The Map of Salt and Stars: A Novel

by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar

  I lift my hand and point at the sky. What did Mama say the word for camel was, the one Rawiya used?

  “An-naqah.” And then I think he might not know what I’m pointing at, so I add another Arabic word Mama taught me, the word for stars. “An-nujum.”

  I stare at the man. He seems unsure, waiting for me to say something else. I point up at the sky again, wondering if I’ve got it wrong, shivering from the cold. Did Rawiya ever doubt herself so much?

  I say, “An-naqah fi an-nujum.”

  The man waves someone over. Shapes come out of the night—a lady and a girl Zahra’s age, leading three camels. They talk to each other in a language I’ve never heard before.

  Behind me, Zahra pops awake. “What’s going on?” she hisses.

  I study the man’s face, knowing my Arabic is only basic, like a little kid’s. Can this be a bad man, if he loves the stars? I wonder if the smuggler man followed Esmat’s eyes, pointed at the sky.

  I try one last time: “Ohebbu an-naqah fi an-nujum.” I love the camel in the stars. I open my palm to the velvet night and start to lose hope. I must have gotten something wrong.

  But my words make the man’s eyes crinkle up, and he starts to chuckle. He leans his head back and laughs with relief and understanding, a long, tinkling laugh like the sky blowing diamonds from its hand. He points up at the stars and smiles. “An-naqah fi an-nujum,” he says, like he has never been surer of anything.

  Relief floods my belly—he does speak Arabic. I try something else. “Ingliziya? English?”

  The lady behind him melts out of the dark. “Arabic, French. A little English.” She smiles. “Come?”

  The lady and the man lift us up and set us on their camels. Before long, we are moving across the dunes, the camels picking their way over crests of cold sand. The lady keeps quiet, riding ahead of us with Zahra. The man gives me water, and every now and then, he looks up and points at a constellation I once picked out with Mama or Abu Sayeed, but he gives them new names. He calls the Pleiades by a name I’ve never heard, and the lady falls back and translates for me into English: the daughters of the night.

  I listen to them talk in a language I’ve never heard before. I don’t have to understand everything. The blue-violet voices wind around me, protecting me from my fear. I am covered with a thick rind of safety, like an orange.

  The night gets thin as an old raincoat. Toward dawn, we ride in silence, and everybody’s heart beats so loud. I listen to the white space. All I hear is breath, like we are all one organ, a single lung.

  Two Things at the Same Time

  Hidden under the palmettos, Rawiya and al-Idrisi watched the palace burning.

  Al-Idrisi’s face was streaked with the ash of palms and linen. He patted the book and map in his robe without focusing his eyes on the flames. “How could they turn on Roger’s son this way?” he said.

  “Because he wasn’t King Roger,” Rawiya said. “People take advantage when power changes hands.” She waved at the night, toward the Maghreb in the distance, over the rim of the island and beyond the sea. “Look at Cairo. Look at the Fatimid Empire.” In the last few months, word had reached Sicily through the merchants of the fall of the Fatimids, until even the servants had whispered of it. The words bitter in her mouth, Rawiya said, “Those caught in between are the ones who get hurt.”

  Al-Idrisi turned his head. “We left him. Khaldun and the planisphere are as good as lost. I have been a coward.”

  “I loved him more than anyone,” Rawiya said, slamming her fist into the palmetto’s bark. “I wanted to spend my life with him. Don’t you think I would have done more, if I could?”

  Al-Idrisi clutched the book in his robe. “But to lose so good a man . . .”

  Rawiya looked back at the palace, lit up against the stars. The smell of salt mixed with smoke, tart sulfur. Ash turned to black paste on her cheeks.

  “Wait for me,” she said.

  Rawiya darted across the palace gardens and back through the ruined kitchen, through the servants’ tunnel, until she skidded to a halt at the end of the brick archway that led into the courtyard.

  Voices and shadows roamed the palace, dragging away furniture, paintings, and jewelry. One man passed the entrance to the tunnel with a torch. Rawiya stepped back into the shadows, holding her breath. The courtyard was ablaze with crashing, tearing, snapping flames.

  The vandals were burning books.

