The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf: A Novel

by Mohja Kahf

  Khadra gave Ebtehaj a hug when it was time to leave for campus the next morning. Her mother was in her robe de chambre, as she still called it, with a vocabulary left over from French colonialism in Syria. Sitting at the kitchen table in the worn old bathrobe and padded slippers, she was getting ready to debone chicken under the cold white glow of the energy-saving neon lights. To pick the slivers of meat even from between the neckbones, so as to use it in some dish that stretched out small quantities. She was taken by surprise.

  "What's all this?" she said. Her cheek smelling softly of Nivea cream. She and her daughter had not been speaking much since the ... what Khadra had done.

  "Nothing." Khadra said. But she clung a moment longer.

  "Well. Here's nothing back, then," Ebtehaj said, and hugged her too.

  The picket at the restaurant that Omayma organized happened on a cold sludgy day, the kind of day when the Indiana cold has drizzled so deep into your bones that you almost no longer remember what it feels like to be warm in summer. Had it snowed, it would at least have looked picturesque. Instead, the rain beat ugly pocks in dirty piles of shoveled snow. Khadra arrived late. She circled around looking for street parking while Ferdinand Marcos gave up power to Corazon Aquino in the Philippines and the remains of the U.S. space shuttle Challenger bobbed somewhere in the ocean. It was an area of downtown Indianapolis she'd only been to once or twiceshe seemed to recall Aunt Hajar Jefferson's salon being around here, near the Projects. And Uncle Taher's restaurant, the one he'd opened with his non-Muslim brother.

  Wait a minute. Uncle Taher's restaurant. TJ's. Was it-? Yes, it was. It was indeed the one they were demonstrating against. Khadra's stomach sank. A few passers-by were watching curiously and, inside the restaurant, at the windowside tables, patrons looked out at the line of protesters with their signs. Omayma was keyed up with the thrill of the moment, the collective action, the eyes upon them.

  Khadra had to work hard to get her attention, finally practically yanking her out of the line. "Did anyone talk to him before we organized this picket?" she asked her.

  "Talk, like, to whom?" Omayma said.

  "Uncle Taher."

  "Uncle Taher Tijan, that's his name, the owner of the restaurant. Did you try to talk to him first, find out why he has the bar? Maybe a non-Muslim investor is making him do it?"

  "What do you mean? A bar is, like, a bar. A BAR IS A STAIN ON OUR COMMUNITY!" she fell in shouting with the others.

  "This isn't your community. You don't live in this neighborhood," Khadra muttered to herself.

  A big bulky man with a long, sorrowful face came out of the restaurant toward them. "What's all this about?" he said. He read the first sign, then another. "ALCOHOL IS A SIN IN ISLAM."

  "GOOD MUSLIMS DON'T SELL BEER." He shook his head. He spotted Khadra.

  `Assalamu alaikum," he said. "Khadra? Is that you? You've changed. What's goin' on here?"

  Khadra wished she could drop into a hole and hide. "Wa alaikum assalam, Uncle Taher. I'm-I didn't know-I'm sorry-"

  "Aah," he said, waving his hand in dismissal. He turned and lumbered back into the restaurant.

  "Who was that?" one of the picketers said.

  "I think it was the owner," Omayma answered, with satisfaction.

  "He was a teacher of mine," Khadra said, kicking a stone on the sidewalk.

  When the silverfish is about to molt, he grows quiet, arches his body, and expands and contracts his abdomen until a split appears along his back. Gradually undulating his new body, he pulls himself through the crack headfirst ... a certain number simply die, unable to escape through the slit in their former backs.

  -Sue Hubbell, Broadsides from the Other Orders

  She drove home and got into bed. It was full of clutter. She pushed to the floor the pile of clothes and books and the empty bowl with bits of milk-softened cereal dried at its bottom. She tipped her heart over like a little boy's toy dump truck. She dumped out Juma and his loving. Sobbing in bed for days. Out, out. Out of my system.

  But what was happening to her? It wasn't just about Juma, the fact that her marriage was over finally hitting her. It was more, even, than the days of embryo bleeding out of her in agonizing bits and pieces.

  It took her by surprise, the sudden revulsion she felt for everything. For her whole life up till now. She wanted to abort the Dawah Center and its entire community. Its trim-bearded uncles in middle-management suits, its aunties fussing over her headscarf and her ovaries, its snotty Muslim children competing for brownie points with God.

