The Hidden Light of Objects

by Mai Al-Nakib

  * * *

  But even with Beirut on the verge of a calamitous war, Nadra and Adam had each other. And they had what mattered to them both even more than each other, as they admitted without jealously or resentment: they had Nader. Nader shimmered with an appetite for everything around him, and it was this quality, more than his incredible good looks, that drew even strangers to him. Nader’s atmosphere was, like all atmospheres, mostly illusion. His was the ephemeral atmosphere of Kuwait in the 1980s, still seemingly untainted by clawing, meddling neighbors and the dank fumes of righteousness. That a Christian Lebanese boy could encapsulate this chimerical time in such a volcano of a place said it all. But even then trouble lurked in the shape of black-eyed hawks and bearded beasts, types Nader would have read about years before in his illustrated copy of Kalila wa Dimna. He would be long dead before these forces would shroud the country, but his weary parents would be there to witness Kuwait’s atmosphere, like their son’s, vaporize to nothing.

  In August 1984, a month before Nader’s seventeenth birthday, a month before his death, he was on a plane heading to New York via London. He was going to visit Columbia College, his school of choice for after graduation the following year, a graduation that would never come. Adam was piloting the flight. About midway through, he emerged from the cockpit to stretch out his legs, to survey the people whose fragile lives were, for a brief time, in his hands. As he walked through the plane, he caught a glimpse of Nader in a seat close to the back. He would never in his whole life forget the scene before him. His son was at the center of a group of young people. Everyone’s attention was on him. He seemed to be describing something, his long, fine hands making odd shapes in the air, of cars or planes or, perhaps, lions and jackals. There was a young girl with exquisite features sitting on his armrest, and every once in a while, his son would ruffle her bobbed hair affectionately, the sister he never had. Periodically the group burst into laughter together, a single organism unified in the promise of youth. In one month’s time, at the end of September, Jido Thomas would have been missing for two years. Seeing his radiant son on that plane, Adam knew in his bones, in a way he hadn’t allowed himself to know until that moment, he would never see his father again. His glamorous son on that flight – surrounded by all those young people, a glass of something in his hand, making them all roar (when things could be that funny), heading toward something in front of him (how was Adam to know it was death?) – made it possible for Adam to let his own father go.

  * * *

  The phone call relaying Jido Thomas’s disappearance stunned Adam. For weeks after he moved around like an anaesthetized ghost. Nadra feared for her husband’s well-being, but she feared for Nader’s more. She remembered with a crash Adam’s long-forgotten oath on their son’s head to be done with politics and religion. She was certain one or the other was the cause behind Jido’s vanishing. She worried Adam would be sucked into a mess he knew nothing about and that demonic forces she still believed in, still a village girl at heart, would descend to extract the price. Suddenly, here was Lebanon at their doorstep, and they were not equipped with the necessary dexterity to maneuver through its deadly tit for tats. Slowly, slowly, Nadra and Adam began to feel their luck changing.

  Nader, on the other hand, had been expecting it. Not precisely his Jido’s disappearance, but something. The arrival of Jido’s final letter preceded his vanishing by three days. The date marked in blue ink over the magnificent stamp revealed that it had been posted a week before that. Nader debated whether or not to show it to his parents. A lesson he had learned early on slipped into his head: some connections were private. He could not betray his Jido, the grandfather he rarely saw but whom he loved and who, he knew, loved him with the grandness and gentle wisdom of elephants.

  The letter made Jido’s disappearance easier for Nader to accept than it was for his parents. He knew, even after two years, their world was not the same, and he regretted his invisible role in their prolonged grief. That morning of the call, Nader decided to hide the letter under the center of his mattress where he knew his mother’s nimble fingers couldn’t reach it accidentally while changing the sheets. He didn’t believe his mother, or his father for that matter, would ever purposely snoop. Nader was certain Jido’s last letter wouldn’t fall into their hands, an eventuality Jido had warned vehemently against. In his final, desperate moment, Thomas chose to confess to Nader, a fifteen-year-old boy, and not to anyone else because he was aware of the double helix in his grandson, a spiral blend of lightness and gravity that ensured he would protect the last actions of a broken old man.

