Time slows down when I’m painting. I read that article you gave me back when I still said I wanted to go to MIT and major in physics—trying to be a good first-generation child—on the state of flow, how a person is supposed to know what they love to do by how time blurs when they’re doing it. The problem, I guess, is that time has always been blurry for me. Maybe that’s why I made such a lousy physics student. I learned a long time ago that things that happened years ago never really go away. They live in the body, secreted away inside liver and fingernail and bone, alive on street corners and in wallpaper glue and the yellowed water in Brooklyn basements.
I stroke my brush against the brick, and its memories rise to meet me: years of car exhaust, and beneath the soot, decades of chicken fat and frying onions, the clang of a cracked cast-iron pan being flung out a window, a girl’s happy shriek, the purple-black curl of a scab being tugged off a knee.
You were the one who first brought me down here as a child and told me there was a whole community here years ago, a Syrian enclave that doesn’t exist anymore, scattered across the country from Brooklyn to LA when Little Syria was demolished to build the entrance ramps for the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel. I used to think there was some secret here, something that drew you to these buildings, some collective memory I could include myself in. That’s why I chose Washington Street to paint on, even though you and Teta came to the States twenty years after it had been leveled. I’m addicted to the memories that live on in the mind of New York, the flood that comes when I place my hand on a wall or a window or a stoop, the knowledge that death and time are both illusions because we and every stone are made of the same ever-shifting particles. If we live, it’s only because some distant galaxy lent us its dust for a while. Ghosts are more honest than the rest of us: they can’t help but be what they are. You taught me that revelation has its price in a world that prefers the comfort of closed eyes. Maybe that’s why I’m still convinced that the painter you loved left an echo of herself behind here, waiting to be heard.
A soundless shape glides by over my head. Pricks of cold air rise on my skin. You were the one who first showed me, when we found that disembodied snowy owl wing hiking upstate one winter, how owls’ feathers make no sound when they cut the air.
I pack my paints and follow the bird back around the building and out to the street. A whisper of feathers, and the owl lands on the lintel above the community house door, its arrival ruffling scraps of posted paper. There’s no mistaking: it’s the scarred owl that visits Teta’s windowsill each day—there are the shorn feathers on the left wing, the white brow. The owl gives a slow blink to the streetlight and peers down at the door, the dull green of a neon bar sign reflected on its talons. There are new notices posted on the front door today. I finger the corner of one stapled page, the illegible signature of some inspector at the bottom, and for a second, the presence of the owl gives me a strange sort of courage. Up the stairs to the fifth floor—what harm could it do to have a look? I touch the door.
It’s unlocked.
It swings inward when I press on it, revealing nothing but dark. There is a chaos of wings at my cheek, and I duck to cover my face as the owl dives inside.
I fumble in my pocket for my phone and use it as a light. Scraps of old paper and crumbs of ceiling tiles litter the floor inside the foyer, and my feet scuff stained tile. This community house has been empty for years, but at one time it was a rich resource with a health center, space for musical productions and plays, classrooms, a food pantry. Now, it’s hard to imagine the life these rooms once held. I sweep the light of my phone toward the back and discover a narrow staircase leading up into the belly of the second floor.
The owl has disappeared into the darkness. I tiptoe toward the stairs. The floorboards groan and sag under my feet, but they hold. The stairwell stinks of ancient wallpaper paste and lead paint. The rooms on the second, third, and fourth floors hold overturned desks and rusted bedframes, wallpaper slashed from corner to corner, old filing cabinets with their drawers pulled out by looters or squatters. On the fifth floor, the empty socket of a light bulb greets me in what was once a living room, the plaster now flaked down to bare brick.
