My Accidental Jihad (9 page)

After Ismail told me about Wajida, he rolled over and fell into a deep sleep, but I lay wide awake, unable to settle down, my heart racing like a child’s after a ghost story. How could a family do this: sacrifice one innocent life for the benefit of the rest? Suddenly it seemed to me that everyone I had met earlier that day was complicit in Wajida’s servitude: Ismail’s gracious, sweet-smelling sisters; his gentle brothers who dropped their eyes in modesty instead of meeting my gaze; his mother who wept and kissed her son’s hands as if he were a saint and she his devoted follower; his father, who returned from the mosque and sat straight-backed and serene in his long woolen tunic, as regal as the Buddha; and Ismail himself, who had lived in an American college dorm and gone to rock concerts, jogged down the street shirtless and gone out on countless dates, all the while knowing about his sister’s confinement. And now I, too, was complicit in her oppression.

Eventually I drifted off to sleep, but in the middle of the night I awoke with a start to see a dark form reaching for Aliya in her cot while my husband snored softly by my side. My adrenaline surged before I realized it was my sister-in-law, who had heard my daughter cough and slipped into our bedroom to soothe her and give her God knows what medicine. On previous travels, exhausted by foreign languages and unfamiliar customs, I’d withdrawn to hotels and bars filled with other travelers, all of us ready to commiserate about home and toast our adventures. But there would be no respite from crowded, generous, broken, resilient Libya.

A
wakened at dawn by the call to prayer crackling over the fuzzy loudspeaker of a nearby mosque, I slipped out of bed while Ismail slept. I greeted my sister-in-law in the hallway with my morning breath, my bed head, and my frown lines. She handed me a tiny cup and saucer, the kind children use at tea parties, filled with a frothy concoction. None of my relatives drank coffee, but as a special treat for me, Fauziya had purchased a small, expensive canister of Nescafé powder. I tilted the cup to my mouth, nearly emptying it in one gulp. Among my hosts there was no coffee, no alcohol, no television or Internet, and as I quickly realized, no outdoor exercise, since I could not be on the streets without an escort and without my skin covered. In Libya I was cut off from all my addictions at once, cold turkey—and under the watchful eye of my female relatives who scrutinized my every expression and tried to anticipate every need.

After breakfast, seven of us piled into a car not much bigger than a golf cart and drove to the home of Ismail’s beloved aunt Fatama, swerving on dirt roads past potholes deep enough to swallow a tire. A Libyan flag flapped in the wind, as green and plain as the apron of a Starbucks employee. In my mind’s eye I saw a barista offering me three sizes that started tall and grew from there, saw myself cradling a paper cup filled with rich, dark brew. Folded onto Ismail’s lap in the backseat, my head brushing the torn vinyl ceiling, I whispered into his ear: “Is there a Starbucks on the way?” He chuckled, low and sympathetic, and squeezed me tighter.

His aunt Fatama squatted in the dust among the chickens behind a high stone wall, waiting for us. A beaming round woman swaddled in a brightly colored cloth from head to toe, with a tattoo that matched my mother-in-law’s, she greeted us with kisses, tears, and prayers, then disappeared into her darkened home. She returned a moment later with a plate of french fries dusted with salt. At 9
A.M.
we sat in her courtyard, dipping them in ketchup and warming our faces in the weak morning sun as her cats threaded through our legs and her chickens pecked the dust.

An hour later, it was time to drive to the home of Ismail’s childhood friend Mahmoud, where we had been invited for lunch. My limbs already heavy and my mind sluggish from jet lag, I leaned against Ismail in the backseat as we bounced down the road, our hatchback dodging chickens and a goat who looked up lazily, his breakfast of trash hanging from his mouth. Concealed behind a high stucco wall, Mahmoud’s courtyard was beautifully landscaped, with a clean-swept brick pathway to an ornate front door. He stood in his doorway in pleated slacks and spit-polished shoes that appeared to have never set foot on a dusty Libyan street. I stepped from the car and, without thinking, swung my arms wide to hug him. With an expression of alarm he leapt deftly to one side, as if dodging a snake attack, leaving me grasping at the air. He would not shake my hand or even hold my gaze during the entire time I was in Libya.

