The Sweetness of Tears (8 page)

Everything was fine at first. I saw Bibi Faith crinkle her nose only a few times when she watched some of the interviews that Uncle Ron’s team was engaged in filming and collecting for broadcast later. Once, while we were still in Nairobi, on the shoe mission, we found her in the clinic, muttering to herself, and then to me and Chris when she saw we were there. “Complaining! Actually complaining, because the kids are smiling too much!
Get me some kids that look sad,
he says! Did you hear him? That idiot who calls himself a producer?
They shouldn’t look so happy,
he says!”

Chris shifted his feet around and said, “Uncle Ron said they’re going to show some of this stuff on TV to get people to donate money to your mission. Guess people give more if the kids look sad.”

Grandma/Bibi Faith nodded, furiously, raising her voice out of mutter mode and into pure indignation. “Pity! That’s what they want people to feel!”

“Well—if it works, why not? If it gets people to give more?” I asked.

“But it’s not the truth! Do you know I actually heard that man ask one of the children to
make
a sad face? One of the most amazing things about these children—and others like them all over the world—is their capacity to smile and laugh. They live in garbage pits for God’s sake! That’s what they should do a story about. To get people to think about how these children, who have none of the things that people back home think are absolute necessities, how they can smile and laugh and look so damned happy.” She trailed off, falling back into a mutter.

Later, in one of the villages on the Ethiopian side of the border with Kenya—an amazing place, with people right out of
National Geographic,
half-naked, bodies painted in all kinds of colors, and those women with plates in their lips—Bibi Faith really blew up. This time, at Uncle Ron and one of the reporters, who was doing an interview with her. He kept asking Bibi Faith about how many children had been saved. Three times, she answered, telling him how many vaccinations she’d given and from what diseases they’d now be protected.

Frowning and shaking his head, the man said, “No, Mrs. Rogers. I’m asking about how many kids were
Saved
. In the Christian sense.” It wasn’t the first time he’d asked. It’s what he’d been asking every day, keeping a tally that seemed to be the focus of all the filming.

Right there, on camera, Grandma/Bibi Faith started yelling, “I’ve had it up to here with this obsession with numbers—with all you mighty ‘Christian soldiers’ and your body counts! I told you to lay off of that here, in this village. They don’t take kindly to it. We promised the elders here that we wouldn’t proselytize. They’ll kick us out and nobody else from our group will be allowed back and if these kids die from lack of vaccinations, it’ll be all your pushy, pushy, fault!”

“Take it easy, Mom,” said Uncle Ron, stepping in with a forced smile and a hand on her shoulder meant to soothe, but which only made her more mad.

The reporter said, “I think you’ve forgotten the reason for this mission, Mrs. Rogers. It’s not about the shots or the shoes. It’s about Jesus.”

Grandma—Bibi—Faith stomped off in a tizzy. I found her muttering to herself again, way up one of the dirt paths in the village.

“Nothing worse than the smug smell of certainty—they’re all reeking with it.” She waved her hands wildly, in a way that indicated not just the reporter but her own son as well.

I was quiet for a moment. “But— isn’t certainty a good thing? It’s the opposite of doubt,” I said, thinking of the wall at camp that had been so hard to climb. “It’s what faith is all about.”

“Not when it makes you willfully blind to the truth. That’s not faith. That’s belief. A decision. A line in the sand. It’s telling yourself, this is what I believe in. And anything—or anybody—that doesn’t fit is the enemy.”

“If faith isn’t belief, then what is it?”

“To me? Faith is revelation. And in order to receive revelation you have to be open.
Belief
is about closing yourself off—a lie you tell yourself to make the world fit in with how you’ve decided it should be. Real faith is an action—a verb. It’s truth unfolding. You have to let yourself be vulnerable to let that happen. You can’t hide from it. You can’t run away from it. You can’t drown it out, covering your ears while you shout out declarations of
belief
. That’s not faith. That’s cowardice—a fear of truth, which is only scary when you’re fighting to keep yourself from knowing it. Do you know what the first phrase I learn is when I go to a new place where they speak a language I don’t understand?”

I shook my head, still digesting what she’d already said.

