Chr[f twisted his palms out of her hands and made to circle her waist again, but, quickly, she interlaced the fingers of both hands in his. Handclasps between her chest and his. Palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss, she remembered or misremembered some line from high school Shakespeare. She could feel his heart beating. She had seen to it that they had avoided apartments, his and hers, when they spent time together. Their touching was like lace: the spaces where it wasn't were just as beautiful as where it was, and there was nothing commonplace about it. Interlocking fingers with him still made her tingle. If he whispered something in her ear at the movies, tiny vibrations traveled to all the plush little folds of her body. There were nights when she fell asleep with the echoes of those vibrations still moving inside her. She knew, all right, what it was she was holding back from. Still she made the choice.
Again and again, when the moment came, she rose up up up like a little hummingbird and hovered on the brink, and then chose. And coming down on this side of it was no less delectable. She lifted her chin stubbornly. No less a pleasure than sex, her vibrant, her tender-skinned, her consciously-chosen-despite-the-deep-tug-oftides chastity, no indeed, not a bit less pleasurable in its own way. Well, okay, a little less.
"Do you know what century it is?" he said, a plaintive note creeping into his voice.
What year it was had nothing to do with it. Why couldn't he keep to his borders and respect hers? Why tear up the lace? Even, Khadra thought with annoyance, even if she was a little confused right now about what those borders were for her-no, because she was confused-or maybe confused wasn't the right word-in some kind of transition, the end of which was not yet clear to her-she was not prepared to go that far with her body. Just because she no longer believed the black-and-white certainties of her earlier days, didn't mean that now it was open house for Khadra Shamy. She wanted to keep some inner sanctum to herself. That much she knew.
Again, he released the handclasp and tried to move somewhere else with his hands, hoping in their powers of persuasion.
"Would you please just not?" Khadra said.
He took a step away from her. "Ever? I can understand not being ready just yet. But ever?"
"I'm a freak," she said to Blu.
"I know you are," her friend said.
Khadra stuck out her tongue. Then she sighed. "I'm too religious for the secular men, and too lax for the religious ones."
"I know," Blu said. "I'm a freak, too."
It was shocking news: Ramsey Nabolsy was dead. Insaf Haqiqat, who had been out of touch with Khadra for years, phoned from Seattle, where she'd settled after college. She'd been close to Ramsey at one point-his teenaged flirtation with Shiism having been, on some level, a flirtation with her-and she was taking it hard.
It was news, literally. "They have it on MacNeil-Lehrer," Insaf said. "Turn it on."
"Oh my God, no!" Khadra cried when MacNeil said his name: "Ramsey Nabolsy." But there it was. Suicide bombing. Israeli military checkpoint in the West Bank.
He'd been able to get close to the checkpoint because racial profiling made it easy. The Israelis were disarmed by his fair-skinned, redheaded Midwestern looks, his buzz cut and style of dress. He could have been a regular American, or an Ashkenazi Pole. Their Us-versus-Them thinking made them slacken on detecting actual behavior tip-offs.
Insaf wanted to talk. "The last time we spoke, you said you weren't hardcore anymore, like the way we were growing up. I dunno, so when this happened, I thought it would be cool to be able to talk to someone from the community. Who might actually be willing to talk to me." Her voice quavered.
"I'm glad you called me," Khadra said. She held the cordless phone between her shoulder and neck in the darkroom. She was developing photos of Seemi and the horses for the therapeutic ranch's promotional brochure. It looked like there were a few she could use on this contact sheet.
Insaf's coming out as a lesbian had caused a stir in their old community. Her sister, Nilofar, still wasn't speaking to her, going on two years. Khadra had no idea what to make of the strange new territory her old friend had stepped out into, "but I'm still your friend," she'd told her. Insaf had chosen not to contact her, or anyone from the old community, for a while. She said she needed space.
"But now, with this news about Ramsey, I needed to talk to a friend who knew him," she sniffled. "Hold on. I have to answer the other line here," she said abruptly. She worked for a child welfare agency.
