Arabian Jazz

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  All right, so it was probably a lost cause with Melvina, since she was born an old maid, fresh from the womb with a face on her like Auntie Miriam’s, but at least that was respectable. Jemorah, with that look of a child lost in the woods, anyone might take her home. Hadn’t Fatima herself struggled to guide the child, even to drag her through life? But the stubborn girl refused.

  You have to make children see, Fatima thought, even if it meant scooping out their eyes and pointing them with your own hands. Jemorah and her innocent face were locked like a clam against her aunt’s good efforts. She simply would not use hair spray or padded bras, no matter how Fatima wept and railed. She listened nicely, then turned and did the opposite. Fatima knew terrible things waited for her niece in the world. Many times she had told Jemorah, “A woman’s reputation is her soul. It’s her heart and gizzard. You let them rape and murder you before you let them do anything to your reputation.” The child never listened.

  And for that matter, what did her brother know about anything? He was an innocent. Nine months, twenty-three days younger than her and he might have been born last Tuesday on another planet. Fatima stared hard at the beautiful heads and bodies in her glossy magazine. Was there really a place in the world like this? Young, lovely women, laughing, sitting on rocks, tawny as cats, while young, lovely men fanned them with palm leaves. Ha!

  SHE LOOKED AT the pretty-faced models and thought of her sisters’ softer, browner faces when they were children.

  There had been seven girls: Rima, Nejla, Yasmin, Suha, Nabila, Lutfea, then Fatima. When Matussem was finally born, Rima had told her much later, there was at last ease in her parents.

  But something happened. An accident? There was another baby after Matussem, a daughter. Fatima herself couldn’t have been more than four or five. The infant was small and weightless as a rag doll in Fatima’s arms, scarcely moving. She didn’t cry so much as whimper.

  They were going outside the village, to a branch of the river she remembered moving thick and dark as blood, the body of a headless creature sliding through the earth. It was a strange day, as were the rest that followed. On this occasion, when Fatima was four or five, there were clouds in the desert sky, amazing in a place usually swept clean. This sky was dense and vaporous, the clouds full.

  They went to an isolated spot, far from where they drew water or where women washed their clothes. Her mother was digging a hole in the earth with her hands. Her father hadn’t come.

  Fatima placed the baby girl in the hole. As she was told to do. As she must have been told to do. The hole was like a cradle. The infant stirred, and for a moment Fatima thought it might cry, but it merely bleated, a small, weightless sound that rose through the years, always floating near the surface of Fatima’s consciousness. Sometimes still she heard it in the sound of bathwater or beneath the noise of a crowd. Sometimes when she awoke, very early, in the stillest part of her mind where her dream opened into the dawn, came the tiny bleat—scarcely an echo, but enough to push Fatima from her bed to wander the house and yard, vaguely listening.

  Fatima remembered the infant eyes closing against the first handfuls of dirt. The baby stopped moving almost immediately, as if the sheerest blanket of earth was too heavy. They covered her then in this tender, sandy clay, adding the heart, breath, and substance of the creature like a new pulse to the earth.

  Fatima recalled assisting in two, possibly three other furtive burials. None came back to her with the immediacy of that first—if indeed it had been the first. The memories moved in and out of her; she returned to them, moving aside this object and that in order to gaze through the half-light at the event itself. She did recall, on what might have been the final occasion, her father stopping her and her mother at the door, his white robes winding around him as he rose in her imagination, tall as a specter, saying to her mother, “She’s getting too old now; she will begin to remember.”

  Her mother looked at Fatima with a gaze touched with rare gentleness, or perhaps it was only the softening of fatigue and heat. Her mother then turned and said, “Yes? And what of me? What do you think I will remember?”

  FATIMA LAY AWAKE on her bed, trying to get rest, to push memory out of her mind. She had a picture in her head of a door opening on a door opening on a door. She stepped from room to room, from the tiny rooms she and her mother dug in the earth, to the constant invasions of relatives, sixteen sharing five rooms, to a room on the border of two countries. It was unclear what countries these were or where precisely the dividing line was drawn. She was sixteen in this picture, and the notion of America sparked in her like a lit fuse. She and Zaeed planned to emigrate. But at some point in 1956—perhaps she was crossing the street to the marketplace, perhaps merely standing at the edge of the road—the border twitched again and she was seized without warning for crossing that line.

