The scene repeated itself in the kitchen, where her stepmother was making coffee. “Sweetheart, why?” she said, sweeping her hands up and down at Lina’s frame. Her stepmother’s lips were inflated and cartoonish, and she wore skinny jeans, white sneakers, and a tight T-shirt. A teenager’s outfit, thought Lina. Photos of the couple on holiday lined the wall, one of them featuring her stepmother in a bikini. The three of them sat together at the table in the kitchen. Her father wore a pained expression and kept looking out the window. “Listen, take this black stuff off,” he said. “Go back to Germany and start wearing modern clothes. Find a boyfriend. I’m okay with it, even if the others aren’t.” He was referring, she assumed, to his sister, her mother-in-law, who forbade divorce.
Lina stared at her hands on the table; she should have known better than to come. The gulf that separated belief and disbelief was impossible to cross. How easily her father spoke of her finding a boyfriend, becoming a loose woman. They didn’t understand her decision to dress like this. They didn’t understand how faith soothed her. She wanted to be in God’s good graces, to dress like the wives of the Prophet, peace be upon him. To them it was foolish, but Lina truly believed in Judgment Day. She truly believed in the Hellfire that awaited those who displeased God, and she was willing, indeed eager, to do anything in this life that would earn His mercy.
As her father kept crossing and uncrossing his legs, Lina could sense how desperate he was for her to leave his house, to leave Beirut and go back to being someone else’s problem. She collected her bags and, the next evening, took a taxi to the airport.
The sun was setting, bathing the city in luminous peach light. Lina had wished to stay here a while, to walk along the promenade near the sea, among the old houses with their arched, jewel-toned windows standing in charged conversation with the aggressive luxury high-rises. She knew she was prone to depression, and had to fight all the time to keep herself from its grasping fingers. She had hoped her mood would be lightened by the light and warmth of spring and autumn in Beirut, seasons that scarcely existed in Germany. She had hoped to walk the streets of the neighborhood doing her grocery shopping, stopping for a chat at the produce stand or the local corner shop. In Beirut, people who did not know each other still interacted with great warmth. Lina’s clothes would not create an immediate disincentive to conversation or a barrier to being seen as someone employable, likable, human. She could sit in cafés frequented by pious men and women, where people drank spiced coffee and strawberry juice and enjoyed the frantic glimmering of the sun on the Mediterranean.
But there was to be no such chapter in her life. God had not willed it for her, and He knew best.
* * *
—
UPON ARRIVAL AT THE FRANKFURT airport, Lina found a policewoman and explained to her that she had nowhere to go and that her ex-husband, the last time she saw him, had tried to kill her. This was not something she liked to dwell on; the memory made her pulse quicken. But it was true, and pertinent information as she sought the state’s aid in finding a place to live.
The airport policewomen were kindly. They took Lina to a women’s shelter with unobtrusive staff, who showed her the communal bathroom and her own private bedroom. She was so tired she could only murmur “Thank you,” but tried to express gratitude with her eyes. For the first two days, she stayed in bed, anticipating problems. Surely it could not be so simple to be allowed to stay in her own private room. Surely they would ask her to leave, or ask her to stop wearing her Islamic clothes. But nothing of the sort happened. She was surprised and grateful to find the staff at the women’s center respectful and welcoming. They even helped her find work. Eventually a small studio flat opened up at the shelter. It had a living room and a kitchenette, where Lina could make tea and light meals for herself.
After a few months, she heard from an Arab woman staying in the same shelter about a job opportunity—one that would, crucially, allow Lina to wear her hijab and niqab. A Moroccan man in Frankfurt ran a company that offered caregiving services to the ill and elderly. Lina began working for the Moroccan in December, during an especially rainy winter when the clouds would not relent. Her job was to go to the homes of elderly women, do some light cleaning, give them baths and dispense medications. The women were lonely, and grateful for the company. They did not stiffen at her appearance, or at least, not after the first couple of visits.
Lina felt compassion for them, because in their depression and isolation, she saw a reflection of her own condition. It was fine to pause her work and pray the noon or afternoon prayers, and she was grateful to God for this opportunity to earn money and practice her religion. But eventually the work dwindled. The Moroccan complained he wasn’t getting enough new clients due to the fact of his being Moroccan. Lina didn’t know about that; she just needed work.
She found a second job as a school janitor, working on the weekends. The problem here was that she had to work alongside another cleaner, a man, and she worried about wearing her niqab around him. Germans could be touchy about the niqab. But she came up with an ingenious solution: a doctor’s mask. “The cleaning products are really toxic,” she explained, and the man nodded, uninterested. It was striking how much it mattered to others exactly what you were covering your face with. On the best days, the man didn’t show up and she handled the cleaning by herself, free in her isolation.
