“Wa alaykum as-salaam,” a deep cello of a voice calls back, and Sabah emerges from the kitchen behind the shop carrying a portable fan. Sabah is tall and broad-shouldered, a hewn marble slab of a person, but she maneuvers her square frame about the shop with surprising lightness. “Sit down. I’m brewing coffee.”
I follow Sabah back into the kitchen behind the shop floor, and taxi horns fade away. It’s rare to find the shop empty on a weekday afternoon. Sabah’s father has been in business so long, since he came to the States from Aleppo, that the whole neighborhood knows their family, so there’s always a steady stream of people who stop in to say hello and chat in Arabic. The delivery guys often stay for tea or coffee, arguing over politics with Sabah’s father, and when Sabah is in, the old Lebanese ladies stop by to pick up fresh bread and give Sabah the latest neighborhood gossip, mostly regarding who’s getting married and whose son just got into business school. Sabah always takes the news with a solemn nod and a grunt, and somehow this always placates the women, as though any response at all from Sabah is a precious thing. For as long as I can remember, Sabah’s cousins have affectionately referred to her as a hassan sabi, a tomboy. Even the delivery guys, when they speak to her in Arabic, tell her “tfaddal” instead of the feminine “tfaddali” when they hold a door open for her. It might be a running joke, but she never corrects them.
“My sister had to take Dad in for a diabetes test,” Sabah says as she lifts an orange cat off the uneven kitchen table, “so I had to cover at the store this afternoon.”
“I figured you might be around today.” I blink in the dark kitchen. In the dimness, I make out the shapes of glass bottles on the counter stuffed with gerbera daisies. Her father has been bringing Sabah fresh flowers for years when she watches the shop for him, a token of affection and a way to brighten up the room, and Sabah changes the water and trims the stems of the daisies, gently, so as not to bruise them.
“Claudia’s watching the gallery for me.” Sabah moves off toward the windows, tying up one of the curtains to let a bit of light in.
“Any news about the spring show?”
Sabah motions to a pillowed chair and clears away a stack of books with one large hand. “I’m doing a studio visit in Detroit in a few weeks with an artist. I saw her solo show in LA a few months back. She makes maps of North American bird migration routes in handblown glass. Not my usual thing, but unique. I could pair her with someone more established. A double solo show, maybe for Frieze next May. People will call me crazy, but I don’t care. I want something different, I want to combine energies. I’d really love to sign the artist who’s doing those pop-up bird murals in Lower Manhattan, but they’re never signed.”
My face gets hot, but I don’t take the bait. Sabah doesn’t know that I haven’t painted anything show-worthy in years; I’ve been too busy with my private experiments. The last time I painted a self-portrait, I tried to face myself in the mirror and paint myself nude. I ended up blotting out my breasts with black paint.
I clear my throat. “Who’s gonna run the gallery while you’re in Detroit?”
“Claudia and Sami can get by while I’m not there.”
My stomach turns at the mention of his name. Sabah hands me a cup of coffee with two crushed cardamom pods floating in the foam. Her pinky finger is too big to fit into the tiny handle. She sets a tray of rosewater Turkish delights in front of us, dusting cornstarch off her hands as she sits down. Sabah used to run a bakery in her previous life, before she became a gallerist, but she still makes desserts for her father’s shop on the odd weekend, especially now that his arthritis has gotten worse. She motions toward the tray, and I take the smallest piece, hearing my mother’s voice in the back of my head, admonishing me to be polite.
“The gallery’s not what I’m worried about.” Sabah taps a tray of cookies cooling on a rack.
I pick at a loose thread in the chair cushion. “Who’s going to fill in with the baking?”
“There’s not many folks I’d trust to help Baba out. But I trust you.”
“Me?” I’ve barely been out of Teta’s apartment in the last six months, and nobody would say I know how to bake. But Sabah’s got my number—she knows I’ve got nothing else to do while Teta is napping.
Sabah pushes her chair back and rises from the table. “I’ve had your teta’s bitlawah. You’ve watched her make it.” Anything Sabah asks is rarely a question. “You can take some ma’amoul home to her.”
