My Accidental Jihad (11 page)

But this time, when he turned away from me toward the window and slammed his heart shut against me, I was not alone. Still staring straight ahead, Fauziya reached behind her seat. Her hand searched for mine in my lap. She wove her fingers into my own and, with the pad of her thumb, began to stroke my palm. Like wiping dust from a window, each stroke swept away more of my anger. My breath grew steady and my head began to clear. I had imagined that Ismail was my only ally in this strange and exhausting country that was so far from my home, but I was wrong. In this moment, someone else in this cramped space understood me better than he did; someone loved me even after bearing witness to my ugliest self. Her touch told me what I needed to hear to climb out of this pit of alienation and despair. It expressed what Ismail, with his wounded pride, had never been able to say in moments like these: that I was understood, I was forgiven, and I was family.

T
he open-air market in Tripoli’s Old City was a labyrinth of narrow, crowded alleys where shoppers jostled past row after row of displays: tall stacks of neatly folded cloth, a pile of shoes, a display case spilling with gold. Vendors and customers faced off in noisy negotiations, leaning over counters and slapping tabletops and jabbing the air for emphasis. A woman’s slender hands appeared from a tent of cloth, and she ran them over a gold bracelet’s engraving as if she were reading Braille. A fabric vendor unfurled a length of white lace with a snap of his wrist, holding it aloft only a few inches over a black puddle. As a tour guide waddled down the alley, a tight cluster of European tourists followed like skittish ducklings.

I had often tried to imagine the country where Ismail had been born and raised, the land where the Arabic trapped in his throat in our small southern town would flow as freely as it had for the first half of his life. I wanted to know him in a country where no one inquired about his strange accent within the first few minutes of meeting him or stumbled over the pronunciation of his name. Even as our intimacy deepened back home in North Carolina, his foreign status clung persistently to him, permeating every aspect of our relationship, like the spicy aroma of his clothes after he cooked a meal. Each time he rolled an
r
across the roof of his mouth or touched his forehead to the carpet to pray or carried on passionate phone conversations with his relatives in Libya, I was reminded how foreign he was to me. In his native land, where I could see him not as an immigrant but as a son and a brother, I imagined I would finally locate the missing pieces of the puzzle.

Watching him now, maneuvering through this bustling market in a T-shirt, jeans, baseball cap, and sandals, our daughter balanced on his shoulders and pressing her hands to his cheeks, I was startled by how strange he seemed here. Never had I seen him look as American as he did surrounded by Libyans. Men his age seemed a generation older in their flowing white tunics and sandals. Huddled close on overturned milk crates and plastic chairs, absorbed in animated conversations, their hands swinging dangerously close to the cups of tea beside them, they raised their eyebrows and turned as Ismail walked briskly past, curiosity mixed with scorn on their faces. I suddenly understood the loneliness Ismail wore like a second skin, the heavy judgment that landed on him wherever he went, his nostalgia for a home that could not be found on any map.

As we flowed along with a current of shoppers down a winding alley, we almost collided with a dwarf standing squarely in the middle of the path. Like a buoy in a stormy sea, his head bobbed in and out of view among hips and shopping bags, his thick bowed legs anchored as people elbowed past. His severely curved back forced his face toward the ground, but as we passed he cocked his head to one side and jutted his chin upward, peering up at us with what appeared to be his one good eye. In his raised fist he clutched Chinese-made children’s plastic sunglasses, whose crooked plastic ends nearly collided with Ismail’s chest. Aliya immediately reached for them.

“How much?” Ismail asked.

“Ten dinars!”

Ismail shot a look of disbelief at the dwarf, whose serious expression instantly melted into a placating smile. Though I couldn’t speak Arabic, the counting games I had been playing with my nieces and nephews, along with the jabbing fingers and melodramatic expressions between the two men, made their negotiations easy for me to understand.

“Just for you, eight,” the dwarf murmured in a lower, conspiratorial voice, glancing around him as if a stampede might ensue if other shoppers overheard this figure.

Ismail planted his feet squarely and folded his arms across the chest, towering over the dwarf, while Aliya peered down wide-eyed from his shoulders at the contest unfolding below. He shook his head emphatically. “One dinar,” he countered, waving his index finger imperiously over the dwarf’s head for emphasis, to show he would not be budged from this figure.

“Seven! Okay, five—no less!” the little man shrieked, his fingers fluttering, his tinny voice rising.

