The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (14 page)

"But where did she go, Aunt Khadija? Why did she leave?"

Aunt Khadija murmured something about Hanifa going to stay with her grandmother in Alabama, and didn't want to say any more. Khadra smoothed out a cotton crewneck undershirt and picked up a pair of shorts, then realized they must be Hakim's, and quickly put them down.

"Never speak her name again," Ebtehaj said when Khadra said how strange it was about Hanifa.

"She's having a baby," Eyad said to his sister, later, in private. He had information from Hakim.

Khadra's jaw dropped.

They are a people who take the earth for a carpet, its dust for a bed, and its water for perfume; they take the Quran for a watchword and prayer for a covering

-Ali ibn Abi Talib, The Peak ofEloguence

Wajdy and Ebtehaj always viewed their stay in America as temporary. That was part of the reason they were always reluctant to buy many things; they'd just be more attachments to leave behind when the time came. Money saved buying beat-up furniture in America was money that could be spent back home in Syria one day. Who cares what you sat on if this was not home? If your walls were white and bare, or had only a tacky prayer rug with some faded image of mosques pinned up, and your children craved beauty and form, let it be a lesson to them on the value of plainness and the fleeting nature of the life of this world compared to the next. The plan was to return to the House of Islam, ramshackle as it was.

But the return kept getting postponed. First there'd been college degrees to be earned, for learning was a virtue for man and woman, and to travel in search of learning, yea even unto the West, was loved by God. Then there was Islamic work to be done in the Dawah. Wajdy's idea had been to set things on a good course, train his replacement, and leave. But year piled on top of year, and soon two whole children, Khadra and Eyad, had practically grown up, with Eyad in college and Khadra in high school. And Jihad was halfway through a childhood spent in America only by default.

Meanwhile, things were on fire in Syria. "Islamists and Freemasons, landlords, shopkeepers, workers, and peasants, conservatives and revolutionaries, Syrians and Palestinians-nearly all opposed the regime. " The Islamic movement was getting stronger all the time, by word-jihad and deed-jihad, by peaceful means and by the taking up of arms. By any means necessary. The government was punishing those who opposed it-and even those who didn't, since whatever flimsy rules of evidence and legality had existed before were jettisoned in the face of this onslaught-by means of sweeps, mass arrests, executions, rape, and torture.

Wajdy attacked the Syrian dictator constantly in The Islamic Forerunner and urged support for the Islamic movement that sought to overthrow him. Just to express this opinion privately, much less to publish it, was a capital crime in Syria, so this exercise of freedom of speech made Wajdy a "terrorist." If he were ever caught in Syria, he'd be sent to the reeducation camps in the desert.

Whenever Teta got home from one of her American trips, the mukhabarat-horrible men with enormous power, loathed by everyone-hauled her in to question her about Wajdy. When did you see him? Where? Why? He's my nephew, for heaven's sake, a nephew I raised, like a son to me. Who are his associates? What are his activities? Who else did you see in America? What are their political beliefs? For hours and hours they kept Teta sitting in their office, talking to her roughly, as if she were a criminal. They even threatened to put her in Mazze Prison to try to coerce Wajdy to come to Syria.

"Trying to intimidate me," she said to Khadra when she told the story the next year. "But they don't know me! I am one tough cookie. I know no fear. I am the salt of the earth, I am," she sang, dropping her voice to a macho baritone and thumping her abundant bosom. But she looked tired. What indignities they really put her through, she never hinted at. And she never once reproached Wajdy. "My dissident boy," she called him proudly, over the kitchen table in Fallen Timbers.

Then the Hama massacre happened. Twenty thousand Syrians were killed, thousands dragged off to prison, thousands more wounded, and seventy thousand left homeless because the government razed half the city. Even though the resistance was beaten down in the first ten days of fighting, the government forces kept pounding and pounding the city as collective punishment for its rebellion. The wound was deep, and affected everyone in Syria, no matter if they were pro-government, pro-opposition, or neutral. Fear was in the air, and explosive anger. In The Islamic Forerunner, Wajdy let loose with fiery op-eds condemning the Asad regime.

