My Accidental Jihad (8 page)

BY MID-DECEMBER, OUR
cul-de-sac was lit up like a silent carnival. During our nighttime walks, a plump glowing penguin in green and red ear muffs waved at us from beneath a tree caught in a web of rainbow lights. On our neighbor’s lawn a nutcracker stood stiff and tight-lipped beside a fat Santa in red uniform, his hand raised in a military salute. A reindeer with a coat of flickering white lights grazed on a patch of pebbles. Each evening at dusk, a ten-foot-tall snowman puffed up and rose to preside over the entire cul-de-sac, fat arms raised like a conductor, seams stretched with hot air. Unplugged each morning, he crumpled to the ground, his deflated plastic stretched over the shrubs like shedded skin. Each time I passed his collapsed shell, I felt a surge of recognition. I sympathized with his dramatic mood swings; this season affected me exactly the same way. The closer the holidays came, the more my mailbox and inbox were clogged with competing offers: Christmas Countdown! Shop Now! Free Shipping! It always happened this way: the pressure built and built until finally, deflated and exhausted, I collapsed into paralysis and dread.

A few days before Christmas, I sat on the couch with Ismail after our children were in bed, admiring our tree. We were curled under a heavy cotton afghan in the dim glow of rainbow lights, and he cradled my bare feet in his warm hands. Every single Christmas we had celebrated together, I had failed in my efforts to surprise and delight him with the perfect present. There was the year of the super-hero underwear, which I later found tucked into the bottom of the garbage; the cap I had knit that was too short to cover his ears; the scarf I had made that fell nearly to his knees.

But this year I had finally found the perfect gift for a man who hated clutter but was electrified by music: two tickets to see his favorite rock band. Why had it taken me so long to think of this? The tickets were sealed into a simple envelope and tucked into one of the two velvet stockings hanging on the mantel, upon which I had paid a local tailor to embroider the names Ismail and Aliya. I’d slipped into his tiny shop off the main street of town just before closing time. He was counting cash from the register; he barely looked up as I described to him what I needed. A grunt and a slight nod of the head told me he could do the work. He did not look up until I recited the two names. Then he cocked his head, stared, and slid a paper and pen across the counter for me to write them down.

“What kind of names are those?” he’d mumbled, more to himself then me. When I told him my husband was from North Africa, he seemed to take me in.

“Your husband’s from Africa?”

I nodded.

“Is he African like me or African like Osama bin Laden?”

I took in his mahogany skin and broad nose spreading across his round face. In my mind’s eye I saw bin Laden’s narrow coffee and cream profile beneath a white turban, the lower half of his face hidden in a black beard streaked with gray. I wished for a third option.

“Umm . . . perhaps somewhere smack in the middle?” I’d shrugged my shoulders, and he had laughed and shaken his head.

Now the stockings, labeled in script that curled like ribbon, were bulging with small offerings. The following morning, I knew, I would place Ismail’s stocking in his lap, and he would smile uncertainly up at me when I encouraged him to reach inside. This year would be different: his face would transform from halfhearted indulgence, to wonder, to real excitement when he discovered the concert tickets.

“You’ll never guess what I got you this year,” I told him. Smiling, he continued to knead my feet like bread dough.

“Just try,” I persisted. “I dare you.” I was so caught up in my own excitement that at first I didn’t even notice his hands stop moving and his expression turn anxious. When I finally noticed his furrowed brow, I asked him what was wrong.

“I’m worried you’ll be disappointed with what I got you.” He glanced down at his watch, as if contemplating the possibility of a late-night sprint to the mall. “I’m afraid I didn’t get you enough presents.”

“That’s it! That right there! Do you feel it?”

He looked quizzically at me.

“Feel it? That restlessness in your gut—that frantic impulse to dash to the store, to buy presents you’re not sure you can afford or your loved ones will even want? That niggling fear of disappointing those you love, of being disappointed yourself?”

He nodded.

“
Th
at
is the Christmas spirit.”

