The Map of Salt and Stars: A Novel

by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar

  Go, he mouthed.

  The flames licked at his shoulders, melting the window frame.

  Go.

  Rawiya pulled al-Idrisi from the room, tugging him across the courtyard toward the secret servants’ tunnel she had seen when she had first arrived. She led al-Idrisi through the sandy tunnel in the dark, and the brick over their heads shook with dozens of footsteps.

  The tunnel had once led to the servants’ kitchen, but no more. Rawiya blinked in the moonlight. They stood in an open courtyard filled with rubble, the remains of bent copper pots and shattered pottery at their feet. The ceiling had fallen in; the paneling was charred, the tile smashed.

  Rawiya and al-Idrisi picked their way through cracked porcelain and blackened brick and escaped through the servants’ entrance. They fled into the night through the palace gardens, over trampled grass and burnt palm fronds. They hid under the palmettos, watching the palace rumble and burn.

  Al-Idrisi lowered himself to his knees and prayed, his head in his hands, The Book of Roger a heavy outline in his robe.

  Rawiya pressed her hand to her chest, feeling for the shrunken muscle of her heart. It thudded open and shut, only blood where words had once been.

  THE FIRST DAY passes slowly, and the day after that. Before we know it, we’ve been staying in the smugglers’ house for a week, waiting for the smugglers to gather a big-enough group to make the trip across the desert and the Algerian border. They don’t let us go outside to stretch our legs, so young parents pace the room from end to end, and kids press their faces to the windows. Flies buzz in the corners of the ceiling. In the evenings, the smuggler men toss us loaves of bread and shout at us to wait another day. I open my mouth to ask Zahra if we should go back, then remember what Mama said about the fighting around the Gulf: The roads are lawless. At night, we hear men’s voices, and I pretend to sleep.

  The last night, one of the smuggler men comes into the creaking house and shuffles between the sleeping families. He walks like he’s looking for someone, scanning each of our bodies. I tremble against Zahra and squeeze my eyes shut.

  He stops over us. The floorboards groan. The man breathes heavy and snorts, tapping something wooden against the wall.

  Cold dread spreads from my toes to my scalp, prickling me with fear. I hold my breath. The distance between us seems like nothing. He hangs over us in the dark.

  But the smuggler man moves on, and I breathe out. He kicks one of the young fathers, who moans.

  The smuggler man speaks in Arabic, loud enough to wake the other families, but no one moves.

  You, he says. Get up. He kicks the man again. Your family didn’t pay.

  The father stumbles up from his wife and shuffles toward the wall. What do you want me to give? he shoots back. I have nothing. I told you, they will send the money.

  The wet crack of a club hitting flesh makes the whole room twitch. The father cries out. The smuggler pushes him toward the door, still protesting.

  I have nothing, he shouts. I gave you everything I had.

  The door slams shut. Around us, people let out their air, uncoiling tensed necks. Outside the window, hard wood claps against muscle. The father shouts and begs. Coins tinkle in the dirt. My heart slams against my lungs, and I bury my face in Zahra’s belly.

  Her breaths are heavy and uneven, warming the back of my neck. She whispers, “You didn’t understand any of that. Right?”

  Fear runs tense through Zahra’s voice like air through an oboe reed. It’s something Mama would have said, something she used to ask me after the doctors spoke to Baba in the hospital.

  I open my mouth, thinking how to tell Zahra what I heard. The door bangs shut as the father limps back into the house, and Zahra flinches at each of his steps.

  “No,” I whisper back. “I didn’t.”

  The next day, a dozen people pile into the back of the smugglers’ truck, sitting on sacks and boxes. The truck bed is piled high with luggage and rolled blankets fastened with duct tape. Packages hang over the wooden sides of the truck on ropes, making it look like a shaggy dog with tiny legs. People sit on top of their bags, shoulder to shoulder, and the ones sitting on the edge of the truck bed sit with sticks wedged between their legs to keep them from tumbling off if they fall asleep.

  “Go. Go!” The smuggler men clap their hands to make us move faster. They toss us water bottles and tell us to make them last.

  Zahra and I climb on, stuffed next to the boy my age and his grandfather. People jostle as the engine starts.

