Ramadan slid the envelope onto the counter, between the pages of the man’s comic book. Placing his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose, the man picked it up and looked at it closely. His eyebrows arched, as if he were absorbing something more than the details of an address, something that, like the comic book he’d been forced to put down, was telling an engrossing story, one to which even he, a would-be disinterested shopkeeper, could personally relate. His eyes, moving slowly as he read, started to twinkle, or so it seemed to Ramadan, who wondered if that was because they were catching the overhead light or—and this he intuited was more likely, as a tiny fleck of moisture gathered on the man’s lower left lash—if it was because his eyes had, for whatever reason, grown steamy and reflective. Ramadan and Ahmet stared at the man as he continued to examine the envelope, almost forensically, holding it with the tips of his fingers, turning it from front to back, before flipping it over again. His movements had all been slow but then, in a flash, his attention ratcheted to them. His eyes darted above the top frame of his glasses, peering first at Ahmet, then Ramadan, before his focus, laced with wariness, panned again to Ahmet.
“Who are you?” he asked in English, his voice clipped with suspicion. “Where did you get this?”
“We want to find the people in the photograph,” Ahmet said.
“What photograph?” The man opened the envelope.
“Yes, it’s inside,” Ramadan said. “We are looking for Zahirah and Adad.”
The man glared at him again, looking him over. When the picture slid out onto the counter, he picked it up and stared at it for a moment. Then he swallowed visibly, expelling, at the end, a little cough. He muttered, “My father . . . is dead.”
Ahmet and Ramadan stared at each other for a moment. Then, facing the man again, they saw that while he was still holding the photograph in his left hand, he was reaching under the counter with his right, letting it rest there, suggestively. “And why are you looking for my mother?”
A few elongated seconds ticked away during which neither Ramadan nor Ahmet moved or managed to reply. They regained some rudimentary skills of vocalization and animation—however primal and stop-motion jittery—when the man pulled out a large shiny silver pistol and pointed it at them, his arm stiff with tension, his index finger crooked around the trigger with intent. The gasps from Ahmet and Ramadan, as throaty and alarmist as the squawks of crows, matched their hands-up, finger-feathered poses.
The last things Ramadan saw and heard with any real clarity were the gun pointing at him and the man’s gruff, repeated inquiry, “Who are you? Who are you?”
After that, his vision blurred, and he experienced a dizziness he hadn’t felt since the day he was shot. Having a gun aimed at him—actually seeing the weapon this time—he revisited, in an instant, his complete trauma. It was as though he had never really stopped feeling it. The sting; the burn; the sensation of his blood rivering coolly down the length of his arm, puddling in his palm; the wooziness; and, perhaps most distressing, the hurt of it all, not the physical pain, but the ache of betrayal—not by anyone in particular (that would come later)—just the awful understanding, as he fell to the ground, presumably slain, that life, in general, had let him down. Then, after the initial panic, a subsidence of anguish, an acceptance, a pleasure even, the sleep that in spite of life’s wonders, he’d always secretly craved—the ultimate silence. Now his knees were buckling, and he was crashing to the floor in this little Aleppo convenience store, about to black out completely, when he heard what must have been Ahmet’s voice warbling with fear. “Please . . .”
Ahmet . . . , he wanted to say, but his paralysis had rendered him as mute as the essence of the very idea he wanted to express. I know who the Sultan of Silence is. The Sultan of Silence is D—
* * *
THOUGH RAMADAN COULDN’T understand the words the feminine voice was murmuring, its tones of consolation coaxed him from the depths. Maternal caresses broke through the barriers of language and unconsciousness, and he awakened in a state of sublime comfort.
“Ah . . . ,” the woman staring down at him said.
“Ramadan, we are here.” Ahmet was somewhere in the room. “This is Zahirah.”