An official in Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, Mahmoud wore tailored suits and Italian leather shoes each time I saw him, even on weekends. A cloud of fear hung in the air around him like cheap cologne; friends and even his own family addressed him with downcast eyes and ingratiating smiles. I only saw him smile once, and he wiped the expression off his face so quickly that I thought I must have imagined it. Mostly he sat sullenly among the men, the lit cigarette between his fingers sending a thin question mark of smoke swirling above his head. One of the wealthiest men in Ismail’s hometown, he had a shiny Volkswagen Jetta in his driveway and a comfortable home enclosed by a wrought-iron gate. In the United States his would have been a solidly middle-class home, but in this labyrinth of dirt alleys and trash-strewn roads, parched lime trees and dusty, wandering chickens, his residence was startlingly opulent.

Mahmoud’s wife was heard and sensed but rarely seen: a swirl of black cloth, the sound of clanking pots, the smell of simmering curry drifting to us from the kitchen. I glimpsed her round face suspended in a tent of black, her kind eyes encircled in thick black kohl, her hands delivering a brass platter of glass teacups. The dining room table was elaborately set for two, though there were eight of us present; Mahmoud had assumed that my daughter and I would eat in the kitchen with his wife and children while the men convened in the formal dining room.

With a cajoling smile, Ismail said something to him in Arabic. Mahmoud responded in a clipped voice, and the two men began to negotiate. Mahmoud’s tone told me he was increasingly annoyed with Ismail, who was clearly refusing to back down. Finally Mahmoud tossed his hands into the air and retreated into the kitchen. A moment later his wife emerged to set two more places at the table. “Don’t worry: you will be eating with us,” Ismail whispered into my ear. I was grateful and uneasy. I could not decide what would be more uncomfortable for me: eating in the kitchen with a woman and children whose language I did not speak or eating among the men where I was obviously unwelcome.

I sat between Ismail and Aliya at the dining table. Mahmoud sat across from us, smoothing his napkin and avoiding my gaze, appearing to be as rattled as if I had insisted on dining with him bare-breasted. He was tense with the effort to deny my presence. Every now and then his eyes darted toward me, but he yanked them away like dogs on a short leash. Mostly I kept my eyes on my plate, raising them only to thank Mahmoud’s wife guiltily and effusively each time she emerged from the kitchen to serve me another dish.

After dinner we moved to another room to lounge on floor pillows, and Mahmoud’s wife and children joined us there. The floor pillows at Ismail’s mother’s house were only inches thick, but the ones at Mahmoud’s were plush and ornately embroidered with gold thread. We relaxed into them and Mahmoud placed a gift in Aliya’s lap: a Muslim Barbie doll covered from her neck to her toes in a black abaya. Just a few wisps of her brassy blonde hair slipped out from beneath her head scarf, but the face that stared up at Aliya was as familiar as an old friend from home: wide, sky blue eyes; slightly parted bubble gum lips; a brilliant white smear of teeth.

Something besides her clothing was fundamentally different about her; something essential was missing. It took me a few moments to realize what it was: her torpedo breasts, those unyielding nipple-free mounds. Her chest was as flat as if she had gotten a double mastectomy.

The Barbie stared up at Aliya with her impenetrable smile. The room fell silent as we waited for Aliya’s reaction. I silently willed her to show gratitude and delight, but instead she stared down at the doll with a furrowed brow, her lips pursed in concentration. This Barbie was a riddle she couldn’t solve.

After a few moments of befuddled contemplation, her face lit up with an idea. She yanked the head scarf from the doll’s head, freeing the brassy blonde hair, which she combed with her chubby fingers until it lay down her back. The narrow strip of cloth she smoothed out onto the carpet beside her, considering it carefully. Next she yanked the abaya wide open, its Velcro strips resisting before giving way to her insistent fingers, revealing Barbi’s peach-colored near nudity in plain white granny underwear and what looked like a Jogbra. Now I could see that her figure was childlike: gone, too, were her pencil-thin waist and voluptuous hips. Aliya tugged at the undergarments, but they were sewn to the doll’s flesh, not to be removed under any circumstances.