AS MUCH AS
I loved them, I could no longer deny that suffering was often wrapped up in the presents I gave or received: disappointment with the wrong gift, resentment for the wrong reaction, shame for forgetting an occasion or neglecting to send a thank-you card, the persistent loneliness of feeling overlooked or misunderstood. As we sat together in silence in the dim glow of the Christmas lights, I recalled our most recent Valentine’s Day. Ismail had pushed the door open with his foot and walked in cradling a dozen red roses, bundled in candy apple red crepe paper and tied up with a pink satin bow. He handed me a small black box which I opened to find the most exquisite chocolates I’d ever seen: ebony hearts wrapped in a web of pink filaments, dense chocolate squares topped with sea salt like cut glass, a pyramid of black chocolate with a pure white tip that drizzled espresso cream over my tongue. I was amazed; for Ismail to offer such traditional Valentine’s gifts, I knew, was as much an act of surrender as putting his forehead to the ground in prayer. I knew how much he dreaded this day, when American men circled grocery-store flower displays like sharks or grabbed heart-shaped chocolate samplers from the shelves of drug stores in a distracted rush. So many previous Valentine’s Days had ended in tears and anger, when he had refused to participate in rituals he was certain were cooked up by the marketing teams of chocolate and flower conglomerates.

The moment I saw the gifts he carried, I was overcome with guilt.

“I didn’t get you anything for Valentine’s Day this year,” I blurted. Even as I spoke the words, I cringed at how thoughtless they sounded, knowing how hurt and angry I had been when the tables were turned.

I had never done this before. It wasn’t that I had forgotten or that I was trying to make him pay for previous oversights. Twice, in fact, I had gone shopping for him. I’d wandered through sports stores and men’s departments, fingered the collar of men’s sweaters, sprayed men’s cologne in a fine mist on my wrist, loosened the caps on organic shaving creams to sniff them. Argyle socks, belts, pajamas, briefs and boxers—I’d considered them all.

But then, standing before photos of preening men with glistening cleavage wearing boxers or bulging briefs, I thought of the twenty-year-old T-shirts and plain white underwear stacked in Ismail’s dresser drawers. I recalled the cologne and shaving cream bottles lined up neatly below his sink—untouched presents from previous holidays—as well as the nearly identical shirts and sweaters hanging in his closet, all purchased on occasions like this. In a burst of inspiration, I knew what would mean the most to him: for me to turn around and leave this department store empty-handed, to defy Hallmark’s insistence on this particular expression of love. So I went out on a limb and decided to give him the one present I never had before: nothing. Instead I’d found a piece of red construction paper among my daughter’s art supplies, cut it into the shape of a heart, and scribbled reasons I loved him all over the back.

Later that night, after the dishes were done and Aliya’s bath was finished, we set out in the dark for a nighttime walk. Leaving behind our warm, bright house that still smelled of the chicken we had roasted, we stepped into the bracing night air beneath a starlit canopy. We cut through our backyard and crossed into a meadow. A herd of deer lifted their heads in unison to stare at us, then froze like lawn ornaments as we passed by. We skirted the edge of the pond without speaking, our long strides falling into rhythm. On the far side of the meadow, we stepped onto the sidewalk and walked side by side. The damp pavement shimmered in the weak glow of a street lamp.

This was the time of day when we talked, when our thoughts meandered like these paths we followed through our neighborhood. His voice in my ear was a low purr, contented and pleasant. We walked briskly, our long shadows leading the way before us on the sidewalk. Ismail turned to me. “I’ll never forget the gift you gave me today. Thank you.”

I glanced at him, then back at our shadows bleeding together on the pavement. The Qur’an says that God is nearer to us than our own jugular vein, and there were moments when Ismail felt that close to me: nearer than my own skin, so close that I lost sight of him altogether. If I tried to describe that intimacy, each word was a wedge between us, cleaving us in two, creating concepts from a seamless whole. So I said nothing, focusing instead on the slender, faceless shadows before us. Merged together, they lumbered like one animal into the dark.

A
crowd of relatives the size of a large tour group waited in the bright sunshine outside the Tripoli airport to welcome Ismail home for the first time in eight years. We had flown to Libya via New York and Milan so I could meet his family for the first time and we could introduce them to Aliya, then five years old. I was three months pregnant. Having trekked the Himalayas, camped along the Baja peninsula, and crossed Europe in trains, I considered myself a seasoned traveler. But if I’d known that the cappuccino I drank at the airport in Italy would be my last taste of coffee for the next three weeks, I would have felt more apprehensive about this trip. I was also unaware that the workout clothes neatly packed in my suitcase would remain untouched. None of my previous travels had prepared me for my arrival in Libya as the pregnant American wife of a firstborn Muslim son.