Zahirah’s celestial blue garment heightened the holiness with which a dazed Ramadan was endowing her. Gaining awareness, he realized he was lying across her lap, and his torso was draped in the folds of the azure fabric covering her from head to foot. His legs were stretched out on the small sofa holding them both as snuggly as she was cradling him. Lying here in the care of this woman, who was treating him as if he were hers, it struck him as odd that he had willed himself around the world in search of a man he didn’t know, a man, in pursuit of a hazy, elusive, unfelt-before, father-feeling—when here was the thing he knew best, the thing in which he had almost always been able to trust. Yes, his aunt Clarissa’s cruelty had blemished the sanctity of womanhood for him, swinging the pendulum of his heart toward the pole of masculinity. But still, after Mama Joon’s passing, wouldn’t making a daring effort to discover another version of this affection, which all his life had been his saving grace—the nurturing warmth of a mother figure—wouldn’t making a frantic run for that, for this, have been a far more sensible goal? Why had he wanted, why did he still want Mustafa? Had he come all this way under false pretenses? What if, in the end, there was nothing greater than this?
“Bae-bae is wake,” Zahirah said, dabbing a thin glaze of sweat from his forehead with a fistful of her garment, adding, with this pampering, more gravity to his self-doubt. Her dark, expressive eyes beamed down, asking about his well-being with far more depth than her English permitted. “Is okay?”
Ramadan sat up and put his feet on the floor, breaking the contentment he’d felt while in her arms. She scooched closer and took his face in her hands. “I see Malik, when he was a boy.”
“Ma-ma . . . ,” Malik said from across the room.
“I am the mother,” she said, still looking at Ramadan. “I know. You have just one thing different—American color.”
“And that curly hair!” Malik shouted. “Boy—you could be a comicbook character!”
“No, no. Adad father, he have this hair—how you say—kully? But change the color and the kully, comedy hair, and I am looking at the young you.” Her voice lost its wistfulness when she added, “And you show the boy the gun, Malik! Is like you show the gun against you-self! The war—it make men crazy.”
Zahirah let her fingers disappear into Ramadan’s curls. “Yes, you look like the Totah boys.”
“But he is not a Totah boy, Mama.”
“I know this! I just say he look like Totah boys. The eye. The nose. The mouth. Is very strange . . .” Then she yelled something in Arabic.
Malik responded, sounding to Ramadan as though he might be cursing. After a pause, he said, “She just likes you because you bring her that picture of her and Baba.”
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you . . . thank you!”
Distracted by the idea that he looked like a Totah, he’d forgotten all about the letter. Now he felt certain his father was related to these people, that he was, too. But whatever Ahmet had told them, he must not have mentioned anything about Mustafa.
Zahirah picked up the photograph from the coffee table. If Malik had handled the letter like someone wanting to know everything about it, she held the picture as if it knew everything about her. “This day!” Her voice was filled with nostalgia. Then she added, almost inaudibly, “My secret . . .”
“What secret, Mama?”
Ignoring the question, she continued, “Look, Malik—” She showed him the image. “Baba is so young. He look like Totah boy, too! But he was a man . . .”
She cackled, and Malik shrugged, averting his eyes.
Ramadan looked at Ahmet, who motioned for him to say something. But he shook his head. What if, like Adad, Mustafa . . . was . . . ?
“Ramadan . . . ,” Ahmet said.
“Allahu Akbar,” Zahirah
and Malik said together.
“No,” Ahmet said, pointing to Ramadan. “Him. He wants to ask you something.”
“Oh, yes, Ramadan.” Zahirah rubbed his hand. “Is you.”
“Uh,” Ramadan began. “I was wondering . . . what happened to Mr. Adad?”
Zahirah pointed her chin toward the ceiling and sighed, but Malik stepped forward. “The big storm. You are from New Orleans, but maybe you are too young to remember.”
“No, I remember. I was there.”
“Okay. I was there, too. Me, Baba, and my brother, Jamil. We should stay in the store that night, near the high ground. But instead we go home to the parish, past the Ninth Ward. St. Bernard. We have never been through a storm before. We do not know the smart place to be. We do not know what will happen.”
