The Thirty Names of Night

by Zeyn Joukhadar

  After the storm had eased and everyone had settled into sleep, I escaped and climbed the ladder to the deck. I emerged to a cotton fog and the sting of salt. Above me, the mast disappeared into the starless gray night.

  A boy was standing at the starboard rail, his head cocked toward something in the water. Now and then, he tugged on the worn coat draped around his shoulders. His linen pants had long ago grown too short for his legs, revealing the tendons on the backs of his ankles and his old leather sandals. He seemed totally unaware of my presence. As the mist drifted over the deck of the ship, I began to question whether he was there at all.

  When he spoke, I jumped. “They’re following us,” he said, as though he were continuing a conversation we’d been having.

  I crept closer until I was beside him at the rail. He kept his gaze on something off the side of the boat. He sported a fuzz of mustache over his lip, and the black hair at his temples merged into the soft down of boyhood on his cheekbones. He continued speaking as though he were irritated at having to repeat himself, telling me the birds had been following us for a day now. Before I could ask what he meant, a shape unfolded itself from the mist beside the boat, then a second. Two small birds, white-bellied with gray-brown backs and a crescent of charcoal under their eyes, adjusted their wings to buoy themselves on the night breeze. The boy explained that they were storm petrels, identifiable from the black markings under their eyes. He thought they were lost or wounded to have followed us so far, maybe blown to us by the storm winds. Their legs were thin as dandelion stems. It dawned on me that this boy must have made this voyage before, and I told him so.

  He turned to me. On the side of his face that had been hidden, his iris was flecked with scar tissue, as though he’d been burned. He’d been turned away once before, he said. The doctors had mistaken eye damage from the glare off the water for trichoma. There was something mysterious about him that I couldn’t quite decipher, so I asked him what his parents’ names were, and what village he was from. He hesitated at first, then flicked his eyes to the ghosts beside the ship’s rail as though he hadn’t heard me. He told me his parents were waiting for him. I assumed he meant in New York and didn’t press the matter. He couldn’t have been much older than me, his voice not yet dropped, his eyes still with that big-eyed look of childhood.

  Before I could say anything else, my brother’s voice called to me from the fog, and the boy slipped away. Issa strode toward me across the deck, his hands in the pockets of his overcoat. Fog pooled in his elbows and glazed the stiff wool with droplets. He held up an object, breathless and grinning.

  Issa has always managed to retain a boyish wonder in things and people, no matter how my parents tell him it’s inappropriate for a boy his age, a firstborn son on the verge of manhood, to be so delighted by a flower or by sunlight on the water in the afternoon. I’d always been taught that men were wise and firm and never wondered at anything. Yet my parents have not succeeded in dissuading him from coaxing dry patches of earth to bear violets or from imitating the whistled languages of insects.

  Issa bent his shoulders toward me and opened his hand. Inside was a linen pouch, little thicker than cheesecloth, secured with a drawstring. Shaking out its contents into his hand, he told me he’d met a man on the ship from Cairo, a botanist bringing a collection of seeds to Amrika, where he hoped to build a greenhouse and conserve rare plants. He took a single brown seed between his thumb and forefinger and held it up before a squinted eye. The botanist had said these seeds came all the way from Ethiopia, from a tree that grew in the mountains. After college, my brother said, perhaps he could work for him.

  He spoke with such confidence that his dreams seemed close enough to reach out and touch. In that moment, under the milky moonlight, Issa’s stiff overcoat reminded me of the men I’d grown up with, the fathers and jiddos who met over coffee to discuss politics, while at home their wives discussed who had sons in need of wives. With a snap of the fingers, our futures would diverge one day, and I would have to watch my brother walk through doors that would remain forever shut to me.

  “Have you told Baba you’re going to be a botanist now?” I said, more harshly than I should have.

