He didn’t make it out of the province before the sound of warplanes sent him running down a hill to hide in the brush of the nearest orchard. The planes passed overhead without incident, but my young father tripped on a root and went sprawling head over knees down the hill, breaking his leg. He was promptly returned to the village by a passerby, where word spread that he had survived an air raid, though this was only partially true. Soon, the story became more and more embellished by the village youth, who quickly claimed—despite my father’s halfhearted protestations—that he had been attacked by a dozen or more men and fought them off himself, that he had popped out one of their eyes with a branch, that he kept the dried eyeball like a desiccated persimmon under his bed. By the time the Arabs took Dera’a and then Damascus, my father had become a local hero without ever lifting a weapon, and because my mother had taken a liking to teasing him about the absurd tales of his misadventure, when he asked her to marry him, she said yes.
But despite the promises of the Allied powers and Emir Faysal’s declaration, France and Britain divided up our land according to their whims, and my father grew sullen and jaded. The failure of independence had broken something in him, my mother used to say, and he was never the same hopeful, rambling intellectual after that, with his big plans and uncompromising ideals. He settled into my grandfather’s textile business and became resentful of the revolution that had failed his hopes, resentful of the world that had disappointed him.
Five years later, the smallpox came. The epidemic arrived in the spring and was followed by an ill-timed drought. My mother buried many infants and children who succumbed to the disease, and she quarantined me to the house for most of the spring and summer, healthy and forlorn. Our neighbors began to flee disease and lack of water, until it was clear there would not be enough people to harvest even a meager crop.
I had just turned five. The scent of lightning was thick in the air when we received word from the Bedu elders that Sultan Pasha al-Atrash had declared revolution against France in Jebel ad-Druze. The Druze revolt grew in strength, until many cities were in open rebellion, and sympathy for the rebel cause began to grow in Homs and Hama and, finally, in our village.
Do you have any memory of those years, little wing? Perhaps you were too young to remember them. We were lucky; our village was of little importance to the French, so we were spared the violence France rained on Hama from the air. The aerial bombardment reached us when my father’s business suffered, though, and when the French cut back Abu Rayan’s orchards to prevent ambushes.
On the first of October of that year, my father set down a bite of bread and lentils at supper and announced that he intended to join his kin in Hama in the fight against the French. My mother told him he was a lunatic, that he had two small children to support, that we would starve if he were lost. My father accused my mother of her disbelief in his ideals, and she accused him of being naive. To this day, this was the bitterest fight my parents have ever had.
My father left that night, dissolving into the dark with only a goat-hair jacket and a bag of bread and dates. We would not hear from him for eight days. The fighting lasted only four, but it was dire. The French, who had few troops in Syria, brought in additional forces from Morocco and Senegal to quell the uprising, and surprised the rebels. The revolt in Hama was over. Preparations were made to bury the dead.
When we did not hear from my father after six days, my mother began to fear the worst. She became frantic, searching the orchards at night for survivors who had been missed. Still, there was nothing. After a week, Imm Rayan, who lived next door, tried to console my mother with herbal teas and the revolutionary songs my father loved to sing, but my mother was in too tight a knot. My mother opened her mouth to scream in frustration when, to everyone’s shock, the door opened and my father fell into the foyer.
After we had cleaned the scratches on his legs and arms and given him a little ara’ against the pain, my mother spread old linens on the good couch and set him down in the sitting room, demanding he tell her what had happened.
My father had cheated death a second time. Senegalese mercenaries under French command had surprised them in the orchards, and the Hamawi forces had run this way and that, afraid to fire on their countrymen amid the trees and the dark. Two bullets grazed my father in the confusion, impossible to say whose. One bullet had torn a line of flesh from his back, and another had taken a chunk of his ear. Bleeding and stunned, he had stumbled in the dark and struck his head on a stone. He’d lain in the brush like a dead man for the remainder of the battle, too weak and confused to rise. When he finally came to, the fighting was over, and he’d crawled his way to the closest house, where a sympathetic widow had cleaned and dressed the wound on his ear. The damage to his spine was harder to remedy. He had lost the use of one of his legs, to which most of the nerves had been severed, and would walk with the aid of a cane for the rest of his life.
The season of my father’s political idealism was over, and with it, Hama’s revolt. Merchants stopped coming to our village for a time, and trade nearly ceased. A pervasive sadness filled the streets and the homes of my neighbors, a hopelessness that made people whisper again about leaving. They spoke of relatives who had gone to Amrika and come back to build houses, sons who sent good money home, a cousin here or there who had decided to stay and make a life where there was a good living to be made. Why were we here when our sons were reaping their harvests elsewhere? Though Amrika had begun to close her doors to immigrants from outside Europe the year before, children were occasionally able to bring their parents or their siblings to join them, and hopes were high that the measure would be reversed. Perhaps there was a way, they said, and even my father spoke of such things when he thought my brother and I weren’t listening. When he began to talk of abandoning not only his business and his village but also his country, I knew my father had lost all hope.