All eyes in the room rested on the disrobed doll splayed out on the floor. The dolls at our house were shameless, always in a state of partial undress. When I found them lounging topless on our furniture or lying spread-eagle in an empty bathtub, I stepped over them without giving them a second thought. But in this foreign world, her exposed peachy flesh made me squirm. I had to resist the urge to cover her up. Aliya cocked her head like Versace considering a half-dressed model. Then, in a burst of inspiration, she grabbed the strip of cloth that had once been a head scarf and was now a bandera. She cinched it tightly around the doll’s bottom, turning it into the smallest miniskirt imaginable and tying it rakishly at the hip. Her eyes lit up with pleasure and pride; now the doll was ready to play.

H
u
ssein had been the first to embrace us when we arrived in Libya. He was over six feet tall and thirty years old, the first slivers of gray hair already streaking his temples, but he had raced down the sidewalk outside the Tripoli airport and clung to his big brother like a little boy, wiping tears from his cheeks with the back of his hand. Next he’d turned to Aliya, lifting her gently from my arms and kissing her on each chubby cheek. His display of vulnerability and raw emotion evoked a tenderness I usually only feel toward small children. From the first moment I saw him, he was our quiet and gentle companion in Libya, often hovering in the background, his hand appearing before me just in time to open a door, refill a cup of tea, or sweep Aliya from the sidewalk before she stepped in a puddle.

The other men in Ismail’s family refused to meet my gaze for more than a few seconds, staring instead down at my knees when we were introduced, but Hussein let his curious eyes linger on mine before dropping them again toward the floor. When our eyes met, he could not suppress a shy, boyish smile. Like the sun momentarily appearing between the clouds, his smile lit up his whole face before it was concealed once again behind an impassive masculine front. Like Ismail, he seemed more at home with his laughing, affectionate sisters than with the men, who spoke over him and addressed him in clipped tones. He responded by springing from the floor to do whatever had been asked of him.

Having graduated from college seven years prior, Hussein was still living at home with his parents and biding his time until the government, Libya’s main employer, placed him in a job. Seven years was not an unusually long time to wait. He seemed frozen in time, trapped in a prolonged adolescence even as his hair began to recede and his belly began to spill over his pants. He inhabited the same small rooms where he had been raised, slept on the same floor cushions on which he had lain as a child, his long legs and large feet now spilling onto the floor. He had spent all of his twenties under the brooding, critical eye of his father and within arm’s reach of his doting mother. When he first approached us, I had seen a full-grown man, handsome and broad-shouldered, walking down the sidewalk with a purposeful stride. But when he bent his head and ducked through the doorway of his family home, he seemed to shrink in age and stature, to become once again the baby boy of the family: subservient to his father and older brothers, affectionate and attentive toward his mother and his sisters.

One day, when I was seated alone on the floor, Hussein sat down only inches away, closer than any man but Ismail had been to me since I had arrived in Libya. He pulled a worn leather wallet from his pocket and dug into it to find a postage stamp – sized snapshot. Blushing, he pressed it surreptitiously into my hand. I held it up to my face to study the plain, serious face of a young woman in a dark head covering. She stared into the camera as if posing for a mug shot. The snapshot was creased and yellow at the edges; it must have been tucked away in his wallet for years.

“My fiancée,” Hussein said proudly, in halting English.

Ismail had never mentioned anything to me about the fact that Hussein had a girlfriend, much less that he was engaged. For a moment I felt a bitter righteousness; I had often complained to him about his failure to share important information about his family, details I needed in order to be a gracious daughter- or sister-in-law.

I held the photo up close and studied the woman’s face more carefully, this time seeing her through Hussein’s eyes: arched black eyebrows as precise as calligraphy strokes, full lips, round cheeks, and flawless skin. “She’s beautiful,” I murmured, handing the photo back to him.

Hussein nodded and flashed me a quick smile like we were in on a secret, then slipped the photo back into his wallet like money he was saving for the future. He told me his fiancée had sat on the opposite side of the room in his accounting class at the university. They had exchanged smiles over the heads of other students and had spoken a few words in the hallway or walking the pathways across campus. In one of those stolen moments, he had fallen in love. Like tumbling from a high place, like gravity’s swift and inexorable pull, it took no time at all for him to realize he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. He had asked her parents for her hand in marriage, and the day they consented, seven years ago, she had given him the photo that he had just shared with me.