She put Khadra on hold with a radio news broadcast. Lebanon was at peace, after fifteen years of civil war. It stayed at peace while the first photo went through the stop bath, the fixer, all the way to the rinse. She hung the first print on the clothesline. It was hard to believe, but it had been a year since the fighting stopped, and it looked like for real this time. On the other hand, civil war was breaking up Yugoslavia.
"I'm back," Insaf said. "Here's the thing: I refuse to believe that God is gonna shut Ramsey outta heaven because he killed himself." Her voice was angry. "I refuse to believe any of that so-called Islamic crapola."
"I hear you."
"And I'll tell you what else. I refuse to cheer him for taking an Israeli soldier down with him," Insaf said. "I refuse to cheer." Because that's what the radical Muslims were doing these days, issuing rulings that attempted to define suicide bombers as martyrs. In their blackscarf days, she and Khadra would've rallied around this rationale.
Khadra agreed. "It was stupid, senseless violence that accomplished nothing." Her timer buzzed. She pulled Seemi out of the developer and laid her in the stop bath.
Insaf was silent for a moment, and Khadra could hear her breathing getting jagged. "Ramsey's not a terrorist," she said, crying. "Is he? Is he a terrorist, Khadra?" That was what news was calling him: "Palestinian terrorist bombs West Bank military checkpoint, killing one soldier, wounding another." That was all Ramsey merited, his whole life, the history that brought him to that point, twelve words?
"No. Ramsey is not a terrorist," Khadra said. "If he'd done it at a market, he would be. But he didn't. He didn't go for civilians. He attacked soldiers. Of an army of brutal occupation. Ramsey joined the war. It's sad and I wish he hadn't. But that's what he was, a soldier attacking soldiers. Not a terrorist."
Insaf blew her nose. "And I know the hell he went through with his father. That man took a switch to him too many times-but I gotta go, Khadra. I got more to tell you, but it'll have to wait."
Khadra dunked Seemi and the horse in fixer fluid. The story of the lady and the mare, its subtle shades of gray, its meaning was emerging. If it's true like she read somewhere that it takes your body seven years to renew all its cells, then what was the Seemi-ness of Seemi? Khadra wanted her photographs to find the truth of their subject, to see beyond first appearances. To discern. But what truth can a photo get? How do you see something true and real about a person, any person? Out of all those surfaces like the thousand sides of the eye of a fly? Who had Zuhura been? You thought you knew her, but then as you grew up you figured, well, maybe you had seen only a part of her in your limited vision as a little girl, the part you wanted to see. "This seems to be it." Wasn't that-in the Quranwhat the Queen of Sheba had been careful to say when faced with an enigma? Not, "I am certain I know," not the overweening claim, but the more modest, more tentative, "It seems to be so."
Who had Zuhura been, really? A martyr? That's what the Dawah Center people had decided. Khadra had bought it for years. But what if she'd been just a regular Muslim girl trying to make her way through the obstacle course-through the impossible, contradictory hopes the Muslim community had for her, and the infuriating, confining assumptions the Americans put on her? A girl looking for a way to be, just be, outside that tug-of-war?
And so I passed the night with her like a thirsty little camel whose muzzle keeps it from nursing
Know then that I am not one of those beasts gone wild who take gardens for pastures
-Ibn Faraj, "Chastity"
ChrIf and Khadra came to the same old sex impasse the next time she saw him. "Look, I'm not sure I really know, like, on a deep level what chastity really is," she told him thoughtfully. "I do know, at least, that it's not the simple deal the puritanical set makes it out to be." She wanted him to understand her thought process on this topic.
"Ails I know," he lashed out, before she had even finished explaining, "is that you want to pretend you're some kind of liberated woman on one level, but on another level you're just your typical backward Muslim girl with the old country still in your head. Hiding in your self-righteous haik."
Khadra was quiet until the waiter finished filling her water and Chrif's wine, silently fuming that he'd been berating her in front of this stranger. "I find you every bit as self-righteous," she said. "Everyone has to accept sex on your terms or get ridiculed and labeled?
"If the shoe fits, baby."
Maybe it was true she was scared at crossing the sex boundaries, but it wasn't out of prudishness. "A prude doesn't like sex. I like sex. At least, what I can recall of it." She tried to make a little joke, but he didn't lighten up.
