My own career has given me my share of worries over the past year. For years I supplemented Ilyas’s income by selling my illustrations to the neighbors and to the occasional publisher, but the more ambitious I became, and the more I tried to get my work considered and exhibited by galleries and museums, the more I was turned away. It is no secret that women artists are not considered to be capable of real talent, but I thought—naively, I suppose—that I could prove them wrong. Day after day, I arrive at the galleries with my portfolio of aquatints, and day after day, I am turned away. Ilyas has always encouraged me, but now that the community house has been bought, he’s going to lose his job as a social worker.
So when, several months ago, the same Mr. H of whom Mrs. Theodore once spoke contacted me through an intermediary, saying he’d seen some of my prints and wanted a full set for his private collection, I jumped at the chance for a commission. I envision the project as a series of aquatints, a sort of reclamation of Audubon’s work, the birds drawn from life and through my eyes. But Mr. H had an unusual request: for his collection, he wanted me to include the birds I’d seen flying into the west in the forests outside of Detroit, Benjamin’s elusive G. simurghus. Mr. H had spoken with a friend who’d seen my sketches, and was interested in this bird whose name he didn’t know. The print would be the crowning jewel of his archive of rare birds.
There was something unsettling about the offer that arrived via brusque courier late one Thursday evening, but the money was good, so I agreed. I set to work trying to create an aquatint of the ibises I had seen in Michigan, but they were difficult to capture. My every effort failed my eyes, my heart, my memory. The birds curled into impossible shapes, took on elusive, iridescent colors, and nothing I created did them justice.
As the weeks went by, and Mr. H received my other prints, he grew impatient. He wanted to know where the final aquatint was and what was taking me so long. I’d been paid for the rest of the series, which Mr. H claimed would be bound into a book, but I could not complete his commission, nor earn the bonus he had promised me for this final print. I was unnerved and uncertain. One day I began to nurse a suspicion that perhaps he’d publish the book without crediting or compensating me at all, and how was I to know whether he was trustworthy or not, this obsessive billionaire? I sat in my studio, day after day, trying to capture grace, the way the light hit the birds’ crests and the tips of their wings, but every attempt was plain and unsatisfying. I could not convince myself of any of it—not my work, not the project. There was always something about these creatures I could not get right. I wrote to Benjamin that I didn’t know what to do. One day, procrastinating while Sawsan was in school, I went out and bought a copy of Attar’s Sufi poem translated into English. It was expensive, a luxury, but I took it home and began to read it and to sketch in the margins. Of the Simorgh, the king of the birds, Attar’s hoopoe says:
Whatsoever wears the shape of anything in existence
has come from the shadow of the beautiful Simorgh.
If Simorgh unveils its face to you, you will find
that all the birds, be they thirty or forty or more,
are but the shadows cast by that unveiling…
Do you see?
The shadow and its maker are one and the same.
As I was reading, night began to fall. The more I read and sketched, the more difficult it became to separate myself in my mind from the birds I had followed into the forest of Michigan. Had I been following the birds, I asked myself, or had they been following me; I could not be sure then that the birds had appeared because I had been looking for them, had been waiting for them, had conjured them, or whether their appearance had changed me somehow. Perhaps I had seen them because they had willed me to see them. Perhaps, I thought, we had each willed the other into existence in order to be seen, and wasn’t that the point of this too-long life?
I wrote to Benjamin that afternoon and told him that I had decided I would not give Mr. H a print of our bird. Instead, I slipped my letter and one of my illustrations into Attar’s book and wrapped it as a gift for Benjamin, ripped up the last note I’d been given by Mr. H’s courier, and in this way I learned that sharing a thing is not the same as keeping it alive.
* * *
Little wing,
Time is short tonight. I will need to hurry to set down everything.
Today we saw what happens to the buildings. The wrecking balls and bulldozers arrived in the morning to pull down one of the other tenements on our block, and by evening, it was as though the building had never been there at all. Tonight there seem to be no birds left in New York. Even the pigeons, save those in their dovecotes on the roof, fled the day our hope fled, too.
We are to leave tomorrow morning. I write this from the kitchen table in Khalto Tala’s apartment while my mother says her prayers. We’ve packed the steamer trunk with her few things, her rosaries and icons and Sunday dress, and Khalto Tala has helped her wrap my father’s sweaters and the tattered book of poetry he took with him from the bilad when he left. From my place at the table, I can see the orange wallpaper peeling on my old bedroom wall. Lately I’ve been carrying this notebook with me in my pocket, rather than leaving it in the box in its hiding place. A few days ago I found my mother inspecting the missing bricks in the bedroom, and I fear she may be looking through my things or even reading what I’ve written while I’m working during the day. Memory may be a sacred thing, but the words in these pages are dangerous now, and I have far more to lose than when I first began to write. Forgive me, B. I’ve left the box with some of my prints and your wing, but I will keep these pages with me at all times, at least until we leave this place.
We put Sawsan to bed a few hours ago. I made my last gallery visit today. As soon as I came home, Ilyas and I packed her toys and patent leather shoes along with our things and brought my mother over to Khalto Tala’s. With my father gone, she wandered the place for a few moments, then sat on the fire escape watching the women hang their laundry. She is waiting for something.