I imagined this young woman in her early twenties, celebrating her engagement—and then waiting under her parents’ roof, just like he had been doing, for seven long years. After all this time, had he become as difficult to recall as the math formulas she had learned in that class? Was she still as excited about her engagement now that her thirties loomed and the first fine crow’s-feet were appearing around the edges of her eyes?

“When do you see her?”

Sometimes driving down the streets of his hometown, he caught a glimpse of her walking with her mother or her sister: a flash of full cheek, the swivel of a round hip beneath flowing cloth. Sometimes in the market he saw her slender fingers reaching for fresh fruit or heard her distinct laughter floating above the chatter of vendors and shoppers.

“When is your wedding?”

He shook his head and furrowed his brow. Not until he had finished building his own house on the small plot of land beside his parents’ home, he said, pointing toward the barren courtyard. He would pay for the construction himself, with wages earned at his long-anticipated government job; he and his family would lay the foundation and build it piece by piece as he could afford to purchase the materials. In other words, it seemed as if he might be no more than halfway through his engagement. He would be lucky to wed before his bride’s eggs began to wither.

It seemed to me that nearly every person I encountered in Libya was waiting for something: a job, a house, a visa, a spouse, a car, a future. A lone shopkeeper in the market sat on an overturned crate, waiting with a faraway look in his eyes for customers who never arrived. Young men loitered on street corners all hours of the day, hands thrust deep into jeans pockets, scanning passing traffic as if impatiently waiting to flag down their futures like taxis. My sister-in-law, at home all day with two small children—without a car, sidewalks on which to push a stroller, or a park nearby where they could play—sat in her kitchen and stared out the window, clutching a cup of tea already cold in her palms, waiting for her husband’s return while her children’s shrieks bounced off the barren walls.

An impenetrable bureaucracy was cast like a fishing net over the entire country, trapping Libyans in place; the more they thrashed against their constraints, the more they engaged the dysfunctional system, the more tangled and paralyzed they became. The moment I had stepped onto Libyan soil, I felt the weight of this net falling over me. When the plane taxied to the gate at the Tripoli airport, I leapt from my seat and reached into the overhead bin, eager to be one of the first to enter the airport. If I had been paying attention, I might have noticed how slowly other passengers were now moving; this would have given me a clue of what was to come. One of the first to enter the airport, I immediately found myself in a stock-still line that snaked out the door. The line surged forward when a man at a desk waved an entire group through without even looking at their paperwork.

Then it came grinding to a halt. Up ahead at customs, a middle-aged man sat at a desk, now and then calling to a tight cluster of men who huddled in the corner in a nicotine cloud, eyeing those of us who had just arrived with hostile suspicion. For the next hour, we stood in place or stepped forward inches at a time, scanning the plain, stained walls for something to hold our interest, finding only Gaddafi’s massive portrait to contemplate. The men who appeared to be in charge took long drags off their cigarettes and carried on animated conversations in Arabic, like old friends who had gathered here to share news and gossip. They seemed oblivious to the line of exhausted, impatient travelers that spilled beyond this room. This was a perfect initiation to life in Tripoli.

In Ismail’s mother’s home, my waiting began in earnest. I waited to be told where to sit, then for tea to be served. I waited to go to the bathroom; to talk to Ismail, who was engrossed in conversation with the men in another room; to go for a walk, since my family insisted I needed a chaperone. I waited to be driven downtown, and when we had finally gotten to the old city market and Gaddafi announced without warning that all stores must immediately close so he could make a speech on television, I returned home and waited for his announcement that stores could reopen. (That announcement came days later.)

I belonged to a world where, with one mouse click, I could purchase a plane ticket, track down an old boyfriend, chat with childhood friends now living in California, China, or Ethiopia. I could order a meal to be delivered to my door in minutes; jump in my car and head to the mall, grocery store, or cafe to satisfy any craving; lace up my running shoes and disappear into the woods. Thanks to such dizzying freedom, I had friends all over the world. I was well traveled, well dressed, and physically strong—and very, very bad at waiting. Especially when it came to my addictions.

