The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (30 page)

Khadra pried up two more large tiles. A sort of crawl space appeared. "But my grandfather was prepared, you see. This is a secret passage. Hmm? I don't know when it was built. It maybe goes way back, before the Turks. It connects from house to house in the neighborhood-no, not every house. That wouldn't be wise. Select houses. You must select carefully the houses to whom you will connect. Now comes your part," Teta said.

Khadra was mystified. "It's like something out of The Thousand and One Nights."

"It is," Teta chuckled. "Now what if I tell you that you are to crawl into it and bring me back what you find?"

"Will it be a lamp with a genie?" Khadra joked.

You had to crawl on your stomach for just a yard or two-"not long, don't worry!" Teta called-and then you got to a little closetsized space where you could stand. She held her breath, her stomach sliding on the cool slab. She did not like small spaces. Something feathery brushed her arm and she shivered. Bugs are your friends, she said, to calm herself. Instars. Think instars. An instar in a raspberry beret. `Raaaaspberry beret, "she sang in the pitch dark.

"What?" Teta called down.

"I can't see a thing down here. Do you have a flashlight?"

"Just feel around," Teta said. That was not a happy prospect. "It's just a trunk, a leather trunk. About the size of a smallish suitcase," she said.

"Found it!" Khadra called. She pushed it out in front of her through the passage and climbed back into Teta's bedroom. "There is nothing like this in Indiana," she said.

"Sure there is," Teta said. "Every place has its secret passage. Like the crack in the armor."

From a dresser drawer she pulled a big metal ring clinking with thick iron keys-

"Of course!" Khadra said with glee. "There has to be a keyring with a kajillion keys in the story!"

-and opened the brass latch on the leather trunk. Inside was a wooden mosaic-inlay box, about the size of a tissue box. It contained fat gold coins, same as the ones she had given Khadra as a wedding gift. She knew now how valuable they were. "A treasure that fire cannot eat," Teta said. "My little secret. I've carried them wrapped in a handkerchief in my bosom through some tight places. Not for nothing do Shamy girls have good boobs."

"I don't know, TEta," Khadra said, looking at the pile of coins. "It would take some pretty hefty boobs to hold all that."

"They're yours now.,,

Khadra gasped. "But Teta-keep them for yourself. How do you live, anyway-surely your pension from the Centrale is not enough."

"Khadra, I won't be able to keep these after I die. May you bury my bones-but I don't think you will be here to bury my bones." She lifted up a hand to shush Khadra, who was saying a blessing for long life on TEta's head. That phrase, te'ebrini, "may you bury me," always tugged at Khadra's heart.

"There's shariah rules about who gets what. Inheritance laws," Teta went on. "How do we get around them when we need to? We give things away as gifts, before we die. That's how. Take it from me, this will be a load off my heart." Khadra would not take them all, but they came to an agreed-upon division.

The divine face has burning glories. Were it not for the veils, the glories would burn away the cosmos.

-Muhyiddin Ibn al-Arabi

Sitting on Mount Qasyoon looking down on the city of Damascus, you could not possibly hold that one religion had claim to an exclusive truth. Damascus demanded that you see all religions as architectural layers of each other, gave you the tangible sense, real as the crumbling citadel steps beneath your feet, that it all came together somehow in a way that made sense. All the religions spokes on the same wheel. All connected to the hub. All taking their turn in the wheeling of the great azure heavens.

While surveying Damascus from Qasyoon through her camera lens, Khadra came to realize that photography was her thing. "Get the training, learn to make a living at it. There you go," she encouraged herself.

She shifted her angle, and suddenly in her viewfinder she saw: a man, looking plumb at her. He sat on a rock, a writing notebook before him, a cigarette dangling from his lips.

"Don't mind me, keep talking to yourself, my lady," he said in a Damascene drawl. "Qasyoon does that to people." She hadn't realized she'd said anything aloud.

She glanced around behind her. The path was dotted, on this workday, with the usual smattering of mountainside housing residents walking down to the city or up toward their cheap new apartments. She was not in an isolated locale where no one would hear her if she screamed. She approached.

He was older up close than he looked from a distance, with iron-gray hair that was not cut short, Khadra realized with a start as she came near, but tied back in a ponytail. There was a scent about him of musty old woodland. She soon realized it was the cloud of cigarette smoke. Not your usual cigarette smell, yet it seemed oddly familiar to her.

He jotted something into the green notebook. She could see that it was filled with lines of poetry. He was a poet, the type of modernist poet who had been all the rage in Lebanon and Syria throughout the sixties. Khadra didn't understand a bit of his poetry, which he recited to her from reams of Arabic pages. Soon their meetings on Qasyoon developed from random moments into standing appointments.

Jasmine armpits? Whatever. She loved listening to the little white pebbles of the familiar-unfamiliar words ring against each other. He spoke half a dozen languages, too, Kurdish and Armenian and Swahili and Aramaic he claimed, as well as others-and all worked their way into his poems.

