The Map of Salt and Stars: A Novel

by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar

  I bury my face in his tee shirt. His heart thuds in his stomach. “I thought I dreamed you,” I say. The blade of Yusuf’s pocketknife bites into my palm. “I thought no one remembered us.”

  Yusuf wraps an elbow around my shoulders and bends to press his cheek to my ear. “Then we have to remember each other,” he says.

  “But you came all the way here,” I say. “How?”

  “There was too much fighting in Libya,” Yusuf says. “Did we come all that way to hear the shots in our sleep again? So we kept on. The sea journey was too dangerous, but we could still continue west. It was Spain for us. Ceuta was the only place.”

  “I have to find my uncle Ma’mun,” I say. “Mama said he lives here, or he used to.”

  “Ummi, Sitti, and Rahila are at the CETI canteen,” he says, then pauses. “And your sisters?”

  I wring heat out of my face with the back of my hand. “Zahra is in town. Huda—”

  He takes my hand. “One thing at a time,” he says. “Let’s find Zahra.”

  We walk until the forest pulls back from the road, and the city sprawls out below us. The harbor curls away like an open hand. The buildings are matchboxes of white, yellow, and pink. Seagulls coast over our heads. The salt sticks to my hair and puffs it, making tight rings of curls.

  Far down the ribbon of road, a figure trudges toward the city, jeans ripped at the hems, sneaker soles black with walking.

  “Zahra!”

  We tumble down the hill, shouting. Zahra turns. When she sees us, she presses her hands to her face and then holds them out in front of her, like she’s trying to catch something God is dropping in her hands.

  Yusuf and I run into her, grabbing each other around the shoulders and the waist, laughing. We collapse together on the side of the road, our arms and legs tangled, knit up by joy.

  “How did you get here?” She looks at me twice before she sees me. “I told you to stay in the CETI.”

  Yusuf holds Zahra tight by her forearms. They kneel, facing each other, the tops of their heads level with my shoulders. “We crossed the border three nights ago, a group of us,” Yusuf says. “Sitti and Rahila went in the trunks of cars, one after the other, but Ummi and I were turned away. We were desperate. We took a rowboat into the harbor.” His eyes shift toward the strait before he blinks. “I applied for asylum for all of us.”

  Zahra grins, the kind of stupefied grin that could equally lead to laughing or to tears. Under her eyes, the sea boils.

  “Do you know what this means?” Yusuf draws her forehead toward his, as though what he’s trying to say can leap through his skin into her bones. “I am staying. If your family can apply for asylum, if you can stay too—”

  Her knees still scuffing the grass, Zahra wraps her arms around Yusuf and kisses him. And then she pulls me in and kisses the top of my head where my hair, just long enough now to form tiny curls, has been rubbed with dirt. The air between us is sharp with salt and sweat.

  The three of us pull apart and stand. We look down toward the city with its clusters of homes like pearls and olive seeds and red clay.

  “What do we do now?” Zahra asks.

  I lift the tile at the end of my necklace and pull out the freed blade of Yusuf’s pocketknife. I slice the silver cord. The round, broken piece of blue-and-white tile drops into my hand.

  “We find Uncle Ma’mun.”

  WE DIP DOWN to the peninsula from the forest toward the stucco and plaster buildings. We curve around bicycles, down palm-lined streets and narrow alleys. We can see the beach from almost everywhere, the shoreline with its stones like cut glass. We pass the white balconies of hotels. We pass parking meters and latticed fences. We pass rose gardens.

  We search the city through the afternoon and into evening, but we don’t find a house with a fountain in blue-and-white tile.

  At the top of one hill, we watch the sun start down. I sit under an orange tree, my legs splayed out on the sidewalk, and stare down the bowl of the sun. The broken tile digs into my hand. Where are Mama and Huda tonight? Did someone bury them the way Rawiya and her friends buried Bakr? I know God heard them both the same at the end, that he loved them both equally even though their prayers were different. I wonder if whoever buried them knew it.

  Out here, the sounds of the city seem farther off. The street bends away from us. Behind us, up the hill, are bigger, older houses, the kind with walled courtyards and gardens and elegant tile roofs. I glance at them over my shoulder. All I see is our house in Homs that Zahra still has the key to, our own broken roof.