Years went by like this, my father withdrawing into himself, business dwindling, the young and the strong being drained from the villages to find work elsewhere. On one particular evening, I lay awake as my mother mended clothing by the window. We’d gone to bed hungry again; my father hadn’t sold anything in weeks, and my mother had served us the same watery lentil soup from the night before. An owl had come to roost in the tree in our garden, and it called out into the falling evening. Beyond the window, the orchards outside of Hama were visible against the sky. My father shut the window; he could not take the owl’s cries. He used to say they were the spirits of those who had died unjustly, haunting the living.
“Come now,” my mother said to my father. “Do you believe such things?”
“I’ve seen many things I would not have once believed.”
My mother set down her sewing and scolded my father that he was lucky to be alive. Though she raised her voice, I pretended to sleep.
“You have your life and two healthy children. Can’t you be happy with that?”
My father breathed in through his nose. The night lay still, uninterrupted by the usual sounds of evening, the happy noises I’d once heard: the neighbors in their gardens, telling stories, laughing over glasses of ara’ or cups of coffee. There were no such sounds from our neighbors now. Imm Rayan and her husband had left to join their son in Amrika, leaving the house to a cousin in Aleppo. The village had taken on a brooding quiet.
The owl sent its mourning cries into the dark. My father looked up from his account books. He fixed his gaze out the window on the empty house next door and said nothing, and I knew then that there was more than one way to imprison a man.
* * *
Little wing,
Today Khalto Tala snuck me away after my chores were done and took me to see a talkie at the Roxy movie palace off Times Square, on the condition that I not tell my mother. You’d like Khalto Tala, B, I’m sure of it. Sometimes I can hardly tell she’s my mother’s sister, they’re about as different as dandelion and hibiscus.
Khalto Tala left Syria long before my p
arents got up the courage to follow her. She was always the braver of the two sisters, so when she boarded a steamship bound for Amrika, no one was too surprised, even though it was rare for a woman to travel alone. Before we arrived in New York, I only had vague memories of her. I used to take solace in her letters, though, and in her tales about the land of plenty beyond the dark Atlantic. Khalto Tala sent back trinkets from time to time, baubles she bought for me or my brother with the money she made peddling. Khalto Tala had found someone in Amrika who was teaching her to read and write, and in her letters she built fantastical worlds for us back home.
None of the older women in my family knew how to read, not even my mother, who I used to believe knew everything. My father read the letters to us while my mother cooked or sat with my brother in her lap, and I would listen. That’s how I learned to read English, from reading the bits of it in her letters over and over. When my parents decided to invest in English lessons for Issa (who was, in fact, not well suited for languages), I would eavesdrop while I washed grape leaves for wara’ einab or mixed burghul and lamb with my hands for kibbeh, and after Issa’s lessons were over, I’d whisper what I’d learned to myself as I went about my day. And anyway, what did I have that was more interesting in those days than Khalto Tala’s stories? Khalti wrote of deep pine forests and ice-laden cold, of prairies flat as a palm and of sky melting into heaven, and these were my dreams in those days, the fantasies I escaped to when I was alone.
That’s what I was thinking of when I met you the day after Hawa’s death. At first, I didn’t even see you. I was walking home from school when I looked up and noticed a small gray bird fighting with a hawk. Though the bird put up a bold and desperate fight, the hawk tore the feathers from his wings and dropped him. I broke away from the cluster of schoolchildren and ran to the place where he’d fallen. It was a kite, one of the same birds I’d seen when Hawa crashed. His eyes were closed and his beak was open, his head tilted at an angle so that he looked like a holy man opening his mouth to pray.
You ran up to me as I scooped the kite into my hands, another girl in the same awkward stage of middle adolescence. We locked eyes—do you remember? We looked just alike back then, our hair the same shade of almost-black, our arms and legs the same gangly length, our strong chins all but identical.
You reached out to touch the kite’s feathers and asked me if he was dead. I thought he was; I couldn’t feel him breathing. We studied his feathers and the shape of his wings, the talons on his scaly feet. For a time neither of us wanted to speak. You asked if you could hold him. He seemed to belong with you. I was jealous, though I didn’t say so. You had the look on your face my mother once described to me of new parents—a wondrous silence. Finally you said we should give him a proper funeral, then picked up the feathers on the ground that had been torn out by the hawk. I thought of your hands months later on the ship to Amrika, how the feathers were longer than your fingers.
We buried the kite in my mother’s garden. We stood side by side for our prayers, but the heat of you so close distracted me, and I had to start over twice. I said the Lord’s Prayer over the bird’s body and crossed myself, and you said: “Surely we belong to Allah, and to Him we shall return.” We both said, “Ameen.”
Something about your face made me feel I was looking at myself. I’d been lonely so long. I put my arms around you and kissed you twice on each cheek, the way I’d been taught to greet the women in my family. I felt strange and light, but I pledged my sisterhood, because I had no words then for what that lightness meant.
