The Map of Salt and Stars: A Novel

by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar

  “Tonight we lie content under the dome of the stars,” said al-Idrisi, “safe from marauding beasts.”

  Bakr grumbled as he sat down by the fire. “I would fight a horde of marauding beasts to have a bath like a decent person.”

  But al-Idrisi only laughed and reclined on his carpet. “Look up, my young friends,” he said, “and see the magnificence God’s hands have created.”

  The constellations winked above them. Al-Idrisi told Rawiya and Bakr of the constellations the Bedu and the Arabs had seen long before the Romans and the Greeks.

  “The Bedu saw Cassiopeia,” he said, “not as a damsel, but as a she-camel. In Ursa Major, they saw not a bear, but three mourning daughters and their father on his funeral bier. In Ursa Minor, they saw two calves turning a gristmill. Where the Romans saw Pegasus, the Bedu saw a great bucket. Instead of Leo Minor, they saw three gazelles running from the great lion.” Al-Idrisi clapped his hand to his breast. “Ah, Leo,” he said, “the lion. The emblem of King Roger, the lion of Palermo.”

  Then he pointed out the stars. “The star Vega,” he said, “is often seen as a great white eagle. That is, in fact, what the star’s name means. An-Nasr al-Waqi—the Falling Eagle.”

  Rawiya thought about all these different ways of seeing. Standing in the olive grove with her father, she had never known the names of the stars. “And these constellations can be seen as far away as the Maghreb?” she asked.

  “Certainly,” al-Idrisi said, “and farther. I studied the heavens as a boy in Ceuta, where I was born.” And he told them of his family home, an elegant riad on a hill with a blue and white tile fountain in its central courtyard, and of how he had studied in Córdoba before his travels to Europe and Asia Minor. “I hope to return to Ceuta,” al-Idrisi said, “once my work for King Roger is finished.”

  Rawiya and Bakr were surprised. “A man of brilliance like yourself,” Bakr said, “must have been impatient to leave Ceuta and travel the world.”

  But al-Idrisi sat very still with his arm wrapped around his knee and met Bakr’s eyes. “Ceuta once held such treasures,” al-Idrisi said, “as I would give all my rank and honor to see again.”

  Bakr blushed and looked away. Rawiya said, “A learned man like you—I thought for sure you came from al-Andalus, across the strait.”

  Al-Idrisi softened and stoked the fire with a smile. “Never assume anything, Rami,” he said. “A man of science must see things as they truly are, not as they appear to be.”

  The servants put out the fires and retired to their tents. Bakr nodded off. Above them, the camels slept among the stars. Rawiya and al-Idrisi sat for some time, staring up at the stars without speaking, watching the gazelles run.

  ABU SAYEED HANDS Huda to Mama and disappears into the dark, leaving only the crunch of his footsteps in the rubble. He becomes an invisible creature, clawing through brick and cracked plaster, crushing tile like chicken bone.

  “Abu Sayeed, where are you going?” I follow him, ripping the toe of my left slipper on stray glass.

  “Nour, come here.” Mama reaches for my elbow and misses. I trip on the curb, cluttered with shredded pillows and goose down, the metal frame of a belt buckle. The arm of a couch clings to a slice of burnt mattress on the sidewalk.

  The streetlights are out. The only light is a string of car alarms going off, some silent, some ruby loud. They blink on and off like the yellow eyes of coyotes.

  I saw a coyote once, on West 110th Street. Baba and I were walking past the north end of Central Park. It was December, and the whole sidewalk was ice. The only thawed part was the stone dividing wall between the park and the sidewalk. Baba held my hand while I tiptoed along the top of the wall, crowding up to me when he had to pass a bench. Kids had packed snowballs onto the beige sides of the tenements across the street, and the rails of the fire escapes were stiff canes of ice. I chose my steps, scuffing moss and grime. In the park, the lake was an iced-over hole. Baba’s palm was warm on my fingers.

  I broke away. I ran ahead a few steps to the end of the wall, and Baba called after me to stop. The park was a black streak on my left, just the stick figures of maple trees.

  I jumped off the wall and saw the coyote. It was bigger than a dog, but thinner, and a funny color—gray and gold and brown. The coyote’s black nails tapped the sidewalk. All its muscles tensed, hard as vines.

