“Nur ad-Din’s favorite story was that of the terrible bird called the roc. The creature had been chased out of these lands many years ago by brave men who drove him from the crags of the mountains and away into the Maghreb. I had heard tales that the roc had settled in a valley of huge serpents where none dared to follow. There the beast was guarded from danger, and he fed on the serpents’ flesh.
“But one day, a calamity rolled over the province. The roc returned to claim his ancestral hunting grounds: the city of ash-Sham and all its surrounding country. He terrorized the townspeople, dropping boulders on them from out of the sky, diving down on their flocks and scattering them, carrying off whole sheep in his talons.”
The great terror. Rawiya and Bakr looked at each other. Al-Idrisi glanced at them, his lips tight together, his knuckles knit up in his lap.
“By all accounts,” Khaldun continued, “this calamity was far worse than before. So the emir, deciding that he must defend the city of ash-Sham against this terror, searched for those who knew of the roc’s weaknesses. He sent for me and had me brought into his grand hall. He told me of the wretched creature, and since I had told him countless tales of the first defeat of the roc, he commanded me to kill the beast myself and put an end to the torture of his people.” Khaldun tore at his hair and robe. “Why, O Lord?” he cried out. “Why have you burdened your servant?”
Al-Idrisi laid a hand on his arm. “Poet,” he said, “continue.”
“I told the emir that I was no warrior,” Khaldun said, “that I was only a young story-weaver. He would have none of it. He told me I must kill the roc, or else I was a liar and a traitor. He ordered that if I did not kill the roc in forty days, I would be put to death. In the meantime, my mother and sister were put in chains in the palace. They sit rotting in prison, awaiting the outcome of my quest.” Khaldun put his face in his hands and sobbed. “Why,” he said, “why have these evil fortunes befallen me?”
“What will you do?” Rawiya asked.
Khaldun motioned to the steppe around them, the silver hills and the scrubby grasses. “I wander the countryside,” he said, “seeking the roc to kill me and put an end to my miserable condition. He seeks vengeance on all who enter these lands. “
“Then you won’t try to fight him?” Bakr said.
Khaldun laughed. “Have you seen the creature? He can carry five men away in his talons. His legs are wide as palm trunks.”
“We saw the beast,” said al-Idrisi. “A winged island of bone-white feathers.”
Rawiya said, “He attacked our expedition near Homs.”
“Homs!” Khaldun put his hand to his breast. “The city of my birth. I have not returned since I entered Nur ad-Din’s service.” He wept again. “O beautiful city, besieged by calamity from above. I shall not see the curve of your gates until merciful God gives me entrance to the Garden.”
Rawiya was moved by his words.
“Your story is sad indeed, poet,” al-Idrisi said. “Can we offer no help?”
Khaldun shook his head. “What are a poet’s words against the talons of a beast?” he said. “Twenty-five suns of forty are set. What shall I do? I can no more put an end to the roc than I can throw a stone high enough to strike him.”
“But perhaps,” Rawiya said, “I can.”
OUTSIDE THE HOSPITAL windows, Damascus pulses to life. My eyes are still hot and sticky from not sleeping. Mama comes out from behind the curtain. Huda is in surgery.
Abu Sayeed folds his hands. Zahra crosses her arms and snores, propping her forehead against the wall. Who knows where Huda is in this place? It’s the first time we’ve been separated all summer. No matter how hard I try to sleep, I keep jerking awake, feeling like I’ve forgotten something, like somebody’s come and sliced off one of my arms while I wasn’t looking.
I pick at the beige padding on my chair, swinging my feet until its legs move from the force of my knees. Red beeps pop all over the hospital. I wonder which IV is Huda’s and then wonder whose other monitors I’m hearing. I imagine I can pick out Huda’s from the throng, like picking out a single frog in a pond of spring peepers.
When I think I’ve got Huda’s pulse, I press my fingers to my wrist and try to sync my heart to hers, but it doesn’t work. All it does is make my fingertips go white and numb until they tingle.