  Zahra and Yusuf sit down next to me, facing the sea. Ancient poplars stretch their arms between the buildings, like the city grew up around them when they weren’t looking. In the east, the night is coming from Syria. Somewhere, Itto is guiding her camel into the dark.

  Yusuf leans over to me. “I love your sister very much,” he says. “I want us to be a family.”

  I lift my face from the cobblestones. “I’d like that.” I pull out the remaining pieces of his pocketknife. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I took it across the desert in the fruit truck, and it got pulp on it. And then I ran into a wall before I jumped, and it got broken in my pocket.”

  Yusuf holds the two pieces of wood and the bent blade in his hands, studying the splinters and the tarnished steel. He fits the pieces back together, tucking the metal back between the wood, until the pocketknife is a pocketknife again. He opens his palm, feeling the heft of the mended knife as though being broken isn’t something that destroys you.

  He smiles. “Fruit pulp is nothing,” he says.

  Down the hill, the sea is marbled with whitecaps. Zahra leans out and picks up a pebble from the curb. “Did you know where the Arabic name for Ceuta comes from?” she says.

  I shake my head.

  “In Arabic, Ceuta is Sabta,” she says. “It comes from the Latin septum, meaning seven.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the city is built on seven hills.” Zahra tosses the pebble in the gutter.

  “I never knew that.” I think of the seven sisters of the Pleiades and shift my legs under me so I can see farther down. The cobblestones melt into each other in the distance. Through the night haze, the Rock of Gibraltar lifts its chin, lining up perfectly with the street.

  “I know this.” I stand up, my belly humming with heat. “I’ve seen this view before.”

  “That’s not funny,” Zahra says.

  “No, I know this hill,” I say. “This is the hill from the story, the one al-Idrisi’s house was built on. He said they would build here again. They did.”

  I run in the opposite direction, away from the sun, toward the houses on the hill. I pass gardens and palmettos, terraced roofs with satellite dishes, arched windows and iron fences. I run until my chest burns.

  I turn a corner and brace my hands on my knees to catch my breath. Zahra and Yusuf run up behind me. I scan the lots, big houses with many-windowed faces.

  There, in front of me, is a three-gabled house of pink stone. Facing the street is a wrought-iron fence twisted into flowers and long-tailed birds. Between the gate and the house is a garden with a fountain.

  “I see it!”

  Zahra scrambles up the hill. “See what?”

  “I see the fountain.” I run to the gate. “Lift me up.”

  Yusuf picks me up under my armpits, and I get a foothold on the gate. I swing my legs over and jump down into the garden. The sun is just dropping into the sea behind me, making long shadows.

  A cracked old fountain, the water drained, sits in front of the big house with its carved wooden door. Palm trees and ferns rustle. Pigeons settle in for the night, cooing soft blue and purple.

  I walk up to the basin. I peer through a side window of the house, into a courtyard, but nobody comes. I set my hands on the rim.

  There, in the center of the old fountain, is an empty space. The tiles are mostly square, forming a delicate design of flowers and vines in blue and white. But in the center is a
space for a circular tile that’s still missing. Only rough grout is left.

  I hop into the fountain. I reach out with my broken piece of tile and set it into the empty space in the center.

  Except for a sliver missing on the left side, it fits perfectly.

  I whisper, “This is the place.”

  “Nour?” Zahra and Yusuf wait on the curb, glancing nervously.

  I leave the tile in the fountain and hop back out in the growing dark. I walk to the door of the gabled house. There’s a moment I remember you can never build things the same way twice, and I wonder if I’ve got things figured out after all, if anything in the world can stay the same.

  I knock anyway.

  A tall man with a round potbelly comes out. His hair is thinning around his ears, just like Baba’s, and his eyes are wide and brown with long lashes. At first I’m sure I’ve seen him somewhere before, he looks so familiar. But then he squints at me in the shadows and frowns, and I doubt myself.

  “Yes? Who are you?” he asks in Spanish.

  I try to say my name, but nothing comes out. In the pit of my stomach, something whispers that I’m wrong, and the fear turns my throat and lungs to stone.

