Abu Sayeed gets down on his knees with the jack, frowning up at the belly of the green car. He shouts back a translation. “He used to be a storyteller in a café in Damascus. A hakawati. Then the café was shelled, and he couldn’t find work.” Abu Sayeed squeezes the jack under the car and fiddles with it. It starts to expand. “He left his home and livelihood.”
I perk up. “A storyteller?”
Abu Sayeed translates. The car rises at one corner, like a dog picking up its leg. The old man says something in Arabic to Abu Sayeed, words carving shapes in the wind. He blooms in front of me, his voice a green flower. He looks happy and young, like he’d never grown old at all, like it was only a trick of the light.
Abu Sayeed eases the wheel off and inspects the tire, his nails rimmed with grease. I wait for the old man’s answer, watching the curls of his silver beard and his cracked lips.
“Tales of kings and adventurers.” Abu Sayeed translates, and the old man smiles. “Salah ad-Din. Sinbad the Voyager. The great love stories, fables that fed my parents and my grandparents.”
“Tell me a story,” I say.
“I don’t tell stories anymore,” the old man says through Abu Sayeed, “just the truth of things. I used to love the tales of jinn and the deeds of princes. My heart beat for all that once was—the lovers, the mapmakers, the adventurers.” The old man props his weight on the door handle and lowers himself to the dirt, shaking his finger. “Don’t forget,” he says, and Abu Sayeed looks up while he translates, holding the words back a little, “stories ease the pain of living, not dying. People always think dying is going to hurt. But it does not. It’s living that hurts us.”
Abu Sayeed kicks at the wheel. “The tire isn’t the problem,” he says, wiping his hands on his pants. “It’s the axle. She won’t run a mile more.”
We get into Umm Yusuf’s blue van. I watch the flat green-and-yellow country pass by. There is so much I’ve already forgotten that I wonder if I’ll remember this. I wonder if something so big could disappear from your head, like opening the door of a moving car and stepping out of it.
We pass crumbs of brick and an old stone railway station, the long-faced windows boarded and barred. The border crossing looms up. First come the cypress trees, then a rounded white curb. Huda is draped half across me, leaning on Zahra, who has her face turned to the cushions. Huda opens her eyes only long enough to smile at me.
We come to a set of white and green archways with wide gates. Policemen stand in the shade, waving us toward the curb. We get out. They ask for our papers. Truck brakes squeal behind us.
Zahra leans against a metal post with her head in her hands. “I’m tired,” she sobs. “I just want something to eat. I want a normal bed.”
Huda sways, her bandaged arm knocking against her ribs. We wait. Mama and Umm Yusuf talk. The old man sits down on the ground while the policemen check the van.
I tug on Mama’s sleeve. She answers me in Arabic, forgetting.
“Are they letting us in? When do we go home?”
Mama looks like I bit her. “We can’t go home,” she says. Umm Yusuf pulls out booklets and papers, pointing to each of us in turn. Mama leans down. She smooths my hair, frizzy from the scratchy headrest. “Remember, habibti, it isn’t the place that matters. Your family is here. That has to be enough.”
Beyond the archways, the steppe eyes us, a yellow snake pricked with tufts of green. I read the blue signs down the road, half-Arabic and half-English. Welcome to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
Farther on, past the border, the curb is black and white, just like the archways of the shops in Damascus. Stray trucks have taken chunks out of it, like the ruins of the old citadel. The pavement on the other side has a shimmering quality to it, like it’s shifting in front of me, as though the world outside of Syria is made of fear and wonder and light.
Something rumbles behind us, on the Syrian side of the border. I turn back and see smoke. A lady behind us says something to her kids in Arabic—Fireworks. They are only fireworks.
Even if I didn’t know what the rumbling was, my muscles do. My legs tense, telling me to run. While a puff of crumpled smoke fogs the horizon, I feel for the first time how far away we are from Homs, how there really is no going back now. The lady behind me tugs her daughter against her knees and meets my eyes, her face tight with fear. Her son bends his neck to check his phone before stuffing it in his pocket. I can tell by how they stand too far apart that they’re leaving room for somebody who isn’t there. The world is ripping apart, I think, leaving pain to spread like blood through Huda’s bandages.