I glanced around, looking for anything but this argument on which to focus my attention. Nearby, a leathery-faced man in a long white tunic held a basket full of blood oranges in one hand and lifted a bag of herbs to his nose with the other. Then he dropped coins into a vendor’s palm with a
clink
and walked away. I watched the white cotton sliver of his receding back until it was swallowed by the crowd. Meanwhile, like actors on the stage, Ismail and the dwarf contorted their faces from shock to outrage to cajoling smiles as they heatedly argued over what amounted to less than one dollar.

The longer I watched this baffling contest, the more anxious I became. I stared down at the thick layer of dust covering my sandals. I thought of the gleaming linoleum floors of our neighborhood grocery store, where I pushed my cart past row after row of brightly wrapped food glistening under fluorescent lights, as familiar, soothing tunes were piped into my ears like the refrigerated air that hummed through the building. I avoided eye contact with other shoppers as I maneuvered my cart past them, only barely interacting with the cashier who asked me in a monotone, without looking up from her register, if I had found what I was looking for. On days when I was too impatient to wait in line, or had an aversion to even that fleeting human contact, I chose instead to use a machine that instructed me, in an authoritative female voice, to pass my purchases over a scanner and place them into a bag. Once, a jar of spaghetti sauce had slipped through my hands and shattered on the polished white floor, spraying the red sauce across the linoleum and onto the leg of my pants. Shards of glass swam in a thick, slow-spreading puddle at my feet. Other shoppers glanced furtively up from their monitors, then tucked their chins down quickly and resumed tapping impatiently on screens, as if trying to get the attention of someone inside. The store employee bent the microphone to her mouth and spoke in a code that bounced off the polished floors. Nobody said a word to me. Shopping was as cold and efficient as swiping a credit card through a machine: no public spectacle, no unpredictable emotional exchanges, no niggling questions about fairness.

Ismail and the dwarf were still lobbing numbers back and forth like hot potatoes. Their contest may have lasted just a few minutes, but to me it felt like hours. Each imperious announcement from Ismail, each indignant shriek from the dwarf drove my blood pressure higher. I could not understand why Ismail would waste his time haggling over a few coins with someone who clearly needed the spare change far more than we did. I imagined the old man at home with his oranges by now, sitting cross-legged on the floor, lifting one to his lips, a trickle of juice dribbling onto his pristine white tunic. The light in the marketplace seemed to be changing, the sun sinking behind the buildings that bordered the narrow alleyway. And still this negotiation would not end. I tried to flash Ismail a look that said
enough,
but he was so focused on his wrangling that he didn’t even notice me. Finally, I leaned into his face and mouthed,
Give. Him.
Th
e. Money
.

Ismail’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. Immersed in this ancient ritual, he had momentarily forgotten all about his life on the other side of the world: his corporate job and wallet full of credit cards. His frequent flyer miles and wireless Internet access. His suburban home and his American wife.

He dug into the pocket of his shorts, pulled out a small pile of coins, and dropped them into the open palm of the dwarf, whose face broke into a victorious smile as he closed his fist over the money. He thrust a pair of sunglasses at Ismail, then retreated bowlegged and sideways through the crowd. I spun on my heels and walked briskly in the other direction.

“What’s wrong?” Ismail sputtered, struggling to catch up.

I glanced back at him helplessly.
What’s right?
I wanted to ask.
Can you name one thing that is right about haggling mercilessly with a disabled dwarf over forty cents in the middle of a crowded marketplace?
Instead I picked up my pace.

“You don’t understand,” I tossed back lamely, struggling to dislodge a single sentence from the glut of words stuck in my throat. His behavior made him seem terribly cheap and irrational; it embarrassed me. But I could see that my exasperation and judgment were just as unsettling to him, and I felt that familiar wave of exhaustion and despair as I began, once again, to search for the right words to build a bridge between us, to follow language back to this partnership, to restore us to husband and wife instead of two foreigners gaping at one another with naked prejudice.

He was nearly jogging now to keep up with me, feinting left and right to dodge approaching shoppers. I stepped up my pace, avoiding eye contact, until finally he reached for my arm and pulled me around to face him.

“Do you expect me to act like a tourist in my own hometown, to give that man exactly the price he demanded? This is what we do in the marketplace: we challenge each other. We yell. We laugh. We negotiate. It would have been an insult to him to avoid bartering. Where I come from, we don’t patronize people simply because they look different.”

