The Thirty Names of Night

by Zeyn Joukhadar

  The last of the stars and a sliver of moon were still visible. The last of the cool spring nights are now behind us. The pigeons shook the chill out of their wings, fluffing their leg feathers for warmth. As I reached to open the dovecotes, they squawked and hopped. They knew something was coming.

  The machines roared to life, the first of the dynamite less than a block away. Metal and brick shrieked as the building two doors from ours came down. I hurried to undo the latches of the coops, and the doves took to the air all at once. Startled by the noise of the machines, they bolted from the dovecotes with such a hum that I covered my face. In our old apartment, my mother remained rigid in the window, squinting at the birds against the sun. Dawn had just broken and flooded the courtyard with light. She shielded her eyes, then pressed her fingers to her lips. She fell against the windowpane and wept, mouthing one word in Arabic again and again: malayika, malayika. Angels, angels. My mother had not seen doves.

  Afterward, she followed me back to the community house, but I closed myself in this bedroom to spend the last few moments alone. She’s jammed her desk drawer shut, so I’ll leave this notebook in its place in the wall where it belongs, and I’ll try to move on. She is knocking frantically now, but Ilyas is reassuring her that we’ve forgotten nothing. She’s convinced we’ve left something behind. Maybe we have.

  Maybe she was right to burn my things, little wing. I loved you once, and I love you still, but not all migrations end with a return home. Even memory begins to cut if you hold on to it too tight. I don’t know anymore if I believe in angels and signs. Perhaps we are the miraculous creatures my mother was looking for.

  TWENTY-THREE / NADIR

  I KNOCK REEM, QAMAR, and Sami to the ground when I land, and we fall in a tangle in the alley, coughing and groaning. Sami checks me for injuries, kissing the tips of my fingers and the dark smears of ash on my face. Qamar and Reem wrap their arms around us, and Reem squeezes me to her, laughing a terrified, relieved laugh. She doesn’t want me to see her crying.

  I grope around on the ground. The wooden box has landed nearby, denting one corner. The lid has popped open. I pry it off and pull out an odd-shaped package wrapped in burlap. There are no pages here, no papers, no rolled-up canvas. There are no illustrations.

  Qamar picks up the burlap-clad object and unwraps it. “Are those feathers?”

  I take the burlap from them. Inside is something comma-shaped and soft. A wing.

  “Wait a minute,” Reem says. The burlap is stamped with the name and address of a business on Washington Street: Khoury’s Linens and Laces. “Isn’t there a Khoury’s fabric shop on Atlantic?”

  Brooklyn. Brooklyn, all this time. I underline the text with my finger, then weigh the wing in my other hand. The longest contour feather is embroidered with delicate thread, the stitched handwriting so small that I have to hold the wing beneath a streetlight to make it out.

  You are altogether beautiful, my darling. There is no flaw in you.

  * * *

  I’ve been here before, when the kites were in the air, when the streets opened their sails to the wind. We follow the address to a fifth-floor apartment above Khoury’s Fabrics, the same balcony where an old woman and her daughter watched the kites pass. The hallway stinks of clove cigarette smoke, lined with a stained rug that was once red but is now brown. In one of the apartments down the hall, a father is shouting at his child, and elsewhere a television drones daytime shopping. Teta is on my arm as we ring the bell, her cane in her hand. She knows who we are here to see. This morning, she was quiet as I prepared coffee, quiet when the owl alighted on the sill as usual, quiet as we piled into a cab to take us the ten blocks to the building we presumed was Laila’s apartment.

  I straighten my shirt and tug the fabric away from my binder. I count each passing second. Under my arm is Laila’s notebook, an unsent confession to Teta Badra but which Teta has never read. Sami and Reem wait with their hands in their pockets, and Qamar shares their headphones with me so that the sound of Umm Kulthum’s voice comforts us while we wait. Teta coughs. Reem clears her throat.

  A scraping announces the pulling back of the chain lock. The door opens to reveal a light-skinned, barefoot girl in her early twenties with chestnut hair, her pink sweater embroidered with the word Mondays.