Farther up, a man waves us through the gates. The old man, the storyteller, gets up. Then there’s a flurry of Arabic, and he sits down again. I wonder if he left behind a family of his own, if I could do the same if I had to.
“Why can’t he come?” I ask, pointing to the old man. “Why not?”
Zahra hides her face, her right hand dipping into her pocket for the phone that isn’t there. Huda’s sneaker slips off her foot and drags on the sidewalk. She stumbles. Nobody answers me.
Mama takes my hand and holds on to Huda with the other. Abu Sayeed follows behind us. Umm Yusuf gets back in the blue van, and Rahila puts her palm to the window from her car seat.
“We cross separately,” Mama says.
“But the old man—”
He hobbles after us, a slow, measured walk. He ignores the men shouting at him and stops at the border. He leans on the gate after we’re through, putting his face to the bars. I realize I never asked him his name.
“He has no family to vouch for him,” Mama says.
“Can’t we do anything?”
“He doesn’t have the proper papers,” Mama says, grunting to hold Huda up when she slips. “There is a system. It’s complicated.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” I say.
“But it is, whether we like it or not.” Abu Sayeed’s voice is all black consonants and sour vowels drawn out like oil on concrete. I don’t recognize it.
I take another step toward the road beyond the border. I hold my breath, waiting for the moment when Syria and I split apart, realizing that once I cross, there’s no way for me to know what will happen to the place I once called home.
Umm Yusuf parks the van by the side of the road up ahead, waiting for us. I look back at the gate as we walk.
The old storyteller presses his forehead to the bars. He reaches out his hand and flattens his palm against them, his fingertips outstretched. He blinks, slowly, and smiles. His combed black hair reflects the sun, his gray roots a feathered crown. His smile becomes a reminder, a picture to fix in my mind forever.
The sun beats hot on the wild thyme. I trip over my feet on the curb. When I turn back again, the storyteller is still watching us, his words still in my head: It’s living that hurts us.
PART II
* * *
JORDAN / EGYPT
Hidden Heavens
From ash-Sham, the trade roads wandered south through the steppe, curving around the border of the lands occupied by the Franj Crusaders: the southern tip of the County of Tripoli and, beyond that, the Kingdom of Jerusalem over the mountains to the west. The expedition followed the road toward the edge of Nur ad-Din’s territory, toward the border with the Fatimid Empire. Patches of shrubby palms and scrub grasses interrupted the steppe, and the occasional group of sheep grazed under stands of cypress or Lebanon cedar.
In those days, the lands were pockmarked by the bloody snarls of disputes between the Seljuqs, the Fatimids, and the Crusaders, but al-Idrisi was unafraid. He checked his notes and guided the expedition to the southeast, away from the trade roads they had been following for nearly a fortnight. He had a particular destination in mind before they turned west toward Cairo and the Maghreb beyond. Rawiya asked him where they were going.
“My boy,” al-Idrisi said, “to understand that, you must understand a few other things besides.”
As their camels plodded across the yell
ow steppe, he told Rawiya, Bakr, and Khaldun of his boyhood passion for maps and mathematics. “What I wanted more than anything,” he said as he checked the astrolabe, “was to travel and to see the world. That is why I left for Anatolia at sixteen.” He laughed. “What a fool. Young and full of adventure, thinking myself invincible. That wondrous journey fixed in my mind the idea of a wide world, full of dangers and beautiful things. I loved that world, in spite of its crushing vastness. I loved it in spite of the terrible weight of its hope.”
An oasis with a fortified outpost appeared in the distance. Palms jutted up around the stone dome of a crumbling qasr, a castle. Grooves of abandoned irrigation ditches rimmed the building.
“Deserted,” Rawiya said.
“This is Qasr Amra,” said al-Idrisi, “once the pleasure-dwelling of Walid the Second, a place of entertainment, songs, and banquets. The caliphs once listened to songs and poetry by the castle’s pools. It held a hammam painted with fine frescoes. One day, only the foundation will remain.”
But the presence of a bathhouse in such a place perplexed Rawiya. “Why a hammam in the middle of the Badiya?” she asked, motioning to the rocky steppe. “And how?”
