The Beauty of Your Face

by Sahar Mustafah

  Her son Ayman shifts in his chair, listening, his brows furrowing as he tries to comprehend their conversation. The day after the planes collided, a classmate called him a terrorist, a word he’d never heard before, as insidious to Afaf as rapist or pedophile. Words that make adults cringe, yet too awful for a child to hear, let alone be called.

  When Afaf became a mother, she’d stopped sleeping soundly, her ears perking at the slightest cough or whimper. She lay on her back, rubbing the scar on her arm from the boiling soup her mother had spilled so many years ago. She tries to avoid the news, though the faces of the terrorists—nineteen men who were once sons, brothers, husbands—haunt her everywhere she goes. The mushrooming clouds invade her prayers. How could so many lives be taken in the name of God? It’s not her God or Baba’s, the one who’d saved them both.

  Sometimes Bilal stirs awake and they make sudden love, clinging to each other in that early morning darkness before he drifts off again. It’s more frequent these days, like new lovers discovering each other all over again. She listens to Bilal’s soft snoring, her body pressed against him, his broad back like a reservoir wall, holding her in.

  Then the alarm clock sounds and she prepares for a new day to teach at Nurrideen School, where three hundred young muslimat in defiant hijab arrive. Before joining the Islamic girls’ school, Afaf taught in Chicago, combatting unemployment and poverty, gangs and daily violence. Skin color determined how much funding their school would have, what her students’ neighborhoods looked like. Now it’s a child’s religious upbringing—their faith—that incites hateful vandalism on their family’s garage, or being spit at in the parking lot of the Walmart.

  They’d gone from towel-heads to terrorists.

  Afaf’s unwilling to take off her hijab, though it sometimes feels heavy. A week after the towers fell, she considered it: Just for a little while, until things settle down, her brother Majeed had urged her. But it felt more like a humiliating surrender than protection. How many people had died rather than denounce their own beliefs? It seems they’ve always engaged in this strange dance with their Christian brothers and sisters.

  It’s not the same God, a white teacher at her last school had declared. She and Afaf had been debating the commonalities of Christianity and Islam. Her coworker balked at the notion that they were worshipping the same biblical Lord. Afaf had brought her literature the Center had produced in an effort to forge interfaith relations among their communities. Afaf saw the pamphlet lying on top of a heap of discarded foam coffee cups in the staff break room.

  A few muslimat from the Nur Society have taken off their hijabs—Suha Bakri, and one of Kowkab’s sisters—their husbands worry about their safety. Just last week Afaf heard about a woman who was shoved and kicked by a white couple at a supermarket while she was unloading her groceries. Others hadn’t been so lucky to escape with mere injuries. Afaf grimly recalls the images on the news of women donning blond wigs to deter Son of Sam, the same year Nada disappeared.

  Last month Afaf had gone into a Victoria’s Secret at the mall to purchase a bridal shower gift for one of the younger women. A middle-aged white woman and her friend had sneered at her as she carried a lacy negligee to the salesclerk: Isn’t it a sin for them to shop here? As if muslimat were incapable of being sensuous beings. Or did not wear underwear. But she hadn’t turned around to argue these things with those white women. She’d simply purchased her gift and left, eyes straight ahead to the exit.

  Haven’t women always been most vulnerable in difficult times? Sister Nabeeha reminds them at the women’s hadith lecture about the special burden they carry. We experience the pain of menstruation, of first intercourse, then hours of labor and years of rearing our children.

  They nod, the younger girls blushing at the mention of sex.

  But those burdens are no less gifts. We will be exalted in His kingdom. Did not the Prophet, peace be upon Him, declare, ‘Heaven lies under the feet of your mother’? Nabeeha charges them, Sisters, do not abandon your hijab. We can withstand more than men.

  Still, several women have resorted to hats with low brims instead of colorful headscarves.

  Akram scampers into the kitchen and tugs at Afaf’s shirt. “Mama! Can I feed the fish?” Her five-year-old hops from one foot to the other. Akram favors his father, thick brown hair with a natural side part, penetrating amber eyes.

  “No, habibi. You fed them this morning.” She tickles his stomach. Akram giggles and squirms.

