Teta scoffs between bites. “They raise the price one time more,” she says, “and I cut them in half.”
“You can’t do that. Those are your maintenance meds, Teta. For the myeloma. They’re important.”
We’ve broken two of our unspoken rules: I’ve questioned Teta’s frugality, and I’ve made her feel frail. Every month, as we get close to refilling her prescription, Teta starts cutting her pills in half. I’ve seen her do it, even though I tell her it’s dangerous and unnecessary. She’s never forgotten war and hunger, never forgotten hoarding medicine for her own sick mother during the French bombardment of Damascus in the late spring of ’45, and I’ve had to accept that sometimes to feel secure is its own medicine. Still, by now she must have found the spot where I stash the bills. She must know I don’t always have the money to pay them.
We eat in silence, and then Teta folds the napkin into a tiny square and pushes herself up on the arms of the chair. “The kazbara,” she says, as though the cilantro on her fire escape explains everything, and turns to the window.
“Teta, you’re not supposed to—”
Before I can stop her, Teta hikes up her wool skirt to slip a stockinged foot onto the fire escape. She knows I won’t pull her back, for fear of knocking her down, which is why she turns and smirks at me over her shoulder.
“Oh, you know what you’re doing,” I call after her as she lifts her other foot over the windowsill. Asmahan saunters over, curious.
“Don’t sass me,” she retorts. “I stood up to armed men with a bucket of water before you were born.”
There’s little I can say to that. “I already watered the kazbara, Teta. Come back in. Let’s play tawleh.”
But there’s no arguing with Teta when she has her mind set on something, and anyway, she’s been climbing out onto the fire escape to water her garden when I’m not home for months. She never grew thyme after you died, but she’s kept the garden ever since.
“First Christmas after you were born,” Teta says over her shoulder as she takes up the watering can on the windowsill, “your father, he wanted a tree. Astaghfirullah! He demand a tree, and I’m the only one home. I carried the tree on my back to surprise them. You remember, eh?”
Asmahan puts out a paw to test the situation, and I shoo her from the window. “I know, Teta. Twenty blocks.”
“Twenty-four!” This number has increased over the years.
I set one foot on the fire escape and freeze. It’s been years since I’ve been able to stand on one of these without panic. “Come inside. It’s about to rain.”
Teta waves the watering can for emphasis. “I took you to Prospect Park so we could walk and walk. Thirty, forty blocks.” Teta sits down on the window ledge and wipes her brow. “We used to walk and walk until I had the feet like two stones. You remember?”
I laugh. “Ma fi benzene.” The first thing I ever learned from Teta, who never got tired first, was how to tell her I was out of gas.
Teta cackles. She pinches a silver tuft of sage between two fingers. “To Allah belongs the east and the west.” She’s reciting Surat al-Baqarah. “So wherever you turn, there is the face of God.”
Surat al-Baqarah reminds me of the afternoons I used to spend with you during Ramadan, when I’d start out trying to fast during the school day and come home cranky and exhausted, and you’d recite it to me. Teta memorized the whole Qur’an as a young girl, something you used to say impressed everyone around her, given that her education was cut short by poverty. You always denied it, but I think you knew it by heart, too. You used to tell me, during those long afternoons, how fasting could bring you closer to God if you let it. You used to say that not worrying about your next meal made you feel more present to the world around you. I wonder how it would feel to inhabit my own body so fully that even the ache of fasting would feel miraculous.
I lean out the window and lay my forehead on Teta’s broad back. If I close my eyes, I can remember being carried in the thick branches of her arms. “I wish I was as strong as you.”