  “You.” Rawiya stepped out from the tunnel with her sling in her hand. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  One of the men tossed down a thick leather-bound book, hand-lettered with gold ink. Rawiya glanced at the cover. It was Ptolemy’s Geography.

  “Is this a joke?” the man snapped. He set his foot on the book, grinding it into the stones. “William’s day is over. You should have run like a dog while you had the chance.”

  Rawiya waved at the book. “I want to know what you’re doing with that.”

  The man smirked. “Maybe I’ll burn it.”

  “Pick it up, then,” she said.

  The man reached for it.

  Before anyone could stop her, Rawiya notched a stone to her sling and fired it, stinging the man in the hand. He fell to the ground, howling.

  His friends charged her, dropping frames and cushions and pieces of cut glass. She fired six stones, one after another, gashing her attackers’ shins and bruising their bellies until they dropped to the ground.

  The man whose hand she had stung ran at her, using a broken chair leg as a club. Rawiya stuffed her sling into the band of her sirwal and pulled out al-Idrisi’s jeweled scimitar, blocking his blow. She staggered back with its force.

  The man grinned at her over their crossed weapons. “This is a joke after all,” he said. He pressed harder, forcing her back. “A woman with a sword? Has William gone so soft that he leaves women to protect the palace? A woman.” He spat. “You are no warrior.”

  “I am a woman and a warrior,” Rawiya said, her blade cutting into his club. “If you think I can’t be both, you’ve been lied to.”

  She heaved her weight forward, slicing the club clean in half. The man stumbled back and fell. His friends rose, rubbing their sore limbs, and charged again. Rawiya parried their daggers and clubs, shoving men aside with the force of her blade. She dove through their ranks, making for the workshop.

  The narrow room was full of smoke. She coughed, blinded. “Khaldun?”

  There was no answer.

  Rawiya choked on smoke and pulled her head back. Blows came from behind her, and she lifted her sword to block them. She rolled aside against the wall, calling out, “Khaldun!”

  “Your friend was lost to the fire,” her first attacker called out. He sat on the ground, rubbing his hand and his shin. “Nothing is left of him.”

  Rawiya ran at him. He surged to his feet and stabbed at her with a dagger, making her jump back. Rawiya lunged away, grabbing Ptolemy’s Geography as she went. The rest of the men surrounded her, pushing her back toward the servants’ tunnel.

  With the book in her hand, Rawiya couldn’t put her full strength behind her blows, and she stumbled. A man kicked her, and she flew backward through the archway of the servants’ tunnel and into the dark.

  They began to beat the tunnel entrance with their clubs, knocking down bricks. Ten of them beat the walls at once while Rawiya shook sparks from her eyes, getting to her knees. The walls began to crack. Stone crumbled across the entrance.

  Rawiya pushed herself back as stones fell around her knees and ankles. She crawled away from the entrance just as the archway collapsed, leaving no opening.

  “Khaldun,” Rawiya whispered. “My home.”

  She stumbled back to the ruined kitchen and across the palace garden, clutching the book she had rescued, the book King Roger had once offered her.

  Rawiya crossed to the burnt palmetto where she had left al-Idrisi. She found him weeping with his head in his lap, his white turban shuddering.

  TOWARD DAWN, W
E climb a high dune and look down on a narrow rocky plain scattered with tamarisk trees. A square tent draped with goat hair rugs and colorful blankets leans against one of the tree’s roots, shaded from the rising sun by its bushy leaves. An older boy watches us from a distance, shooing brown goats and two lean sheep. A lamb totters toward us, braying. Dogs chase each other behind the tent, barking at jackals slinking away with the dark.

  Normally we don’t move at night, the lady says to Zahra in accented Arabic, but the dogs smelled you.

  She helps Zahra down from the camel, and her daughter sets me on the ground. They shoo us inside the tent and make us sit down. The floor is covered with wool rugs woven in orange diamonds and green starbursts, laid with their edges overlapping each other. The man, who must be the lady’s husband, comes in and brings us a silver pot of tea. He holds his arm high up and pours the tea in a thin stream into glasses. After going hungry all this time, I feel the sugar sticking to the hairs in my nose.

