The Wrong End of the Telescope

by Rabih Alameddine

  I didn’t have to ask any questions, barely needed to utter a word. I wasn’t sure he cared about who his audience was or remembered who was listening to him. He rambled on in a dolorous tone, his head still bent, as if he were addressing his knees. He hadn’t been able to talk to his daughters yet. Asma had understood how badly her mother was doing all on her own, but the younger two knew only that their mother was ill. They were waiting for her to get better. Everything got better, everything always turned out all right. Wasn’t that what Sumaiya and he told them?

  How would he take care of his three girls? No family around him in a foreign place where he knew nothing. Why him, why his family? He had tried to be the best man he could. Sumaiya—Sumaiya was the best woman in the world, the most decent. Everyone loved her. Why was God testing him harshly? Was there some lesson behind all the disasters that had befallen them?

  His unhappiness was that of a man who felt he was about to lose more than what he already had. He went on, kept talking, worried and bemoaning his fate, until Mazen changed the subject, asked him what he did for work. He was a farmhand, working a modest field belonging to one of his uncles. No education, he said. Neither he nor his wife had gone past middle school. He had to work at an early age since his own father and brothers couldn’t make enough to feed everyone.

  “But my life could have been different,” he said. “When I was seventeen, I worked for a well-educated man, a professor at the university. He visited our village because he was studying the geography of the area. He needed someone to take him around, so he hired me. I was a gofer at first. Do this, get me this, take care of that. I did everything. I loved it. After a couple of weeks, I noticed that he was trying to draw maps, but his fingers were old and swollen. I had a great facility for drawing, always had, and I suggested I do it. I became a cartographer, and he taught me all the time. I was so good that the professor promised he would enroll me in a school for mapmaking. I would have a great career. But then I was arrested, and everything fell apart. Even though I was released and all, the professor no longer wanted anything to do with me. It wasn’t that he liked the regime, he said, but he couldn’t take the risk of crossing the powers that be. No one could. I was unable to find any work for a couple of years after that. The only one who would hire me was my uncle because I was family. And now another disaster. I’ve heard that Syrian doctors can only find work as taxi drivers in Germany. What’s a farmhand like me going to do?” And he devolved back into lamenting his horrid luck.

  As soon as the door to the X-ray room swung open, Sammy was on his feet, a forced smile on his face. The Swedish physician, his hands swallowed by the sleeves of his ill-fitting lab coat, explained that we couldn’t see anything we didn’t know before. We couldn’t admit her to the hospital, but we should move her and her family to another refugee camp, Kara Tepe, where she would receive better medical care. She could stay in a special tent where refugees who were ill would be away from the hustle of the camp.

  He used the word “hospice,” but I didn’t translate that. Not yet.

  When You Don’t Know What to Say, Have a Cookie

  We had to split up. Sumaiya was to ride in the ambulance to the Kara Tepe camp while Sammy went to Moria to pick up the kids and their belongings. I wanted to go with Sumaiya since no one else in the group spoke her language, but she maintained that Emma and I should help her husband and kids. She was only going to be moved to a new bed, as she put it. The Swedish doctors would take her. She did not need to understand anything they said. As soon as she arrived at the bed, she was going to sleep. In the wheelchair, she looked exhausted, barely able to speak. Her eyes insisted on drooping.

  But then Mazen said he’d go in the ambulance. He could translate if need be. “I’ll make sure to be really sweet to you,” he said to Sumaiya, which delighted her.

  In Moria, while Sammy went to collect his kids, Emma and I waited outside the barracks. Amid the lugubrious decay of the camp, she looked shiny and ultracompetent. With raking fingers, she pulled in strands of hair that had gone astray. She wanted to know if I had any ideas as to how to tell Sammy that he had to test his daughters. Sumaiya had tested positive for hepatitis B. We would leave it to him to explain to his daughters that their mother was not leaving the island. Emma’s organization could speed the Swedish registration process. They would have been able to move the family to Sweden within a day or two had Sumaiya not been sick.