She slips a furred sprig of purple sage behind my ear, then cuts a bit of kazbara for later. She angles her bulk back through the window. Teta is a sturdy ship in the too-small harbor of this apartment. I gather up the remnants of our man’ousheh while Teta sets the fresh cilantro in a cup of water. She sets the cup on top of the fridge to discourage Asmahan from drinking it. As I crumple our oily napkins, my gaze drifts from Teta to your Laila Z, the sun glinting off the wooden frame. It’s a hair crooked, and I rise to straighten it. I’ve been studying the bird since Sabah gave it to you, but I still can’t tell what species of hudhud it is. I thought about asking Sabah once, but I didn’t want to make a fool of myself to your best friend. I was supposed to be the ornithologist’s kid, supposed to absorb everything you knew. I failed, though to your credit, you never gave up on me. You were still teaching me up until the day you died.
A second set of fingers strokes the frame. You never come two days in a row. This is not supposed to happen. I am not supposed to have to miss you so much.
“Teta,” I call out into the kitchen, “you want me to do the dusting before dinner? The frame needs it.” Maybe if I go about my day as though you aren’t here, you’ll leave. Out of the corner of my eye, you seem wounded.
“Ma’alish,” Teta calls back, “leave it.” She fills the teapot with water and lights the stove. She looks up at me and then squints at the dusty frame of your Laila Z, and it’s impossible to tell if she is only pretending to look through you. “It wasn’t so common those days, a woman painter. And to paint with all those details, like a scientist—it was rare, yanay. Beautiful, her birds.”
I roll and unroll the hem of a doily on the end table. “Mom never really accepted her disappearance.”
“No.” Maybe Teta doesn’t see you after all. She is rubbing the leaves from a cutting of sage, preparing to make tea. “By the time we arrived, she was missing nearly twenty years.”
You tap the corner of the frame, and underneath the illustration is a signature in Arabic, one I’ve seen before. I could go to my room and pull out Laila’s notebook, let the words pour out of me, tell Teta about the community house and the watercolor sparrow. But in my mind’s eye I can hear what Teta will say, the way she will turn her face from me, the way she will plead with me not to root around in the past the way I do, the way you did. Teta has lost too much to the hunger of memory. I’ve given up trying to force that lock.
But those birds. The details on the tail feathers, the beak, the scales on the toes. “It’s hard not to imagine what might’ve been. If things were different.”
“Eh.” Teta nods her agreement. She fills her silver tea egg with sage, then stops so long I nearly ask her if she’s all right. “I was in love once,” Teta says, “before your jiddo.” She pauses, even her hands. “There was someone.”
* * *
I wait for Teta to fall asleep in her easy chair for her afternoon nap, then tuck Laila Z’s notebook under my shirt and open Teta’s walk-in closet. A quarter of the space is dedicated to the frames wrapped in brown paper that house prints of Laila’s illustrations, along with two rare aquatints. All your things are here, just as Teta was keeping them for you when you died.
Though Laila Z was never able to secure gallery representation, she did do some illustration work for publishing houses, mostly for birding guides and conservation campaigns. One of her aquatints, like the hudhud in Teta’s sitting room, was a gift from Sabah. The other you saved up for years to buy.
I understood, even as a child, how much you loved Laila Z’s birds. Once, while you were saving up to buy that second aquatint—the yellow-crowned night heron—I offered you my life savings in my ceramic piggy bank, but you refused. When you got tenure, not a year before your death, you bought that print to celebrate. Sabah was the only curator of Arab American art that we knew in those days, so she was the one who helped you find it. Aquatint, a variant of etching, isn’t so widely used anymore; it produc
es tone rather than color, with lines etched to create detail and depth. Laila Z insisted on hand-coloring her prints with watercolor, creating startling images with hyperrealistic anatomical details. They have a surreal, flattened look to them, with all the detail of pen and ink and the ethereal wash of watercolor. There are still a few galleries that show Laila Z’s work—what little of it is still circulating these days, produced before her disappearance back in ’46—but being a naturalist, observational painter, and a woman besides, she’s generally been relegated to the obscurity of time. Just a few weeks before your death, you had Sabah over to pick her brain about Laila Z’s last painting before her disappearance, trading theories on what was known to exist—and what might have happened to her.
Sabah, along with most of the art world, was beyond certain that everything we’d ever know about Laila Z had already come to light. Her disappearance coincided with the city’s destruction of Little Syria, all records of her vanishing, and so everyone took this dead end to mean death. You were one of the few who refused to let her memory die.
