by Stuart Dybek
At least, people said he was a priest. I watched his implacable crawl during the summer after my senior year—a confused, solitary time. In the space of the few months before graduation, I had become more involved than I’d realized with an exchange student who had returned suddenly to Beirut to attend the funeral of her grandfather. She had been in the States only since the start of the academic year. Her name was Nisa. We’d met during the winter semester in a poetry class. The first assignment was for each student to memorize and recite a favorite poem. “Howl” was too long, so I chose Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” At a hundred and thirty-one lines, it took five minutes to declaim. When it was Nisa’s turn, she rose from her seat with her tangle of black hair pouring down her back and in a clear voice recited:
I want to be where
your bare foot walks,
because maybe before you step,
you’ll look at the ground.
I want that blessing.
Then she quickly sat back down. Her recitation had lasted moments. She didn’t say who’d written the poem; no one inquired. I’d never heard a poem like that, a poem direct and sensual, and it occurred to me that perhaps she had written it and was too shy to admit it. I didn’t ask in class for fear of embarrassing her, but I wanted to hear the poem again, to copy it down, and read more like it. After class, I caught up with her and asked who wrote it.
“Rumi,” she said.
“Who?” I asked. Rumi was hardly known in America then, though years later he became a New Age bestseller.
“Jalaluddin Rumi. He wrote in Persian in the thirteenth century. He was a Sufi, an ecstatic.”
“Mind if I walk along with you?” I asked.
“Let us go then, you and I,” she said in a portentous voice, mimicking my recital of “Prufrock.”
We walked to the library, where she helped me find an anthology of Persian poetry. Until reading about Sufi mysticism in the introduction, I hadn’t realized that the poem Nisa had recited was a prayer to God, rather than the sensual love poem I’d taken it to be. I decided not to mention my disappointment. Her family was Maronite Christian. Although I had some vague notion that Maronites were connected to the Greek Orthodox Church, I was ignorant as to how they differed from Catholics. I wondered if Nisa’s upbringing had been a strict Christian equivalent to that of Muslim women required to wear burkas. When I asked if she was religious, she told me that she made a distinction between living by religious tenets and living her life in a way that allowed for the spiritual. She believed the sacred was everywhere, hidden only because we are not taught to see. She wanted to know what I believed in. I told her that my current saint, if I had one, was Albert Camus, who wrote, “I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.” She asked if I knew that my name, Jack, meant God is gracious. Trying to joke, I asked if her name, Nisa, had anything to do with Phoenicia.
“Actually,” she said, speaking slowly and clearly, as if to the village idiot, “it means woman.”
We began meeting at the library after class, discussing poems and novels, and then everything else. By mid-March, on days posing as spring although the tulip trees on campus were still a month from flowering, we’d walk along the lake or wander through neighborhoods, sometimes cutting class. There was a dreamy, timeless ease to those walks, a sense—so brief in a lifetime—when being in college seems like a form of sanctuary. We’d walk for miles and stop along the way at little Mideastern places where the food was cheap, fresh, and fragrant with lemon, parsley, and mint—storefronts I’d have passed by. I’d tease Nisa that her homesickness expressed itself as hunger, and she’d say she wanted me to taste the flavors she grew up with. She could turn the city I was born in into a different city, one that would otherwise have remained invisible.
Her city was in turmoil. We could watch yesterday’s street fighting on the evening news. “No matter the time here, I always feel the exact hour at home, like having a clock inside me, and I’m living here and there in both times at once. It has nothing to do with homesickness,” she told me, trying to explain. “There’s a line in a poem by a Lebanese poet, a woman who actually inscribed a book to my mother. In English, it’s something like, I have hidden under my tongue a land, I keep there like a host.”
Nisa’s love of poetry came from her mother, a teacher at a private girls’ school in Beirut. Her mother believed that an educated woman was a free woman. That’s how she’d raised Nisa, and yet the night before Nisa left for the U.S., her mother warned her to guard her heart. She told Nisa that travel exaggerated emotions, and that foreign travel could both broaden and distort perspective—it could make highs ecstatic, and the depths hopeless. She cautioned Nisa about callow American boys.
