Bidders began to raise their hands. Soon the print was whisked off the auction stand, sold to a fat man in a bowler hat who only raised his finger and never spoke. As the auction continued, he outbid Mrs. Theodore every time—first on the red-tailed hawk, then the great blue heron with its chest whiskers bright as fresh cream, and finally the emerald-feathered Carolina parakeet—until Mrs. Theodore huffed and told me he represented a collector who never showed his face in these auctions, a certain eccentric millionaire known in the art world only as Mr. H.
After the auction was over, Mrs. Theodore, still grumbling, led me back outside to her car. I was looking out the window when out of the corner of my eye I noticed her studying me.
“So, dear,” she said, patting my head and smoothing my hair, “did you enjoy Audubon’s birds?”
I nodded. I could not figure out why she had touched me, though she’d made it seem so natural. Mrs. Theodore told me we would make one more stop before the driver took me home. When we arrived at the public library, there were newspaper photographers waiting for us. Mrs. Theodore got out of the car smiling and waving, but I shrank back. Mrs. Theodore pulled me from the car, a bit sharply but without malice, and whispered to me by way of encouragement, “Silly thing, they’re here for the winner. For you.”
After I’d held up my certificate and the photographers had taken our picture, I followed Mrs. Theodore into the library. A large glass case sat in the foyer on display, and Mrs. Theodore stopped before it and motioned for me to join her.
I was struck by the size of the book before I realized what it was. It was as big as our kitchen table at home, thick as a stone block. The elephantine book was seated on a massive stand, open to a print of two birds on a branch, the background a drab gray lake. The bird on the upper branch was brown and mottled, standing on one leg with the other drawn up beneath her. The other bird regarded her from a lower branch, his back to the viewer and his gray-blue tail feathers, fine as hair, draped from his back. He had a curious face, with a white streak beneath his golden eye and a cream-colored crown extending from the top of his head like a fan.
I recognized the style immediately—it was the same painter we’d seen at the auction house. I was struck not only by the unusual look of the bird but by the quality of the print, which was much more luminous and detailed up close. I set my hand on the glass and squinted at the shimmering watercolor, the etching of each individual feather. I traced each one on the glass with the tip of my finger and felt, for the first time, the possibility of beauty stretch out before me like a field of fire. What lines might my own hands make, I thought then, and what colors; and it was as though the whole world was laid before me to be recorded, fast slipping away into the past, and I had already wasted so much time, because there wasn’t time in this life for all that I wanted to make.
One of the library’s curators had pulled Mrs. Theodore away to greet her. Where she had stood there was now a slim Black man with a tweed driving cap in his hands, a rose-colored bow tie at his neck. He wore a fine coat with pearl buttons and polished shoes, and I felt that he must be someone very important. He held a notebook in his hand, in which he was scribbling while gazing at the painted bird.
“The yellow-crowned night heron today,” he said, then looked down at me and smiled. “They turn the pages every four days. Last week was the red-breasted snipe. Come back tomorrow, and you’ll see the American bittern.”
The man introduced himself as Benjamin, but when he shut his notebook, it was embossed Dr. Young. He explained that he was an ornithologist, a researcher who studied birds. He spent weeks in the field gathering information about all kinds of wild birds, their behaviors and habitats. He told me the world is full of creatures we don’t dare dream of; even birds who cross oceans to overwinter in South America and fly over the world’s tallest mountains.
“And your favorite bird,” I asked him. “What is it?”
He grinned and handed me his card. On the back was the same yellow-crowned night heron from the book. “I wouldn’t have missed this one,” he said, “as you can imagine.”
* * *
When Benjamin had left and Mrs. Theodore was finished, we got back into her Rolls-Royce, and she rubbed the skin between her eyebrows and sighed. The car felt stuffy and uncomfortable, as though Mrs. Theodore’s patience was running thin and she might at any moment pull the car over and make me walk home.