Ramadan said, “Nobody knew.”
“This is true, Ramadan. Well, we think while we sleep in the night, Baba must decide to go back to the store. Maybe for the computer. Jamil left it in the office. The whole business was in the laptop. No backup nowhere. Stupid, you know. So maybe that was why he went back out, but we don’t know. The levee must break when he leave. Too much water. Water everywhere. Everywhere. We wake up and the neighborhood is like the ocean. And Baba, he cannot swim. He always say he hate the water. That night—the water hate him, too.”
“No!” Zahirah objected. “He did not hate the water. He like a good bath. And he like the river! See here, in the picture. We ride in a boat on the Nile!”
“Okay, Mama!” Malik heaved a sigh before continuing. “So then, next day, after the crazy night, is water everywhere. Me and Jamil, we must swim to be safe. And while we stop to rest on the roof of a mechanic shop, we see a little boat come to us. Is like a dream. So much of what happen is like a dream. I look at Jamil, and Jamil look at me. We don’t believe it. But if he see the boat and I see the boat, it must to be true. ‘Allahu Akbar,’ I say. ‘Allahu Akbar,’ Jamil say. And then we get in the little boat—and we go to look for Baba in the city.” He paused and chuckled. “Mama, is like we float on the Nile, the Nile of the Ninth Ward.”
Zahirah’s body vibrated with complicated laughter. Ramadan saw the corners of her eyes twinkle the way Malik’s had when he had pored over the letter in the store.
“But then the police, they stop us. They think we are bad Arab men. We try to explain about how we search for Baba, but we do not find him. But with no Baba and the whole city destroy, nobody believe us. The police do not believe. They point the guns at me and Jamil—like I do to you, Ramadan. Is what people do when they do not understand, when they do not put them self in the place of the other man. And then . . . and then we go to jail! And then they move us to Texas. And then we deport. Boom, boom, boom. Just like this. Is crazy but true.” Malik raised his hands in surrender.
Zahirah said, “And one day, more than two years after the storm—government letter. Official papers of death. Adad Totah, dead, drown. It make me think how my Adad die. Alone. In this Nile of the Ninth Ward. In the water he sometime love, sometime hate. Was he afraid? Do he think about me? I wish to know what happen. But the government letter do not tell me nothing. It do not tell me what happen at the end. The end end. Who know that? The government do not know. Even if I am there with Adad, I do not know. Only Allah know. Only Allah . . .”
Where did all this water come from? Adad wondered. So much, so fast! Streaming into the old Ford that carried him and the boys to the store every day and home every night. A minute ago the truck was still just a truck, rolling on the dark, slick road, skidding a little, shifting in the wind, pelted by the rain, but nevertheless rolling, as it was meant to do, as he rushed back to the store. And then—whoosh—the truck was a boat. Out of the stormy blackness of this last stretch of the Lower Ninth Ward right before he reached the Industrial Canal—this crazy current had lifted the vehicle off the ground, set it afloat, set him adrift. The engine had choked up, then gone silent; the headlights and the dashboard had blinked off; and the steering wheel had locked. Rudderless, the truck-boat had spun around and around, out of his control. Those first few seconds of the Ford canoeing in the water had felt almost magical. Like experiencing the impossible. Or maybe it felt more like a dream, because in this case he was in the middle of the magic. In the middle of a thing becoming a thing it was not. And if a truck could become a boat, then what could this dream make of him? What would he, part of this becoming, become? The dreaminess of the situation proposed promising possibilities. Meet Admiral Adad Totah, the naval commander, at the helm of a vessel on the high seas, leading a flotilla of other truck-boats, charging toward an unsuspecting shore, one deserving of being conquered, doing the bidding of a worthy king. Or, more modestly, but no less purposefully, the crusty old angler Adad, a fisherman alone at sea in a tempest, out early, before dawn, line cast, awaiting the weighty tug, the challenge and the satisfaction of reeling in the first catch of the day. Either way, an Adad who was up to this task. An Adad perfectly compatible with this: the magical floating Ford. His dream boat.
