she saw in his face before the shutter went down over his feelings. "He'll go home to Kuwait and his mommy and daddy will find him someone else to marry in a snap. He'll have a zillion kids and live in that family compound and be happy ever after."
Her regular doctor wouldn't perform the abortion. He'd been the one who prescribed the antibiotic when Khadra had strep, but forgot to tell her that antibiotics mess with the effectiveness of the birth control pill. No, he wouldn't do it. Neither would anyone else at the campus clinic, so Khadra had to find one in Indianapolis.
"Why did you come with me?" she asked Joy. Her parents had refused. Eyad, too. "I'm not going to be a party to something I think is munkar, "he said.
It was a cold Indiana day in late autumn, when the vibrant foliage was gone, and everything so bare and hopeless that it was hard to believe the world might ever bloom again. Joy had waited out in the hallway reading an Amanda Cross mystery and, when summoned, sat next to Khadra's upholstered recliner in the recovery lounge. Now she was driving her home through the wintry sleet. Home to the broken nest. "You're horrified by abortion, Joy. Even if you're pro-choice. You're the most horrified by abortion prochoice person I know. So why'd you come?"
"I'm your friend. Friends don't drop you when you do something they disapprove."
Corny Hoosier Joy. Is that what friends did? I wouldn't know, Khadra thought. I've never been a real friend, or had one. I've demanded that my friends conform to what I approve and disapprove. She leaned back in the bucket seat and closed her eyes. "You're a beautiful friend, Joy. You're a teacher of friendship."
"Aw, that's your meds talking," Joy said. She had this exaggerated idea about abortions, like Khadra must be on morphine or something, when all they'd given her was was a little pain reliever.
"Do you know what entomologists call the body of the bug in its different stages of life?" Khadra said. "An instar. Like, they'll go, `here is the nymph instar of the nine-spotted ladybug' or `the pupal instar of a blackfly has spiral gills."
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Joy said, keeping her eyes on the road.
"Know what they call the adult instar-the mature bug?"
"What?"
"An `imagine.' Yeah. Like, you and I are the `imagines' of the human species."
Joy concentrated on getting her home. She was leaving for an ecology internship in New Zealand as soon as the semester was over.
"Joy? Do you think God will punish me by not letting me have babies later, when I want them?" That's what Eyad had said, in his last angry conversation with her before the procedure. Now why did he have to say a thing like that? She needed someone to have her back. I'm holding out for a hero.
"God is not such an asshole," Joy said. After a while she added, alhamdulilah. "
Khadra ha
d some cramping and bleeding like a heavy period. Not really any more than she usually got. Some lower-back pain the day after she lugged around a chem textbook, her Trapper Keeper, and The Arab-Israeli Dilemma in her backpack. Skipped a day of classes but only that one. She had to get through the semester. Just get through.
Her parents would not speak to her. Their throats knotted, and the silence on their end of the phone grew, and they did not come to Khadra. She awoke in the apartment the third night and thought she felt her mother's hand smooth back her hair, stroke her damp forehead. It felt like the old days in Square One. Khadra almost cried. No one was there. She steeled herself. Just get through.
Everyone was talking about her. She felt their whispers feather around her. (Was this how Hanifa had felt?) Was there anyone in the community her parents hadn't told? She felt sure Eyad or Tayiba had told all her old friends and that the awkward glances she was getting on campus from the girls in hijab and the beardy boys were not coincidental. Dawah Center poster girl had fallen.
She offered Juma a khulu', or wife-initiated divorce. That way he wouldn't have to pay her the deferred part of the mahr, the rest of the eight thousand dollars. These were due to her if he initiated divorce. She was well versed on khulu', thanks to Dawah Center seminars. Popular Islam mostly buried khulu', and Muslim women the world over did not know they had this right. Modern Islamists such as the Dawah folk, however, revived many concepts from classical Islam and this was one of them.