“At least she didn’t call them decadent,” Nisa said.
“Personally, I prefer decadent,” I said.
“Then you shall have it. You’re my first decadent American boy.”
Despite my callow joke about her name, she liked hearing in return that she was my first Phoenician girl.
She had to return to Beirut before the winter semester ended. The day she left, I called a cab and rode with her to O’Hare. We’d never before taken a cab together. On excursions downtown we always rode the Red Line L over the city. Nisa loved the L. Once, during a March blizzard, she made up a fantasy about us boarding an L train with a violet headlight at a snowy, abandoned station and riding the sparking third rail of the Violet Line over roofs and across the dark lake, where we fell asleep to the rhythmic hiss of wheels on water. When we wake it’s light and the train stands among date palms at a sun-drenched station in a white city. The doors snap open and she takes my hand. “Let us go then, you and I,” she says.
The cab smelled of curry. The Pakistani driver was forking his breakfast from a to-go carton as he drove. Nisa and I tried to keep things light, but only managed to seem self-conscious. She became so quiet that I asked if she was all right.
“I’m not afraid of flying,” she said, “but airports make me nervous. They remind me of hospitals.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“In hospitals people are giving birth while others are dying; it’s hello or goodbye, like an airport.”
When we checked Departures for her gate, I kidded about not seeing any flights to Phoenicia. “Maybe it can only be reached by galley. I’m afraid you’ll have to stay,” I said.
Her eyes suddenly teared. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I promised myself I wouldn’t do this, but I am going to miss you so much. If this is the exaggerated emotion mothers warn daughters about, I’m not leaving it behind.”
I put her suitcase down and held her, breathing in the scent of her hair. “You know it’s the same for me, right?” I whispered against her ear. “You know where this is going, right? I want to be where your bare foot walks.”
“You will,” she said.
We promised again to call and write. She didn’t have a return ticket, but would be back in maybe four weeks, she said, maybe even in time to take her final exams. Her grandfather had belonged to the Phalange and when the Syrians shelled the Christian neighborhoods, he had refused to move. His insistence that the family remain in Beirut was one reason Nisa had been sent out of the country to school. Now that he was dead, she knew the family would be relocating, perhaps to the Christian stronghold of Rayfoun, or to Brummana, the town of her mother, in the mountains. I’d never been farther from Chicago than New Orleans, and beyond clips on the TV news, I understood little about the conflict and the country to which she was returning, knew next to nothing of its history, language, and culture, nothing of the whitewashed, bullet-riddled, glass-strewn, window-blown, smoldering city she called home.
At the international gate, while travelers hurried by, we stood kissing.
“No cheers?” Nisa asked. “What’s wrong with these people? Are they sleepwalkers? Don’t they recognize the girl from Phoenicia, who came all this way in a Chicago winter, to have that once-in-a-lifetime
kiss, a kiss that would be legendary? If I look back to wave, I’ll cry,” she said, and then she turned and walked away without looking back. I watched until her black hair disappeared into the crowd.
I took public transportation back. I carried no luggage, but the L ride felt like traveling to a foreign province—the City Where I Missed Her—a place I’d never been before, complete with exaggerated emotion and a distorted perspective.
After a week of silence, I called the numbers she had given me, but the calls never went through. The letters I wrote, nearly every day at first, like pages in a diary, went unanswered. Each day I’d read the paper for news about Beirut. There were so many questions I wished I had asked her. I’d wait for the mail. Everything that summer seemed like waiting. I went to sleep waiting, woke waiting, read waiting, looked for a job waiting, walked beside the lake, as Nisa and I had back in March before walking had become another way of waiting.
The priest swam each morning that summer, far out beyond the whistles of lifeguards. Reflecting light like white marble, his arms milled a steady stroke south toward the hazy skyline of downtown. I assumed he launched his swim from the tiny pebble beach near Madonna della Strada. I don’t know how far he swam; I never saw him returning. I wondered if swimming for him was a form of prayer, a daily routine akin to that of the priests murmuring their breviaries as they strolled through the lakeside campus at dusk.
