He told her that his parents were accomplished worriers and that they had successfully passed this skill on down to their son. “It was my mother’s worry that finally got me to leave our country, taking the family with me, of course.”
“When did you leave?”
“Three years ago. In ’78. Not as soon as my mother would have liked. But I am being unfair. Not as soon as I should have. Everything that wasn’t being destroyed by the war was being transformed by it, including my job.”
At last she could ask, “And what was that?” She had developed a practice since her divorce of assessing male character traits and manners: Like Greg and Not like Greg. She was certain (though she recognized she had a poor track record in judging such matters) that the man sitting opposite her was not a womanizer. At any rate, he wasn’t womanizing her. Which made her all the more curious about the dyed hair. She felt his profession would finally explain this incongruity.
“I had been the assistant director of antiquities at the National Museum. When the fighting broke out, we took measures to protect the museum collections. I supervised the removal of our most vulnerable objects into storerooms below ground. Then we walled up the openings, so that there was no longer any access to the lower floors.” He produced a rueful smile, “No longer any suggestion that there were any lower floors.”
“Like the tombs of the pharaohs,” she said.
“Yes,” he sighed. “Very much like that. On the street level, all the mosaics laid into the floor were covered over with concrete. Those things that could not be moved—large statues and sarcophagi—were surrounded with sandbags until we could replace the sandbags with shielding made from formed concrete. Even thus, so many rare, even peerless, artifacts have been shattered. And the fighting goes on.” He shook his head. “My entire professional life had been spent bringing antiquities before the public. Now instead of researching and cataloging artifacts for display, I was overseeing their being removed from view. Of course I wanted to preserve the museum’s collections, but I felt much saddened. We all did. We closed the doors to the museum in 1975. After we finished protecting the collections as best we could, I had no real work. And of course there was the danger. It was better to go elsewhere,” he sighed again.
“Why Montreal?”
“I had completed two years of study here as a young man. I remembered the city fondly.”
“Is that when you learned French and English?”
“French was the first language of our household when I was a child. In my country, people who live in the cities typically speak Arabic, French, and English.”
Betsy flushed. She didn’t say that in her country people native to the cities often fail to master English; instead, she changed the subject. “Are you working at a museum in Montreal?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I am working at a museum in Montreal.” He looked at his watch and stood abruptly. “I must leave you. Thank you for letting me share your table and your company. I find it”—he smiled—“unpalatable to eat alone.”
“I very much enjoyed talking with you.”
He bowed slightly.
“Where is it you’re going?” she called after his retreating form. She had assumed he was visiting Lebanon but now worried that he would.
“To Saudi Arabia,” he said, turning, his face all at once suffused with a light that made him, impossibly, still more handsome. He raised his hand, not quite a salute, not quite a wave.
Heading back to her gate, Betsy discovered she was no longer anxious about boarding the plane for Paris. If not this plane, then another. If not this day, then the next.
Already she had made it out of the United States onto foreign soil and into her first adventure. Savoring the jangle of languages in the air, she congratulated herself on having begun her journey with not just small talk but meaningful conversation with very possibly the most piercingly handsome man on the planet. That would be something to write to her sister about.
Four days later, Betsy climbed into a taxi, the first she had permitted herself since arriving on the continent. The driver surveyed her and said “Where to?” in English. She decided that he was extending a courtesy, addressing her in what he had deduced was her mother tongue, and she would do the same. She requested, in French, s’il vous plaît, that he take her to the train station. Her words—her pronunciation—unleashed the monster (or monstre) in him. When he’d finished ranting in the vernacular that there was no war in his country save the war she and those like her were waging against the French language, Betsy checked her watch. She had ample time to make her train. She waited until he had lowered his invisible submachine gun, then she hoisted her backpack off the seat beside her and opened the taxi door. “I was talking about the war in Lebanon,” she said in English. “But never mind. I think I’ll walk.”
All Roads Lead to Mekkah
2.
