by Mai Al-Nakib
He in his.
A French girlfriend with bouncing blond hair. Oui. A coquette in the French style. At the Sea Club sometimes, a flip, a wink. Voila! How to compete with that? Smitten with the pretty French girl with the glass giggle. Jonas fell for the icicle blonde, delicate as tulle, la French belle. At least for a while and not too hard. Drinking, as young Swedes do, in the sun. He in his world peeking at her in hers.
The pouch disappeared. She (almost) forgot about it.
It was the year of the furtive whispers by men who were old enough to know better. The year she smelled of freshly cut grass in a country where landscaping is a luxury. She stretched out, all promise and exuberance. No illnesses, no deaths, no prohibitions, yet. No attempt to save time. No reason to follow the phantoms of desire, of photographs lost. Everything poised to begin just then, the vortex point. A stillness beneath pulsing flesh. Mina was, in this final year of late childhood, already the adult she would become minus the damage of the onward march. There was expectancy and quivering. Music drifting out of windows left open on purpose. White curtains flapping like red sleeves in the dry breeze. The word girl’s flesh and blood. It was the year of airports imagined for later. Taking flight. In ten years, you will still be here. You will be married. You will have children. You will always be in this place. Je refuse! In the breeze carried in by the long white tails of open windows, she refused. In the words she writes, even now, she refuses to let the phantom go.
Maybe this is the story she has been rehearsing her whole life. Why this moment? Why this pouch? This stationary deck? This elevator? Why this goodbye before flight? Why this snow boy’s kerchief-tied neck? This bite like a badge? This dizzying sky, Arabian blue, before the fires, before the end for us, before death and damage and no going back. Frozen in him, Mina becoming, not what she would become (for now, but not forever, please, never forever; she still refuses!). Frozen in the snow, still unfurling, arms outstretched, expectant, land still open and hot. In snow there is no war. No prisoners made to stand like crosses, unspeakably smeared. No inexplicable cancer. No oil under the desert more beautiful without it. No plastic byproducts dimming the blue-green. No holy moly abracadabras one, two, three, you’re dead if you don’t bow down four, five times a day. Jonas from the land of snow with a pouch that contains everything from before. There are days when the pouch opens. A tear in the constellation letting old light in, blue-greens and downward-curving brown-grays. A talisman in the pouch hinting at, promising, reaching toward something, anything that hasn’t come before, that doesn’t feel somehow, yet again, familiar. In his slow walk from gate to building, in her anticipation of what might or might never follow a bite is everything we ever hope for. A constellation of sparks, a tapestry woven over the years, strand by glittering strand, a life. And then, suddenly, a tear in the constellation letting old light in. This could break her heart. Or maybe it is just what she needs, just what she has been waiting for. Maybe it is what we need to stop dimming seas, naked crosses, multiplying cancers, holy moly abracadabras, the oil in the desert breaking the world apart. Just what we have all been waiting for.
* * *
He gave her the leather pouch, before the kiss on the bus, before the envelope unopened, before the final flight on the last day. The pouch, after the kiss on the deck, after the kiss in the elevator, the first real goodbye. Silence between them on the deck, words unsaid. The French belle gone. Mina and Jonas sitting in a tree. Finally. April, May, June. Jonas of the snow, floppy still, insecure but piercing. A young man with young skin and a dancer’s body, artist’s hands. The boy lost for words but piercing still. Electric fingers locked and thumbs caressing. Looking out at the blue-green, seeing only black, at a dance on the deck of a stationary ship. Waves licked the sides of a ship aching to move, to escape the trap of land, anchors aweigh to sail on the merry sea, now black with night, to the land of snow and ice, elsewhere. Murmurs and whispers. They stammered to each other. Straining to hear them. Half-sentences, half-words strung together like popcorn, paper chains, a feather necklace. Pretty. Stars. Far away. Island escape. Fragile. Tonight. Trembling. Snow. If only. Language failed. Silence like before the phantom kiss. This time Jonas kissed Mina, opened her throat for shushed sound to emerge, eyes closed but flickering to see them kissing for the first time, slowly, slowly, all the time in the world to kiss her lips. Never again such excruciating beauty, electric fingers, open throat. Never again like that, black sea ahead and stationary ship. Before goodbye, that kiss. To save between the phantom pages of a phantom book in a dream. Forever is a long time.
