by Mohja Kahf
"More than one fine young man lost his heart to me-don't smirk, darling, I am entitled to preen-but I only gave my heart to one. One heart, one love. Gazelle, gazeh-eh-elle, now my wound is healed ... Hmm? He was Circassian, his grandfather fled the czar and settled in Palestine, and he was in Damascus working with a carriage merchant. My parents were furious when he came to our house to propose. With his older brother and aunt-his parents were far off in Haifa. Filthy gypsies! -I don't know, they call anybody who has no settled home a gypsy. Because they were immigrants, you see-his family. My father saw him standing-absolutely crushed, poor gorgeous man-outside my window the next day, went after him with a shotgun. Nameless nobody! Hmm? No, they were just typical Damascenes. All Damascenes are snobs. Depend on it, lovesy. Well, I don't know why. Maybe because they live in a heartland, far away from the coast and all new things. They don't trust newcomers. People of Damascus-Shami people-tend to be very satisfied with themselves, I'm afraid. My dear, I don't think you young generation understands how grand a long soothing bath really is, the kind that opens your pores up and restores, ah, so marvelously. . . . Well, we were absolutely in love, there was no telling us no. And then we eloped to Haifa-his parents lived there ... more lather, lovesy. Like that, yes, that's the way."
"Eloped? What? Teta! You never told me this."
"You never asked, lovesy. Circassians do it all the time, elope. Then they pretend to be shocked when their children do it. It was a very respectable elopement."
Khadra giggled.
"Oh, but it was. His old aunt was with us all the time, and as soon as we got to Haifa, we married properly, with witnesses. But it was hard to get there. It was the years of the Palestinian protests against the British, and Syrian protests against the French, all the time raids and soldiers and hiding-only we were hiding from the colonizers like everyone else, and hiding our love, too. People were hard on us. That handsome boy Nizar said it years ago: `people of my city hate love and hate lovers.' Have you ever heard his poems? Oh yes, I memorized reams and reams of Nizar in my day-bless your heart, Nizar. More water, please. And so my parents said I was dead to them. And what had I done? What was such a crime? Had I gone against God and the Prophet? Not I. They were the ones in violation. They were the ones. Doesn't the Prophet say if you find a good god-loving man, accept him? Does the Prophet say unless he's Circassian? Does the Prophet say he must be from your people? Hardhearted people, using religion-the butt end of it. And my brother, Wajdy's father-only Wajdy wasn't born yethe didn't dare contact me." She paused, and telescoped what must have been years here. "They came around eventually. People often do, you know, dear. They got over themselves. But it was ages before any of them talked to me again ... no, it's just a little soap in my eyes, don't mind me."
Khadra had always known TEta with a song in her heart. She had no idea she'd come from such sorrow. Teta turned her eyes-they were closed against getting soap in them while Khadra shampooed her lovingly-to the opaque window high over the tub, sensing the light through her closed eyelids and basking in it.
"We lived in Haifa till '48," Teta went on. "Terrible year, the Nakba. So many were killed in the scattering. My sheikha was killed, the one who was my teacher and friend and guide for years and years. Hmm? Yes of course, dear. Her line of teaching goes way back, all the way back to Lady Nafisa, a great teacher of Love. I used to go to her circles of remembrance, she was of the order that gives constant thanks, my old teacher. The whole order broke up, no more circles. Running for our lives, marching madly for the border, leaving willy-nilly, you grabbed what you could, you strapped your baby to your hip and ran. Because the Yahudi terror squads were at our heels, te'ebrini. And that's when I lost him. Killed, shot in the back by one of the Zionist militias. I will never forget those coward Jew terrorists. Never. And then. They wouldn't let me stop, all the other people I was fleeing with. I was like a rag doll, they dragged me along by the armpits, someone held my babies for me. Because you couldn't stop and kneel over the body. The roving Zionist guerrillas would shoot you, or drag you off. You couldn't bury"-here she broke-"couldn't bury him."