  * * *

  Fourteen years after her son’s death, Nadra found Jido’s last letter to Nader hidden under his mattress. It had been placed right in the middle where her fingers, still tucking in clean sheets every week for the last fourteen years as they had for all the years of his life, never reached. If they had, they would no doubt have found, in the luck-filled early years, a few Playboy magazines, notes scribbled on scraps of paper once spiral bound from girls desperately in love with her chestnut-haired beauty, a joint or two, and, every once in a while, a stamp that promised Nader something about the future he wanted to remember. Nader had thought of his mother’s fingers the morning he selected where to hide Jido’s final words to him; and Nadra, panting a little with the exertion of pulling her son’s old mattress off the bed frame all alone, ignoring her husband’s earlier plea to wait till he got home so he could help, knew it. Nadra collapsed into her boy’s dusty, dump-destined mattress, now taking up half the floor. The thought of Nader contemplating her fingers was a thing that could rip apart the tight stitching holding her together. She simply could not allow herself to unravel on this day before their return back to Lebanon, forty years after making Kuwait their home. She would not do it to Adam. She focused instead on the letter in her wilted hands.

  Adam had never shared with Nadra his belief that Jido Thomas spoke to him through the stamps on his letters to Nader, but looking at the stamp on Jido’s last letter Nadra came to the same conclusion. Jido had been trying to tell them something. This stamp, fragile and sad, stood for goodbye. It was smaller and less flashy than most contemporary Lebanese stamps. It looked like it could have been from the colonial period. Not Lebanon’s, but India’s or maybe Kenya’s. The stamp was monochromatic, an unearthly teal. It looked a little like those stamps of Queen Elizabeth that seemed to come in endless colors – though Nadra wasn’t sure quite how she knew that. Where the Queen’s face should have been, an elephant’s appeared. It was in profile, nothing but one large ear, a lowered trunk, and one steady eye. It was the eye that got Nadra. It looked exactly like Jido’s. It was as though Jido had somehow managed to etch his own eye into this most incongruous, unlikeliest of stamps. The elephant looked like it was about to speak. Jido seemed plaintive, diminished. And in the mournful, glossy eye of her father-in-law, Nadra saw the reflection of her son.

  19 September 1982

  My dearest Nader,

  It is impossible you have already heard what has happened.

  Every year begins with hope in this village. We give thanks to the Blessed Virgin despite ruination, despite injustice. But after this, hope is finished. I cannot begin again after this.

  The blackest stain. You will hear of it. Sabra and Shatila. They were trapped like vermin, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, surrounded and slaughtered. Even if it had been only one. The blackest stain.

  Blessed Virgin.

  Two girls got out. Twins. I heard about it from the judge, the one with the white beard and blue eyes, remember him? You once said he looked like God. They found them in a cellar two kilometers from the camps. They refuse to speak. I can’t stop thinking about these two girls, eight, maybe nine years old. They could have been your sisters. They are your sisters, Nader. They are my granddaughters. These two girls quaking in a damp cellar with no food or water, centipedes in their tangled hair.

  How could we?

  I’ve includ
ed a list of names. There is nothing you can do with this list. I don’t want your father to see it. It is absolutely imperative, Nader, that your parents do not see this letter or the list. No matter what happens, this is between you and me. When your father chose to leave, he made the right decision. I couldn’t see it then, but I see it now. I will not allow all this to drag him back into it. He is free. You are his freedom.

  But this list is something I want you to have. I want you never to forget who’s who and what’s what. Maybe you will never return to Lebanon. Never return. But if you do, I want you to know.

  I’m going to look for those girls. I’m a dead man with this list, but I have to see the girls. If there’s anything left for Lebanon, it’s in them.

  This will be my final letter. I love you.

  Goodbye.

  Thomas

  VII

  Sara once gave me a tiny gold ring with a speck of emerald on it. It may have been for my birthday. It may have been for friendship. It fit, just barely, around my ring finger. Sara had hair like a Brillo pad, at least that’s what Jake and Andrew said, every single day, twice a day, for about two years. We weren’t sure what a Brillo pad was, what exactly it looked like, but we knew it wasn’t good, that it implied something harsh and kinked, something to scour black pans with, a cruel exaggeration of Sara’s hair. They called her Brillo pad and me Mona Lisa, which sounds a lot better but wasn’t. Yellow-eyed Jake and red, flaky Andrew – cherry orange hair, pale pink, freckled skin – you know the type – horrible, diseased-looking, but saved, swelled, and made cocky by his Americanness. Not much we could say to counter that.