  The petrels glided through the mist some distance from the boat, ever silent, eyeing us with detached curiosity. Issa put the seeds back into their linen pouch and slid his hands back into his pockets, lowering his face toward the water. I regretted what I had said just then. My brother had still not noticed the birds. I considered calling out my future, too, to the witness of those phantoms, but I didn’t want to lie, and I couldn’t think of a single plausible future I wanted to name.

  * * *

  On the day we arrived in New York, the sky and sea were the dull gray of a kitchen knife. Though it was spring, the wind raked our necks with ice. Fog had become a constant companion in the mornings, and my parents grumbled of their fears that the ship would pass by the statue and her torch without seeing her. But as the men were gathering on deck to begin the morning’s lookout for land, a flock of white egrets soared overhead. As they passed, the sea cracked and the fog parted, and the birds cut the mist before them like dogs through a pasture of goats.

  After that, the winds were with us, and before long, a crowd gathered on the deck. An anxious silence settled over us. Issa took my hand and tucked it into the pocket of his overcoat. A strip of fog on the horizon darkened, and soon a silhouette with an outstretched hand appeared across the water. The families around me held their breaths. Her arm emerged, and her torch, then her patinaed face with its uplifted chin.

  For a moment no one said anything. I shut my eyes and thought of you, as though your memory could prevent Amrika’s enchantment of forgetting from falling on me like a sheet of rain. I’d expected cheers to erupt the moment we entered the harbor, but instead a quiet weeping began to spread across the masses on the deck. The sobbing grew until everyone around me, save Issa, was weeping. The cries of joy became zagharit, as though this were a wedding and the guest of honor had arrived at last. Men took off their red tarboushes and threw them into the sea. Women lifted their hands to heaven and praised God for his mercy. But nausea rose in me, and I slipped my hand into my pocket and closed my fingers around your hidden wing.

  I untangled my other hand from Issa’s and turned back. Gazing out toward the place we’d left behind, the ocean was wider than any desert. In the white foam of the ship’s wake, the discarded tarboushes of my countrymen bobbed up and down behind us like flakes of rust.

  As the ship pulled into the harbor, Ellis Island’s arched portals became visible, its four copper-domed spires and its red brick. We waited as immigration officials boarded us at the harbor to process the first- and second-class passengers; then we in steerage were ferried to Ellis for processing. Everyone tumbled off the ship, speaking their own tongues, and pulled their baggage up the stairs into a great open hall. I would have given anything to see a familiar face just then, but when I saw the crush of people and the gruff way the American officials spoke to the passengers, I was glad you weren’t there. My mother crossed herself and muttered a prayer.

  As the other passengers fanned out to sit on the long rows of wooden benches, translators were located. My parents could speak no more than the few words of English Khalto Tala had tried to teach us, and Issa’s lessons proved to be in vain, so we were brought to a man by the name of Hamawi with a curled mustache and a caramel for Issa and me.

  “Alhamdulillah!” my mother said when the man addressed my father in Arabic. Finding someone from Hama, someone who might even know my father’s business partners or friends, seemed a bewildering miracle. Mr. Hamawi asked us our names, where we were from, and how much money we’d brought with us. There were throngs of people all around us, mostly young men with steamer trunks dressed in their only suits, still blinking. After a time, we were ferried into a long series of rail-edged lines, like cattle, until we reached a large desk where a man sat with a buttonhook and a piece of chalk. The exami
nation was quick: the doctor shone a light into our sore eyes, looked us over, and, marking our coats with chalk, pronounced us healthy, despite my fears of meeting the same fate as the boy on the ship.

  Then Mr. Hamawi informed us that in America it was best to have names that the Americans could pronounce. My name was all right, he said, but my brother’s was too uncommon to take with him. Poised with his pen above the paper that would change everything, Mr. Hamawi made suggestions, settling on Joseph, though Joseph was not at all a translation of Issa. And so Issa became Joseph. Our family name, too, would have to be adjusted for transliteration into English. His pen crackled across the paper, and just like that it was as though our family name had never existed, and the fist of Amrika’s enchantments began to close around us.

  As my brother and I picked up our family’s steamer trunk, I caught a glimpse of a boy in a too-large overcoat, one eye flecked with scars.

