"Oh!" Aunt Razanne said, looking at it with interest when Khadra explained its use. "Would that you had brought many of those." Yes, her mother had told her Aunt Razanne would want one. Self-protection devices interested her.
"I did," she beamed, producing another for her aunt.
Muhsin seemed obsessed with the Tintin comics. Khadra sat next to him saying, "Tell me about this Tintin." She peered over his shoulder and-oh! That wasn't what he was actually reading. Behind Tintin and the Treasure of Timbuktu, she saw the close Arabic typeface of a badly printed book. "What's that?" she said. He put his fingers to his lips. Shh.
"It's Zakaria Tamer," he told her later, when they were alone in the family room.
"Who?"
"A banned Syrian author. He's political!"
She was impressed. "If he's banned, howd you get him?"
He grinned. "I will not reveal my sources even if you turned me in to the state police and they tortured me unto death," he said, extra-dramatically. He had more gumption than his parents.
"Oh you little devil!" she cried. Mafaz saw the two of them with the Tintin between them and winked. So she was in on it too.
"I'm the one who gets the books," Mafaz said. So Muhsin was exposed, the little braggart. His sister tweaked his ear and he ducked, grinning.
At least some members of this family had red blood still left in them.
Say to the fair one in the black headcover as she appears at the door of the mosque, "What have you done to a worshipping lover? He came to pray, then saw you and was lost. "
-lyrics sung by Sabah Fakhry ("Qullil malihati")
Peeling an eggplant was like unveiling an ivory-skinned woman dressed all in black. The eggplant in Khadra's hand was plump. She and her aunt sat close to the floor on little wooden crates-the ones the eggplants came in from the vegetable market-working on a tray set on top of another low crate.
"Tell me about my grandma, Auntie." Ebtehaj had spoken of her own mother rarely. There had only been a single photo back in Indiana. It had shown her grandmother with her husband and daughters wearing little set smiles. She had a kindly, concerned face.
"Well. Your grandmother was a sweet soul. Devoted to her children and home. She didn't appreciate Father flitting about with friends, hanging out at the coffeeshop. She was a homebody. And saintly, you know. Neighbors always said of her, `if there are angels walking the earth, Um Mansur is one of them.' I always remember her sitting on the mat in her bedroom, doing her praise-be's on her beads. And you know she's in heaven, because she lost a child. A mother who buries a child goes straight to heaven, same as a martyr."
"What was her name, Grandma Um Mansur?" All these years, and she didn't even really know her name. Essential things that Khadra needed to know, in her limited time, but her aunt seemed always to get lost in the telling.
"Badriye. Badriy6 Bustanjy. From a very religious family, my grandparents' family, of course. Scholars and sheikhs under the Ottomans. Mother tried to imbue us with all that. But you never know with your children. Some will follow you and some won't. She tried all the time to get Ebtehaj to wear hijab and pray regularly. Begged and pleaded and wept-"
Khadra nearly dropped her eggplant. "What? My mother didn't pray from the start?"
Aunt Razanne blinked up, placidly peeling the thick glossy skin. "Hmm, dear? Of course not. I was the good girl. Your mother was the rebellious one. I always tried to help and guide her, but . . ." she sighed.
"But what?" Khadra's insides were churning. She felt deceived.
"She had to learn the hard way." Her aunt swept a pile of eggplant peelings into the old powdered-milk canister that served as the garbage can. No one in America had a kitchen garbage can that small.
Well? Why was she stringing it out like this? "What hard way?" Khadra prompted. She tossed a peeled eggplant into a chipped white melamine bowl and picked up another one.
"Well, it was the trip to France." Aunt Razanne sighed.
"So? What happened in France?"
"You mean she's never told you? You've never talked about France?"
Khadra shook her head.
Aunt Razanne bit her lip.
"What happened in France?" Khadra repeated.
"I think I should wait until I can write to your mother first-"
"What happened in France?" Khadra stabbed the eggplant she'd been peeling with the knife and put it down. "Tell me now. Tell me now.
Aunt Razanne, weak of will, was prevailed upon. She took up Khadra's eggplant and set to it herself. "Father called me to come over to the house right away. She'd locked herself in the bathroom for hours. Wouldn't talk to him. Used up all the water in the house bathing. Wit's end, he was ..."
"From the beginning, Auntie, please, from the beginning."
