The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf: A Novel

by Mohja Kahf

  She glanced around behind her. The path was dotted, on this workday, with the usual smattering of mountainside housing residents walking down to the city or up toward their cheap new apartments. She was not in an isolated locale where no one would hear her if she screamed. She approached.

  He was older up close than he looked from a distance, with iron-gray hair that was not cut short, Khadra realized with a start as she came near, but tied back in a ponytail. There was a scent about him of musty old woodland. She soon realized it was the cloud of cigarette smoke. Not your usual cigarette smell, yet it seemed oddly familiar to her.

  He jotted something into the green notebook. She could see that it was filled with lines of poetry. He was a poet, the type of modernist poet who had been all the rage in Lebanon and Syria throughout the sixties. Khadra didn't understand a bit of his poetry, which he recited to her from reams of Arabic pages. Soon their meetings on Qasyoon developed from random moments into standing appointments.

  Jasmine armpits? Whatever. She loved listening to the little white pebbles of the familiar-unfamiliar words ring against each other. He spoke half a dozen languages, too, Kurdish and Armenian and Swahili and Aramaic he claimed, as well as others-and all worked their way into his poems.

  "My dear chit of a girl, born yesterday," he said-his gravelly voice cut right into her, took her to some other world, made her listen raptly. "Let me tell you something you don't know."

  She leaned forward expectantly, and he recited,

  She burst out laughing. "The baklava is me?"

  "Pay attention. You don't get a poet like me every day, you know," he said.

  "And you get a listener, which every poet craves," Khadra teased. She had a sun-burnished strip across her nose and cheeks from her mountain treks by now. Like days in the sun with Hanifa, when they were little girls.

  "Wrong, baby," he deadpanned, turning from Khadra and making a notation in his notebook. The iron-gray hair was unbound today, making him look a little like Grizzly Adams. "I get a muse, which every poet craves. In the form of a beautiful woman, no less, which is the perfect form of a muse. Allahu akbar." He leaned back and contemplated her.

  She basked in the compliment. Even though he was a terrible old sexist. Such a product of his era.

  "Ibn al-Arabi said the best meditation for the soul bent on knowing something of Divine Beauty is contemplating the beauty of a woman," he continued, chain-lighting another cigarette. Khadra was sure he was making it up. It didn't sound like something a renowned sheikh such as Ibn al-Arabi would say. He fabricated half of what he said, she was sure. The other day he'd told her he was a sailor once and, on another occasion, he claimed he'd spent years living alone in the desert.

  "Hey, wait a minute," she said, putting the Pentax up to her eyes. "Then what does a woman contemplate if she wants to know the Divine?"

  Without missing a beat, he said, "A poet."

  They both laughed. So rich was the timbre of his chuckle it was almost a growl. She clicked away, and caught the light of the setting sun on his creased face. It was a cynical but not jaded look he had. As if he knew the jig was up on the world, yet held onto some small secret hope-one he'd never admit to. His little white cigarette box had a red star and crescent.

  "Are those-are those Islamic cigarettes?" she asked, laughing at the oxymoron that seemed.

  "Oh, absolutely." He handed her the box. "General Directorate of Tobacco, Salt, and Alcohol Products, Government of Turkey," it said. She took out a cigarette. No filter. You could see the bits of shredded tobacco at both ends. She sniffed. Musty, kind of a rich rotten wood smell. Old forest undergrowth. Old rich woodlands.

  "Oh my God," she blurted.

  "What?" he said. "You are invoking the deity for what purpose?"

  "The smell of your cigarettes," she said, half-joking. "It solves a puzzle I've been bothered by all my life."

  He lifted an iron-gray eyebrow.

  "Indiana," she laughed. "That's the answer. Indiana smells like Turkish cigarettes."

  "Why do you spend so much time worrying about what God thinks of you?" the poet asked her once. She was startled at his directness; his low voice seemed to come right out of her own gut. She didn't think she'd shared that much of her state of confusion. "It's the other way around, you know. God is what you think of God, you know."

  This made no sense and sounded heretical. He must be a leftist, a secularist, maybe what her parents would call a godless communist.

  "Oh, no you don't," he said. "Don't try to label me so you can put me away. I am what I am."