The old bedroom walls are covered with peeling wallpaper that probably used to be orange, now a rusted, water-stained goldenrod. A lace doily that must have once covered the upended desk lies wrinkled on the floor, decorated by the red carapace of a dead cockroach. The matching curtains have all but disintegrated, as though they’d turn to dust if I touched them. The desk’s single drawer has been jammed shut by years of Manhattan humidity, and a candle burned down to a stump has slid off the surface of the desk onto the floor, leaving a ring of wax on the wood. The wallpaper bulges and sags on one wall of the room, near the carcass of a twin bedframe. I peer closer—the peeling corner of the wallpaper is trembling. A puff of air escapes a slot in the wall formed by two missing bricks that must have been papered over at one time, revealing a rectangular cavity, a hidden shelf.
I brush my fingers along the inside of the opening, and they come away filmy with cobwebs. I squeeze my eyes shut and reach in. My fingers brush something firm and soft, and when I open my eyes, I’ve slid a leather-bound notebook out of the hidden compartment.
The spine creaks as I open it to a sketch of a little yellow bird, a woman’s shaky handwriting on the facing page. It must be some artist’s old nature journal, each illustration accompanied by a diary entry. A black-and-white photo slips out of a young woman, her black hair in braids. Behind the photo is a watercolor painting of a bird with a frill of white feathers at his chin—a white-throated sparrow.
I slip the notebook into my backpack and shut the papered door on my way out. On my subway ride back to Teta’s, I study the photograph inside the front cover of the notebook. In the light of the subway car, the subject looks a bit like Teta when she was a girl. The young painter has her black hair over each shoulder, her strong chin raised, her eyes dark and hooded, her eyebrows thick with a soft unibrow. She and Teta could be sisters.
I turn back to that first sketch. It’s signed in Arabic, bold and rising to the left: Laila. The ink is blotched on the final curve of the last letter, the alif maqsurah, leaving a smudged black mark. Later on, the signatures switch to English, and the handwriting gets smoother and smaller. When I was young, I, too, used to hoard my Arabic name like a treasure, trying to convince myself that this name, too, existed.
On the page that faces the watercolor sparrow, Laila Z’s notebook begins: The day I began to bleed was the day I met the woman who built the flying machine—
TWO / LAILA
DEAREST B,
The day I began to bleed was the day I met the woman who built the flying machine. My mother would say this isn’t a seemly way to begin a journal—she would prefer a list of mundane tasks, I’m sure, or news of visiting friends, or gratitude for the fact that our family has survived the hunger that has overtaken the city since the stock market crash. But Khalto Tala told me I should use these pages to write down the truest things I know of myself, and anyway, since no one else will ever read them—and I can’t imagine why anyone would—then I suppose I’m free to say what I really feel, which means I can write to any audience I please, real or imaginary. That’s why I’m addressing this diary to you, B. You’re the only one I can imagine reading my secret thoughts over my shoulder. No matter that it’s too late now to tell you all this; never mind the thousands of miles of ocean between us. Here, in this notebook, I can call you back into my mind and write the words I’d never dare to say.
Until I met you, I had few friends. Back in the days when I knew you in Syria, my mother was beloved by everyone. Both the village midwife and dresser of the dead, she walked hand in hand with the shadow world, and the otherworldly became my constant companion. I played by myself in the fields, tracing the golden line of the steppe. Beyond were the ancient pillars and temples of Tadmor, the Bride of the Desert. It was on this desert road that the Bedouins somet
imes approached our village to sell wool or livestock, though they came less often in those days than when I was small. On the day I began to bleed, I thought I’d grown beyond the age when magic approaches from the corner of one’s eye.
There, at the edge of the world I knew, I met a woman from my village who loved winged creatures more than people. To my mind there wasn’t anything strange about this, though our neighbors regarded her as quite the oddity. I came to learn her name was Hawa, like the first woman, and that she was building a flying machine.
Amongst themselves, our neighbors whispered about her and called her Majnouna. My mother’s friends gossiped about her flying machine as they picked pebbles from the freekeh one afternoon. I began to watch her while my mother was out delivering babies. Those who saw me returning to the village laughed and warned me away, but day after day, I went out into the fields to watch Hawa gather her materials. She built the double wings and the body of the machine first, then added the two wheels and the two rows of fabric draped across its back.
