The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (13 page)

Even if the schoolbooks didn't say so, Islamic civilization was responsible for most of the good scientific inventions of the world, up until the last hundred years or so. The clock. Eyeglasses. "I thought Benjamin Franklin invented them," Khadra said.

"He may have, I don't know this Ben-Yameen," her father said. "But if he did invent them, it's because Ibn Sina advanced the science of optics in the eleventh century."

There was a picture in the ninth-grade social studies book of an Arab with an unkempt beard standing in a dirty caftan next to a camel, and a picture of an African bushman with no clothes and a bracelet threaded through his nose that made Khadra wince.

"Islam is scientific," Ebtehaj said, in English because Hanifa was there with Khadra. "Not like Christianity. Islam, it encourages us to learn science. In history, Christianity killed the scientists."

"It was an Arab who discovered the world was round," Wajdy said. "This is why Christopher Columbus came to America."

But Tayiba's parents said it was an African scientist who discovered the world was round. So which was it, an African or an Arab? It was a Muslim named al-Idrisi. He was African and wrote in Arabic. Aunt Ayesha spoke of the great empires of Mali and Ghana and the glories of Timbuktu and Benin, while Ebtehaj told of the glories of Al-Andalus and the beauties of Baghdad and Cairo in their prime.

None of this information was in any book Khadra could find at the school library. Sometimes she wondered if maybe a little bit of Muslim pride made them exaggerate.

One time her father told her Shakespeare was really an Arab. "Just look at his name: It's an Anglicization of Sheikh Zubayr," he said, with a straight face.

She insisted on it for fifteen minutes to her language-arts teacher the next day. When she got home and related the story, her father threw his head back and laughed, and only then told her he'd been joking.

To back her claims about Islam and science before her doubting daughter, Ebtehaj showed Khadra one of her old Damascus University books on Muslim contributions to medicine. But it was too hard to read, in close Arabic print with no pictures.

Khadra and Eyad could just about manage the little Arabic readers that their parents made relatives send from Syria every year. "See Mazen run. Rabab goes to market. See Father and Mother. Father is brave. Mother reads a letter from Father at the front." Father wore a Syrian Army uniform and Mother never wore hijab. They were secular Baathist textbooks, with a picture of the Syrian president, Hafez Asad, in the front. The first thing Khadra's parents did was tear that page out and throw it away. Then they set to teaching the children Arabic, and gathered them on the prayer rugs to recite the Quranic suras they worked hard to memorize. Eyad was working on The Cave, an ambitious project. Khadra was all the way up to Surat al-Fajr, the "0 Soul made Peaceful" section: Come in among My worshipers, and in My Garden, enter.

No matter how hard they worked, however, the children could never keep up with their cousins in Syria, whose always exemplary Arabic composition was pointed out to them whenever the featherweight bluepaper letters arrived by airmail. Khadra harbored a secret loathing for Reem and Roddy.

By the rivers dark, I wandered on I lived my life in Babylon

By the rivers dark, where I could not see Who was waiting there, who was hunting me

-Leonard Cohen, "By the Rivers Dark"

Where was the soul at peace? Somalis were in the grip of a terrible famine. There was fighting in Western Sahara. Afghans filled refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan. Patani Muslims were being persecuted in their Buddhist-dominated country. Life in Lebanon was a hell of shelling and death. None of this was an important part of the news in America. Whereas the minute details of the lives of the American men held hostage, and the tears and hopes of their mothers, fathers, grandparents, and second cousins in Kissamee made news every day. Only they were human, had faces, had mothers. People wore yellow ribbons for these fifty-two privileged white men who now were, if the American news was to be believed, the most wretchedly oppressed of the earth. Anchorman Walter Cronkite counted out the days of their captivity at the end of each news broadcast.

Khadra counted out her days in George Rogers Clark High School where, for four hundred and forty-four days, she was a hostage to the rage the hostage crisis produced in Americans. It was a battle zone. Her job was to get through the day dodging verbal blows-and sometimes physical ones. By the time she got home, she was ready to be crabby and mean to anyone in her way.

"Why are you such a sourpuss?" her mother asked sharply, when Khadra snapped at Jihad.

"And what's wrong with your grades?" Wajdy demanded. "A C in English composition? You used to get As."