Ismail’s youngest brother, Hussein, ran toward us and engulfed Ismail in a tight embrace, weeping and kissing his cheeks, while three of his sisters, in bright head scarves, circled around us. Like colorful, twittering birds that have found bird seed, they talked and laughed and pecked our cheeks, foreheads, and hands. They herded us into the parking lot and we crammed into tiny cars, counting each lap as an additional seat. The car I folded myself into with Aliya had no room for Ismail, so he ducked into a separate one. I found myself in a tiny hatchback with four adults and three small children who giggled and scrambled from lap to lap and from the front to the back of the car as we sped down a two-lane road through the desert.

We were headed to Ismail’s family home, where he had been raised. Though we were probably traveling no more than forty miles per hour, it felt like we were going twice that speed in this tiny vehicle. I rested my elbow on a door that rattled on it hinges, and the floorboards beneath my feet strained and popped over the cracked and pothole-marked road. My husband’s cousin, who was driving, spoke to me either in heavily accented English or in Arabic—I couldn’t tell which over the mad hum of the car’s engine. I nodded and smiled as my teeth rattled in their sockets. Cars dodging oncoming traffic sped past women wrapped in colorful cloth who walked serenely along the narrow dirt shoulder of the road.

Ismail’s hometown on the outskirts of Tripoli was a labyrinth of tangled, unmarked alleys whose intersections were marked by towering piles of trash. My husband’s cousin sped down narrow dirt roads, dodging trash and animals and parked cars, then came to a stop along a high stone wall. We had arrived at my in-laws’ house, and there was no sign of my husband anywhere. The children tumbled from the car and ran through an iron gate into a dusty courtyard where patches of brown grass baked in the sun. In one corner, a lime tree with fruit like hard green stones cast a spindly web of shade in the dirt. Laughing and talking to one another excitedly, my Libyan relatives herded me toward the front door. I gripped Aliya’s hand tightly in my own and stepped across the threshold of a squat blocklike cement structure into a large room with cold tile floors. Yet another crowd of relatives, twice as large as our greeting party, was seated in a circle on thin floor cushions. The men looked down when I entered the room, avoiding eye contact, but the children stared wide-eyed, and the women met my gaze with exuberant smiles. At the far end of the room, seated cross-legged on the floor, was a heavyset old woman. A worn and faded piece of cloth was wrapped several times around her body like a toga, and her head was wrapped in a flowery scarf. Her knees pushed up against the soft cloth and her large breasts rested heavily in her lap. A thin green line ran from the center of her bottom lip down her chin.

“A tattoo,” Ismail explained to me later, “inked onto her face by an elder the week before her wedding.”

This was my mother-in-law, Njaima, or Hajja, as everyone called her since she had returned from making her obligatory pilgrimage to Mecca many years before. Her eyes, creased with deep wrinkles, brimmed with tears, and she murmured softly and reached up toward me like an ancient child. Holding tight to my daughter’s hand, I crossed the room and sat at her feet as everyone watched. “
Marhaba,
” she said, taking my hand.
Welcome.
She leaned forward and cradled my daughter’s plump cheeks between large, calloused hands. Tears streamed down her face.
“Masha Allah,”
she murmured over and over again.
“Masha Allah!”
Literally translated as “God has willed it,” the phrase was often used to express appreciation for children and to remember that all beauty and goodness came from God.

She turned to me, covering my slender hands with her broad, leathery ones, and began to speak. I could not understand a word of her Arabic, and there was still no sign of Ismail anywhere. I listened closely to the rise and fall of her voice punctuated by long pauses when her eyes searched mine for understanding. I watched the tears pool in her rheumy eyes and imagined what she was telling me. What I read in her eyes I could feel in my bones: how much she had missed her son, how welcome I was in her home, how she adored her granddaughter. I took deep breaths and tried to hold her gaze. Then she pulled back, grabbed me by my shoulders, and looked me up and down, appraising her lean blonde daughter-in-law in jeans and running shoes. She shook her head, furrowed her brow in concern and disapproval, and muttered the same Arabic words she would repeat to me over and over again on this trip:
Daifa, Daifa. Kuli, Kuli!
Too skinny, too skinny! Eat, Eat!