But then she smiled and raised a finger to her lips in a conspiratorial way. She said I must be hungry, and I said that I was. She pulled out a package of chocolates, not fancy like I had been expecting, but the kind Khalti and I might buy to share on our break at the linen shop. Mrs. Theodore tugged off her gloves and giggled, snapping off a piece of chocolate for me to share as though we were two schoolgirls. “I can hardly stand all that fuss without something sweet,” Mrs. Theodore said. “The way I see it, chocolate should be a girl’s God-given right. You people do eat chocolate, don’t you?”
Something in her voice made me feel as though I should apologize, though for what I wasn’t sure. The chocolate was milky-sweet, though, and I felt then that maybe I’d misjudged Mrs. Theodore. “Yes, ma’am.”
She gazed at me in the way I’d seen her gaze at the mannequins in Mr. Awad’s shop. She licked her fingers and tucked a lock of black hair behind my ear. In that moment I regretted my reticence to being touched and that I’d been afraid of her. I wished we had a whole string of afternoons to spend together, like sisters, lying in some grassy place we could reach with her car and eating chocolate in the warm midday.
“You’re just as cute as a bug’s ear, aren’t you?” Mrs. Theodore lifted my chin with a pink finger. “A little lighter, and you would have really been beautiful.”
I burned and jerked my face away. Mrs. Theodore did not give me any more chocolate, and I did not speak for the rest of the car ride. I fingered my colored pencils in my pocket and stuffed down that furious urge to apologize for something I couldn’t name. I still felt the eyes of the bidders from the auction house on the dirty hem of my dress. My family hasn’t had a plugged nickel to our names since we arrived in this city, but no one had ever made me feel dirty. What beautiful things are left in the world for people like us, B? The birds that led us into the west and the night were no less beautiful than Audubon’s herons or cranes. But Amrika’s enchantment has erased any trace of those birds from my mother’s stories. Sitting in Mrs. Theodore’s Rolls-Royce after the taste of the chocolate had gone, I tongued the grit of my mother’s turmeric between my teeth.
When the car pulled up in front of our building, my mother was standing in the doorway talking to a man who worked at my father’s factory, his cap in his hands. It was the union representative who’d helped him get the job.
I stepped out of Mrs. Theodore’s car. The door closed behind me, and the car sped away. Looking back as it disappeared around the corner of Rector, it was easy to imagine it had never been there at all. I looked down. I had dented my certificate with my thumbs.
My mother turned to me as though I had materialized out of the air. My father’s friend beside her was smeared with oil and something that I took, at first, for beet juice.
There had been an accident.
Issa was still at school, so my mother and I rushed over on foot to my father’s factory. That afternoon was the first time I saw real fear in my mother’s eyes. I imagined my father’s mangled body, the smell of blood. Though my mother was once a dresser of the dead, I had never imagined what I would say to a dying man. A sea of union workers greeted us at the factory doors. The union man led us to a great machine with teeth as large as my head. A figure was crumpled up there, one hand in the belly of the iron wheel.
My mother fell to her knees beside my father. Half-delirious with pain, he laid his head against the wheel, now still, as though he were concentrating very hard on something he knew once but had forgotten.
My mother examined my father’s crushed hand. A union worker told her a docto
r was on the way, but my mother only glared at him and went back to her handiwork. She had seen enough amputations over the years—seen folks’ hands crushed by cart wheels or legs gashed by plows. But there was something different about my mother now, some hesitation I’d never noticed.
My mother worked the gears and asked for oil. One of the union men poured a dark liquid on my father’s hand, and my mother worked the motor oil into the spaces between my father’s ruined fingers. He moaned. One by one the fingers came free—all but one, which had been eaten by the machine and remained, bloodless and gray, in the teeth of the wheel.