  Baba called my name. None of us moved. The coyote stared, its fur stiff as a bristle brush, the tips slick with frost. Its eyes were the color of the amber rings Mama used to wear, the kind she was wearing the day Baba died.

  The coyote breathed out mist from the twin teakettles of its nostrils, staring into me.

  And then, like a beautiful ghost, it was gone. The coyote trotted back into the underbrush, glazed with ice.

  I felt Baba’s heat before his hands were on my shoulders. He lifted me clear off the sidewalk. Then we were on a park bench, and I was in Baba’s lap. He wrapped me up in his coat like he was afraid to let me out. We rocked back and forth like that for almost an hour, Baba refusing to let me go, me remembering those amber eyes.

  “Nour.” Mama’s calling me. “You’re bleeding again.”

  But I’m not listening. Abu Sayeed is on his knees in the wreckage of his house, his forehead to the smoldering mess. I bounce over the slice of mattress and skate my slippers over flat hunks of ceiling tile, the broken limbs of furniture. I pick my way toward Abu Sayeed’s bent back, the worn-down mountains of his shoulders. I never saw him alone in Baba’s old pictures, not once.

  “Abu Sayeed.”

  He lifts his face and opens his palms. He rocks his chin up to the sky. He’s collected bits of rock and crystals that were probably polished once, but not anymore. They’re cracked and coal black. I think I see a chunk of limestone I once gave him, a piece of rose quartz I brought him as a gift. Everything is split apart, and the stones that aren’t cracked are coated with grime.

  The headlights blink off, on. The car alarms streak the world with red. I want to be wrapped up in Baba’s coat again, to feel his warm hands on my back. I picture Abu Sayeed sitting at a café, sharing a plate of mezze with Baba, their arms around each other. I drape myself over Abu Sayeed’s shoulders, hugging the back of his neck, hoping the ghosts of safe things seep through.

  Abu Sayeed wraps his stones in a handkerchief and stuffs them in his pocket. We walk back to the street. The bumper is dented, but his green car still runs. He shoves stacks of papers and metal cases of tools into the trunk. He says they’re geologist’s tools.

  He starts the car and drives, careful to avoid shattered stone. Zahra is in the front seat, Mama behind her, Huda between us. Abu Sayeed’s ripped the hem of his undershirt into a long strip, and Mama wraps it around the knob of Huda’s shoulder, trying to stop the bleeding. She looks like she’s been splashed with the juice from a can of beets.

  The sun starts to come up. We pass the Great Mosque of al-Nuri and turn off onto a narrow alley to avoid Quwatli Street and the square. We loop past the tomb of Khalid ibn al-Walid, where Mama took us sightseeing when we first moved to Homs. I check the gate of the mosque for the statue of a scorpion and a man, but it isn’t there. I try and imagine the time that has passed since it was built, the mountains of years that should be heavy enough to crush us.

  We drive to the closest hospital, but it’s packed with cars and patients. We try another. All the hospitals in our neighborhood are flooded with hurt people. There are no wait times, no estimates. There are only masses of people, stacks of them, long cords of them crusted with brown blood. A boy goes by on a sheet, the doctors carrying the curve of him like a hammock, a tube dripping from his mouth. As he goes by, a doctor glances at Huda’s feet on the ground, at Mama and Abu Sayeed holding her up. Outside, the sky and the road rumble like an earthquake settling. The doctor passes us with the boy bleeding in his arms. He says something to Mama in Arabic: We won’t have a place for her tonight. He leans over and tightens the knot Mama tied in Abu Sayeed’s under
shirt. Mama and the doctor look at each other with the boy between them. Before he turns away, the doctor says, She should not wait.

  We get back in the car, and Abu Sayeed steers us out of the city. Mama tears another strip of cloth from Abu Sayeed’s undershirt. She doubles it over the knot at Huda’s shoulder until the bleeding slows down. She presses another to my left temple, trying to get the blood to clot. I feel cold and sleepy.

  We drive past the olive grove on the outskirts of town, the one Huda and I walked through on afternoons when Mama was busy and wanted us out of the house, the one where I sat on Huda’s shoulders and looked for Abu Sayeed’s nameless stone. We drive away from the Orontes River until the satellite dishes on the rooftops look like tiny ears, past the flat plains of farmland in checkered squares. Beyond that are terraced hills piled up in rings, the far-off outlines of mountains. The river snakes away from us toward Hama in the north, toward the places that used to be swamp before people drained them. Didn’t Mama tell me once that they used to call the Orontes Asi, rebel, because it flows from south to north?