TEta decided not to risk travel abroad that summer, and that was the end of her long lovely stays with Khadra and her family. "I'm too tuckered out for this," Teta told them over the phone. "Te'ebruni, such a long journey, and the stress.... And you will ever be at sea, no harbor in your destiny," she said, and started singing Abdul Halim's Nizar poem, "The Palm Reader." Here Hayat Um Abdo, her neighbor and best friend, tried to take the phone from her, but TEta yanked it back and finished the song:

After that there was only the telephone. May you bury me, lovesies, may you bury my bones, call me.

The spirit is truly at home with itself " when it can confront the world that is opened up to it, give itself to the world, and redeem it and, through the world, also itself. But the spirituality that represents the spirit nowadays is so scattered, weakened, degenerate ... that it could not possibly do this until it had first returned to the essence of the spirit: being able to say You.

-Martin Buber, I and Thou

There had always been the telephone, providing its staticky line to Syria. Such communication, however, was rare and extremely expensive. If Eyad and Khadra came home from school and their mother was shouting at the top of her lungs "WE'RE FINE, FINE! THANKING GOD! MISSING YOU!" then they knew there was a phone call to Damascus going on. You had to talk real loud on an overseas call. And you took the phone call standing on edge. You couldn't read a book or eat a snack while a phone call to Syria was in progress. Everyone stood at attention. It was a major family event, like a childbirth or a hospitalization. And indeed, aside from the two Eids, you mostly only phoned Syria when events like that happened, like Jihad's birth the year after they moved to Indianapolis, Wajdy's appendectomy and, on the other end, the births of Mafaz, Muhsin,' and Misbah, the younger siblings of Reem and Roddy, those model Muslim children.

The phone call to Syria followed almost exactly the same script year after year, except instead of bulletins like "JIHAD'S TEETHING!" they began to say things like "KHADRNS IN HIGH SCHOOL NOW." and "EYAD GOT A SCHOLARSHIP TO COLLEGE!"

"We don't have that," Hakim said one day to Khadra, when she spoke of having to hurry home because there was a phone call to Syria.

"Huh?" she said.

"We can't phone home like you all," he said. A dog-eared book of poems by Marvin X was under his arm, a black book with a star and crescent on the cover. Fly to Allah, the title said. Ever since Han- ifa'd dropped out of sight, Hakim had acquired kind of a hard edge, read militant black authors, and talked tough about "self-discipline," as if to distance himself from what she'd done, an undisciplined thing. "This stuff's for real," he liked to say of his new reading matter. That was what he was after, whatever the latest book in his hand: what was for real. Where was it to be found?

"Who? What are you talking about? Who's `we?' and who's `you all?"' Khadra thought his quest and even his newfound fierceness noble, but was frustrated by how it locked her out. Not that they saw much of eath other, other than in the context of time their families spent together. Past a certain age, girls in their community didn't hang out with boys. This sometimes had the effect of lending a mystique to the few interactions they did have, whereas constant familiarity might have dulled down their views of each other to a sisterly-brotherly boredom.

"You all is, immigrant brothers and sisters. `We' is, black people. I mean, African people. African people in the North American wilderness."

"You're not African," Khadra retorted. "Aunt Ayesha's African. And `we' are all one thing: Muslim." This was the Dawah Center line: No racism in Islam. Meaning, none is allowed; a commendable ideal. But it was also a smokescreen of denial that retarded any real attempt to deal with the prejudices that existed among Muslims.

"Oh yeah?" Hakim shot back. "Then how many Dawah Center officers are black? How many immigrants do you know who've married African American? Be for real! Immigrant white-pleasers'll marry white Americans, Muslim or not, but they won't marry black people."

