“It’s okay, I’ll just read it later. We’re getting close now.”
I followed my sister’s car into Rose Hills Memorial, then down perfectly manicured lanes toward the Cedar Crest Lawn section. A row of oak trees sprouting new leaves bordered the parking lot. Beyond it, the lawn sloped into a valley, all of it a deep shade of green, in spite of the drought that had plagued the state for months. “This place is so big,” my mother whispered, looking at the burial grounds that seemed to stretch endlessly around us. Then she put her face in her hands and began to weep. I reached across the seat divider and touched her knee. The strange thing was that I’d always cried easily—watching Little House on the Prairie or listening to Umm Kulthum. Now I had a ball in my throat and my chest hurt, but my eyes were dry. What was happening to me? Why couldn’t I grieve like the rest of my family?
I stayed with my mother until she was ready to step out of the car. Tareq and Salma were already waiting, he in a black suit and she in a blue shirt and an ankle-length skirt. The twins were in the prim clothes they usually wore for school recitals. But from head to toe, my mother was in widow’s white. The color of absence. The color of mourning. We all started down the path toward the gravesite and the sound of our footsteps cut through the vast silence of that part of the cemetery. On the grounds, a gardener stopped pulling weeds to stare at us.
Salma turned to me. “Did you remember to bring a scarf?”
“Yes, of course.” I rummaged through my purse, but couldn’t find it. “I think I left it in the car. I’ll go back.”
She pulled a blue scarf from her own purse.
“You brought an extra one?” I asked.
“Just in case.”
A small group of people was waiting at the gravesite—my aunt and uncle from Culver City, two cousins, some friends of Salma and Tareq’s, and three or four people I didn’t know. A gaping hole in the ground waited, too. Then the coffin arrived, and the imam faced east, cupped his ears with his hands, and called the faithful to prayer. God is great, he chanted. God is great. At these words, my uncle and Tareq gathered with the other men in the front, and I had to stay in the back with my mother, my sister, and all the other women.
In the name of God, most Compassionate, most Merciful, the imam began. His voice was a beautiful baritone, but as he recited the Fatiha it rose to nearly an F, a greenish blue. The ritual words, once as familiar to me as a lullaby, did not come easily—the last time I had gone to prayers was for Eid services when I was sixteen years old. The outing had ended with another argument between my parents, in the car on the way back.
The sight of a cleric in robes praying over him would not have moved my father. But he would have liked Rose Hills, I decided. There were willow trees everywhere, the air was brisk and clear, and beneath my feet the ground felt soft. Bluebirds chased one another across the lawn. It was a good place to rest for a while. The voice of the imam brought me back to the present moment: he chanted a prayer for the Prophet, a prayer for the dead, and a prayer for the living.
Then the coffin was lowered into the grave, and my father was gone.
Driss
This is what happened. Eid fell in mid-December that year, and Maryam wanted the whole family to go to the mosque in Riverside for morning services. Take the girls if you want, I said, but why would I go? I’m an atheist. She doesn’t like it when I use that word, especially when her brother visits us from Los Angeles, but it’s the truth. Sometimes, I hear her apologizing to him in the driveway, telling him that I don’t mean it, that I just say these things to get a rise out of him. But of course I mean it. I don’t pretend to be someone I’m not. And yet I agreed to go that day, because Maryam insisted, and Salma was home from college for winter break, and I wanted to keep everyone happy.
Holiday services started at seven in the morning, but by six thirty you could hardly find parking. I had to circle the lot several times before I found a spot, and that put me in a bad mood. Maryam led the way on the concrete path, our daughters followed, and I lagged behind, trying to finish my cigarette before we went inside. At the entrance, a handsome boy, perhaps ten or eleven years old, held an orange bucket labeled EID DONATIONS. A tithe isn’t a donation, I wanted to say, one is a tax and the other is a gift, but no one else seemed to mind it. People lined up to put their money in. Maryam had prepared the check at home and sealed it in an envelope, but as she let it drop into the bucket, the boy called out to Nora. “Sister,” he said. “Cover your legs. You’re indecent.”
Indecent! For a moment, I thought I’d misheard him. Did he even know what the word meant? I was glad when Nora turned on him. “What did you just say?” she asked, her lips breaking into a puzzled smile.
“Cover your legs, sister.”
“Who do you think you are, kid?”
“Your brother in faith,” he said gravely. Then he nodded to thank a lady who’d placed a crisp $50 bill in the orange bucket. People walked past us, dressed in Eid clothes. No two outfits looked the same: men in suits and thobes and dashikis, women in flowing robes and shalwar kameezes and bright-colored tunics. My daughter was in a black skirt that fell below the knees, but it had not been enough for this miniature cleric. It was very crowded, and I could hear impatient car horns in the parking lot. An old man circled around us so he could get inside.
“We’re going to be late,” Maryam said as she pulled our daughters toward the women’s section.
I had finished my cigarette by then, but stayed behind, watching the boy. He had curly hair, a small nose, skin the color of sand. Except for his green eyes, he could have passed for my son. His face glowed with a confidence that unsettled me. “What’s your name?” I asked him.
“Qasim.”
“And how old are you?”
“Eleven.”
Just as I thought. So young, and yet so sure. I had been like that, once. I had recited the Qur’an at the msid, hardened my knees on the straw mats of our neighborhood mosque, kept the fast not just in Ramadan, but for a few days in Shawaal and Sha’baan as well. These rituals consoled me; they told me that the world was what it was because of sin, whether its manifestations were seductive or repellent, and all I needed to do was resist it. There was a mathematical elegance to faith like this: believe in God, follow His rules, and you will be rewarded; disbelieve, disobey, and you will be punished. But one day Mr. Fathi, my middle-school religion teacher, told the class about the seven stages of hell. I was familiar enough with the rivers of fire and fountains of pus and blood that awaited sinners, but that day the lesson was about how these people would find no respite even after their bodies burned—their skin would grow back only to burn anew. That made me think of Mr. Nguyen, who had a burn scar along his left arm, the result of a confrontation with French settlers during the war in his country. I loved Mr. Nguyen, as did the rest of the class, because he made algebra seem like child’s play. That was the closest thing to a miracle I had ever witnessed. So I asked Mr. Fathi whether his friend Mr. Nguyen would burn in hell, too, with all the other unbelievers. Instead of an answer, I was given a whack on the head and told not to interrupt the lesson again. I was only a couple of years older than this boy, Qasim. My doubts were born that day. Over the years they grew, until one day they were all I had.
“Do you think,” I asked the boy, “that maybe your faith has other things to worry about than my daughter’s legs?”