It felt like hours before Ismail appeared in the doorway to join us. Hajja’s face creased in ecstasy at the sight of her son, and she cradled his face in her hands. My husband sobbed like a little boy, and tears flowed throughout the room. She patted his cheeks, then rose and pulled me by the hand into her kitchen, turning back once to wag her finger at Ismail and accuse him of starving his wife. She seemed deeply disturbed by my athletic build, the result of years of recreational running and careful eating. To her, it was a sign that something was terribly wrong. From that moment until the day I left, she plied me constantly with powdered nut cookies, bowls of rice, jerk meat, and strong sweet cups of tea. Only when my mouth was full did she seem to be at ease.

Taking my seat on the floor among the women, I looked around and knew immediately which ones were Ismail’s sisters. They bore a strong resemblance to their brother: thick black eyebrows, brown eyes like dark chocolate medallions, plump cheeks and skin the color of coffee and cream. Fauziya, Aida, Nura . . . I studied their faces and tried to remember their names. One was missing: where was Ismail’s fourth sister?

In the corner of the room, a woman hung back in the doorway to the kitchen, quietly witnessing our arrival as if eavesdropping on this family reunion. She stood only a few feet away but seemed much farther from this exuberant welcome party that surrounded me. Unlike the other women with their bright makeup and colorful clothes, her face was plain and pale, and she wore a simple black
abaya,
or floor-length robe, and a white head scarf as plain as a cloth napkin. She wore a guarded expression, smiling shyly when she caught my eye and then dropping her gaze immediately and disappearing into the kitchen as if she had been caught indulging in something forbidden. Ismail’s family ignored her so completely that I assumed she must be a servant—but domestic help seemed incongruous in this small home with its barren walls and sparsely appointed rooms.

When we had all seated ourselves on the floor—men in one tight circle and women in another—the woman in black swept quietly into the room with a tray of cookies and tea, kneeling to serve each of us in turn. Family members helped themselves to her offerings without addressing her or acknowledging her presence—but when she knelt before Ismail, he reached for her and cradled her cheeks with such love that I knew they must be related. He tugged at her arm and appeared to be coaxing her to sit, but she resisted him and continued around the circle. When she disappeared into the kitchen, Ismail stood and followed her. Startled, the men glanced from his departing back to one another, as if alarmed by his strange behavior. A moment later Ismail returned from the kitchen holding her hand, pulling her toward me like a reluctant child, though as she got closer I could see that worry lines already creased her face.

“This is my sister Wajida,” he told me, and she blushed as she took my hand. For the rest of the evening, I only caught glimpses of her as she came and went from the kitchen, clearing dishes and offering fresh cups of tea. When the men’s conversation reached a fevered pitch and their laughter ricocheted off the empty walls, when the women fell back against pillows cupping their full round bellies in their hands, when the children flopped down onto floor pillows giggling, Wajida haunted the edge of the room as silent as a ghost.

Throughout my long first afternoon in Libya, a steady stream of relatives filed through the house to inspect Hajja’s American daughter-in-law and granddaughter. Hajja led each guest to where I was seated, and they stood over me smiling and speaking in Arabic. I smiled as warmly as I could—an effort that became increasingly difficult as the hours wore on—and they settled onto the floor around me, nested in flowing layers of cloth, and carried on animated conversations that went on for hours. Laughing loudly and slapping her thigh, Hajja elbowed me as if I were in on the joke. I cocked my head and listened to the melody and rhythm of their Arabic, trying to glean whatever I could from these foreign sounds. It was like hearing the hum of a television through a closed door, never getting the specifics, only the general mood of the discussion: joyful, serious, sympathetic. All through that long afternoon, Hajja watched me with a probing, open gaze like an outstretched hand.