  The merchants and villagers had fled before the foreign truck. No one had spoken to her; if they did she did not hear them. They gathered their possessions and ran. And Fatima, who was alone at the time, who was visiting relatives in the village, merely stood, watching. She held a paper bag containing a dozen loose eggs. The men wore army jackets; they did not speak Arabic. They put her into a truck so crowded that she couldn’t turn around. Her bag of eggs was smashed and liquid pressed through the paper.

  The men threw hoods over the prisoners. When the hoods were removed, Fatima saw a room the color of which she would never forget, though there was no word for it in Arabic or English. Later, if she saw this color—in a stranger’s eyes or flitting through the pattern of a woman’s dress—she would have to sit and put her head between her knees.

  Fatima lived for two, three, four days without a visitor, without food, just a bucket of water in the room. She tried to scoop up what was left of the eggs, now just shell and a spot of liquid at the bottom of the bag, long fibers of egg she sucked from her fingers. She tried to eat the shells, which cut her mouth; finally, she sucked on the bag itself. She curled into herself, into the clear curve of an egg against both light and hunger. What happened? Nothing. She was released. A mistake, the man turning the key said. He spoke English. Nothing happened. She was not beaten. She was released into a blue doorway of light, empty, the desert road. Some merchants found her there and drove her back to town. Her family rejoiced when she returned. They rejoiced without asking where she had been. Not her husband. Not her mother. And she found that she could tell no one. Years later, she and her husband emigrated to America. She and her husband.

  Sometimes she would tell herself a story about that time, the day in the village. She would think: I was left in a room somewhere, and I waited. Such waiting is worse than a beating. Worse than death. Then she would feel ashamed for thinking so. All the same, it was true. She was released into a blue doorway of light, empty, the desert road. They believe they let me out of there, she thought; they never let me out. She would close her eyes and mentally close a door, the door on a tiny brown room of earth. I’ve been waiting to go out, she thought, room in room in room. I am waiting.

  Chapter 15

  EVERYONE CALLED UNCLE Fouad “Uncle Fouad,” even Matussem and Fatima, his brother-in-law and sister-in-law. He was related to them through his marriage to the eldest Ramoud sister, Rima, and was a distant cousin to Fatima’s husband, Zaeed. Rima had not returned to the United States since the World’s Fair in New York, at which time she’d been goaded into taking a ride on a thing called the Whipper-Snapper and had vomited cotton candy and hot dog across the faces of several bystanders.

  Every year when Fouad urged his wife to renew her passport, she would respond, “That may be what you call fun, Fouad, but I’d rather fall down a well.”

  Fouad heard this with glee, since it meant another summer vacation of flirting with skinny American women and playing Sugar-Daddy from Amman. Now, as he pried himself out of the black Trans Am rental, he tried to decide if his brother-in-law’s house was getting smaller or if he was getting larger. His hands explored the vistas
of his belly, then pushed the hair back from his scalp. He wore it long, combed back into stiff, greased curls around his collar. He always kept a comb marinading in a jar of hair tonic with him, as well as a big bottle of lemon-scented cologne, and found that with these implements it was possible to dispense with bathing for days, sometimes weeks, at a time. Two of his teeth were gold, one was silver, and one had a little diamond embedded in it. He wore thick chains of twenty-four-karat gold around his neck and wrist, and designer shirts that he ordered from Niagara Falls. He hung beads around the rearview mirrors of his Lincoln Town-car and his Cadillac Seville to keep away the evil eye.

  The family’s attitude toward Uncle Fouad was that since he made more money than all the Ramouds and Mawadis put together, he was boss.

  Melvina came into Jem’s room and peered out at Fouad through the bedroom curtains. “Look at him!” she hissed to Jem. “Preening like the emperor in his tasteless new clothes. He won’t even knock on the door. He’s waiting for us to come out and abase ourselves at his feet.”