He continued to swim after Labor Day, when the lifeguards left and the beaches officially closed. He swam through early autumn as the temperature fell and leaves rusted and rattled and the windy days stropped the waves to a metallic glint. Fall mornings when the surface of the lake steamed, I’d spot him, always at the same distance from shore, like a man training to swim the Channel. There were overcast days when the sudsy gray chop made him hard to see. I’d test with my hand and imagine immersing my body into water that glacial. I began to wonder if, rather than a prayer, swimming was penance, some form of mortification, like a monk lashing himself in his cell or Raskolnikov embracing suffering at the end of Crime and Punishment. What was he swimming from? I tried to imagine his demons, without accusing him of a specific crime—molester, murderer, skimmer of donations on church-sponsored bingo nights. I supposed if there was a sin that had become his secret, then it must have been some betrayal of his office or vocation, a breach of trust that redefined him. By late October there were morning frosts and days you could see your breath, when it was too blustery to walk for long beside the lake. I don’t know on what day he either found forgiveness or simply admitted that it was impossible for him to enter the water.
* * *
Swimming would never be my prayer, but now, years later, breast-stroking away from Columbia Beach at night, I hoped that, like a kind of meditation, the swim would still my mind.
Instead, my thoughts worked back to my caseload. It was over one hundred cases and I was constantly behind. Ragged unread case files buried my desktop. I thought about the people I’d seen earlier that day, like Serena Dixon, an obese woman who would insist on brewing a pot of coffee so we could “visit like civilized folk.” In conversation, she seemed a caring mother, but her four-year-old daughter, Deedee, had just had her third major “accident”—a fall down the stairs that broke her arm—and I’d begun keeping a record of other signs of abuse.
I thought about Mrs. Wise. There was nowhere on the case forms to record the daily courage it took for her to face the daily threats of poverty. She was a grandmother who, despite her own ailments, was raising her mentally impaired fourteen-year-old granddaughter, Alma. Earlier in the year, Alma’s headaches had become so severe that she was rushed screaming to the emergency room. They thought it might be meningitis and were prepping Alma for a spinal tap when a festering red bean she’d inhaled into her sinus months before was discovered. The last time I’d visited, Alma looked pregnant. Mrs. Wise claimed it was just baby fat. She slid a steak knife from her sewing bag to cut the thread from the button on a blouse she was mending, ran a raspy, thimbled thumb along its blade, and told me that any man who laid a hand on Alma would get stuck like the pig he was, as would anyone who tried to take her away. She narrowed her eyes and added how from her windows she could see me hanging out at “that whorehouse hotel,” pretending I had clients to visit there.
“You ain’t fooling nobody, Mr. Cook County,” she said. “I seen a lot of your kind, poking your nose in on folks you don’t know nothing about, don’t care nothing about, never will know nothing about, and one day you ain’t here no more, moved on to something better, and there’s another fool come to give me his Mr. Cook County card, no damn different than the fool before knocking at the door like he knows something.”
I was the caseworker for that whorehouse hotel the DuSable—the Mighty Du, as it was known in the hood—eight floors of alcoholics and junkies on disability and prostitutes, mostly young women addicted to crack. There was a soul-food restaurant called Banks located in what had been the old Drexel Bank across the street, and the cops who ate there wondered how I could go into the Mighty Du unarmed. A week ago I’d found a package without a return address in my mailbox in Rogers Park. Inside was a small-caliber gun, its serial number filed off, and a box of bullets. I loaded the clip and instead of going to campus to run, I walked out late at night to the beacon at the end of the pier off Farewell, thinking I might test-fire a shot into the water. But when I got there, I didn’t want to ruin the silence. I imagined some stranger lying unable to sleep, who would hear the shot and wonder if there’d been a mugging, and if he should call 911. It had been enough to just once experience the petty power of what it felt like to walk around armed. I unloaded the clip and kept the gun hidden in a locked suitcase under my bed.