“I don’t understand
.
I don’t know,”
Bibi Faith said. “It’s the most liberating bunch of words you can learn in any language. When you admit your own ignorance, to yourself and to others, you open the door to the kind of revelation—real faith—that I was talking about. The strangers I meet in foreign places slow down when I say those words. They start paying attention to my face, to see if I get what they’re saying. It brings out the kindness in folks. I’ve had people—all kinds—men, women, children—literally take my hand and guide me to the place I’m asking directions for. Miles out of their way. Waiters in restaurants have chosen my meal for me—and it’s always the best stuff on the menu. People will help you shop. They’ll take care of you. If you let them know the truth. That you don’t understand. That you’re ignorant. That you’re lost. It’s the best part of going to a new place. Because you’ve admitted something that’s true for all of us—whether we admit it to ourselves and to each other or not—that we’re all vulnerable. It’s like—it’s like going back and getting to be a kid. You’re not afraid of breathing through your mouth, of letting your eyes drink everything in, wide-open—that cynical slit of the eyelids that we all have to practice and perfect in front of the bathroom mirror disappears and all those muscles in your face that you have to flex to look smart get to relax. And it’s wonderful. All the pretense of adulthood melts away. It’s all crystal-clear—that I don’t know a damn thing about anything and that’s okay. Good, in fact. Kind of like what Jesus said in Matthew:
‘Unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’
Diving into a new place, a new language—that’s the closest I’ve ever come to understanding what that verse means,” Bibi Faith said.

After that trip to Africa, Grandma Faith decided not to work with religious organizations anymore, taking up a position with a secular medical aid group instead.

She said it was something she’d been thinking about for a long time. “With these guys, at least, I’ll be able to just do the work that needs to be done,” she said, “without constant interference from ignorant fools who’re too much in love with the sound of their own preachy voices to really understand what Christ is about. They think evangelism is about spreading the Word by talking about it, while I think it’s about
doing
it, as best I can.”

I suppose that talk with Bibi Faith, back in Ethiopia, was the reason I finally asked Mom the questions that took me to Sadiq’s door.

When Sadiq called that last time, I picked up. I was relieved to hear him say he was leaving. I pretended to write down the number he gave me, in Pakistan, so that I could reach him if I ever needed to. As if I ever would. I felt bad, but I think he got it. That I didn’t really want to have anything to do with him. I already had a father. And even though I couldn’t pretend, anymore, not to know what I knew, I didn’t have to let it affect the rest of my life.

Except that it did, of course. I didn’t tell him. That I dropped out of the Swahili class I’d enrolled in during the first week of school. That I signed up for an Arabic class and an Urdu one instead. I only dropped in to audit the classes at first. But I fell in love with the letters—mostly the same alphabet for both languages. The curves and the dots. The unfamiliar sounds.

The Arabic department had an assortment of professors that I got to know over the next few years. The first class I took was taught by a British man, Professor Crawley—a large man with an intimidating, snooty attitude dripping from the lines of his jowls and the sacks under his eyes, topped off with thick, black-out-of-a-bottle hair—who was old-fashioned enough to never address his students by their first name. In my first semester of Arabic, I went to his office one day to ask a question about an assignment. After he’d answered me, he leaned forward at his desk, put his chin on his hands, and asked me, in that lazy, British drawl of his, “Are you a convert?”

“Excuse me?”

“I am asking, Ms. March, if you are a convert? To Islam?”

“Oh. No. I’m Christian.”

“I—see,” he said, as if he’d just tasted something sour. “Then you have an Arab boyfriend?”

“Uh—no.”

“That’s good. They’re handsome devils, some of them. But barbarians, the lot, when it comes to women. May I ask, then, why exactly you are taking Arabic?” he asked, frowning a little.

“I—uh—I love languages.”

“An admirable sentiment,” he said, his voice dripping with the kind of sarcasm that only a British accent could convey. “But why Arabic?”

“No particular reason.”

“Hmm.” His eyes, under the shadow of a pair of straggly eyebrows, narrowed with amusement. “An Ian Fleming fan, Ms. March? Or is Le Carré more to your taste?”

“Excuse me?”

“Russian would have been the choice only a few years ago. How circumspect of you to choose Arabic. See me when you’re ready to discuss career options, my dear. I have some connections that might be helpful.”

