The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf: A Novel

by Mohja Kahf

  "Te'ebrini, what's the matter?" Teta cried. "Are you dizzy?"

  "Walay hemmek, "Aunt Hayat said. "Don't you worry, I've got the thing for the girl." She snapped the clasp of her big clutch and rifled through it. Then, impatient, Hayat dumped its contents out on a ledge. Sewing kit, nail kit, her pearl-inlaid cross that she was taking to get repaired, pictures of grandkids, national I.D. card that every Syrian had to carry-"Here!" she cried. She opened a tiny vial and held it under Khadra's nose. It smelled of eucalyptus, sharp and refreshing.

  "I'm whole and sound," Khadra reassured them.

  The poet looked at her piercingly. "You are," he said. "Whole and pure. The broken and the holy."

  "But how do you know?" Khadra whispered, her heart tight.

  She stood, planting her feet moderately apart, her weight evenly distributed, hands down at her sides. Allahu akbar. She was coming to find the new, unveiled lightness familiar and comfortable in its own way. Still, hijab had been her comrade through many years. Her body would not forget its caress. Her loose clothes from the days of hijab were old friends. She had no wish to send them packing.

  The covered and the uncovered, each mode of being had its moment. She embraced them both. Going out without hijab meant she would have to manifest the quality of modesty in her behavior, she realized one day, with a jolt. It's in how I act, how I move, what I choose, every minute. She had to do it on her own, now, without the jump-start that a jilbab offered. This was a rigorous challenge. Some days she just wanted her old friend hijab standing sentry by her side.

  And then, finally, it was time for her to leave Syria. Aunt Razanne pressed a small jar of eggplant jam into her hands. Khadra hugged her cousins. As she pulled away from Reem, she felt as if earring posts she'd worn all her life had just slipped out, and a lightness came unto her.

  "Come with me," she said to the poet, half-joking. She wished he would always be there to sift the gold from the dross of her, to rescue her heart from the evil playing of her mind, and to save her again and again from her despair.

  "I will, baby," he said drily, and then he was gone, and Aunt Hayat was kissing her cheek.

  "Cherish yourself," Ttta whispered, "te'ebrini." She held her tightly for a moment.

  Khadra turned and waved one last time on the tarmac.

  On the plane, she pulled the tangerine silk out of her handbag. Pulled and pulled, and drew the head-covering out longer and longer in her hands like like an endless handkerchief from a magician's pocket. Before landing in Chicago, she draped the depatta so it hung from the crown of her head. Not tightly, the way Ebtehaj wore it. Loosely, so it moved and slipped about her face and touched her cheek, like the hand of a lover. She wanted them to know at Customs, at the reentry checkpoint, she wanted them to know at O'Hare, that she was coming in under one of the many signs of the heritage. And she wanted her heart to remember, in the dappled ruffle and rustle of veiling and unveiling, How precious is the heritage! A treasure fire cannot eat.

  She knew by the time she crossed the Atlantic that she was headed home, if there was any home in the world of worlds. She loved the country of her origin, and found that something in the soil there, in the air, in the layout of streets and the architecture of buildings, answered a basic need in her, and corresponded to the deep structure of her taxonomy. She would go back again in a flash if only Syria wasn't so clenched and a path out wasn't so open to her. But she knew at last that it was in the American crucible where her character had been forged, for good or ill. No matter that she had been brought there through no act of her own will. It was too late, it was done, no going back now, no phoning home. She was on her shariah to America. Toto, we're not in Damascus anymore, Khadra whispered, as the wheels hit the ground. Homeland America, bismillah.

  Come then, here is world upon world, and all that you seek and desire. You yourself are the traveler and the Goal, lover and Beloved. The earth seems a riddle, but you-if you see yourself with Love's eye-are the answer

  -Shah Dai Shirazi

  But where to go in America? Back to Indiana? There was the new home of her parents in South Bend. Jihad was living at home, still in school. Eyad and his wife still lived in Indianapolis. In "the community." Where you cannot live down anything you have done. Where everyone who knows you knows exactly what you are supposed to become. And where, if you try to become anything else, they laugh and spin your head till you give it up. 0 you are Ebtehaj Qadri-Agha's daughter? 0 you are Wajdy Shamy's daughter of the Dawah Center? When are you coming back to carry the banner?