I never spoke to her until after her fateful flight. That was the day of the blood. Though my mother would have been ecstatic, I hid it. I didn’t want to tell her, maybe for fear she’d keep me home that day; or maybe it was the fear of what else it would mean, the new things I’d have to learn as a woman, the vague fear I had of marriage, the feeling that something was ending and would never come again.
The whole village came out to watch the spectacle of Hawa’s flight—all but my mother, who had been called away a few hours earlier by a neighbor whose wife had gone into labor with her first child. Though the baby shouldn’t come until after sundown, my mother said, the woman was nervous, and her husband insisted she come.
For my part, I was thrilled. I rushed out to the edge of the village. A crowd had gathered, a circle with Hawa at its center. Her flying machine was an ungainly contraption with pedals and wheels and adjustable wings, little more than linen stretched over wooden broom handles. People whispered that it was a strange amalgamation of a bird and a bicycle. I was the only one who believed she could fly. To me, Hawa’s linen wings looked like God’s angels.
Hawa pedaled hard, gaining ground and speed. As her path diverged from the crowd, I lost sight of her. I ran along behind her until I escaped the crush of people. By the time I caught sight of her again, she had reached the crest of a small ridge, and then she was airborne. The crowd went silent and stopped their taunting. No one followed her. The village whispered prayers and murmured fearful things.
Only I followed. I tracked Hawa overhead, into the fields. When I looked back, the crowd and the village were far behind us, nearly out of sight. Hawa’s wings held; I held my breath. Her shadow rushed over me. She hadn’t gained much height, but she was in the air, and that, I thought, counted as a miracle.
Because of my faith in her, I was the only one to witness her death. It began with an upward gust of air. Her wings wobbled, then dipped. The linen tore and separated from the wood. She didn’t cry out as she fell, only angled her body toward the earth, smiling as though she were going to meet an old friend.
I rushed to her, but I didn’t have my mother’s skill at dressing wounds and setting bones. I cried out for help. We were too far for anyone to hear.
Before I could rise and run to get someone, Hawa gripped my wrist. “Allah calls to his daughter,” she told me, “and soon I must go to Him.” These are the only words of hers I can remember now. Time has reduced the rest to the mist of dreams. Hawa pressed my hand to her chest and related to me startling things, visions that had been revealed to her before she hit the earth, wonderful and monstrous events that were to come: dark clouds, rippling flocks of shadows, winged flashes of light.
“But madame,” I said, for what she had told me had disturbed me, and I was afraid, “are these visions of blessing, or a curse?”
Hawa did not answer. Above us, the gray kites drifted into the south. Hawa’s eyes fixed themselves on the sky. I closed them each with a finger.
I treasured up her words as I returned home. My mother met me along the way, coming from her delivery. She was early, but I kept my curiosity to myself. I told her Hawa’s flight had ended in tragedy, but kept quiet about the visions she’d related. I was sure she’d be sorely angry with me for following Hawa into the fields, but she said nothing. At first I was relieved that she was too tired to chastise me. But as the first shadows fell over our faces, the fading light caught my mother’s skirts, marred with blood. Then I began to fear her silence. I asked her, as I was accustomed after a delivery, whether the baby was a little boy or a little girl. My mother bit her lip.
“Ya ‘albi.” She called me “her heart” only when she was overjoyed or gravely sad, and I knew then without having to ask that neither mother nor baby had survived. “The night falls over all of us the same,” she said, “but also the light, praise God.”
* * *
When I was born, my mother named me Laila so I would not fear the night. “Allah, in His infinite wisdom,” she used to say, “has created the darkness to remind us that He has given us the light.”
But in truth, I have always been afraid of the night and the doubt it brings. When we arrived in Amrika and I picked up a paintbrush for the first time, I was sick with terror, and more than terror, guilt. Who was I to pick up a brush and freeze the soul of something, knowing the world was ever-changing and nothing would appear this way again? Even a piece of fruit ages and dies, and there I was, trying to capture a robin or a hummingbird, seizing time in one hand.