His words were like oxygen to my smoldering resentment, fanning it into a full-blown flame. How dare he accuse me of being incapable of dealing with difference? Wasn’t I here in this broken-down country on the North African coast, surrounded day and night by people who were different from me in every imaginable way? Hadn’t I smiled and bowed my head, drunk and eaten everything I was offered, including the gnarled and greasy jerk meat that made my stomach turn? I’d extended my hand to yet another visitor when all I wanted was solitude. I’d spent long days and nights in crowded homes, barely feeling the sunlight on my face, when all I wanted to do was slip out the door and explore the city on my own. I’d been trying my best to play the part of gracious daughter-in-law and guest, while inside I swung among mounting resentment, dizzying boredom, and bouts of homesickness as visceral as nausea. I was beginning to feel like a marionette with a frozen smile and a bright, wooden gaze, my every gesture produced by Ismail’s family and friends tugging at my strings.

And then it dawned on me: I had kept everyone here at a polite distance, had never once risked treating them like kin by engaging them in messy, authentic interactions. Not once had I clearly asserted myself or stood my ground. What would have happened if I refused another cup of tea and excused myself and disappeared behind a closed door? Or sat down next to Ismail in a room full of the men, or pulled him down beside me on the floor among the women, insisting he translate so I could have a real conversation? Instead I had approached my relatives like an anthropologist, trying my best to blend in with the surroundings while I took mental notes about their strange customs, many of which I saw through the small, sharp lens of judgment and pity.

As much as I hated to admit it, back home on American streets I would be extremely unlikely to challenge someone who was old or disabled or whose skin was a different shade than mine. I understood words like
diversity
and
tolerance
to mean white people being on their best behavior, bringing out their best manners for mostly darker-skinned others whose suffering was undeniably greater. Tolerance meant trying to understand and intuit the needs of the less privileged, like a gracious host reads the face of the shivering and hungry guest who crosses the threshold. She might very well make a mental note about the mud he dragged into the house or the mismatched clothes he wore or the fact that he showed up without an offering—but she smiled brightly and offered the best of what she had, secure in the knowledge that later he would disappear back into the dark, and this well-appointed home and all it contained would still belong to her.

In the high school I had attended in the New Mexico mountains, diversity was represented by the single black girl in our class, adopted by a white family, whose bellow and guffaw bounced off the metal lockers, and who, with her big curves, unapologetically took up as much space as a football player. Skinny white girls pressed themselves against lockers to allow her to pass and followed her with fearful, admiring eyes. Diversity was the Native American boy in stained and torn jeans and heavy-metal T-shirts, whose mane of black hair fell to his waist like a shimmering black waterfall. Tolerance meant ignoring as much as possible the black girl’s blackness, ignoring, too, the fact that the Native American boy slinked into class a half hour late after hitchhiking ten miles down a mountain road from the reservation. On a winter weekend morning, my family stopped at a gas station on that same mountain road en route to a ski hill blanketed in two fresh feet of powder, and I saw him crouched on the sidewalk, eyes half-closed and chin tucked into a too-big army surplus jacket. Tolerance meant pretending not to see him and driving away.

In college, diversity meant rounding out my education by taking a literature class devoted to African novelists and another dedicated to black American writers. Our all-white class seemed to understand the unspoken rule that these authors could not be criticized or joked about. We might make offhand remarks about the long-winded ruminations of Virginia Woolf or the melancholy drama of Edgar Allen Poe, but with darker-skinned writers we grew earnest and careful, bent our heads to our desks and took copious notes, as if their writing were printed in indelible ink.

After college, when I worked at Planned Parenthood, diversity was what we encountered when we drove across the Mexican border in a van loaded with medical supplies to an ashen undercity built entirely from garbage on the outskirts of the dump. Women stared out from scrap-metal doorways. Children in cast-off clothing played with broken toys or sat in the dirt eating stale food. Our van crept past putrid puddles, barefoot children in the street, a hoarsely barking dog that appeared to be melting into a puddle of muddy blood, its lower half having been crushed by a car. As soon as I stepped from the van, a little girl ran up to me and began to sing a Madonna song. She swiveled her tiny hips and kicked up the dust with plastic flip-flops.
Los Angeles,
she said proudly, stabbing her chest with her finger, to let me know she had briefly resided in the land of the rich and famous. Smaller children circled around her, admiring the rusty scraps of English she spat into the air. Diversity was a brown palette of skin colors—from parched dust to black mud—on the bilingual birth control pamphlets we passed out that day, discreetly wiping our hands on our slacks.