LITMIR.BIZ

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despite the annoyance I like the sound of this voice, warm, soothing like an announcer on a classical music station, and yet with a certain sense of command. Okay, I’m not always the good girl that I seem to be. I have my own way of being provocative, so I respond that we call it baksheesh and we think it’s a duty for Muslims to help those who can’t help themselves. He takes that as an opening and introduces himself as Benjamin Redstone. What kind of a name is that for a Jew?

      Alison, I say, trying out my new name for the first time. I’ve been thinking about this change long before arriving here. Say Aisha and people never get it. Not Americans and somehow Europeans are even worse. Asia? Asthma? Ashes? Ashi? They always look slightly puzzled, even more so if I explain, as I used to when I first arrived in Kansas, that it’s a historic name, a holy name, the name of the youngest and most favored wife of the Prophet, may peace be upon him. His fourteenth wife. His fourteenth wife? That was the usual reaction. He had fourteen wives? And then begin the smirks suggesting You guys are weirder than we thought, followed by the heavy handed jokes, which are even worse.

      Alison? He says the word as if he doesn’t believe its my real name, as if he knows such a name does not go with this skin and these eyes and this hair. He asks if this is my first time in Madrid.

      There are some people whose intonations and expressions, whose posture and body movement, whose very aura, which you can’t see but feel even if you can never put that feeling into images or words, people whose very presence gives you sense of comfort, a feeling of the familiar, as if you know them already, have met them before, shared secrets with them in another time and place or perhaps another life if you can believe all that stuff the Hindus believe, and even if you can’t believe it, and I certainly don’t, it doesn’t banish the truth that there are people who immediately put you at ease, make you trust them enough to say things you haven’t said to others unless you have known them for decades and maybe not even then. That sudden feeling, those certain people are among the many mysteries which only Khodajan can understand. How else could you explain that Benjamin is one of them?

      Yes, I answer. It is my first time in Spain, first time in Europe other than a few hours at Charles De Gaulle airport though I don’t say that was years and years ago on my way to America, and for the first time but not the last, there will never be a last, will there? he gets clever and historical with me, and asks, But is Spain really Europe? When I don’t have an answer he explains that a French king once said that Europe ends at the Pyrenees and that Spain is different from everywhere else on the continent because of the legacy of Islam, seven hundred years as a Muslim society when Europeans were the foreigners here.

      My response surprises me: I know all about that. I’m a Muslim. I will always be a Muslim.

      What a thing to say! Am I afraid he is going to try to convert me, put on one of those little hats and start babbling things in Hebrew that will steal away my soul? Do Jews try to convert people? If they do they must get extra credit for a Muslim. I do know that Jews are clever and smart and always trying to trick Muslims. That’s what my grandmother said. Everyone says it. With Jews you have to be careful or they’ll steal the socks from inside the shoes on your feet.

      I don’t remember his response, but I startle myself a second time by saying that I’m an Afghan. An Afghan? Since when did I begin to volunteer where I’m from to perfect strangers. When people ask I usually dodge the question or refuse to answer or make them guess, Where do you think I’m from? The responses are all over the map—Turkey, India, Iran, Lebanon, sometimes a Latin country, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil. No one ever says Afghanistan. Even before the war and the American invasion and Al Quaeda and all that, when they heard the name of my homeland their reactions were strange. Some would go sort of blank and not know what to say, as if I had just revealed that I was from Mars. Others would go on and on about women in veils as if veils were the central part of my existence, and they always seemed to resent it when I explained that I never wore one. When I first got to Kansas, the response was always Oh, you’re from Africa, that’s cool. During the Soviet period it became a badge of honor, even in wintry Lawrence, to know about the landscape and people of my homeland. At parties I was always drowned in shouts about your glorious Freedom Fighters. Great people, your people, giving hell to the Russians, way to go. Whenever I tried to explain that the translation for mujahaddin was not Freedom Fighter but Holy Warrior, they would back off, saying No reason a Freedom Fighter can’t be a Holy Warrior too. Nothing wrong with fighting for your faith.

      America seems to love freedom fighters, even those who haven’t the slightest idea what freedom might be.

      Benjamin’s reaction to the word, Afghanistan, is not at all what I expect though I can’t be certain what I did expect. He says that being Afghan sounds a lot like being Jewish. What an idea! Nothing could be farther from the truth, or so I think, even while he goes on about both groups never being taken for granted, but I am listening less to the meaning of his words and more to the sound of his voice. I have the impulse to ask why he isn’t wearing one of those little skull caps, but I restrain myself because who knows? it may be impolite, you never know with people’s beliefs, and to tell the truth, I am enjoying this back and forth, it’s a me I like, a freer than usual me, talking with a man who is, let’s face it, picking me up, if I wish to be honest about what is happening, and if mother told me one thing a million times it was that I should not talk to strange men for you never know what will happen but you do know that there is only one thing that they really want.

      We have broken some sort of ice. We both know that as we sit in a warm silence, watching the sun disappear behind the buildings on the far side of the Plaza, the shadows stretching out to engulf a column of elderly Asian women carrying parasols, marching behind two young female guides in bright red suits, one of them holding a small triangular flag on a slender pole. They make for the bronze statue of the man on the rearing horse, stop in front of it, sort themselves it into three neat lines, as if they have been practicing this maneuver all their lives, shorter women in front, taller ones in the middle, tallest ones in back. The guides shoot photos, and then each woman in turn steps out of the group, points a camera at her comrades and a flash stabs through the dusk. After every one has taken a turn, they reform into a column and march towards a distant archway and out of the plaza.

      Benjamin begins a lecture about the king on the horse, a Felipe with some number after his name who had this plaza built in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, and while I begin to wonder if he is going to ask me for a drink and I am going to accept, he goes on about the events they used to have here, horse races and bullfights and public executions and even something about Muslims and Jews being hung or burned, and I keep thinking why is he putting Muslims and Jews together when they are so far apart. Of course I wonder how come he knows so much and all kinds of odd thoughts go through my mind, like what if he is something strange like an FBI agent or a expert in guided missiles or some kind of sneak gas bombs or even maybe a rabbi. His nose sure looks like the nose of a rabbi, but I don’t know if there is there more than one kind of rabbi or are they just like mullahs, sort of the same except some are a lot smarter and better educated and a lot cleaner than others? That’s one of the things that’s wonderful about Islam, you have to be clean and there’s always the fountain in the courtyard of the mosque, a beautiful fountain with that lovely splash of water and you have to wash before praying to Khodajan, no dirty hands or feet or dirty anything when you pray. No he can’t be a rabbi, a rabbi wouldn’t go on talking to a Muslim woman, would he?

      It seems like forever before he finally gets around to asking me for a drink. I say no, I don’t have time, because I don’t want to seem easy, but when he asks again I say okay, but only for a minute. This is Europe after all. That’s what you do in Europe, sit in cafes and talk about the kind of stuff Europeans talk about, men and women together, discussing art and literature and politics and sex, no doubt, they are big on talking about sex at least to judge from their movies, French films and even more Spanish films, for what does Almadovar ever have his characters talk about or do for that matter but sex. It’s not like back home, funny I still think of it as home after twenty years, like all over that part of the world where the men sit in coffee houses all day long, smoking from water pipes or cigarettes, Marlboros if they can get them, and if a woman walks in all eyes turn your way and all conversation stops, even the movement on the checker board halts, as if the presence of

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