  He did seem to Jem to be doing just that as he positioned himself—as usual, two and a half hours early—in the center of the front lawn and ran his hands over the stomach that pushed between his designer buttons. He was wearing long sleeves, and the expensive fabric of his shirt was already stained with deep V’s of sweat in front and back. Jem knew from past experience that inside of fifteen minutes he would have the shirt tied in a turban around his head and he would be lounging around in gray Fruit of the Loom boxers.

  Matussem crept up beside his daughters. It was eight-thirty in the morning. “Go on there, somebody, and see what he want so early,” he whispered. “I’m not done watering.”

  Melvina turned around in indignation. “What do you think he wants! He came all the way from Jordan for our family picnic! He wants family fun!”

  Matussem sighed. “That’s what I am afraid of. He scares me,” he said. “He is weird dude. Always trouble with him and the dancing girls.”

  The three of them knelt together for a while on Jem’s bed, watching Uncle Fouad as he stretched and patted himself and modeled various profiles. Then a black Lincoln Continental turned in, roaring up the driveway.

  “Fatima,” Melvina said.

  “THIS FOOD TERRIBLE,” Uncle Fouad said, gnawing on a chicken bone. “Miserable, I say. Nothing like home.”

  “Oh, I know, I know,” Fatima said, shielding her eyes from the sun under a screen of polished nails. “Is all what I have to work with, the quality, the materials—”

  “I would feed this maybe to my cat,” he said, reaching for a drumstick. “To kill him with. And I want my coffee; why aren’t you bringing me my ahweh? You are wanting to shrivel me up like a black fig?”

  They were sitting on blankets in the backyard. Fatima had begun unloading baskets of food the moment she’d arrived while Fouad moaned over how they wanted to “starve him alive” by making him wait to eat until tenthirty. Matussem had called Larry Fasco at ten, pleading with him to come over with some beer. Now Zaeed and Larry were playing a limp game of badminton over on the other side of the lawn, and every once in a while Fatima would stop cooing over Fouad to turn and scream at them, “Stop it, stop it, stop it! You giving me a FIT with your BALL GAME!”

  “Actually, Uncle Fouad,” Melvie was saying, “coffee is a stimulant and a diuretic, it—”

  “Yes, yes!” Fouad shouted. “Melvina, my favorite! Come here, yes come to me, give me kisses, here and here. Come, come, you little bamboozler, you flabber-gaster. What a heartpicker, look at this face. Your father hides you in the closet so the boys won’t catch you. And Jemorah, what are you doing there hiding from Mr. Wonderful Uncle Fouad? Here, put me kisses! My favorite! Somebody bring me cheeseburger and baklawa, too.”

  Jem kept her nose to the right of Uncle Fouad’s ear as she kissed him, which seemed to help mute the smell of lemon cologne. Behind her, Melvina was refusing to fetch Fouad a cheeseburger and holding forth on diet and health services. “In the words of La Bruyère, ‘There are certain things,’ Uncle Fouad, ‘in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence.’ End quote. To this I would add nutrition and nursing. Actually, I would place those first.” Then Melvie broke off, and Jem heard her say, “You! It’s you. I never forget a criminal face.”

  Jem looked up. It was Gilbert. Gilbert Sesame, in person, back from the grave, in clothes like winding-sheets, torn and spinning into the air around him. Yet he was basically the same, slightly bruised, perhaps, shrunken somewhat with age, but still Gil Sesame.

  “Ah yes, the once-in-a-lifetime Melvina,” Gil said, raising his arms without moving toward her.

  Then Gil turned to Jem. There was still the shyster smile; the diamonds flickered on his fingers as he reached toward her. “Jemorah, queen of my Nile.”

  “Who is this blob?” Uncle Fouad asked. “What now?” He turned to Matussem and said in Arabic, “Every day in this country more bullshit!” To which Matussem shrugged and said, “Yimkin naam, yimki-naah.” Maybe yes, maybe no.

  Jem embraced Gil gingerly. “Gil. Well well well,” she said.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Sesame,” Melvina said, marching toward the back door. “I’m afraid I’ll have to alert the FBI to your prison break now. Do not move off the perimeters of this property.”

