My Accidental Jihad

by Krista Bremer

In my family, talking about money, like talking about sex, was considered vulgar. We knew that cash, like body fluids, was exchanged behind closed doors, and we even intuited that these transactions were the unspoken foundation of our lives, but we never discussed them openly—and we certainly never made a spectacle of ourselves in public.

  But this time was far worse: he was corrupting what should have been one of the most significant memories of my life—the moment a diamond ring was slipped onto my finger. It was bad enough that I had to witness the purchase; to stand by as he haggled, tossing out numbers and pointing out the ring’s flaws, was unbearable. The jewelry store salesman repeated his price. Ismail rolled his eyes and flicked his wrist in the air as if swatting away a fly.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me. For this ring? This tiny diamond? Come on, we both know how inflated diamond prices are!”

  He pulled the ring from my finger and placed it onto the glass countertop with a decisive plink, reached for my arm, and turned to leave. Just before we made it through the doorway, the jeweler called after us. We turned around, and he gestured impatiently for us to meet him in the back corner of the store for a private conference. Speaking in a low murmur and glancing around to make sure no other customers heard his offer, he reduced the price by thirty percent. Speechless, I stared at him: in all my years of wandering through malls, never once had I imagined that the numbers on price tags were negotiable.

  Ismail nodded immediately in agreement—this was exactly what he had been expecting—and shook the man’s hand. I left the store wearing a diamond ring that now appeared exactly thirty percent smaller on my finger, as if it, too, had shrunk in embarrassment. One day, I imagined, this child I was carrying might run her fingers over the sharp edges of this jewel. “Tell me the story of how my dad gave it to you,” she would say, and curl into the crook of my arm, wide-eyed with anticipation of a romantic tale. What would I tell her about this day? We left the jewelry store, stopped by the drugstore, then wove through the parking lot back to our car. With diapers under one arm and my hand in his, Ismail beamed like a man returning to his cave with fresh meat from the hunt, like a warrior who had just protected his beloved from a band of marauders, like a man who felt that he was truly blessed.

  6 Promises

  Ismail was not interested in a bachelor party or a ring for himself or a honeymoon. He had only request: for this marriage to be blessed in Islam.

  I peppered him with questions. Would a ceremony have to be done in a mosque? Whom should we invite? What would we wear? He shook his head. It did not have to be done in a mosque—in fact, he would prefer for it to be done in the countryside, in an overgrown field beneath the endless blue sky. His only request was for Surah al-fatiha, the opening prayer of the Qur’an, to be recited before at least two witnesses. I couldn’t understand why this was so important—and in fact, it seemed almost superstitious to me—but it was an easy request to fulfill. All I needed to do was stand with him and two friends under the open sky and let Arabic tickle my ears like a gentle breeze. When he offered to translate the prayer, I politely declined, only half joking that as long as I didn’t understand it I could not be held responsible for any promises made that day.

  We invited the only Muslim couple we knew in town, Jamal and Maryam, along with our non-Muslim friend Jim. My mountain biking partner and one of my first friends in North Carolina, Jim was an investment manager, a triathlete, and a spiritual seeker who tackled the enterprise of enlightenment like it was a start-up company—launching a new practice from the ground up in a burst of creativity and ambition, then cutting ties and starting over when he was struck with a new and better idea for salvation. His dual passions were to make money and to know God. He had piercing blue eyes, a prematurely receding hairline, and an ironic smile, and his strenuous workout regimen made him glow with the luminosity of the enlightened or the extremely fit.

  His ramshackle home at the end of a dirt road in the country was covered in Middle Eastern rugs and floor pillows. Mountain bikes hung from the ceiling. When I visited, he invited me to select from a cabinet bursting with teas from all over the world. He poured boiling water from a sea green kettle whose spout was the mouth of a dragon, whose nostrils flared twin plumes of steam. Seated on floor pillows and cradling our steaming cups, we had animated conversations about spiritual teachers who offered the shortest path to God, or concepts for a new stock option he swore would make him rich. On our bikes in the woods, he raced up hills reciting Rumi poems that drifted back to me in fragments, then flew down steep winding trails and skidded abruptly to a halt, dropping his bike and falling to his stomach in the dirt to examine wild ginger plants almost totally concealed beneath ivy.

