The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (31 page)

Damascus was such a small town, the way everybody knew everybody. The poet had wooed one of TEta's cousins in the fifties. It had been the gossip of the land for a good fifteen minutes.

"But if I'd known she had such an exquisite relative, my dear lady. . . " he said with a charming smile full on T6ta when Khadra introduced them in the dim lobby of the National Museum. "And that she had such a lovely friend," he went on, turning to Hayat, "I might have lingered in your neighborhood far longer!"

Hayat and T6ta smiled then, not like pretty young things, but like the splendid well-lived women they were.

Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence Existence: this place made from our love for that emptiness

Jalaluddin Rumi

The Jobar kanees was only three kilometers from Damascus. It had seen three thousand years of continuous use by the Syrian Jewish community, and locals claimed it was the oldest synagogue in the world still used as a house of worship.

"This was Iman's synagogue," Hayat said, speaking in a low voice because they were inside the prayer hall. To their right, an inscription on a tablet in Hebrew, Arabic, and French told why the kanees was built on this spot: C'est ici qu en l'an 3043 de notre ere, le Prophete Elichaa ben Chafat a enterre Eliahou Hanabi. The Arabic inscription called it "maqam al-Khidr. "

"Who's Iman?" Khadra asked.

"The three of us were inseparable. Your Teta and I and Iman. We all worked at Centrale together."

Khadra was left to absorb in silence the fact that the third friend had been Jewish. She followed the poet and the two women up the aisle. Now, on a weekday, there were only a few people about, mostly men. One middle-aged woman with a boy by the hand was leaving the rabbi's office.

The rabbi, white-bearded and spry, came out and chatted with Khadra's three companions like an old friend, and when he was told her connection to them, he welcomed her with the same warmth and began to point out some of the features of the ancient kanees.

"Four hundred years old, this lantern," the rabbi said, indicating a great iron lamp that sat in a sort of hearth along one wall. "It cast a magnificent glow in its day, like a living thing." Electric lighting was used now, of course.

He spoke with the deepest Damascene accent Khadra had ever heard, drawling out the last "m" on every word. "W'intooh keef? Alhamdi'llah, tamam. Ey na'am, " His voice in those chords was like family to her. Something vibrated in her chest.

"Yes, of course, he speaks like a Damascene, darling-he is a Damascene," TEta said, as they emerged, and Khadra felt ashamed for not getting it. Of course, of course; she knew there were Arab Jews. Why should she be like the Marion County librarian who once gushed, "Oh, you can speak the English language! And your accent is so American!"

But this was different, wasn't it? It's just that-all this time, she'd thought of them as Them, these people over There, not all the same of course, she knew that, but, still not part of Us. Never. And even when she grew out of that primitive notion of "There's-us-and-thenthere's-them," she grew by accepting, albeit reluctantly, the claims of some of her professors that certain things crosscut religion. Dr. Mattingly used to argue, for example, that class interests could unite working-class Arabs in Israel with working-class Jews.

It had made sense. In her head. But not any deeper. She'd kept it there in her head as a plausible idea but did not know it with her heart or in her gut. Not the way you know yaqin. Not the way you know mubin.

And now-when the rabbi said "ey na'am, "drawling out the last syllable so you could barely hear the `mmm' at the end, like such a Damascene, she could suddenly imagine being his granddaughter. Blood and soil and home, boiling coffee in the kitchen, puttering about in faded house slippers to find him dozing in his chair, his finger on a word in the holy book in his lap. And then this whole other life opened up in her mind. It sent her whirling in mad agony. This incidental skin, this name she wore like a badge-glance down, check it-what was it again? Had it changed? Was it always changing? Who was she? What was she, what cells of matter, sewn up into this Khadra shape, this instar? Imagine!

It was suddenly too much. She began to gasp. Great gasping sobs poured out and wouldn't stop. Teta and Hayat, full of concern, flanked her, and the poet flagged a service. "What's your road?" the cabbie said. "The road to Damascus." When they got home they put her to bed.