  “Excuse me, Ms. Ramoud,” Gil said, producing a piece of paper from his back pocket and waving it. “Completion of community service. I got time and a half off for behavior above and beyond the call of duty. I turned my talents to preaching to the senior citizens. Saved the souls of at least three men and brought several more at least halfway closer to their Lord. Mormons will not argue with a good savin’, I find. I may have something of a calling.” He twisted one of his rings, eyes modestly cast down, then looked up. “Course I had to part ways with the Lord to catch the last red-eye freight out of Mona by way of Salt Lake. He can fend for Hisself just fine back there. Anyway, I come at longawaited last to make my pilgrimage to you, Jemorah, and worship at the altar of your feet. I’m here to save you now, darling, with effervescent wit and extraordinary presence. We’ll make babies and live in your father’s attic!”

  Fatima perked up. “You are want to marry her?”

  “This house doesn’t have an attic,” Jem said, her throat dry. “Didn’t you want to stay out West?”

  Gil pulled a crumpled bandanna from his pocket and wiped the back of his neck. “Well, honeychild, I thought I explained. The truth of the matter is there’s a little…delicacy there. Between me and Idaho. And Utah. And a few others. We finally worked out a kind of agreement. Just temporary, of course. Just for the immediate future or so. We’ve agreed that I would go away—a mere two thousand mile radius—just for a spell, just to show there’s no hard feelings. See, that’s the problem with being a hustler, you can get a little too familiar. Then I started thinking about all the beauty and excitement that New York State has to offer. Why, Syracuse is a world-class city.”

  The back screen door slammed shut behind Melvina.

  “Well Jem, honey dumpling, listen, you didn’t want to move out West! Shit, Utah ain’t nothing so much like a bunch of people so prayed-out and pregnant that they’re all like balloons with the air let out.”

  “But—what about—Mecca, artists, land—” Jem said, almost disappointed. “You said the whole point was to move out—find a new place.”

  Fatima, Fouad, Zaeed, Larry Fasco, and her father all leaned forward.

  “So help me, Jem,” Gilbert placed one hand upon his heart, the other in the air, “I swear to you, I swear as a man of honor and the highest, most pure and innocent of intentions, Mecca is right here where you already are.” He seized her hands with both of his. Jem looked down into his milky eyes, his loose cheeks, hands soft as hankies. “Moving out doesn’t make life better. Marry me and I’ll prove it. Like the poet says, every town is the same town. Just say to yourself, ‘There’s no place like home….’”

  Chapte
r 16

  THE SENSATION HAD been one of traveling: out the trailer window, past Moyers Corners—Euclid’s farthest signpost, past Bumble Bee Groceries, Three Rivers Inn—and the Clay County line, beyond the antique buildings of Syracuse, then above Route 81 where it gashed the mountain valleys, past teardrop ponds, men in waders among boulder-broken rivers and pines carpeting the earth.

  Then Dolores opened her eyes to see a girl with the bearing of an angel, neck flowing into the fine cast of the head, eyes concentrating, the mouth making her think of the story princess whose mouth spilled rubies.

  The girl looked up and said, “I am Nurse Melvina Ramoud, head nurse. Now that you’ve come out of it I’ll inform your doctor, but before I do, it’s incumbent upon me to make clear how near death you were and what an incredibly stupid stunt that was—”

  “You’ve been talking to my ma, haven’t you,” Dolores said.

  Melvina clicked her pen against the clipboard she held. “This is your life we’re talking about, young lady,” she said. “Every last synapse and enzyme of it, and I’ll thank you not to forget it.”

  Dolores lifted her head an inch or so from the pillow and peered at Melvie. “Hey, I know you! Didn’t you ride the bus with my Wally? You did!”

  Melvie’s eyes flicked to the name on the chart: Jane Doe #1675. She’d been admitted through emergency after the paramedics had been summoned on an anonymous call—a child’s. There was a note from one of the drivers that a group of children had run into the woods when they saw the ambulance. Melvie imagined them fleetingly, dirty children scattering like doves. “That’s unlikely—I’m twenty-two, you must be around thirty-six.”