I follow her to fetch a pair of aprons from the cabinet. “How did I sign myself up for this?”
“I changed your diapers. You can bake some pastry.”
We wipe down the table, then flour the wood. Sabah uncovers a bowl of dough and pulls it apart while I chop a sticky pile of Medjool dates.
“Listen.” I rock the chef’s knife back and forth. “You’re the only expert I know on Laila Z’s work. Did she ever paint a bird like this?”
I wipe down my hands and open my messenger bag. I’ve brought one of your leather-bound sketchbooks, which I open to your watercolor sketch of the nesting pair from Lower Manhattan. Sabah smears flour on her apron and finds her glasses atop a sack of lentils in the corner. She stares at the bird so hard and so long I’m not sure if she has any idea what I’m asking. Then she takes off her glasses and massages the balls of her palms. Years of touching hot pans has left her with hardly any fingerprints. I wonder for a fleeting moment if Sabah, like me, finds it hard to stand being called a woman.
“I told your mother,” Sabah says into her hands, “if it’s out there, no one’s ever seen it. Somebody may have fallen for a good fake along the way, but no one’s laid their hands on one of Laila’s. Not like this.” Sabah turns away and takes up two paddle-shaped cookie molds, hand-carved, brought over from Syria by her mother. She begins to rub oil into the hollows in the center of the smooth wood. “Anyway, Laila painted real birds.”
I flinch without knowing why. “What do you mean, real?”
“Birds that actually exist.” Sabah nudges her head in the direction of the notebook. “Habibti, I respect your mother more than anyone, Allah yarhama. But she told me herself only one ornithologist had ever actually catalogued that species. He nearly lost his career—his colleagues thought he was inventing it. It’s never appeared in any field guides or surveys, not Audubon’s, not Sibley’s. And you can’t tell me a bird that rare just shows up in the middle of Manhattan fifty years later, just like that.”
“But she wasn’t the first New Yorker to see one.” I draw closer to Sabah, the sketches in my hand. “She was never wrong on an identification. Never.”
Sabah shakes her head. Her hair is pulled into a tight bun, exposing new gray at her temples. “Some of the most well-respected ornithologists checked your mother’s sketches. Wallah, she talked to Aisha Baraka. Most of the bird people said your mother must have seen some common species, maybe an albino, and been mistaken. Or maybe it was a trick of the light.”
I take up the knife again and chop dates, the veins in the backs of my hands pulsing. You follow the sun with your eyes. I could mark the hours by the longing to see you and the ache of waiting for you to dissolve into the dark. “I saw those sketches myself. You know how female scientists are dismissed.”
Sabah says nothing. She doesn’t want to talk about you. You are everywhere in this city: laughing in Abu Sabah’s shop, waiting for a man’ousheh at the bakery, giving an interview for the evening news, sketching in Prospect Park, walking west into the sunset while finches scour the sidewalk for cockroaches and bits of hot dog. Sabah and I divide the dough, and you are there with us whether we conjure you or not, petting her orange cat as she eats Abu Sabah’s tuna, making spirals in open sacks of dried chickpeas with your finger. You have no shadow and no weight to creak the floorboards. I knead the chopped dates into a paste. Your hands are on mine, the smoke traces of your skin leaving the scent of fresh thyme on the hairs on my arms. Then I blink, and you are nowhere.
I set down my towe
l. “Theoretically speaking, if there were a painting? If I could find it?”
“Could be worth a small fortune.” Sabah presses the dough into the molds and fills them with date paste, then seals them and thumps the mold onto a towel wrapped over the table’s edge to free the molded ma’amoul. “We’re talking orders of magnitude more than her other works. Six figures, easy. No one’s found anything in years. Definitely nothing like that.”
