The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf: A Novel

by Mohja Kahf

  "Of course he's evil, Omayma," Khadra said to her Iraqi sister-in-law on the phone. You little traitor, she almost added. "Nobody disputes that he's evil. But he's safe in a bunker somewhere and it's the poor ordinary Iraqis who are getting beat down by this. Carpet-bombing a whole city? Can you imagine if they carpet-bombed Indianapolis? Can you imagine if you heard a sound at nine o'clock and it was your dad's practice being flattened, and at ten it was your grocery store, and at eleven it was your street in rubble? That's carpet-bombing. Water cut off, electricity, roads down, bridges-what that does to hospitals, schools, emergency services? Don't you still have family in Baghdad?"

  Dr. Hayyan supported the war even though it made him unpopular in his mosque. His wife, however, who still went every summer to family in Baghdad, went into a depression. When the shelter in the Amiriya neighborhood was smart-bombed, killing five hundred people who had sought refuge in it, Omayma's mother developed migraines and fought a low-key war of nerves with her husband. She refused to take her antidepressants, and started hoarding matchbooks and candles, so many that, whenever her husband opened a cabinet, they'd rain down on his head.

  "She knew someone who was reported to have died there," Eyad told Khadra. "Her former dentist. With her five teenaged daughters. The dentist's husband had brought his family to the shelter and gone back outside into the shelling and debris. He survived. They all died."

  "Good God," Khadra said.

  "They all died," Eyad repeated, in a stunned voice. "His whole family. In one swipe."

  New broadcasts spoke of the "video-game precision" of the bombing and the White House Press Office infamously called the casualties among ordinary people "collateral damage."

  "Can you imagine living on after losing your wife and all your kids?" Eyad softly asked Khadra over the phone, and she heard his love for Omayma and their brand-new baby in his voice-Coethar, a girl, seven pounds three ounces. This was all he had really ever set his sights on in life. 0 upright man, man just and true, patient and kind, content with your lot, rejoicing, not speaking evil. Simply this: having a family and being able to provide for them, and all of them being able to live as good Muslims, praying their prayers and giving their alms and performing their duties to God in the manner they deemed worthy. Was it not sweetness enough out of life, to ask for this and have it answered? Cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace, for this too is the lot of man.

  With the passing of the war, some of the heaviness in their hearts lifted. Now Khadra and ChrIf began to discover their disagreements. "You're so full of contradictions," he said. Out on the broad, rippling Schuylkill.

  "Most people are," she said. "Full of contradictions." Chr[f was far more athletic than she and Khadra liked that he pushed her into these outdoorsy activities, like sculling. Chr[f was a skilled sculler. As far as she could tell, a scull was the Philadelphia name for what they called a kayak back in Indiana.

  "Well, your contradictions fascinate me, I must admit," Chr[f said. The nose of their scull dispersed pond skimmers, those gangly bugs that live on water, but not in it, preferring to stay on the surface of things. "You're so old school on one level, but then on some other level you're a modern girl. I've never known anyone like you."

  A woman loves to be fascinating to a man, and Khadra was a woman-feeling herself so for nearly the first time since her marriage had ended. And so she found herself delighting in Chrif and things like his curly hair. A damselfly dove beside him, down to the surface of the river and then back up into the blue dimension. Always, in the religious Muslim social scene where her instincts had been honed, you had to dull your awareness of eros. You had to put down that delicious tingling feeling that made you want to be fascinating to men, that made you admit they were fascinating to you. Only for the serious, almost businesslike pursuit of marriage prospects could you allow yourself to look up from lowered gazes. It was a sweet and unfamiliar release to allow herself simply to delight in his tilt of chin, his sexy voice.

  Khadra enjoyed the adventure of every conversation with him. An edgy, strange world of avant-garde artists on both sides of the Atlantic, and pan-African travel and friendships and a haunting search for beauty, for getting high on beauty, above all. "And did I mention I love his curly hair?" she said, laughing, to Blu, who remembered him from photography classes. She loved the abundance and abandon of it. The men and boys she grew up around wore their hair trim and tame. Ebtehaj with her buzzing electric clipper had come after Eyad and jihad if their hair got longer than Beaver Cleaver's. "No Beatles hair in this house!"

