The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (34 page)

"See, that's the opposite of me," Seemi said. "My father is this hard-boiled, whisky-drinking atheist, and my mother is a die-hard feminist. They're divorced. But whatever their differences, they both encouraged me and my brother to be totally open-minded about people from other religions."

"Plus, you know, in South Asia, you can't very well ignore Hinduism," Veejay said. "It's part of the shared culture of the land."

"Can we watch my favorite scene again?" Khadra asked. Her friends rolled their eyes and cued The Mahabharata tape to the part where Duhasena tries to rip the sari off Draupadi, to humiliate her before the court, and Draupadi prays, and Krishna stands invisible behind her and grants her miles and miles of sari, a never-ending sari to keep her covered. Finally, the evil man, trumped, trips and falls on his rump in the small mountain of yellow silk.

"That sort of Muslim you're defending would never allow me and Veejay to be together, if they had their way," Seemi said, another day. There was an edge in her voice. She led a gentle brown mare into a stall.

"I'm not defending their views. I'm defending their right to have their views. There's a difference." Khadra maneuvered carefully over a pile of horse manure that needed shoveling.

"You're doing more than that."

"Well-I guess so-I'm humanizing them." She could easily picture those in the Dawah Center-her own mother and father, for example-frowning and turning away from Seemi and her family. Shaking their heads and calling them "lost Muslims, led astray by Satan, following their base ego desires instead of God's Law." That sort of phrase came easily to them. But turning into those sneering figures in the news photos Seemi'd pointed out to her, their faces twisted, throwing acid? Khadra could not fathom that. There were several steps between the narrowminded but stable and sane Muslims of her old community, and these-these-what amounted to thugs, really. How did those acid-throwers get what they got from her religion, from the same religion?

"So who's the latest guy your mother's proposing a preposterous arranged marriage with?" Seemi said with a sideways look. Khadra had shared that her single status was an unbearable limbo for her mother, who, with crazymaking regularity, called with ideas for rectifying it.

"Hey!" Khadra stopped short. "Not that there's anything wrong with arranged marriage," she found herself saying, rather hotly.

Seemi seemed amused. "Really? You like it?"

"I'm not saying I like or don't like it," Khadra hedged. "I'm just saying, that in itself is not the problem. It's not this terrible tragic movie-of-the-week thing, okay."

"It works for some people," Seemi conceded.

"Yeah. It does." She hadn't expected Seemi to agree with her just now.

-Lord Byron, Don Juan 1:60

She'd met Chrnf at photography school, and they'd kept in touch as friends, but it wasn't until Saddam invaded Kuwait that they started getting together. On August 2, 1990, a phone call woke her up. "Did you hear?" a man's voice said. "Do you think America is going to let him get away with it? How come Reagan could invade tiny Grenada whenever he wanted, but an Arab can't invade a small country in his own backyard, answer me that?"

Khadra looked at the time. It was six a.m. "Unh," she said. "Who is this?"

ChrIf Benzid was twenty-five like Khadra, stocky, with curly brown hair that fell down around his dimpled chin. Of pale Berber stock from Tunisia. They jogged together in Fairmount Park along the Schuylkill River. A family of Muslims, the classically observant sort with the beards and hijabs, was praying under a tall cottonwood tree.

"Why do these people have to make a spectacle of themselves all the time?" Chr►f said.

"These people? Which people?" she said, panting. Two joggers separated around them, man woman black white, and rejoined up ahead.

"Muslims."

"Uh, you're a Muslim yourself."

"Not like that, man. I'm a secular Muslim. These religious Muslims, they always have to embarrass themselves, on some level. Alls I know is, they give us a bad name. Like, let's make sure the entire world knows we're religious nuts. Look at them, praying in the middle of the park with their rear-ends in the air. Besides being uncouth, it's so arrogant, on some level. Look at us, we pray."

"I pray." Khadra felt it was unfair of him to generalize about their motives, or to assume all religious Muslims were alike.

He only lost his footing for a second. "But you pray in private."

"I prefer to. But sometimes you can't avoid praying in public-if you believe in the prayer times."

"Well, I don't see you over there in line with them."

"I'm on my period," she shrugged, startling him. Oho, thinks he's so progressive, but finds it shocking for a woman to mention her period.

Chrif irked her to pieces, but they kept going out. They needed each other because Baghdad was being bombed. "Oh God, oh God." Khadra and Chrif were out with his friends, a cousin who was a cabdriving civil engineer, and an Algerian couple, when the first greeny night-vision shots of the carpet-bombing of the city of Baghdad were aired. They watched these images as they shone down eerily upon them from the TV set above the bar, seeing the fiery glow dropping from dark sky into dark city. Some guys at a booth shouted "Whoo! Nuke 'em!" and they looked at each other. The Algerian woman pushed her plate away. Her husband opened his billfold, shaking his head. Khadra had her hand on her mouth in horror. Chrif dropped a tip on the table as the waiter came toward them, tray aloft, and stared bewildered after them as they filed out, faces sad and drawn.

Khadra covered her face when the screen showed shots of a Baghdad street in rubble. "Oh my God, it looks just like Damascus. Oh my God."