And it had been a dream that had brought him here, waking him up in the middle of the night. A happy dream at first. Just ticking off in his slumber the events of the day before they meandered into meaning—oh, yes, the surprise of seeing the young one, Mustafa’s boy. The little Totah. He had been dreaming about the boy. How things like this happen, there’s no way to know. If the boy had not run out of the store. If the old woman, his grandma, no doubt, had not called after him. If Adad did not owe her change! If there were no such thing as change! Thank you, Allah, for change!
“Today I saw your boy!” he had said to Mustafa. “They call him ‘Ramadan’! Can you believe this? What a blessing! What a blessing!” And how happy Mustafa had sounded. Which should have reminded Adad. He had still been at the store when he had placed the call home. Malik and Jamil had not yet finished outside with their rushed, haphazard hammering, boarding up the building. (They had been so flustered by the preparations for disaster. Later, after the rain had already started, Malik had poked his head into Adad’s bedroom and muttered, “Jamil forgot the computer.”) Adad could have just walked into the office—oh, he would have seen the laptop, too!—opened the desk drawer, and found the letter, the photograph.
Yes, during the call, it had not been too late to remember.
“What about Alicia?” Mustafa had asked.
“She wasn’t with them. Just the boy and the grandmother. But isn’t it a blessing?”
“Yes, yes!” Mustafa had said, sounding to Adad as excitable, as frisky as the nineteen-year-old he had been in America years before, getting into trouble with all that bad business, the business that—in spite of everything, judging by the boy with the Totah eyes—had turned out pretty good. “What a blessing!”
Yes, the joy in Mustafa’s voice should have reminded him. It should have brought him back to when he himself was young, and he had first known he was going to be a father—when Zahirah had told him she was pregnant with Malik! Even before they were married. Before their time on the boat. On the Nile. Before the photograph in which she and he had been captured in the resplendence of their sin!
But no. He had not remembered until he was in bed asleep. Muttering to himself about Jamil leaving the laptop, he had dropped off quickly. Sighing, thinking how it could be replaced—everything could be replaced—if the hurricane damaged the store. He was counting his blessings . . .
Then later, through the sounds of the storm, which was rattling his bedroom window, he had heard Mustafa ask about the girl when he had called him about his son—“What about Alicia?”—only in his dreams, where things become things they are not, Adad had heard a different question. “What about Zahirah?”
Zahirah!
And only then did he remember. What time was it? What difference did that make? He had peeked out the window. Wild winds and rain. This was why he worked indoors! Who needed such misery! He had to go back. If he hurried, he could drive to the store and get the photograph before
the worst of the storm arrived, before the boys were even awake. They would think he went back for the laptop. Yes, that was what he would tell them in the morning, in the light of day. Not for the picture of him and their mother—which he could not explain—not to rescue the resplendence of sin. You can’t explain why the bad business, even to a good businessman like him, was, in the end, all that really mattered.
It was almost a straight shot up Claiborne Avenue to the canal, then over to St. Claude Avenue . . . he could do this in his sleep!
And the truck-boat was being tossed into the branches of a tree, more water sloshing inside. More water than air now. The air becoming water. He couldn’t blame his lungs for their confusion. All because he’d seen the boy and the woman. Called Mustafa. Remembered too late. Dreamed.
What was this death, his death, worth? he wondered. What commodity could it buy? Surely Allah knew the precise value of things. All things. He would not ask for too much or too little. What Allah took—in this instance Adad himself—was just what was needed to cover the cost of something, the cost of whatever Adad had extracted from the world. Yes, Adad knew this. He was paying for his life with his life. What a perfect transaction! There would be no need for Allah to fumble around with paper or coins. No counting change. No shutting the drawer. Just a smile. A thanks. A “Next!”
Ramadan Ramsey Page 30
