The Thirty Names of Night

by Zeyn Joukhadar

  “I thought you left me,” he whispered.

  The birds were sailing close over us, taking flight toward the west. They hid us in the shadow of their wings. When I put my arms around him, Ilyas laughed into my hair and we ducked our heads. I let go of him and took his hands in mine. Kneeling in the field under the waves of feathers, I held on to him as though he were the most beautiful of wild birds. I asked him to marry me.

  “Yes,” he whispered, our hands clasped tight under the winged thrum. He pressed his face to our hands and kissed them. “Yes.”

  When I pulled him to me in the grass, all I felt of the birds was the brush of their feathers against my hair, a thousand silk scarves.

  SEVENTEEN / NADIR

  WE ARE AT THE shop at first light, and Abu Sabah is there to greet us with a broom and a basket of mana’eesh. No one has mentioned Reem. I haven’t prayed fajr in so long that I still feel the effects of the silence and the dark and the reverberations of my prayers, like the lingering sensation of fullness hours after a meal. I haven’t bled since the offending piece of plastic was removed from my body yesterday. My head is clearer, I laugh at Sami and Qamar’s jokes, and I even withstand Abu Sabah’s frown when I realize I’ve forgotten to wear my hat. Mercifully, he makes no comment. We go inside, each with a man’ousheh in hand, oil on our fingertips and our chins dusted with za’atar. We try to pretend everything is normal.

  The new shop window was put in yesterday evening. Sabah, who flew into LaGuardia late last night from Detroit, comes out from the darkness of the shop to inspect it. Abu Sabah scolds us not to get our fingerprints on the glass. Sabah, who has held it together the entire time since she got the call about the attack, seems more troubled by the new glass than anything. The repair has drawn more attention to the wound than the fire itself.

  Three white ibises glide over the block, reflected in the glass between our fingers, and disappear. Back in the spring of ’99, I found a newspaper clipping you’d left on your desk about a fire in the Everglades that killed fifty adult white ibises, trapped on a cattail island by thick smoke. Their bodies had been found after the wind cleared the smoke away. For a few weeks after, you doodled those ibises in every margin of your sketchbook, every notepad, every napkin. You drew a series of oval faces and curved beaks, fifty V-shaped strokes of your pen in a page corner. That was around the time I started sketching my own reflection, gazing at the mirror by the door. You used to use that round, wood-framed oval to straighten your jackets and re-pin your hijab before leaving the house. After you’d clean and polish it, I’d trace my reflection. The brain, like any organ in the body, knows wordless truths, knows health from sickness, knows how to recognize self and other. Maybe it’s true that the self is every artist’s first obsession, that every other subject—a plate of oranges, a mountain, a lover’s face—is just a recognition of the self in another form. The conceptual artist Roman Opałka’s life’s work, titled 1965 / 1 - ∞, consisted of painted numbers from one to infinity, white numbers on a black background, adding one percent more white to the ground with each number he painted. In 1968, he began to take photographs of himself after each day’s work. It was a way of visualizing himself in time. He went on doing it for more than forty years until he died. His final number was 5,607,249. Those last fifty marks of white paint; fifty white ibises on a sheet of paper. A single thing, Opałka once said, a single life.

  From the doorway, there is an audible gasp.

  “Your hair!”

  Aisha is rooted to the spot, clutching a shrink-wrapped platter of chicken and basmati rice. Her hand rises to cover her mouth.

  I wait for someone, anyone, to laugh off my haircut or change the subject, but that silence stretches on for what feels like minutes, and no one says anything. Sabah turns to me, waiting for my reaction, then Sami. They stare as though witnessing a head-on collision.

  “I cut it.” I rub my palm up the back of my buzzed head. I escape into the kitchen to put coffee on, but Aisha follows me. We’ve run out of coffee anyhow, so I put the kettle on instead and busy myself with counting out cups.

  “But it was so beautiful,” Aisha says. “Why would you…?”

  Sabah enters without speaking. Sami and Qamar hang back in the hallway petting the orange cat, murmuring a feigned conversation.

