The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (17 page)

Khadra tried to keep the joyous talbiya in her mind and on her tongue: Here I am, 0 my Lord, Here I am! Labbaik, allahumma, lab- baik! But she kept getting it crossed with Phil Collins in her head crooning, "I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lo-ord ... I've been waiting for this moment for all my life, oh Lo-ord. . . "

Everything was ceaseless motion around the Lady of Night, and the Lady was absolutely still. She was Sakina, the serenity within the whirl. Imagine, Khadra thought, looking at the massive tides of pilgrims around the Kaba, these circles get bigger and bigger, as people all over Mecca face here to pray, then all over the world, even as far as America, wave after wave of people, in concentric circles going all around the earth, and I am here at the center of all that. Khadra was a little stunned, and then she was taken up swirling too, and her mother was pleading, "Hold onto Jihad! Hold him tight!" and her father was calling, "Stay with me! Stay with me!" And they were off, part of the sea.

A small elderly man jabbed Khadra in the ribs without being aware of it. He was scrambling to keep up with a litter bearing what looked to be his wife. Suddenly a wall of Arab Gulf men stormed through, elbows locked around their women kin. They shoved everyone aside, barking "We have womenfolk, make way for them! We have women!" What are we, chopped liver? Khadra thought as she was pulled over to the right. A tall black teenaged girl, roundshouldered like Zuhura, got pressed up against her. Despite the discomfort and the fray, her face, up close to Khadra's and meeting her eye, was serene. "Peace," she whispered in Khadra's ear. "Salamu. Ya salam. " She seemed to surrender herself to the chaos with a sort of trust in its ultimate direction.

After tawaf, Khadra waited for an opening to ford the river of people. She found a place to pray and then sat very still, her knees tucked under her chin, contemplating Islam's Lady in Black. Here was the center of the world just as the heart was the center of the body. The massing multitudes about her, flowing like blood through a vein-in the circulatory system of what larger consciousness?

I'm glad God's ways are not your ways, He does not see as man; Within His love I know there's room For those whom others ban.

-Frances E. W. Harper, "A Double Standard"

Stately date palms towered over the adobe wall around the house. An evergreen bush at the door bore creamy yellow flowers. A middle-aged man with a white ghutra covering his head answered the door, all smiles through his full beard. A couple of stocky younger men stood beside him.

"Welcome, welcome," Zaid Jafar Tihamy said, extending his hand to Wajdy, Eyad, and little Jihad. He touched his heart in respectful greeting to Khadra and her mother. "My sons, Bandar and Anwar," he said, indicating the young men by his side.

They passed through a courtyard lined with tamarisks and palm trees. The men went left, into the public parlor, and the women went right, where a lovely floral scent grew stronger and appeared to be coming from a compact tree in a soil bed near the door. A large, heavily ornamented woman welcomed them warmly.

"My henna tree," Aunt Saweem said, after greetings. "Isn't it wonderful?" She turned up her plump, braceleted hand to gesture at the tree, displaying the henna arabesques that adorned her palm.

Saweem Shahbandar was Ebtehaj's milk sister. Milk relationships were created by women alone. When a woman breastfed another woman's baby, that child was henceforth considered a sibling to all the children of the woman who'd nursed him or her. In recognition of the milk bond created by Saweem's and Ebtehaj's mothers a generation ago, the Shamys had been invited to stay at Saweem Shah- bandar's home for the rest of their Mecca sojourn.

Aunt Saweem had been a teacher at a private lycce in Damascus when she received the proposal from the handsome uncle of one of her Saudi students. Her ensuing life had been spent entirely in her husband's country, and she had assimilated to Saudi customs.

"Why, even your speech is Saudi-ized," Ebtehaj teased.

The two women chatted, catching each other up on their respective lives. Khadra grew drowsy and leaned back on the ornate sofa. Some kind of nature documentary was playing on a television at the far end of the large room. Khadra could hear both narrations, the uppercrust British male voice that reminded her of 16mm films in ninth grade biology class and, layered on top of it, the Arabic dubbing. To survive in the and climate of Saudi Arabia's western lowlands, these unexpectedly beautiful flowering plants have developed physical defenses. The forbidding-looking thorns ofthe acacia trees are an example. Such lethal external appearances discourage grazing animals from chewing their foliage ...

