The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (27 page)

She didn't renew the lease on the apartment. Didn't care that the semester was beginning. Didn't care what would happen with her IU degree. Medical technology? She couldn't think of anything more meaningless to her. It was all part of some previous life lived by some other Khadra who accepted things she didn't really want, who didn't really know what she wanted and took whatever was foisted on her without examining it. Took whatever crappy unnourishing food for the soul was slopped in front of her and ate it up, becoming its spokesperson and foisting it on others. Ruining friendships for it.

She loathed that girl, that Khadra. Despised her. Blamed her for it all. Wanted to scratch her face, to hurt her, wanted to cut her-she looked dully at a razor, one of Juma's, forgotten in the back of a bathroom drawer. Wanted her dead. Wanted to be dead and gone-what was it Maryam had said when she was all alone in her dark night? "If only I had died before this and been forgotten, long gone out of memory. " Maryam got an answer, a voice calling out from underneath her miserable butt. But then, she had been carrying Christ, the comfort to all the worlds. Khadra was carrying-nothing, by her own wretched(but she had to, had to)-choice. Nothing, nothing. And so no reviving water came for her and no fresh ripe fruit fell upon her.

She stopped watering the maidenhair fern in her little living room and it died. Turned to dry stubble like the garden of the vain man in the Quran's Chapter of the Cave. Its slender green fronds that had once flopped hopefully over the side of the pot now withered yellow and brown. She stood over it thinking dully, my fern is dead. I killed it. She wrapped her arms around the green plastic pot and slid to the floor and lay on her side curled around the fern pot, the black dirt spilling out, rocking and saying, My fern is dead. My fern is dead.

It was rock bottom for Khadra Shamy. "Rock bottom days for Khadra Shaaaaamy, sha-na-na-naah," she air-guitared bitterly, not even knowing what she was saying, just mouthing words that came to her. She was through. She couldn't feel anymore. What else was there to feel?

And finally one day she was done. Exhausted. As if she'd traveled down the seven gates of hell, discarding at every door some breastplate or amulet that used to shore her up. She felt empty. Crumpled and empty, that was her. Like a jilbab you've taken off your body and hung on a nail.

She packed up the apartment. Put Juma's remaining stuff in a cardboard box for one of his pals to pick up: a pocket-sized Quran in a zippered leather binding, an enormous textbook on petroleum extraction with the cover torn off, a Go Big Red sweatshirt, one soccer goalie glove, and a vial of sandalwood oil he used when he took his shower before Friday prayers-and when they went to bed together. The scent made her almost falter. If only their marriage could have gone on the strength of the sex alone. Had she made the right choice after all? Would it have been such a tragedy to have the baby, to travel along the typical wife-and-mother trajectory? She stared at the little golden vial of scented oil, grown warm in her hand. She hesitated-dabbed a dot on her wrist-quickly put it with the other stuff in the box.

And then what? Where do you go when the first part of your life is coming to an end, and you don't know what is yet unborn inside you? Where do you go when you're in a free fall, unmoored, safety net gone, and nothing nothing to anchor you?

Invisible: How can I see your face Untouched Wrapped in yourse Who Will show me the way? You have no homeland ...

-Attar

It was time for a retreat. She would betake herself unto an eastern place.

Back where she came from: Syria. Land where her fathers died. Land that made a little boomerang scar on her knee. Ya maal el- shaam, you were always on my mind. Yellow rose of Damascus. Oh Damascus, don't you cry for me. She sold Teta's Ottoman coins to a collectibles dealer from Chicago. She used the cash for her ticket.

Her parents were aghast. The Baathists, the mukhabarat, the Asad, the army-police-border-patrol-visa-authorities.

She would risk it. Maybe she had a death wish. She was in a reckless state of mind.

"Speak only English with the Syrian authorities in the airport," Wajdy advised. Her father looked sad and defeated. She had not turned out the way he wanted. He didn't understand why. At the gate, she threw her arms around his neck and hugged him. She had not wanted to disappoint him; it was so hard!

He kissed the top of her head and pressed an envelope into her hands. "You might need this," he mumbled. "Put it away safely in your money belt." This made her cry on the airplane. She pictured her father and mother sitting at that cracked formica table deboning chicken, hands greasy, heads bent, deboning and deboning to stretch out the last sliver.

Syria was blinding, searing sunlight. Where the Indiana sunshine was buttery yellow, its summer palate full of rich brown tree bark and mellow leafy greens, Syria was white light on dried-out, dusty streets, brilliant turquoise sky, scraggly silver-green trees, crumbling stone walls that had been there since the start of time.