  “I got tired of it. Short hair is less work.” I turn back to the cups. The kettle will not whistle.

  Sami appears at my side and fills tea eggs with rose petals and chamomile leaves. He keeps his voice low. “Nadir, you good?”

  “It’s just so drastic.” Aisha touches her hijab where she’s pinned her favorite barrette, the silver one with the rhinestone bird. “But if you start growing it out now, it’ll reach your shoulders by next summer.”

  Qamar looks up and says, “I think it looks good short.” I want to hug them.

  It doesn’t occur to me that Sabah has heard Sami’s question until she says, “Maybe they don’t want to grow it out.” I realize she hasn’t gendered me in conversation, not once, since she saw my haircut this morning. She made no comments, only stepped aside from names and pronouns, and now I understand that Sabah has always been paying attention in ways that had been invisible to me until the moment they were not.

  At last, the whistle. I fill the cups and deposit the tea eggs, then walk back out to the front of the shop with my cup. Again I fail to escape: everyone follows me. Aisha stands at the door with her teacup in her hand and shoots me concerned, furtive glances. She is searching for the words to tell me she knows that something is wrong, but I don’t want to tell her because she will think the wrong thing needs fixing. I imagine opening my mouth to say the same thing to Teta, but I can’t picture it. Reem said it best: there are blueprints that have been laid out for me since before I was born.

  There is a thud on the glass, and something wet splashes my cheek. I gasp and jump; Aisha lets out a muffled scream. A swallow has run into the window, leaving a smear of feathers and blood. Aisha approaches the dazed bird, scoops it up, and listens for breath. Abu Sabah brings a checkered tea towel, and she wraps it. A rectangle of golden light gleams in the new glass above the streak of blood, a block of yellow sun and a block of purple-red shadow, and this reminds me of Etel Adnan’s paintings of Mount Tamalpais in California, one of the places she’s lived for many years with her partner, the Syrian artist Simone Fattal. Adnan painted Tamalpais as I’ve painted my own face for years: in varied light, in different seasons, in shifting shades and moods. Her paintings of the mountain have a lover’s touch about them, even obsession. She and Fattal made their own migrations, two women carving out a life under the silent Tamalpais. Adnan once wrote of this work, “I am making the mountain as people make a painting,” and I have wished I could fashion myself in the same way ever since.

  Aisha rocks the wrapped swallow in the bowl of her arms. Everything about the night you died is a blur except for this: Aisha’s brown fingers around the oxygen mask the firefighters pressed to my nose and mouth, Aisha’s hands cradling my face, wiping soot away with a wet wipe from her purse. Hers was the first face I saw of that new world in which you had become past tense. She was the first to see into the well of my grief. I wanted to pull away that night, wanted to slide away into oblivion and leave my body in a lump on the sidewalk, but she held my eyes fast. “Don’t you look away from me,” she kept saying, voice soft and hands firm. “Don’t you look away.” I have never looked into anyone else’s eyes like that, not before or since, and maybe the terror of being seen is what keeps me silent.

  Aisha rises to leave. Shifting the bird to one hand, she takes her silver barrette in the other and slips it into my own hair. She tries to smile. She fails.

  “There you are,” she says. “Still your mother’s pretty daughter.” She touches my cheek with a curled finger. There is love in this touch.

  I tug off the barrette on the walk over to Qamar’s place. I’ve tried to block out the awkward years of my puberty, but we’ve played this same
what-if game before, you and me—what if it’s just a matter of finding the right haircut, the right outfit, the right boyfriend, the right femininity. Maybe you were right in some way; you never gave in to expectations of what a woman should be. But there were other walls to the box I was in, walls beyond marriage and a child, walls beyond the raises you didn’t get and the keys between your fingers late at night, walls beyond the cheaper cost of men’s razors and your terrified tears when I wore a boatneck shirt with my bra straps exposed. My body came with borders. I gave up my collared shirts when my chest burst the buttons, gave up short hair after a friend’s dad told me boys would call me ugly for it. I gave up my long strides when the girls at school said I walked like an elephant. I gave up going to see movies with guy friends when I figured out, after an acquaintance groped me in the dark, that I couldn’t trust their judgment on whether other boys were safe. I’ve lost count of the times I wished I could share in sisterhood, could lay my head on an auntie’s lap and know we bore the same weight. But I’ve borne a different burden, and I’ve borne it so long that, as I turn the barrette over in my hand, I don’t yet have the heart to tell Aisha that I have tried all the ways I can think of to make myself fit.

