The Thirty Names of Night

by Zeyn Joukhadar

  FOURTEEN / LAILA

  B,

  An unremarkable string of days. We’ve left Minneapolis for Dearborn, skipping over Chicago on our way back. Khalti says we’ll drive back to New York the way we’ve come, stopping for a week in Dearborn to visit Abu Majed and bring gifts back for our own families. Ilyas and I never seem to know what to say to each other now, though often I will set down my hand on the seat of the truck and find his there, waiting. Sometimes, when we talk, I have the feeling that I know what he’s going to say before he says it, as though I am in his body with him.

  The closer I get to Ilyas, the more I think of you.

  I’m stalling. But if I set down the whole truth here, little wing, maybe I can let you go.

  I haven’t gone a single day without tasting your lips on the corniche again, sweet and tart like salted licorice. You were so much softer than I expected, your cheek as silken as the inside of my thigh. No one was looking that day when I cut my finger on the back of your earring, or when you dabbed my blood with your handkerchief. Did you ever have a kiss like that again? Did you No, I don’t want to know. You must be married with a handful of children by now, a respectable woman, a mother, a wife. Did you throw away my locket when you married? Was your stained handkerchief inside where I folded it and tucked it tight, so that a part of me would be with you forever?

  Forgive me. I used to think of my body as a part of yours, and I never did manage to stop.

  * * *

  B,

  If Dearborn has taught me anything, it’s that life in a factory town is only calm if the factory and the town get along. There was a tension in the air when we arrived the day before last. The union has been gaining in popularity among the workers at the Rouge, the fathers coming home to their families with pamphlets and ideas mentioned in a murmur around the dinner table. It was the same in Chicago. The factory doesn’t like it much, of course, but now things seem to be building to a thunderclap.

  There had been a time, five years ago, Abu Majed told us, when workers were laid off and times were hard and people were desperate. People were starving to death every day in Detroit back then, he said. Thousands of protesters marched on the Rouge on one of the coldest days of the winter in March of ’32, all the way from Detroit, and nothing much happened until they got to the Dearborn city limits, where things started to escalate. Eventually, both police and security men started shooting into the crowd of marchers. Four workers didn’t come home to their families that night, one of them little more than a boy. Abu Majed says it’s things like this that show how important the unions are. Tomorrow, the union is planning to hand out pamphlets at shift-change time, advocating for $8 an hour and a six-hour workday. Abu Majed says there’s a lot of support for it in the community. In some departments at the Rouge, like the assembly and the foundry and the engine plant, there are lots of Arab workers, many of whom are joining the union. Majed told us tonight that he and some of his fellow workers will be there tomorrow to help pass out the pamphlets at gate four, and a few of the boys, including Ilyas, offered to come along in solidarity. I decided to go, too, and I know it’s the right decision because as soon as I said it, I felt a little braver, a little more like Khalti. Khalto Tala will come along, too, of course, though probably she’d been planning on it all along.

  We’ve exhausted the goods we brought to sell on our westward journey, so I’ve started to paint and sell canvases of birds, first in watercolor and then, when someone’s second cousin begged for a painting that would be more resistant to sun bleaching, in oils. I have a secret dream of making prints, so I’ve started making sketches, hoping one day I can etch them in copper.

  Aunties talk, and I should have known word would get around eventually. No surprise, then, that my reputation as a painter preceded me here on our way back. Word spread that the daughter of Abu Issa from New York, of the Zeytouneh family, was painting American birds. That’s how everything spreads: everyone wants to know who your people are. When we arrived in Dearborn, friends of Abu Majed were there to buy illustrations for their cousins and their children, some sign that I had been there and that they had supported me. Someone’s father requested a painting of a red-tailed hawk of the kind that used to circle his family’s duplex in Highland Park every morning; someone else’s daughter loved the quaint face of a barn owl she’d spotted gliding over Dix. I hadn’t intended to show my work to my community, but people were so sincere in their support that it would have been rude to refuse them. I never let anybody pay much, just enough that I have some pocket money, something to buy milk for Sawsan without troubling Khalto Tala. I don’t allow myself the luxury of higher aspirations, not yet.