"Yeah well that cuts both ways," Khadra countered. "I don't see the proposals rolling in from the African Americans to the immigrants, either." She bit her lip, knowing he was right. Syrian Arabs like her parents sure didn't think black was beautiful.

They pretended it was about language, not color. Losing Arabic was tantamount to losing the religion, so "You have to marry a native Arabic speaker" made sense.

Then, one day, Eyad worked up the nerve to enlist his parents' help in asking for the hand of the Sudanese doctor's daughter, Maha Abdul-Kadir, a regal beauty whose color was rich and dark. Her family lived far and high above the Dawah Center Muslims in a Meridian Hills mansion, and the only problem he could foresee was his lack of means, especially compared to what she was used to. But maybe religious ideals-that material wealth matters little compared to piety and character in a spouse, and so forth-could overcome any qualms she or her family might have about the economic gap? And maybe they could be persuaded to bear in mind that he was pre-med, so that, even if he was poor now, he had good prospects?

Khadra had noticed Eyad mooning over Maha at the massive Muslim Eid prayer at Eagle Creek Park. That is, he seemed to be trying a little extra hard to lower his gaze when he found himself in her vicinity. She was an usher, responsible for passing the zakat alms box up and down the women's rows. He lit up when she tapped him on the shoulder, even though it was only to hand him the box and ask him to see that Brother Derek, the men's usher, got it, because Brother Derek was too deep into the men's crowd for her to proceed to him modestly.

The girl had impeccable character, was active at the mosque, and wore flawless hijab with not a hair showing. And, definitely, she was a native speaker of Arabic, with a pure accent, and a fluency aided by the private Arabic tutors her father had hired. She was splendidly qualified to teach their future children the language of the Quran. Piety, character, beauty, brains, the right language, the right home culture-what more to ask in a bride?

"So ... I was wondering what you would think about the idea of proposing to Dr. Abdul-Kadir's daughter Maha," he began timidly one evening in the kitchen.

His father stopped deboning the chicken, mid-breast, and blurted, "But for heaven's sake, she's black as coal!"

So there it was. Out in the open.

As soon as he'd said it, Wajdy looked queasy, and seemed almost taken aback that such a thing had come out of his own mouth. He lowered his eyes to the chicken bones and made no further comment. Ebtehaj was silent, but it was clear that black grandchildren were not what she had in mind, either. She concentrated on drawing out a slippery crescent of meat hidden between the bones of a chicken wing.

Eyad seemed dazed, even paralyzed. The gulf between what they'd taught him and what was happening-and his not wanting to face that gulf even in light of what his father had just said-was overhelming. All of a sudden, his thought processes slowed down and he could only stare blankly.

"But more importantly, she's older than you," Ebtehaj jumped in after the long awkward pause. "The woman should always be younger, because girls are more mature than boys and women go downhill faster in old age."

"She's only older by a few months," Eyad said weakly. He was never going to marry anyone to whom his parents' first reaction was so negative. So that was that. He lowered his gaze to what would please his parents, believing their approval to be next to God's.

Like many religious `radicals' they were persecuted, to the point of being executed for heresy. Finding no safe haven in other surrounding countries ... a conservative faction ... took the name of its leader, Jacob Amman, adopted his severe social and familial code, and looked for a better life across the sea.... The Amish follow an oft-misunderstood idea called gelassenheit, loosely translated as ... submission ... one must strictly adhere to or risk being shunned...

-Thomas Huhti, The Great Indiana Touring Book

"We have no passports," Wajdy told Ebtehaj. Their old raggedy green ones had expired, and the Syrian embassy was not about to renew the passports of dissidents and their children. So now they were paperless in America. Stuck. Plans to go on Haj had to be put on hold. But it was worse than that-their American residency papers, their green cards, depended on having valid passports to back them up. Remaining in this situation was not an option. Next they would become undocumented aliens, a precarious limbo status.