"You'd rather sleep alone in a cold bed forever than take a lover? Just because some old men back in history made up a rule that you have to be married to have sex?"
"I certainly don't want to sleep alone forever. I would like to get married one day and have sex again. Good sex. Great sex," she said.
"Oho. So you're angling for me to marry you, after all. Typicaljust like I said," he snorted. "You can't even hold an Arab woman's hand, before she's all marry me, marry me."
That did it-it felt like bullying and humiliation, and Khadra went cold. She threw down her napkin and got up and left without another word. He didn't even try to come after her. She held back the tears until she made it home to bed and telephone. It was too maudlin to cry over him, but. "Well, I am an Arab woman!"
"An Arab-American woman," Seemi corrected her, in a mild tone.
"-and I don't need to sit there and take insults for that," Khadra continued, pulling her feet up off the cold floorboards and tucking them under the heavy comforting blanket.
"Good for you for leaving," Seemi said, sane and soothing as a girlfriend should be. "No one should be badgered into sex. Although-can I tell you this-you've got some issues with your mother and how she made you look at your body."
"Besides," Khadra continued, ignoring the last bit, and wanting to parse every word ChrIf had said, "It's not just `some old men back in history.' Every religion in the world has rules about sex. Including his big-whoop Buddhism that he thinks is so free and feel-goody. Don't you wonder why that's such a constant in all religions?"
"To control women's bodies," Seemi answered promptly. To Khadra, she sounded like a broken feminist record.
"But religion tells men to control their bodies too," she reminded her. "Why do you always have to see it as a conspiracy against women?"
"Because it is. Not to see that is naive. Because it's never equal. Men always get breaks. Polygymy in Islam ring a bell there, huh? Please. Women always have to be more pure." Seemi wasn't giving any ground.
"I don't see it that way. I see it as we're all supposed to be careful with what's between our legs. Full of awe and mindfulness and tender care."
There was a pause on the other end. Seemi said, "Tell me, do you see me as immoral, then?" Khadra knew that Seemi and Veejay's relationship included sex.
"No," Khadra protested. "I would never say that about you."
"But you'd think it."
"No. Honest. There was a time when I would have. But I don't now."
"Well, why not then, if you don't believe in sex outside marriage?"
"I-I don't know. Because I know you. I know it's not a casual decision for you either. Because people are human and have different weaknesses, and having a weakness for ego maybe just as much a problem as having a weakness for sex, but people only see the sex one and forget that everyone has something?"
Seemi said nothing.
"Look, I don't know," Khadra went on. "I've never thought it through, okay? I just don't believe in it for me. I don't presume to know you and the path you're on and where this act falls in your relationship with God and the universe. Maybe it just needs to happen in your path, for you to learn from it and get somewherehow do I know?"
Seemi paused. One of those pauses heavy with unvoiced disagreement. "Well," she said, "getting back to your break-up. Do I need to come over with the tub of raw cookie dough?"
"Nah," Khadra sighed. "I'm gonna be all right."
She fell asleep railing in her mind against ChrIf. That he would think she would just up and-! When she didn't even know his family or, or anything. Anything beyond the surfaces he'd presented to her, really.
Why, it had taken her and Juma a month before they really-! And then another six months before they got to the next thing. Nights and nights of patient tendrils curling and growing in the lacework between them. Nesting in their little bed, and Juma wasn't going anywhere, and all of the community around them like branches giving them cushion and support. It had taken all this for her to be able to let go, and let go further, and a little further still. All that takes building up.
Takes a marriage, she thought, as as she drifted off to sleep. And what have you built up? a little voice wanted to know. Your mother was married with three children at your age. Your father had begun his life's work. What have you built? Where have you gone? Where are your foundations?
She dreamed of a poet on a mountain. Carrying in his arms a package, a package, a-a child in a bundle. Coming down the mountain into a forest of lights and columns and forms in long caftans floating past the corner of her eye in Ibn al-Arabi's mosque. Arch after arch, and moving between the arches, and through the flutter of light and shadow, someone in pursuit in the light and shadow, pulling her, and pull and push, pull and push and-oh! There! Melting there at the base of the arch in loveliness.