  Ilyas stays close to me while I work, rocking Sawsan on his chest, licking his finger to remove stray specks of paint from my face late at night, rubbing my hunched shoulders after too many hours over a canvas.

  Ilyas and I haven’t spoken of the yellow-crowned night heron since that night in the marsh, and it’s the one work I made on the road that I haven’t sold, the only work that I, in fact, have refused to sell. On the ride back to Dearborn, we kept the canvas rolled up in the bed of the truck with the last few sacks of spices and jars of pickled olives, wrapped in spare blankets.

  Ilyas broke his silence today. We only have time to talk after everyone else has gone to bed, when we give Sawsan her bottle and burp her by the window before she falls asleep. Khalto Tala usually just eyes us and shakes her head—“like two buttocks in one pair of underwear,” she says. Sometimes I lay my head on his shoulder and pretend it’s possible for a long future to stretch out just like this, that this is the kind of life a person could choose. Everyone must assume we’ll get married when we get back to New York, that we’re playing at a family. New York—the thought of coming back to the city is like squeezing myself into a too-small blouse.

  Tonight, sitting together by the dark window, Ilyas lifted Sawsan to his face and rubbed her nose with his, telling her what a beautiful black-eyed girl she would be one day. I replaced Sawsan’s knitted cap on her head. Sooner or later we’ll return to New York—I must have said something like that. I don’t know why I said it, except that I couldn’t get it out of my mind and I couldn’t see beyond it. My return to New York with Sawsan and Ilyas seemed an impossibility, as though what I had once considered a normal life couldn’t exist with them in it.

  Ilyas’s face closed like a struck flower. He wrapped an arm around Sawsan’s back, and the gesture was so protective it was hard for me to imagine he’d ever give her up. I still remember what he said: “We could make something of this.” He kept his voice low so we wouldn’t wake anyone, not even Khalti with her sharp ears.

  I stuttered a moment, then said something about us playing at a regular life. I regretted it immediately. Ilyas turned to me, wounded. He had not removed his hand from mine, and his fingers were stiff and cool. He asked me, keeping his voice even, if this life weren’t real.

  It wasn’t an argument I meant to have. We can’t get attached, I whispered back.

  Ilyas pressed his lips into a line. “Are you talking about Sawsan,” he said, “or are you talking about me?”

  That took me aback. We don’t know the first thing about caring for an infant, I argued, and Ilyas countered that we’ve been doing just that, all this time. He was talking about something more than caring for Sawsan.

  I asked him if he wanted a family with me.

  He paused. He’d been controlling the volume of his voice, but I was afraid that at any moment Abu Majed would wake and enter, and I would blurt out everything. It wasn’t so much that I might blurt out that particular thing, that night by the water in St. Paul with Ilyas, because the need to say aloud what I felt for him was a need so strong that giving voice to it seemed beyond doubt, but rather that threaded into the fabric of that truth would be another truth: the dark stain of my shame, the same acid shame that rose in my chest when I kissed you on the corniche, and that this time there would be no running from it. />
  “I’ve made my choice,” Ilyas said. “Now you’ve got to make yours.”

  I am ashamed—write it!—but I said nothing then. Nothing! Ilyas took Sawsan up on his shoulder and brought her to bed. I was frozen to the windowsill, afraid that time might run backward like the tide if I moved. I thought of your hands pressing the handkerchief to the bead of blood forming on my torn cuticle, the way the tiny dots of blood made wine-colored constellations on your mother’s thin cloth. You sucked on my finger to stop the bleeding, and though I flinched, the touch of your saliva didn’t sting at all.

  * * *

  The red-winged blackbirds were calling from the trees behind Abu Majed’s house this afternoon when we left for the Rouge. We gave Sawsan to Abu Majed’s daughter-in-law, Imm Ibtisam, to look after for a few hours. Sawsan was still sleeping swaddled in her blanket, and we hoped we’d be back before she needed to be fed again.