Months have passed since I wrote here about Hawa. I sketch more birds than I write these days, maybe because I’ve never been one to raise my voice or speak my mind. But if I fill this book with drawings and say nothing of myself, I fear I won’t recognize my own hand when the colors have dried. So as I set out with my paints and these pages, I will write down where I come from. And to keep the fear at bay, I will imagine you here again before me, little wing, and this time I will tell you everything.
Let me start over. I was born on a sunny day in early March of 1920, the day Emir Faysal declared Syria to be an independent Arab state, in a village not far from Homs. You never knew my birthday, did you? My mother tells me my grandmother took all the flour and oil and clarified butter in the pantry, went down to the butcher, and had a lamb slaughtered. She gathered all the women of the village together—for in the bilad my mother and her family knew everyone; my mother had delivered every last one of their children—and together they baked bread and kibbeh and prepared huge trays of kunafeh while the men drank ara’ and danced the dabke as though it were a wedding. All this celebration was for Syria, not for my birth, though my mother always says the rejoicing and zagharit went to my head.
The French saw to it that the young kingdom didn’t last six months. When the French army took Damascus in July of that same year after a ten-day siege, my father’s textile business took a sharp downward turn. My mother’s milk dried up. But I was the kind of child who struggles, and my mother had already birthed two other children, twins who would have been my older brothers. George had died of pneumonia in childhood, but God had spared my brother Issa. I grew up to be a skinny, scab-kneed girl with teeth too large for my mouth, and for years Issa would tease me that I had gnawed my way out of death’s grasp, until well into adolescence when my features had balanced themselves and I had gained some plumpness in my cheeks.
You knew my mother as a wise woman, the kind of woman who would listen to anyone with a problem, who always had coffee in the house to serve a grieving family who had lost a loved one in the night and enough flour and ghee to make a tray of bitlawah for the celebration of a birth. She was the keeper of life and death. Her face, creased by years and by the sun, was the first thing most people had ever seen—and the last. People recognized her at once, even children who met her for the first time. The elderly and ailing, those who had lost the ability to recognize even their own loved ones, still knew her. Perhaps it was this mystic
al power that set her apart from the other women; perhaps it was this that separated her from me. For as long as I have been her daughter, my mother has been the loneliest woman I have ever known.
My mother used to say her loneliness arrived with the locusts. She said they came as a dark storm from the heavens, descending upon the crops until they had eaten every fig to its stem, devoured the bark from every olive tree, and reduced the fields of wheat to dust and a fearful hum. This was during the Great War, before my parents met; you would not have been born yet, ya ayni. The Ottoman armies had begun conscripting Christian men in those days, stocking their ranks with my mother’s brother and father, with uncles and husbands and neighbors’ sons. Throughout the province of Syria, particularly in Mount Lebanon, people suffered from the taxes and from the famine that followed the locusts. In those days families had little, and what little they had stored up for hard times was quickly depleted. My grandfather, already ancient, stopped eating so that his remaining children would not go hungry.
The way my mother tells the story, she had only just started out on her own as a midwife when the famine began. In those dark days, weeks went by with more miscarriages than births. Those who had been ill when disaster struck succumbed to their illnesses. Friends and relatives began to disappear, either leaving for Beirut or Tripoli or vanishing into their hunger. At first the women mourned their dead, wailing as the funeral processions went by. But as time went on, all became too weak with hunger and too crushed by loss to wail.
The war had taken more from my mother’s village than it could bear. And so when news arrived of an Arab uprising against the Ottomans, the village rejoiced. Some of the young men spoke of joining the revolt. If you ask my mother, she will tell you that my father, then a scrawny young man prone to philosophizing, declared one day that he was going to join the fighting. They barely knew each other then, though my father had a reputation for lofty political ideas and larger-than-life stories. He was laughed at by the other boys his age, and my mother, too, scoffed at his outlandish promises. But when he vanished one morning, the mothers murmured that he had finally made good on his promise.
The Thirty Names of Night Page 3