Kassim wished, devoutly, that he could have put off his journey until Dhu al-Hijjah, the last month in the Islamic calendar. Only then could a hajj be made. He longed to be addressed respectfully as hajji, as one who has completed the pilgrimage to Mekkah required of all who are able to make the journey. But his hajj must be delayed indefinitely because his petition to Allah could not wait.
His mother insisted that he could not afford to put off his journey for even a few months. “You cannot wait for the seasons to change, my son. It is always winter in your wife’s heart.” Financially, he couldn’t afford to make the journey at all. His mother, Azar, had solicited funds from her two brothers to supplement their dwindling reserves. Najwa, his wife, resented that their savings were being exhausted by a pilgrimage that did not even fulfill her husband’s obligation, but of late Najwa resented everything to do either with money or with her husband.
When the family had lived in Beirut, they’d employed four servants, three in the house and one who tended the grounds and the automobile. Now Najwa was expected to do the work of all those, not that they any longer had a house or grounds or automobile to tend. All six of them—Najwa, her husband, their three daughters, and Kassim’s mother—shared a two-bedroom third-floor walk-up in the Mile End neighborhood of Montreal, “the End of the World neighborhood,” according to his daughter Hala. Kassim’s mother and youngest daughter shared the second bedroom while the two teenagers unrolled a mattress that was used for seating in the living room during the day and fell asleep each night to a soundless flickering TV screen.
When Kassim had shepherded his family out of Lebanon in 1978, everyone agreed there were many more reasons to leave than to stay, but the reason that dwarfed all others was unambiguous, they had lost so many: Kassim’s father to a sniper’s bullet, Najwa’s brother and cousin to a suicide bomber, other relations listed as casualties—their deaths so insignificant—of the fighting between Israel and the PLO. Leaving Beirut had been wrenching—they mourned their old life—but not only was that way of living already lost to them, they feared the loss of their very lives each day. Kassim’s family, what remained of it, had regarded him as their savior. Back then they blessed this man who brought them to a land of peace, of unbroken buildings and empty skies, but now fear for their lives had been supplanted by fear for his livelihood, the cataclysmic eclipsed by the everyday.
At home, Kassim had been the Assistant Director of Antiquities at the National Museum of Beirut. In Montreal the best he could find was work as a security guard at the Redpath Museum at McGill with its extensive natural history collections and relatively modest accumulation of archaeological and ethnological artifacts. Kassim was baffled by his failure. He had nineteen years of experience acquiring, cataloging, and displaying significant archaeological treasures and supervising those who handled them. He spoke a more refined French and polished English than many of his Canadian counterparts. He assumed that his fluency in Arabic along with his deep knowledge of the gilded votive statuettes and other finds from the Obelisk
Temple of Byblos, not to mention his paper establishing the sarcophagus of Ahiram with the oldest text written in the Phoenician alphabet as belonging to the Iron Age rather than his own Bronze Age, would make him valuable in the museum marketplace.
His mother was known for saying that it was fitting that Kassim should work in a museum as he himself was a work of art. Saying so did not endear her to her daughter-in-law. Najwa was keenly aware of her husband’s exceptional good looks and Azar’s remarks suggested that her mother-in-law did not find his wife worthy of her beautiful son. Azar and Najwa had kept an uneasy peace between them, one that had been buoyed up by the charged air that had buffeted them in Lebanon and was in danger of complete collapse in enervating Canada.
After nearly five decades of futile appeals, Kassim had almost given up asking his mother to stop drawing attention to his appearance. He found the unsolicited attention others paid to be disturbing enough without her reminding him that he was sought after and singled out for his looks rather than the things a man hoped to be remembered for. As a small child, Azar had dressed him in lace and skirts in the European manner. He had been as pretty—more pretty!—than any little girl. As a schoolboy he had been thought shy. He had kept his gaze downcast, not just because he was self-conscious but because he wanted to veil his green eyes, a gift from his Persian great-grandmother.