  The city shrinks to a beetle on the horizon. The rocky ground turns to sand. Shrubs and grasses disappear. The uneven road throws up clouds of dust.

  The boy my age gives his water bottle to his grandfather, who rubs his bushy white eyebrows and the papery skin under his eyes. The boy pulls a bulging sock from his pocket and slips out a plastic medicine bottle. He hands a pill to his grandfather, who swallows it with a sip of water.

  He notices me staring. The boy says in quiet English, “It’s for his heart.”

  “Oh.” We bounce up and down, sweat jiggling free of our chins. I consider my words in Arabic, but my nerves fail me, and I respond in English. “I’m Nour. This is my sister, Zahra.”

  “I’m Esmat.”

  I ask, “Why do you hide the pills?”

  “They cost a lot of money,” Esmat says. “I didn’t want them to be stolen.” He stares at his hands. “Do you like football? I liked to play at home, with my friends.”

  “My sister Huda played before we left,” I say. I can feel the Arabic translations behind the English words, as though my brain has become two interlocking gears. “Where we lived, they called it soccer. She was the best, the captain of her school team.”

  “That’s amazing,” Esmat says.

  The sun swings its head across the sky. Esmat wags his legs over the side of the truck, kicking at imaginary soccer balls.

  “Someday,” he says, “I hope your sister can play again.”

  IN THE AFTERNOON, we stop so people can jump off to pee. Some of them ask for water. The smuggler man curses and pushes them, throwing water bottles at the others until they get back on the truck. He tells us we won’t get our money back if we’re left behind.

  The road winds between rocky buttes and reddish hills, then flattens out into a wide sandy expanse dotted with gray-green tufts of hardy grass. Now and then we pass camels sitting with their legs bent under them, and sometimes, far off, tiny figures watch us.

  As we near the border with Algeria, the dunes of the Sahara rise up to the west—cliffs of sand, rippling crests and ridges and mountains of honey-colored sand. The truck rambles on, bouncing and complaining.

  As the sun sinks, Esmat gives his grandfather the last of his water. “He has to keep drinking,” he says.

  At sunset, we take another pee break, and the driver threatens to make us take pills to stop us from peeing. No water from now on, he shouts.

  Next to us, Esmat shifts between piles of packages, restless. He shakes the last few drops of water from his empty bottle. His grandfather looks glassy-eyed and weak, and his hands tremble.

  Esmat hops off the back of the truck and approaches one of the smuggler men, who is stretching his legs. My grandfather, Esmat says in Arabic. He needs water.

  But the smuggler man shouts at him. He pulls a stick out of the truck and hits Esmat hard enough to make him scream. He strikes him on his back, his wrists, his temples. Red welts rise out of the skin on his shoulder blades. I bury my face in Zahra’s lap and cry out with each crack of the stick, and even though I can’t see them, each welt feels like it stings my own skin.

  THAT NIGHT, ESMAT is lying with his head on his grandfather’s lap, in and out of sleep, when the truck stops in a scrubby field. The smuggler man who beat Esmat slams the truck door and stomps back to us, telling us to get off.

  We stand in the field, shivering. He tells us to start walking, that we’re crossing the border into Algeria on foot. He tells us not to make a
sound, cocking his finger to his head and pretending to pull the trigger.

  Border guards shoot first, he says, and ask questions later.

  Pregnant women and parents with little kids struggle to keep up. Zahra carries a little boy while his mother hangs nearby, her nose and cheeks badly sunburned and a baby in her arms. Esmat walks next to us, holding his grandfather’s hand. Esmat’s face and neck are so swollen I almost can’t recognize him. As we walk, I wonder if we look like a family. Can people become glued to each other as easily as they get peeled away?

  In the dark, our breaths are the wings of a dozen locusts beating.

  Then come the pops of bullets.

  The shots rip the night at the seams. We dive and run. The little boy jerks and bolts from Zahra’s arms. The families scatter, and Esmat and his grandfather lose each other in the chaos.

  Zahra grabs my hand, and I hook my arm around Esmat’s elbow. We run from the road, ducking under the moon.