  The lady comes in and sits down, adjusting her floral-print dress and embroidered scarf. The tea is sweet and hot, and the mint smells a clean, pale blue. The lady says a few words. I recognize bismillah—in the name of God.

  The lady waits for us to speak.

  I bow my head and thank her in Arabic—“Shukran.” Then I ask in English, “You speak four languages?”

  She smiles. “My French and Arabic are from my school days. The English is from the market. We make kilims.” She motions to the rugs on the floor.

  “I’m Nour,” I say. “This is my sister, Zahra.”

  The lady tips her head and smiles again, crinkling the sun wrinkles around her eyes. “Itto.”

  Zahra launches into Arabic, explaining what has happened to us and how we’re trying to get to Morocco, then Ceuta, where our uncle lives. We need to get to Sabta, Zahra says, using the Arabic work for Ceuta. We were separated from our mother and sister. We traveled for days.

  Itto translates for her husband, who gets up and goes out. I hear him talking to his son and daughter outside.

  Itto frowns. They were supposed to take you to Algiers, and from there through Morocco to Sabta?

  Yes.

  The Moroccan border into Spain is not easy to cross.

  I know.

  Itto glances at me. This is your brother?

  Zahra looks over at me and then back to Itto. She’s my sister. She explains about the lice, and I look away.

  This is better. Itto pours us another three glasses of tea. She made us laugh with her stars. She is a sweet child.

  She is. Zahra looks down into the steam. Itto’s daughter comes in with clay dishes of hot couscous topped with spices and almonds. I look from Zahra to Itto, but Zahra doesn’t look at me. Like always, she thinks I haven’t understood.

  Our words come out in Arabic at the same time. Zahra speaks to Itto for me, saying, My sister only speaks a little Arabic.

  I say, Thank you.

  Zahra and Itto turn to look at me, and Itto smiles.

  In Arabic, Itto says, “There is a place—Ouargla. Fruit is grown there and packed on trucks for sale. Some of the trucks are bound for Ceuta.”

  ITTO AND HER family take us west on their camels, driving the goats and sheep with them. I think we travel for a week, but I lose track of time. We eat and sleep in their tent and help them herd their flock. The desert becomes familiar, a face decorated with the arched noses of rocks, the lips of dunes, the hairlines of green patches dotted with eucalyptus.

  Itto shares her water with us and teaches me words in Arabic and Shawiya and French. At night, she and her daughter mend fabric, and when the light is gone, they tell stories. I listen to their laughter and to the camels shuffling and swaying. The dogs bay at jackals under the moon.

  One day, I twist my neck to look at Itto, sitting behind me on her camel. I talk to her in Arabic. My baby sentences have gotten easier, the words coming to me when I reach for them.

  “You never asked where we’re from,” I say.

  She squints past the dunes. “You told me you were from Syria.”

  “Zahra was born in Homs. Mama and Baba lived there a long time. But I was born in New York, in the United States.”

  “New York?” Itto looks down at me. “You may be American, but you are still Syrian.”

  I rub the camel’s coarse hair with my palms. “How?”

  “A person can be two things at the same time,” Itto says. “The land where your parents were born will always be in you. Words survive. Borders are nothing to words and blood.”

  I think of the storyteller man behind the Jordanian border gate. Our camels’ hooves sink into the sand. If I put my ear to the ground, could I hear him breathing?

  “There was a time others came to claim our country,” Itto says. “We couldn’t speak our language or name our children what we wanted. But we held to what our mothers loved. Our heritage. Our stories. They call us Berber, from ‘barbarian.’ But Amazigh means ‘free man.’ Did you know this? No one can take our freedom from us. No one can take our land or our names from our hearts.”

  Heat warps the horizon, making things that are close look far away, and things that are far away look close. Did Baba ever feel that way about Syria, I wonder, when he looked out across the East River, past Brooklyn? Mama said Uncle Ma’mun was a different kind of person, somebody who saw life as an adventure. Did Baba and his brother miss things differently too, so that Baba was mourning the same place Uncle Ma’mun kept tucked in his shirt pocket? I think of Yusuf and Sitt Shadid and think maybe there are parts of yourself you never stop missing, once you realize you’ve lost them.