  He called himself Muslim, in the secular sense of claiming the historical heritage, but he wasn't observant. Then, while they were going out, he started getting into Buddhism. "Ails I know is, I don't like religion, but I like spirituality," he said. They were walking in the city. "On some level," he added, unnecessarily.

  Khadra found this glib. "What is religion but spirituality?" She walked a little faster to keep up. She found out when she first moved to Philadelphia that you had to walk fast or people would bump into you and give you dirty looks as if to say, "go back to Indiana, hayseed."

  "All the organized shit," he said. The statue of William Penn on City Hall was coming into view ahead of them as they walked.

  "Well. Buddhism is a religion too," she said. William Penn held up an unsheathed sword. How odd, for a state founded by Quakers, she thought-weren't they pacifists?

  "Is not."

  "Yuh huh." He found it ridiculous that she said "yuh huh" like a hick. "My Hoosier girlfriend," he teased when he introduced her to his friends. This, in turn, disconcerted her-his use of the term "girlfriend," that is. She didn't call him "boyfriend."

  "It's got temples and priests and monks and nuns," she insisted. "It's a religion."

  "Well. You never hear about Buddhists going around killing people in the name of religion," Chrif said.

  "Oh yeah? Ask the Rahingya Muslims who massacred a hundred thousand of them in 1942 and gave their property to Buddhist Burmese, and who raped thousands of women and burned hundreds of mosques and evicted half a million Muslims in '76. Who? Burmese Buddhists, that's who." Wow, Khadra thought to herself, I can still score points thanks to all those years of litanies naming the "persecuted Muslims du jour."

  "Oh, don't give me a political lecture. There are assholes everywhere, so? What does that prove? Alls I know is, Buddhism is a philosophy. Get it straight. Not a religion."

  "Look, it's both," Khadra contended. No. Huh-uh. She wasn't going to let him get away with that whole "I'm a Buddhist, I'm too cool for religion" pose. He wasn't even a Buddhist. He merely dabbled in Zen. "It's a religion on some level, and a philosophy on some other level." This-the reference to "some level" and "some other level"-was ChrIf's trademark phrase.

  "Like any other religion," Khadra continued. "Like Islam."

  "No way like Islam. If you believe in Islam you have to believe in cutting off hands and stoning and shit."

  "No you don't. Surrender to the oneness of Reality, that's all that makes you a Muslim." From the angle where they were now, the statue of the city's founder with his sword looked a little like awhat was that? Between William Penn's legs? No, it was only his sword sticking out oddly. Khadra averted her eyes. She wasn't going to bring it up.

  "Read the fine print before you sign, woman. It's a bait and switch. Believe in One God, or `Divine Reality' as you put it so fancy? Fine, now you have to believe in the Prophet."

  "Peace and blessings be upon him," Khadra interjected, on purpose, just to annoy him.

  Chrif went on as if she'd said nothing. "Believe in the Prophet? Now you have to sign up for hadith and ulema and shariah and all that shit, on some level." Khadra winced when he called shariah and hadith "shit." But she knew what he meant. "It's all one package, baby. That's how the scam works. The Islam Scam." It had a catchy ring.

  Part of her agreed with him. The part that didn't pressed on, "But shariah law is ela
stic. It changes. It evolves slowly, like Talmudic law."

  "Well, I'm not up for Talmudic law either. Same bullshit," he said.

  "There's Sufism."

  Chrif was too cynical for Sufis. He called them snake charmers. Organ-grinder monkey masters with a bag of mystical tricks.

  "Okay, there's progressive Islam," Khadra tried.

  "Oh, please. There's no such thing as progressive Islam. That is such a crock. What is that, some sheikhs who'll only flog you twenty lashes instead of eighty?"

  Khadra sighed. She just wanted to make him admit that being Muslim wasn't such a straitjacket. It was the same argument she had with her mother. She didn't expect Chrif to be arguing for the same thing as her mother, that Islam was rigid and homogenous. It's like, they both wanted Islam to be this monolith, only for her mother it was good, for him bad. She knew it wasn't that simple.

  Cultivate tolerance, and enjoin justice, and avoid the fools.

  -Quran, The Wall Between Heaven and Hell: 199

  Khadra was dealing with a new roommate, one she'd taken out of necessity. She was an Iranian girl named Bitsy Hudnut.