  The popping gets louder. The smugglers’ truck starts in the distance. I trip over something that pulls and sticks in my shins—a roll of barbed wire on the ground, stretching into the night. Algeria.

  There’s a heavy tug from Esmat’s arm, and he slips away. I break from Zahra’s hand and turn. In the dark behind us, Esmat’s head is silhouetted on the ground, the red welts the smuggler man made on the back of his neck exposed to the night.

  “Esmat,” I whisper, “we’ve got to run.”

  He’s too heavy for me to lift. Far off in the dark, border guards’ flashlights sweep the ground. Just as my eyes adjust to the dark, the bright pool of a flashlight blinds me and the pops of gunshots come again. I throw myself to the ground and lose Esmat in the dark.

  “Come on.” Zahra pulls me away from the circle of light, and we run and run until the popping stops. We don’t look back.

  When we catch our breath, Zahra and I are alone. I look back over the dunes toward the road, but I can’t see anything, not Esmat’s body, not his grandfather, not the border. Cold has come like I haven’t felt since the city, painting my legs with goose bumps. The little pimples are sticky with blood.

  Zahra touches the cuts on my shins and the smears of blood on my hands. “The wire?” she asks, thinking all the blood is my own.

  I nod. Zahra’s jaw is gashed too, caked with blood brown and thick as pan drippings. It’s the kind of ugly cut that never heals right, the kind that leaves a long finger of nubby flesh.

  I squat down and cover my bumpy knees with my arms. The moon licks the half inch of hair on my head. I blink and see Esmat’s frozen face, like he is just about to cry.

  “I bet I know what the man would say, if he were here.”

  Zahra stares back toward Libya. “What would he say?” she asks.

  “ ‘No money back.’ ”

  THE SUN IS a torch. During the day, the rock and sand go from ice to coals under our feet. We plod over dunes, searching for the road. We both know that, if we find it, only one direction is open to us. Even if we brought our identification back to the Libyan border, that border is already shut. We can’t go back.

  My legs turn to brick. My palms ooze sweat. Zahra and I pass my water bottle back and forth until we drain it. I imagine the half-sweet taste of bread. I imagine the blue rush of cold tap water hitting my tongue. I try to remember the color of ice cream’s taste.

  The nights are long winters, and we spend them huddled up under the dirty carpet. We eat the last of our dates and tuna fish. The cans pucker and dry out. For the first time, I say a prayer to thank the smuggler man for the extra water bottles he gave us when we got on the truck, the ones Zahra and I have been saving.

  We wear holes through the bottoms of our shoes with walking, our muscles cramping up and our backs aching. I wonder if the heat is making the paint melt on Mama’s map. Even my skull feels heavy, my burlap backpack and my pockets full.

  “Maybe we would have been there by now,” Zahra says after a few days, “if things hadn’t gone wrong.”

  Above us, the clouds whip and run, beckoning the coming wet season.

  I kick at stray pebbles and see Esmat’s face in the patterns in the sand. I say, “I bet the man never meant to get us there.”

  Zahra wipes sweat off her face and neck, and it drips from her wrist. “The twisted son of a bitch. We were nothing but money to him.”

  I scratch old blood from my cuticles. “Mama wouldn’t want you to curse.”

  Heat ripples off the ground, buckling the horizon. I wonder if anybody made it back to the truck. I wonder if there is somebody out there who loves the smuggler man, if anybody loves all the mean, unlovable people in the world. I wonder if bad men are good sometimes, when we aren’t looking.

  And then I wonder: if they find Esmat’s body, will they read the words he wrote in crayon on his shirt?

  My scalp crawls with fire, the heat painting my vision red. Sweat beads up between my eyebrow hairs and sticks to my lashes. My blood is thick, the stories in me boiled to mush. The words in me, the ones I don’t say, have gravity in them. All those unsaid words are like iron gravity spots. I am weighed down by the sticky residue of feeling them, crushed by the heaviness of hope, wondering if my heart is only tubing.

  I stop walking. Zahra shuffles on a few steps in the heat until she notices.

  I say, “It’s September.”

  “It’s probably halfway through September by now,” Zahra says. “So what?”

  “If Mama were here,” I say, “we’d be safe. We’d have someplace to sleep. We wouldn’t have to do this.”