Finally, Hajja lowered herself to the ground and sat cross-legged before me. She gestured toward my head and said something to Ismail. “She says you would look beautiful with your head covered,” he translated, flashing me an apologetic look. I nodded and smiled politely, and she nodded emphatically and brought her hands together beneath her chin, miming the act of tying a scarf. She raised her eyebrows invitingly like she was suggesting a game for us to play, then raised herself up off the floor and disappeared into a back room. She returned clutching a silken head scarf covered with Technicolor fruit: Day-Glo oranges, glossy red apples, an ornate vine of electric green leaves. She knelt before me and gently placed it over my head, sweeping stray hair from my forehead and tucking it beneath the cloth, then tied it snugly beneath my chin as if I were a porcelain doll. The other women in the room, each of whom I was related to in ways I did not comprehend, smiled and bobbed their covered heads approvingly. With my head swaddled in bright cloth and all eyes upon me, I felt ridiculous. Smiling apologetically and shaking my head, I pulled the scarf off and handed it back to her, feeling both indignant and for the first time self-conscious about the hair that fell across my face.

It seemed that I spent hours gazing down at the floor of Hajja’s crowded home. Sunlight poured across the concrete, then faded. Darkness pressed against the window, and the shadows of women in the kitchen boiling yet more water for fresh tea began to seem like a delirious dream. Five hours had passed since our arrival, and I was exhausted. I had not had a moment to myself except in the bathroom—and then, squatting on the low toilet, I’d listened to my sisters-in-law in whispered conference outside the door. I longed for privacy, and I’d hoped to stay in Tripoli’s big new hotel, where oil executives and tourists congregated. I wanted a steaming-hot bath, a countertop on which to spread my toiletries, an adjustable thermostat and a heater that hummed through the night, drowning out the honking of horns on the crowded streets below.

Finally I went to find Ismail. Standing in the doorway of a narrow windowless room where a circle of men sat appearing to have a heated debate, I gestured frantically for his attention.

“Can we go to a hotel?” I whispered when he met me in the doorway and bent his head to hear my request. Behind him, a room full of men watched us with curiosity; the circle of women behind me had grown silent and was studying us as well.

I did not realize how offensive this proposal would be to his family, but Ismail did. He sighed and looked at me long and hard, then turned to his family. I could tell by his apologetic tone that this situation called for the utmost diplomacy. His gentle suggestion that we retire to a hotel was met with a moment of shocked silence as relatives stared at one another and at us incredulously. Then the room erupted in protest. Men and women shook their heads and wagged their fingers, their expressions cycling rapidly from outrage to insult to pleading disbelief. They insisted we stay in the finest accommodations they could offer: the half-built home of my sister-in-law Fauziya and her husband, Adel. In the midst of the uproar, Ismail turned to me helplessly and raised his palms to the air. There was nothing he could do to stop this tidal wave of hospitality.

Blinking back tears of frustration, I climbed into the backseat of another tiny, rusty car, and we sped off down a winding alley while I groped in the dark for seat belts that did not exist. At their home, Adel and Fauziya led us down a gray concrete hallway to a small, unpainted bedroom with black plastic taped over each gaping window frame to keep out the wind. We slept in their bed while they curled up in a room nearby on floor mats. After seventeen hours of travel and eight more of socializing, I fell exhausted into the bed beside Ismail and with Aliya curled on a cot jammed between the bed and the wall.

Before falling asleep, I turned to him in the dark and asked him to tell me the story of Wajida. In a low whisper, he explained that after his three sisters had been married, the man Wajida loved had approached her father, but her father had driven the suitor away. Instead of getting married, Wajida became the one to care for her parents in their old age. She was their social security, their retirement plan, their domestic help, and their in-home nurse. When her brothers completed law school in Tripoli or left for the United States and Malaysia for graduate degrees, when her sisters got married and moved into apartments in downtown Tripoli or farms in the country and celebrated the births of their children, Wajida remained trapped in the rooms in which she had been raised, where her father’s angry outbursts echoed through empty rooms and her mother’s bitter silence hung like acrid smoke in the air. Her parents no longer spoke to one another, instead relying on Wajida to deliver curt messages between them. Instead of changing diapers, she massaged swollen feet and arthritic hands. Instead of continuing her education she was apprenticed to her own mother, learning the intricacies of housekeeping, martyrdom, and unbreakable faith.