My first few days in Libya, each time I saw a flash of Gaddafi’s signature green in the distance, I imagined, like a mirage, a green Starbucks goddess beckoning to me from a distant storefront. My heart sank when I realized it was a figment of my imagination, but an equally appealing sign made my heart race when we pulled up to the curb beside it: a small, hand-painted sign that read
INTERNET
. Hussein worked part-time there, in a dim, narrow room lined with dated computers. We ducked inside. Hussein sat at the front desk and I sat down at a terminal beside a teenager watching a YouTube video, her earplugs tucked beneath her head scarf. The sight of Google popping up on my screen was as familiar and comforting as the sight of my own front door. I would have been happy to sit there all day long checking news headlines, scanning the weather, emailing friends. Even checking work email felt like a vacation.

Suddenly two skinny boys in matching green fatigues burst through the front door yelling in Arabic. Their voices ricocheted off the empty walls, and the rifles slung over their shoulders swung like toys against their hips. Startled teenagers in tunics or
hijabs
looked up, then froze like statues and locked their gazes on the screens before them. Hussein curled his shoulders inward and dropped his eyes to the ground. The boys, who appeared to be half his age, squared their skinny chests and barked orders, raising their voices over one another as if in contest to see who could be the loudest. They would have seemed comical if not for the fear that blew through the room like a cold wind.

Hussein nodded and murmured placating sounds, and then they turned abruptly and left, slamming the door behind them and peeling away from the curb in a shiny new German car. When I asked Hussein what their visit had been about, he told me they were from Gaddafi’s internal security force and that they had come to demand that he take down the small storefront’s Internet sign. Gaddafi had banned the English alphabet from Libyan streets. I looked out at the small, sun-faded sign, its paint peeling at the edges. How long had it been hanging there? About three years, Hussein said, the left side of his mouth lifting into an ironic smile. I looked longingly back at the computer monitor before me. I wanted to climb inside the screen, hook myself to the Internet with an IV, numb myself from the unrelenting strangeness of this country. But Hussein rose from his seat and gestured toward the car. It was time to go; my sister-in-law Fauziya was expecting me.

FAUZIYA WAS A
tall, slender woman with sculpted black eyebrows and a porcelain complexion. She commanded respect both inside and outside the home. It was evident in her quiet authority over her children, in the attentive way her husband listened to her, in the way shopkeepers in the market brightened at the sight of her and hurried to meet her requests. Before she left her house she applied red lipstick, slipped on high-heeled Italian boots, and wrapped a scarf expertly around her head so that it hugged her face and fell in silken ripples over her neck. When she returned home, she slipped off her boots and removed her head scarf in the foyer, shaking loose a thick black mane that fell down her back. To my eye, the black curls that framed and softened her face transformed her swiftly from foreign to familiar.

At her half-built home in an arid field there were no sidewalks, no walking paths, no nearby parks where the children could play. One day Ismail left me there while he tried to track down his passport, which had been confiscated from us at customs. (Ten days before, when we had arrived, an airport official had tucked it into the pocket of his cheap polyester workshirt, waving us on with a promise to return it to us sometime in the next few days. We had heard nothing since.) I sat in her drafty house, where children delirious with boredom tore from room to room with high-pitched squeals. When I couldn’t bear the sound any longer I moved to the front steps, where I squatted and tilted my face toward the weak morning sun.

I was increasingly desperate to escape Fauziya’s excruciating patience and grace. She seemed unphased by the cold wind pawing at the black plastic, the shrieks of the children, the watery Nescafé she served. She smiled warmly at me as she washed yet another stack of dishes, and I tried to prevent my restlessness from exploding into full-blown rage: Where was Ismail? When would I finally get a few minutes to myself? Where could I get a real cup of coffee? And what kind of a goddamn vacation was this, anyway? My swollen American ego was a serious liability in this country—a heavy burden like an unwieldy, overstuffed bag I hauled everywhere, often enduring incriminating glances from in-laws who had never before seen a woman weighed down by so much individualism, impatience, and desire. Libya’s rough terrain was far too treacherous for me to be hauling around this much baggage. Fauziya’s ego, like a lightweight backpack containing only the barest essentials, was far more suitable; patience and humility cultivated over a lifetime allowed her to gracefully scale Libya’s formidable obstacles and navigate its tight spaces.