After a meal of rice and eggplant, Ilyas went out to the courtyard to smoke a cigarette and give me a moment alone with my brother. I set down these lines knowing this may be the last conversation I will ever have in this apartment.
“So this is the end,” Issa said into his coffee.
I scolded him for saying so. People have been setting up shop on Atlantic Avenue for months now. Half the neighborhood is there, starting over or trying to. So they’ve succeeded in evicting us across the river—we’d manage somehow. I’d been trying to talk myself into this line of thinking for months, but it doesn’t erase the injustice of the thing.
“It’s not home,” Issa said.
We sat in silence while we drank our coffee. I began to list in my head all the families who had left New York altogether when they received their eviction notices, the sons and aunties and cousins who chose to join their families in Toledo or Dearborn or Chicago or the Twin Cities or even distant Los Angeles and Houston. This eviction is an exodus. Most of our neighbors we will never see again.
Issa began to speak of what he’d seen as a pilot during the war. Once, he’d had two planes on his tail in cloud cover so thick it might as well have been Khalti’s lentil soup. He was close to the Alps, and he was afraid that he would crash into an outcropping. But an ibis appeared, large with a long, sleek body, its color difficult to determine because of the iridescence of its feathers and the play of the clouds. Tricks of the light, he’d thought at the time, or the adrenaline. Still, the shimmer of the sun on its back had calmed my brother, and so he’d followed it, banking when it banked, flying higher when it rose on an updraft. And before he knew it, the ibis had steered him clear of both the mountain and the planes tailing him. When he emerged from the cloud cover, it was gone.
Below us on the street, one of the widow Haddad’s pigeons pecked at an eviction notice before fluttering up to join its siblings on the roof.
I told him we should stay.
“You saw what happened to Abu Anas.” Ilyas came in, folded his jacket over a chair, and sat down. The past eight years have aged him, etching new lines across his face, turning his hair silver at his temples. He still has the boyish look he’s always had, but he’s fought his own battles, most of which he will never utter. Unlike my father or my brother, Ilyas has always known the world was an unjust place, and even though he believes in the hope he’s made for himself, he has never pretended otherwise.
My mother stoked the kitchen fire, silent and brooding. Khalto Tala entered the room and began to fill the dish bucket with water. She’s suffered a double loss in the last year: the loss of the widow Haddad and then the loss of the neighborhood. Khalto Tala has built a life here far longer than we have; she’s lived in this community for more than twenty years. She only just last year opened her own linen shop, a dream she’s had since she arrived at Ellis Island with only the dress on her back and a gold necklace to pawn. We’ve talked about it since I was a girl. Khalto Tala and I even came up with a name during our time on the road: Khoury’s Linens and Laces. Her shop has been one of the few still operating in the neighborhood over the last few weeks, defying the eviction notices, but we had to close it, too, earlier this afternoon, emptying out the inventory and transferring it over to the new building on Atlantic Avenue. Khalto Tala was lucky to have the money for a new location; not everyone does. Still, she’s taken it hard. I was sweeping the empty shop this afternoon and came out to lock up for the last time when I saw her behind the building, smoking a cigarette and wiping her face. Khalti has never, as long as I’ve known her, let anyone see her cry. I slipped back inside and left her alone.
After Issa had gone, Khalto Tala pulled a stool up to the table and sat down as she washed the dishes. She confronted me without ceremony about the gallerist I’d spoken to that day. She knew right away that he’d said no. I didn’t bother telling Khalto Tala the rest of what he’d said: that if indeed I came from the Holy Land, then I should follow the example of Our Lady and focus on my duties as a mother rather than wasting my time with my paints.
More and more since I refused to give Mr. H the print of G. simurghus, I’ve been considering giving up painting. I complained to Khalto Tala tonight, not for the first time, that the only thing I was allowed to paint as a woman were birds, landscapes, copies of Audubon and other painters with something between their legs. Eight years ago that was enough for me. But if I want to do something else, something bigger, something perhaps even bigger than painting, I’ll be shunned as a woman who doesn’t know the first thing about art, as though having a womb precludes my having eyes or a brain.
Ilyas set his hand on my forearm, and his wedding band was a reassuring heat. “They wouldn’t know art if it chewed their balls off,” he said.
Khalto Tala tried to comfort me with the reminder that women writers in the nineteenth century used to write under the names of men in order to be published. Where would the state of science or the arts be, she said, without women? It had been a Muslim woman who had opened the oldest existing, continually operating university in the world, after all, al-Qarawiyyin in Fes. Khalti meant it as a consolation, but as she spoke, a spark came into Ilyas’s face.
“You could do it,” he said.
His plan is simple: there’s no reason I have to present my paintings in person to the galleries. If I have someone to represent me to gallerists and museum curators, they never have to know who I am. I can take on a man’s name, or at least an ambiguous one; Ilyas can represent me to the galleries; and their assumptions will take care of the rest. As long as I never appear in person, no one will be the wiser.