  Twenty-one years of useless head-clutter. It all had to go. All those hard polished surfaces posing as spiritual guidance. All that smug knowledge. Islam is this, Islam is that. Maybe she believed some of it, maybe she didn't-but it needed to be cleared out so she could find out for herself this time. Not as a given. Not ladled on her plate and she had to eat it just because it was there.

  These were weeks during which she left the apartment hardly ever. She slept fitfully, ate badly, and puttered around aimlessly. By the light of the flickering TV, which she kept on late into the night for company-for she had never been so alone-the news of the world was too horrible, young Palestinian boys and girls of ten and twelve throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, and the soldiers dragging them and beating them, just pounding those kids with their rifles and boots. It was the first time American television had ever shown Israeli-on-Palestinian violence.

  Stupid Connie Chung and stupid American commentators and that all-news channel, CNN, were like, "But Brian, tell us how is this possible, we see Israel doing bad things to the whatcha- callems, how can that be?" and one asshole Zionist "expert" suggested that the violence done to Palestinians was their own fault, because they were not following Gandhian and Martin Luther Kingian nonviolence principles-"a rock is a very violent object!" he actually said. Khadra threw a plastic flip-flop at him and said "Fuck Gandhi and Martin, and fuck nonviolence, and fuck Israel, and fuck you, CNN!"

  It was all so horrible, there was no point watching it, ever. Khadra didn't want to hear another word of news again in her whole life. She switched on Whitney Houston, turned up the music loudloud, and buried her face in a pillow.

  She missed fajr after fajr sleeping through her alarm. It made her feel ill to miss a prayer. It was so drummed into her: the first thing a believer will be asked on the Day of Judgment is prayers. His foot will not move until he has accounted for the five dailies. She made up the late fajrs contritely at first. Then she began to be angry. The rest of the five, duhr, asr, maghreb, isha, she banged out with fierce uncaring roteness, pecking the floor with her forehead. Peck peck peck, one rakat after the other.

  There, she said, flinging it at God. Here's what you demanded. Two rakats? Four? Four-three-four? Take it, take them all! Was this what prayer was for, to stave off an exacting bean counter? Ticks on some kind of scorecard He was keeping on her? Fuck it.

  She didn't renew the lease on the apartment. Didn't care that the semester was beginning. Didn't care what would happen with her IU degree. Medical technology? She couldn't think of anything more meaningless to her. It was all part of some previous life lived by some other Khadra who accepted things she didn't really want, who didn't really know what she wanted and took whatever was foisted on her without examining it. Took whatever crappy unnourishing food for the soul was slopped in front of her and ate it up, becoming its spokesperson and foisting it on others. Ruining friendships for it.

  She loathed that girl, that Khadra. Despised her. Blamed her for it all. Wanted to scratch her face, to hurt her, wanted to cut her-she looked dully at a razor, one of Juma's, forgotten in the back of a bathroom drawer. Wanted her dead. Wanted to be dead and gone-what was it Maryam had said when she was all alone in her dark night? "If only I had died before this and been forgotten, long gone out of memory. " Maryam got an answer, a voice calling out from underneath her miserable butt. But then, she had been carrying Christ, the comfort to all the worlds. Khadra was carrying-nothing, by h
er own wretched(but she had to, had to)-choice. Nothing, nothing. And so no reviving water came for her and no fresh ripe fruit fell upon her.

  She stopped watering the maidenhair fern in her little living room and it died. Turned to dry stubble like the garden of the vain man in the Quran's Chapter of the Cave. Its slender green fronds that had once flopped hopefully over the side of the pot now withered yellow and brown. She stood over it thinking dully, my fern is dead. I killed it. She wrapped her arms around the green plastic pot and slid to the floor and lay on her side curled around the fern pot, the black dirt spilling out, rocking and saying, My fern is dead. My fern is dead.

  It was rock bottom for Khadra Shamy. "Rock bottom days for Khadra Shaaaaamy, sha-na-na-naah," she air-guitared bitterly, not even knowing what she was saying, just mouthing words that came to her. She was through. She couldn't feel anymore. What else was there to feel?

  And finally one day she was done. Exhausted. As if she'd traveled down the seven gates of hell, discarding at every door some breastplate or amulet that used to shore her up. She felt empty. Crumpled and empty, that was her. Like a jilbab you've taken off your body and hung on a nail.