Juma's pride was deeply offended by khulu'. She, repudiate him? He'd never even heard of it. Was Khadra making it up? No matter how many courses with sheikhs she may have taken, she was just a girl in Juma's eyes, a girl who'd grown up in America, to boot, and so couldn't possibly be trusted when it came to shariah matters.
Khadra didn't insist on khulu'. She was relieved, actually. She would have had to sell Teta's Ottoman coins and whatever else she owned to pay him back the front-mahr. And she didn't know what she would have done suddenly to support herself. Eyad was the one who'd worked since high school; other than the entomology lab, she'd never had a job. She wasn't going to ask her parents for money, even if she thought they had it to spare, which she knew they didn't.
It didn't seem fair to take all the after-mahr, since she'd been the one who wanted out. She took only enough to pay the rent and bills. She gave Juma back the wedding gold in its red velvet box.
Just as Khadra's marriage was going through its final twitches, Eyad announced his own intention to find a wife. "I know, I know, I have a few more years of school and residency left. But I'd like to complete half my religion," he said to his parents. "Temptation is everywhere," he complained separately to his father. But he didn't have to, since Wajdy remembered from his college days in Square One what the unmarried brothers went through, being around Americans who had no self-restraint.
Eyad's mother got on the case-a joyful project, but one that required care and circumspection and good planning. She excelled at these. She had contacts in Muslim communities all over the U.S. and Canada and, once a list was compiled, Eyad winnowed it down. They then paid each of the shortlisted girls a visit. This involved road trips to Detroit, Windsor, and Cincinnati over the next few months. In the end, the girl who was the one was right there in Indianapolis, or in the northern suburb of Carmel, anyway.
Omayma Hayyan was the daughter of an Iraqi colon specialist. She was slender, pretty, and expensive. She had wide green eyes, fair skin, a petite nose, and strawberry blonde hair under her exquisite scarves. She shopped at L. S. Ayres and the big malls, not Kmart and Sears, and somehow found ingredients from the racks of highend lines such as Liz Claiborne and Laura Ashley to put together hijab outfits that set new heights in Islamic fashion. Had a prep school education and went to Butler, drove to classes in a shiny white TransAm, an Eid gift from her doting father and mother. Bought new, of course. Her vanity plates said "WWPMD," which stood for What Would Prophet Muhammad Do?
What was not to like? Eyad was smitten. His brow knotted at the possibility of his sister and her bad choices ruining his outlook with Omayma and the Hayyans. "You just keep a lid on it, Khadra, that's all I'm saying," he said to Khadra at the door of her apartment one afternoon. He was dropping off Jihad to spend a weekend in Bloomington with her. Her little brother came with his Atari box and Pac-Man cartridge, oblivious.
"I'm not advertising it, if that's what you mean, you jerk, "Khadra said, quickly converting hurt to anger. "And my recovery is going well, thank you very much for asking. I hate you."
If you go one night to the mosque, be sure you walk with bright torches so everyone will note your piety
-Sanai
Eyad and Omayma's wedding was held in the Indianapolis Marriott, not some apartment complex lounge. Homey little weddings were not for Omayma's social set. Her father trained the hotel staff to understand the separation of the sexes, with the men in one banquet room and the women in another. Waiters matched the gender of the room they were serving. They didn't mind; Dr. Hayyan tipped them well.
When they returned from their honeymoon, Eyad and Omayma set up house in a new garden-apartment complex near Butler, where she was still working on her degree. Eyad commuted.
Khadra's new sister-in-law may have had sequins trimming the edges of her expensive scarves, but she was no less committed to Islam than the Dawah community. "Have you ever heard Dr. Allam speak?" Omayma asked Khadra. "I went to one of his lectures in Paris."
"No. Who's he?" Khadra said, eating another leftover wedding cannoli from a crystal dish on the coffee table. They were in Eyad and Omayma's apartment, in which every stick of furniture was newly purchased. At retail. It wasn't just her sister-in-law, it was Eyad-he seemed to have developed the immigrant child's craving for gleaming new things, after a lifetime on threadbare secondhand couches.
