The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf: A Novel

by Mohja Kahf

  "It's Zakaria Tamer," he told her later, when they were alone in the family room.

  "Who?"

  "A banned Syrian author. He's political!"

  She was impressed. "If he's banned, howd you get him?"

  He grinned. "I will not reveal my sources even if you turned me in to the state police and they tortured me unto death," he said, extra-dramatically. He had more gumption than his parents.

  "Oh you little devil!" she cried. Mafaz saw the two of them with the Tintin between them and winked. So she was in on it too.

  "I'm the one who gets the books," Mafaz said. So Muhsin was exposed, the little braggart. His sister tweaked his ear and he ducked, grinning.

  At least some members of this family had red blood still left in them.

  Say to the fair one in the black headcover as she appears at the door of the mosque, "What have you done to a worshipping lover? He came to pray, then saw you and was lost. "

  -lyrics sung by Sabah Fakhry ("Qullil malihati")

  Peeling an eggplant was like unveiling an ivory-skinned woman dressed all in black. The eggplant in Khadra's hand was plump. She and her aunt sat close to the floor on little wooden crates-the ones the eggplants came in from the vegetable market-working on a tray set on top of another low crate.

  "Tell me about my grandma, Auntie." Ebtehaj had spoken of her own mother rarely. There had only been a single photo back in Indiana. It had shown her grandmother with her husband and daughters wearing little set smiles. She had a kindly, concerned face.

  "Well. Your grandmother was a sweet soul. Devoted to her children and home. She didn't appreciate Father flitting about with friends, hanging out at the coffeeshop. She was a homebody. And saintly, you know. Neighbors always said of her, `if there are angels walking the earth, Um Mansur is one of them.' I always remember her sitting on the mat in her bedroom, doing her praise-be's on her beads. And you know she's in heaven, because she lost a child. A mother who buries a child goes straight to heaven, same as a martyr."

  "What was her name, Grandma Um Mansur?" All these years, and she didn't even really know her name. Essential things that Khadra needed to know, in her limited time, but her aunt seemed always to get lost in the telling.

  "Badriye. Badriy6 Bustanjy. From a very religious family, my grandparents' family, of course. Scholars and sheikhs under the Ottomans. Mother tried to imbue us with all that. But you never know with your children. Some will follow you and some won't. She tried all the time to get Ebtehaj to wear hijab and pray regularly. Begged and pleaded and wept-"

  Khadra nearly dropped her eggplant. "What? My mother didn't pray from the start?"

  Aunt Razanne blinked up, placidly peeling the thick glossy skin. "Hmm, dear? Of course not. I was the good girl. Your mother was the rebellious one. I always tried to help and guide her, but . . ." she sighed.

  "But what?" Khadra's insides were churning. She felt deceived.

  "She had to learn the hard way." Her aunt swept a pile of eggplant peelings into the old powdered-milk canister that served as the garbage can. No one in America had a kitchen garbage can that small.

  Well? Why was she stringing it out like this? "What hard way?" Khadra prompted. She tossed a peeled eggplant into a chipped white melamine bowl and picked up another one.

  "Well, it was the trip to France." Aunt Razanne sighed.

  "So? What happened in France?"

  "You mean she's never told you? You've never talked about France?"

  Khadra shook her head.

  Aunt Razanne bit her lip.

  "What happened in France?" Khadra repeated.

  "I think I should wait until I can write to your mother first-"

  "What happened in France?" Khadra stabbed the eggplant she'd been peeling with the knife and put it down. "Tell me now. Tell me now.

  Aunt Razanne, weak of will, was prevailed upon. She took up Khadra's eggplant and set to it herself. "Father called me to come over to the house right away. She'd locked herself in the bathroom for hours. Wouldn't talk to him. Used up all the water in the house bathing. Wit's end, he was ..."

  "From the beginning, Auntie, please, from the beginning."

  Chopping the stem off another eggplant, Aunt Razanne carefully peeled back the barky petals around the tip. "The whole thing-she wasn't even supposed to go on the France trip. Your grandma didn't want her to go. At the beginning of the school year, she brought the permission slip home and Mother said no. Mother liked us to stay close to home. But, you see, Mother died before the year was out."