  “Sorry to bother you.” I peek around the girl into the apartment. “Does Laila Zeytouneh live here?”

  The girl looks me up and down a moment before peering out of the door to study the rest of our entourage. “She doesn’t normally take visitors.”

  “I think we have something that belongs to her. I’d like to give it back.”

  The girl is nonplussed. “One sec.” The door closes again, and we are left in the hallway, fidgeting.

  Just as I am about to turn away, the door opens and the girl beckons us inside the apartment. Books and papers lie tossed about everywhere, piles of stretched canvas and tins of watercolor, yellow legal pads covered with doodles of garlic with the shadows blocked in, open boxes of Conté crayon covered in reddish dust. White folds of what look like origami hang from strings throughout the apartment, suspended confetti. The girl pads across the carpet to lead us into the living room, where she drops onto the sofa beside a woman who looks to be at least in her mid-nineties, sitting by the window stirring a cup of hibiscus tea.

  After a few awkward moments, the girl says, “This is Nadir. He and his friends are here to see you.” She pauses and surveys us, then pops up from the couch. “I’ll make some more tea.”

  Laila squints at us. “You are who?”

  “My mom was a big fan of yours,” I say, and that is all it takes to conjure you. I notice you when I turn my head, seated in an easy chair in the corner of the room in a shaft of sunlight. You observe the proceedings with a nervous detachment, smoothing your dress pants, the white pair you used to wear to research conferences with your navy jacket and hijab. Someone has dressed Laila in your style: a matching pink sweater and pants set, a chiffon scarf in a floral print that she has tangled around her wrist. She sets down her teacup on the table beside her.

  “Does she like birds?” Laila turns toward the kitchen and shouts to the girl, who I surmise is her granddaughter. “Grace, where’s your mother?”

  “She’s getting dressed, Grandma, I told you.” Grace comes back with two cups of tea in each hand.

  Laila says, “Show them the kites.”

  “Kites?” I look around at the corners of the room and realize that what I took for origami are the bird-shaped kites we saw floating over Atlantic Avenue. They are scattered about the apartment now, hanging from the ceiling by their kite strings. “That was your work?”

  “It was her pet project for, like, a decade.” Grace tugs one of the kites down and holds it out for me to examine. “The kites tell the story of something that happened to her in the thirties when she was out in Michigan. Mom found the funding, and we all helped. They released the kites to commemorate the year Little Syria was demolished.”

  I take the kite from her. “You said—Mom?”

  Laila picks up her empty teacup. “Habibti, get me a tea,” she says. “I haven’t had one all morning. Wallahi, my mouth is so dry.” Then she turns to me as though just processing my comment and gasps. She reaches out her hands, then motions for me to come closer. “Where have you been, ya Ilyas?”

  Laila touches my face, and I glance over at Grace for an explanation. She gives me a helpless, embarrassed look, and it dawns on me at last: Laila has end-stage Alzheimer’s. She was crying at the kites that day because they were beautiful. She had forgotten they were hers.

  My fingers wilt on the notebook. Teta plasters a tight smile onto her face. She is drinking Laila in, though Laila has no idea who she is.

  “Jiddo Ilyas passed away a few years ago,” Grace says so Laila doesn’t hear. “He told the best stories.”

  The bedroom door opens, and a steel-haired woman enters the room, a red shawl wrapped around her shoulders. On her cheek
is a purple birthmark the size and shape of a fingerprint.

  “Mama, you’ve got guests.” Sawsan greets us each with cheek kisses. “This isn’t Baba, this is—?”

  “Nadir.” I finger the notebook under my arm. “I found something that belongs to your mother.” It is difficult for me to relinquish Laila’s diary. You rise from the easy chair in the corner and sit on the couch beside me. The sunlight follows you.

  Sawsan takes the diary and studies it. Laila only furrows her brow, then takes the cup of hibiscus tea Grace offers her. “Where did you find this?”