You loved Laila Z long before you started campaigning to save the remaining half of the old tenement on Washington Street, the one that’s been reduced to an empty, weedy lot since your death. But by the end, you became so passionate about saving the building her family lived in that even for me, it was hard to remember which obsession came first. Maybe the painter’s activist spirit inspired you. Maybe that’s what fueled your desire to save the nest of rare birds you found on the old tenement’s roof during the building inspection, the birds that set everything in motion. Either way, you took the nest as a sign, adding it to your long list of reasons to save the building. When you joined forces with the local masjid in trying to buy the old tenement, the fact that the purchase would not only save the home of both painter and birds but also create space for the local Muslim community made you even more determined. It couldn’t all be a coincidence, you said, all these reasons popping up like crocuses. You believed that God was the remover of obstacles; you used to talk about the future as though it were something we could build for ourselves. It was an omen that the birds had chosen that building to roost on, you said. There were only two tenements left on Little Syria’s stretch of Washington Street—history was slipping away. You reminded me of the power Allah gave to Solomon to understand the language of the birds, the way that all things were signs for those who look. But you read those signs wrong.
I shuffle through the frames tucked in their brown wrappers, peeking under the taped corners of the paper. You once looked with love on these paintings; your passion made me want to create beautiful things when I grew up. But I didn’t grow up to be a Laila Z. I wonder, if you were still alive, if I could take you with me on the subway, walk you down to Lower Manhattan and show you the murals I’ve been working on, the hudhud and her crown.
When I open the corner of one of the packages, I find you sitting beside me in the narrow closet in the dark, examining the edges for dents or rips, your legs crossed under you like you always sat with me on the old Persian rug on your bedroom floor. You’ve got your hijab off, your hair mussed as though you’ve slept on it, the white hairs in your part preserved forever from the last time you dyed your hair black with henna and indigo. Two generations before you, our ancestors were nomadic. You used to sit like this and tell me stories about my great-great-grandmother, the one who killed scorpions with her bare heels and slit the throats of the goats on Eid. You and Teta Badra before you and Teta’s mother before her—my great-grandmother Wafaa, daughter of the scorpion-killer—you were the bearers of bravery in our family. You were the one who fought to save the neighborhood I’m now sneaking into to paint each night. But you failed to realize that America has only ever deemed certain heritages worth preserving. If the Lenape were forced from their ancestral home on the island of Mannahatta, the eviction of Little Syria’s impoverished immigrants is no surprise, and it’s hard for me to imagine that things will ever be any different.
Even I believed, by the end, that what you imagined was really possible—that this abandoned tenement, the older of the two left on the block and the place where Laila Z and hundreds of other Syrian immigrants had once lived, could really become a place of prayer, a place of history, with a protected home for the birds who miraculously built a nest on the roof. But futures so beautiful are rare for people like us. You lost your battle and, in the process, I lost you to someone else’s anger. There was a confidence in everything you did that I never learned to emulate, a belief in everything you loved, as though victory was secured, as though it wasn’t a fool’s errand to believe in justice. You weren’t afraid when the death threats came, and you don’t look afraid now. For a ghost, you are strong-shouldered, the glow of middle age still gleaming on your brown hands. With no one else in this closet but us, I could be the one who died in the fire, not you. I am left with these paper-wrapped frames and the reminder you always gave me with a raised eyebrow: Don’t believe them when they tell you who is dead and who is living.
I stack Laila Z’s paintings back against the wall and rise to dust fuzwahs off my knees. I bang the top of my head against a low shelf. The shock of pain stuns me, and the shelf’s contents tumble to the floor: a stack of your leather-bound sketchbooks.
The first begins with dozens of pages of notes, followed by hand-drawn maps of Lower Manhattan. A block of Washington Street is indicated by a darkened rectangle, then inset in a larger view on the next page. The inset block reveals the second tenement next to the one still standing at 109 Washington Street. You’ve outlined the front of the building, drawn a red arrow to the westernmost window on the top floor. A sketch of a nest, the silhouette of two birds.