The whole hospital smells like bleach. It reminds me of the time after Baba died, when I had to go with Mama to the funeral home. It smelled like sour apples and Clorox. It was disgusting because the smell of sour apples looks yellow to me, and the smell of Clorox is the color of puke.
Mama brought me in, and we sat down with the director. Huda and Zahra were in school. I was supposed to be home sick with a stomachache, but really I just wanted to come with Mama. I thought maybe if I could see Baba one more time, I would be able to stop missing him.
The director disappeared into a closet and came back out with two cups of black coffee. The main room was all red velvet curtains and deep couches you could get lost in, the curtains so thick they didn’t let any light in. It felt like a furniture store without the plastic. I dangled my legs and swung them back and forth. That puke smell clung to everything, the preserved reek of chemicals and waste and tears.
Mama talked to the director until a skinny boy came in, not much older than Huda. The director said, “This is my assistant, Lenny.”
We shook hands, his big hand limp and clammy over my small one. Lenny had a few curls of beard hair and a wispy mustache. He smelled like cheese.
I swung my legs some more. Lenny stared at my sneakers. He asked if I wanted some juice. I nodded.
He went to get it, and Mama got up with the director. “Will you be okay?” Mama asked. “I’ll be right back. Wait here.”
By the time Lenny came back, they had disappeared down a staircase into a dark basement. Lenny handed me a cup of orange juice.
“Where did Mama go?” I asked.
Lenny blinked. “To see your dad’s body, probably.”
I ran my finger along the wet edge of my paper cup. “You weren’t supposed to tell me that, I bet.”
Lenny tilted his head to the oily ceiling tiles.
“And I can’t see?” I asked.
“You wouldn’t want to.”
“Why not?”
Lenny didn’t answer. I sipped my juice. The pulp and sugar had separated, making a cloudy mess. I took a sour sip and set it on the floor. Then I bolted.
I made it halfway down the steps before Lenny lumbered after me. I couldn’t find the light switch, so I followed a green light at the bottom of the stairs. It was really cold down there, like in the freezer section in the supermarket. I stopped on the bottom step, holding tight to the railing. Mama’s voice floated around the corner from a room down the hall, clipped and low. The smell was stronger down there, more nauseating, that vomit color smeared on the walls.
Behind me, Lenny clopped down the stairs.
I pounded down the hall and swung the door open. “Mama?”
Mama and the director turned toward me like they weren’t sure if they were awake. A body lay on a slab of white plastic, the room lit soft green and egg white. I could see the dry creases around the elbow, the heavy fine-haired thighs, the fleshy pads on the underside of one foot.
“Nour.” Fear flashed across Mama’s face and coiled around her eyes. “You shouldn’t be down here.”
I waited for the toes to twitch, for the muscles in the forearm to pop up. No ridges of veins showed through the skin. The arch of the foot was gray, like meat past the sell-by date.
Lenny burst in. I reached up and caught hold of Baba’s big toe, curling my first two fingers and my thumb around his toenail. He was cold. I held my breath, that rotted-apple smell thick in my nose.
THE BITE OF antiseptic drifts over my shoulder—that hospital scent. A man in a white coat comes up behind us. He searches for his pockets on the front of his coat, but they’re pulled tight by his potbelly. He says something to Mama in Arab
ic. His voice is gray with spots of pink. Hers is a yellower brown than usual, uneven. Then the doctor walks off, his shoes clipping on the hall tiles.
“Huda is out of surgery,” Mama says.
“She is?” I stop counting the beat of the IV monitors, dropping my hand from my wrist. Mama tugs me up and shakes Zahra’s shoulder.
We tumble down the hall, through the lobby, and into another wing. Mama hugs the bag with her map and our food in it, jostling scraps of bread and some canned fish we found in the rubble. Abu Sayeed follows. We take an elevator up two floors and turn a corner, then another. My legs hum and shake like they did in the street, my knees stinging with speed.
Mama dives through a door and into a long room full of beds, and there’s Huda under a white sheet. My calves shimmy and burn when we stop running, and I try to catch my breath.
Mama and Zahra go inside, but my stomach churns. I stop in the doorway.