It was everything they ever imagined it to be, and after, fingers still entwined, they walked underwater to the elevator. The elevator, like the end of the world, the end of joy, the end of everything before the final storm. The elevator she imagined would crush them. It would preserve them like fossils, suspended in that first perfection, perfect only because it came first. An elevator on a stationary ship soon to be burned in the war of oil and cancer. An unruly elevator where elevators had no business being. On a doomed ship, their chariot. In the elevator, another kiss. Time stopped. Would that be it? She would remember. The best year of her life. Would this be the final k-i-s-s? Jonas and Mina. Not forever. Last comes love. Words failed.
Jonas said goodnight to Mina. It felt like the first honesty. Looking down into a car, downward-curving eyes, sad, a prelude to the final goodbye. For Mina, he broke, for a second, unexpectedly. That was the night of their first kiss and second to last. It was the end of the best year ever. No promises were necessary when the future was still unfolding. They didn’t understand possessiveness yet. No promises were sought when all it took was a blue sky and laughter in the waves with girls. There was no premonition of the pain that would descend, also in waves. Après toi, le deluge. Even in that, excruciating beauty. Tears that flood the body for the first time since, lucky girl, never before a loss, an illness, a death. Not lucky for long. The first realization that love is possible, that some versions of life might not be, that an island escape may vanish. Forever.
The car drove away in the dark and Mina was not yet a doll in pieces, not yet pencil shavings on the floor. Chatting with the girls in the car about the dance and fairy dresses and the prettiness of the first time. Muted chatter for Mina who sank into throat opening, lips pressing, eyes fluttering, over and over again. Stop. Rewind. Stop. Rewind. All she thought it could be and more, more, more. It was the future in her hands. The promises – unsaid, unnecessary – little colored candies in twists of crinkly paper, hers to open. All hopeful and trusting and prepared to jump and no looking back and happy. Mina bouncing like two transparent rubber balls, pink and green, higher and higher. The sound of promises unwrapping, about to be made, hope not yet let down. The world still a peachy sunrise to a girl with red sleeves flapping, with joy like spring rain on rare desert grass. On that drive back home from the dance, Mina was pink and green, not yet in pieces.
Then, one week later, the final goodbye, the secret of the pouch revealed. Jonas walked in through the gate alone and for the very last time. He moved quickly. He looked directly at her, serious, furrowed. Fifty meters, thirty, twenty, ten. The distance between them closed. She saw something in his left hand. Was he left-handed? Memory’s collapse, but a tear in the constellation. Mina stood at the edge of the pavement watching Jonas walk toward her. Nobody else existed. Nobody breathed. He stopped, this time looking up. He held open her hand and placed in it a small leather pouch and a square blue airmail envelope. What happened next? Her fingers closed around the pouch, smaller even than she remembered. The envelope slid into her pocket, unopened. He took her by the hand, the same hand holding the pouch. They cradled the pouch between their fingers like love, fragile, on the brink of breaking. They walked together to the gate in silence, hand in hand. The heat, the noise of buses ready to leave, ice cream vendors on all sides shouting, “Zoom, Zoom, Zoom. Lolly, Lolly, Lolly.” The final time he would hear these words he has heard every day for the last year. W
ould he forget? Has he forgotten now? Someone got on a bus. It was him. Hands still clasped, he kissed her on the mouth. In a Muslim country, he kissed her deeply in front of everyone, on a bus about to leave. The world was invisible. “Zoom, Zoom, Zoom. Lolly, Lolly, Lolly.” Kids were screeching for summer vacation, arms were dangling out of buses, ice cream was dripping. In the heat of June there were no words, there were no tears. A downward-curved goodbye.
Mina walked back, tracing their steps alone. Past the pavement, past the boys’ locker room, past the water fountain, up the steps into the abandoned school. Hallways bereft of kids were suddenly gray. She walked into the bathroom, into a stall, locked the door, and leaned back against it. She breathed in, the pouch cupped gently in her right hand, the unopened letter in her uniform pocket. The tenderly fingered leather pouch, his arm, his neck, his smile, his dancer’s body, his artist’s hands. The school was empty. She could hear the buses leaving. She would be left completely alone. She lingered, slow, indulgent. To open the pouch was goodbye. The end of childhood, the end of the first time, the end of laughter in waves, the end of the secret. Opening the pouch was Mina unfurled. Jonas took with him the promises unsaid, wrapped in crinkly colored paper, the first kiss, the second to last, the last.
