Chapter 14: The Scarf Comes Off
Mrs. Ebrahim reached up and pulled off her scarf.
“I’ve been waiting to do that for months,” she said, exhaling slowly, as if she’d been holding her breath for months.
Clare instinctively looked around the coffee shop as if the sharia police would rush in and grab the woman. The woman’s hair was blonde, as she’d thought.
“To become a Muslim you have to pronounce that you believe in Allah and so on, in Arabic. I never actually did that, not in public or in private. No one can say I did. I accommodated my husband as much as possible, but saying I was a monotheist was about as far as I could go. I used to think Allah just meant god, and we all believe in one god, so it’s the same. But it’s not the same. Since I didn’t make that statement I’m not technically an apostate now. At least, I don’t think so. Ali will … I don’t know what he’ll do, actually.”
“You’re his mother, he loves you. He will have some sympathy, if not understanding.”
“Not necessarily. He’s a hard one.” She was silent for a moment.
“You must think it’s strange, my telling you all this when we don’t know each other. All these years I’ve had no one to talk to. I didn’t want my mother to worry. Some of the women in the mosque are very sweet, but they absolutely would not … be supportive. Some of the younger ones, maybe, but not the married ones, not the ones my age, even if they’re American. And all my old friends from before, Americans, from before my marriage … we couldn’t continue to be friends.” Mrs. Ebrahim put her head in her hands, then straightened her spine again. “My daughter is just 17. I’ve been so worried about her. She’s really an American but Ali might as well be an immigrant like his father. As long as he lived here, Mo was always a foreigner.”
Clare suddenly remembered a little book she’d read as a girl, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Lovely Persian poetry, a thousand years old, but hardly Islamic, as far as she could tell. It seemed impossible to see any connection between Omar the Tentmaker and Ali Ebrahim the thief with dreams of war. Maybe that book was still in her parents’ house.
But helpless pieces in the game He plays
Upon this chequer-board of Nights and Days
He hither and thither moves, and checks ... and slays
Then one by one, back in the Closet lays
Perhaps that verse, which strangely lingered in her memory — certainly not the most famous or popular, no jugs of wine, loaves of bread, or singing maidens — did express a distant Allah and the irrationality of Islamic fate. She knew he wasn’t the Christian god that she remembered from Sunday school.
And what about The Thousand and One Arabian Nights, where Scheherazade talked as if her life depended on it, which it did. Wonderful magical stories, not like Mrs. Ebrahim’s sad and somehow banal tale. But was it banal, a common story of marital disappointment? Clare still had a feeling there was more behind what the woman told her, more than the blinding romance of a college girl, aged to maturity and bitter knowledge. Perhaps her story-telling would destroy her life, not save it.
What Clare knew of the Muslim world of recent years could not furnish romance for a typical moony teenager, though maybe it did for the boy Ali. And she knew from the news that murderous jihadists could inspire a sort of romance in the madwomen who paraded in front of the Boston courthouse protesting the innocence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — a misunderstood boy who was too cute to have killed innocent people at the Marathon, and then a policeman, before running over his own brother.
Love, romance, idealism, beauty, poetry — suddenly she thought of Jackson, the evanescent.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Ebrahim, what were you saying?”
“Both of my children had American friends and did most of the things that American kids do, although maybe we were stricter than most parents here. They went to the mosque but mostly socialized with the kids they went to school with, public schools in Akron. While my daughter wanted more freedom, her father tried to put pressure on her to make her more like an Iranian girl. No dating, but he talked about arranging a marriage for her with some Iranian man. My son started to gravitate toward what he saw as increasing power for himself as a Muslim man.”
“Power? How do you mean?”
“Well, in the family, really. Over me and his sister. Telling even me what was proper and so on. I had adapted a great deal over the years to Mo’s expectations but I was starting to want to revert a bit to — well, American ways. Wanted to be a little more independent, in a mild way. So in the last few years, family life was rather tense.”
“I can imagine.” Clare could almost imagine. Her own family had its tensions, but the normal American kind. Her parents were comfortable together.
Mrs. Ebrahim seemed to suddenly shake herself out of her memories, and looked at Clare.
“Well, anyway, I wanted, I want to change the house. I cannot continue living between worlds. They are too different. I’ve gotten in touch with a few of my old American friends, and I’m spending more time with my parents and other relatives. I’m making a lot of changes. Ali doesn’t like it and he questions my authority, as I suppose most teenagers will. But he thinks he has the force of the entire Muslim world behind him. Maybe he does. So, that’s why I threw out the helmet and why I don’t want it back in my house. He almost feels like it has magic power,” she sighed. “Maybe I should have gotten him a dog. But Mo didn’t like dogs.”
Despite this deluge of confession, Clare still believed there was more that the woman wasn’t telling her. In her experience the average American woman would tell you her whole life within minutes of being introduced, but this felt a little different. This woman had been somewhat de-Americanized, and it was possible that she had more than emotional family secrets to tell.
“Maybe you saw the story in the Akron Beacon Journal about the helmet. I wore it, with candles, at the Fourth of July parade in Greenline, where I live, and at the Memorial Day parade before that. It was sensational,” Clare smiled. “There was a story about it in the local paper, and the Beacon Journal picked up the story, and a friend of mine, who writes for a magazine here in Akron, wrote about it. So a lot of people know about it now and are interested in it, as an antique.”
“Yes, we saw the story, and I must say Ali was enraged, especially at the photographs. He still thinks it’s his.”
“Did your husband give it to him?”
“No. It belonged to me now, just because I inherited as his wife. Nothing specifically went to the children.”
“I expect Ali to come to Greenline again, to try to steal the helmet again,” Clare said, looking expectantly at Mrs. Ebrahim.
“Probably,” she said.
“Now, it’s locked in a bank vault. It won’t be in my home or in my store,” she emphasized. “Your son was seen in the alley behind our bank but got scared away. Do you think he’d be crazy enough to try to rob a bank vault? That would be even harder than robbing a bank for cash.”
“Well, he might. Honestly, he’s not, um, brilliant. He’s all emotion. And he has friends, who think the same as him. From the mosque. Maybe they give him ideas. I think … I think there’s a group of people in the mosque who have jihadist ideas. They think they’re going to bring sharia to Ohio.”
“Really!” Clare was alarmed, and showed it. After all, she’d hardly remembered Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s name, just a few months after the Boston Marathon bombing, but his name had rolled off Mrs. Ebrahim’s tongue. She was paying attention.
“Really. I am watching.”
“But since you’re not going to the mosque anymore …”
“True. I do talk to one person there sometimes, on the phone.”
“I thought you said you didn’t have anyone to talk to.”
“Well, I don’t talk about my problems. This person talks to me.”