Huda’s fingers poke out from under the sheet, her palm flecked with dried blood. I can’t make out her face, just the squiggles of her pulse and her blood pressure on the monitor. She doesn’t look like my sister.
Zahra walks to Huda. Instead of touching her, Zahra tugs on her own fingers, cracking her knuckles. I haven’t seen her this quiet in a long time.
Abu Sayeed nudges me between my shoulder blades. At first, I don’t move.
“Is she asleep?” I ask.
“I think so,” he says.
I walk over to the bed. Huda’s arm hangs out from under the sheet, poking between the slats of the bed’s railing. I remember her fingers swinging limp in front of Abu Sayeed’s knees. The lumpy landscape of her body shudders, then goes coyote-still.
I nestle my fist into the sheet next to Huda’s hand, but I don’t touch it. I try to remember if Baba looked any different in the funeral home basement. I picture the gray of his skin. Was there a minute or a second that I knew he was dead, a moment when he stopped looking like my baba?
“You can hold her hand,” Mama says.
When Baba died, Mama told me it was his time. But it isn’t Huda’s.
I stare at her fingers, the nails white and ringed with red. Her face is bruised and greenish, like she’s out of breath, like she ran all the way home from the olive grove. She wheezes yellow air. Blood splotches up through her bandages, pricking the sheet with cranberry. I’m scared to touch her. I’m scared of making her worse, scared of waking her, scared of her seeing me and forever connecting me with this hospital, with the slippery brown of her own blood. Guilt tunnels in my guts, but I just stand there, staring.
“You can ask anything,” Mama says. “Don’t be afraid. All you have to do is ask.”
From around the corner, another stretcher passes us. The sheet is dotted with red like shredded Gouda rind. The green smell of iron brings me back to the shattered house, the rush of it in my mouth and in my eyelashes.
I pull back my fingers. “She’ll make it?”
“She has to rest,” Mama says.
Huda’s collarbones move up and down, barely visible. Her breath latches, stops, and shudders before starting again. I think to myself, I’ve seen a dead person before, but I’ve never seen anybody die. What if death is something that clings to you, like a bad smell?
Abu Sayeed takes my hand in his. “Come on, little cloud,” he says. “Let us give her some space.”
We can’t wait in the recovery ward where Huda is sleeping, so Mama takes us out to a courtyard for guests. It’s got a garden and a view of the street past the palms and white jasmine flowers. Ladies stroll down the checkered sidewalk wearing big sunglasses, and phone lines cross in front of concrete parking garages and apartment buildings. A man adjusts a satellite dish on a rooftop. Down the street from the hospital is a big hotel-lined highway that leads to the fountain in the city center, where all the other roads break off like spokes on a wheel. Across the highway, cobblestone bridges with iron railings cross the Barada River.
Mama sits us down on a bench at the back of the garden. She puts her head in her hands. She shakes, the bag at her feet shivering.
I ask, “Are you crying?”
Mama pulls me to her. Abu Sayeed gets up and paces the length of the garden. Zahra walks off to wait inside, in the air conditioning. She runs her fingernails along the wall, her bracelet jangling against the stone. I realize she never bought anything in the jewelry shop before Huda pulled her out.
I brace myself against the bench. “Tell me what’s wrong with Huda.”
“The shell hurt her when it fell,” Mama says. She stops and holds her breath. “When it hit the ground, it broke apart. The metal pieces exploded and became hot, like knives held to the fire. One of them pierced Huda’s shoulder.”
I already know those knives. I don’t want to think about the bomb. I watch Mama’s necklace, a piece of blue-and-white ceramic tile fastened with silver cord, sway at her chest. It must be really old, because she’s had it my entire life. The blue-and-white porcelain reminds me of the plate she held when the house came down. I realize I’m not sure when it happened, one night ago or two. I should be able to remember something that important.
“So all that metal is still inside her.” I make a list in my head of all the things that could get lost inside a person. I picture Huda’s bones like islands in red muscle.
“Shway,” Mama says—a little. She passes her hand under her eyes, tugging at the skin on her cheekbones. “Shrapnel can be hard to get out.”