  At their next meeting, he scoffed, "What's eating you? Begging forgiveness? God should be begging you for forgiveness, you beautiful child."

  She was taken aback at this blatant blasphemy, spoken with his characteristic nonchalance.

  "You still think of God as some Big Parent in the Sky, don't you?" he demanded. Again she was surprised at how he seemed to be able to speak right into her mind's conversation. "Waiting with a logbook of all your misdeeds to punish or reward you? All those hoary ancient guilt trips and self-flagellations for such a tired notion. Not worth a Syrian dime."

  "But then what? Without that, I'm lost," she protested.

  "Be lost then. Better lost than false."

  Lost to myself, I am found in You

  She walked home slowly, her camera banging against her hip. Was he sent by God or the devil?

  "Your veil is very revealing, you know," the poet said through a haze of tobacco smoke. Just a hint of a mocking tone, was there?

  No one touches my veil, buster, she thought, but didn't say.

  He sensed her bristle.

  "Oh, but veiling is important, definitely" he said, reassuringly. She relaxed. He shook his head mockingly. "You're so easy to bait."

  She made her face blank, determined not to show him her reaction.

  "Uh-oh-you've gone and veiled your face again!" he yowled.

  She couldn't help smiling.

  "Your woman-body is loved by God, good and pure. Veiled or not veiled," he said through his teeth, lighting the cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

  My body is none of your business, she was thinking.

  "Real religion's in here, baby," he went on, "here is your church, here is your mihrab." Instead of placing his hand on his own chest as she expected, he put it on hers. Was he a prophet or just copping a feel? She was ashamed of wondering, immediately the thought came to her. No, she wasn't. She went back and forth.

  "Who? You've met-O! But, chfrie, he's a famous poet!" said Teta's friend Hayat, when Khadra told her and T6ta about the man she'd been speaking to on the mountain. "His name is golden-Arabs and poetry, you know, cherie. Give us a poet, we treat him like a conquering hero."

  "Mmm," T6ta murmured. "A handsome lad, too, this one. When he arose in all his beauty, in truth, in truth he stunned me," she sang.

  Damascus was such a small town, the way everybody knew everybody. The poet had wooed one of TEta's cousins in the fifties. It had been the gossip of the land for a good fifteen minutes.

  "But if I'd known she had such an exquisite relative, my dear lady. . . " he said with a charming smile full on T6ta when Khadra introduced them in the dim lobby of the National Museum. "And that she had such a lovely friend," he went on, turning to Hayat, "I might have lingered in your neighborhood far longer!"

  Hayat and T6ta smiled then, not like pretty young things, but like the splendid well-lived women they were.

  Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence Existence: this place made from our love for that emptiness

  Jalaluddin Rumi

  The Jobar kanees was only three kilometers from Damascus. It had seen three thousand years of continuous use by the Syrian Jewish community, and locals claimed it was the oldest synagogue in the world still used as a house of worship.

  "This was Iman's synagogue," Hayat said, speaking in a low voice because they were inside the prayer hall. To their right, an inscription on a tablet in Heb
rew, Arabic, and French told why the kanees was built on this spot: C'est ici qu en l'an 3043 de notre ere, le Prophete Elichaa ben Chafat a enterre Eliahou Hanabi. The Arabic inscription called it "maqam al-Khidr. "

  "Who's Iman?" Khadra asked.

  "The three of us were inseparable. Your Teta and I and Iman. We all worked at Centrale together."

  Khadra was left to absorb in silence the fact that the third friend had been Jewish. She followed the poet and the two women up the aisle. Now, on a weekday, there were only a few people about, mostly men. One middle-aged woman with a boy by the hand was leaving the rabbi's office.

  The rabbi, white-bearded and spry, came out and chatted with Khadra's three companions like an old friend, and when he was told her connection to them, he welcomed her with the same warmth and began to point out some of the features of the ancient kanees.

  "Four hundred years old, this lantern," the rabbi said, indicating a great iron lamp that sat in a sort of hearth along one wall. "It cast a magnificent glow in its day, like a living thing." Electric lighting was used now, of course.

  He spoke with the deepest Damascene accent Khadra had ever heard, drawling out the last "m" on every word. "W'intooh keef? Alhamdi'llah, tamam. Ey na'am, " His voice in those chords was like family to her. Something vibrated in her chest.

