by Mai Al-Nakib
The villagers fell silent and still, frozen at odd angles. Adam’s father walked toward him, his sharp blue eyes pinning his youngest son like a butterfly under glass. Adam did not flinch.
“You, like every one of your brothers, like your father, like your father’s father, like your father’s father’s father before him, will be a priest or you will enter politics.”
“I,” Adam replied, “am a pilot.”
The villagers, still motionless, sucked into their lungs the faintly wet night air. The mayor of the village gazed into the untroubled gray eyes of his youngest son, the happiest eyes he had ever seen in his life, impossible eyes that seemed oblivious of history’s ruin. He had done something right with this boy.
“And,” Adam calmly continued, “once I’m done studying, I will come back to the village to marry Nadra Issa. I will take her with me to Beirut as my wife and we will have three children together, a boy and two girls.”
Up to this point, Nadra Issa, George Issa’s only daughter, had been standing unnoticed off to one side of the orange grove. Suddenly, though certainly not for the first time in her young life, Nadra found herself the object of the villagers’ attention. She was just as astonished as they were. To be singled out by Adam, fair-haired charmer of the neighborhood, was special and Nadra knew it. He wasn’t the best-looking boy in the village; even his brothers were taller and more dazzling. But watching him in the field where all the boys spent slow afternoons kicking around some coveted ball, Nadra had noticed Adam’s wide capacity for fun, his mischievous self-assurance. Adam was a notorious flirt. He could make every girl who crossed his path feel like she held magic in the palms of her outstretched hands for ten minutes at least, sometimes, if he was in especially good form, fifteen. Nadra struck him as different if only because she tended to stare hard at parts of his body and to ignore most of what came out of his mouth. Through Nadra’s sea green gaze Adam traced a route out of the village, a life strung up above clouds, beyond the heft of time. Nadra, twirling an orange blossom fast in her fingers, laughed out loud when Adam made his confident claim, but when he looked over at her, he caught her approval in the easy swing of her hair. Adam knew Nadra was his.
The mayor recognized Adam wasn’t asking his permission and, contrary to what everyone in the village figured, his son’s audacity did him proud. He took Adam’s face in his hands, kissed him hard three times on the cheeks, and ordered him to name his first child after its mother. This Adam would gladly do.
Adam’s plan unfolded exactly as he wanted it to, and in 1965 he and Nadra were married in the village church by his uncle. Nadra had always possessed the luminous beauty of the mountains, even as a baby. The women of the village – and, furtively, their husbands too – enjoyed watching her grow into her skin, milky as a September moon. They tittered together about the effortless sway of her adolescent hips, the early fullness of her breasts, the playful arch in her lower back. Forms of beauty that would make most people in the world gasp for breath were hardly blinked at by the villagers, accustomed as they were to its reflection in the landscape. They attributed this abundance of beauty to the special luck that distinguished their village, and though they never neglected to sing their gratitude to the Blessed Virgin, it still took something extraordinary to capture their attention. Nadra was extraordinary, her uncommon poise conveying to them all on a daily basis the meaning of her well-chosen name, Nadra, rare. Growing up, Adam had always been aware of Nadra’s beauty, but it was the humor in her raised brows that drew him in, the knowing self-possession of her olive stare that convinced him she was special. On their wedding day, Nadra, orange blossoms in her hair and secretly barefoot beneath her long white dress, was, to Adam and to all the villagers, everything fine the universe made possible.
* * *
The only way to convey 1965 Beirut is to picture a putty-washed technicolor postcard of a sequined sea in a tangerine light. It felt like discovering a private cache of someone’s love letters or learning it was possible to live forever. Beirut was the overwhelming desire to lick a lover’s wrists, the eternal yearning for a first kiss. On its sun-soaked streets: curly-haired cherubs running through, not a care in the world; vendors on corners selling aniseed ices and kaa‘k; the scent of thyme carried on a breeze, an intimation of marinated meals to come. That year, in the splendor of their fabled Paris of Arabia, Nadra and Adam’s marriage was golden, setting a mighty precedent. It was the year of Nadra in a vanilla bikini that offset her caramel tan. It was the year of waltzing in dance halls, smiles as wide as the noon sky, with friends unimaginable the year before, friends as sophisticated as the French they all spoke with such remarkable ease. 1965 was the year Nadra and Adam would force themselves to forget, refusing to allow its extravagance and flash to break the rest of their lives.