The artist without a face. I’ll admit the thrill of the idea appealed to me right away, ludicrous as it was. I said to Ilyas that I would give it a try, as I had little to lose, and right away I knew what name I would take on: the family name, Zeytouneh. The Americans wouldn’t know my gender from such a name. If I started producing new work, something entirely different from what I had done before, the art world—in which I’d been only marginally known—would assume I was a man, new to the market, perhaps, but maybe, considering the scraps of success I’d gleaned as a woman, talented enough to invest in.
Behind the cracked bedroom door, my mother knelt beside the bed to pray. I turned my coffee cup over. The grounds had settled into two wheels with melting spokes and a cloud of brown foam above them. It didn’t occur to me until later, when I had snuck out to wait for the night heron in the spot where my father’s body had touched the earth, that it reminded me of someone I had known, an ocean ago.
NINETEEN / NADIR
THE FOUR OF US get on the A train to Ozone Park close to midnight. Reem has her hair up, rocking her tattoo and her undercut. We aren’t far from the house Sami once shared with his mother. A small group of people is gathered outside of the 80th Street stop. Sami and Qamar greet them one by one, including Yara and Malik and half a dozen other folks I don’t know at all. Sami tells us we’re supposed to walk in groups of two or three down the street, following the organizers, until we come to the entrance of the event space. Reem and Qamar and I walk in a cluster of three, following a few paces behind Yara and another woman who hold hands, and Sami and Malik ahead of them with their arms around each other. Somehow, walking together in relaxed silence makes this walk feel like an act of love. Gradually, it dawns on me that I am marching between some of the same people I danced with at the bar in Bushwick. We are a chain of Black and brown friends and lovers dressed in glitter, leather, and purple hair, holding hands without regard to who is watching us from the sidewalk.
Ahead of us, the clumps of people begin to disappear one by one. We stop, and Sami points without a word to an open manhole in the ground. Yara grabs the ladder and lowers herself down into the darkness. Malik follows, and soon Sami is waving his hand for me to drop down into the circle of shadow.
At first I balk at this, but there’s no time to argue. I step on the first bar, then the third, then grab the ladder with my hand. The fear of slipping seizes me. The ladder is damp and cold, but I keep going, fifth rung and seventh, ninth, eleventh. I shiver as the sunlight becomes a window above me. “Go, go!” someone whispers above me, and I tap my toe on the rung below and climb down into the cloying dark.
Hands pat my back and guide me to the ground. I’ve reached the bottom. The only light down here is a handful of candles, which someone is touching with a lighter in the dark canyon of the concrete room. I am handed a candle. As my eyes adjust, the others emerge from the shadows. We meet one another’s eyes and nod without speaking. The crowd mills about the tunnel that disappears into shadow. Soon Qamar and Reem are beside me; Sami has gone off somewhere in the dark. Qamar gives Yara a fist bump, a grin plastered on their face. Reem’s face, on the other hand, is stone, and I know her well enough to know that this is her defense mechanism against terror. I squeeze her elbow. She turns to me, deadpan, and says, “We’re all getting arrested.”
In the dark, the faces are my neighbors, my cousins, my aunties, my friends’ parents. Some of them are yours. Above us, someone slides the manhole cover shut, and we are left in darkness. Then music starts up from farther down the unfinished tunnel, distorted by the curve in the concrete and the cavernous echo. The crowd surges toward the music. Soon we are walking in a procession down the tunnel, each with our candles in our hands. There are at least a couple dozen of us, more than I realized when we gathered at the A stop. To my right, two brown men are holding hands; to my left, a tall Black person in a leather harness has dyed their dreads ocean blue and green. Reem’s curls transform themselves into garnet in the candlelight.
Over the heads of the people in front of me is a ring of candles on a concrete subway platform, the edge dropping into debris-strewn darkness. In the middle of the ring Sami sits playing his oud, the red silk knot of memory swinging with the movements of his fingers. He is hunched over his instrument, listening for its hidden language as though none of us are here, as
though tonight, of all nights, he might finally summon the ghost he’s been looking for.
A drumbeat joins Sami’s rhythm, the crowd ripples and separates, and soon we are dancing. Here in this place the city carved out and abandoned, there is only movement and heat and darkness. I can’t see my body, or Reem’s, or Sami’s, or anyone’s. I can only feel my hips moving the stale air and listen to the rise and fall of the feet of those around me.
I have been taught all my life that masculinity means short hair and square-toed shoes, taking up space, raising one’s voice. To be soft is to be less of a man. To be gentle, to laugh, to create art, to bleed between the legs—I have been taught that these things make me a woman. I have been taught all my life that to dance is to be vulnerable, and that the world will crush the vulnerable. I was taught to equate invincibility with being worthy of love. But here in the darkness of this abandoned subway platform, I can almost imagine a world big enough for boys like Sami and me to love each other, to dance and let the pain out of our bodies, to breathe and make love and be enough and be enough and be enough. Tomorrow, Sami and I will tie a green silk knot around the elm tree in front of Aisha’s sanctuary, and Sabah’s father will sweep bits of glass from the floor of his shop that we missed. But for now, Sami comes toward me through the crowd carrying his oud, and the light in our faces is the only thing we know of ourselves.
The Thirty Names of Night Page 24