Shrapnel is a red word. To me, it sounds like metal and anger and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It sounds like the red and yellow things inside of people, the fear and rage that rot a person out until they rot out somebody else.
“She will rest a few days,” Mama says. “Without rest and medicine, it could get infected.”
“But she’ll be okay when we go home,” I say.
That tight-coiled look comes over Mama’s face again, the fear in her lips and her forehead. “When we go home,” she says, like she isn’t sure what the words mean.
“They’ll fix our house. Right?” In my head, we drive backward in the car again. The fires burn out, the walls tilt up, and God spreads super glue on the splinters of my bed and on Mama’s cracked dinner plates.
Mama wraps her arm around me instead of answering. But I don’t want a hug, not now, so I press back against her with my shoulder. Her not answering me is worse than anything she could say. The first week of May—isn’t that what she said in the alley in Homs? How can we leave a place I’ve been waiting to see my whole life? How can we leave twice?
“We can’t go anywhere else,” I say, my voice high pink. “Unless we go back to New York.”
“I don’t know yet, habibti.” Mama closes her eyes and breathes out, warming my collarbone with her air. “When you’re older,” she says, “you will understand. You can’t bake bread without flour. You can’t draw a map of a place you’ve never been.”
That doesn’t make any sense. “What about Abu Sayeed?” He has his back to us, shuffling between rows of shrubs and palms. “Where is he going to go?”
“He is family,” Mama says. “Baba would never leave a brother behind.” Then she remembers to smile. “Do you know why Abu Sayeed is called that?”
I shake my head.
“Abu means ‘father’ in Arabic,” she says. “When a man has a son and becomes a father, they call him by his son’s name. So he becomes ‘Abu’ and then his son’s name.” She studies my face. “Do you understand?”
“But Abu Sayeed doesn’t have a son anymore.”
Mama strokes the small of my back. “But he did, once. His name was Sayeed.”
“What happened to him?”
Abu Sayeed paces. He wears a track in the stones with his leather shoes, his ragged linen pants swaying.
“He had a fight with Abu Sayeed as a young man,” Mama says, “and ran away from home.” She looks down at her bag, at the dirty carpet that smells like soot and the gold-rimmed map rolled up
inside it. “He never came back. They never saw each other again.” Mama stares at the garden railing. “He was a geologist.”
“Oh.” Were the tools in Abu Sayeed’s car his or his son’s?
“Abu Sayeed used to teach geology at the university in Homs. He taught his son everything he knew. His son could have had a long career; he was brilliant.” Mama pulls back from me. “Does this surprise you?”
I follow Abu Sayeed’s sloped shoulders with my eyes. One of his pockets sags, and I’m the only one who knows it’s heavy with stones.
“I didn’t know,” I say.
“You didn’t know what?”
“That there was somebody else.” The leaves cast shadows on us, cooling the top of my head. “Somebody who loved stones as much as Abu Sayeed.”
Mama doesn’t answer. Abu Sayeed keeps walking, scanning the pebbles on the ground. I wonder if the stones are talking to him. I wonder if they have anything to say he hasn’t heard before, words he can hear in his bones.
There Also Is My Heart
The following day, the expedition set off with Khaldun for ash-Sham, the City of Jasmine, also known as Dimashq—Damascus. Since Khaldun had no camel, Rawiya offered to let him ride with her. He thanked her, telling her God would reward her generosity. As they rode, Rawiya tried to ignore the heat that spread over her cheeks and under her turban.
Ash-Sham lay in the center of a wide, irrigated plain called the Ghouta. This land was green with fields and orchards and small villages, and it was well known in all the surrounding country for being the closest thing to paradise a person could enjoy. A valley of fruit trees and streams called the Wadi al-Banafsaj, the Valley of Violets, extended for twelve miles from the western gate of ash-Sham.
The city was surrounded by a wall with seven gates. The Barada River came down from the western mountains and flowed east through the city and out into the desert. Khaldun said that between this river and a street called Straight lay the fortified citadel, the Souq al-Hamidiyah, and the Umayyad Mosque with its gold mosaics, enamel tile, and polished marble.
The Map of Salt and Stars: A Novel Page 9