  “We are moving camps,” Asma said, coming out of the barracks, followed by the dank, stuffy air of the building, the smells of bodies and cold sweat. “We’re going to a better one.”

  “Oh, yes you are,” Emma said after I translated. “It’s better for families, and we can take better care of your mother over there.”

  Asma looked up at us. Her gloved fingers plucked at one of the extra-large buttons of her overcoat as if they were playing some ancient instrument whose music only she could hear. Her face, encapsulated by her head scarf, was gorgeous and questioning. She hesitated briefly before bluntly asking: “Is my mother going to die?”

  Emma wanted to know what she’d said. I translated, and Emma gave me a look. “Tell her we don’t know when something like—”

  “Yes, she is,” I said. I crouched down so Asma and I would be at eye level. I wasn’t that much taller. “Your mother is sick and declining. I don’t know how long she will continue to live, but she can’t stay much longer.”

  Asma, aspiring doctor, seemed to shrink. Her lips quivered, her eyes welled, but she didn’t cry, not until Emma bent and hugged her fiercely. I watched them weep into each other’s shoulders. Asma was the one who pulled back first. Through tears she said she didn’t want her sisters to know, didn’t want them to see her in this state.

  “Cookies,” I said.

  Hand in hand, Asma and I walked the downward-sloping twenty steps or so to the tea and cookie dispensary. It was afternoon; there was a long line. We were heading toward the end when I noticed Rasheed and his Palestine Red Crescent Society vest at the front of the line, almost at the window. He grinned sheepishly, rubbed his stomach. “I need my afternoon tea and cookie,” he said, shouting so we could hear him across the distance. “I shouldn’t have sweets, but it’s not my fault. I blame British colonialism!”

  I pointed to Asma and mouthed “cookie.” He nodded. We walked beyond the line a little, stood on a ridge of chilly dirt watching the refugee tents below us. The Greek riot police still loitered at the bottom of the hill. An American in his fifties, big man, rugby-build physique, talked to a group of refugees on the cement walkway quite a ways from Asma and me, but I could hear his slurry, adenoidal accent clearly. He was indicating where the refugees were to sleep that night. Another family waited to talk to him, a thin, lanky mother with worn men’s slippers on her bare feet, her four children wrapped around her like cotton candy on a stick.

  Francine, Francine, help me talk to this young girl.

  I pulled Asma close to me, my hand on her shoulder, and she gently squeezed it. At the end of the middle finger, her glove had a hole with a wreath of jagged stitches around it. The tip of her nail poked through the wreath. The cold afternoon light had a sheen, like air behind a windowpane. We observed the scene below us, the pup tents, the impromptu soccer game with no goals, the triple-strand concertina razor wire, the police vans, the far horizon where the sea and sky were joined by a thin blue thread that was never straight, as if sewn together by an incompetent seamstress. Quite a bit for the eye to fix on if it wished to avoid the discomfort of intimacy.

  Below, to our left, was a static line, much longer than the tea and cookie one, where families, mostly women, waited for another gift box from an NGO. The women had a demeanor of calm anticipation peculiar to people accustomed to waiting. This package would be magically imbued with their dreams of respite, with their hopes of comfort, of a sudden change of fate. This was a box that would return everything to normal, a miracle of lig
ht and purity that would heal their family’s pain. Even though the package of the day before contained nothing but a box of cereal and a doll, today’s was sure to break the cycle. And the line began to inch forward little by little.

  “I have dreamed of our house every night since we left,” Asma said. “It’s a small house with a small sitting room and two small bedrooms, but in my dreams it’s huge and warm and pretty and the courtyard is even bigger with a giant oak tree in the middle of it. I know we left our home, but my dreams don’t seem to know that.”

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m fine. She told me this was going to happen. She explained it to me. She said I have to be strong, and I am.”

  “Yes, yes, you are.” I said. “Everyone can see that.”

  Good, I thought to myself. That’s handled.

