6. VOWS

A COUPLE OF MONTHS after he met Heidi, Ali moved into a studio apartment on Rutger Street. And soon Heidi joined him.

She knew this seemed rash to those who knew her—and she was still in turmoil about her divorce—but she was happy with Ali.

Ali felt the same way. “Heidi is nice, she is kind,” he said quietly.

But the old brick building—across from Sadia’s family’s house—turned out to be poorly maintained. The hallways were dirty. And then one afternoon, in the elevator, they saw bedbugs.

“We were like crazy people,” Heidi said.

They ran to get insecticide—a huge 10-gallon drum. They wrapped the bed in a plastic tarp. They caulked every chink in the walls.

“We only saw one or two bedbugs in the apartment,” Heidi said.

But at night, Ali—worried Heidi would be bitten—refused to sleep. He sat in a rocking chair, watching over her. “I’d wake up in the middle of the night,” Heidi said, laughing, “and he’d just be staring at me.”

Ali had gotten a job as an interpreter in Utica’s hospitals and schools, which he liked. He slept during the day, between appointments.

After a couple of months, Heidi found a clean one-bedroom apartment on South Street, just a few blocks away.

Ali bought a comfortable recliner, his first piece of American furniture. After work, he would relax next to Heidi, smoking his hookah filled with applewood tobacco.

They exchanged vows in private. “We did it a Muslim way,” Ali said, “between me, Heidi, and God.”

“She respects my religion as if it were her own,” he added. It did not bother him that Heidi is Christian. He has never brought up the idea of her converting—and she has no interest in it.

Heidi—after a miserable marriage—was not interested in a legal ceremony. “I don’t need it,” she said about a marriage license. “My marriage ended—so what did that paper mean?”

Heidi quickly adapted to living with an observant Muslim. “I kind of roll with things,” she said. Ali fasts during Ramadan; she is attuned to his needs that month but does not fast. There is no pork in their house; all their meat is halal.

“Ali is really strict about no alcohol,” Heidi said. “Sometimes, I work around that,” she added, smiling. “I’ll say, ‘My doctor said my good cholesterol is low—a glass of wine would help.’ ”

In some ways, their backgrounds are similar: “Both sides of my family are very warm and welcoming,” Heidi said. Her mother’s family is from Italy, her father’s is from Germany.

“Iraqis are simple,” Ali said. “They knock on your door—they help. They forgive even when you hurt them.”

But they do not always forgive, he added: “Revenge is very bad. It is only for when a big thing happens. A killing in the family. Or when someone attacks a group of people. Then you will defend.”

Heidi liked having her stereotypes about Muslims broken: She found Ali’s friends to be unusually tolerant.

Her best friend, Karen, who is 4’ 4”—“a little person,” Heidi calls her—has dwarfism.

“My whole life I’ve watched people react to Karen,” Heidi said. “There’s always that one half-second people take to process what they’re seeing. Most people don’t even know they’re doing it.”

“I’ve yet to see that reaction from anyone in the Muslim community. If someone’s different—disfigured—there’s no being taken aback, no looking away.”

When Ali first met Karen, he went up to her, got down on his knees because he is so tall, hugged her, and then kissed her on both cheeks.

Karen—a pretty woman with dark-brown cropped hair—was so flattered she kissed the top of his hand.

“Please never do that!” Ali said. “In my country that means someone’s far above you. It would be like meeting a god!”

Heidi had assumed Muslim women were modest and submissive. So, she was amazed to hear about Ali’s household: that his mother held an important government job. That Retaj, his older sister, who speaks Russian, has written several books about the arts. “Retaj isn’t shy around men,” Heidi said. “She has collaborated with men on projects.”

Ali’s sisters revere him. They told Heidi, “We will never find a man like our brother.”

When she repeated this to Ali, he laughed: “Who said that? I’m a bad guy. I do horrible things!”

Heidi knows Ali will return home if he is needed. There are no assurances their relationship will last. “We’re just taking it one day at a time,” she said. “We want to enjoy each other.”

Recently, Heidi got a glimpse of Iraqi culture that surprised her.

At a wedding reception in Utica, Heidi followed the women into one room; Ali went off with the men. “At that point, the women were dressed very modestly,” she said. But head wraps and shawls quickly disappeared. Long, shiny hair emerged. Everyone wore tight, brightly colored dresses and high heels.

Elaborately painted nails flashed as women danced with each other. “It was a bunch of Kardashians out there,” she said, laughing.

When everyone came back together, the wives had put their head wraps back on, and covered their dresses with black shawls. Some had removed their false eyelashes. “Everyone still looked fabulous,” Heidi said, “but toned down.”

Ali intensely enjoys the male camaraderie at the Islamic Center, though he does not go often. It is a small, informal Utica mosque, where most members are Shiites from Iraq and Iran. Women rarely attend.

Heidi likes that he has found this connection. “But I just don’t get the separation between sexes.”

The center is where Ali celebrated one of the most important moments of his life—becoming an American citizen. “When something good happens, you want to say, ‘Thank you, I’ve been blessed,’ ” he said.

After his naturalization ceremony in 2013, he bought a sheep from a local Bosnian farmer, who slaughtered it. Ali went from house to house, dropping off bags of cut-up meat to friends.

Then he asked a longtime friend, who had been a chef for CNN in Baghdad, to cook an enormous meal and bring it to the mosque.

Huge pots of rice and meat arrived—so heavy that two men had to carry each one.

“Fifty men—maybe more—came,” Ali recalled, happily. “I invited everybody!”

“I wasn’t there,” Heidi said drily.