For Urdu, there was just one professor. A native of Minnesota, with a much milder, gentler personality than Professor Crawley. Professor Dunnett—who was tall and thin-faced, with soft, white hair—had spent many years in India and some in Pakistan. Some of the other students in his classes, Indian and Pakistani Americans trying to reconnect with their roots, said his accent was amazing. That if you listened to him with your eyes closed, you’d never know he was white. He was the one who introduced me to Devon Avenue—a long street on the other side of the city, cut up and nicknamed in sections that represented a diverse range of Chicago’s ethnic populations. At the end of the first semester, he took me and the other students there. We passed the Mahatma Gandhi and Golda Meir sections of the avenue to eat in a restaurant on the Muhammad Ali Jinnah block, where the stores and restaurants had as many signs in Urdu as in English, a great place to practice reading. The restaurant, which Professor Dunnett said was his favorite, became one of mine, too

Unlike Professor Crawley, Professor Dunnett never asked why I was taking Urdu. And because he didn’t, I told him one day, in my second year in Chicago, over chicken
biryani
at Mashallah Restaurant. “I want to be a missionary.”

“Ah,” he said, smiling, with none of the smugness of Professor Crawley. “My parents were missionaries. You’re taking Arabic, too?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you’ll have to tread carefully. They don’t take kindly to proselytizing in the parts of the world where Arabic and Urdu are spoken. Can’t blame them really—given the history. Missionary work in the Muslim world is necessarily cloak-and-dagger. You’ve certainly chosen two very challenging languages to learn. Though you’re doing quite well, I must say, in Urdu at least. You have the ear, which is important—you can never really master a language until you learn the rhythms of its intonations. And your tongue is flexible enough to master the sounds.”

“Thank you.” I flushed with pleasure, remembering Grandma Faith saying almost the same thing.

“Of course, the real test of proficiency comes when you get to the stage of poetry—in any language one undertakes. Poetry touches on truth beyond words. Almost impossible, really, to ever fully understand poetry in a foreign language. Almost. It’s too difficult to translate, you see, because there’s so much more to it than the definition of words. In poetry, words are meant to bypass our normal ways of understanding—to skip the mind altogether and pierce the heart. One must fully live in a language before truly comprehending its poetry—to know it from the inside, to feel it rather than understand it. In the Eastern world, this is even more true, because poetry there is a living thing. Not something you learn about in a class in college. Here, when we think of poetry, we think of dusty old sonnets and verses written long ago by people no longer living, or by strange, solitary people who write their words in privacy, to be read privately, too, out of a book, silently, to yourself. Poetry in the East has to be recited and sung out loud in public to be considered really alive. The written form of it is only a record, to help people remember how the words go. Here, you don’t see people writing music to go with Shakespeare’s sonnets or Wordsworth or Yeats. A pity. In India and Pakistan, the
ghazal
s of Ghalib are still sung out loud. In Iran, Hafez comes alive in the mouths of children, through songs that everyone knows.”

While I was at college, I went home as little as possible. I took a trip to Northern India one summer, volunteering at a Christian mission—an orphanage—to practice my Urdu. I went to the Middle East, too. Professor Crawley, who seemed to take a liking to me though his sarcasm never softened, arranged for me to stay with some friends of his in Lebanon, wealthy Christians who showed me around Beirut. From there, I went to Syria and Egypt, my eyes wide-open, breathing through my mouth the whole time, just like Grandma Faith had talked about. When I did go home, when I had to, I tried my best to slip back to a time before Mendel, living with Mom and Dad and Chris as if nothing had changed. If Mom wondered why I was studying Arabic and Urdu—she must have!—she never said anything about it.

Chris was attending Shepherd’s College of San Diego, having decided, after that trip to Africa, that there’s no place like home, no food like Mom’s, and no other place he could have gone where his bed would be made for him, his laundry folded. To call him a mama’s boy would have thrilled Mom and not bothered Chris at all, since nothing really ever did. School had never been a priority for him anyway. He was serious only about one thing—his music and the Christian rock band he’d formed when he was still in high school. Christian March, it was called, which was his name, and which his friends, the other guys in the band, had decided was too good not to use. Chris was the lead singer, and they were working on getting enough material together to do an album.