  “I think my baba tried to keep Syria inside him,” I say, “but it was too big to hold on to.”

  “That is why we had to hold on to the old words,” Itto says, “until our mothers’ voices sprang from our mouths.” She squints out at the horizon, as though the land itself holds layers of reality I can’t even see. And I realize how little I know of Itto’s pain and her ancestors’, how every story is more complicated than it seems, even the story of the Imazighen and the Normans who separated them from the land that bore them. If a language or a story or a map can be used to give people a voice or to take it away, only our own words can guide us home.

  “Then home is here.” I sketch out a circle in the air that holds all of us, the people and the camels and the goats. Then I point at my heart and at my own tongue. “Home is this,” I say. “No one can take it from us.”

  “No one.” Itto raises her arm. “There—Ouargla.”

  At first, the city is just a cluster of trees in the distance. The roads are washed over with sand, only visible because they are flatter than everything else. Itto’s husband stops outside the town, and the goats and sheep cluster around him, a lamb in his arms. He raises his arm, watching us go.

  The city of Ouargla rises up, rippled and white in the heat glare. Trucks pass, blowing a sheet of sand off the blacktop, revealing yellow lines. The rocky sand turns to stretches of shrubs.

  The first buildings appear, tan plaster. The streets narrow. The city is built around an oasis, a thin bowl of shallow water surrounded by palm trees and wading ibises. Groves of palms and fruit trees ring the bowl. The sound of traffic, of leaves rustling, of birds calling—it’s all so loud I can’t bear it, not after the quiet of the Sahara.

  Itto takes us into the market in the city center. Her son and daughter set out their woven rugs for sale. Then Itto takes Zahra and me aside and points beyond the market to a row of trucks parked behind a squat building. Itto nods her head toward the trucks. “Fruit trucks,” she whispers. “Probably bound for Algiers or Ceuta.”

  “Probably?” Zahra bites her lips.

  “Or Fes.”

  I sniff, burning the cracked edges of my nostrils. Something smells rotted and sweet, a brassy, greenish smell. The open backs of the trucks are gaping holes into darkness.

  “You will be closer there than here,” Itto says. She raises her hands to the heaven
s. “It is dangerous. God brings peace.”

  At nightfall, Itto steals us away to the trucks. Outside the building, a man smokes a cigarette with his back turned.

  We peek around the bumper. The trucks are loaded with crates, each crate slapped with a green and yellow label. A row down the middle of the back of each truck, between the crates, leads into blank dark. A cold mist of steam wafts out.

  “It’s like hell,” I whisper to Zahra in English.

  “These are refrigerated trucks.” Zahra ducks her head inside, then glances back at the man with the cigarette. Its red tip blazes and sparks when he breathes in. “It can’t be much above freezing in there.”

  “Go.” Itto looks from Zahra’s face to mine. “They’re finished loading. They will close it soon.”

  “Wait.” I fumble in my pocket and tug out Abu Sayeed’s handkerchief, stitched with diamonds. After all this time, it still smells like home. I hold the handkerchief out to Itto.

  She hesitates. “This is for me?”

  I nudge my hand into hers, and she takes the handkerchief. “For everything,” I say. “It’s from somebody else. Somebody who would want to thank you too.”

  Itto clasps her arms around me one last time. “When you find your mother,” she whispers, “don’t let go.”

  We clamber onto the truck hitch and into the back. When I turn around, Itto has already sprinted back to her children in the dark, ducking into the shadows between buildings. She reappears down the street. It’s too far to tell if she’s smiling, but she raises one arm and points at the stars. Then she’s gone.

  Zahra and I pick our way between the crates. We bump into something that cracks open, thudding a soft glob onto the floor.

  “Ew,” Zahra whispers. “What is that?”

  I try to avoid it, but I step in it anyway. “It’s squishy.”

  “A crate must have broken open.” Zahra sniffs the air. “Oranges, maybe.”

  “I smell bananas. Pomegranates?” The acid-green smell of smashed, overripe fruit is overpowering. Some of it must have rotted.