  And then Indiana itself, the flat land that felt like a trap. The sweet constancy and modesty of stolid, undemonstrative Indiana white people, of Indianapolis black people with their sights set low. Everyone avoiding extremes, and also avoiding stepping out of the rut of self. Hoosiers in their homes with the gate latched against strangers-who's here? Go away, change. Go away, possibility.

  She couldn't bear it, not one more instant, not now, not for a long while. Away. Anywhere but.

  And now-with the Ottoman liras-Khadra had a new freedom. What did she want most to do? Not to return to Bloomington and finish a degree she'd never use. Photography, what she'd wanted from the start, but had not even let herself acknowledge she wanted, because it was not in the Dawah program, in the Wajdy and Ebtehaj program.

  Now was left only to choose where. She wanted to move to a big city where she knew no one. There, she'd make it on her own, carve out a life that would manifest gratitude and modesty and love. She would throw her beret up in the air in a celebratory way, slow motion. She wanted her own theme song.

  But she ended up doing it with help from the community, after all, help from friends of her family, and the families of her friends. One of the aunties had a son who had a friend who'd attended the Art Institute of Philadelphia, and through that channel she learned about its application and financial-aid process. And when she got there, well, one of the uncles had a cousin whose roommate's Muslim sister needed a female roommate and even better if she was a Muslim woman who didn't drink, didn't smoke. In this way, Khadra found a place to live that wouldn't chomp down all her budget. For start-up funds, she could dip into Te ta's gift. But she was frugal; it must not be frittered.

  Photography school was its own adventure. She opted for the twoyear degree for budgetary reasons. No matter; it was a huge amount of work. She met Blu Froehlig when she was at the library, struggling with an assignment in Structure & Form in Composition.

  "Blu's short for Bluma-Yiddish," Blu said. She was from Brooklyn, pale, with deep-set eyes and wide cheekbones scattered with freckles.

  Khadra and Blu discovered they were both emerging from the shell of a highly observant, orthodox religious upbringing.

  "Yeah yeah yeah, a thousand rules for everything, that's halakha, too," Blu said, recognizing Islamic fiqh as a parallel structure to Judaic law. "I get it."

  Christians in Indiana never, ever got it. Protestants found it so foreign and bizarre to have a religious law, the sort with rituals and specific rules and all. If they knew anything at all about shariah, they equated it with stoning. Death, that's all shariah was to them. Yet it wasn't that way at all. Just like American constitutional law, shariah expanded and evolved, and was meant to protect life, and relationships, and all that was good.

  So it was a relief not to have to explain every little thing about that to a friend who was an American. Cool to find an American who was not even a Muslim but got it.

  "So do you still observe?" Blu asked.

  "Sure. Kind of. Depends on what you mean."

  "Do you eat pork?"

  "No. But I eat meat from the deli slicer," Khadra said.

  Blu nodded. Khadra didn't even have to explain the deli slicer controversy.

  "So do you eat pork? Do you keep kosher?" Khadra asked.

  "No pork. And kosher: on the toaster of kosher, I'm medium-light," she said. "Hey-have you been to E. Pluribus Unum yet?"

  "No. What is that, another historica
l landmark? I've been to the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. And the Quaker church."

  "It's a food store. With foods from all over the world."

  Blu offered to take her. "But you have that project due in graphic design," Khadra said. "If you want to just give me directions, I'll find it."

  "I'm going there anyway. I go all the time. Besides, I'm not too busy for friendship, or it would be a sad day in Philadelphia," Blu said, "City of Brotherly Love, right?" Khadra felt a warmth and a tightening inside. Warmth because of the kindness of the invitation -so far she had only acquaintances, no one in Philly whom she saw outside school-and tightness because she had fouled up so many friendships so far in her twenty-odd years. Could she handle a friendship, did she even have the basic human skills?

  The store was not huge, just the size of a regular Kroger back in Indiana. But what a difference. In the same number of aisles, it managed to fit a whole world of foods.

  "The halal aisle is thataway," Blu said. "The kosher aisle is thisaway."