She opened the pouch, took out its contents. A wooden bear with a small smile. Jonas had made this. He had carved it. He had painted it. What’s in the pouch, Jonas? A bear. A bear I made for you. A Paddington. A Pooh. Because I’m still just a kid. Because I don’t want to let go of the smiling bear. I’m letting it go.
Maybe he thought she would be able to cradle it for a few more years before she too would have to let it go. He was wrong. That was the last year for Mina. She carefully put the bear back in the pouch and pulled the unopened envelope out of her pocket. She slid a ruler under the flap. A small rectangular card with a bear painted on it. In the belly of the bear, tiny crawling ant script. My Dearest Mina. My dearest. She stopped reading. The most dear to him. Mina. She continued. The letter unfolded love. Faith. He had not told her because he knew if he had it would have been impossible to say goodbye. He had decided not to act and so, all year, floated in a kind of purgatory. But maybe, he wrote, in another time, another place. Maybe on an island together. Resorting to the cliché. How many loves missed? How many people in the world to love, but never? How could he have withheld a year of new love, maybe the best, maybe just ordinary? He loved her. She, the most dear to him that whole year. The word girl’s heart raced. Alone in an abandoned school, Mina with a bear in each hand.
* * *
For the next five years, once or twice a year, Mina would get a postcard from Jonas. His cards were always brief, energetic, elsewhere. The bear secrets were never mentioned. Jonas of Arabia was gone, back to the land of snow and light. No wars of oil and cancer for him. No dimmed blue-greens, no plastic byproducts, no holy moly abracadabras. Jonas fades to black.
It isn’t Jonas that matters. After ten, fifteen, twenty. Jonas disappears, but the secret stays. A tear in the constellation. We remember, we remember, the place where we were born. Gone forever. Dimmed. But sometimes. The most that can be hoped for in this land of oil and cancer: a tear and a bear letting old light in.
VI
In 1984, smoking was allowed on airplanes. It’s baffling to us now. Just imagine the reek of it. But back in 1984, there we all were, clumped together at the tail end of a British Airways Boeing 747-200, smoking like tomorrow was never going to happen to us. Look at us, golden, drinking champagne, vodka, red wine, whiskey, beer, whatever, out of clinking bottles and mini cans, screaming with laughter (when things could be that funny). Smoking and drinking, limbs knotted, making out at the back of an airplane. The stewards and stewardesses – they weren’t yet flight attendants – handing us endless bottles and cans, knowing we were parched. So what if we were fourteen, fifteen, no older than seventeen? So what? They weren’t much older than us and they sympathized. We were staggering out of a desert. We deserved it and they knew it. Once in a while, they took drags off our cigarettes, sips from our bottles. They were with us. They were on our side. Don’t ask how we all managed to sit together, kids from three different international schools in Kuwait. Kids we didn’t necessarily know personally, but had seen often at the skating rink or at parties. Now we had our arms around each other, were sharing each other’s saliva; and after the summer, we would pretend none of this had ever happened, like we couldn’t quite place that face. I don’t know where our parents were. In the middle of the plane? At the front of the plane? I don’t know how we managed to congregate at the tail end together like that, without having to answer to anyone. Flying doesn’t work that way anymore. No more. Flight attendants are serious. Cockpits are bolted shut. Smoking is strictly prohibited, even in lavatories. But flying out on a Boeing 747-200 in 1984, to better places no doubt, the future was an egg, our egg, on the horizon.
I’m not sure he was with us on that particular flight. I put him there now because he was beautiful. He was so tall and he belonged to our school; we could be proud of that. ASK was for the lucky ones, for the kids with bones that glowed, pulsed with promise. Nader’s arms and legs would not have been knotted with mine on that flight. I hardly knew him, though I remember him completely. He had the ease of an older brother – protective, lasting. I want Nader on that plane with me, with the champagne, with the rosy light along the horizon, early, early in somebody’s morning. I want to see him leaving Kuwait for the summer, following the promise of his beloved stamp collection. I want to see Nader again, young and arrogant, tossing back his chestnut hair, laughter in his teeth.