I thought of Felice Lavel, a mother on ADC—Aid to Dependent Children—whose daughter, Starla, had been diagnosed with leukemia. Felice was determined to get a college degree. The first time I visited her, I noticed books scattered around her apartment, a few romance novels, but also I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, The Bluest Eye, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. She wanted to talk about them, and on the next visit I brought her Go Tell It on the Mountain, Invisible Man, and Bronzeville Boys and Girls, the anthology of poems for children by Gwendolyn Brooks, who was still alive then, still living on the South Side. I told Felice the book was for Starla. She thanked me and asked me to bring other books, especially my favorites, so we could discuss them.
“They all don’t have to be black,” she said.
Her dream was to go to law school. I helped her enroll at Martin Luther King College and got her part-time secretarial work at the office of a lawyer who did pro bono work with welfare recipients, but Felice quit to become a cocktail waitress. She wasn’t making enough yet to get off public aid, but she was trying. Visiting her apartment a few days earlier, I’d noticed immediately that the cracked plastic chairs and the wobbly table from a resale shop were gone, replaced by stylish furniture. The windows were open and new silky green drapes billowed into the room. Starla was in the children’s wing of County Hospital, but her bedroom was waiting for her, redone in shades of pink and complete with its own TV and a canopy bed presided over by an enormous black-spotted pink leopard.
“Okay, Jack, you’re wondering where the money came from,” Felice said. “You been straight with me. I ain’t going to lie to your face. I’m doing a little tricking on the side. Only connected clients. You’re not going to report me and mess up Starla’s medical, I know.”
I could have said, I wish you hadn’t told me; or, Be careful, Felice, prostitution is more dangerous than commercial fishing; or, Have you thought about what will happen to Starla if something happens to you? I said nothing.
“So?” Felice asked.
“So, you’re taking too many chances. You just took a chance telling me. You know that saying we talked about? ‘Chance favors the prepared mind.’ Well, it works in reverse, too, when it comes to bad luck. What if you’d guessed wrong and I said I’m going to report y
ou, like I’m supposed to?”
“Then I’d say, I know you think I’m pretty, Jack. I’d do you pro bono.”
I closed the folder in which I was supposed to be making notes for the “Living Arrangements” section of the case report I was required to submit to document the visit. “Good luck, Felice,” I said.
“Let me ask you something ’fore you go. If … when I get off welfare and you’re not my worker anymore, would you ever think to give me a call, you know, keep in touch, talk books, get a drink or something?”
“Maybe,” I said, knowing it was the easy-out answer.
“Maybe, huh? Maybe you might do something crazy like have a cup of coffee, huh?”
“Get off welfare and I’ll buy lunch to celebrate.”
“Thanks, Jack, I’d like that.”
* * *
One becalmed night when I swam as far as I safely could, still keeping something in reserve for swimming back, I saw, along a streak of moonlight paved like a path on the black surface of water, a body floating farther out. I knew it had to be an optical illusion, only a log, probably, but when fish began to jump around it—I’d never seen fish jumping at night until then—I had the eerie sense they were feeding. I swam along the path of moonlight toward it, but it moved away, farther out, as if swimming, too, inviting me to follow. I was breathing from exertion when I’d spotted it and could hear the sound of my breath echoing over the lake; at least, I thought the sound was mine, but when I held my breath I still heard the resonance of someone breathing. I swam keeping my eyes on whatever it was, sure I was gaining, until as I drew closer it widened the gap between us again. When the thought came to mind that it was the priest, I gave up. It was a ludicrous thought, crazy. Plus I’d never catch him.
Each night I would swim out farther and then, treading water, turn and gaze at the distant Gold Coast, a lustrous veneer behind which the apartheid of slums wasn’t even a shadow. If a power outage suddenly plunged the city into darkness, I would be confused as to the direction of shore. The imaginary fear of that happening would get me swimming back.
