Ilyas has been quiet these past few weeks. Sometimes I hear him downstairs, chatting or exchanging boasts with Majed and his brothers. He busies himself, helping Abu Majed clear away a fallen tree or fix a crack in the roof. It bothered me at first, the way the men seem to understand Ilyas in a way I don’t, the way he sits among them and is served at dinnertime, the way they’ve absorbed him and treat him with an assumed respect. He inhabits a world that is closed to me, and knowing this and being unable to do anything about it stings. But Ilyas has had to navigate men in the same ways that I’ve had to navigate them, ways that have become much clearer to me now. The world seems full of men to be avoided and negotiated with and fled from, weapons that might accidentally go off or icebergs to be steered clear of: the men who tell me their wives are home when they aren’t, the man whose living room I bolted from, leaving all my wares, when I felt his hand wandering. Sometimes I wonder at all the things Ilyas and I could have accomplished in this life were it not for the shoals of men we’ve had to make detours to avoid.
Ilyas has begun to remind me, in small ways, of my father, before his injury. My father’s stubborn belief opened him to the knife of disappointment, and I have always secretly thought him naive. Watching Ilyas, I wonder if I judge him too harshly. Ilyas sometimes makes a plate of apples sprinkled with lemon juice and eats them beside me in bed, Sawsan twitching beside us with sleep, and I catch myself remembering that he carves each moment of joy from the jaws of a world that seeks, every day, to devour him. Sometimes I remember this is true of both of us, and then to believe in anything, let alone joy, seems a lonely tightrope walk.
Yesterday, I felt a little stronger, so I asked Ilyas to walk with me out into the field so I could watch a pair of egrets hunting for fish in the shallow pond. The spring has turned cold again here in Michigan, and the shawl around my shoulders was thin. Ilyas draped his flannel work shirt over me and rubbed the backs of my arms.
As we watched the egrets, Ilyas began, unprompted, to speak of his childhood. It was the first time he’s talked about his past or his family; I’ve never asked him. Perhaps I’ve been afraid of what he would say.
He spoke of his mother, a seamstress from Tarabalus who kept silkworms, a valuable—and difficult—business. The family owned a small grove of mulberry trees, the leaves of which the silkworms ate, and harvested toutes when the berries ripened. She was a kindhearted woman, but she wanted a safe, traditional life for her child. She had laid out Ilyas’s future for him since he was small: a husband with prospects, a respectable man, a marriage in the church. She told Ilyas he would have beautiful sons and taught him to plait his black hair. She bathed him in milk and scrubbed him with turmeric to give him a smooth, pale complexion, the better to attract a good husband. She had grown up in the mountains, and she was a beautiful, rugged woman, large of frame, her hair divided into two fat braids shot through with silver. When she sang, she clapped her hands, and her voice traveled for miles. She knew all the old folk songs, all the hymns, and in church on Sundays, hers was the voice the congregation listened to when they forgot the words. Her husband died during the famine that hit the mountains before I was born, after the arrival of the locusts. Ilyas’s older brother had worked from a young age, and the family had only survived because of the value of their silkworms. Ilyas left his mother and brother behind when he left for Amrika, obtaining forged identification that marked him as a man. If he’d been caught dressing that way in New York, he could have been arrested for lewd behavior; with American women, the police would send them home to their parents, but far worse things would have befallen a boy like Ilyas. He’d spent most of his life unable to imagine he might survive beyond adolescence. The moment his name was recorded at Ellis Island as a man, he said, was the moment he finally began to imagine a future for himself.
The egrets had long since flown off. We stood in the cold field, the nodding heads of the grass stiff with frozen dew. A skein of ice drifted across the surface of the water. I wanted to ask Ilyas if his mother had tried to understand how he felt. But I knew as well as he did the weight of ‘ayb, the shame a thing like that would bring on a family.