"He's amazing," Omayma went on. Her eyes widened. "He's, like, this religious scholar from Egypt. Oh my God, when he lectured-it was so intense. He turned off all the lights in the auditorium and then he goes, if I were the Angel of Death-if I were Azrael, come to take your lives, right now, how would you meet your Lord? Like, have you lived Islamically, and have you done good, or like, have you wasted your time on earth? And he, like, thundered. I got chills. I am so serious." She wiggled her toes for emphasis.
"Really," Khadra said. Even Omayma's toes were elegant. Not stubby, with flaking cuticles, like Khadra's. Even her toes felt numb, as numb as her heart that short dark season.
"Oh my God, yes," Omayma said. "That's when I totally knew that I had to get good with God and rededicate my life to Islam. And ever since I have," she said, "I've been so blessed-and now your brother has come into my life, so blessed-"
Noticing she was getting a little teary, Khadra handed her a tornup tissue she dug out of her pocket and, after looking at it, Omayma dabbed a teeny-tiny corner just under her eye. "Always dab, don't wipe, it's better for your skin, dear," she said to Khadra through delicate sniffles.
What's wrong with my skin? thought Khadra. Maybe it was Omayma coming into her life during the raw period after the abortion, or maybe her heart was simply too clenched up just then. She should have liked her. Were they not two very similar Muslim girls of Indianapolis?
" ... and there's this Muslim restaurant owner, and he, like, serves alcohol. Bottles lined up from here to the ceiling," Omayma said at the meeting to which she persuaded Khadra to come.
"Boycott him?" her friend Maha, the Sudanese doctor's daughter, asked.
"That's it, that's totally what we need to do." Omayma looked around the group with bright earnestness. She and Maha and some friends had recently formed a new sisters' circle called the Nusayba Society. Tres chic and trPs holy, they were the face of Islamic women's work for a new era. Khadra attended a few meetings to please her sister-in-law, but oh, how she would have despised these Muslim Junior Leaguers in her black-scarf days.
How like Mama she is, Khadra thought to herself while marking up one of the signs for the bo
ycott. How can Eyad stand it? Omayma didn't see herself as being like Ebtehaj at all. She saw her mother-inlaw as an old-fashioned innocent, out of style and out of step.
"What an-interesting-jilbab," Omayma said, looking at Ebtehaj's tan double knit with its large, outdated collar.
"Wajdy sewed it for me, thank you," Ebtehaj smiled. "Would you like him to make you one? Then we could have matching mother-in-law/daughter-in-law outfits!"
"Oh-ah-no, it's all right. I really wouldn't want to put Uncle Wajdy out," Omayma said, as Khadra saw her flash a look of "save me" to Eyad. It almost made Khadra want to defend her mother's polyester jilbabs. Almost.
"Have you ever thought about changing the look of the place?" Omayma asked, glancing around at the shabby sofa and the bare white walls, a little smudged around the light switches, and punctuated by "classic Islamic art" such as the black-velvet Kaba and the green prayer rug with the Prophet's mosque. They'd had those ever since Square One. Tacky as they were, Khadra couldn't imagine home without them.
Khadra followed her gaze. And suddenly, although she had vowed never to let country plaid anything cross the threshold of her own house, she wanted to smack Omayma's pretty little face. The Shamys (whose South Bend move had been twice postponed) were the last of the old Timbers crowd that still rented there. Everyone else had moved on. But because of the ugly garage-sale furniture, and the rest of the gimcrack decor and the refusals to indulge in things one craved over the years-things of the sort Omayma took for granted-she, Khadra, was able to go to IU. Because of Wajdy and Ebtehaj's extreme mindfulness and annoying diligence in all things.
And they were so vulnerable and fragile, her parents. They could be knocked flat by anyone. But this was a home they'd created, a home. Out of nothing. Out of arriving in America with so little. Intangibles their only treasure-their brains and their values. How dare Omayma? What could she know, just seeing surfaces? The godawful plaid couch, the ratty black velvet Kaba. They didn't tell the whole picture. They didn't tell anything.