The following year brought rumblings of a future few were ready to face. Nadra and Adam, living comfortably enough, had not yet deposited a single lire into the savings account Adam’s boss had advised him to open the day he was hired. The collapse of Intra Bank, therefore, meant nothing immediately personal to them.
“What does it mean to run on a bank, Adam? I’ve never heard of such a thing? What is it that we are expected to do?”
“Nothing, my angel. Not a thing. We’ll go to the kino tonight, and afterwards we’ll dance and drink champagne. Don’t bend your head over anything, habibti. This is Beirut. It bounces.”
Nadra believed Adam. She always did. He kept to himself the fact that, as Intra Bank was a major shareholder in MEA, its fall could very well threaten his livelihood. Shot through with Beiruti confidence, Adam was convinced a mere bank failure could do nothing to halt his rise, his airline’s rise, his city’s rise to the peaks of the highest mountains. How could it possibly? How could anything?
Adam lived like nothing out of the ordinary was happening all through 1967. The only events that mattered to him that year were getting Nadra pregnant, welcoming their first child into the world, and naming him Nader, after his mother, just as he had promised Thomas. The wrath churning around them was ignored.
It was impossible for Adam to ignore 1968, however, since Israel’s decimation of the Lebanese civilian air fleet directly affected his everyday life. Allowing himself to feel the revenge of time snapping at his country’s heels, fearing its inevitable crunch, Adam made the excruciating decision to leave Lebanon. He packed up his wife and his son and together they returned to the village for a week of goodbyes. His bewildered father was heartbroken and refused to see him, refused to acknowledge what he saw as a violent and unnecessary severing of ties. Adam’s mother worried her son had lost his bearings, and Nadra’s parents wailed for their girl as though she had a terminal disease. Adam, accustomed as he was to flight, to an airplane’s routine telescoping of time and space, could not understand this immoderate grief. Even with his deep sorrow over Beirut – a sorrow that would haunt him increasingly over the years despite every attempt to blot it out – he was excited to begin again, excited with a feeling of expanse only the young own. The future belonged to them. They would go to the boomtown of Kuwait where everything still seemed possible, if twenty degrees hotter.
Climbing up the steps of an MEA Comet temporarily chartered from Kuwait Airways, Adam swore on the head of his son Nader – an oath he would live to regret – that he was washing his hands of politics and religion forever. If he had paused to listen just beyond the strident reverberations of his own voice, he would have heard his wife’s small, dizzy whimper. Cosmopolitan as she had lately become, Nadra remained a girl of the village, never proud enough to tempt destiny’s cords to tighten around their lives. To hear her precious son’s head used as potential collateral, especially on such a poor promise, filled her with a murky-toned, all-consuming dread. Unlike her husband, who seemed more and more relieved the further away from Lebanon they flew, Nadra soared through the air toward Kuwait with tiny black birds of trepidation circling her pretty shoulders.
* * *
Kuwait was on the up and up. It was a place eager to learn about pleasure from Beirut. After centuries of desert dwelling and pearl diving, the recent gush of oil promised great bounty, unprecedented advancement, a life of plenty for anyone interested. Adam was interested, and he put in the hours at Kuwait Airways, worked harder than anyone to turn it into a competitive airline. Plus there were striking black-haired girls in mini skirts. There were dance halls and drinks. There was an international school for Nader and an equestrian club with pristine beaches where weekends could be spent lounging with friends. Fun was in the air and Nadra quickly forgot her early apprehension about leaving home. Once the war began in Lebanon, not so many years later, she and Adam, a safe distance from the fray, couldn’t help but feel luck, their old friend, on their side.