Ilyas plucked a stem of grass and rubbed it between his fingers. He’d gone up to Harlem once, he said, after he’d arrived, to one of the rougher speakeasies without a doorman. He was looking for others like him. Ilyas met a woman there named Duke who sang dressed in men’s clothes, a tuxedo and top hat. That was the only place you could go, she told him, where nobody would take a swing at you or call you bulldagger or sissy, especially if you were Black. Ilyas started to go there every weekend to hear Duke sing. Within a couple of months, though, cops had raided the place, and the last time he’d seen Duke and his other friends, they were being dragged off in cuffs. Ilyas, terrified and ashamed, escaped out the back of the building and managed to get away with barely a word from the police. It was because he was light enough to pass, in his good clothes, for an American boy out on the town. The cops, he said, looked through him, and for that, I don’t think he’s ever forgiven himself.
We turned back to the house. I said nothing. I was nauseous, uneasy. In the distance, downtown Detroit was just visible. Back in New York, the recently returned will be greeted with haflehs and dancing, but the city will not notice. Migrating birds will navigate around the smoke of New York’s factories. How different the world would look if it had any mercy toward migrations undertaken as a last resort against annihilation.
* * *
That night, everyone had dropped off to sleep by the time Ilyas came to my bedside with a cup of chamomile tea and a kiss on my forehead. There was no way we could sleep in the same bed at night, but he often snuck up to see me under the pretense that, should he find anyone awake, he had been checking if I needed something.
Sawsan had drunk her milk and dropped off to sleep. Ilyas sat down by the window, rubbing his shoulder. I slid out of bed and made my slow way over to him. I’m mostly healed, but I get short of breath from walking.
At the touch of my hands, Ilyas waved me away. He lifted his shirt. Underneath, he had wrapped strips of cloth tight around his chest. As he untied the knot that held them, the cloth fell to his hips in sweat-stained rings, leaving stripes of bruises on his ribs. He had left them wrapped too long.
I touched his shoulder again. He seemed as far away as a continent, beyond my power to reach, let alone comfort. He turned. His chest was bare, his brown nipples swollen violet, inflamed lines crisscrossing his skin where the tight strips of fabric had cut too deep. I reached for him and caught his eye, but he flinched and retreated from my touch.
“Don’t,” he said.
We were standing by the window. The waxing moon emerged from behind a cloud, illuminating the frozen field. Three shapes slid across the moon in silhouette, narrow as knives, their black wings sleek, their long, curved beaks. The birds were iridescent, huge, like my mother’s stories of the birds that followed the night. As they spiraled away into the forest, I imagined that nothing, not even those moon-slicked wings, could be as lovely and true as the stories I’d been fed as a child. Nothing was ever as beautiful as it was promised.
There was a voice from the door, and Ilyas and I froze with my hand on his chest. Khalto Tala stood in the doorway, her eyes downcast, her hand on the knob. I don’t remember what she said—probably she told Ilyas to put ice to his ribs. I remember she added I’m telling you this because I care for you both, but at the time all I felt was fear. Ilyas pulled away from me, slipped his shirt on, and left the room without a word.
I made Khalto Tala promise not to tell, but it didn’t matter. She saw us, little wing, saw us on the corniche that morning in Beirut. She said she thought I was upset and confused and would perhaps outgrow what I was feeling, so she had said nothing.
Little wing, I could never outgrow you.
“Habibti”—I remember there was genuine regret in Khalto Tala’s voice—“some things are possible for a woman in this world. Others are not.” A w
oman’s path is written for her and seldom escaped, she said, and not everyone was like her. The aunties and uncles might call a stranger majnouna, but family is different, and there are some things, she said, about which even she must keep silence.
I thought of the widow Haddad on the roof, tending to her pigeons. “I love him, Khalti.”
She got up to shut the window that faced the pond. A strip of purplish light was growing on the horizon. Khalti told me a story.