Chopping the stem off another eggplant, Aunt Razanne carefully peeled back the barky petals around the tip. "The whole thing-she wasn't even supposed to go on the France trip. Your grandma didn't want her to go. At the beginning of the school year, she brought the permission slip home and Mother said no. Mother liked us to stay close to home. But, you see, Mother died before the year was out."
She pulled a wooden chopping board from behind the oven. The naked eggplants were stacked high in the chipped bowl. "These need to be chopped in wedges, dear. I'll heat the oil."
Khadra obediently and swiftly took the chopping board. She didn't want to risk distracting her for an instant.
"The whole idea of taking schoolgirls to France is wrong. It was part of the Baathist plan to ruin the morals of the land. To get us out of our homes, out of our veils, make us vulnerable. You see? They succeeded. Aping after the imperialists. You see? Ey, na'am. Father let her go. She only had to pout and he'd let her do anything." A bitter look flickered on Aunt Razann's face as she struck a match to light the gas burner, or so Khadra thought. She jumped back as the gas lit. "He was so sad and confused without our mother. For a while-then he started getting interested in that Sibelle woman. So glamorous, so a la mode. She was the daughter of a Turkish diplomat Father met at the athletic club. He had so many friends-"
"The France trip," Khadra prompted.
"Ebtehaj was fifteen. Or was she fourteen? Or sixteen? Well, I was nearly nineteen, you see, and married by then, so it didn't affect me as much. Sibelle, I mean. Not Mother dying-of course I was devastated at that. So sudden. Pancreatic cancer. In three or four months it was all over. The doctors said-"
"Aunt Razanne, the France trip." Yooh!What was the matter with her? The woman had ADD.
She sighed. "Right. They sailed to Marseilles. Ten or twelve girls and three teachers. You had to have excellent grades to go, and that Ebtehaj had, I'll give her. I was never one for As. No, go larger, Khadra."
"Huh?"
"Chop the pieces larger. This is for ma'lubeh. Upside Down Dish. You don't know how to make that, dear? Your mother never taught you, over there in America?"
Khadra chopped the eggplant into the larger pieces as instructed, waiting for her aunt to continue.
"Saweem Shabandar, she was one of the teachers, or teacher's aide. I think the oil is hot enough. Let me have those chopped eggplants. So you met her in Saudi, you say? She's wonderful, isn't she?" Aunt Razanne held her hand out at arm's length, plunked a handful of eggplant chunks, and jumped back. The oil snarled at her.
"No, not really."
Her aunt was startled and looked away from the violent oil. "You didn't like her? Goodness, why not? She's so-"
"Never mind, I was kidding. I liked her. Please go on?"
"Oh-pull these eggplants out at once, dear, they're almost brown. Here, into the aluminum pot. So. The head teacher, the one in charge of the trip was Sitt Iffat Innaby. The third chaperone was a history teacher named Ustaz Basil. Basil Abul Qushtban. Madame Innaby wanted him to court her daughter. Ey na'am, yes, indeed. Mind you, I think our Saweem had her eye on him too," Aunt Razanne chuckled. "Well, he was a catch. I had been hearing about him all year from Ebtehaj and her friends. He was a Nasserite. The young, handsome Nasserite history teacher. How the girls with their budding politics pressed him with questions-just like the girls in that Leila Murad musical, how did it go? It was such a hit. The one with the high school girls following the good-looking tutor around in their smart school uniforms, how did it go? Abcdefgee-ee, what a handsome teach is he-ee. Oh, they were very forward girls. It was her own fault, you know. On and on, she would gab in my kitchen, describing him to me. How smart he was. How he told them all about the Nasserite party even though he wasn't supposed to. This was the early '60s-or was it the mid-'60s? Either way, the Baath were in power already. Though they weren't as bad as they are now." She lowered her voice and looked over her shoulder. At the little vent window at the top corner of the kitchen.
The vent window? Her aunt was afraid of what might come through the little vent window now? Whew. "So the Nasserite history teacher-?" Khadra said. Aunt Razanne was so damn longwinded.
"Raped her."
Eggplants sizzled in the hot oil.