Al-Idrisi told them the hammam had probably been supplied by a wadi that filled during the rainy winter months. “An indulgent use of water here in the Badiya,” he said. “I have heard stories of deep wells and a complex system for diverting water.”
Khaldun stared into the empty pools overgrown with scrub grasses. “Can you imagine it?” he asked. “The caliphs and the poets, the hunting parties, the feasting and song? The performances given here were the pride of their day. Now they are forgotten.”
Qasr Amra was built of limestone and basalt, its old walls rubbed smooth by the wind. Inside, cool dark washed over them. The triple-vaulted, domed ceiling curved high above their heads.
Al-Idrisi found a torch, shriveled but intact. Bakr fumbled with his striking flint.
A whoosh of flame burst to life, revealing painted walls. The frescoes were bright as crushed fruit: the sumac-red fur of a bear playing an oud. Sulfur-colored camels laden with blankets. Bathing women with dark hair as glossy as ebony.
Al-Idrisi took them into a tall side chamber. “This is the caldarium,” he said, scribbling in his leather-bound book. “In the days when the caliphs used this hammam, the caldarium was the bathhouse’s steam room.”
A zodiac painting crowned the domed caldarium, the plaster just lifting at its edges. The indigo of Cassiopeia’s gown sparkled in the torch glow, and the brilliant turquoise of Sagittarius’s bow curved to catch the light. The elegant figures of the constellations spun above them, driven by the wheel of the heavens.
“Only a few have seen these frescoes with their own eyes,” al-Idrisi said. “They make up one of the most exquisite examples of a vault of heaven in all the world.”
“A vault of heaven?” Rawiya asked.
Al-Idrisi lowered his face from the frescoes. “A dome decorated with a diagram of the stars,” he said, “the constellations as you would see them if you were to look down from amid the heavens. The Umayyad caliph must have invited Greek or Byzantine craftsmen to complete it. There is not another to equal it in all the earth.”
Rawiya extended her hand toward the crumbling face of an oud player and wondered who had taken refuge here over the years, whether the place might have been looted after it was abandoned. Her fingers hovered over a deep crack in the ravaged stone, like an old scar. It was a noble thing, she thought, to seek beauty in a calloused world.
“The torch won’t last much longer,” Bakr said. “We should go out while it’s still light.”
Outside, their camels shuffled their hooves in the dust. Al-Idrisi folded his notes into his leather book and set the clasp, and Rawiya saw a sketch map he had drawn of the Badiya, with south oriented at the top.
Beyond the outer courtyard, the servants waited, circling the camels. The growing winds carried sharp sand, and they pulled their turbans tight. Their faces flushed with torchlight, the expedition stared up at the rising moon.
They readied the camels. Rawiya turned to Khaldun. “My father used to love to look at the stars,” she said, “before he died. When he fell ill, he tried once to get out of bed. He took me out past the olive grove at dawn so we could see falling stars sparking.” The camels lowed and spat. Rawiya straightened her saddle. “Neither of us knew the names of the constellations, so we used to make up our own. But the skies look different here.”
Khaldun helped Rawiya fasten her saddle, the side of his hand brushing hers. Heat crept up her neck. She cleared her throat and pulled away, hoping he hadn’t felt the trembling in her fingertips.
A brotherly smile crossed Khaldun’s face. “Sometimes,” he said, “a picture can only be understood by looking at it upside-down.”
Rawiya patted her camel’s neck, smiling to herself. “Just like a map.”
AT FIRST, JORDAN is rocky and as flat as the bottom of a foot. But then the road curls west across low hills like crinkled paper. As we wind away from the border toward Amman, everything is yellow earth: ripe-banana earth molded into valleys, knobby amber earth cracked by sun, olive-pinky earth smooth as a spatula. As we drive south, the roads widen, becoming clogged with trucks. We pass small villages, then an oil refinery. A train chug-chugs, far off, past a handful of camels. It never cooled off last night, and even though it isn’t muggy here, the day gets hot, and the van’s engine rattles. We roll the windows down, watching the heat wisp off the steppe. An endless string of power lines tunnels into the distance.