  I lift my chin and force a smile. The name comes. “Rawiya.”

  “Rawiya?” The man repeats it like I’ve said something that has jogged his memory. He bends toward me, and the last of the light catches him. He wears a thick knitted sweater with a shawl at the neck, like a sailor might wear to watch the sea. He hasn’t shaved his beard in days. It’s grown wild, spreading like wisteria up his cheeks, tangling in his sideburns, and curling down his neck into the collar of his sweater.

  He looks toward the street and sees Zahra and Yusuf gripping the gate. Has he got Baba’s eyes and nose, or is it only my imagination?

  “I fixed your fountain.” I forget to use my Spanish, but I stand my ground, licking salt from my lips. “Mama gave me the last tile.”

  The man says, “The tile?”

  “She said it’s hard to make something the same way twice.” I raise my face. “Uncle Ma’mun?”

  “Ya Allah!” he says. “Nour? You look so much like your baba.” He wraps his arms around me. “Come in,” he bellows to Zahra and Yusuf. He lumbers down the path toward the gate. “Hamdulillah! Come in. You made it all this way!”

  “You knew we were coming?” I lope after him through the ferns.

  Uncle Ma’mun lets Zahra and Yusuf in through the gate and hugs them both, lifting Zahra off her feet. “I will not have my family standing on my step like vagabonds,” he says. “Come inside.”

  We go in. The sparrows hush in the courtyard with its cool stones and arched doors. Uncle Ma’mun leads us through a warm kitchen, past a raw wood table that looks like it was carved from driftwood. It’s been smoothed by hands and years, polished with spilled oil. The soft wood is rippled with burls. Somewhere fish stew is cooking, giving off that warm, heady smell I remember from Sitt Shadid’s kitchen—the smell of home.

  The smell is so comforting and familiar that I stand rigid on the tile, rooted and overwhelmed. The sudden shock of safety makes me feel like I’m going to die from my heart hammering its relief into my chest.

  Uncle Ma’mun shoos us through the house, and we pick up speed as we go. We jog upstairs, then down a hall lined with bedrooms. A single door stands cracked, a salt breeze clinging to the jamb. I see the curtains first, white linen and lace. Then curls of soft lavender paint themselves over my vision: I smell roses.

  I swallow around a hard lump in my throat. A woman sits at the window, her back to us, watching the strait.

  It comes back: Huda in the bed in the Damascus hospital, blood on the bandages. I draw closer. I swallow air, looking for the scent of death, but none comes. The sharp yellow of that salt smell is overpowering at first. Then, behind it, comes red and violet, the smell of pomegranates and flowers, the smell that got swallowed up in Manhattan by Mama’s tears.

  “Mama?”

  The woman turns from the window. “Habibti!”

  I throw myself to the window, grabbing Mama with both arms, tangling us in the curtain. She wraps her arms around me, rocking me against her ribs. I feel the band of her amber ring on the back of my neck. Her smell is everywhere: between my eyelashes, in the bristles of my short hair. It’s the smell of Syria, as though I never left home.

  “I read what was underneath,” I say into her blouse. “I know what happened to us. I know the story by heart.”

  “You didn’t need a map to tell you that,” Mama says, her lips to the crown of my head. “You have the map of that inside you.”

  I can’t hold my question in. I pull back. “Huppy?”

  Behind me comes the strained husk of a voice: “Ya Nouri?”

  And that shiver goes through me, the same one I felt in the funeral home when I saw it was Baba’s body on the slab. That feeling that came first, before the sticky dread of death: the tingling feeling of blood rushing out of my scalp, joy like overwhelming terror. Like the land of the dead has doubled over to cough up the living.

  I turn to face the voice. In the single bed, a girl is wrapped in a pale yellow blanket, the folds of it draped over her left shoulder. It’s not her thin face I recognize first, her eyes older than I’ve ever seen them. It’s the pattern of her scarf, long hidden under smears of dust.

  The roses.

  “Huppy!” I bound over to her, and Zahra shouts something behind me that isn’t words. I toss myself down on the bed, pressing my cheek to Huda’s scarf. I breathe in, and then I know where the purple scent of flowers came from. Huda is the reason I smelled roses.