  "Yes, of course, he speaks like a Damascene, darling-he is a Damascene," TEta said, as they emerged, and Khadra felt ashamed for not getting it. Of course, of course; she knew there were Arab Jews. Why should she be like the Marion County librarian who once gushed, "Oh, you can speak the English language! And your accent is so American!"

  But this was different, wasn't it? It's just that-all this time, she'd thought of them as Them, these people over There, not all the same of course, she knew that, but, still not part of Us. Never. And even when she grew out of that primitive notion of "There's-us-and-thenthere's-them," she grew by accepting, albeit reluctantly, the claims of some of her professors that certain things crosscut religion. Dr. Mattingly used to argue, for example, that class interests could unite working-class Arabs in Israel with working-class Jews.

  It had made sense. In her head. But not any deeper. She'd kept it there in her head as a plausible idea but did not know it with her heart or in her gut. Not the way you know yaqin. Not the way you know mubin.

  And now-when the rabbi said "ey na'am, "drawling out the last syllable so you could barely hear the `mmm' at the end, like such a Damascene, she could suddenly imagine being his granddaughter. Blood and soil and home, boiling coffee in the kitchen, puttering about in faded house slippers to find him dozing in his chair, his finger on a word in the holy book in his lap. And then this whole other life opened up in her mind. It sent her whirling in mad agony. This incidental skin, this name she wore like a badge-glance down, check it-what was it again? Had it changed? Was it always changing? Who was she? What was she, what cells of matter, sewn up into this Khadra shape, this instar? Imagine!

  It was suddenly too much. She began to gasp. Great gasping sobs poured out and wouldn't stop. Teta and Hayat, full of concern, flanked her, and the poet flagged a service. "What's your road?" the cabbie said. "The road to Damascus." When they got home they put her to bed.

  She slept and woke. Slept again. Dreamt, cried, and blessed. They came to her, all the people she had once held at bay, as if behind a fiberglass wall. Now the barrier was removed, and they all rushed into her heart, and it hurt: Livvy. Hanifa. Im Litfy. Joy's Assyrian boyfriend, whose holocaust she'd denied. Droves of people, strangers and neighbors. We are your kin, we are part of you. Where are those who love one another through my Glory? Their souls are in the roundness ofgreen birds, roaming freely in paradise.

  She called out for a caller to call to her and listened; she was the caller and the call. Your Lord delights in a shepherd who, on the peak of a mountain crag, gives the call to prayer and prays.... And if he comes to Me walking, I go to him running.... Let not any one of you belittle herself.... And no soul knows what joy for them has been kept hidden.... I was a hidden treasure ... and I wished to be known. 0 soul made peaceful, return to your Lord, accepted and accepting. Come in among my worshipers, and in my garden, enter. Come to prayer, come to prayer.

  Khadra came to prayer. She felt as though she were praying now for the first time, as if all that long-ago praying, rakat after rakat, had been only the illusion of prayer, and this-what she began to do now-was the real thing. All that had been lost was returning. All that had been disconnected was connected again-alo, Centrale?

  The poet called every day. Teta would talk to him and report to Khadra. "Here is what he said today, lovesy, I wrote it down!"

  When you do plan to wake up? A blessing on that hour! Meanwhile, guess Who cradles your head in his lap?

  Auntie Hayat, her fine white hair floating about her head like a halo, came in the evenings after the bells of ramsho (vespers). On her watch, she took one of the poet's messages: "Today he said,' baklava!'"

  "What?" Khadra said sleepily.

  "He said to remind you that you are the baklava, how should I know, cherie? Let me see if I can remember the rest: `You do not know your own beauty, you struggle in grief, but I, I have seen it all, and I know: You yourself are the secret essence."'

  One day the poet came to the house and said, " Vdmonos, baby! You haven't seen the Ghuta Orchards. Get up." And he clasped her hand and pulled her up out of bed and into the dazzling sunlight of Syria.

  "To the Ghuta, before they cut down the last grove, hurry!" Auntie Hayat and Teta said. The peaches had bloomed and ripened and gone. White cherry flowers in long, pendulous corymbs had blossomed on the dark naked wood, light against dark, like a pale girl in a black man's arms. Fallen petals carpeted the orchards and had melted into the earth and now the cherries, the cherries were in their prime.