  "No way-they have a halal aisle?" Kosher sections, Khadra was getting used to seeing in Philadelphia grocery stores, but halal sections, never.

  "Sure," her friend said. "Here's the Chinese aisle-well, it's also Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Malaysian stuff. Care for some squid?"

  Khadra wrinkled her nose.

  Blu laughed. "Me neither. Okay, Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Caribbean, aisle two. Ethiopian we just passed, aisle three. Along with your Sierra Leonian and Nigerian foods. And then there's Persian, Turkish-well, the whole Middle Eastern contingent is aisle four." She was going through the global groceries too fast for Khadra. "Next, you've got your Indian cuisine-look out!"

  Khadra, gaping, had nearly sideswiped a pyramid of chutney jars. "It's incredible," she marveled. "You'd never see this in Indiana!"

  "Vegetarian, vegan. Whoa-hang on a sec, here's my aisle," Blu said. She scooped heaps of barley into a plastic baggie and took a sticker from the bin.

  Halal aisle, they hit next. They found halal pepperoni and"What the-?" Khadra said-halal bacon bits. "How can bacon bits be halal?"

  "Hmm-here you go-it's imitation bacon," Blu read off the label. She made a face. "Doesn't sound very healthy to me."

  "Yeah." And then Khadra saw-"Oh my LORD!" she screamed. Right in front of her, gaily packaged in tangerine and yellow. "Look, Blu, LOOK!"

  Her friend looked bemused. "Halal candy corn?" she said. "This excites you?"

  "Oh! But you don't know, Blu, you don't know-" and she told her the story of the pig in the kindergarten candy corn and her first brush with eternal damnation and the despair that had grown like a malignancy inside her so long after. But now! She would wear red ribbons in her hair again, red and yellow and swing her legs high in the air! She hugged a package to her bosom-hugged two!-she danced, she twirled for joy among the jars of coconut oil and tins of rice dolma.

  "This requires a Shehichyanu, you know," Blu said. "A blessing for the first taste of a fruit at the beginning of its season." She recited the b'racha over it: "Baruch ata ad-onay, Eloheinu, Melech haolam, shehechiyanu vkiyemanu, vhigiyanu lazman hazeh. Blessed are you, Hash-em, our G-d, king of the universe, who has kept us alive, and brought us to this season. "

  And together they did eat of the candy corn. And it was good.

  Where Khadra and Blu repeatedly reached a wall was Israel. Religion was one thing, politics another.

  "The Arabs had a chance to share the land peaceably in '48, and they refused," Blu said coolly. "What's with their greed?"

  "Right," Khadra said. "So like, if someone came to New York City and told you all at gunpoint to get the hell out of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island, all the best land and the best access to waterways, because they felt they had a right to own it, and, lookie, they would be generous and give you, ooh, Staten Island and the Bronx, you New Yorkers would just move over and `share,' right?"

  "Don't be ridiculous," Blu said. "It's not like Jews up and came to Palestine. They've been there all along."

  "A tiny fraction, and they were Arab Jews, not Europeans with different customs and a contempt for the locals."

  "But all Jews long to be there. Love for the land is part of the religion."

  "So why is it when Jewish people claim a religious reason for politics, I'm supposed to roll over, but if Muslims do it, it's called fundamentalism?"

  That did it. Both were incensed. They didn't speak for weeks. Then they ran into each other again on campus. "Am I speaking to you?" one said ruefully to the other. "I don't know; am I speaking to you?" the other said, with equal rue. And they'd start talking about other things, and it would be okay for a while. Khadra went to her first Seder at Blu's apartment. Blu celebrated a Ramadan iftar with Khadra. And it was good. Then a few meetings later, they got into Israel again and a new fight ensued.

  "What? You don't recognize Israel's right to exist?' Blu stood up. This was beyond bounds.

  "What? You mean you actually expected me to?" Khadra said, indignant. "Israel was illegally made-by terrorists emptying out villages and forcing a mass exodus of Palestinians."

  "I can't listen to this," Blu said, her voice tremulous. "You don't understand: My grandmother died in the Holocaust. My mother grew up saving pennies in her little Land box. You're insulting their lives. Their deaths."