  I am so deep in my own well that when Qamar stares agape at their phone and stops on the sidewalk, it takes me a few steps to notice.

  They lay a hand on my shoulder, trembling. “One of the foundations agreed to let us check their archive.”

  * * *

  Qamar preps Sami and me on the way over to the archive of the Harmstead Foundation in Midtown. From everything Qamar has studied about Laila Z, their understanding is that she only worked on commission when it suited what she already had in mind. Contemporaries of hers who commented on her disappearance in the forties wrote that she could have had a lot more success if she’d tailored herself to the market, but she resisted being boxed in.

  “That said”—here Qamar leans in on the subway to keep their voice down—“rumor has it she was contacted sometime in the mid-forties by a collector who wanted a book of aquatints. Now, this guy—the artists only knew him as Mr. H—he was a serious bird art collector. He knew everybody. So Laila gets back to New York, settles down, and agrees to do a series for him. The only records I’ve ever seen list it as the last work she sold before she disappeared.

  “But this guy was eccentric—and secretive. When he passed away, his daughter discovered he had a hoard of bird art and paraphernalia: eggs, skeletons, probably more than a few things that would be illegal now. He didn’t want his collection broken up, so in his will, he established a foundation. He set his daughter in charge of it and willed his entire collection to it. He just passed away recently, so the foundation is new. Apparently the daughter had no idea what he’d amassed over the years. It wasn’t just about aesthetics for him—it was an obsession. His daughter felt weird about all this, of course. So she’s dedicating the foundation to showcasing work by newer and lesser-known artists alongside the birds, especially women of color.” They make eye contact with me, and we both know without having to say it that this does not include people like us. “Long story short, the foundation scoured Mr. H’s collection, but even though they’ve got a letter from Laila promising an aquatint of some kind of rare bird to complete this series she made, G. simurghus is missing. They’d pay a lot of money to find it. In the meantime, we’re welcome to look for clues.”

  In Midtown, the address leads us to the gilded entryway of a multiuse office building with a narrow elevator. I am the lightest of all of us, so the white doorman makes eye contact with me first, but does a double take when he fails to gender me. Before he opens his mouth, Qamar gives him a name, and he lets our little brigade pass.

  Qamar takes us down two floors in the old elevator, deep into the basement. We are greeted by a nervous research assistant who explains to us that the materials we are interested in have been laid out on the table behind the movable bookshelves. She busies herself with a wall of paintings waiting to be arranged upstairs in the exhibition space. I stop and stare, stupefied. Every painting awaiting hanging is by a woman artist, from Mary Cassatt’s painting of two women and a child feeding the ducks on a lake; to Orazio Gentileschi’s St Francis and the Angel, its wings unsettlingly like those of a real bird, one of the works she painted just after sending her rapist to prison; to the abstract winged figures of Iraqi artist Madiha Omar’s Arabesques. I stare until something in me begins to hurt. I imagine a wall of paintings by people like me, like Qamar, like Ilyas. Somehow I have never been more acutely aware of my unbelonging than this moment in which I realize that things could be different. You never know how hungry you are until you watch someone else sit down at the table.

  The space at the back of the archive is bare concrete save for a clean white table on which these treasures have been laid. It is immediately obvious that Mr. H was not only obsessed, but must have bought from artists and dealers all over the world. The first species I recognize is the extinct dodo, a bird last sighted in 1662, a cast of its skeleton in white porcelain. Its form is repeated in a seventeenth-century illuminated Mughal painting of the dodo beside several other birds in an emerald forest. One corner of the table is crowded with jeweled brooches bearing painted insets depicting colorful birds, and another is taken up by a sculpture of a bright-eyed Spix’s macaw, now extinct in the wild, captured in bright blue glass. From there, the collection is an explosion of canvas and paper, with oil paintings and illustrations of birds by various artists that I’ve seen only in your textbooks: the kakapo, the clapper rail, the California condor, the extinct passenger pigeon, the red-throated loon, the whooping crane. A box lays open beside these riches, its body and lid lined with velvet, cradling four rows of perfect blue-green heron’s eggs.