* * *
—
THE DAYS PILED UP. LINA, still living in the shelter, stopped cooking real meals for herself and subsisted on boiled chicken and potatoes: sick-person food. She stopped looking up at the night sky, stopped noticing whether the moon was round or crescent. The smell of the elderly women’s rooms—a sour, curdled smell—seeped into her mind, along with images of their fungal nails and cloudy glaucoma eyes and the sound of their confused mumblings. She never spoke to her children. Sometimes she even had difficulty remembering the sound of their voices. When someone died, at least that grief had stages and might eventually abate; this kind of grief was ever present, an ache, like a ringing in the ears. She was afraid that if she called her children, her ex-husband would find out that she was in Germany. She knew that he would search for her and try to harm her.
She feared that even here in Germany, had she tried to divorce him in court, she might not be protected. Just a couple of years earlier, in 2007, a German judge had refused to grant a German Moroccan woman a quick divorce from an abusive husband, on grounds that the couple were Muslims and that, as such, the woman did not qualify for the hardship criteria required for a fast split. The judge interpreted a verse of the Quran—one that has been contentiously debated by Muslims for centuries—to argue that both God and custom permitted a Muslim man to beat his wife. The case caused great public uproar, especially among German Muslims, who felt the judge had inexplicably sided with a rebarbative, fringe reading of their faith. How any German judge felt qualified to read and interpret the Quran was unclear to Lina. There was no example of the Prophet ever beating his wives; indeed the Prophet’s forbearance, his playfulness, his storied understanding, offered a model of conduct that wives over the ages had nudged their husbands to follow.
The thought came to her one night, previously unconsidered, that her ex-husband might have remarried. What if his new wife treated her children harshly, as Lina had been treated by her own stepmother? The idea panicked her. Her pulse went staccato fast and she felt breathless and jumpy, as though there were butterflies beating their wings under her skin. She took one sleeping pill, which usually helped when sleep eluded her. She loved nothing so much as sleeping and spent most of her days off in bed, not even bothering to change out of her pajamas.
It was hard for her to see a way out. Later that night, she took several more sleeping pills. She decided that nothing would be sweeter than not having to wake up at all.
* * *
—
WHEN LINA AWOKE MANY HOU
RS later with a metallic taste in her mouth, shoulders stiff, in a pool of her own vomit, she recognized that God had given her another chance. For the Muslim who takes her own life, Hellfire is a ceaseless reexperiencing of the means of her death; Lina had been spared this.
Each morning after that, she stared into the bathroom mirror and reminded herself that God did not impose on any of His creations more than they could bear. She hardened her heart against the yearning she felt for her children. Her life depended on not seeing their father. She prayed every night to have a chance to see them later in life and explain her story, such that they could eventually understand and forgive her.
She was solitary by nature, but started going to the mosque because she was self-aware enough to know that being so utterly alone was making her sick. Having left her children, she felt that it was her duty to try to be at least a little happy, and attending Friday prayers each week lifted her mood. There was the intimacy of her sleeve being tugged as the women lined up in tight rows for prayer; the feeling that, for even just that quarter of an hour, there was one specific spot designated for her; within the collective of women kneeling down in unison, as one body, submitting to God.
Afterward, in the courtyard of the mosque, as she greeted brothers and sisters she had gotten to know, she was often asked if she was open to getting married. These questions made her blush deeply and she invented a fiancé in order to fend them off. This imaginary fiancé began to take definite shape in her mind. It was then that Lina acknowledged to herself how badly she wished to remarry, to have more children, to visit her father in Beirut in triumph—to show him she had made a success of things the second time around, and that with her faith, she was in every way superior to him.
EMMA
2007, Frankfurt, Germany
We was young and we was dumb, but we had heart.
—TUPAC SHAKUR
Emma’s mother was a native-born German, a seamstress who worked odd jobs to support her two young daughters. Her personal life was chaotic and brought pain to her daughters, but as an adult and a convert to Islam, Emma was reluctant to linger over the details, because Islam counsels respect for one’s parents, regardless of how abusive or negligent they might have been. Before she met Emma’s father, who was from Spain, her mother had been married to a Moroccan man. She did not manage to divorce him promptly, so Emma bore the absent Moroccan ex-husband’s last name.
In later years, Emma thought perhaps this had foretold her destiny, her very surname evoking the ghostly presence of a Muslim man who should have been taking care of her but was not. Emma and her sister’s actual father abandoned the family soon after her sister’s birth and returned to his native Spain. Her mother viewed her experiences at the hands of these various men as a reflection of general male brokenness, rather than her habit of choosing broken men. Emma grew up hearing variations on “All men are dogs,” lines that she associated with her mother’s haplessness but that filtered into her consciousness as possible wisdom nonetheless.
Theirs was not a household filled with the finer elements of German child-rearing that other residents of Frankfurt enjoyed: wooden building blocks, vintage editions of Grimm’s fairy tales, and cartoons featuring intellectual farm animals. It was a meager childhood. Sometimes, depressed and exhausted, Emma’s mother even forgot basic things, like the colorful, candy-filled cones—like tall, inverted dunce caps—that children were expected to bring on the first day of school.