The only dark patch on their otherwise incandescent existence was that Adam couldn’t seem to get Nadra pregnant again. A boy and two girls was how Adam had pictured it in those warm days of adolescence. Some mornings, over breakfast, he wondered whether naming their son Nader, rare, had initiated an altogether different trajectory for his family than the one he had so carefully plotted. But he refused to allow the words “fate” or “destiny” or “God’s will” to punctuate his thoughts. He chose, instead, to focus on “luck.” They were lucky they had one at all. There were countless couples who didn’t even have that. Brushing all doubts aside, Adam would slurp up his sweet Turkish coffee with immense satisfaction, bang his small cup loudly on the table to hear Nadra call to him from Nader’s room that if he broke her favorite set he would be buying her ten more to compensate. He would don his pilot’s hat with a flourish and, from habit, thank the Blessed Virgin for all the luck that was so clearly his.
* * *
It all started with a letter addressed specifically to Nader from his grandfather in 1972, on the occasion of his fifth birthday. The letter itself was brief, even a little stilted. It was, after all, the first time Thomas had ever written to a grandchild, the only grandchild he would ever have to write to, the others never leaving their village. Over the years, his letters developed a style Nader would come to adore. Through the energetic language and elaborate stories relayed about who in the village had done what to whom and for what unfathomable, ancient reason, he discovered his Jido’s wicked humor, his formidable authority. Behind his grandfather’s large, confident scrawl, Nader sensed an intelligent evenhandedness he hoped he would one day inherit. But all that would come many, many letters later, after an avalanche of letters, sometimes one a week. Thomas’s first letter, a line on white paper transparent as a single ply of cheap Syrian tissue, didn’t convey much at all to Nader. Happy Birthday my grandchild, it said, or something as innocuous. What caught Nader’s fancy was not the paper or the words, which he couldn’t read. What caught his attention were the stamps on the envelope commemorating the Munich Olympics: black silhouettes of athletes performing Herculean feats suspended in colored ovals. Nader couldn’t take his eyes off the images – those vibrant rings, all that power quivering beneath taut muscles, the ink lines marking the distance crossed from Lebanon, a place he did not remember, and home. He was more fascinated by those stamps than by any of the expensive toys bought for him by his parents and his parents’ friends. To Nader, collecting the stamps off his grandfather’s letters felt like capturing stars. His big black stamp album promised a world of adventure and, together with his father’s tales of Bombay, Rio, Athens, and Rome, conveyed to the boy something of life’s great allure.
That first letter arrived in the middle of September, a few days before Nader’s birthday, a few days after the Munich disaster. Adam considered whether his father was trying to tell him something with those stamps. Had he bought them months earlier, using them now only because they happened to be in his rickety desk drawer? Or was he hinting at the state of things, at approaching catastrophes swirling like smoke in the air across the Middle East and up into Europe, as far away as Munich? In those six pleasing stamps, far more than he needed to stick on, was Thomas signaling his approval of Adam’s decision to move his family to the relative safety of Kuwait?
It wasn’t that Thomas ever completely stopped speaking to his son. It was true he had refused to see him the week before his departure, a snub registered by the villagers as a definitive sign of an irrecoverable love. But they were wrong, and even that lonely week, Thomas had silently slipped a sealed letter into the hands of his wife. His wife, his partner in all things, needed no special instructions. She folded the light blue Aerogram into a neat square and placed it in the inside pocket of her son’s jacket, the pocket where she knew he kept photos of her, his father, his wife, and his child, photos that ensured he would not be without those he loved if ever the planes he flew failed and went down. Adam opened the letter as soon as he found it. All it contained was a phone number and a fat scribble: Once a month.
The first few calls were stiff, not least because Thomas was unaccustomed to speaking into a device. The odd time lag between his voice at home and the voice of his gray-eyed child so far away took some getting used to. Thomas, now officially Jido Thomas, at first used questions about Nader to deflect attention away from the rift between Adam and himself. Incapable of cutting off contact completely, Jido was equally unable to let things go. As patriarch of both his family and the entire village, total forgiveness would have been interpreted as a sign of weakness, and Thomas was still lordly enough to care about appearances. This would change.