  She pulled a wooden chopping board from behind the oven. The naked eggplants were stacked high in the chipped bowl. "These need to be chopped in wedges, dear. I'll heat the oil."

  Khadra obediently and swiftly took the chopping board. She didn't want to risk distracting her for an instant.

  "The whole idea of taking schoolgirls to France is wrong. It was part of the Baathist plan to ruin the morals of the land. To get us out of our homes, out of our veils, make us vulnerable. You see? They succeeded. Aping after the imperialists. You see? Ey, na'am. Father let her go. She only had to pout and he'd let her do anything." A bitter look flickered on Aunt Razann's face as she struck a match to light the gas burner, or so Khadra thought. She jumped back as the gas lit. "He was so sad and confused without our mother. For a while-then he started getting interested in that Sibelle woman. So glamorous, so a la mode. She was the daughter of a Turkish diplomat Father met at the athletic club. He had so many friends-"

  "The France trip," Khadra prompted.

  "Ebtehaj was fifteen. Or was she fourteen? Or sixteen? Well, I was nearly nineteen, you see, and married by then, so it didn't affect me as much. Sibelle, I mean. Not Mother dying-of course I was devastated at that. So sudden. Pancreatic cancer. In three or four months it was all over. The doctors said-"

  "Aunt Razanne, the France trip." Yooh!What was the matter with her? The woman had ADD.

  She sighed. "Right. They sailed to Marseilles. Ten or twelve girls and three teachers. You had to have excellent grades to go, and that Ebtehaj had, I'll give her. I was never one for As. No, go larger, Khadra."

  "Huh?"

  "Chop the pieces larger. This is for ma'lubeh. Upside Down Dish. You don't know how to make that, dear? Your mother never taught you, over there in America?"

  Khadra chopped the eggplant into the larger pieces as instructed, waiting for her aunt to continue.

  "Saweem Shabandar, she was one of the teachers, or teacher's aide. I think the oil is hot enough. Let me have those chopped eggplants. So you met her in Saudi, you say? She's wonderful, isn't she?" Aunt Razanne held her hand out at arm's length, plunked a handful of eggplant chunks, and jumped back. The oil snarled at her.

  "No, not really."

  Her aunt was startled and looked away from the violent oil. "You didn't like her? Goodness, why not? She's so-"

  "Never mind, I was kidding. I liked her. Please go on?"

  "Oh-pull these eggplants out at once, dear, they're almost brown. Here, into the aluminum pot. So. The head teacher, the one in charge of the trip was Sitt Iffat Innaby. The third chaperone was a history teacher named Ustaz Basil. Basil Abul Qushtban. Madame Innaby wanted him to court her daughter. Ey na'am, yes, indeed. Mind you, I think our Saweem had her eye on him too," Aunt Razanne chuckled. "Well, he was a catch. I had been hearing about him all year from Ebtehaj and her friends. He was a Nasserite. The young, handsome Nasserite history teacher. How the girls with their budding politics pressed him with questions-just like the girls in that Leila Murad musical, how did it go? It was such a hit. The one with the high school girls following the good-looking tutor around in their smart school uniforms, how did it go? Abcdefgee-ee, what a handsome teach is he-ee. Oh, they were very forward girls. It was her own fault, you know. On and on, she would gab in my kitchen, describing him to me. How smart he was. How he told them all about the Nasserite party even though he wasn't supposed to. This was the early '60s-or was it the mid-'60s? Either way, the Baath were i
n power already. Though they weren't as bad as they are now." She lowered her voice and looked over her shoulder. At the little vent window at the top corner of the kitchen.

  The vent window? Her aunt was afraid of what might come through the little vent window now? Whew. "So the Nasserite history teacher-?" Khadra said. Aunt Razanne was so damn longwinded.

  "Raped her."

  Eggplants sizzled in the hot oil.