  "Excuse me, could you repeat that?" Khadra said.

  "Bitsy. Bitsy Hudnut," the young woman with dyed blond hair and brown roots repeated. Her references checked out, and Khadra really needed a roommate. No, what she really needed was a loan so she could buy a place, instead of throwing all her money down the drain on rent. She had gone to a bank once and asked to speak to the loan officer. New territory for Khadra Shamy of the mortgages-aresinful upbringing, she thought, encouraging herself: You go, girl!

  You had to prequalify for a loan before house-hunting, a real estate agent had told her. So she made an appointment, put on her neatly pressed hijab, and sat on a chrome chair in the lobby of the bank. Other people, a white couple and a man with a Sikh turban, also were waiting there amid the skinny trees in square chrome planters. They exchanged mild "we're all in the same boat" glances. The white couple was called. When the Sikh man's turn came, the mortgage officer looked at Khadra, then back in a puzzled way at the man in the turban already walking through the frosted-glass door he held open. The mortgage officer shrugged and followed him inside, letting the door close behind them. Khadra waited and waited after the Sikh guy left, but no one came through the frostedglass door for her. She got up and inquired at the desk.

  "Oh, Mr. Kawalski-the mortgage officer-has gone to lunch, I'm sorry."

  "When will he be back?"

  The receptionist checked something in front of her and then said, "I'm afraid he won't be back today. He has a closing at a title company across town this afternoon. Tomorrow morning," she said brightly, as if talking to a child.

  Noting Khadra's crestfallen look, she said, genuinely puzzled, "But, you know, Mr. Kawalski did come out for you. He met with your husband, didn't he? The man with the, the-turban?" Khadra's face fell. "Mr. Kawalski wondered why you didn't go in with your husband. He assumed you weren't allowed to-"

  There was no time in her busy schedule for more of that just then. Back to renting, which was simpler. The landlord of her new building told her she could change the lease to include a roommate if she got one within two weeks. Bitsy must have needed one badly too, because she made it clear after she moved in that Arabs were not her favorite people.

  "How did she make it clear?" Seemi asked.

  "Well. She said to me, `I want to make it clear that I normally loathe and despise Arabs and have successfully avoided them all my life."'

  "She actually said that?" Seemi said.

  "Actually, factually, said that. Then she goes, `but at this rent, I am willing to try and live with one."'

  It really was a nice find of an apartment, in an economically challenged neighborhood behind the Art Museum. It was a street of brick row houses that had been converted but not gentrified, with stoops and run-down postage-stamp front yards dignified by shrubs and flowers in window boxes. A racially mixed set of residents lived there, and Khadra was lucky enough to get a first floor one-bedroom. Most importantly, it had a walk-in closet she could convert into a darkroom.

  "How generous of her," Seemi said. "And you're letting her stay?" Khadra's apartment also had a slit of a patio, where a porcelain commode served as a planter for bright red geraniums, with just enough room for two beat-up Adirondack chairs next to it. An evergreen holly shrub, glossy and lush, grew in a brick-encased raised bed of dirt. Khadra was going to plant mint at the foot of the holly as soon as her mother sent the mint root.

  "Too late to change-I already signed a new lease with both our names on it." Khadra had made the mistake of meeting Bitsy without her hijab. These days, she made sure to wear her it the first time she met anyone. But she'd been in a hurry that day, and it slipped her mind when Bitsy rang the doorbell. Most of Khadra's stuff was still in cartons, like her family pictures and framed photographs of the Ibn al-Arabi mosque. The only things unpacked were Macrobiotics for Life: The Only Cookbook You'll Ever Need, a secondhand Anzia Yezierska paperback, The Collected Works of Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore, a Thomas Eakins print, a Clash album, things like that. Nothing telltale about. The Muslim Feminist's Guide to Shariah Reform by Dr. Asifa Quraishi was lying cover side down in a crate.

  "You could have been Greek," Bitsy pointed out later. But Khadra had known Bitsy was Iranian because the guy behind the desk at the Y, who'd seen Khadra put up her ad for a roommate, had said, "I know this Iranian girl who's looking for a place."

  "Why? Why does she hate Arabs?" Seemi asked, looking without much interest at a copy of The Collected Poems of Mohja Kahf, Vol. 17, which had been tossed in the remainder bin. They were browsing in Between the Lines, the bookstore where they'd met.