  The day was cloudy, but warm. The weather has finally turned. It’s almost the end of May now, and here in Michigan that means the leaves are finally on the trees again, and the afternoon sun is pleasant in the worn coveralls Majed’s wife gave me; her sister used to work at the Rouge. We gathered men on our walk to the Rouge until we were a small throng. As we approached gate four on the overpass over Miller Road, there was already a group to meet us, swelling like a clot in front of the factory doors. A group of men were posed for a picture for reporters there. A second group approached them, perhaps two dozen or more, maybe company service men by the look of their trench coats and trilby hats.

  It happened quickly. One of the trenchcoated men grabbed a union worker, pulled his coat over his head, and then they were pummeling and kicking him. The fight became a brawl. Our group surged forward, the boys throwing punches. I lost Ilyas and Majed and Khalti in the scuffle. The fists seemed to be disconnected from the bodies. I tried to squirm away, only to take blows to my chest, my head, my shoulders. I blocked with my arms the way Khalto Tala had taught me. The crush of men throbbed and shoved. I found out later that one of the union men had been thrown down a flight of stairs. More men came, maybe because it was shift change and the other workers had seen us up on the overpass.

  Khalto Tala pulled Majed from the brawl. The throng of workers writhed like a single aggrieved body. The crowd was too thick to escape, so I rode the current of bodies until, taking a hard blow to my ribs that left me sputtering, I was ejected back the way we’d come. There was a dull heat, a wetness at my waist, numbness. I didn’t feel anything at first because of the adrenaline, just shock and a ringing in my ears. Ilyas limped toward me. It was as though he’d materialized out of the ground.

  “Where did you learn to fight like that?” I asked Khalto Tala, breathless.

  “You learn a few tricks when you’re a woman alone on a silver claim,” she said. She frowned and pressed a hand to my ribs. It came away bloody.

  We limped some distance from the factory before I started to wheeze. The pain was sharp and unrelenting. I collapsed in a patch of grass by the side of the road, not far from Abu Majed’s home. The fist had left a red and purple welt across my ribs that oozed pus and blood. Khalto Tala tugged a handkerchief from her pocket and pressed it to the cut. Nauseated with pain, I blinked away sparks of light. I wanted to beg her to stop, but I was afraid of what would happen if she did. I looked up at the sky. The clouds were the cream color of your mother’s handkerchief dotted with my blood.

  Ilyas’s face appeared between the clouds. I reached for him, but lifting my arm brought sharp pain. Even now, writing this in bed hours after, I have to be careful not to stretch as I write. Those first minutes of pain, real pain without the adrenaline to mask it, were sharper than any I’d ever felt. The thought crossed my mind that I’d been shot. I didn’t know what it felt like to be shot, but I thought of the Hunger March five years before in this same town, and the four dead workers, and thought that maybe shot people didn’t realize right away that they’d taken a bullet. I began to fear that I was going to slip away any second. Khalto Tala told me later that I kept asking if they’d heard gunshots, but they assured me no one had. Ilyas slipped off his jacket, folded it, and slid it beneath my head. My ribs had become a pulsing ache. The panic subsided.

  I opened one eye to Ilyas and managed a smile. “Will I live?”

  Ilyas laughed. “Tough little bird. You’ll be all right.”

  Khalto Tala bound my chest in bandages and helped me up. The weather had turned, and the afternoon air threatened rain. I grinned, the stupid grin of the newly terrified. Looking at the greening bruise of my ribs now, in spite of it all, I have to admit I’m a little proud that I’ll be able to prove all this to my mother by my scars.

  FIFTEEN /

  I WAKE UP BEFORE dawn with a sharp pain low in my belly. I’m bleeding heavily now, soaking through an overnight pad every two hours. I roll my swollen body out of bed. I’ll call someone tomorrow, or next week maybe, after Reem goes home, after we’ve finished fixing up Abu Sabah’s store. I don’t want to get the whole family in an uproar over nothing.