  Khadra was taken aback. "I don't mean to be," she said, softer. "I'm sorry about your grandmother. The Holocaust was a horrible, evil thing. And I need to learn more about it, like your grandmother's story-I've never known anyone personally who-I'm so sorry." She took a breath. "But-I don't see how that justifies Israel. How does it follow ..."

  Things blew up right there. Blu said you couldn't follow a statement about the Holocaust with "but." When Khadra got home, she was mad at herself for not having said, "Well you're insulting the death of my TEta's husband in '48, and Uncle Omar's parents, and all the other Palestinians who got killed by the terrorism that Israel was founded on, so there. You don't have a monopoly on suffering, you know!" Why hadn't she said that? She fumed.

  All the generosity with which they regarded each other's point of view evaporated when the conversation turned to this issue. Gentleness disappeared and the claws came out. At one point, they made a pact not to bring up Palestine or Israel. But it came up anyway, again and again.

  "Yeah well, do you recognize the PLO as a legitimate Palestinian government?"

  Blu was indignant. "Of course not. They're a terrorist organization."

  "Yeah-according to the United States. Today. In 1987. But the whole rest of the world recognizes them. Who's gonna be America's pet terrorist twenty years from now, I wonder?"

  "They advocate armed struggle against Israel!"

  "So? It's called war. Countries do it all the time. You'd do it if your country got taken over. They have a right to fight. Fire with fire. Or did you just expect the Palestinians to lie down and take it?"

  "The PLO kills civilians-children!-and assassinates diplomats."

  "If they do, that's different from fighting soldiers-and notice, I said if they do. Then I agree, that's immoral, and they should be brought up for it-and so should Israel, 'cause they kill children and diplomats too!"

  "They do not! And if they happen to, by mistake, while fighting off Palestinian lawlessness, that's different."

  "How is it different?"

  They left each other in a huff. Again.

  A few weeks later one called the other. A meek voice said, "You talking to me?" Another meek voice answered, "I dunno, you talking to me?"

  "Why can't we just be friends?" one of them whined.

  "Shut up. We are friends." And they were.

  "You know, you really need to go out and get other Arab friends besides me, girl."

  "Yeah, honey, and you need to get other Jewish friends besides me."

  "Yeah, I can't be your only Arab."

  "Me neither, your only Jew."

  "Yeah. Puts too much pressure on us."

>   "Yeah. Sugar?"

  "Yeah. Two lumps."

  "Yeah."

  There was a clink of spoons. They stirred and stirred and sipped.

  After Khadra finished her photography degree, there was the search for work and then working, at first-stop, pay-the-rent jobs such as taking evidentiary pictures for insurance companies and shooting for photo stockhouses and even working forensic photography at the city morgue. "You here for the job interview?" the assistant coroner looked at her dubiously. "You speak ENGLISH?" he added, raising his voice at her the way people do to foreigners. She wasn't even wearing a scarf that day.

  "Oh-I just thought-it seemed to me you had an accent," he fumbled, trying to cover himself after. "Where is your accent from?"

  Is he allowed to ask that? Khadra wondered. But all she said was "Indiana."

  "India?"

  "No, Indiana."

  "Oh." Confusion registered on his face. Anyhow, she got the job, alhamdulilah.

  She supposed not many people were climbing over each other to work at the morgue. It was a city-government job, meaning the pay was low but the benefits good.

  On the side she did weddings and anniversaries, when she could get the work. For this moonlighting, she got the Rabbit, needing to get to the far-flung suburbs of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. It had a spunky power-to-weight ratio, and despite its pansy-ass name was a good little jihad-wager of a car.

  She found herself especially sought after by conservative Muslim families holding segregated weddings at which the hijab'd women unveiled and coiffed and ornamented themselves. They relaxed around her once they realized she was from their world, and she'd make wuzu and namaz side by side with them and get back up out of the prayer line and shoot some more photos and the older ones would beam and nod and heap her plate with food. She took this great shot of one of them holding up an oval platter stacked high with shiny triangle samosas. Auntie's eyeliner was smudged around her eyes, allowing you to see how her smile lines and sorrow lines were deepening. But you could also see the face of the beautiful woman she'd been at thirty, and the hopeful and radiant girl she had been at half that.