You didn’t come to me with your gift until weeks later, tapping on my window before school one morning with a bundle wrapped in old linens. Your mother had been ill, as I recall, and you’d stayed home to take care of her. She was pregnant. You were hoping for a sister you could sew tiny dresses for. Back then, neither of us knew what lay ahead.
I unwrapped the linen bundle, curved like the seed of a mango. You’d stitched the feathers of the kite into a magnificent silver-white wing. You held your breath while I lifted it to the sun, and I thrilled at the thought that you cared for my approval. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
I brought the wing with me to school that day, hidden among my things. I took it everywhere with me, carried it in the folds of my skirt and tucked it beside me when I slept at night. With the wing under my pillow, I once dreamed that God visited me in the form of a bird. I don’t know why I think of it now. He was a slender starling, his feathers smoothly oiled, his iridescent plumage speckled with pearls. He perched on the window my father kept closed to the owl. I opened it, and there the King of Kings sat with the moon for a crown, preening his feathers. For the first time in many days, I felt peace.
When I awoke, it was to my father once again poring over his account books and my mother’s whispered prayers. My Lord’s visit had changed the inside of me, but out in the world, it had changed nothing. I lay with my eyes shut and your silver feathers beneath my head. I clutched their softness tight. I’ve showed your wing to no one since then, B, not even when I folded it into my steamer trunk when we left for Amrika. It reminds me that something pure still exists in this world, that something immortal can be lifted even from a harvest of torn feathers, and of all your qualities, little wing, that is the one I have always loved best.
THREE /
ON THE SUBWAY, THE first sign of dawn is a girl in a striped blouse who breaks the quiet of the empty subway car where I sit reading Laila Z’s diary. I’ve been riding the system all night since I missed the stop for Teta’s apartment. I’ve been sitting on this orange plastic bench, people shuffling forward and back around me, until all human presence trickled away to silence. Down here, I can almost pretend I’ve escaped the passage of time.
But it’s later than I thought, and Teta will be worried about me. I’ll have to find some way to make it up to her. I get off at Borough Hall and emerge into the reddish light. An elderly Black woman is feeding pigeons in the park, and grandmothers in saris, scarves, or Yankees caps are walking their kids to school, laden with their backpacks like blossoms heavy with bees. Black trash bags are lined up on the sidewalk for collection. We used to make this walk, too, on our way to the Islamic community center. You used to take me to their after-school Arabic classes, though I was far from the best in my class. You liked the location because it was close to Teta, so we could drop by for dinner afterward. It’s housed in a beautiful old two-story building and has been missing the Arabic half of its sign for years because of fears of arson. A few years after you died, the women’s entrance was scorched by fire one night, and I felt like telling you, Look, see where this silence has gotten us.
I walk down to the bodega and grab a newspaper to kill time. I am bleeding again, and the farther I walk, the worse my cramps get. I’m convinced my body is rejecting the piece of plastic in my uterus, no matter what my gyno says. I stop by the local bakery to pick up a man’ousheh for Teta, trying to assuage my guilt. The woman behind the counter can tell I haven’t slept. She says nothing; she doesn’t have to.
When I leave the shop with my paper box, I spot two men walking down the sidewalk across the street holding hands, checking the brunch prices in a restaurant window. The man on the right laughs at something the other man says, flipping his black hair over his shoulder. His partner rubs the back of the man’s hand with his thumb. They look at each other.
I drop my eyes. The man with the long hair reminds me of Sami, and on this morning, of all mornings, my unrequited crush is the last thing I want to think about. But I can’t help myself: I see Sami in the linen shirt this man is wearing, remember our thrift shop fashion shows and the day I held Sami’s hand when he finally got up the courage to get his ears pierced. Now he is using his art with laser focus to keep the memories of his community alive, and I am trying to forget him.
I turn away and head back to Teta’s apartment. A man in a crisp polo shirt passes the two men on the street and turns to stare. The knot of the
ir fingers unravels when they drop each other’s hands.
* * *
Teta’s living room is cool and dark. The curtains are half drawn, blocking the usual rectangle of morning sunlight. Teta is in her chair, reading under your framed print of John James Audubon’s American Redstart, one of his paintings from the Birds of America. Next to it, hanging in a place of honor above the china-filled breakfront like a religious icon, is the most valuable thing in the house: your prized Laila Z aquatint of a hudhud in its walnut frame.
Teta motions to the sofa opposite her chair, and I sit down, unwrapping the man’ousheh for her. The apartment smells of disturbed dust, but the sounds of the city don’t find their way in. Apartment 4A is Teta’s stronghold against the repeating past.
“Hazy today.” Teta accepts the man’ousheh with a napkin on her lap to catch the stray za’atar. The bread is still hot from the oven.
“Summer in Brooklyn.” I don’t add what we are both thinking: that time of year again. Teta holds the man’ousheh between her lap and her mouth. You are on the tip of her tongue, but she won’t invoke you. Your death is an enchantment neither of us is strong enough to break.
I glance toward Teta’s days-of-the-week pill tray in the kitchen. “Did you take your meds?”
The Thirty Names of Night Page 4