  The ruby-throated hummingbirds appear with the morning light as though they’re a part of my bleeding. First one flits up to the windowpane in my bedroom, and then it’s joined by a second and a third. The light unfurls in a ribbon across the floor where Reem lays, drawing a triangle of red light on my comforter, which Sami has thrown off in the night. The tendon at the back of his knee is exposed to the light, a boomerang of muscle blanketed in soft dark hair. A hummingbird flits across his pillow, and he mumbles in his sleep. He reminds me of all the brown boys I wanted to be growing up, the ones who looked like my jiddo when he was young or like the cousins I saw in photographs, lined up on the rooftop of the family home. I changed and swelled and bled, but each year they only grew taller, stronger, more angular. I could never see myself in the haughty white boys I grew up with at my private school, but I could almost locate my face in my cousins’, could almost imagine myself a body that existed for no one and nothing but myself.

  I wrest my eyes away from Sami. I want nothing more than to curl up on the couch in a ball, so I walk into the living room to escape the thrumming of the hummingbirds’ wings. But they are outside every window, their high cries filling the air. There are thousands of hummingbirds above our street now, the red sun flashing off their emerald bodies, each small enough to hold in a palm. You are seated at the windowsill, a shawl over your feet on the fire escape, as though you just might reach in for a second blanket against the chill. You are framed by the hummingbirds in a foliage of light. Asmahan swishes her tail on the sill beside you, mewling in imitation of the chirping.

  Teta has fallen asleep in her easy chair again like a sentinel, and her brows are furrowed with the look of bad dreams. People I love are mourning what they’ve lost, and the city is bleeding birds. When one of the old sisters down the hall from us went into kidney failure, her sister gave her one of hers; when she passed away, a part of her sister died, too. As a teenager I learned that the body itself can be a gift, a sanctuary, a sacrifice. Satin bowerbirds will build intricate homes for their mates and decorate them with bright blue objects—bits of ribbon, stolen jay feathers, bottle caps, worn glass—before the pursuer dances for their would-be mate, displaying his feathers and his agility. The bowerbird makes a gift of itself. Maybe it’s born knowing how to do this: the instinct to gather, to open, to bend. Or maybe instinct is only a name created to discount a wisdom to which one has no access.

  I rearrange the blanket on Teta’s lap and think of the time I asked her what it meant to love a person. It was shortly after Jiddo Jibril passed away, and though you told me Teta was grieving, she just seemed to spend a lot of time with her hands folded in thought, watching a praying mantis that had appeared on the windscreen that summer. It clung there until it froze and dropped off after one cold autumn night. Someone told me I could tell the females from the males by the number of abdominal segments, so I counted them. Female, or so it seemed. I liked being
able to categorize nature more easily than I could categorize myself.

  When I asked you for a definition of love, you gave me a list of agonies: depression and disfigurement, cancer and colostomy bags, amnesia, moody evenings, unemployment. It seemed then that love was the sum of what you could bear. I wondered if this was how you’d felt about my father, if you’d left because you could no longer justify carrying the burden you were supposed to let him lay on your back. But I couldn’t ask you that.

  The door to Teta’s room is open again. A breeze enters through the window, ruffling the photos tucked into the sides of her mirror. The closet where she keeps your boxes is open a crack. I slip into the room, and you turn to watch me. I open the closet and take out your boxes of notebooks, old scarves folded thin as paper, jewelry boxes for the earrings colleagues gave you as gifts, not knowing your ears weren’t pierced, useless treasures you couldn’t bear to give away because they’d been given out of kindness. Now I open the boxes one by one. I take out your brooches and earrings and bracelets and lay them on Teta’s bed in a line, all gold, kept carefully polished as though you were just about to wear them. You watch me from the windowsill. Hummingbirds enter the house through the tunnel in your chest, zipping around lamps and landing on the velvet back of Teta’s chair as she sleeps. They hover in the doorways and crowd the air like jeweled bees.