In Syria, the shape of things was different: sleep, corner errands, little tea glasses on hammered copper trays, even light switches. Rooms had doors with keyholes you could see through. Doorways had sills you had to step over and the doors were metal and opened with a clang down the middle, like refrigerators, which never opened down the middle in Syria. Neighborhoods meant people leaning out of flung-open windows talking to pedestrians below, dim narrow passageways under ancient stone arches, and people clustered on balconies drinking golden tea as afternoon shadows lengthened. Pulling themselves inward, like a snail retracting, as soldiers passed in their olive drabs. Here the day flowed differently. Asr time in Syria was like fajr in America: things were that quiet, people waking up slowly from the naps of hot noon. Rooftops were where you went of an evening to sit and sing and look up at the stars, like the patio back home.

Somehow all the unfamiliarity seemed familiar to Khadra. "And then we turn here, and there will be a rise in the road, and an arch," her mind said-or no, she wasn't even thinking it with her mind, it was her feet, her body moving itself-and there it was. The rise in the road, the arch. As if her body retained an unconscious imprint, as if the ground remembered her feet and guided them.

She was startled by the gargantuan pictures of the president. His image was the first thing in your face, at the airport, everywhere; you walked under his eyes. It played on her nerves. So did the great rumbling tanks and clusters of soldiers throughout the city.

Through the inherited lenses of her parents' memory, she had thought the city a much smaller place. Since theyd left, the real Damascus had swollen. Whole new neighborhoods had sprung up, and chunks of outlying land had been swallowed by the urban maw. Damascus was full of country folk newly migrated from the villages, and of refugees from neighboring countries. Army garrisons and Palestinian camps surrounded it. Downtown, white-collar women with fluffy shoulder-length hair spilled out of the big concrete buildings on their lunch hour, arm in arm, in neat pleated blouses tucked into short skirts. Men in big handlebar mustaches went about in safari suits-her father's sense of fashion, she realized, had begun and ended here.

Khadra had told no one she was coming. She followed directions to Tr ta's house. TEta opened the door and gasped.

Khadra said simply, "Here I am."

"Glory be to God who hath taken His servant on a journey throught the night, "TEta said, and enfolded her in an embrace. "I have been waiting for you." What did she mean? There had never been any plan for Khadra to come to Syria.

"I can't believe I'm really here," Khadra said. "It's like a dream." Sitting on a low stone ledge in TEta's inner patio, a place open to the sky in the heart of her home. A laurel-scented nest in the scarred land of Syria. There was Tr ta's tall spindly lilac. There was her walnut tree, and another tree whose branches had white felted undersides. And there was the sweet bay laurel itself. All these she'd heard Teta describe to Mrs. Moore.

"Oh. Mrs. Moore sent this gift for you." It was a homely little gunnysack of cornflour stamped "Made in Simmonsville, Indiana. " "It's for making cornbread. She said you'd had it at her house and liked it."

She slept in a narrow iron-frame bed-maybe her father's? Or Uncle Shakker's? She was in the old Shamy house in Salihiyeh, the one that used to belong to Teta's brother, Khadra's grandfather. The first night in Syria, Khadra half-woke around-it must have been three o'clock. A faint voice, not Teta's, called her name, or so she sensed as she lay in the dark not knowing who she was anymore. Khadra. Khadra? She half-lifted her head off the pillow, listening. Lay her head back in sadness. She felt a withdrawal of love, a pulling away of the kind of love that had been given to her old self automatically, as long as she abided by its conditions. What would she do with the raw hurt left in its wake? She fell asleep listening for the one who was calling her.

Syria was Teta, sitting on a wet wooden crate in the bath with a modesty cloth on her lap. "-0 soap my back, te'ebrini." Her sloping back, its flesh soft and speckled and old, soaping and soaping it, pouring warm water over it. Happy as a baby in the water, and loving to talk. And Khadra, sitting on a wet wooden crate next to the tub in her calico nightgown, sleeves pulled up to her elbows, soaping her TEta's back, was happy to listen. In the warmth and the vapor, the stories came pouring out.

"-for love, yes, I married for love. This was extraordinary in my day, darling!-and still is, in much of the world. For I am an extraordinary woman. Pish, it's not ego. I'm telling you the truth. You are allowed to know the truth about yourself. Besides, you have to have an ego, te'ebrini-of course! You have to have one to live! Who can live without a self? Ego is not the same as ego-monster. You must nurture and guide your ego with care. You must never neglect it. To be unaware of it, how it is working underneath everything you do, to think of yourself as floating high above the normal level of humanity, selfless and pure-why, that is what gets you in the greatest danger. I'm a great philosopher in the bathtub, darling, water gets me started. Are we finished here? My bathrobe please, and the towel for my dripping head, yes and your hand. I am quite old and a slip will do me in, you know. Te'ebrini."