His first stay in Montreal, as a young man doing postgraduate studies, had inspired open, aggressive declarations by both women and men. He was approached with offers of a cruise to the Bahamas, an engraved Swiss watch, a gold and onyx ring with a ruby winking in its center (that for a single afternoon tryst with a commodities broker), as well as modeling jobs and party invitations. When he declined, as he always did, Kassim became still more desirable.
As an object of intense interest, it was not so surprising that he became interested in objects rather than people. He chose as his companions dusty artifacts so long buried that they carried no imprint of the hands that made them.
When he returned to Beirut, a marriage was arranged, and despite his travels and time away from the traditions and conventions he had grown up with, the marriage suited him. Najwa had been a dutiful wife during their years in Lebanon and Kassim was not the sort of husband who was aggrieved at being presented with daughters. Secretly, he felt relief that he was not responsible for fathering a painfully handsome son. Such a boy would either suffer, as he had, or glory in his looks, a prospect surely as repugnant to Allah as it was to Kassim. The daughters looked well enough, but none had the haunting, harrowing good looks of their father.
The youngest, Reem, whose name meant “white antelope,” had a bend in her nose that grew more pronounced with each passing year. This attribute was pointed out by her unremarkable older sisters and appreciated by her father, who felt it saved her from being perfect. Reem was the daughter of Kassim’s heart.
When, in their cramped apartment in Mile End, Hala and Leila conspired with their mother in their grand scheme to ignore Kassim, to converse around him as though he weren’t there, to show him of what little consequence he had become, Reem would appear at her father’s side and slip her hand into his. Her sisters picked on her for her devotion to him, and for her independence from them. Kassim was pierced by the aptness of her name: a white antelope was an easy target as well as a symbol of purity.
Surprised at first by her disloyalty and then bewildered by her distance, he had admonished his wife to praise Allah for their deliverance. “You cannot wish our daughters back in that house, huddling against the stray bomb, the intentional bullet, unable to go to school in safety.” When that failed to arouse Najwa’s finer feelings, he would remind her that it wasn’t just the bombs and gunfire that had driven them from their home: the National Museum had closed and the cost of living had tripled in the three years before their departure. But she could no longer see where they had been, nor could she see where they would be now had they stayed, only where they were at that moment. He had brought her to this.
His pride was the first victim of his family’s disdain, followed shortly by his pleasure. Gregarious by nature and more at ease with the intimacy of females than most of his countrymen, Kassim missed the interactions that family life should have afforded him. He was already bereft of the recognition and rapport that workplace relations had once furnished.
Though as disrespected as her son, Azar felt his disgrace more acutely. When Kassim’s employment prospects proved meager, Azar cursed the Canadians. “Spite and jealousy,” she spat. “These pasty cold blood pashas cannot bear to work around someone so much more distinguished than themselves.” In their third year in Montreal she decided that Kassim was unable to get a better position because only young men, or at least more youthful-looking men, were getting hired to fill the most important posts. Now she blamed both his good looks and the deterioration of his looks. “All eyes would turn to you. Now they look away.” Kassim ignored her for months, but when she pointed out that the disregard of his wife and older daughters coincided with the advent of his gray hairs, he thought perhaps his mother was right. He let Azar color his hair with the same potion she used on her own. He should have realized that every strand on his head would be painted the same flat, false color. He might as well have used boot black. He recognized the extent of his mistake when his daughter Hala laughed openly and his wife shook her head in disgust. “Now you look like a security guard who is chasing after the young girls.” So he felt the fool as well as a failure. Waiting for the hair to grow out and reading the scorn on the faces of his wife and daughters would only destroy the remains of his confidence.
Despairing of all else, Azar began prodding him to make an ‘Umrah, the lesser pilgrimage to Mekkah that could be undertaken at any time of year, to appeal to Allah for His aid in once again achieving prosperity. “All will be better after your return, inshallah.” Kassim did not need much prodding. Once Azar had secured the needed extra funds from her brothers, whom Kassim had helped settle in Montreal, he contacted a Lebanese travel agent (who had once been a surgeon in Beirut) and two weeks later found himself on the first of three flights that would take him to Saudi Arabia.