The next morning, Khadra asked the one she thought was the daughter-in-law, "Where's the mosque whose adhan I heard right outside my window?" The call she had heard had thrilled her, bringing pure glory to all her senses. She'd never experienced a real adhan before this trip, the kind that rang out over the rooftops.

"Right next door," Buthayna said.

What Khadra could not explain to this stranger was how the sound had made her feel. She had run to the window, flinging it open, and leaned her head out in the early morning darkness, as if to bring her whole self closer to the call. It was the long-awaited invitation. She was going to the ball.

The next day Khadra awoke to the adhan for fajr as if to the call of love. She beat Buthayna to the bathroom for wudu. Then back in the bedroom, she got dressed and picked up her shoes and tiptoed out.

"Where are you going?" Buthayna asked her guest in the hall.

"To pray fajr," Khadra whispered over her shoulder.

Thirty minutes later, with a tearstreaked face, Khadra was back, escorted by two burly matawwa policemen with big round black beards and billy clubs belted over their white caftans.

"Is this one of your womenfolk?" they asked Uncle Zaid, Saweem's husband, his face freshly washed. "We found her trying to get into the mosque." They said it as if she was a vagrant or something.

Uncle Zaid shook his head no, not looking at her bare face. He seemed mortified that the matawwa police were at his door and glanced sideways to see if any neighbors were out.

"But I'm Khadra!-the daughter of Wajdy Shamy and Ebtehaj Qadri-Agha," she cried in a tremulous voice. "Your guests!"

He looked up, startled. "Ah, yes, yes, I'm so sorry-yes, officerswhat is the problem?"

"Are you her mahram?"

"No."

"Produce her mahram."

Wajdy came to the door. "Khadra! Binti, what's wrong-when did you leave the house, what is this?" He had to produce his passport and travel documents, the whole family's documents.

"How could you leave the house without permission-your parents', your hosts'? Without telling anybody?" Ebtehaj asked in an angry whisper behind closed doors.

"I-just-wanted-to-pray-fajr," Khadra hiccupped between sobs.

"You can pray in the house," Wajdy said.

"But I didn't want to pray in the house, Baba. The mosque is so near-the adhan was so beautiful-and it was calling to me, to me."

"Well, women are not allowed to pray in the mosque here," her father replied. He was deeply embarrassed by the position Khadra had put him in before his grave-faced host.

"But, Baba, how can women not be allowed?" Khadra had never heard of such a thing. No mosque she had ever encountered hadn't had a place for women. Not even the tiny Kokomo mosque that ran out of a Motel 6. "Then where do they pray?"

"They pray at home."

"But where do they pray when they go to the mosque?" Khadra said, uncomprehending.

"Khadra, you're not listening. Women here don't go to the mosque. They don't in most Muslim countries."

Khadra had never heard of such a preposterous thing. It couldn't be right. Being a Muslim meant going to the mosque. "What? I don't know what you're talking about. It doesn't even make sense. Everyone knows women go to the mosque. Women have always gone to the mosque. It's part of Islam."

"You're used to America, binti," Wajdy said. "In most of the Muslim world, it hasn't been the custom for hundreds of years."

"But you said you said-" she whirled here to include her mother, "you always said it was part of Islam. What about Aisha? What about how Omar wished his wife would not go to the mosque for fajr but he couldn't stop her because he knew it was her right? What about the Prophet saying `You must never prevent the female servants of God from attending the houses of God?' I told the matawwa that hadith and he laughed-he laughed at me, and said `listen to this woman quoting scriptures at us!"'

Here she started sobbing again. It was like-the tone when he said "this woman"-it was like the police thought she was some kind of bad woman, out in the street at that dark hour, alone, face uncovered, and were going to haul her in for some sort of vice crime. None of them believed her or even listened to her. Like she was a joke, like what she said didn't even matter. It was all she could do to get them to bring her to the house.