  “Come, baby, wash your hands for dinner.” Bilal swoops Akram off the floor, their son’s shrill laughter echoing down the hallway.

  There’s a ring at the front door, then Baba’s shuffling feet, his cane clacking against ceramic tile in the foyer.

  “Salaam, habibti. Your favorite.” Baba hands Afaf a brown paper sack with grease stains on the bottom. He holds her face with both hands and kisses each cheek. He steps back and she sees how much her father has aged. Perhaps it’s this trip to hajj, or perhaps it’s how the world has just turned topsy-turvy—Baba looks like an old man, no longer virile and straight-backed. He leans against his cane, shoulders stooped. His body seems to shrink with every passing year.

  “Thank you, Baba.” Tangy sumac spices and chopped onions permeate from the bag: spinach pies. Afaf finishes spooning steaming rice onto a platter and sprinkles the golden almonds on top.

  “Smells good,” Baba says. He loves Afaf’s mensaf, though she predicts he’ll only have a few bites before putting down his fork. His appetite has diminished over the last few months. He refuses to talk about anything regarding his health. It’s a battle seeing to his blood pressure medication and daily supplements. Since Mama moved to Palestine, Afaf and Bilal have asked him repeatedly to move in with them so that she can better monitor his condition, but he refuses. Baba still lives in the old apartment in Chicago. Nearly every white person has left her old neighborhood; now it’s mostly young immigrant families from Mexico with whom Baba exchanges greetings in English. Afaf and Bilal purchased a home in Tempest to be closer to the Center.

  When Afaf frets over a missed dosage of his latest prescription, he tells her, “It’s in Allah’s hands, habibti.”

  This has been Baba’s way: this unquestionable surrender of his health to God despite his doctor’s recommendations. And it’s the same for everything else in his life—financial matters, the plight of the Palestinians.

  Everything except when it comes to Mama. Afaf doubts there’s any verse in the holy book that has eased Baba’s loneliness. It’s been nearly eight years and he still misses her. She’s returned to her parents’ home, residing with her younger brother’s family. Mama will never come back to the States. Baba’s pride keeps him from traveling to Palestine without her invitation, though she and Majeed have the means to send him. When Afaf dutifully calls her long-distance, Mama refuses to speak to Baba, only politely asking Afaf and Majeed about him as though he’s a distant relative.

  Still, Baba wires her money every month like he’s paying off some exorbitant debt he owes Mama. Afaf and Majeed, too. For Eid, she sends Mama pajamas and house slippers, and kitchenware for Mama’s sister-in-law Huda.

  Your mother is too quiet, habibti, Huda chirps on a long-distance call. She’s in her own world. And all that walking she does! No wonder she still has her girlish figure. Her aunt’s tone is a tad more than envious.

  Mama never went on walks, barely left the apartment, in Chicago. Afaf tries to picture the villagers watching Mama with awe as she strolls down their dusty roads like a prodigal daughter returned from a failed life. To them, she’s a cautionary tale that America isn’t a land of dreams, but one of nightmares, a place that snatches your child and ruins your marriage.

  “Have a seat, Baba.” Afaf pulls out a kitchen chair for him. He waddles over to Ayman, pats his grandson’s hair.

  “Keefak, habibi?”

  “Salaam, Siddo Mahmood.” Ayman kisses the back of Baba’s hand as Bilal has taught their sons to do. “I don’t
want to go back to school tomorrow.”

  “You’re going,” Afaf says.

  Baba slowly lowers himself in the chair. “Where’s my other boy?”

  “Here he is,” Bilal says, Akram bobbing at his heels.

  “Ahlan! Ahlan!” Baba kisses Akram’s head and holds it for a moment longer, his lips moving in du’aa. He pulls out his musbaha and with his other hand he tugs at his short beard. “I was at the hospital with Benjamin. Maskeen. It’s very bad.”

  Mr. Parker, Baba’s longtime friend, is dying. She remembers, so many years ago, a bear of a man sitting in her mother’s kitchen, arguing about systemic racism. “May Allah give him strength. How are his wife and Ashanti? I haven’t seen them at the masjid.”