After she had given up on her silver claim, she’d packed her things and hiked back toward the nearest town. It was miles away, and she was deep into the hills, and the snows were coming. She got lost. She stopped that night and slept the miserable sleep of an empty stomach. In the morning, she said, she awoke to a silver-black fox sitting on the ridge that overlooked her camp. He was so big that he might have been a young wolf, were it not for his black face and paws. As Khalti pulled on her boots, he rose and looked over his shoulder, as though he were leading her. It seemed a sign. She followed—like a fool, she added—leaving everything behind. The fox led her along the river, then deeper into the hills as the day grew, until she had well and truly lost her way. She began to be afraid, but continued to follow. The sun sank. The fox proceeded, always glancing back to be sure that she was there.
As the day was drawing to a close, they overtook the ridge of a low mountain. Khalto Tala stopped to catch her breath. In the valley below was the town she’d been searching for. If she descended, she would find food and shelter and return to New York the following morning. But the fox stood on the ridge, inviting her deeper into the forest. Through the trees lay a rocky path, the kind that often leads to veins of silver. Birds she’d never heard were calling in the dusk. The fox waited. But Khalto Tala went down into the town, and when she looked back, the fox had disappeared.
I asked her if she ever wondered what she would have found if she’d kept going, but Khalti shook her head. “To go on would have been foolish, selfish, maybe deadly. My loved ones were waiting to hear that I was safe. I had people counting on me that I couldn’t let down.”
I sat on the bed after Khalto Tala left. I, too, have loved ones waiting for me in New York, parents who are counting on me to lead a respectable life, to find a husband and become a mother, to be the face of my community in this world we now inhabit. I have a brother whose education needs financing, who will one day need a good reputation to find a wife. There has never been room in these long-laid plans for me to drink my fill of desire. There has never been room in this world for you or for me, ya habib ‘albi. And now here I am on the banks of Lake Michigan, and I have still not chosen for myself, have never truly chosen, and I am still looking to the sky for signs, reading coffee grounds for something I can use as an omen.
Let the record show, little wing, that you were with me tonight in Michigan, that I carry you with me in the form of stitched feathers. Let these pages bear witness that I came to this city to follow the birds. Let them testify that on this night, I followed Khalto Tala downstairs to where Ilyas lay, rigid and awake. Let them testify that when I turned my face to the window and saw the lean black figures of the birds, I gathered my box of paints and this notebook, crossed the frozen field toward the forest, and followed.
* * *
I took Khalti’s red truck and drove west following the birds. I’d only driven it once and was unsure of myself, but it was so late that there was hardly anyone on the road at all, and soon I found myself far from the city. The birds continued west for a couple of hours until a wind picked up and drove them to the north. I followed, and we continued on this northwestern route for a while longer, another hour, then two, then three. I knew eventually Ilyas would notice I was gone and would take Abu Majed’s truck and come looking for me. I squinted at every set of headlights in the dark expanse behind.
The forest seemed to rise out of nothing. By the time dawn had flooded the sky with pink, I was well into wooded land, far from any town at all, and well and truly lost. At first I’d been able to stay on a worn fire road, but after a few hours the birds had veered away, and I soon found myself parking the truck by a field and crossing through the grass after them. They were traveling west again now, the wind having died down with the coming light. Beyond the field was pine forest, carpeted with dry needles. The maples and birches were still flowering, so that when the sun came out from behind the clouds everything turned green and pink, and the birches were silver columns of reflected light.
I had left the last of the farmhouses behind me more than an hour ago. Now I was deep into the Michigan forest. Occasionally I wandered through a patch of fog that had yet to burn off, so little light penetrated the canopy in places. In spite of the birds that led me, I began to feel this forest was a strange and unforgiving place from which I might never return, like the fairy tales of the jinn my mother used to tell me as a child. Then I wondered what exactly I was doing here, alone in an eerie copse of birches, the only sound the morning cacophony of jays protesting the passage of Canada geese overhead. I had made my choice: here I was. But as my legs began to tire and I realized I wouldn’t know my way back to the house where I’d left Ilyas and Khalti sleeping, I wondered who I thought I was to follow.