After that summer, in the relief of autumn, Nader would be found by his parents. Nader, hanging naked in his family’s garage. Imagine all that beauty, long, loose limbs, the hair of a fucking angel, swinging gently in a cotton breeze. Think of the parents, their precious boy. His hands tied together with wire behind his back, this was no suicide. Who would kill Nader? It’s the easiest thing in the world to rumor drugs. Easy to think it, easy to mutter it under your breath. We did, though we didn’t want to believe it, his naked body burned in us forever. To crush that kind of splendor so early in the game for drugs or money is obscene. On that flight, it still wasn’t possible. Nader is there, smiling sweetly at the blonde stewardesses taken with his olive charm.
Elephant Stamp
Adam’s father, they were told, vanished without a trace. It was like he had melted into the horizon, leaving behind nothing but the residue of his good deeds as mayor of the village. Jido Thomas had packed no bags, had left no letter, apparently, had given no warning to anyone that he was planning to go anywhere. There was no way of knowing whether he had suffered a stroke or some rare form of amnesia in the night. His behavior the day before had not been unusual. Beiruti police were alerted but, accustomed as they were to mysterious disappearances and kidnappings those middle years of the war, they weren’t keen to pursue the case of a missing grandfather, a man in his late seventies. They did, however, ask to be informed if a ransom letter appeared. For filing purposes.
In the ensuing chaos of planning a trip to the village to see for himself what might be done, Adam didn’t think to ask his son about Jido’s final letter to him, though he had been the one who had handed it to Nader three days earlier. Adam and his wife Nadra, used to the playful and innocent missives Jido Thomas had written to a younger Nader, never considered that the exchanges between grandfather and teenaged grandson, exchanges they no longer read eagerly over their son’s shoulder, may have developed into something deeper. They certainly never imagined that Nader’s last letter from his grandfather might hold the key to the old man’s disappearance. Years later, when it no longer mattered, they would find out it did.
Before all this, Nadra and Adam had always considered themselves lucky. They belonged to a village buoyed by a glut of good fortune, so their luck felt natural to them. The pair walked through life with kismet on their side, but their chests remained resistant
to the spread of pride they had been cautioned could take down the hero of any land. None of their people had thought to warn them about the invisible perils of luck itself, however. None had bothered to mention that sometimes, maybe once every couple of generations, luck becomes a curse.
* * *
Nadra was eighteen when she and Adam married, but she had known him long before then. She knew him because their fathers and grandfathers shared arak and apricots under the village pines, listened together to cones cracking in the high afternoon sun. She knew him because their mothers rolled grape leaves side by side on the narrow shores of a nearby stream, molding graceful green tubes from long rice and unhurried dreams. Nadra knew Adam because his sister linked arms with her as they skipped to the songs their grandmothers sang to them in the light whisper of evening, songs about the forest at dawn, about learning the language of birds.
Lebanon then still offered itself believably as the empress of the Middle East. To drive up into the mountains in the morning to ski and then to swim in the Mediterranean all afternoon was the lush promise it never failed to keep. Money poured in from across oil-sopped deserts. Banks and casinos swelled and lifted spirits and not even the sky could limit the certain goodness of the future. Lebanon was the place of blue and yellow light, of honey on warm almond cakes, of girls and boys with a ready spring in their step. Nadra and Adam were there, and their world pledged miracles.
Adam had ideas, but in his village his family had clout. The string of priests and politicos threading their line meant that he and his three brothers, like their father, the mayor, or their uncle, the town priest, had one destiny or the other already in store for them. The rusty ache of religion and politics was as familiar to them as it was to every Lebanese, though some years it burned less than others. The year Adam turned fifteen, life in the village took the shape of a snow crystal and everyone was beaming with azure hope. Adam, as inflated with expectation as everyone around him, announced to the villagers one balmy August evening that he was going to fly. With flashing eyes and a heart as full as it would ever be, Adam explained to the puzzled group, gathered together for their monthly communal dinner, that he was going to train to be a pilot for Middle East Airways.