  “Here’s the thing.” Qamar clears away the paintings and sets them at the far end of the table, revealing a small book wrapped in cracked leather. Putting on a pair of white gloves provided by the assistant, they unwrap the leather to reveal a cloth-bound book with an evergreen cover and no title. They open the book to the first aquatint, a white-throated sparrow with illuminated gold margins. “The series Mr. H commissioned from Laila wasn’t just a rumor.”

  “It’s hers.” I lean over the table to examine Laila’s etched details and hand-watercoloring, the tufts of chest feathers, the markings around the eyes. I pull the notebook out of my bag and open it to random pages, comparing the prints to her sketches. “It’s got to be hers.”

  “Masha’Allah,” Sami says. “They’re beautiful.”

  Qamar turns the pages like they’re made of glass. “She signed each illustration, which makes this the first confirmed Laila Z anyone’s found in more than two decades.” Qamar reveals to us bird after bird: red-tailed hawk, fish crow, American bluebird, white ibis.

  Your Laila Z is hanging in Teta’s apartment, but somehow, looking at these pages is different. I set my hand on the table and find that I’m shivering. The same hands that once touched Teta’s face painted these same birds. All these years, you knew. I glance up, looking for you—I expect your presence everywhere I go, and so even in the sterility of this room, I’m not surprised to find you standing at one corner of the table, resting your hand beside the porcelain skeleton of the dodo. But there’s a forlorn look in your eyes. You trail your index finger along the edge of the table, passing the box of eggs and the blue macaw, keeping your eyes on the book as Qamar turns the pages. I register each bird, placing it by genus and species, waiting for the one I’m looking for. The prints are magnificent, each detail colored by a masterful hand. But then we reach the end, and you are gazing at me as though you are waiting for me to understand.

  I catch Sami’s eye. “It’s not here.”

  Sami swears under his breath. “An embarrassment of riches.”

  Qamar closes the book. “But not what we’re looking for.”

  I put the notebook back in my bag. At the bottom is a glint of metal, a spark. One of Reem’s mechanical birds zip
s out, searching for the sun to recharge its wings, then fizzles out of power in my palm.

  We thank the research assistant for her time. Sami takes my hand and guides me back to the elevator while the assistant and Qamar discuss the upcoming show.

  “It’s just a couple of birds,” Sami says.

  “The demolition is tomorrow night. It was on the condemnation notice.” I want Sami to feel the heaviness I am feeling, the phantom of these five long years. “It’s over. We failed.”

  “Nadir, I’m sorry.” Sami tries to put his arm around my shoulders, but I am itching out of my skin. He wraps me in the canopy of his arms. “Sometimes we have to move on.”

  The elevator takes us back up to the lobby, and Sami and I step out into stark sunlight. The breeze is cool for the first time in months. Fall will be setting in soon with its crisp nights and steel skies, and your presence in the kitchen will become less frequent. Teta’s bones will ache when the rains come. We’ll spend the long nights of the winter in her apartment, listening to the drone of the television. She will ration her pills. I will always wonder if she is thinking of the lover who could’ve been but wasn’t, and we will look at each other and see all of this and not speak a word of it. Sami’s grip on my hand is loose now. He is waiting for the moment he can let go.

  “If you were me,” I say to Sami, “how would you explain all this to Teta?”

  He looks down at our fingers interlaced. “Not everybody is going to get it, habibi.”

  Sami changes the subject. He gets me to agree to come out to some party tonight in Ozone Park that he and Qamar have been planning for weeks. He wants to cheer me up. I say I’ll be there. Orange-bellied hawks circle above us on a gust of wind. But there is no respite for them here, no patch of green but a nearby playground, and soon a band of jays rises from the trees to chase them off. The world is a series of infinite migrations.