  In a Ghuta orchard, Khadra and TEta and Hayat and the poet picnicked amid other clusters of picnickers. The sky was the blinding turquoise blue typical of Syrian days. They brought bakery boxes of ghraibeh, little O-shaped sugar cookies. And nectar of apricot. It was as if she'd lived on Tang all her life: is this how real juice tastes? Had I known! Sometimes they spread an old blanket on the pebbly ground. From such couches of grace, supplied with such sweetness, they gazed on the city spread below.

  After lunch Khadra ran and picked cherries for their dessert, meandering through the colonnade of trees, reaching up through the dappled play of leaf and light and shadow. And the trees bent their fruited branches low for her. She came swinging her bucket, hands and lips dark-stained. Deep pink and orange streaks of light from the sun as it set, like a great lamp in its niche, glowed across the clearing, and across the faces around the little table. Teta and Hayat and the poet were instruments in symphony, their conversation a slow music, variations on themes of friendship and love.

  Khadra set the bucket down and scooped out a handful of cherries to set before her beloved Teta. Her scarf, a kelly-green chiffon, was slipping off the crown of her head. She reached to pull it back up. Then she stopped, noticing the wine-red juices running between her fingers, and not wishing to stain the lovely scarf. The poet glanced at her.

  Khadra paused, standing there in the fading rays with her palms spread, her hands spiraled upward to the sky like question marks. She was in a position like the first stand of prayer. A yellow butterfly flittered by. The scarf was slipping off. She shrugged. The chiffon fell across her shoulders. She remembered when she'd taken her last swim in the Fallen Timbers pool as a girl. She closed her eyes and let the sun shine through the thin skin of her eyelids, warm her body to the very core of her. She opened her eyes, and she knew deep in the place of yaqin that this was all right, a blessing on her shoulders. Alhamdu, alhamdulilah. The sunlight on her head was a gift from God. Gratitude filled her. Sami allahu liman hamadah. Here was an exposure, her soul an unmarked sheet shadowing into distinct shapes under the fluids. Fresh film. Her self, developing.

  She saw her TEta looking at her. Teta g
ot it. Maybe she'd had such a moment in the Ghuta sunshine herself, ages ago; maybe she knew about kashf, the unveiling of light. How veiling and unveiling are part of the same process, the same cycle, how both are necessary; how both light and dark are connected moments in the development of the soul in its darkroom.

  Blessed be Ishmael, who taught us how to cover ourselves. Blessed are you who dress the shivering spirit in a skin.

  -Leonard Cohen, Book of Mary

  Under the cherry-tree canopy it had felt fine having her scarf slip off. She was safe; she was among friends. Back in the mad soup of the city it was a little different. The first few days without her lifelong armor she felt wobbly, like a child on new legs. Her body felt ofd balance, carried differently. Gone was the flutter about her, the flutter and sweep of fabric that was so comforting and familiar. Having waist and legs encircled now, being compactly outlined by clothing that fit to the line of her body-that defined her body, instead of giving it freedom and space like hijab did-was all so new. At first she felt like a butterfly pinned in a glass case, splayed out and exposed. How to hold herself? Cars whooshed past her as she walked through busy intersections and she'd feel the unfamiliar rush of air at her neck. Reaching up to touch the soft fabric, she'd find nothing, then touch her hair and neck with startled fingers. The cars honked and made her jump.

  While strolling with the poet and Teta and Hayat in Medan al- Rawdah, with the vendors' cries (za'bub! hab'lass.') in the air around them, Khadra suddenly felt discombobulated. "Where are we?" She misjudged the distance, bumped into an 'irqsus cart, lost her footing. In a flash the poet realized what had happened. His shoulder behind her head, his arm across her back felt like welljoined iron, like columns of strong poetry.

  "I champion you," he said in a low voice, "body and soul." Khadra could never tell if he was being straight or sardonic. "I always champion a woman true to herself," he murmured. He suddenly seemed to Khadra like one of the titans from the old world of gods. He wasn't being ironic. He was solid. He was the real deal. Wasn't he? She shivered.