The crowd of union workers began to cheer, but my mother and I remained silent as she tied a tourniquet around the severed knuckle and wrapped my father’s hand in strips of linen. Without my father’s job at the factory, we wouldn’t be able to eat, and this would be added to his string of disappointments. My mother rubbed a smear of motor oil from the lapel of his work shirt. Then, setting her hands under each of his arms, she lifted my father from the floor. She moved with slow dignity, ignoring the presence of the union workers. It was almost possible to believe that none of this was really happening, that she could take my father home on her shoulder and all would be well. But something heavy remained in her eyes. I wondered if these were the stones that had lined her belly with each death in the village, with each miscarriage. My mother had coaxed life into the world and led it out again, but perhaps those passages had each left their mark on her as well, as a mountain of even the smallest pebbles becomes an unbearable weight. All these years, I’d seen my mother carry the burdens of grief, birth, death, war, and disfigurement with a superhuman strength. But perhaps my mother could not, in the autumn of her life, bear so heavy a stone.
Later that evening, as my brother and my father slept in the bed beside us, I woke to the sound of my mother crying. It was the first time in years that I’d seen her cry. The night murmurs mostly hid her sobs, and in the dark it was impossible to make out the shuddering of her shoulders.
I called to her in a whisper. At first, she sniffled and said nothing. Then she lifted her head and whispered back, “Hayati, will you rub your mother’s back?”
I sat up and laid my hands on her shoulder blades. The muscles of her back had been twisted for so long around her ribs and her shoulders that it was like caressing a thick vine. I pressed the balls of my palms into the plane of her broad back. She didn’t cry anymore, only lay silent on the narrow mattress. It occurred to me then that I would not have woken to her crying in the night in our house at home in Syria, now half a world away, and I wondered how many times my father had heard her sobs and pretended, as a mercy, to sleep.
“What did they see, Mama?” I murmured to her. “What was it that came to meet the birds that flew into the west?”
My mother stayed quiet for a moment. I kneaded her back and read in her skin the fate that had awaited her, and her mother before her, and her mother’s mother before that. This was a back that had carried the pain of others until it had become impossible for her bones to unbend themselves, like certain saplings will become permanently twisted under the force of windstorms. I thought of Hawa, whether it was this slow bending she had tried to escape with her linen wings, and whether there was any mercy in the world for those who decline to carry the burdens they are assigned to carry. My mother’s back and mine were made from the same mold. Our spines were fashioned for bearing and bending and bowing and burying. Our backs had been honed over generations for the thankless labor of women. They had never been made for wings.
My mother turned her face to me over her shoulder. “What came,” she said, “was night, with all its names.”
NINE /
REEM’S PRESENCE ANNOUNCES ITSELF, as always, before I even open my eyes: the tap of warm metal on my nose, the click and buzz of electric wings. I swat the air and come up empty-handed. On the windowsill sits a mechanical starling, my sister’s latest invention, courtesy of a lifelong passion for building things and an engineering degree wasted at a consulting job. I call it a starling only because, with its coat of iridescent black paint, the flash of circuitry within its hollow body, and its solar-powered wings, I don’t know what else to call it this early in the morning.
Grease pops in the kitchen. The mechanical bird skitters across the sill and zips out into the hallway. The apartment smells of French toast and floral perfume. A giant mountaineering backpack the color of an overbaked sweet potato is sitting on the floor in front of my bed. I shove the thing out of my way, and it thuds to the floor. One of the zippers has come undone, revealing a soldering gun and a massive tool kit.
The thud prompts an immediate response: “Careful with that!”
I groan and amble into the kitchen. Reem is tall and dragonfly-lean, flitting about pouring Arabic coffee with cardamom and flipping toast onto our plates. She’s dressed in a gray linen sack dress she somehow pulls off, her toes painted the same plum as her lipstick. She’s glossed her thicket of black curls with henna, turning her hair a deep shade of wine. Teta is seated in her easy chair in the living room, laughing at something Reem’s said.
“Your sister’s home,” Teta calls to me from the living room.
I pour myself into a kitchen chair. “To what do we owe your majesty’s presence?”