"She's prejadess," Khadra retorted.

It sounded like an excuse, but the comp teacher was prejudiced for real. Whenever Khadra wrote an essay about how hypocritical America was to say it was democratic while it propped dictators like the Shah and supported Israel's domination of Lebanon, "and then they wonder why people over there hate them," she got big red D's and Mrs. Tarkington found a reason to circle every other word with red ink. As soon as she turned in a composition on a neutral topic, no politics or religion, the Tark gave her a big fat A. It was that black-and-white.

Khadra felt a jab between her shoulder blades. Her books slipped to the floor An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X

"Oops," said a voice behind her. She whirled. Brent Lott and Curtis Stephenson. She was cornered. The whole school was at the rally in the gym. She could hear the pep squad's war whoops in the distance.

Curtis grabbed Malcolm X off the pukey green floor.

"Give me that." Khadra glared.

"Take off your towel first, raghead."

"Give it!"

"Why don't we take it off for her?" Brent Lott's hammy hand clamped on the nape of her neck, yanking her backward. The scarf went down around her shoulders. If Mindy Oberholtzer's little pleated cheerleader skirt had been ripped off, so that she'd been rendered half-naked right in the middle of school where people could see her, she might have felt as mortified as Khadra did then.

"Look, raghead's got hair under that piece a shit," Curtis crowed.

Brent yanked again.

"Cut it out, jerkoff?" Khadra yelled, swiping uselessly at his arm behind her back. Ow-the topaz scarf brooch opened, poking her skin, drawing blood.

"Want me to hold her down for you?" Curtis grabbed one of her flailing arms.

"Stop it!"

A ripping sound. Brent stepped back, waving a piece of scarf. Khadra lunged-tried to grab it-her scarf was torn in two, one strip in Brent's hand, the other wound tightly around her neck.

"I hate you!" she screamed.

`I hate you!" Brent mimicked in falsetto. "It's just hair, you psycho!"

"What a psycho," Curtis echoed. The two boys ran down the hall, the thump of their Adidas'd feet merging with the clatter of the pep rally.

Khadra knelt and started collecting her things. Algebra, Hola Amigos 11, her binder with all the papers falling out of it on the floor, My Antonia crumpled on its face.

"I hate you! I hate you! I HATE you!" she screamed at their receding figures.

Mr. Eggleston came out of his room down the hall. Silhouetted by the daylight streaming from the double doors at the end of the hallway, he shook his head, gave her a look of mild disapproval, and went back inside.

Mama was going to freak out, Khadra knew. "Where is your scarf? Why did you take it off?" Her father would say gravely, "But why were you talking to a boy anyway?" They didn't get it, they didn't get anything. She slid to the floor, her back against the cinder blocks. After her breathing got back to normal, she shoved her stuff into her locker and kicked it shut, wiping her face with the back of her hand. She would not cry in this hateful school. She never should have let them get to her. Hated herself for that.

The scarf. It was a mess. She didn't want to give anyone in this building the satisfaction of seeing her bareheaded. She shoved her disheveled hair under it. The brooch from Aunt Khadija was broken. Great. There was a smear of blood on the folds of the scarf where the brooch had poked her. Just great. That'd never come out.

She needn't have worried about her mother's reaction-when she got home, Ebtehaj was in another world. She and Aunt Trish were focused intently on the news of the day: ". . . massacre ... Sabra and Shatila ... allege that Israelis allowed Phalangist forces to enter the camps at ... Red Cross estimates ... death toll rising ......

"Omar heard from his cousin in Tripoli it was several thousand," Aunt Trish said, worried. Her husband's brother Muhammad lived in Sabra. Was he among the massacred, or just temporarily unreachable because of all the terror?

All of Omar Nabolsy's brothers had been named Muhammad, out of some fancy of their slightly unhinged mother, whom their father indulged. There was Muhammad Ali, Muhammad Taha, Muhammad Khair, and plain Muhammad. When things started to get confusing in the household crowded with Muhammads, he'd put his foot down and named the last boy Omar. But since the Nabolsys had been thrown to the four directions by the Palestinian diaspora, and there seemed little chance of the Muhammads ever reuiniting in their city again, it didn't matter so much anymore.

Nothing mattered to Khadra, except surviving the minefield of each day.