With every step, I felt that first paintbrush in my fingers, the first time I’d spread a wash of Payne’s grey across pressed paper and defied death. Now I was pressing deeper into the white pines of Michigan, more and more out of breath with each step, watching overhead for the streaks of long-bodied birds that kept me moving westward. Often I wouldn’t see them for a long time, and I’d become worried. But then I would hear a strange cry, a sleek shadow would pass over me, and I would be reassured that they were there, as constant and elusive as God.
By the time I reached the river, it was past midday, and I was beginning to shake from hunger and exhaustion. There were stones visible between rushing tongues of water, but the rock was slick. As I moved to cross, my foot slipped and crashed into the current, and before I knew it my right leg was soaking wet, and I had twisted my ankle between two river stones. I winced and limped to the other side, where I wrung out the hem of my dress and waved my shoe in the breeze to dry. The sun, at least, had come out, and the clearing where I stood was warm. Still, it had been a cool spring with chill nights, and soon I would start to shiver.
Footsteps rang out behind me. Though Ilyas was close behind, I didn’t turn around. I picked up my pace, knowing that when night fell again I would be exposed to the elements and that this day was my only chance at seeing the birds for myself. Of these birds, of course, I knew nothing. But I had become the selfish woman my mother had once warned me of. I’d come to feel that these birds were like me, and that if I intended to go west following the light, then I had better be sure that I was willing to accept what I would find there, for there was no going back.
The next time I caught sight of the birds, I counted more than two dozen shadows with their legs tucked under them, long beaks splitting the wind. I had not expected so many. The terrain turned rugged, and a cold wind picked up. My right shoe had not dried out. My toes stiffened, and goose bumps rose on my calves where the wet hem of my dress rubbed my skin. We’d turned due west. Nothing at all lay around me to distinguish this part of the forest: the stiff needles of white pines or the veined leaves of birches, squirrels chasing one another up the trees, the gray horizon. In spite of myself, I wished then for a road or a farmhouse, for an excuse to turn off the path, for a sign that what I was doing was foolish and unwise. But no such sign came. I understood then why my mother had wished for an angel all these years, how a faith tested by silence might begin to feel more like a burden than a balm.
Out of breath, I surmounted one final ridge. I arrived in a clearing of furled ferns and young red oaks, and the smell of wet earth was everywhere. I squinted in the falling light, and there they were: thirty arrow-shaped birds with shimmering feathers, long curved beaks, their faces shimmering iridescence. I had never seen anything like them
. It seemed then that all the knowledge I considered encyclopedic had been only part of the story, and that the world was big enough to contain more than I have ever dreamed. I have learned nothing from emulating Audubon or Mrs. Theodore. Studying paintings of posed specimens has brought me no closer to the essence of things, nor has copying the patterns of spotted eggshells or the fine bones of a bird’s foot. How foolish I’ve been to search for a sign in these things when all along, right here before me in the hush of evening, something so holy was alive without a name.
I pulled out my notebook and set my box of paints on a stone nearby. I began to sketch. Thirty shapes, three in flight and the rest on the ground, some in silhouette, some resting while another bird craned its neck to nuzzle or to inspect or to nudge, the legs extended for landing, the four toes curled. As I sketched, the hem of the sun dropped below the trees, and the birds became black sewing needles backlit by ruddy light. If my mother were here to see this, I thought, or Ilyas—but he had never been waiting for a sign. It was I who had been ambivalent. Ilyas had always pushed on, whether or not he was afraid.
I set down my brush. The birds were strolling the field in messy rows, picking at insects in the grass. I inched closer to them as I was sketching, and now I was almost among them. All along I had been searching for the remedy that would either wither the love wasting in me or make it visible. All along I had been searching for my memory of you. Only now, letting go of the dream I’d held too tight, could I lay my love for you on the broad backs of these thirty birds, wish you all the love that you deserved, and realize that another love had been waiting for me all along.
Ilyas came crashing into the clearing. The white, ibis-like shapes of the birds drifted up into the indigo evening, shimmering like curls of ribbon. Ilyas came and stood at my side. The shadow of a bird fell across his face.
The Thirty Names of Night Page 21