The mechanical bird buzzes into the room and alights on Reem’s shoulder. She turns to me, and her face is a perfect replica of yours. She eyes me with that don’t-sass-me look she’s been perfecting ever since she hit thirty-five, as though I were her child rather than her kid sibling.
“I had a lull in clients and decided to come down for a week or two. Wallah, if there’s anything I’ve learned from consulting, it’s that I got way more sleep as an engineer.” She hands me a demitasse of Arabic coffee. “We can fit another mattress in there, right?”
I fumble the coffee cup. It spills onto my lap, but I bite back a yelp and manage to catch it before it smashes. “No way. Not gonna happen.”
Reem bends over to feed Asmahan a bit of turkey bacon, and Asmahan licks her fingers, twining her tail around one of Reem’s legs. “I’m not crashing on the couch. Those days are behind me.”
Asmahan lays herself across Reem’s feet. Teta calls out, “The air mattress is in the hall closet, habibti. I washed the blue sheets.”
I shoot Asmahan a dirty look. “Traitor.”
Reem shakes off her hands and pulls her hair into a half-updo atop her head. Her hands could be your hands. As she reaches up, her racerback dress reveals a tattoo at the base of her neck, but she fans out her curls, and I wonder if what I saw was only a trick of the light.
“If you want to blame someone,” she says without turning to look at me, “blame your best friend the wandering minstrel, not the cat.”
“Sami?” I frown and scratch my belly below the hem of my T-shirt, and my fingernails come away with pen ink underneath. “He called you?”
Reem hesitates. She glances at me from over her shoulder and waves a sponge in my direction. “Forget it. Just get over here and wash.”
The sun is strong on the window. Reem is reflected in the glass in brown, plum, and merlot. After she left home and you got divorced, I spent years hating the way our father was still present in my face, hating the nose I’d inherited, the pink of his palms, the freckles that appeared in summer, the five different shades of foundation I’d need to cycle through if I spent an hour outside. In high school, I used to hate visiting him and his new girlfriend, a white woman from New Rochelle who gave me unsolicited advice about my body hair and always claimed to forget that I didn’t eat bacon. Reem looks nothing like our dad; she could be your sister rather than mine. She was living two hundred and twelve miles away in Cambridge when you died, yet the minute she walks in the door, she belongs. I will never understand how two people with the same parents can come out so different. Once, in art school, I sketched her while she read a magazine, and I ended up drawing you instead.
“Forget the dishes.” I pu
ll my knees to my chest. “I thought you had some big product launch next month.”
Reem pulls an empty chair toward her and settles down with one leg up. “The team can prep without me.”
That doesn’t sound like her. “Can you at least get that alien yam out from in front of my bed?”
“That alien yam has gotten me over the Himalayas, so show some respect. But we have to make space for the mattress anyway.” Reem curls around her coffee like a smug cat. “And before you say no—we’re going out tonight. No excuses.”
* * *
I beg Reem and Sami not to take me dancing again, so Sami packs his oud and the three of us get on the 3 from Crown Heights and ride up to 14th Street. Qamar meets us at this noodle place in the West Village that Reem’s been craving since she left New York. We end up on Bleecker with our takeout boxes, Sami traipsing ahead of us in his best runway walk until he’s got a group of college girls in the Marc Jacobs shop window whispering and staring. Qamar whistles, then joins him, first draping their keffiyeh like a fur stole, then vogueing their way back. Pretty soon we’ve claimed a stretch of sidewalk for our own personal runway, and even Reem whoops and snaps.
A flock of two dozen grackles follows us overhead, eyeing our takeout boxes. When we stop at an intersection, I bend down to retie my shoelace and touch the ground. I see the city as the birds do: they trace the road that once ran along the shore here through the marshland called Saponickan, its branches carrying travelers up to what is now Harlem. These roads may be paved over, but their travelers are not gone. You used to tell me stories of jinn; all the other Arabs I know believe in ghosts.
The Thirty Names of Night Page 12