  Huda bends her arm around me, her left shoulder still under the blanket. She holds me to her chest.

  “Hamdulillah,” Mama says—thanks be to God. She hushes Zahra’s questions. “We heard you were dead while we were still in the hospital. Ya Allah, when they rocketed the aid ferry, I thought—” Mama rises and sits at the end of the bed. The breeze lifts the sea through the window, twisting the curtains.

  “Your mama and sister were in danger,” Uncle Ma’mun says. “They crossed the desert with smugglers.”

  “By the time the surgery was over and we left the hospital,” Mama says, “Algeria had closed its border with Libya. There was a man, a truck with other families. We were stopped at the Tunisian border and turned back. The second time, we crossed in the desert. We made it. Many didn’t. They put sand in the food. To make us drink less water, they mixed it with gasoline.” Mama rests her mouth in her hand and looks away. “But none of that matters now.”

  Uncle Ma’mun pulls a chair up to the bed. “I waited for months,” he says, “hoping you would come.”

  “Your Uncle Ma’mun helps people who have nothing,” Mama says. “He helps them find places to live, makes sure they have food for their families and help with their papers. But some people get angry. They think we are dangerous. We scare them.”

  “I didn’t want to scare them,” I say. I bury my face in Huda’s hijab. “I just wanted to come home.”

  Uncle Ma’mun bows his head, his hands clasped in his lap. When he looks up, his eyes are round and wet as a pony’s, the laugh still in them somewhere deep. He says, “You are.”

  I turn to hug Huda again and pull the blanket off her shoulder. But her left arm isn’t there. Her arm is gone below her bicep, the end of it patched with bandages, her sleeve folded neatly up. If I concentrate, I can imagine the slender curve of her elbow and her smooth, thin-fingered hand.

  Huda says, “The infection was moving toward my heart.” She shifts in bed. Her biceps flexes to compensate under her folded sleeve. “They said it would be less painful, less dangerous. So many doctors had fled or been killed.”

  “The hospital was overwhelmed,” Mama says, reaching for me. “Sometimes we didn’t have electricity or medicine.”

  I push myself up on my knees, and even the sheets sting the blisters on my shins with their friction. I touch my fingers to the bone above
Huda’s bandages. Underneath are scars like mine, worse than mine. To lose the metal inside her, she had to give up a part of herself.

  “The metal is gone,” I say to her. “Isn’t it?”

  Huda pulls my head to her collarbone with her right arm, and her left shoulder curves around me as though the rest of her arm were still there.

  “Things can’t be like they were,” she says, “but I’m still your Huppy.”

  Holding on to Huda, I can feel the spot where her ribs meet each other, near her heart. Her blood and mine thrum in the backs of our necks and our fingertips.

  “I would have given mine up,” I say. “I wouldn’t mind having more scars, if you could’ve had less.”

  Huda strokes the knob of bone where my neck bends into my shoulders. “There are worse things in life than scars,” she says. She lays her palm over the baby hairs matted to my skull. “Just because I had to lose the bones the shrapnel cracked,” she says, “doesn’t mean that all my bones are broken.”

  My belly aches with blood, all the way up to my heart. “Mine either.”

  Beyond the peninsula, the wind jumps into the strait. It slips away past stucco and pine forest, tugging the salt from my words.

  The Last Empty Space

  The next day, Rawiya and Khaldun left Rawiya’s mother’s house in Benzú to check on al-Idrisi and tell him the good news. They returned along the coastal road and entered the city, arriving at his estate by midday.

  They found him waiting for them in the garden. The fountain had been restored to its bubbling and mumbling, the water splashing on the ferns around the tiled basin.

  They walked the grounds of the estate, stopping every so often so that al-Idrisi could catch his breath.

  “We had wonderful adventures, didn’t we?” al-Idrisi said. “We saw fantastical sights, things I had read about but never seen. Things I had never dreamed of seeing.”

  “We found treasures beyond imagining,” Rawiya said. “We mapped the world, survived a war, and banished the tyranny of the roc from ash-Sham and the shores of the Maghreb for generations to come.”