When her mother moved Emma and her sister to the city in the early 1990s, Turkish immigrants lived among the white native Germans in their working-class district in Frankfurt.
The Turkish families in the neighborhood, nearly all Muslims, lived under a uniform level of strain. Their cramped, shabby flats didn’t get enough sunlight, permanently smelling of damp from drying clothes; their paychecks didn’t stretch easily to cover all the things a family needed. Everyone shopped at discount supermarkets; no one went on holiday.
But when Emma visited the homes of her Turkish school friends, it was like stepping into an alternative world. To her, all Muslim families were alike in their happiness. The apartments were small, but the interiors were orderly and clean, with pride extending to protect even modest furniture with plastic doilies or sofa covers, and always on the table a glass bowl of hard sweets or raisins. These families were almost living on top of one another, constantly in and out of each other’s houses; no one felt obliged to call first before coming over, and no day passed without a visitor. Whatever was cooking for dinner could accommodate an unexpected guest. Very little food was wasted, because there was always an auntie on hand to do something with it. If parents worked night shifts in taxis or restaurants, there were relatives or friends to put children to bed and ready them for the next school day. For the Turkish immigrant kids of Frankfurt, being raised by a whole klatch blunted the effects of poverty, keeping it from bleeding into neglect.
By the time she was a teenager, Emma, along with most of her Muslim friends, was tracked into Hauptschule, a low-level school for children destined to work vocationally. The German state believed it could determine which children had the aptitude to enter the academic education system and which were best served (or alternatively, which best served the state) by entering a vocational stream that would end in apprenticeship and a life of, ideally, skilled labor. The Hauptschule track held no promise of securing for Emma the one material possession she had come to covet in life—a BMW 6 series, with its sleek lines and glint of power—but spending time in the homes of her Turkish friends showed her that family, with lots of children, was a wealth of its own.
She preferred spending time at her friends’ small and busy houses. In fact, though she was native to Germany, she felt much more like her Turkish friends in general; she enjoyed their warm manners, the music they liked, the open, natural acknowledgment of men’s and women’s different but complementary duties. She liked the way each family kept folded-up mattresses and bedding in the corner in case of impromptu sleepovers. Only one thing set her apart from them: she was not Muslim.
Many of her friends weren’t especially devout, but Islam was an intimate part of their identities, values, and social rituals, and it was hard to disentangle culture from religion. Tending to family, behaving with warmth and pleasantness, even the act of smiling itself: these were formally articulated Muslim values. Emma learned this as she started reading about Islam in her late teens. “No one smiled more than the messenger of God,” Imam Ali said about the Prophet Muhammad.
Emma wanted to be a part of it. She wanted a share of the belonging and the warmth. When she was nineteen, she converted to Islam. At first, she did not wear the hijab. Some of her friends wore it and some didn’t, reflecting the range of attitudes among second-generation Muslim girls, from the cheerfully practical—concerned with career ladders and fitting in, confident that their iman, their faith, was in their hearts—to those who wanted those things too, but wanted to please Allah most of all.
One weekend afternoon in early autumn in the late 2000s, Emma and her girlfriends were walking through one of the central squares in Frankfurt, where Turkish Kurds who supported the Kurdish separatist PKK movement back home in Turkey liked to gather. They hoisted placards with the mustachioed face of their leader and bleated their horns, in solidarity with fellow Kurds. German matrons in blazers walked past with bags of groceries, eyeing the commotion. On the far side of the square, Emma and her friends stopped at an Islamic dawah (preaching) stall, manned by people her friends knew. The imam smiled at Emma and handed her a “Have you considered Islam?” leaflet. She felt a flash of irritation. “I’m already Muslim, thanks be to God.”
“Alhamdulillah,” he repeated, smiling. “But why no hijab, sister?”
She explained that her family wasn’t Muslim and she was trying to ease them into her new identity. “Do you really think that’s a good excuse?” the imam asked. Among
the stacks of leaflets on the table, he handed her a pink one, about the virtues of hijab. It featured a serene pink ocean with a partially obscured pearl in a half shell, radiating light.
“I’d like to. I will one day, I just don’t know when,” Emma replied.
“If you pray to Allah for help, He will make it easier for you. There are so many reasons to start now. When you don’t wear a hijab, you discourage other Muslim women from wearing it. Also, wearing hijab makes you a message. Imagine you are Muslim walking around this square and you see a woman in hijab and you feel happy!…You think to yourself, ‘Look, there are Muslims here!’ You become a happy signal.”
A happy signal—Emma had never not wanted to be a happy signal. Even though the imam’s words were pressing and intent, his tone was soft and his pale blue eyes smiled. Emma liked talking to him. She liked the feeling he gave her: that her actions mattered; that if she listened he would not stop looking at her; that their exchange was light but consequential; that it was perhaps the most important conversation going on in the whole of the leaf-strewn Platz. The imam had abundant charisma. He was clearly the right kind of guy to be running a dawah stall.
Guest House for Young Widows Page 4