  “They spend every moment with Benjamin at the hospital. They would be pleased to see you, habibti.”

  “Inshallah next week.”

  Baba turns to Bilal. “How’s your mother?”

  “Elhamdulillah, Uncle. She started dialysis.” Something pitches in Bilal’s voice, imperceptible unless you’re listening closely. He escorts his mother to every treatment and stays with her for four hours, three times a week. They speak in their native tongue, remembering what it was like before the war. He taps away at his laptop, evaluating financial portfolios while his mother’s blood flushes through tubes, a steady humming in the small room at the dialysis center. A nurse sits across from an imposing machine, monitoring the procedure.

  His mother still sings to Akram at naptime a folk song from the country she’d fled forever with her own two children:

  Maghrib has come, the sun went down,

  The shine is left on your face.

  Maghrib has come, your face

  Shines more beautiful because of the sun.

  I would like to warm myself

  In the beauty of your face.

  Baba turns back to Afaf. “Have you heard from Majeed?”

  “Yes. He’s fine. Still working on that settlement for that food service.” Afaf speaks to her brother once a week, suspecting he might not call her if she didn’t initiate their conversations.

  The real question twinkles in Baba’s eyes. “Have you spoken to your mother?” He thumbs his musbaha, pretending to be nonchalant.

  “Yesterday.” Afaf pours him a glass of pomegranate juice. “There was a muzzahara after the Friday prayer. Two shot dead.”

  “Lah, lah, lah. Allah yarhamhum. May the Lord grant them patience and peace.” Baba looks at her, eager for some personal message, a sentiment from Mama that she misses him, too.

  “Mama sends her regards,” Afaf tells him, refusing to delude him with false messages. Perhaps it’s cruel, denying an old man some slice of joy. But Afaf believes she’s no crueler than Mama, who’d left her wedding band behind on her dresser. Afaf had hid it before Baba discovered her mother had discarded it.

  He looks down at his musbaha, but not before she catches his eyes clouding over, his shoulders sinking at Mama’s indifference. Mama remains as distant as ever, by an ocean and her own poisoned mind. She might never know Afaf’s sons, that each has one dimpled cheek, or that Ayman always sleeps on his back, how Akram stutters when he’s excited. And she’ll never know that Afaf learned to prepare meals from cookbooks and from recipes the women from the Center swap after hadith lectures. Afaf has made a good life without her mother’s guidance, and yet Mama’s absence looms like someone erased from a photograph, leaving an empty space to which your eyes are perpetually drawn in the frame.

  Afaf changes the subject. “Baba, we’ve been talking about going to hajj. I think we should postpone it until next year.”

  Baba gestures with his musbaha. “Why delay it? Are you worried about the boys?”

  Afaf is the youngest muslimah to travel to hajj this year from the circle of women, some of them surprised that she’d leave behind her two young sons. She and Bilal have had long conversations about it, had decided a summer ago. They want to fulfill this important pillar while they’re relatively young and fit.

  Who knows what next year might bring? Bilal says. Her husband keenly understands how, in a precarious whim, life can force you to flee from your country, after your father has been brutally executed. He’s taught Afaf to never plan too far ahead, to appreciate every waking moment, no matter the hardship that accompanies it. Together they watched two planes hurtle through the World Trade Center, instantaneous flames revealing how dangerously short life can be.

  Afaf sits across from Baba at the table and serves him first. “It’s you I’m concerned about, Baba. Are you sure you want to do this again?”

  The first time her father planned to fulfill hajj, Baba had thrown himself into prayer, spending hours reading the Quran and performing du’aa, Mama glaring at him from the kitchen sink. His musbaha had become a new appendage of his hand, the beads in a perpetual cycle through his thumb and fingers. The prospect of a second pilgrimage seemed to offer some solace; the old light in his eyes flicked on from time to time.

  Baba holds his hand up, halting another heaping scoop of rice. “I must go. When a Muslim cannot make the journey himself, another can go in his place.” He’s going for Mama, though she’s not asked him to.