Teta's laughter filled the steamy, primitive little tiled room. The bath had been added to the old house when the practice of communal bathing in neighborhood bathhouses had become more or less defunct. One bath a week: she loved her routine. Finite quantity of water, carefully poured into jugs. This was not America of faucets left rushing.

"No, te'ebrini, don't drain the bathwater away. I reuse it to water the houseplants. No, the soap won't hurt them-it comes from them, after all." Of course: her laurel soap. "Ey na'am. Yes, indeed. It's been a drought for years. Maybe it'll break this year. City of Seven Rivers, no, no more. Barada River only a trickle. You must have heard of it from your parents. Nothing to show you there. Poor Barada. Te'burni, Barada."

"-mmm, have I told you I was a telephone operator?" she began, in the next bath session.

"Yes, Teta, of course you have, many times."

"-but I haven't told you what it was like. One of the new jobs opening up for women, the very first wave of working women, and I was one of them! AIo, Centrale? Connect me, please-and we'd connect them. Strangers, neighbors, wasn't it marvelous! Things were so exciting! We were fighting off the French, an old world was ending, a new one beginning. Dunya al-ajayeb like the magical worlds you get when you rub a lamp, all of it opening before our feet. New technology coming to Syria. All the old-fart people hanging back fearfully. They tried to make out that a telephone girl's job was a bad thing, a thing for floozies, imagine! No, but I and my girlfriends laughed in their faces. We wanted to be the New Woman. We didn't know that nothing is new under the sun. All that once was circles back and returns and looks new. But back then, it seemed so hopeful. And we had a little circle of friendship, the three of usme and Iman and Hayat-you'll meet Hayat soon. We were all azizahs, it was our little code word: women who cherish themselves, women who are cherished. So we linked arms and went out into the new day. Centrale, number please? I worked as an operator for years and years! 0 but your Teta was chic, my lovesy, et que j etais belle! People used to say I looked like Asmahan, the green-eyed legend.

"More than one fine young man lost his heart to me-don't smirk, darling, I am entitled to preen-but I only gave my heart to one. One heart, one love. Gazelle, gazeh-eh-elle, now my wound is healed ... Hmm? He was Circassian, his grandfather fled the czar and settled in Palestine, and he was in Damascus working with a carriage merchant. My parents were furious when he came to our house to propose. With his older brother and aunt-his parents were far off in Haifa. Filthy gypsies! -I don't know, they call anybody who has no settled home a gypsy. Because they were immigrants, you see-his family. My father saw him standing-absolutely crushed, poor gorgeous man-outside my window the next day, went after him with a shotgun. Nameless nobody! Hmm? No, they were just typical Damascenes. All Damascenes are snobs. Depend on it, lovesy. Well, I don't know why. Maybe because they live in a heartland, far away from the coast and all new things. They don't trust newcomers. People of Damascus-Shami people-tend to be very satisfied with themselves, I'm afraid. My dear, I don't think you young generation understands how grand a long soothing bath really is, the kind that opens your pores up and restores, ah, so marvelously. . . . Well, we were absolutely in love, there was no telling us no. And then we eloped to Haifa-his parents lived there ... more lather, lovesy. Like that, yes, that's the way."

"Eloped? What? Teta! You never told me this."

"You never asked, lovesy. Circassians do it all the time, elope. Then they pretend to be shocked when their children do it. It was a very respectable elopement."

Khadra giggled.

"Oh, but it was. His old aunt was with us all the time, and as soon as we got to Haifa, we married properly, with witnesses. But it was hard to get there. It was the years of the Palestinian protests against the British, and Syrian protests against the French, all the time raids and soldiers and hiding-only we were hiding from the colonizers like everyone else, and hiding our love, too. People were hard on us. That handsome boy Nizar said it years ago: `people of my city hate love and hate lovers.' Have you ever heard his poems? Oh yes, I memorized reams and reams of Nizar in my day-bless your heart, Nizar. More water, please. And so my parents said I was dead to them. And what had I done? What was such a crime? Had I gone against God and the Prophet? Not I. They were the ones in violation. They were the ones. Doesn't the Prophet say if you find a good god-loving man, accept him? Does the Prophet say unless he's Circassian? Does the Prophet say he must be from your people? Hardhearted people, using religion-the butt end of it. And my brother, Wajdy's father-only Wajdy wasn't born yethe didn't dare contact me." She paused, and telescoped what must have been years here. "They came around eventually. People often do, you know, dear. They got over themselves. But it was ages before any of them talked to me again ... no, it's just a little soap in my eyes, don't mind me."