It was not soap in her eyes, either. Her eyes glittering not with laughter now, but with diamond-bright tears. Turned toward the light filtering through the little block of opaque glass. "Oh, TEta!" Khadra exclaimed, aghast.
"Well, you never asked. You're twenty-one now, time to know things. My sons are there now. They went in '65 to see their father's people-they were grown men by then-and got stuck. Pour me water from that jug, lovesy." And she sat there with her eyes closed in the filtered bathroom sunlight, water running down her head, with its thinning but defiantly black hair.
And then, in next week's bath, another astounding thing:
"Your mother, Ebtehaj. Of course, you know her father married again after your mama's mother died. Married a Turkish woman whom your mother hated. Can you rotate in circles down the middle of my back, te'ebrini? Yes, there ..."
"Why?" Khadra glimpsed a piece of vital knowledge about her mother, long withheld. "Why did she hate her?"
"It was mutual. She was a Kemalist, totally secular, the second wife. Militantly, spitefully secular. Sibelle, her name was. Your mother was seventeen at the time and couldn't stand to see her father go in Sibelle's direction, making light of his prayers, dropping out of his first wife's pious circle, allowing wine at his table .... Well, no, he didn't drink, but she and her copines did. Made your mother miserable, never gave her a moment's peace in her own home. Yes. Mocked her for wearing hijab. Most of the fashionable people had stopped wearing hijab by then, you see. The city was against it, the tide was against it. Oh, how Sibelle loathed the sight of that hijab. She made fun of it-she tried everything-she'd yank it right off her head. I heard she put it in the pot and shat on it-no, I'm not kidding. She was embarrassed to be seen in public with her stepdaughter in it. Made Ebtehaj walk on the other side of the street.... You've stopped scrubbing, yoh. Lather up, te'ebrini-And that Sibelle yanked her out of that Quran circle she was in for just a few months-her deceased mother's circle. Ebtehaj got interested in it after her mother died. Well, Sibelle like a good Kemalist thought it was all garbage. Said she wouldn't have anyone in her household connected to it. `Her' household, imagine! As if your mother had no place in her own home anymore! Yanked your mother right out. And then-she's never apologized for any of this, not to this day-Sibelle tried to force your mother into a marriage with a man who drank and whored, just to make her misery lifelong. She had the wool pulled over your grandfather's eyes so well, yooh. Men can be a little limited like that, men like your grandfather who enjoy-but never mind that-he and she are in Turkey nowadays, you know-darling I'm getting cold-a little more hot water, please. Your Aunt Razanne, well, her husband Mazen was good friends with Wajdy back then, before their disagreement over politics. Ebtehaj was desperate to get out of that house. Oh yes, it was all Razanne's doing, your parents' marriage. She and Wajdy saved her. Ooh! the water is hot! No, no, dear, that's a good thing! But, Khadra, don't think that you need to find out all your mother's secrets and understand her story to go on with your own. Her pain is hers to heal. You are not responsible. Hmm ... I can feel all my pores open. Thank you, dear. Thank you, Khadra darling. Thank you 0 thank you 0 thanks."
I am not among those who left our land to be torn to pieces by our enemies
-Anna Akhmatova, "I Am Not Among Those Who Left Our Land"
They studied each other, Reem and Roddy standing before their cousin Khadra in the elevator of their building. The kind with an iron gate you had to pull shut. Outside the dusty lobby with its corridor sounds of flip-flops slapping the floor, the bloated city teemed. Vendors hawked, bicycles tinkled, cars honked, tanks rumbled, buses belched. Heavy construction trucks lumbered up and down the long apartment block. A dwarf fan palm tree grew by their stoop. Huge palmate leaves, a meter across, swayed on delicate stalks over a thick trunk with rough scarred bark.
"So. You're the famous Khadra," Reem said.
"The famous?" Khadra asked, baffled.
"Mmm," was all Reem said.
"Our mother was always bragging on you," Roddy explained. "The wonderful, accomplished cousins in America. We could never compare.