  "'Arabs caused the ruination of the once-proud Persian people by corrupting their culture, religion, language, and race,"' Khadra recited. Bitsy didn't answer to assalamu alaikum" because it was Arabic, not Persian, and had been foisted on the once-proud Persian people by the evil empire of the Arabs.

  Bitsy left notes on little yellow stickies around the house for Khadra, since their schedules almost never coincided. Sometimes the notes said things like "Electrician coming at ten." Other times, the notes listed reasons why Bitsy hated Arabs, because Khadra had made the mistake of asking. For example, "Reason #5, for conquering onceproud Persian Empire."

  Bitsy dated a man she claimed was a descendent of the Hapsburg royal family and boasted about the fancy dinner parties she attended on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, dropping names like Rockefeller and DuPont. "Now that's civilization," she said, wrapping tissue around a one-hundred-year-old bottle of brandy he gave her. But if if her true element was the aristocracy, as she seemed to think, then why was she living in Khadra's rinky-dink apartment? Seemi pointed this out.

  "No offense," Seemi said.

  "None taken; it is rinky-dink," Khadra agreed.

  Khadra knew better than to discuss the Iranian revolution with Bitsy, who was obviously a Shah loyalist, with a family probably from the ranks of his well-rewarded royal-butt-kissers. Khadra's own enthusiasm for the Islamic Republic had dimmed, of course, a far cry from what it had been in '79. Yet even after her post-fundie transition (as she once flippantly called it in front of Seemi, even though she wouldn't let other people call her family "fundamentalists"), Khadra had a lingering fond spot for revolutionary Iran. Not for its brand of Islam, which Khadra now found distasteful, but the way it stood up to America. Like the people in the south of Lebanon, or the Palestinians who said "fuck you" to America and Israel even though they were getting stomped on. Khadra even had a newfound respect for the human-rights-abusing Hafez Asad, Syria's president-for-life. For the same reason. Somebody needed to not cave in to the One Great Superpower. Somebody out there needed to be alive and kicking. Saying, hunh-we don't care how you do things over there, we do things our own way. You ain't the Masters of the Universe. You can't come and make us. Wanna piece a this? You had to love them for trying, because it was so obviously a los
ing battle, after perestroika and glasnost and, God help us, the impending McDonaldization of the globe.

  "Reason #10, for corrupting the Persian language with Arabic words." "Reason #11, for changing the `p' in Persian to `f' as in Farsi-why did we have to drop our p's just because Arabs can't say them?" "Reason #3, for making Persians go from white-skinned, green-eyed Aryan people to dark-skinned, brown-eyed part-Semitic mongrels."

  Khadra left her a note. "Bitsy, your optometrist called. Your green contact lenses are ready for pick-up. PS, If it helps, I'm so sorry about Arabs turning the green eyes of your people brown."

  "Did you know Iranians were Aryans?" Khadra asked Seemi.

  "I wonder if Punjabis are too, then."

  "Bitsy says Iranians are racially closer to Germans than to Arabs, originally," Khadra said. "I think that was Reason #23."

  "Anyway, I don't believe in race. I don't believe in origins," Seemi said flatly. "Origins are myths. And race does not exist."

  "Racism exists," Khadra objected. "You can't say racism doesn't exist."

  "I didn't say racism doesn't exist. Of course it exists. Races don't. I mean, the idea that human beings belong to one discrete racial category or another. Like Semitic, Aryan, Slavic, and so on. We're all mixed."

  "Okay-but then how can you say ... " by then Khadra had lost any logical thread. Seemi's definitions dizzied Khadra. She had taken graduate classes in postmodern theory at Temple and said bizarre things all the time, like "the subaltern cannot speak." It was quite unintelligible. Reminded Khadra of the weird stuff the Sufi professors in Bloomington used to say.

  To All Brothers: From All Sisters

  every nite without you i give birth to myself

  who am i to be touched at random?

  -Sonia Sanchez, Homegirls and Handgrenades

  And then it all came screeching to an end with Chrif. At the sex crossroads.

  "What do you mean, you're not comfortable going any further than that?" he said as she slid his hands from around her waist and gently but firmly held them down at his sides. "Ever?"