Did it take long to find me, I asked the faithful light
-Yusuf Islam, "Moonshadow"
Damascus was the capital city of a deep-set heartland. Full of smalltown minds-or, following the axiom "Small minds talk about things, mediocre minds talk about people, great minds talk about ideas," it was full of mediocre minds. Far from the sea and its ports, slow to take in waves of change, suspicious of strangers. Sort of like the Midwest, it occurred to Khadra. TEta kept Khadra's presence secret from this Damascus, buffered her from the tides of Shamy and Qadri-Agha relatives who would have overwhelmed her on a normal visit, wanting to know her business, picking the straws out of her mind like ravens. Khadra didn't know how Teta drew the veil over their eyes. Including the middle-aged Shamy couple, relatives of limited means, who lived in a part of TEta's old house, doing housekeeping and maintenance in exchange for board. They were kindly folk, very curious about America, and could Khadra get them a visa, and could she find them some work there? Somehow his low-level job in the ministry of agriculture posted Cousin Husney to a rotation in Qamishly for the season, and his wife went with him, grumbling about being sent to the provinces.
Teta saw that she got rest. Made a space around her, selecting bits of Damascus for her as she got stronger. For there were many Damascuses. There was the sepia-toned Damascus of TEta's 1940s and 1950s, and today's misshapen city cringing under the giant-sized glances of its president. There was the Damsacus of possibility, you could sense it, even now, under the surface, seeping through lock and key. A Damascus that stirred the imagination, behind the scarred face of the present.
It was was to the mosque of Muhyideen Ibn al-Arabi that Khadra found her steps turning. Not during the crowded prayer times but in between, when she could sit and pull her knees under her chin and rock by herself, untouched by man or jinn. The faint rhythms of dhikrs going on in the deep recesses of the mosque filtered through to her. She listened. She looked. She was still. Dark brick, white stone, dark flesh and white side by side, striped the arch-work of the mosque, as it did everywhere in Damascus's traditional architecture.
She found herself framing imaginary camera shots from the first visit, and the second time brought her Pentax and quietly, from the back of the mosque, clicked away in the play of lights and shadows through the colonnade of the mosque interior. She lost herself in these. She clicked to the rhythm of the chanting of dhikr.
A cavernous desire for beauty opened inside her. Rhythm, color, texture, a carefully tended tree, a twirling skater or athlete on television, an afternoon scene she could frame in her head and composeshe ached for beauty, felt like an orphan from it, coming from the pasty bare white walls of poor Indianapolis immigrants with their cheesy half-hearted attempts to decorate, the ugly velvet rug hung with sad thumbtacks, the gilded cardboard Dome of the Rock above the foil-eared TV set. And always that refrain: why should we decorate a temporary abode, and why spend energy on the frivolity of beauty? But beauty was no frivolity. Khadra craved it now like food and water. The arches of the Ibn al-Arabi mosque in the lap of Mount Qasyoon. The strains of Syrian folk songs and Iraqi mawwals she heard on radios through the souk and the neighborhoods. And coming live from oud strings on open balconies in the evenings and pouring out of cafes with nay artists and violinists.
"How have I never heard this before?" she asked Teta. "It's the most beautiful music in the world." Come to beauty, hearken to the mystery, come to the prayer of the reed ...
"You have heard it before, te'ebrini. All your life. But now you're listening," TEta said gently.
In the fabric alley at the Hamadiya market, Khadra bought a long piece of tissuey silk fabric. "You can pull the whole thing through a ring," said the merchant, for it was that fine-"Bangalore silk," he said, and in a brilliant tangerine color, Teta's favorite. Khadra cut it in half and had the hems finished with a rolled edge at a tailor shop. Two magnificent scarves resulted.
"One for you, one for me," she said to Teta.
"What an unsuitable color for an elderly widow to wear. I love it!" TEta beamed and began dancing with the fabric and riffing Asmahan and Leila Murad. "Sweet, sweet, sweet, how sweet the wo- orld, full of pretty things for a pretty gi-irl... "
Khadra told her the bit about how you could pass it through a ring and, as she expected, Teta loved that.
"Te'ebrini, "Teta said. "That reminds me. I have something to give you." She took a flat screwdriver from the kitchen. "Follow me," she said, and trudged into her bedroom. "Pull my bed back, darling," she said to Khadra. It was an ancient iron bedstead with a thin mattress. "Oof!" Teta said, pulling up a little stool and lowering herself onto it. "Now then. This is where we hid things from the Turks in the olden days," she said, prying first one twelve-inch tile, then another. "My grandfather supported Arab independence -though not by putting his faith in the British, mind you! He said that was out of the frying pan, into the fire. He wanted independence from the Turks and the West. Well, his brother was part of the pro-Turk caliphate movement. They quarreled, and the Khalifa movement brother turned in the Arab nationalist brother. Yes, family drama-betrayal-enough for a whole soap opera! They came hunting for him." One tile had been pried up and you could see a dark void beneath. "Khadra, te'ebrini, this is too much work for me. My back."