The buildings get bigger and closer together. Then the hills come, jostling us over their crests. I try and remember what Mama told me once—that Amman was originally built on seven hills, but that it now sprawls across at least nineteen, maybe more. On the edge of the city, the houses are taller, and apartment buildings cluster into the bones of the hillsides. Green comes: sparse grass, linden trees, blue anchusa flowers. Mama stares out the window at the blue flowers and murmurs their Arabic name: “Lisan al-thawr.” Bull’s tongue.
I stare at minarets and hotels in the distant western neighborhoods of the city, shimmering with glass and new construction. We can’t be more than a fifteen-minute drive from there, but here everything is different. The van twists through a sea of brown and white plaster buildings and strips of flat, red-rimmed rooftops. Closing food marts lock up the soda in their mini-fridges and tuck in bunches of bananas hanging by their counters. Lights come on in the square slits of windows. Piles of matchbox houses elbow each other on either side of a potholed street.
From the front seat, Abu Sayeed says, “East Amman.”
“Not a single word to strangers,” Mama says, “do you hear?” She fidgets with the buttons on her blouse and smooths the burlap bag like it’s a purse. Zahra mimics Mama’s anxious hands, twisting her gold bracelet. Across the road, an old truck is parked in an empty lot, and kids play soccer in the street. Mama ignores their shouts, smoothing her unwashed hair. Even here, she’s a lady. Not a thread of her is frayed.
We pull up to the curb in front of a squatty-faced building in yellowed brick and concrete. The van doors snap open, and we tumble out. A dog barks somewhere, a cone of silver purple. Down the hill, streetlights come on, chasing the orange squeak of a shopkeeper rolling down his metal curtain.
I stumble to a linden tree by the curb, stretching my legs, shaking out my ankles. With my nose to the linden’s bark, I smell car exhaust and must and roots.
Mama tugs out her burlap bag. She dusts herself off like she does when she’s painting, never getting a speck of paint on her smock. Her fingers bird-twist over her blouse, her hair, her hips. She straightens her pumps even though the uppers are crooked, pulling away from the soles. She helps Huda up from her seat, bending over with her weight.
Abu Sayeed carries out his fistfuls of papers, his case of geologist’s tools. Umm Yusuf straightens Rahila’s earmuffs, clucking at her wet bandages, and lifts her fr
om her car seat. She coos something in Rahila’s good ear, lifting her to her shoulder like Rahila is a delicate piece of papier-mâché. Something about her movements is slow, resigned. When she sees me standing under the tree, she pats my shoulder and leads me up the walk.
We climb the stairs to a little apartment. “My mother and my son are waiting for us,” Umm Yusuf says. “They left before we did. Now there will be three generations under one roof again.” She smiles, lifting the hem of her skirt as we climb. Her cheeks are full, and her smile is bordered by dimples, but her skin is ashen from lack of sleep.
The stairwell gets narrow as we go up, so I fall behind Umm Yusuf, watching the back of her maroon scarf. Mama climbs up behind me, and that smell is still on her—that burnt smell. The same scent is on me, on my tee shirt and in the hairs that are just sprouting on my arms. The shell must have left sulfur and smoke in us and not just metal. All of us have been soaked in bad memories.
“Mama.” I pull her aside. “What happened to Rahila’s ear?”
“Don’t you have eyes?” Mama snaps at me, her whisper red-edged. For the first time she seems really angry, really afraid. “You saw the shelling. Look at Huda. What do you think happened?” But she must feel bad, because she puts her hand on my shoulder. “Hush, now,” she says, and the anger is gone from her voice.
Umm Yusuf unlocks the door. In the apartment, somebody shuffles toward us. Out pops a wobbly pink voice, like how my sitto used to sound on the phone before she died: “Ya Rahila, ya ayni!” The woman behind the door isn’t talking to me, but I shiver anyway. Only Sitto used to call me “ya ayni”—my eye—and I haven’t heard it since she passed away.
The door swings open, making shadows on the white ceiling tiles. A single bulb hangs in the middle of the room. Faded cushions are lined up along the wall, and a leather-sided trunk in front of them serves for a table. An empty soda can sits on top, a clump of nodding anchusa poking out of the can’s rim. For a second that’s all I see, the soda can that passes for a vase and the bare trunk for a table. Why didn’t I realize you can’t just super-glue a dining table back together, a house? How long will it be until we get back the things we lost?
The Map of Salt and Stars: A Novel Page 11