And then the expression on Uncle Zaid's face when he wouldn't look at her at first and then when he recognized her: it was that look again. For a minute, she actually felt like a bad woman, as if she really had done something wrong, and she shuddered, and it frightened her. But then, it made her really angry-angry that they would treat her this way, and angry that she let them get inside her feelings-and she wanted to come out swinging.

I want someone to drive me Down town

-Memphis Minnie, "Won't You Be My Chauffeur"

Saweem was telling Ebtehaj, in scandalized tones, that her husband's sister, Sheikha, held mixed-gender dinner parties. Ebtehaj tsk-tsked.

"I don't see what's wrong with that, if the women wear hijab," Khadra'd said. She couldn't resist. It was so boring here. And it was bogus of her mother to pretend the Dawah didn't have a mixedgender work environment.

On the other hand, she couldn't believe her ears when her mother defended Americans later that day. Aunt Saweem had just declared that American women had to be sluts: that much was clear from the way they dressed.

"I used to think so," Ebtehaj said slowly, and her daughter looked up with interest. Her mother had a puzzled frown on her face, as if she were measuring Livvy's tiny halter-tops against the long denim jumpers of Norma Whitcomb. "How they dress depends on their upbringing. We have a neighbor, if you saw her, why, except for the hair uncovered, you'd say she was as modest as you or I." She looked surprised at what she'd just said. It seemed to have come together in her mind at that very moment.

"Really!" Saweem said, with a doubtful look.

"Yes," Ebtehaj said, with a little more certainty. "And also-even the scantily dressed ones-I've found you can't always draw conclusions about them." Under Saweem's questioning, a notion was emerging that hadn't fully formed in her before. "Khadra has an American friend, for example, who-well, to look at the way she dresses, you might think she was a young streetwalker."

"Yee." Saweem said. "God preserve us."

"No, no-but after you know more, you understand that she is really a very good girl. A moral girl. She just doesn't know how to dress."

"Hmmph," Saweem said, not at all convinced that those two things, skimpy dress and good morals, could go together.

"So you really have to pity them, more than condemn," Ebtehaj pressed on, eager now to express the thought. "They don't have the teachings of modesty. Their mothers don't teach it to them. And everything else in their culture kills the natural instinct of a woman for modesty, and teaches her instead to expose herself. To please men."

This was an insight Khadra'd never heard her mother articulate before.

"Want to go visit my Aunt Sheikha?" Afaaf said to Khadra over a ping-gong game in the recreation room.

Khadra lunged to hit back a strong serve. "Does your mother let you go there? She doesn't seem to approve of your aunt."

"She has to-ties of the womb."

Khadra didn't see what was so tempting about going to another house when all she'd done was sit around this one, but it was a change of scene, anyway.

"You're sure it's safe?" Ebtehaj asked Saweem. "To send the girls with a driver?" Ebtehaj wasn't used to servants. Back in Syria, if you had a housekeeper, she was a poor Syrian, not a foreigner-more accountability in that, both ways.

"Aijaz? He's a good Muslim," Saweem assured her, referring to the Gujurati driver.

"And-this sister-in-law of yours-does she have boys?"

"I understand you completely, my dear. Her sons are at camp in Yanbu. And Sheikha may be too liberal for us, but she is a deeply moral woman."

Sheikha greeted them breathlessly. "I'm sorry girls, you're welcome here, but I'll be busy. I've just received word that Raja Alem-the surrealist playwright, surely you know-is in town for a very short time and I must interview her. I've been trying to get her for my Saudi women writers series. And now," she said jubilantly, "I've got her! What a coup!"

"My aunt is a journalist," Afaaf said to Khadra.

"Call Rini in the back when you want dinner," Sheikha said as she threw on her abaya and veil. "You're welcome to use the library but don't disturb the files on my desk." She hurried out to the car and driver the newspaper had sent.