There is a moment in which the weight of this, the maddening simplicity of it, clarifies itself. The largest amount of money I ever had in my bank account—this was before you died, before I moved back in with Teta, back when I still had the time to hold down a job—was $1,500. Beyond five grand, numbers start to lose their meaning. I argue with myself, scold myself, tell myself I am just thinking of what it would mean to me to see an artist like Laila Z represented in a museum. But it’s too late for my excuses; shame runs icy down the length of my back. And yet, living in this country where my friends accrue scars and aches and ailments because they cannot afford medicine or rest or food or heat, I’m not sure what else I should feel. Money and power act on us whether we admit it or not.
I fish Laila’s notebook out of my bag and open it to the watercolor sketch that could be a replica of yours. “Laila Z and Mom can’t both be seeing things.” I flip back to the first diary entry, to the twin signatures in Arabic and English. “Mom cited Laila Z’s sketches. She was looking for evidence.”
Sabah unties her apron and holds the notebook to the light. Her eyes are wide and her voice quiet. “Ya Allah. Where did you find this?”
“Sabah.” I seek out her eyes. “They can’t both be wrong.”
A long moment passes before Sabah is willing to relinquish the notebook. For a person who rarely gets worked up over anything, her hands are shaking. She slides the tray of ma’amoul into the oven.
“Let’s say,” she says, restraining the excitement in her voice, “that a painting like this does exist. Whoever has it must be keeping it to themselves, or it would have been discovered by now. But—” She interrupts herself, and her voice drops. “Look, I’m getting ahead of myself. What good would it do to look for this painting, ‘albi? The old tenement is gone, the painter, your mother’s birds, whatever they were—gone, all of them. Your mama would want you to move on more than she would want to be vindicated, habibti.” Sabah lowers herself into a kitchen chair and settles her eyes on her own pile of bills, her father’s plastic pill tray labeled with the days of the week and the bottles beside it, a leather-bound copy of the Qur’an in miniature on its wooden stand. A newspaper on the table, ringed with a chain of coffee stains, reports another school shooting in the Midwest. Well, I think to myself. America.
Sabah is murmuring. She’s softened. “If you ever want me to go with you to the cemetery,” she says, “all you have to do is ask.”
I pack up my things, kiss Sabah goodbye on both cheeks, and walk outside into a low, brassy sun. The lamppost on the corner, the one in front of Khoury’s Fabrics, is decorated with a true lovers’ knot in indigo cord. You are two blocks down, walking away from me opposite the sunset, striding one step after another toward the coming night.
FOUR / LAILA
B,
Some nights, little wing, when our stove breaks and we can’t sleep for the cold, Khalto Tala tells us about the creatures who crossed the Atlantic long before ships ever did. The stories of fantastical creatures must have been passed down from my grandparents. My mother always claimed my jiddo was an educated man who once memorized al-Qazwini’s Marvels of Things Created and Miraculous Aspects of Things Existing. But you know how slippery a story can be. The tale of the birds might have come from a distant uncle or great-great-grandmother rather than a thirteenth-century Persian astronomer, but that doesn’t make the story less true.
The elders in my family have always said the birds went before us, long before the first of our families set off across the sea. Even before we left Syria, they’d spoken of these sixty wings, thirty arrow-shaped figures stark and snowy, an absence of color, shocks of light. Some said their wingtips were glossy blue-black, shimmering like the bellies of spiders; others said the white bodies and black markings were a myth, and that the only thing to interrupt their black plumage, dark as the moment after lightning, were their gilded breast feathers that gleamed like coins at last light. For all said that the birds took wing only at sunset. The setting sun was said to call them into the dark. They said the birds never stopped moving. It was agreed that the band of thirty flew west following the night, farther and farther with each day until they circled the planet without ever craning their necks to the east. Few had ever seen them, these birds that were the last of their kind, these birds that encircled the world like an unbroken ribbon. Most of my young cousins scoffed and denied it, and my aunties and uncles who had survived the plague of locusts shook their heads at the things their children now found too fantastical to accept.
Like all stories of things that are beautiful and true, whether or not they really happened, my mother found these stories difficult to believe. This lack of faith grieved her, because she looked for the sacred in everything. But she never, as far as I know, received a sign, not even when she held the hands of the old men of the village as they said their last goodbyes, not even in the eyes of the dying when the light went out in them. I asked her, once, what she saw when a soul passed from this world to the next, whether she saw the light of God’s kingdom. She told me only that their eyes would lock on a spot in the distance that only they could see, and they would inhale with a sigh as one does before cut roses. But she didn’t mention any light.