  Did it take long to find me, I asked the faithful light

  -Yusuf Islam, "Moonshadow"

  Damascus was the capital city of a deep-set heartland. Full of smalltown minds-or, following the axiom "Small minds talk about things, mediocre minds talk about people, great minds talk about ideas," it was full of mediocre minds. Far from the sea and its ports, slow to take in waves of change, suspicious of strangers. Sort of like the Midwest, it occurred to Khadra. TEta kept Khadra's presence secret from this Damascus, buffered her from the tides of Shamy and Qadri-Agha relatives who would have overwhelmed her on a normal visit, wanting to know her business, picking the straws out of her mind like ravens. Khadra didn't know how Teta drew the veil over their eyes. Including the middle-aged Shamy couple, relatives of limited means, who lived in a part of TEta's old house, doing housekeeping and maintenance in exchange for board. They were kindly folk, very curious about America, and could Khadra get them a visa, and could she find them some work there? Somehow his low-level job in the ministry of agriculture posted Cousin Husney to a rotation in Qamishly for the season, and his wife went with him, grumbling about being sent to the provinces.

  Teta saw that she got rest. Made a space around her, selecting bits of Damascus for her as she got stronger. For there were many Damascuses. There was the sepia-toned Damascus of TEta's 1940s and 1950s, and today's misshapen city cringing under the giant-sized glances of its president. There was the Damsacus of possibility, you could sense it, even now, under the surface, seeping through lock and key. A Damascus that stirred the imagination, behind the scarred face of the present.

  It was was to the mosque of Muhyideen Ibn al-Arabi that Khadra found her steps turning. Not during the crowded prayer times but in between, when she could sit and pull her knees under her chin and rock by herself, untouched by man or jinn. The faint rhythms of dhikrs going on in the deep recesses of the mosque filtered through to her. She listened. She looked. She was still. Dark brick, white stone, dark flesh and white side by side, striped the arch-work of the mosque, as it did everywhere in Damascus's traditional architecture.

  She found herself framing imaginary camera shots from the first visit, and the second time brought her Pentax and quietly, from the back of the mosque, clicked away in the play of lights and shadows through the colonnade of the mosque interior. She lost herself in these. She clicked to the rhythm of the chanting of dhikr.

  A cavernous desire for beauty opened inside her. Rhythm, color, texture, a carefully tended tree, a twirling skater or athlete on television, an afternoon scene she could frame in her head and composeshe ached for beauty, felt like an orphan from it, coming from the pasty bare white walls of poor Indianapolis immigrants with their cheesy half-hearted attempts to decorate, the ugly velvet rug hung with sad thumbtacks, the gilded cardboard Dome of the Rock above the foil-eared TV set. And always that refrain: why should we decorate a temporary abode, and why spend energy on the frivolity of beauty? But beauty was no frivolity. Khadra craved it now like food and water. The arches of the Ibn al-Arabi mosque in the lap of Mount Qasyoon. The strains of Syrian folk songs and Iraqi mawwals she heard on radios through the souk and the neighborhoods. And coming live from oud strings on open balconies in the evenings and pouring out of cafes with nay artists and violinists.

  "How have I never heard this before?" she asked Teta. "It's the most beautiful music in the world." Come to beauty, hearken to the mystery, come to the prayer of the reed ...

  "You have heard it before, te'ebrini. All your life. But now you're listening," TEta said gently.

  In the fabric alley at the Hamadiya market, Khadra bought a long piece of tissuey silk fabric. "You can pull the whole thing through a ring," said the merchant, for it was that fine-"Bangalore silk," he said, and in a brilliant tangerine color, Teta's favorite. Khadra cut it in half and had the hems finished with a rolled edge at a tailor shop. Two magnificent scarves resulted.

  "One for you, one for me," she said to Teta.

  "What an unsuitable color for an elderly widow to wear. I love it!" TEta beamed and began dancing with the fabric and riffing Asmahan and Leila Murad. "Sweet, sweet, sweet, how sweet the wo- orld, full of pretty things for a pretty gi-irl... "

  Khadra told her the bit about how you could pass it through a ring and, as she expected, Teta loved that.

  "Te'ebrini, "Teta said. "That reminds me. I have something to give you." She took a flat screwdriver from the kitchen. "Follow me," she said, and trudged into her bedroom. "Pull my bed back, darling," she said to Khadra. It was an ancient iron bedstead with a thin mattress. "Oof!" Teta said, pulling up a little stool and lowering herself onto it. "Now then. This is where we hid things from the Turks in the olden days," she said, prying first one twelve-inch tile, then another. "My grandfather supported Arab independence -though not by putting his faith in the British, mind you! He said that was out of the frying pan, into the fire. He wanted independence from the Turks and the West. Well, his brother was part of the pro-Turk caliphate movement. They quarreled, and the Khalifa movement brother turned in the Arab nationalist brother. Yes, family drama-betrayal-enough for a whole soap opera! They came hunting for him." One tile had been pried up and you could see a dark void beneath. "Khadra, te'ebrini, this is too much work for me. My back."