* * *
Adam learned to read the stamps on Jido’s letters to Nader as coded missives. He grew convinced the Munich Olympics stamps indeed signaled Jido’s acceptance, if not approval, of his son’s move to Kuwait. A moss green stamp of little boys in red shirts playing football gently probed the possibility of more grandchildren. Adam would never have the heart to explain to his father that Nader was destined to be an only child, fulfilling the promise (Adam still refused to see it as a curse) of his name. With Adam’s brazen vow on that unforgettable afternoon still ringing in Jido’s ears – a boy and two girls – Jido knew his son would have done all he could to make it happen. In Jido Thomas’s stamp of the footballers, Adam didn’t read disappointment or reproach but, rather, all the things he would have less of: a father’s hand through his child’s hair; the sweet sweat smell of that child after play; a small voice in the middle of the night asking to be let into his and Nadra’s bed. But he also read in that stamp, and in so many others, Jido’s sympathy and, more than anything, his love for Adam and his little family.
Nader, unlike his father, didn’t bother to decipher secrets from his grandfather in the stamps. He didn’t need to look for hidden meanings since his correspondence with Jido was unobstructed, frank, often sharply humorous. Nader’s interest in the stamps had to do with something else entirely unconnected to Jido. When Nader saw the stamp Jido had stuck on one of his letters from 1975 – an image of the jackal and lion from the Kalila wa Dimna tales – what unfolded before him was that devilishly wide and unanticipated world of books and their clever enchantments. This was not about the usual catalog of children’s books he was more than familiar with from the library at the American School of Kuwait. This was not The Hardy Boys, not The Famous Five, not even The Wizard of Oz, though that last one might have come closest to the new realization brought on by the Kalila wa Dimna stamp. Nader, fascinated by the meticulous illustration of the proud, almost jolly looking lion and the emaciated jackal with the flapping jaws, immediately asked Adam about it.
“They’re a collection of short tales about the lives of animals, some of them noble, some of them trouble. They tell us things about how we should live in the world.”
“Where are they from? They sound Arabic. Who are Kalila and Dimna? Which one is the lion?”
“Kalila and Dimna are both jackals. They show up in most of the stories, that’s why the collection is named after them. It’s hard to say where the stories are from. They’re from a bunch of different places: India, Persia, Iraq,
Spain. It’s interesting because the stories changed as they traveled from place to place. That’s how things are, Nader. Everything collects traces. You’re no different, you know. You’re a magnet attracting life filings as you grow.”
“I think I’d like to read Kalila wa Dimna.”
Adam happily bought Nader a copy of the stories translated into English, the language his son was most comfortable in. This didn’t bother Adam the way it did Nadra and some of their friends, who all feared their children’s loss of Arabic was going to exile them from Lebanon even more. Adam wasn’t convinced there were degrees of exile. Plus, he believed languages were for everyone. It didn’t matter to him that English rather than Arabic or even French was the one Nader had chosen for himself. Nader had already made it his own in the way he wrote to his Jido, mixing it into the Arabic his grandfather preferred, making both languages vibrate and keeping Jido on his toes. As it turned out, Nader would become fluent in all three languages anyway, moving through each like a Kashmiri shawl through a rose gold ring. Kalila wa Dimna, even in English, gave Nader a sense of the wide open world and the role the imagination could play in shaping it. It made him realize that things were more connected than they were apart, but also that not everyone could see or wanted to see the links. Nader would come to believe that sometimes it was prudent to keep the links invisible, that some connections weren’t meant to be shared.
To Adam, on the other hand, the Kalila wa Dimna stamp Jido had chosen for that letter sent just at the start of the civil war, a stamp that had commemorated the Journée de l’Enfance a few years earlier, had nothing whatsoever to do with literature and its strange worlds. It certainly had nothing to do with children or their designated day. Adam understood immediately that with this stamp his father was making a political statement, warning of upcoming betrayals and chopped up lives, of jackals that would trick lions and of lions that would make unlikely demands on hares. Adam could sense – despite the dreams that still came to him in technicolor, despite the endless promise of his glorious boy – their old world rapidly plugging up behind them like a drain. For the first time in his life, Adam began to register promises in pieces.