  “Ya sabi!” He didn’t hear me, and before I could drop my end of the steamer trunk, my mother pulled me into line in front of her. A man crouched before us with a camera raised to his eyes. There was an explosion of light, and my mother told me I was a real Amrikiyah now, the kind of girl who has her picture taken.

  The boy was gone again. We joined the throng of arrivals in their tweed jackets and Sunday hats and rushed toward the wooden post beyond the registry booth, where relatives were waiting.

  A woman moved toward us through the crowd. She was a good head taller than my father, so tall that she made my mother look like a child. She walked with shoulders curved forward as though protecting a flame from the wind. There was a light in her eyes, the same mischievous light that sometimes came over Issa’s face when he discovered something beautiful that he couldn’t explain.

  “Ta’burni,” the woman cried out in a deep voice, and all the other families fell silent. You bury me. It was the highest declaration of love I’d ever heard.

  I hadn’t seen Khalto Tala since I was small. Her warmth barreled toward us across the room, pushing aside wooden benches and towering over bespectacled men. Little wing, you’ll believe me when I tell you that people can’t help but be drawn to Khalto Tala. Rather than dressing in the plain woolen dresses and slippers my mother had always worn, Khalto Tala was dressed in her Sunday best, but with new twists: she had exchanged the shawl over her hair for a jaunty felt hat girded by a silver ribbon. Her plaid dress was cinched at the waist, a look that gave her a breezy, Parisian air. As she rushed toward us, the square heels of her black patent leather shoes click-clacked against the red tile floor. She had framed her smile with bold red lipstick. There was something different about her, even compared with the sophisticated ladies going in and out of St. Georges Hotel in Beirut. Khalto Tala had blossomed.

  I should stop here for tonight, little wing—Khalti will be putting out the candle as soon as her mending is done. I haven’t done her justice in these pages. Sometimes I think back to the day we lost our names and wonder if she, too, had to give up her name to that piece of paper for the silver ribbon in her hat, and whether she feels it’s been a fair trade.

  * * *

  Little wing,

  Another day is over at school and at the linen shop, and I am lying here, exhausted by the spring chill and by my chores. It’s been weeks since I last wrote anything in this journal, I have so little to tell. Sometimes I wish I could show you my drawings. There are so many new birds here, B. Even after a heavy snow, I spot cardinals like lost red mittens on my way to school. Now the orange-breasted robins are coming back, too. I started sketching them for you—as though I’d ever have the courage to mail a single page—but then I discovered I liked drawing the birds for their own sake. Khalto Tala has been promising to get me a paint set soon, if we can pull together the money with some extra piecework. She even said she’d help me send one of my drawings to a contest here in the city in honor of somebody named Audubon who also used to paint birds. Khalti heard about it from one of the women in the local chapter of the United Ladies Syrian Society, which she says should keep my mother from scolding me about the contest fee.

  The island of Manhattan is more a chain of cliffs and canyons than a city, which makes it perfect for spotting birds. The rock doves wander everywhere, perched on the sides of buildings, fluttering in great spirals over the parks, adorning the laps of statues and the stoops of brownstones. I thought they’d be too shy to approach the busier streets, but they strut right down the Great White Way with its neon, its dancers on their way to rehearsal, its Arrow Collars ads in lights. Strings of weary newsboys lift their chins from their hands to shoo them away from their perches atop stacks of papers. The first time I caught sight of the 6th Avenue elevated, I spotted an American lady in a fur coat tossing the last bite of a sandwich to a group of pigeons on the sidewalk, who squawked and clawed over it. I gaped at everything in those early days: the bolt of birds that appeared from the gutters and the rooftops to devour even the smallest crumb, the wooden-sided car that pulled up for the woman in her fur and pearls, the maze of blue veins beneath the pale bone of her wrist, as though she were held together by the skin on a cup of curd.