When Kassim arrived at the Meeqaat, he bathed and assumed his Ihraam. Before leaving Montreal, he had practiced wrapping himself in the two pieces of white sheeting, one for the top of the body, the other for the lower half. No other clothing was permitted during Ihraam. Kassim rejoiced in what was much more than a ritual: the visual acknowledgment that, stripped of their possessions, all stood equal in the eyes of Allah. He left behind, in the pockets of his now shabby suit, his grief and his failures. Mingling with the other pilgrims, he discovered what it meant to be faceless in a crowd.
He entered the state of Ihraam by making his intention in his heart while reciting the opening Talbiyyah. His heart brimmed with prayer and hopefulness as he passed through the mammoth doorway and crossed the threshold of the sacred mosque, careful to set out on his right foot across the cool marble. “O Allah! Forgive me my sins, and open the gates of your mercy for me,” he pleaded. All around him pilgrims were studying or praying from the Qu’ran. He felt the peace of the mosque and the honor of their intentions.
Even though not yet the season of the hajj, the sight of the multitude in the roofless courtyard surrounding the Kaaba caused Kassim to gasp. Then his eyes fixed on the Kaaba itself, the structure of stones brought from the hills surrounding Mekkah, the holy structure that had been ordained by Allah, constructed by Adam, rebuilt by Ibrahim and his son Ismael, rebuilt again by the later prophets, and finally by the Prophet Muhammad. Kassim knew that at the east corner, five feet above ground, he would find the most sacred Black Stone. The Stone that had been white when given to Adam on his fall from Paradise, the Stone that had turned black from absorbing all the sins of the millions of pilgrims who had grazed it with outstretched fingers. Dazed, he watched the blur of bodies swirling around the structure tautly enshrouded in black fabri
c covered with Qur’anic text, a black as deep as faith against the radiant sun-illuminated whiteness of the marble floor of the courtyard there in the center of the Grand Mosque—that center toward which he had pointed his whole being in prayer five times each day of his life.
Kassim was propelled forward by a surge of pilgrims into the vast open area. He joined the mottled whirlpool composed of streaks of brown and yellow and pink and black bodies draped in white. He was one of thousands at that moment performing a Tawaaf —“around the House”—the counterclockwise circling of the Kaaba seven times. As Kassim strode, each circle converging more nearly on the black edifice, he meditated upon his own name, which meant “dispenser of food and goods” and prayed that Allah would again make him worthy of it. It was said that every prayer recited within the Grand Mosque was of one hundred thousand times more worth than any spoken outside it.
A part of the swirling mass of humanity—a particle of it—Kassim felt that he no longer existed as a separate entity. His spirit flowed alongside and through his brethren.
As he neared the Kaaba on his seventh round, he ached with joy, his fingers stiff with anticipation. “Allahu Akbar,” he whispered as the palm of his right hand brushed the Black Stone in the eastern corner. “Allah is the Greatest.” Suddenly he was alone with Allah in a sea of a million people.
When Kassim left the mosque, he was torn, both reluctant to turn away from the Kaaba and eager to complete the ‘Umrah. He fell into a procession heading for Mount Safaa to perform the Sa’y. He climbed Safaa until the Kaaba became again visible, and he recited, “Allah is the Greatest, Allah is the Greatest, Allah is the Greatest. None has the right to be worshipped except Allah alone, Who has no partner. To Him belongs the dominion, to Him belongs all praise, and He has the power over everything.” He repeated the prayer twice more, inserting his own petition between the repetitions. His imam back in Montreal had laid a firm hand upon his shoulder, “Make supplication from your heart for that which will benefit you. Whatever it is you need. Do not be reluctant to ask. Do not hesitate. You cannot be embarrassed before Allah. You cannot bring false pride with you on this journey. For your petition to be granted, you must ask.”
The Opposite of Chance Page 2