  “What do you want from me?” Zahra says. “If you want to find Mama, we have to walk.”

  She reaches for my hand, but I rip it away.

  “We have to keep moving,” she says, and the desperation in her voice bursts into ruby like a hot coal, as red as the welts on Esmat’s ribs.

  “What’s the point?” I shout. “Mama and Huda and Yusuf and Sitt Shadid and Umm Yusuf and Rahila are gone. They’re drowned, or shot, or dead, just like Abu Sayeed. Just like Esmat. Just like Baba.”

  My last word shreds itself on the heat rising from the dunes. In the distance, thunder rocks the sky.

  It’s the first time I’ve said it out loud. Something about the world changes the moment I say it, like none of the bad things were quite real until they left my mouth. Like until I gave death words, it didn’t actually exist.

  Is the world nothing more than a collection of senseless hurts waiting to happen, one long cut waiting to bleed?

  Zahra kneels in front of me and says, “We have to keep going.”

  I sniffle and wipe at my face, but my cheeks are dry. “My feet hurt.”

  Zahra blinks sand out of her eyelashes like gold eye shadow. She says, “I know.” She reaches for my face. “It’s okay if you cry.”

  “I’m not crying.” I hiccup, but no tears come. “I can’t.”

  “You’re dehydrated.” Zahra hands me her water bottle, sloshing the last few drops.

  I push it away. “You need it.”

  “You finished yours this morning.”

  I take the bottle and drink, and my dry throat makes me cough. Zahra tugs the burlap backpack from me. I notice three olive tan lines in the spots where her bracelet used to hang.

  “You sold it,” I say. “Baba’s bracelet.”

  “There are more important things than bracelets,” Zahra says.

  I study her face and the gash along her jaw. Either one of the smuggler men cuffed her in the dark, or she must have sliced herself on the barbed wire. Either way, Zahra will have the scar for the rest of her life. Just like me, she’s marked.

  I say to Zahra, “Let’s just rest.”

  The thunder ripples across the dunes again, louder this time. Rain spits from the sky in thin bursts. Zahra and I flatten ourselves on the ground. We open our mouths to drink, trying to catch the drizzle on our tongues.

  It’s not enough, but we don’t care. We let the night come over us as the las
t drops of passing rain fall, torture and pure joy at the same time.

  Mama was right. Sometimes pain comes with its own sorts of blessings.

  THAT NIGHT, A man walks out of the dark with ten thousand stars at his back.

  I see him silhouetted against the purple sky when I wake up shivering, the sand beneath us gone cold. The Milky Way above us is a gash of light. Zahra is still asleep next to me, the muscles in her forearms and her shoulders twitching from thirst. The man takes a few steps toward me, and I realize someone has found us.

  I get up, rubbing my eyes, and stumble toward him. As the moon casts its glow over his face, he squints at me under thick eyebrows and calls out a few words I don’t understand.

  “Who are you?” I call back.

  The man answers me, but still I can’t understand him. I look back at Zahra, still asleep several yards behind me, and fear takes over. I remember the smuggler man standing over us in the house, the electric terror of being watched, of being alone. We aren’t on any map.

  The man speaks again, slower this time, putting his hand to his chest. “Amazigh.”

  I repeat the word. “Amazigh?”

  The man nods. I try to think back to what Mama told me about the people who live in parts of Algeria and Morocco, the people history books call the Berbers. But Mama told me that, like most people, the name history gave them isn’t what they call themselves.

  The stars hang low over our heads. Out here, the sky is brighter than the constellations on the ceiling at Grand Central. Everyone, no matter what language they speak, has a name for the stars. I focus on their light, fighting back the fear, and find the only words that come.

  I point up at the camel in Cassiopeia. “My favorite.”

  Zahra stirs behind me, groggy and weak from the day’s heat. The man looks confused at my English and speaks again in words I don’t understand. Fear bubbles up in red and yellow, the colors of panic. I remember the words I forgot in the spice shop in Homs—Zahra can’t help me now.

  But the man tries again, speaking more slowly, and his eyes are as young and patient as Abu Sayeed’s in Baba’s Polaroids.