"My dear chit of a girl, born yesterday," he said-his gravelly voice cut right into her, took her to some other world, made her listen raptly. "Let me tell you something you don't know."

She leaned forward expectantly, and he recited,

She burst out laughing. "The baklava is me?"

"Pay attention. You don't get a poet like me every day, you know," he said.

"And you get a listener, which every poet craves," Khadra teased. She had a sun-burnished strip across her nose and cheeks from her mountain treks by now. Like days in the sun with Hanifa, when they were little girls.

"Wrong, baby," he deadpanned, turning from Khadra and making a notation in his notebook. The iron-gray hair was unbound today, making him look a little like Grizzly Adams. "I get a muse, which every poet craves. In the form of a beautiful woman, no less, which is the perfect form of a muse. Allahu akbar." He leaned back and contemplated her.

She basked in the compliment. Even though he was a terrible old sexist. Such a product of his era.

"Ibn al-Arabi said the best meditation for the soul bent on knowing something of Divine Beauty is contemplating the beauty of a woman," he continued, chain-lighting another cigarette. Khadra was sure he was making it up. It didn't sound like something a renowned sheikh such as Ibn al-Arabi would say. He fabricated half of what he said, she was sure. The other day he'd told her he was a sailor once and, on another occasion, he claimed he'd spent years living alone in the desert.

"Hey, wait a minute," she said, putting the Pentax up to her eyes. "Then what does a woman contemplate if she wants to know the Divine?"

Without missing a beat, he said, "A poet."

They both laughed. So rich was the timbre of his chuckle it was almost a growl. She clicked away, and caught the light of the setting sun on his creased face. It was a cynical but not jaded look he had. As if he knew the jig was up on the world, yet held onto some small secret hope-one he'd never admit to. His little white cigarette box had a red star and crescent.

"Are those-are those Islamic cigarettes?" she asked, laughing at the oxymoron that seemed.

"Oh, absolutely." He handed her the box. "General Directorate of Tobacco, Salt, and Alcohol Products, Government of Turkey," it said. She took out a cigarette. No filter. You could see the bits of shredded tobacco at both ends. She sniffed. Musty, kind of a rich rotten wood smell. Old forest undergrowth. Old rich woodlands.

"Oh my God," she blurted.

"What?" he said. "You are invoking the deity for what purpose?"

"The smell of your cigarettes," she said, half-joking. "It solves a puzzle I've been bothered by all my life."

He lifted an iron-gray eyebrow.

"Indiana," she laughed. "That's the answer. Indiana smells like Turkish cigarettes."

"Why do you spend so much time worrying about what God thinks of you?" the poet asked her once. She was startled at his directness; his low voice seemed to come right out of her own gut. She didn't think she'd shared that much of her state of confusion. "It's the other way around, you know. God is what you think of God, you know."

This made no sense and sounded heretical. He must be a leftist, a secularist, maybe what her parents would call a godless communist.

"Oh, no you don't," he said. "Don't try to label me so you can put me away. I am what I am."

At their next meeting, he scoffed, "What's eating you? Begging forgiveness? God should be begging you for forgiveness, you beautiful child."

She was taken aback at this blatant blasphemy, spoken with his characteristic nonchalance.

"You still think of God as some Big Parent in the Sky, don't you?" he demanded. Again she was surprised at how he seemed to be able to speak right into her mind's conversation. "Waiting with a logbook of all your misdeeds to punish or reward you? All those hoary ancient guilt trips and self-flagellations for such a tired notion. Not worth a Syrian dime."

"But then what? Without that, I'm lost," she protested.

"Be lost then. Better lost than false."

Lost to myself, I am found in You

She walked home slowly, her camera banging against her hip. Was he sent by God or the devil?

"Your veil is very revealing, you know," the poet said through a haze of tobacco smoke. Just a hint of a mocking tone, was there?

No one touches my veil, buster, she thought, but didn't say.

He sensed her bristle.

"Oh, but veiling is important, definitely" he said, reassuringly. She relaxed. He shook his head mockingly. "You're so easy to bait."

She made her face blank, determined not to show him her reaction.

"Uh-oh-you've gone and veiled your face again!" he yowled.

She couldn't help smiling.

"Your woman-body is loved by God, good and pure. Veiled or not veiled," he said through his teeth, lighting the cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

My body is none of your business, she was thinking.

"Real religion's in here, baby," he went on, "here is your church, here is your mihrab." Instead of placing his hand on his own chest as she expected, he put it on hers. Was he a prophet or just copping a feel? She was ashamed of wondering, immediately the thought came to her. No, she wasn't. She went back and forth.

"Who? You've met-O! But, chfrie, he's a famous poet!" said Teta's friend Hayat, when Khadra told her and T6ta about the man she'd been speaking to on the mountain. "His name is golden-Arabs and poetry, you know, cherie. Give us a poet, we treat him like a conquering hero."

"Mmm," T6ta murmured. "A handsome lad, too, this one. When he arose in all his beauty, in truth, in truth he stunned me," she sang.