  She packed up the apartment. Put Juma's remaining stuff in a cardboard box for one of his pals to pick up: a pocket-sized Quran in a zippered leather binding, an enormous textbook on petroleum extraction with the cover torn off, a Go Big Red sweatshirt, one soccer goalie glove, and a vial of sandalwood oil he used when he took his shower before Friday prayers-and when they went to bed together. The scent made her almost falter. If only their marriage could have gone on the strength of the sex alone. Had she made the right choice after all? Would it have been such a tragedy to have the baby, to travel along the typical wife-and-mother trajectory? She stared at the little golden vial of scented oil, grown warm in her hand. She hesitated-dabbed a dot on her wrist-quickly put it with the other stuff in the box.

  And then what? Where do you go when the first part of your life is coming to an end, and you don't know what is yet unborn inside you? Where do you go when you're in a free fall, unmoored, safety net gone, and nothing nothing to anchor you?

  Invisible: How can I see your face Untouched Wrapped in yourse Who Will show me the way? You have no homeland ...

  -Attar

  It was time for a retreat. She would betake herself unto an eastern place.

  Back where she came from: Syria. Land where her fathers died. Land that made a little boomerang scar on her knee. Ya maal el- shaam, you were always on my mind. Yellow rose of Damascus. Oh Damascus, don't you cry for me. She sold Teta's Ottoman coins to a collectibles dealer from Chicago. She used the cash for her ticket.

  Her parents were aghast. The Baathists, the mukhabarat, the Asad, the army-police-border-patrol-visa-authorities.

  She would risk it. Maybe she had a death wish. She was in a reckless state of mind.

  "Speak only English with the Syrian authorities in the airport," Wajdy advised. Her father looked sad and defeated. She had not turned out the way he wanted. He didn't understand why. At the gate, she threw her arms around his neck and hugged him. She had not wanted to disappoint him; it was so hard!

  He kissed the top of her head and pressed an envelope into her hands. "You might need this," he mumbled. "Put it away safely in your money belt." This made her cry on the airplane. She pictured her father and mother sitting at that cracked formica table deboning chicken, hands greasy, heads bent, deboning and deboning to stretch out the last sliver.

  Syria was blinding, searing sunlight. Where the Indiana sunshine was buttery yellow, its summer palate full of rich brown tree bark and mellow leafy greens, Syria was white light on dried-out, dusty streets, brilliant turquoise sky, scraggly silver-green trees, crumbling stone walls that had been there since the start of time.

  In Syria, the shape of things was different: sleep, corner errands, little tea glasses on hammered copper trays, even light switches. Rooms had doors with keyholes you could see through. Doorways had sills you had to step over and the doors were metal and opened with a clang down the middle, like refrigerators, which never opened down the middle in Syria. Neighborhoods meant people leaning out of flung-open windows talking to pedestrians below, dim narrow passageways under ancient stone arches, and people clustered on balconies drinking golden tea as afternoon shadows lengthened. Pulling themselves inward, like a snail retracting, as soldiers passed in their olive drabs. Here the day flowed differently. Asr time in Syria was like fajr in America: things were that quiet, people waking up slowly from the naps of hot noon. Rooftops were where you went of an evening to sit and sing and look up at the stars, like the patio back home.

  Somehow all the unfamiliarity seemed familiar to Khadra. "And then we turn here, and there will be a rise in the road, and an arch," her mind said-or no, she wasn't even thinking it with her mind, it was her feet, her body moving itself-and there it was. The rise in the road, the arch. As if her body retained an unconscious imprint, as if the ground remembered her feet and guided them.

  She was startled by the gargantuan pictures of the president. His image was the first thing in your face, at the airport, everywhere; you walked under his eyes. It played on her nerves. So did the great rumbling tanks and clusters of soldiers throughout the city.

  Through the inherited lenses of her parents' memory, she had thought the city a much smaller place. Since theyd left, the real Damascus had swollen. Whole new neighborhoods had sprung up, and chunks of outlying land had been swallowed by the urban maw. Damascus was full of country folk newly migrated from the villages, and of refugees from neighboring countries. Army garrisons and Palestinian camps surrounded it. Downtown, white-collar women with fluffy shoulder-length hair spilled out of the big concrete buildings on their lunch hour, arm in arm, in neat pleated blouses tucked into short skirts. Men in big handlebar mustaches went about in safari suits-her father's sense of fashion, she realized, had begun and ended here.

  Khadra had told no one she was coming. She followed directions to Tr ta's house. TEta opened the door and gasped.

  Khadra said simply, "Here I am."

  "Glory be to God who hath taken His servant on a journey throught the night, "TEta said, and enfolded her in an embrace. "I have been waiting for you." What did she mean? There had never been any plan for Khadra to come to Syria.