Syria, in fact, was sweet relief from the myth of Syria that had hung over her life. Reem was a princess and an airhead. She was the Syrian answer to Marcia Brady. She started brushing her hair, staring demurely at her ivory-skinned reflection in the mirror, her large, gazelle eyes.
"What's that?" Khadra asked, lifting a charm that hung from a gold chain on the nearly sheer stretch of skin between Reem's collarbones.
"A hijab," Reem said.
"Do what?" Khadra didn't understand the word in that context.
"A hijab. A spell, an amulet. You know."
She did not know. "You mean magic?"
Reem nodded. To her, there was nothing at all odd about her answer.
"You-really, you believe in that stuff?" Khadra was incredulous.
Reem held up a hand to request silence. She was counting under her breath and didn't want to lose track. Actually counting brushstrokes.
"I've been put under spells before," Reem told her, when the count was finished. "It was horrible. I'm not going to leave myself without protection again. This one's a specific counter-hex against a woman who envies my beauty and my education." She said it with utter creepy gravity.
For Khadra, Roddy was like having a fun brother her age. It was so refreshing, finally, after Eyad, she thought, with mean satisfaction. ("Gee, an Arab guy with a sense of humor," she said later to Teta, who chuckled.) He was a prankster, and did voices on the telephone. Once he pretended to be an animal-control officer calling to say that a mountain lion was loose in their neighborhood and they had to barricade the doors and remove all fresh meat from the premises. He had the whole street in a panic.
Then there was his petty side. Roddy could, and would, discuss endlessly the price of mangos on the black market and how much it cost to bribe your way to the official document of your choice. Every fifth citizen was an employee of the bureaucracy, and the state did not pay them a liveable salary. Bribes were routine. It was odd when you got an official stamp without having to slip money between the forms.
When Khadra asked Roddy what he thought of the Afghan refugee problem in Peshawar and Iran, he said, "What Afghan refugees?" and made a joke out of it. One day, sitting on little round folding stools sipping tea on the balcony, she asked him how students on his campus had reacted to the news of Saddam's massacre of the Kurds in Halabja-had there been there any demonstrations? Aunt Razanne immediately turned up the radio, and Uncle Mazen took Khadra aside, whispering, "No politics. Ey, na'am. We don't talk politics in our family. We stay away from that. You see?" He looked over his shoulder.
Uncle Mazen was around the same age as her father, but he looked older, was starting to have an old-man slouch to his frame, kind of a caving in at the gut. His eyes were small and close together. He had the receding chin and mousy blond hair that were the source of Roddy's features. You could see where he'd been handsome in youth, and might have had a haggard older-man handsomeness still, if he'd stand straighter, if his face had strength.
"But Uncle Mazen, we're at home. You're inside your own home."
"There is no home. Walls have ears," he said sharply. "The neighbors, for example."
"But you know them. They're your friends," Khadra said.
"Who knows anyone?" he said, and his nostrils flared suddenly. "Who knows who might report us?"
Khadra was startled. She wondered, a little shaken, if he would ever report her.
Later that evening she overheard her aunt and uncle arguing. "What have we ever got behind Wajdy and his Islamic politics but woe?" she heard Uncle Mazen say.
"He hasn't been the same since the heart attack," Aunt Razanne confided to Khadra the next morning at breakfast as they made a large pot of garlicky kishk porridge.
"Heart attack?" Khadra asked with genuine concern.
"The day the paratroopers tore off our veils," Aunt Razanne said absently, stirring the pot.
On September 28, 1982, during the height of the troubles in Syria, President Asad's brother Rifat dropped a thousand girl paratroopers over Damascus, with a guy backup soldier behind each one. They blocked off a section of the city. Within it, they grabbed any woman who was wearing hijab. Khadra remembered reading about it in The Islamic Forerunner and being outraged. She'd never heard an eyewitness account, though. That kind of thing didn't get out of Syria.