What hit Chrif hardest was when the suspension bridge went down. "The bridge, the beautiful bridge." He'd been there, visited as a kid, remembered the bridge. "Bad enough Algiers is being wiped out by the goddamn fundamentalists," he muttered. Khadra opened her mouth to protest that the ruling junta was just as guilty, but decided to leave it alone. "Now we have to watch another Arab capital destroyed," he went on.

From a distance, all Arab cities looked like home. A place you could have been in when the bomb came down. A brown or olive face that could have been your little sister's, your father's, broken in sorrow. ChrIf was outraged at the way the U.S. government twisted the arm of the media throughout the entire operation.

"You can see what they're not showing you," he said, jabbing his finger at the images on the screen. "You can almost see it in your mind's eye, right out of camera range. Why won't they show it?" He was working toward a posting in the Middle East with an international newswire service. He was going to go there and show it.

Omayma said, "I hope Bush takes out Saddam. He's evil."

"Of course he's evil, Omayma," Khadra said to her Iraqi sister-in-law on the phone. You little traitor, she almost added. "Nobody disputes that he's evil. But he's safe in a bunker somewhere and it's the poor ordinary Iraqis who are getting beat down by this. Carpet-bombing a whole city? Can you imagine if they carpet-bombed Indianapolis? Can you imagine if you heard a sound at nine o'clock and it was your dad's practice being flattened, and at ten it was your grocery store, and at eleven it was your street in rubble? That's carpet-bombing. Water cut off, electricity, roads down, bridges-what that does to hospitals, schools, emergency services? Don't you still have family in Baghdad?"

Dr. Hayyan supported the war even though it made him unpopular in his mosque. His wife, however, who still went every summer to family in Baghdad, went into a depression. When the shelter in the Amiriya neighborhood was smart-bombed, killing five hundred people who had sought refuge in it, Omayma's mother developed migraines and fought a low-key war of nerves with her husband. She refused to take her antidepressants, and started hoarding matchbooks and candles, so many that, whenever her husband opened a cabinet, they'd rain down on his head.

"She knew someone who was reported to have died there," Eyad told Khadra. "Her former dentist. With her five teenaged daughters. The dentist's husband had brought his family to the shelter and gone back outside into the shelling and debris. He survived. They all died."

"Good God," Khadra said.

"They all died," Eyad repeated, in a stunned voice. "His whole family. In one swipe."

New broadcasts spoke of the "video-game precision" of the bombing and the White House Press Office infamously called the casualties among ordinary people "collateral damage."

"Can you imagine living on after losing your wife and all your kids?" Eyad softly asked Khadra over the phone, and she heard his love for Omayma and their brand-new baby in his voice-Coethar, a girl, seven pounds three ounces. This was all he had really ever set his sights on in life. 0 upright man, man just and true, patient and kind, content with your lot, rejoicing, not speaking evil. Simply this: having a family and being able to provide for them, and all of them being able to live as good Muslims, praying their prayers and giving their alms and performing their duties to God in the manner they deemed worthy. Was it not sweetness enough out of life, to ask for this and have it answered? Cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace, for this too is the lot of man.

With the passing of the war, some of the heaviness in their hearts lifted. Now Khadra and ChrIf began to discover their disagreements. "You're so full of contradictions," he said. Out on the broad, rippling Schuylkill.

"Most people are," she said. "Full of contradictions." Chr[f was far more athletic than she and Khadra liked that he pushed her into these outdoorsy activities, like sculling. Chr[f was a skilled sculler. As far as she could tell, a scull was the Philadelphia name for what they called a kayak back in Indiana.

"Well, your contradictions fascinate me, I must admit," Chr[f said. The nose of their scull dispersed pond skimmers, those gangly bugs that live on water, but not in it, preferring to stay on the surface of things. "You're so old school on one level, but then on some other level you're a modern girl. I've never known anyone like you."

A woman loves to be fascinating to a man, and Khadra was a woman-feeling herself so for nearly the first time since her marriage had ended. And so she found herself delighting in Chrif and things like his curly hair. A damselfly dove beside him, down to the surface of the river and then back up into the blue dimension. Always, in the religious Muslim social scene where her instincts had been honed, you had to dull your awareness of eros. You had to put down that delicious tingling feeling that made you want to be fascinating to men, that made you admit they were fascinating to you. Only for the serious, almost businesslike pursuit of marriage prospects could you allow yourself to look up from lowered gazes. It was a sweet and unfamiliar release to allow herself simply to delight in his tilt of chin, his sexy voice.

Khadra enjoyed the adventure of every conversation with him. An edgy, strange world of avant-garde artists on both sides of the Atlantic, and pan-African travel and friendships and a haunting search for beauty, for getting high on beauty, above all. "And did I mention I love his curly hair?" she said, laughing, to Blu, who remembered him from photography classes. She loved the abundance and abandon of it. The men and boys she grew up around wore their hair trim and tame. Ebtehaj with her buzzing electric clipper had come after Eyad and jihad if their hair got longer than Beaver Cleaver's. "No Beatles hair in this house!"