  “I don’t understand why we were shelled.” Mama speaks soft like she thinks we’re all asleep, like she’s afraid to wake us.

  Abu Sayeed says nothing at first. The car’s tires hum. The engine clacks and complains. “We may never understand,” he replies, just as quiet. “In times like these, it’s the small people who suffer.”

  I keep quiet, trying to pretend I didn’t hear. Abu Sayeed downshifts, and the car’s clacking groan settles into a purr. We drive until I burrow into Mama’s neck and start to fall asleep, Huda’s arm limp on my knee. I blink my eyes open and shut as we go over a bump. The last thing I see is Mama’s amber ring, the one she hasn’t worn since Baba died. She holds her hands in front of her and twists the band, catching stray hairs around the stone. I wonder how she found it in the wreck.

  THE HOSPITAL IN Damascus is full of moaning and a metal smell like car bumpers. The white tile floor in the waiting room is clean, though, and the brown-and-beige chairs are deep and soft, and I’m too tired to be scared.

  Mama goes with Huda and a doctor behind a curtain. Zahra puts her face to the wall and tries to sleep, and I scratch the bandage a nurse has taped over my temple.

  Around us, people talk among themselves. While we sit, a family comes in with a baby girl. She must not like the beeping and the doctors hurrying around, because she starts to shriek. Her mama gets up and walks with her around the corner, cooing. The baby’s screams die off into a purplish whimper that twists around the waiting-room chairs. I knead the skin on my arms and knees. Fear builds up, hot, knife-edged.

  Abu Sayeed squeezes my hand. “No tears, little cloud,” he says.

  “I’m not crying.” I untangle a knot in the hair behind my ear, jerking until it comes out in a clump. It’s matted with dried blood that escaped my bandage. Abu Sayeed is still watching me, looking worried. His shoulders are sloped again, like two hills worn down by rain.

  I ask him, “Why are you in all of Baba’s Polaroids?”

  “What?” Abu Sayeed laughs a little. “Your Baba and I were friends when we were boys,” he says. “His parents were very kind to me when I lost mine. Your uncle Ma’mun was like my brother in those days, and your grandparents were like a mother and a father to me.”

  I stop picking at my hair and look up at him. “You lost your parents?”

  “When I was very small. After they passed away, I lived with my uncle for a time.” He folds his hands in his lap and smiles, soot deepening a dimple in his cheek. “But I like to think that where the world took from me one family, it also gave me another.”

  “Then you know,” I say. “You know what it’s like.”

  “Yes,” he says, “I know.”

  Abu Sayeed and I sit quiet for a minute and listen to the beeping and whirring of the machines. Then Abu Sayeed takes a rough blue stone from his pocket, veined with yellow and white. “Have you ever seen one of these?” he asks.

  I shake my head.

  “That’s because of how rare they are,” he says. “This is raw lapis lazuli. Gem cutters have used it to make jewelry for queens, to craft tiles for mosques and palaces. There is no other blue like it in the world.” He drops the stone into my palm.

  The sharp edges poke at the chubby cup of my hand. Layers of blue and gray wind together in imaginary roads. “I thought jewels were shiny.”

  “Most precious things,” Abu Sayeed says, “don’t come out of the earth looking that way.” He wraps the stone up in his handkerchief again. “In the earth, even the loveliest gems look rough and worthless. You might see the deepest indigo, but you see dirt too, and salt. But if you are patient, if you polish them with sandpaper and a rag—well, lots of things can become beautiful.”

  “But what if they’re cracked?” I ask him. “What if they’re broken?”

  Abu Sayeed bends his head down and touches his beard. It’s something I’ve never seen him do before, like he’s forgotten that I’m there. Then he looks up at me again and smiles, and I wonder if I imagined it.

  “Stones don’t have to be whole to be lovely,” he says. “Even cracked ones can be polished and set. Small diamonds, if they are clear and well cut, can be more valuable than big ones with impurities. Listen,” he says. “Sometimes the smallest stars shine brightest, no?”