The sketchbook explodes into drawings—graphite, ink, charcoal, colored pencil, watercolor. The birds in this nest are birds I’ve never seen, bearing an unrecognizable name. Geronticus simurghus—third documented sighting, your notes read. The pages of notes spill over into another four notebooks, hypothetical migration routes that might have taken them to New York, the number of eggs in the nest, the coloration of the wings in the dawn light. And, throughout, references to the other two known records of this bird so rare it was once thought to be a fable: the century-old field notes of an ornithologist named Dr. Benjamin Young and an aquatint by Laila Z, hinted at only in a letter to a private collector you found buried in the archives of the New York Historical Society.
Though I never heard even Sabah mention the existence of an aquatint like this, I’ve seen sketches of a similar bird before. I dart out of the closet and into my bedroom, returning with Laila’s notebook. I flick through the pages. The entries are written in English but from the rightmost page to left, as in Arabic. I stop at an entry accompanied by a sketch of a cream-colored bird with hints of iridescence in its breast feathers, little more than a streak across the page.
I still remember the TV interview you did, the one that preceded the first wave of threats. I knew it was going to be a problem while you were filming it. At the time, I was convinced that it wasn’t the fact of the hypothetical masjid that set people off. It was the conviction in your voice when you talked about the birds. The newscaster must have done her homework; she brought out every look-alike species she could think of. You held fast. In the years since, I’ve been afraid of the knot of shame that was tied in my belly then: the shame of earnest belief. Don’t let them see the thing you love, I wanted to shout at you, but it was too late. I wanted to cover your mouth. I’d already learned from my father and my bullies that believing in something, for people like you and me, was a punishable crime.
And yet, here: your evidence waiting for someone to take up where you left off, your secret inkling that you, Dr. Young, and Laila Z all saw the same miraculous event that quickened your belief in the rare, in the impossible. You tried to tell me while you were alive, but I wasn’t ready to believe you. One of your sketchbooks has fallen open at your feet, revealing a watercolor inset of this rare bird’s pale
breast. Your cross-legged ghost is no longer looking at me. Both our eyes drift to your sketch, a mirror half a century after Laila’s. You sit unmoving, your palms curved around the sketchbook. I lift it from the mist of your touch and cradle it as though it might shatter in my hands.
* * *
Sabah doesn’t pick up her office phone, so I walk down to her father’s shop on Atlantic to find her. The sidewalks are packed with girls in gauzy midi skirts and crop tops, boys in tropical print T-shirts and bright sneakers with unscuffed soles, men in plump middle age talking loudly on their phones. The restaurants, shisha bars, and coffee shops are packed with people whose apartments don’t have air-conditioning. The painted electrical boxes thrum with effort.
Sami has expanded his project: the light poles at one intersection are encircled with thick silk cord dyed emerald or wine or adobe pink, each cord tied into an intricate knot—an endless knot, or a bowknot, or a sheepshank, or a lark’s head. His efforts are working; I remember there was a police shooting not six months ago in this very spot that most people in this neighborhood, given the relentless pace of violence in this country, would have already stopped talking about. The knots are talismans against forgetting, and they work. I have not forgotten Sami.
The bell tinkles on the door of Sabah’s father’s shop when I push it open. I step inside into cool darkness. A path winds from the door to the back of the shop, past the ouds hanging in the window, the tawleh boards inset with mother-of-pearl, the brass coffeepots and trays assembled along the wall. The countertop is crowded with open boxes of roasted chickpeas and silver necklaces bearing Ayat al-Kursi, the floor with open canvas sacks of rice and bulgur wheat and fava beans that shoulder up against shelves of teas, halawa, and half a dozen kinds of pickled olives.
“As-salaamu alaykum,” I call out into the dark, and something metallic dings to the floor as one of the cats startles up from her afternoon nap.
The Thirty Names of Night Page 5