  Khadra pried up two more large tiles. A sort of crawl space appeared. "But my grandfather was prepared, you see. This is a secret passage. Hmm? I don't know when it was built. It maybe goes way back, before the Turks. It connects from house to house in the neighborhood-no, not every house. That wouldn't be wise. Select houses. You must select carefully the houses to whom you will connect. Now comes your part," Teta said.

  Khadra was mystified. "It's like something out of The Thousand and One Nights."

  "It is," Teta chuckled. "Now what if I tell you that you are to crawl into it and bring me back what you find?"

  "Will it be a lamp with a genie?" Khadra joked.

  You had to crawl on your stomach for just a yard or two-"not long, don't worry!" Teta called-and then you got to a little closetsized space where you could stand. She held her breath, her stomach sliding on the cool slab. She did not like small spaces. Something feathery brushed her arm and she shivered. Bugs are your friends, she said, to calm herself. Instars. Think instars. An instar in a raspberry beret. `Raaaaspberry beret, "she sang in the pitch dark.

  "What?" Teta called down.

  "I can't see a thing down here. Do you have a flashlight?"

  "Just feel around," Teta said. That was not a happy prospect. "It's just a trunk, a leather trunk. About the size of a smallish suitcase," she said.

  "Found it!" Khadra called. She pushed it out in front of her through the passage and climbed back into Teta's bedroom. "There is nothing like this in Indiana," she said.

  "Sure there is," Teta said. "Every place has its secret passage. Like the crack in the armor."

  From a dresser drawer she pulled a big metal ring clinking with thick iron keys-

  "Of course!" Khadra said with glee. "There has to be a keyring with a kajillion keys in the story!"

  -and opened the brass latch on the leather trunk. Inside was a wooden mosaic-inlay box, about the size of a tissue box. It contained fat gold coins, same as the ones she had given Khadra as a wedding gift. She knew now how valuable they were. "A treasure that fire cannot eat," Teta said. "My little secret. I've carried them wrapped in a handkerchief in my bosom through some tight places. Not for nothing do Shamy girls have good boobs."

  "I don't know, TEta," Khadra said, looking at the pile of coins. "It would take some p
retty hefty boobs to hold all that."

  "They're yours now.,,

  Khadra gasped. "But Teta-keep them for yourself. How do you live, anyway-surely your pension from the Centrale is not enough."

  "Khadra, I won't be able to keep these after I die. May you bury my bones-but I don't think you will be here to bury my bones." She lifted up a hand to shush Khadra, who was saying a blessing for long life on TEta's head. That phrase, te'ebrini, "may you bury me," always tugged at Khadra's heart.

  "There's shariah rules about who gets what. Inheritance laws," Teta went on. "How do we get around them when we need to? We give things away as gifts, before we die. That's how. Take it from me, this will be a load off my heart." Khadra would not take them all, but they came to an agreed-upon division.

  The divine face has burning glories. Were it not for the veils, the glories would burn away the cosmos.

  -Muhyiddin Ibn al-Arabi

  Sitting on Mount Qasyoon looking down on the city of Damascus, you could not possibly hold that one religion had claim to an exclusive truth. Damascus demanded that you see all religions as architectural layers of each other, gave you the tangible sense, real as the crumbling citadel steps beneath your feet, that it all came together somehow in a way that made sense. All the religions spokes on the same wheel. All connected to the hub. All taking their turn in the wheeling of the great azure heavens.

  While surveying Damascus from Qasyoon through her camera lens, Khadra came to realize that photography was her thing. "Get the training, learn to make a living at it. There you go," she encouraged herself.

  She shifted her angle, and suddenly in her viewfinder she saw: a man, looking plumb at her. He sat on a rock, a writing notebook before him, a cigarette dangling from his lips.

  "Don't mind me, keep talking to yourself, my lady," he said in a Damascene drawl. "Qasyoon does that to people." She hadn't realized she'd said anything aloud.