She slept and woke. Slept again. Dreamt, cried, and blessed. They came to her, all the people she had once held at bay, as if behind a fiberglass wall. Now the barrier was removed, and they all rushed into her heart, and it hurt: Livvy. Hanifa. Im Litfy. Joy's Assyrian boyfriend, whose holocaust she'd denied. Droves of people, strangers and neighbors. We are your kin, we are part of you. Where are those who love one another through my Glory? Their souls are in the roundness ofgreen birds, roaming freely in paradise.

She called out for a caller to call to her and listened; she was the caller and the call. Your Lord delights in a shepherd who, on the peak of a mountain crag, gives the call to prayer and prays.... And if he comes to Me walking, I go to him running.... Let not any one of you belittle herself.... And no soul knows what joy for them has been kept hidden.... I was a hidden treasure ... and I wished to be known. 0 soul made peaceful, return to your Lord, accepted and accepting. Come in among my worshipers, and in my garden, enter. Come to prayer, come to prayer.

Khadra came to prayer. She felt as though she were praying now for the first time, as if all that long-ago praying, rakat after rakat, had been only the illusion of prayer, and this-what she began to do now-was the real thing. All that had been lost was returning. All that had been disconnected was connected again-alo, Centrale?

The poet called every day. Teta would talk to him and report to Khadra. "Here is what he said today, lovesy, I wrote it down!"

When you do plan to wake up? A blessing on that hour! Meanwhile, guess Who cradles your head in his lap?

Auntie Hayat, her fine white hair floating about her head like a halo, came in the evenings after the bells of ramsho (vespers). On her watch, she took one of the poet's messages: "Today he said,' baklava!'"

"What?" Khadra said sleepily.

"He said to remind you that you are the baklava, how should I know, cherie? Let me see if I can remember the rest: `You do not know your own beauty, you struggle in grief, but I, I have seen it all, and I know: You yourself are the secret essence."'

One day the poet came to the house and said, " Vdmonos, baby! You haven't seen the Ghuta Orchards. Get up." And he clasped her hand and pulled her up out of bed and into the dazzling sunlight of Syria.

"To the Ghuta, before they cut down the last grove, hurry!" Auntie Hayat and Teta said. The peaches had bloomed and ripened and gone. White cherry flowers in long, pendulous corymbs had blossomed on the dark naked wood, light against dark, like a pale girl in a black man's arms. Fallen petals carpeted the orchards and had melted into the earth and now the cherries, the cherries were in their prime.

In a Ghuta orchard, Khadra and TEta and Hayat and the poet picnicked amid other clusters of picnickers. The sky was the blinding turquoise blue typical of Syrian days. They brought bakery boxes of ghraibeh, little O-shaped sugar cookies. And nectar of apricot. It was as if she'd lived on Tang all her life: is this how real juice tastes? Had I known! Sometimes they spread an old blanket on the pebbly ground. From such couches of grace, supplied with such sweetness, they gazed on the city spread below.

After lunch Khadra ran and picked cherries for their dessert, meandering through the colonnade of trees, reaching up through the dappled play of leaf and light and shadow. And the trees bent their fruited branches low for her. She came swinging her bucket, hands and lips dark-stained. Deep pink and orange streaks of light from the sun as it set, like a great lamp in its niche, glowed across the clearing, and across the faces around the little table. Teta and Hayat and the poet were instruments in symphony, their conversation a slow music, variations on themes of friendship and love.

Khadra set the bucket down and scooped out a handful of cherries to set before her beloved Teta. Her scarf, a kelly-green chiffon, was slipping off the crown of her head. She reached to pull it back up. Then she stopped, noticing the wine-red juices running between her fingers, and not wishing to stain the lovely scarf. The poet glanced at her.

Khadra paused, standing there in the fading rays with her palms spread, her hands spiraled upward to the sky like question marks. She was in a position like the first stand of prayer. A yellow butterfly flittered by. The scarf was slipping off. She shrugged. The chiffon fell across her shoulders. She remembered when she'd taken her last swim in the Fallen Timbers pool as a girl. She closed her eyes and let the sun shine through the thin skin of her eyelids, warm her body to the very core of her. She opened her eyes, and she knew deep in the place of yaqin that this was all right, a blessing on her shoulders. Alhamdu, alhamdulilah. The sunlight on her head was a gift from God. Gratitude filled her. Sami allahu liman hamadah. Here was an exposure, her soul an unmarked sheet shadowing into distinct shapes under the fluids. Fresh film. Her self, developing.