I still wonder how my father convinced her to cross the ocean for Amrika. When he brought up Khalto Tala’s letters, my mother wouldn’t listen. My father’s business had been failing for years, but my mother had been able to earn a modest living as a midwife to keep our family afloat—babies come whether one’s pockets are full or empty, she used to say. But my brother was of the age that yearns for adventure, and my father had heard that his son could earn a better living abroad than here in our village, where prospects were dwindling. And anyway, B, you remember the whirlwind each young man would kick up, returning to the bilad in a new American suit to find a wife and get married, only to leave the following month on a New York–bound ship from Beirut. The men who stopped in to speak with my father spoke of a city larger than Damascus, glittering terribly, her cobblestone streets filled with automobiles and rich men. The past couple of years had been hard, but they were still hopeful the good days would return, and still optimistic about the opportunities that lay ahead for them in New York. Soon my father was casually speaking at supper about the nine monthly steamships that could carry a family from one of the Syrian ports to New York. He began to repeat things I never thought I would hear him say, praising the virtues of Amrika the way some had once spoken of France, as though the Amrikiyyin possessed the education and wisdom to appreciate him in ways his countrymen did not. It was as though he thought our family was better than our neighbors. I’d long held my own unspoken opinions about my father’s lofty ideals, but that was the first time I felt ashamed about his aspirations. With each passing week, his convictions grew stronger, until he was convinced that we owed it to ourselves to leave.
It was you who made me want to stay. I would have tried, if you’d asked.
* * *
How silly I feel this evening, B. If you were here, I’d ask you to forgive me for what I wrote last night. The truth is that, after that night, I don’t blame you for not asking me to stay.
Maybe what Khalti says is true. Maybe if I write it down, I can stop carrying it.
I woke rubbing my eyes. My mother still hadn’t come back from delivering Imm Shams’s baby, and my father was nowhere to be found. He had taken, in those days, to nighttime walks around the village, as though he were saying his goodbyes in secret. As for my brother, Abu Anas had taken pity on the sorry state of my father’s busin
ess and started paying Issa to watch his shop at night.
As this ink is my only witness, I confess that I was dreaming of you when you woke me. For this, too, forgive me. If you saw my pulse in my throat when I opened the door, you didn’t show it. It was a dry summer night, but your hair was damp with sweat, and your palms were glossy with fresh blood.
My mother had taken the suitcase with her delivery kit. I threw open the trunk in her bedroom looking for supplies—a needle and thread, a spare tourniquet, old linens, a half bottle of laudanum she kept hidden for when her migraines struck. I threw my makeshift medical kit into a pillowcase and twisted the top into a knot. We ran from my house to yours, the sack bouncing. You sobbed soundless at my side. In my dream, you’d worn a yellow kerchief on your head. You’d stepped into my doorway with fresh bread from the village oven, handing me a warm piece as you might to a husband or a son. I dreamed I’d taken your hand and led you out into the fields, beyond the last houses, to where I’d seen Hawa and her flying machine fall. We knelt together where Hawa’s shoulder had kissed the earth and began to dig with our hands. You smeared your yellow kerchief with dirt. When we’d dug a hole as deep as our elbows, twilight was upon us, and the sounds of jackals started up in the distance, and I was afraid. Antares, the heart of the scorpion, shone above us. You reached into the ground and pulled out my heart, bloody and beating, and gave it to me to swallow. It tasted of copper and must. Reddish earth still under your fingernails, you leaned over and kissed me.
I expected to hear the shrieks before we reached your door, but there was nothing. A bad sign. We burst into the kitchen and found your mother on the floor, embroidered couch pillows beneath her, her thin dress and the floor smeared with blood. Your father had already gone for the doctor, but neither of them had returned yet.
The Thirty Names of Night Page 6