  "I can't believe I'm really here," Khadra said. "It's like a dream." Sitting on a low stone ledge in TEta's inner patio, a place open to the sky in the heart of her home. A laurel-scented nest in the scarred land of Syria. There was Tr ta's tall spindly lilac. There was her walnut tree, and another tree whose branches had white felted undersides. And there was the sweet bay laurel itself. All these she'd heard Teta describe to Mrs. Moore.

  "Oh. Mrs. Moore sent this gift for you." It was a homely little gunnysack of cornflour stamped "Made in Simmonsville, Indiana. " "It's for making cornbread. She said you'd had it at her house and liked it."

  She slept in a narrow iron-frame bed-maybe her father's? Or Uncle Shakker's? She was in the old Shamy house in Salihiyeh, the one that used to belong to Teta's brother, Khadra's grandfather. The first night in Syria, Khadra half-woke around-it must have been three o'clock. A faint voice, not Teta's, called her name, or so she sensed as she lay in the dark not knowing who she was anymore. Khadra. Khadra? She half-lifted her head off the pillow, listening. Lay her head back in sadness. She felt a withdrawal of love, a pulling away of the kind of love that had been given to her old self automatically, as long as she abided by its conditions. What would she do with the raw hurt left in its wake? She fell asleep listening for the one who was calling her.

  Syria was Teta, sitting on a wet wooden crate in the bath with a modesty cloth on her lap. "-0 soap my back, te'ebrini." Her sloping back, its flesh soft and speckled and old, soaping and soaping it, pouring warm water over it. Happy as a baby in the water, and loving to talk. And Khadra, sitting on a wet wooden crate next to the tub in her calico nightgown, sleeves pulled up to her elbows, soapi
ng her TEta's back, was happy to listen. In the warmth and the vapor, the stories came pouring out.

  "-for love, yes, I married for love. This was extraordinary in my day, darling!-and still is, in much of the world. For I am an extraordinary woman. Pish, it's not ego. I'm telling you the truth. You are allowed to know the truth about yourself. Besides, you have to have an ego, te'ebrini-of course! You have to have one to live! Who can live without a self? Ego is not the same as ego-monster. You must nurture and guide your ego with care. You must never neglect it. To be unaware of it, how it is working underneath everything you do, to think of yourself as floating high above the normal level of humanity, selfless and pure-why, that is what gets you in the greatest danger. I'm a great philosopher in the bathtub, darling, water gets me started. Are we finished here? My bathrobe please, and the towel for my dripping head, yes and your hand. I am quite old and a slip will do me in, you know. Te'ebrini."

  Teta's laughter filled the steamy, primitive little tiled room. The bath had been added to the old house when the practice of communal bathing in neighborhood bathhouses had become more or less defunct. One bath a week: she loved her routine. Finite quantity of water, carefully poured into jugs. This was not America of faucets left rushing.

  "No, te'ebrini, don't drain the bathwater away. I reuse it to water the houseplants. No, the soap won't hurt them-it comes from them, after all." Of course: her laurel soap. "Ey na'am. Yes, indeed. It's been a drought for years. Maybe it'll break this year. City of Seven Rivers, no, no more. Barada River only a trickle. You must have heard of it from your parents. Nothing to show you there. Poor Barada. Te'burni, Barada."

  "-mmm, have I told you I was a telephone operator?" she began, in the next bath session.

  "Yes, Teta, of course you have, many times."

  "-but I haven't told you what it was like. One of the new jobs opening up for women, the very first wave of working women, and I was one of them! AIo, Centrale? Connect me, please-and we'd connect them. Strangers, neighbors, wasn't it marvelous! Things were so exciting! We were fighting off the French, an old world was ending, a new one beginning. Dunya al-ajayeb like the magical worlds you get when you rub a lamp, all of it opening before our feet. New technology coming to Syria. All the old-fart people hanging back fearfully. They tried to make out that a telephone girl's job was a bad thing, a thing for floozies, imagine! No, but I and my girlfriends laughed in their faces. We wanted to be the New Woman. We didn't know that nothing is new under the sun. All that once was circles back and returns and looks new. But back then, it seemed so hopeful. And we had a little circle of friendship, the three of usme and Iman and Hayat-you'll meet Hayat soon. We were all azizahs, it was our little code word: women who cherish themselves, women who are cherished. So we linked arms and went out into the new day. Centrale, number please? I worked as an operator for years and years! 0 but your Teta was chic, my lovesy, et que j etais belle! People used to say I looked like Asmahan, the green-eyed legend.