  “I rescued it before they demolished the community house.” I turn to Laila, but she seems to have forgotten me again, murmuring to herself.

  Sawsan smiles and pats her mother’s knee. “Please accept my thanks on her behalf.”

  “It’s nothing.” I look down at my hands. I don’t know how to continue. My voice falters. “We were—my mom was an ornithologist, and—I don’t know if you heard, but they found a book of illustrations Laila made for a private collector, a long time ago.”

  “Mr. H. Whatever happened to him?” Laila snaps to attention. She seems so lucid that it’s hard to believe she mistook me for Ilyas. “He owes me three hundred dollars.”

  I turn from Sawsan to Laila. “There was one print missing.”

  Laila laughs. “That’s because I haven’t finished it yet.”

  Sami, Qamar, Reem, and I exchange confused looks. Laila rises from her chair, beckoning Grace over to help her up.

  I stand. “What do you mean?”

  “Come with me.” Laila leads us all to the spare bedroom, and Sawsan opens the door. Inside is a studio strewn with white drop cloth, a single easel and an ergonomic desk chair in the middle of the room. All around these things, the room is filled floor to ceiling with canvases and papers, oil paintings and illustrations, piles of sketchbooks and spare frames, mountains of drawings. All these works have a single subject—G. simurghus, your birds. Laila has varied their features, sometimes giving them white wings and sometimes making them dark, allowing the sun to bring out the iridescence of their feathers, positioning them with wings spread or heads cocked, walking a field after dusk or taking flight. The detailed etching she is known for is here, too, the fine tufts of feathers above the birds’ legs and on the crests behind their heads, the dots of light in each of their pupils. In one corner of the room are an array of small prints of the birds with gold foil laid painstakingly into individual feathers. This is not a room; it is a menagerie, and standing in the midst of it, I am one of its birds. Beside me at the door, Qamar is weeping, and I am trembling like a person in snow. One day, someone will try to explain us as they once tried to explain this, and they will not have the words.

  “I never finished it,” Laila says. She picks up an exquisite aquatint of two simurghus ibises, one perched with wings extended, the other hidden in its shadow, and holds it out to me. “Take it,” she says, “if that’s what you were seeking. There’s no need to hold on to it now. As for what the others will think—tfeh. People see only what they are ready to see.”

  I take the painting and put my hand to my heart by way of thanks. It is in this moment, when I hold the painting in my hands and understand what it represents, not only to me and to my friends but to everyone we love, that it finally dawns on me what it means to compromise for your own survival. Yes, it is painful to imagine releasing my grip, relinquishing the painting to Sabah or to Mr. H’s daughter. But then I remember what Laila’s work has meant to me all along, how many times I longed to see her in a gallery, and I realize what a profound gift this will be for so many people, if I can let it go.

  Laila pats the painting like an old, beloved friend. “I release you to the light.”

  “Auntie.” Qamar touches the crest of one of the painted birds. “If you never gave it to Mr. H, then who were you keeping it for?”

  Laila sits down in front of the easel. An aquatint is half-finished there of one of the ibises with wings extended, the delicately inked feathers hand-painted with watercolor. You slip between us to join her. The sun is in that rare hour now when it pierces the canyons of apartment buildings, and you bring the light to warm the silver hairs on Laila’s arms.

  “I was in love with her once,” Laila says. “She wore her hair in two braids. Her mother lost a child one night. I remember. I was there.”

  Beside me, the scarf Teta has folded in her hands is dotted and damp. She is fingering the locket in the breast pocket of her jacket.

  From beside the easel, your ghost motions to the last object in my hands.

  “Auntie.” I hold my hand out to Laila. “I think this is yours.”

  Laila takes Teta’s wing. She runs her fingers over the silver-and-white feathers. Her face blossoms, her eyes widen, and then, like a person just waking, she turns from the easel to offer Teta her hands.

  “Ta’burni,” Laila cries.

  I try to picture Teta through Laila’s eyes, young and black-haired and a little shy. She would have had her ears pierced then. As far back as I can remember, Teta has never again worn earrings.