She saw her TEta looking at her. Teta got it. Maybe she'd had such a moment in the Ghuta sunshine herself, ages ago; maybe she knew about kashf, the unveiling of light. How veiling and unveiling are part of the same process, the same cycle, how both are necessary; how both light and dark are connected moments in the development of the soul in its darkroom.

Blessed be Ishmael, who taught us how to cover ourselves. Blessed are you who dress the shivering spirit in a skin.

-Leonard Cohen, Book of Mary

Under the cherry-tree canopy it had felt fine having her scarf slip off. She was safe; she was among friends. Back in the mad soup of the city it was a little different. The first few days without her lifelong armor she felt wobbly, like a child on new legs. Her body felt ofd balance, carried differently. Gone was the flutter about her, the flutter and sweep of fabric that was so comforting and familiar. Having waist and legs encircled now, being compactly outlined by clothing that fit to the line of her body-that defined her body, instead of giving it freedom and space like hijab did-was all so new. At first she felt like a butterfly pinned in a glass case, splayed out and exposed. How to hold herself? Cars whooshed past her as she walked through busy intersections and she'd feel the unfamiliar rush of air at her neck. Reaching up to touch the soft fabric, she'd find nothing, then touch her hair and neck with startled fingers. The cars honked and made her jump.

While strolling with the poet and Teta and Hayat in Medan al- Rawdah, with the vendors' cries (za'bub! hab'lass.') in the air around them, Khadra suddenly felt discombobulated. "Where are we?" She misjudged the distance, bumped into an 'irqsus cart, lost her footing. In a flash the poet realized what had happened. His shoulder behind her head, his arm across her back felt like welljoined iron, like columns of strong poetry.

"I champion you," he said in a low voice, "body and soul." Khadra could never tell if he was being straight or sardonic. "I always champion a woman true to herself," he murmured. He suddenly seemed to Khadra like one of the titans from the old world of gods. He wasn't being ironic. He was solid. He was the real deal. Wasn't he? She shivered.

"Te'ebrini, what's the matter?" Teta cried. "Are you dizzy?"

"Walay hemmek, "Aunt Hayat said. "Don't you worry, I've got the thing for the girl." She snapped the clasp of her big clutch and rifled through it. Then, impatient, Hayat dumped its contents out on a ledge. Sewing kit, nail kit, her pearl-inlaid cross that she was taking to get repaired, pictures of grandkids, national I.D. card that every Syrian had to carry-"Here!" she cried. She opened a tiny vial and held it under Khadra's nose. It smelled of eucalyptus, sharp and refreshing.

"I'm whole and sound," Khadra reassured them.

The poet looked at her piercingly. "You are," he said. "Whole and pure. The broken and the holy."

"But how do you know?" Khadra whispered, her heart tight.

She stood, planting her feet moderately apart, her weight evenly distributed, hands down at her sides. Allahu akbar. She was coming to find the new, unveiled lightness familiar and comfortable in its own way. Still, hijab had been her comrade through many years. Her body would not forget its caress. Her loose clothes from the days of hijab were old friends. She had no wish to send them packing.

The covered and the uncovered, each mode of being had its moment. She embraced them both. Going out without hijab meant she would have to manifest the quality of modesty in her behavior, she realized one day, with a jolt. It's in how I act, how I move, what I choose, every minute. She had to do it on her own, now, without the jump-start that a jilbab offered. This was a rigorous challenge. Some days she just wanted her old friend hijab standing sentry by her side.

And then, finally, it was time for her to leave Syria. Aunt Razanne pressed a small jar of eggplant jam into her hands. Khadra hugged her cousins. As she pulled away from Reem, she felt as if earring posts she'd worn all her life had just slipped out, and a lightness came unto her.

"Come with me," she said to the poet, half-joking. She wished he would always be there to sift the gold from the dross of her, to rescue her heart from the evil playing of her mind, and to save her again and again from her despair.

"I will, baby," he said drily, and then he was gone, and Aunt Hayat was kissing her cheek.

"Cherish yourself," Ttta whispered, "te'ebrini." She held her tightly for a moment.

Khadra turned and waved one last time on the tarmac.