  Everything about this city has been so different than I imagined it would be. When the ferry from Ellis Island landed at Battery Park at last, I spent the fifteen-minute walk—my brother and I hauling our steamer trunk between us—waiting to see the elegant house I’d dreamed of, with its sculpted staircase and great wrought iron railings. Khalti told us we weren’t far from Wall Street, but though I tried to picture well-to-do blond men on their way to the Stock Exchange who would lift their gray hats to my mother and me, we didn’t see them. In fact, as we continued uptown, the buildings became more tightly packed and the cobblestones less even. On one corner, a line of men curled around the block in worn coats and hats with chewed brims, waiting for bread. We passed bakeries with signs in Hebrew and Russian, and then my ears caught flashes of Arabic from the crowds: Washington Street, the place Khalto Tala announced was home. The road was packed with pushcarts and vendors selling vegetables, halawa, tea, roasted watermelon seeds, tin pots, religious statuettes, and an assortment of household goods. Men sat outside restaurants with names like Lebanon and Byblos smoking arghile, mustaches oiled and hair slicked, their shirts damp from the day’s work. We passed an empty lot where a building had been torn down; its neighbor’s blank brick facade bore a hand-painted advertisement for a cola whose name I couldn’t make out. Soon we came upon rows of houses crammed like wood shavings in a tinderbox, the alleys between them strung with lines of yellowed laundry. There was only milky daylight the day we arrived; the haze of smog tends to temper the sun. Children played on the steps of the buildings and in the alleyways, some searching the garbage for glass bottles or bits of discarded food, kicking aside scrawny cats. Farther in the shadows of these alleys were plywood huts, some decorated with lithographs with grimy frames, some insulated with newsprint, and Khalto Tala told me these huts house the families who lost their jobs and got evicted. The stink of smoke and car exhaust filled the air, the gutters were stained with soot, and the drains were stuffed with the rusted corpses of cockroaches.

  My first impression of our building was of suffocating closeness. Khalto Tala led us into hallways where children hid behind their mothers’ skirts and women hummed over their sewing machines. Our apartment—shared with Khalto Tala—was little more than half the size of our house in Syria. The walls of the narrow bedroom were covered with faded orange wallpaper, pressing in on the bunk bed and the mattress on the floor, and the cold kitchen was barely large enough to fit a wood stove and a metal wash bucket.

  My mother set about making the apartment a home, tsking those first few days that Khalti had sacrificed her femininity to this squalid place. Since the very moment we moved in here, my father started to talk about finding a job and moving us somewhere else. He still had something of his youthful charm, and it didn’t take him long to become fast friends with a man from Zahle who lived next door. He worked
at a factory and represented the union. After coffee and tawleh one evening, this man offered to try to get him a job at the factory where he worked. Someone else had gone home to his own country, he said. This life is not for everyone, my father’s friend said, and these days my father has taken to saying this, too. When my father comes home from the factory in his denim overalls and wool cap, he says he enjoys a hard day’s work. He got a good job making machine parts for printing presses, one of the few manufacturing jobs you can find in New York these days. My mother told me the man before him had been paid three times my father’s wages, but I doubt it would have mattered to him. He’s proud to feel useful.

  Within a few weeks, I started walking from school in the afternoons straight to the linen shop on Rector Street where Khalto Tala found a small job for me. She works in the back room embroidering ladies’ negligees or doing lacework for tablecloths, and I help her, bending over the dented table and wiping sweat from my eyelashes until it’s time to go home. It’s not glamorous, but it has its bright moments. There’s a dry goods shop next door, so every now and then, when Khalto Tala goes outside for a cigarette break to rub her sore hands, she gives me a coin for a bit of chocolate or some taffy. In the beginning, when we had a few moments to ourselves, she would pull out a book and teach me to read. I’m a quick study, she says, not just with English but with everything. Over the past year I started bringing books home from school to read to her and chatting away with the shopkeeper next door. It’s gotten so that I dread the moment Mr. Awad calls us back into the shop and away from my stories. Khalto Tala brags to my mother about my English, but has sworn me to secrecy about her smoking.