  Jim studied with a a Sufi teacher in town known as Shaykh who had a handlebar mustache, a gray cottonball of a ponytail at the base of his neck, and a belly that spilled from the ornately embroidered vests he wore with jeans. He and his wife lived in an apartment complex beside the train tracks, among undocumented workers and Burmese refugees, but could usually be found lounging in front of the local health food store, drinking black coffee and smoking unfiltered cigarettes. Each week Shaykh gave teachings at a local hookah bar covered with floor pillows and faded Persian rugs that smelled of patchouli and musty wool. The owner was a towering Moroccan who walked all over town in leather sandals with an ornately embroidered satchel bouncing against his back. Fluent in Arabic, he sat at Shaykh’s side, translating his teachings to a hodgepodge crowd that drifted in from the darkened street.

  On nights when Shaykh taught, the cafe filled with spiritual seekers with ADD like me and Jim—middle-class Americans shopping for a spiritual path that would offer instant enlightenment with no up-front investment. A doe-eyed hippie whose bangles jingled like spare change swished through the door in a floral skirt that swept the floor. Dark-skinned men clustered in the doorway in a nicotine cloud, chatting in Arabic and sucking the last long drag from their cigarettes. A few Muslims would sit straight-backed at the edge of the gathering, looking well groomed, disoriented, and slightly uncomfortable, as if they had showed up at the wrong party. Jim showed up a few minutes after the lecture began because he’d lost track of time while surfing the Internet or working out or engrossed in a discussion with friends over a cold beer in the bar next door. He squeezed in at the front and turned his radiant, tanned face to his teacher, surreptitiously checking his triathlete watch as Shaykh droned on in Arabic.

  Back then I thought all I had to do to know God was lounge on pillows with friends, drinking strong, sweet tea, or spin like a dervish in a long flowing skirt. The god I liked best did not require me to pray or perform acts of service, go to the church or the mosque, or change any aspect of myself. It was as if he had given this strange little gathering a special pass, granted us VIP access, exempted us from Islam’s tedious requirements of five daily prayers, fasting, study, or self-examination. A few years later, amid rumors of sexual improprieties among Shaykh’s close circle, Shaykh and his translator left abruptly for Morocco and never returned. The once-bustling hookah bar locked its doors, and his followers, who had once greeted one another with radiant smiles and long, meaningful hugs, now split into factions—those who believed the rumors and those who did not—and avoided eye contact when they passed one another on the street, like onetime lovers now ashamed of their late-night hungers and misguided vulnerabilities.

  On the day Jamal was to read the Fatiha to bless our union, Ismail and I stood in an overgrown field beneath a towering walnut tree. It was spring in North Carolina, the time when trees exploded with pink blossoms and everything green looked as if it had been plugged into an electric socket. Maryam loaned me a gauzy white tunic, pants, and a flowing embroidered scarf. Jamal wore a white tunic, too—buttoned high on his neck, like a chef’s jacket—and a black beret which made him look like a French painter. We walked out to the middle of a field and stood beside a towering oak, the sound of traffic humming in the distance. Jim stood beside Jamal, weari
ng a suit and an ironic smile, his eyes hidden behind wraparound sport sunglasses whose lenses reflected my image back to me, blurry and small.

  We stood in a tight circle, the overgrown grass tickling our ankles. Maryam gave me a bouquet of multicolored roses wrapped in brown paper, which I cradled to my chest like a newborn. My hands rested on Ismail’s palms—whose warmth always surprised me, as if they were heated by some mysterious source. I had fallen in love with those hands first, before I loved the rest of him, because his touch made me feel like my veins ran with syrup, sweet and slow. Jamal began to recite from the Qur’an, and because I could not understand the words, I listened instead to his baritone voice rising and falling with rhythm and rhyme that fluttered over our heads and drifted away on the breeze. I looked into Ismail’s eyes and knew that I could never claim ignorance about this vow; in the bottomless black of his pupils, I read the translation of each syllable that washed over me. No spoken word or written signature was required; my unwavering gaze was my promise.