  At one of the tents, next to a small campfire breathing a little smoke, two women sat one in front of the other on a small tarp as if in yoga positions. The younger of them, wearing a green head scarf, knelt with both feet under her behind as she combed the hair of the other, who seemed to be in a half-lotus position, an assiduous combing to rid the wet hair of even the tiniest tangle. On the other side of the women, looking utterly out of place, was a small pot of wilting geraniums wrapped in pink crepe. Francine had a black dress with a pattern of tulips the exact color of that pink.

  No, I had not handled that.

  “You are strong,” I told Asma, “but it’s difficult when we lose someone we love.” I made sure to look at her, to see her. “My father died a while ago. I hadn’t seen him for a long time, but I loved him. I was sad for many months. A piece of my heart was taken away. I had to be strong because I had people who needed me. I had to go to work in the morning. I had to talk to all kinds of people. I would be strong and operate on a patient. But then I had to find time to cry by myself. I couldn’t help myself. I would cry and cry until I had to be strong again.”

  “How long did you cry?”

  “Oh, a long time,” I said. “Two months, maybe more.”

  “And then what happened? Did you stop?”

  “I don’t know what happened,” I said. “I think I started crying less and then a little less. I was still sad, but it didn’t hurt as much.” I crouched before her once again, face-to-face. “I’ll tell you a secret. You can’t tell anyone. As I’m talking about my father now, I want to cry. I’m still sad, but the sadness isn’t as strong anymore. I still think about him. Just today I was talking to my brother about him.”

  Rasheed showed up with chocolate chip cookies for each of us, and Asma had hers in her mouth in an instant.

  One Should Listen to a Soprano During a Refugee Crisis

  All that time, while Mazen and I were with Sumaiya at the hospital, while I helped the family move to Kara Tepe, you locked yourself in your room and refused to leave. You checked yourself in to the fanciest hotel in Mytilene, affordable during the off-season, and waited to leave for San Francisco. You were out of it; you didn’t have the wherewithal to simply take an earlier flight. Whatever penalties you would have incurred for changing your reservation would have been cheaper than those three nights in Mytilene. You were a zombie.

  You didn’t leave the room for twenty-four hours. Thankfully, the hotel had room service. You burrowed under almost-lush sheets, listening to one soprano after another sing the great tales of woe.

  Kindertotenlieder? Oh, yes.

  Der Rosenkavalier? For sure.

  Das Lied von der Erde? Hit me.

  You’d flown all the way to Lesbos to help refugees, and you ended up hiding in a hotel room. Only you.

  The next morning, you were able to sneak out of your room briefly. You had breakfast in the hotel restaurant and rushed back to your room.

  Female Trouble

  The next morning during a break in the rains, I was back in Moria waiting for Rasheed, standing on the same ridge as the day before, looking at the same scene. That morning’s viewing included an unbridled horse promenading in an orchard up the hill behind the camp’s wall and razor wires. Luminescent in the distance, the animal didn’t seem to be eating or doing anything in particular, just taking in the air on a stroll in its backyard.

  I’d promised Rasheed three hours of my time before I checked on Sumaiya and her family in Kara Tepe. I was his to use however he saw fit, which meant that Mazen belonged to him this morning as well. One of his Jerusalem group’s primary focuses for the last couple of months in Lesbos had been helping with cases of physical and sexual abuse. Being Palestinian, speaking the same language, Rasheed and his friends were better than Westerners at interviewing refugees. A Farsi-speaking group performed similar interviews with Afghan and Iranian refugees. It seemed that Rasheed spoke some Farsi but nowhere near nuanced enough for native speakers.

  “Do you mind?” I asked Mazen. “It might not be much fun for you.”

  During the rains in Moria, everywhere there was the smell of the sea—of electricity, of ozone. After the rain, the smell of way too many humans returned. Mazen took in some air and stood more erect for a moment.