  Teta takes slow steps toward Laila. She has forgotten her cane in the other room, but with each step she becomes surer of herself. When she reaches the easel, she bends down to wrap her arms around Laila, who has grown small with age. Laila strokes Teta’s back with her swollen hands, and Teta rocks her, whispering something only the two of them can hear. Hidden in the blanket of Teta’s arms, Laila weeps.

  You move to the window, slipping yourself into a shaft of light. The owl will not visit Teta this night or any other. The next morning, I will rise to watch the light fall across Teta’s kitchen, and you will not be waiting for me at the table.

  TWENTY-FOUR / NADIR

  ONE BRIGHT MORNING, I gather my paints, and the four of us head over to Laila’s building. Grace has asked the owner for permission, so we bring all the materials we think we will need: ladders, masks, brooms topped with foam paint rollers. Over the course of a week, Sami, Qamar, Reem, and I paint a mural. It’s our own interpretation of the birds that follow the night, their contour feathers iridescent, their faces turned toward the east. When we’ve finished, I add a smaller bird in the corner, a white-throated sparrow, by way of a signature. We add our names to the mural. I sign it Nadir.

  The night after the painting is finished, we all go up to the roof of Teta’s apartment. We light a fire in the firepit, arrange Teta’s plants, and watch the sunset. I’ve already laid out Teta’s pills for this coming week; she hasn’t cut them in half in months. Aisha will come over tomorrow, after she’s finished getting everything ready for the reopening of the sanctuary next week, to check on her. We are all surviving, however tenuous our grip. From this high up, the last light hits the wing feathers of our birds on the brick wall of Khoury’s. Sami takes out his oud and plays, setting the red knot swinging. Reem gets up to dance. The fire crackles, and the mural dissolves into the dusk. The Canada geese are migrating this time of year, winging over New York like single-engine planes. I get up and walk to the ledge to study the arrow of their flight. By the fire pit, Qamar cracks a joke, and Sami interrupts his playing to laugh.

  “Ya Nadir,” Sami calls to me. “Ya habib ‘albi.”

  When I glance back, my friends are beckoning me to them. I step back from the ledge and turn my face from Brooklyn’s silhouette. There is a new moon tonight, revealing Deneb low in the sky. On the edge of the city, planes are landing from Beirut and from Cairo, angling their enormous wings.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FOR THIS JOURNEY, ALHAMDULILLAH.

  I want to acknowledge the Lenape, Paugussett, Wappinger, Fox, Miami, Anishinaabe, Peoria, Sauk, Potawatomi, and Ohlone peoples, on whose ancestral homelands the majority of this book was written.

  Thank you to everyone who made this book possible. Thank you to Trish Todd, for giving this project the care necessary to bring it to fruition. Thank you to Kaitlin Olson, Megan Rudloff, Abigail Novak, Laywan Kw
an, and the entire Atria team for the support they have shown me and my work. Thank you to Michelle Brower for always believing in my words. Thank you to Danya Kukafka, Kate Mack, Chelsey Heller, Esmond Harmsworth, and everyone at Aevitas Creative Management for their tireless support.

  Thank you to those who provided me with the time and space to write this book over the past four years. Thank you to Lori Wood, Donna Conwell, Kelly Sicat, Andrea Blum, and everyone at Montalvo Arts Center’s Lucas Artists Residency Program, where I was lucky enough to be a 2017–2020 fellow in fiction. You may never fully know how precious the time and space you gave me were, but my time at Montalvo changed the direction of my creative work and of my life, and for that I will be forever grateful.

  Thank you to Ryah Aqel, Kirsten Terry-Murphy, Matthew Jaber Stiffler, and the folks at the Arab American National Museum, where I spent two months in residency in 2019 holding workshops for marginalized writers and researching large portions of this book, including the sections in Little Syria and in Dearborn. The AANM’s oral history archives of the stories of Arab Americans during the first half of the twentieth century helped to shape this work in crucial ways.