  II

  Foreigners

  7 Motherhood

  On New Year’s Day, a doctor reached into my abdomen and scooped my furry black-haired daughter out in one palm like she was a kitten. Her tiny limbs dangled from the doctor’s fingers as she blinked in the fluorescent light of the operating room, looking as if she’d been rudely awoken from a deep and beautiful dream. I had been expecting the drama of motherhood to begin with a newborn squall, that first sound defining our new roles—her need, my response—but she did not enter this world with a cry. Instead, she blinked and rolled her big brown eyes around the room. Her silence was unsettling; the curtains had parted on motherhood’s first act, but the star seemed to have forgotten her first line. I was momentarily frozen, suspended between before and after. She looked as shocked as I was about our comfortable worlds being yanked out from under us.

  I approached mothering with the zeal of a new convert, hanging unbleached cloth diapers out to dry in the sun, pressing steamed organic vegetables into ice cube trays, turning up the volume on Beethoven to broaden her tiny mind. I studied the latest parenting scripture and sat in a circle on the floor with other women who had recently been born again into motherhood, having pious discussions while our children played with wooden toys beside us. We were passionate and uncompromising about our beliefs. Co-sleeping, extended nursing, and toddler hour at the public library were holy; baby formula, epidurals, and Disney were evil. We glowed with the certainty of the chosen ones and spoke in hushed and sympathetic tones about the unsaved—those who had not been able to conceive, whose sad stories affirmed our own blessings.

  When I was growing up our yellow Labrador, Sophie, had a litter of puppies. The night she delivered her pups, I was awakened from a deep sleep by the soft click of her paws across the linoleum floor. She laid her wet nose on the edge of my bed, nuzzled purposefully beneath my covers, and snorted. She sniffed a pile of clothes on the floor in my closet and then left as abruptly as she had come. The next morning, when I woke up, I found her at the foot of my parents’ bed with seven tiny seal-like puppies in a squirming pile beside her engorged nipples. She looked exhausted but serene, and licked her new puppies with a steady, focused intent.

  She started out as such a dedicated mother, rarely leaving the basement room in which her puppies were contained. When she briefly left them to eat or to relieve herself, she trotted up and down the stairs like she was late for an appointment, and in response to sounds only she could hear, her head jerked back over her shoulder toward her litter. At the slightest yelp, she’d spin around on all fours and leap like a jackrabbit back in the direction of her pups. But as they grew, her once-lustrous yellow coat turned dull and patchy and her furry brow wrinkled as if she were perpetually worried. No matter how many hours she lay in abject surrender, with her puppies clamoring and biting and sucking, they were never satisfied. It wasn’t too long before she growled when a puppy bit down too hard on a raw nipple or snapped sharply at puppies who playfully bit her ears. She stood unsteadily and walked toward the stairs with several puppies hanging from her belly, still latched to her teats. One by one they lost their latch and fell with a muffled thud onto the carpet. Sophie didn’t even break her stride.

  In the early weeks after Aliya’s birth, these memories of Sophie came to me after midnight, when I sat for hours in a rocking chair in our living room, cradling my tiny daughter in the dim light of a winter moon. I was flooded with empathy for the family dog of my childhood: I fully understood her surrender, dedication, and exhaustion. The old hardwood floor creaked beneath the weight of my bare feet, which pressed in a rhythm that slowed gradually until I became too exhausted for even that tiny motion of my toes. Aliya was quiet and alert. I lifted her face to mine, my hands encircling a torso so small that my fingers were interwoven along her back. Her body was a soft, useless weight collapsed into a pile on my chest, but her eyes were luminous. Hour after hour we sat together in the dark, hearing nothing but the occasional exhale of our heater or the distant rumble of a car engine. Her commanding presence filled the empty room: an honored but unfamiliar guest had taken up residence in our home.