  But my brain keeps looping back. I’m standing in front of our yellow house, lying in the garden by the fig tree. I try to remember where I left my toys and my bike, like somebody might come and take them while I’m gone. Is somebody sleeping in my burnt-out bed? Are people coming to take our charred blankets and clean everything out and build a new house where ours used to be? I want to walk the olive grove and the hot stones in the garden. I miss home with an angry hunger, even though home is an imaginary place now.

  Baba should have seen it before it was gone. Things get lost so fast, so easily. Like dropping an ice cream cone. Like tossing a stone in the Hudson. I wonder if the stories I gave the fig tree are lost too, if Baba ever heard them. Did he feel the tremors when the house came down? Is some part of him tossing and turning in the earth, having bad dreams?

  “Last night was too dark for stars,” I say.

  “No, little cloud.” Abu Sayeed lifts my chin with his finger. “If anything, the darker the night, the brighter they shine.”

  The hospital murmurs, coming awake. Zahra sleeps. Out the window, the horned moon sets, and the North Star winks out.

  Bone Island

  The road from Homs to ash-Sham began as a pleasant ride through green farmland, yellow fields of grain, and fruit orchards. The expedition passed stands of cypress and pine that became smaller and more sparse as they went along. Eventually the earth became drier, the shady areas where they rested farther apart. Groups of Bedu herded goats and sheep in the hills under the far-off buttes. Mountains rose in the west, blocking the rains from the sea. The pleasant farmland that had blanketed the plains of Homs became an arid steppe as they approached ash-Sham. Rawiya watched the skies during the day, listening for the beating of wings, and slept little each night.

  On the third day of their journey, al-Idrisi studied his notes and sketched maps and announced that they should reach ash-Sham the next day. They repacked their supplies in the purple dawn and led their camels past tamarisk trees and low shrubs silhouetted against the gray earth.

  Rawiya made out the tiny dot of a figure staggering toward them. The strange man tugged at his haggard beard and his tattered linens. His voice rolled thin across slivers of rock and the parched bed of a wadi. At this time of year, the wadi was dry: these riverbeds only carried water during times of heavy rain. The man’s crooked shoes threw up dust. He shook his fists at the sky.

  Al-Idrisi lifted his hand, and the whole expedition stopped. He hailed the man, who limped toward them, beating his breast and plucking his beard. Al-Idrisi got down from his camel and went to him, offering him water from his own waterskin and asking why he was so distraught.<
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  “O fate,” the man cried, throwing up his hands. “O cruel fate, you have taken my honor and dashed my good name. O divine help, why have you forsaken your servant, Khaldun?”

  Al-Idrisi, seeing that the man was half-crazed with thirst, heat, and despair, called for the servants to refresh him. One servant brought a carpet and made the man sit down, while another ran to tear a branch from a nearby tamarisk to fan the man’s face. Al-Idrisi himself helped Bakr to prepare the man a small meal of nuts, olives, figs, and bread with oil and thyme.

  Rawiya wiped the dust from the man’s cheek with a damp cloth to refresh him as he swooned under the blazing sun. Taking the cloth in her hand, she knelt at the man’s side and gently buffed the sheen of grime from his skin. As the water cleansed his cheek of dust, Rawiya’s cloth revealed the face of a beautiful brown-skinned young man. Rawiya was struck by his beard of black curls, the graceful line of his nose, his dark, thick brows and full lips. As he opened his eyes at the touch of her cloth, she blushed and looked away.

  When they had finished eating, it was time for the afternoon prayer. The man knelt beside the expedition and prayed with them, praising God for their hospitality and kindness. Only after he had done this did he clear his throat and speak.

  The man, who called himself Khaldun, beat his breast again and raised his arms to the sky. “I was born under an unlucky star,” he said. “I was once the foremost of the poets of the emir Nur ad-Din. I sang him songs of great deeds, of heroes and of ancient beasts, and in return, the emir treated me with affection. He provided a large home where my mother and my sister lived, and I myself enjoyed the riches of his court for many years.

  “The emir had long fought to unify the Syrian province and defend it from its enemies. He brought many brave men and warriors to his court and often asked me to sing him songs of courageous deeds. But my words were so convincing and my songs so passionate that the emir came to believe that I myself had done these great things.