"Why can't we befriends now? ... Its what I want. Its what you want. " But the horses didn't want it-they swerved apart; the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks ... the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds ... they said in their hundred voices, `No, not yet, "and the sky said, "No, not there. "

-E. M. Forster, A Passage to India

Livvy and Khadra could no longer meet each other's eyes. Not since the Hellfire Showdown. It was after Livvy's Christian youth-camp revival where she rededicated herself to Jesus. Livvy was sharing the experience with Khadra as they lay on their stomachs across Livvy's purple checkered bedspread, twirling their ankles in the air, Debby Boone playing faintly on the bedside radio. Livvy kept saying "God's Son this" and "God's Son that." Each time she said it, fingernails scraped against a blackboard in Khadra's head.

She finally put her hands to her ears and said, "Stop!"

"Stop what?" Livvy said.

"You don't understand. That's the worst possible sin in my religion, okay?" Khadra said. "That whole son of God thing. I can't listen to that anymore. Even listening to it is, like, a really big sin."

The conversation deteriorated from there to:

"Am I going to hell? According to what you believe, am I going to hell?"

And each one had to admit to the other: Yes.

"Because you're not Saved," Livvy said tearfully. "You haven't accepted Jesus as your Savior. The best I can tell you is, some Christians believe in limbo, but that's really only for children who die young. Like, unbaptized babies. I'm not sure how old the cut-off is. Maybe you'll die young?"

"You want me to die young? Well, guess what, Livvy, you're going to hell too," Khadra said in a quavering voice.

She wasn't sure on this point. Sometimes her mother and father said Christians and Jews could possibly make it to heaven. It was in the Quran. But on the other hand, the Quran was also pretty clear that you couldn't go but to hell if you associated a partner or son with God. That was idolatry. Denying God's oneness. The biggest sin.

Livvy put her head down on her Paddington Bear and cried. Khadra went home feeling miserable. After that, Livvy and Khadra could only look at each other across the lunchroom with big sad eyes and weren't friends anymore.

She missed Hanifa, but they'd grown apart this new school year. All Hanifa did in her spare time these days was take apart and put back together the engine of a junked Ford Pinto she'd found behind the train tracks, sometimes with the Jefferson boys, Malik and Marcus. And get in trouble with her parents for taking the family car on joyrides-she didn't even have a license! Last summer, Khadra'd caught her friend in some unlslamic behavior on the back seat of the wrecked car, and gave her a good talking-to for it.

"What was she doing?" Tayiba had wanted to know, when she heard about Khadra's tirade.

"I'm not at liberty to say," Khadra'd said primly. "That would be tale-bearing." Of course, her vagueness only made worse the whispers in the community.

And now Hanifa had been absent from school for a while. Khadra and Tayiba heard a rumor that she was getting ready to go live with her non-Muslim grandmother in Alabama. Hanifa looked sullen when she answered the door. Khadra followed her to the threshold of the living room. "What's going on?"

"I don't want to talk about it," Hanifa said. "I want to lie down."

Khadra was hurt. Hanifa closed her eyes. Fingers of afternoon light filtered in, but Hanifa lay in shadow, her face smooth and not giving up secrets, her legs stretched out on the sectional sofa. In shorts. She was listening to music. Unlslamic music.

Well, she was related to non-Muslims, wasn't she? She was related to this music, to Lionel Ritchie, to some old non-Muslim grandmother in Alabama. She could just up and leave this life she had where Khadra was her friend, where you abided by the Total Islamic Lifestyle, and go off somewhere else. Be some other person. Leave Khadra in the lurch.

Something snapped in Khadra and she raged at her friend, "You're going astray, you know. Soon you'll be just like any American. You're going to hell, you know!"

Khadra didn't really know how she walked home. She just remembered her outburst, Hanifa's blank face, and then being exhausted, sobbing, in her bed at home.

Then, one day, she heard Hanifa was gone. Khadra's already tight world was one person smaller.

Aunt Khadija teared up when Khadra asked about her. Folded a fitted bedsheet-struggled with the corners-"I just can't figure out how to fold these anymore," she said, her voice getting stuck in her throat, the sheet in a heap in her lap. Khadra, sitting cross-legged on the Al-Deens' sectional sofa, rolled a pair of tube socks together and absently reached into the basket for more.