  “And you think it’s going to be fun for you?” he said. “You’re here to help, and I’m here to help you. I’ll do whatever. And make you feel guilty so you’ll have to buy me a big present for my birthday.”

  I heard the thick, wet thud of Rasheed on the muddy dirt behind me, but still he startled me when he appeared next to us, full of morning cheer. Every time I saw him I wanted to pinch his cheeks as if he were a little boy. He was our age, closer to sixty than to fifty.

  “Did you remember your stethoscope?” he asked. The white-and-orange Palestinian vest seemed to have shrunk on him since the day before. “I have an extra if you forgot.” I took mine out of the side pocket of my cargo pants and showed it to him. “No, no,” he said. “What’s the point of having it in your pocket? You won’t be using it much. It has to drape around your neck in the official stethoscope position, announcing you’re a physician. People trust doctors. They can reveal the most intimate of secrets. They won’t lie to a doctor.”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised,” I said.

  “No, seriously,” he said. “I’m a nurse, and when I wear the stethoscope, the women seem to trust me more. It makes you more godlike. You’ll be a great help.”

  For a moment, Rasheed and Mazen seemed to be appraising one another, and then both smiled, in approval, I hoped. I found it intriguing that I considered them similar, not only in personality but also in looks. Both on the plump side, round faces that seemed to have no cheekbones, yet both were nimble and agile in their movements. Their facial features highly Semitic, the brown eyes, the scimitar nose. The hair was different. Rasheed’s remained relatively dark, cut short. Mazen’s thick, curly hair was unruly, and strands floated above his head in every direction. All his life he looked as if he needed a haircut, no matter when he’d had the last one. His hair was all gray now, much more so than mine.

  We spent the morning interviewing, or to be more precise, listening. We talked to women exclusively. At times, their husbands tried to butt in, not wanting their wives or daughters to talk to us without their being present, at which point Rasheed would gesture toward me and say the doctor wanted to talk about private female issues. To make himself less threatening to the men, he would become a touch more feminine. As you did whenever you returned to the United States from abroad, he instinctively knew how much to camp it up for the husband, as if saying, “Look at me, I’m no threat to your wife at all.”

  It was a gray universe, a gray room, a converted shipping container called an Isobox, which wasn’t small but still felt cramped and airless. A tiny window provided scant daylight. I didn’t understand how we could discover if a woman had been abused unless the physical evidence was obvious. Rasheed wouldn’t ask directly, and I wasn’t sure the Syrian women would admit it if they had been. They did t
alk, though, talked and talked. Some of them regaled us with tales of bombing campaigns and sniper fire, of marauding gangs and arbitrary arrests. They talked about how they left Syria, the routes they took, the journeys lasting days and weeks. They walked, drove cars, rode buses whose ticket prices tripled or even quadrupled if the drivers figured out how desperate they were. There were explosions over here, bombings over there, yet the buses moved slower than fig jam. Livestock blocked traffic, oblivious goats strolling this way and that, drivers cursing and yelling at shepherds, the smell of dust and milk, the smell of cordite, sheep lying dead and bloated on wounded fields that had turned into battlefields. The women ran on and on, moved from depression to optimism and back down again.

  Mostly, though, they talked about their ailments. The physician was in the building. Every other woman had cold and flu-like symptoms, as did the children. Headaches, diarrhea, catarrh, trench foot, and many had menstruation issues caused by stress. Ailments that were minor became gigantic because of the paucity of services. By the time we’d been there for half an hour, we had a sizable if haphazard queue of eager women and their children waiting to talk to us. Mazen ended up doing what he did best. He handled the line of people, talked to them, told stories, became their entertaining and charming host as they waited. I wrote down diagnoses on pieces of paper so other physicians could read them. We handed out NSAIDs right and left. One woman had fungus forming tiny sculptures on her feet. Another had a rash on her neck that she’d been trying to heal by covering it with a convoluted homemade poultice containing sage, marjoram, and three other herbs I’d not heard of. Luckily, I had a tube of hydrocortisone cream.