  “You must be so proud,” murmured a friend who stood beside me admiring her pink sleeping face in her bassinet. But I took no more pride in her than I would in a rainbow appearing after a thunderstorm.

  Long after the pulsing umbilical cord between us had been cut, we remained closely tethered by a continuous stream of milk and love that flowed from my body to hers. I had an insatiable appetite for her smell, her body heat, the taste and texture of her skin. I curled her into the crook of my arm, squeezed her into my chest, rested my nose on the top of her scalp and inhaled as if breathing in the scent of a flower. “I love you all the way to the moon,” I read to her from a book. And then thought: To the bottom of the ocean, to the farthest reaches of infinity, around the corner into a black hole, and out the other side.

  The first time I left her behind and flew to another city for a work commitment, she was less than two years old. Our impending separation loomed before me, as terrifying as an amputation. I grew as frantic as our dog once did when the door between her and her puppies accidentally swung shut—when she clawed and whined and sniffed desperately at the sliver of light beneath it. But at the airport, as soon as Aliya and Ismail disappeared into the crowd as I made my way through security, I walked through the terminal with a spring in my step I didn’t even remember I had. I felt a sweet relief and a surge of energy, as if a large stone had been lifted from my chest. The invisible tether between us slackened, and I leaned into my new freedom.

  An hour later, during a layover in Washington DC, I sat in a waiting area across from a middle-aged woman whose graying hair was swept into a tangled ponytail and whose eyes were puffy with exhaustion. Beside her sat a tiny African girl whose skinny legs barely reached the edge of the plastic bucket seat. She wore a pink jumper that was at least two sizes too big for her, and she sat ramrod straight, staring vacantly into the distance with a resigned dignity, like an exhausted, solitary traveler who had a long ways to go to reach home. When the woman offered a sippy cup from her backpack, the girl accepted it without even making eye contact, as if a flight attendant had just handed her some soda and peanuts.

  The woman told me she was returning from Ethiopia, where four days prior she had adopted this tiny, stoic girl from an orphanage. After both her parents had passed away, this girl’s grandmother had been forced to abandon her at the orphanage because she was unable to care for her. She was two and a half years old. Before they had begun the long journey to their new home, the woman said, she’d spent three days in an Ethiopian hotel room listening to this child shriek and howl inconsolably.

  “It was great,” the woman said brightly, already displaying that uncanny ability mothers have to extract the positive from even the most trying circumstances. “She rejected me the entire time. From the moment we left the orphanage, she cried—which, of course, was an excellent sig
n, because it shows she’s bonded with someone in her life, so she has the ability to bond to a parent figure. I mean, I would really have been worried if she’d accepted me from the get-go.” Her eyes fell, and she contemplated the carpet.

  This pair had been traveling for more than thirty hours already, with many more to go before they would arrive on the West Coast, where her husband and three children waited to encircle this girl as family.

  “Isn’t she beautiful?” the woman said, reaching over and patting the girl’s tiny belly through layers of pink cotton. The little girl stiffened.

  “But these curls—I have no idea how to take care of them,” the woman continued, running her fingers over the child’s scalp. The little girl grimaced. When it was time to board the plane, and the woman lifted the child from her seat, she began to cry inconsolably, a haunting wail as if she were grieving the loss of every single face, every single food, every single landscape she had ever loved.

  I cringed along with the child when the mother reached out for her, but I was also stunned by this middle-aged woman’s courage and commitment, which drove her all the way across the world to collect this tiny, mysterious girl with her unknown wounds, to carry her back across the globe with the crazy conviction that they would become kin. It was an outrageous risk, an improbable act of faith—yet perhaps ultimately not so different from the journey any of us embark on when we decide to become biological parents, when we resolve to stitch our mismatched lives together to make a family.

  8 Desire

  The first sharp pang of desire hit me in the parking lot of my daughter’s preschool. It was a cold winter day in North Carolina, and as I buckled my seat belt another mother maneuvered her gleaming new Volvo station wagon into the space beside my 1992 Honda Civic. She smiled and gestured for me to roll down my window so we could talk.