  When Baba returned from hajj the first time, Mama had stood in the corner of her bedroom as he unpacked his suitcase, pulling out tiny bottles of Zamzam water and mosaic jewelry boxes inlaid with mother-of-pearl. He handed each gift to Afaf, who gathered them in her arms. Mama had sneered with contempt.

  He’d also come home with a urinary tract infection. How much can his battered body stand anymore?

  “I know you can go in someone’s place, Baba.” She wants to say, But Mama doesn’t want you to do this on her behalf—doesn’t want you—can’t you see that? Instead she argues, “But Allah overlooks such things when he knows what’s in your heart—your neeya. You’ve already made the journey.”

  “And I plan to do it again with you and my son.” He pats Bilal’s arm and her husband looks at Afaf with an expression of, I told you so.

  “It’s the timing, Baba. I think it’s not a good year—” She instantly winces at her choice of words. But it’s too late.

  “ ‘A good year’? When is it not a good year if one’s body can carry him to that holy place?”

  “That’s not what I meant, Baba. I—”

  He holds up his musbaha. “Nothing can stand in our path towards God. We cannot give in to fear, habibti. Muslimeen have endured worse in the history of man. We cannot lose faith.”

  Ayman and Akram are oblivious to the adults’ conversation, making goofy faces at each other, tapping their bowls with their spoons until Bilal hushes them.

  Baba is obstinately ignorant of how much the world has changed. He thinks he can still talk to strangers about Allah and the Prophet and amarkan will be amused by this old man who speaks with an accent, recounting verses from a mysterious text. The Islam they’ve seen on TV is a dangerous religion that plunges through buildings with planes, regardless of life. She’d wondered, too, how these men had come upon this path of destruction. The liberal news outlets debated the failure of U.S. policy, that somehow this heinous act could be at least understood. It is still beyond Afaf’s own understanding. She reads the same scripture, prostrates in the same direction toward the Ka’aba, utters verses in the same language. And still there is no reconciling their Islam with hers.

  Afaf leans back in her chair. Bilal takes over serving the food, the boys eagerly holding out their bowls. She can see she’s getting nowhere with Baba. A part of her is afraid that the pilgrimage will take an irreversible toll on his frail body; another part is happy the three of them will be together in that holiest of places.

  Afaf only wishes Majeed could be with them. He seems to move farther and farther away from her and Baba. First to law school in St. Paul, then to a firm in Indianapolis. Now he’s accepted an offer from a firm in Sacramento, will move again across the country, a single man, no wife and children.

  Her brother has
n’t been quite the same after the night they’d discovered Mama in the bathtub, her body bobbing naked in the vomit-filled water. He blames Baba, Afaf knows it, and perhaps he’s resented Afaf, too, all these years.

  Religion doesn’t make reality go away, he’d said bitterly to Afaf in one of many arguments they’ve had.

  But it shields us from the ugliness sometimes. We need that, Maj. Even if it’s not permanent. Isn’t this what civilizations have been doing since the dawn of time? Since the Mayans and Greeks? It isn’t mass delusion, as you call it. It’s the most primitive human instinct. Religion eases suffering, Maj.

  It was the first time she’d shut him up. But not for long.

  It couldn’t help Mama, he’d challenged. And now the attack by so-called Muslims. Majeed had sounded bitterly vindicated.

  Afaf shreds some lamb for Akram and watches her boys vying for their grandfather’s attention, not permitting him to get a word in edgewise. Baba smiles and nods, slowly chewing, making a show of eating. After dinner, each boy takes her father’s hand and he lets them guide him to the family room, where he’ll strum his oud. It’s too cumbersome to carry back and forth from his apartment; Baba is content to leave it at her house, playing only for her children nowadays. It’s one of two artifacts from her childhood: the record player sits on a console in the family room, a stack of old records untouched beneath it. Sometimes Afaf will play Hair while she’s mopping the kitchen floor or folding laundry, amused by the erotic lyrics to which she and Majeed had been blithely ignorant as children.

  Bilal stacks the dishes on the counter and wipes down the table. He touches the small of her back as she stands at the sink rinsing dishes. She lifts her face toward him and he kisses her, his lips soft like the bristles of a paintbrush.