"You could strip off your hijab and jilbab, or get a gun to your head," Aunt Razanne said, tucking a wisp of hair behind her ear. "Well, my Reem was on foot, coming back from the seamstress. She tried to duck into the lobby of an apartment building but it was the buzzer kind and she couldn't get in." Her aunt now looked around to make sure Reem was not in hearing distance. Then she continued, "The paratrooper grabs her by the arm, with a soldier right beside her. She slips off the scarf right away. Why endanger your life for it? But then, the paratrooper barks at her to take off her manteau, too. Well, my Reem is only wearing a cami and half-slip under the manteau that day, as it happens. Ey, na'am. I always tell her, wear a proper dress under it, like the rest of us, but she says, "It's hot, Mama." With the soldier prodding her with the rifle, she starts to unbutton. She is mortified. Then that fucking paratrooper bitchoh, my goodness-did I just say that? I am so sorry for my filthy language. My word, I don't know what came over me." Aunt Razanne smiled sweetly.
Khadra stared. She began to think they had all gone schizo from living under such a bizarre dictatorship so long.
"Then what happened?" she prompted gently.
"Yes. So the paratrooper can't even wait for Reem to take off her clothes. So she rips off the manteau herself, and holds it up in the air and sets it on fire with a blowtorch."
"A blowtorch?"
"Kind of an extra touch. I don't think they used it on everyone."
"And then?"
"Then they moved on. A stranger found Reem huddled in the alley of the apartment building three hours later, disoriented and not speaking, and brought her home off the address on her driver's license. We had been searching for her frantic. That's when your Uncle Mazen had a heart attack, when she was half-carried in the door, hair disheveled and half-undressed with those ugly bruises on her arms."
"How disgusting! How could a government behave like that?"
"Oh no, no, I don't blame them," Aunt Razanne said. "You see, the President was so sorry when he found out. The next day, he sent another set of troops out to the same part of the city with roses. Every woman got a rose. So it's all okay, you see?"
Khadra was flummoxed. "Urn, well, whose fault was it, then?"
"Yours," growled Uncle Mazen from behind her, making her start. "Your father and mother. You dissidents. Who politicized hijab but you? Who made life hell for us but you?"
"You see," her aunt said, as if explaining to a child, "if the government hadn't been so anxious over what the dissidents were doing, it wouldn't have been forced to crack down on us so hard."
Wow. "Wouldn't have been forced to crack down on us?" Khadra's mind couldn't help but reel at this. At least her parents had stayed true to themselves. Wajdy and Ebtehaj stood taller in her sight. They had not stooped. Had not twisted their minds to fit into a cramped space, had not shrunk themselves like poor Uncle Mazen and Aunt Razanne. Her parents had fled, even if it meant leaving everything, everyone they knew, the life that was made for them, the life they could have lived so easily, without being outcasts in an alien country. All it would have taken was accepting a little suffocation, living on a little less air like Razanne and Mazen. Instead, her parents had flown into new air. Home had been left behind, given up. For the utter unknown. What a bitter and marvelous choice.
Khadra had brought the three younger siblings-Muhsin, Misbah, and Mafaz, ages eleven, thir
teen, and fifteen-giant bags of M&Ms from America. She explained that this was the nickname she and Eyad had come up with for them years ago, when they were mere bits of babies with hard-to-remember "m" names. They lay on their stomachs reading Tintin and Osama comics, popping the candies as they worked a jigsaw puzzle of an American farm landscape she'd picked out for them. She'd given Roddy a farting whoopee cushion, which he loved. To Reem she gave a purse-size pepper spray. She thought it would be a good choice, since the optometry shop where Reem worked was downtown.
"Oh!" Aunt Razanne said, looking at it with interest when Khadra explained its use. "Would that you had brought many of those." Yes, her mother had told her Aunt Razanne would want one. Self-protection devices interested her.
"I did," she beamed, producing another for her aunt.
Muhsin seemed obsessed with the Tintin comics. Khadra sat next to him saying, "Tell me about this Tintin." She peered over his shoulder and-oh! That wasn't what he was actually reading. Behind Tintin and the Treasure of Timbuktu, she saw the close Arabic typeface of a badly printed book. "What's that?" she said. He put his fingers to his lips. Shh.