  When Sara and I were younger, Jake and Andrew ignored us. But by the time we were around eleven or twelve, we were worth poking and prying. For them we were an untapped version of fun. We weren’t mice, Sara and I. We would poke and pry back – mocking yellow eyes and splotchy red skin. But with a single “Oh yeah, Brillo pad?” or a solitary “Watcha lookin’ at, Mona Lisa?” we were screwed in our places. Sara was self-conscious about her thorny hair, and I was unsettled by being likened to Mona Lisa who, I had read, might actually be a man and who, in any case, had a sneaky smile. For a year or two we put up with their unpleasantness.

  Girls change suddenly. At fourteen or fifteen they can become minxes without notice. After one long summer, Sara marched onto the bus wearing the kind of lush beauty – red-lipped, olive-skinned – that makes cars honk and boys (and girls) gasp. I boarded after Sara – all high cheekbones and newly angled arms – and Jake and Andrew, slack-jawed, fell over themselves trying to blot out years of teasing and to replace it as quickly as possible with a new, awkward fawning. Sara and I, blotting out what we could of Jake and Andrew – so much smaller than we remembered them – talked, with striking animation, about the weather.

  At the end of the year that we morphed into minxes, I exchanged Sara’s ring for a small leather pouch. The ring was the only thing I had on me that I cared about, the only thing I could give to Jonas that last day. Sara was not happy and considered my gesture thoughtless, frivolous. What Sara never really understood was that giving away my emerald ring said more about my love for her – black-haired beauty – than my love for him.

  Her Straw Hat

  Julie may have been the saddest-looking woman ever to board the hydrofoil, Flying Cat III, from Athens to Sifnos. Yannis couldn’t figure out why Flying Cat? Flying Dolphin, Flying Fish, Flying Octopus all made sense. Flying Cat made no sense. It was the sort of detail Julie would quietly notice and record in the big black ledger Yannis knew had to be tightly wedged inside her head. She would put it in the section called “Inexplicably Annoying Details I’ve Come Across and Have Refrained from Commenting On.” Yannis was convinced that would be one section among many in Julie’s black book. An especially thick section would be titled “Even More Inexplicably Annoying Details I’ve Come Across and Simply Could Not Stop Myself from Commenting On.” Once upon a time, Julie’s complaints had rushed through their lives like a wind stream. Yannis wished it was that way still. Anything was better than this sadness, shaming and acute. Julie’s sour odes used to make him chortle, had signaled to him she was engaged with the world. Not happy, but engaged, anchored in, clamped to land and to him. Now, Julie was adrift. She was floating. Not yet drowning, but she was clearly not flying. No flying cat, his Julie.

  Her sadness as she boarded the hydrofoil was so leaden, he feared the ship might sink too deep. He worried everyone in the cabin would feel the weight of his wife’s misery, that it would smother their youthful excitement about the summer, about all that sex waiting for them on the islands. Surely they could sense the saddest woman in the world had just boarded. Surely they would presume, their sunflower heads twisting toward Julie, that it was all her husband’s fault. The man accompanying the saddest woman in the world – lanky and tall, teal blue eyes and sandy hair – must be responsible somehow. Yannis walked around with the guilt over other people’s silent accusations thudding hard against his back exactly the way the waves now thudded against the side of this boat, this incomprehensible flying feline.

  Yannis saw to it that the children were settled in. He put Zoé in the aisle seat in front of him, fastened her seat belt and showed her how to tighten it around her five-year-old body. Jules sat in front of his mother, in the seat by the window. From his backpack he took out a book – one of the thick Harry Potters – and his rubber clown’s head, which he began to rub rhythmically against his forehead. He sucked his thumb hard; he had been waiting to do it for hours. That morning, Yannis had informed Jules he would be allowed to suck his thumb once they got on the hydrofoil but not a minute before. So Jules had been counting the minutes from their apartment to Charles de Gaulle, the plane ride to Athens, the taxi ride to the port at Piraeus, to this moment, this heavenly release on the wondrously named Flying Cat III. Sucking his thumb and riding on the back of a flying cat all the way to Sifnos, better than a broom, better even than a hippogriff or thestral. Yannis knew Jules, at eight, was too old to be sucking his thumb, but since he was the son of the saddest woman in the world, Yannis figured the kid deserved a break, deserved to take whatever joy from wherever he could for as long as the world would allow. He wondered whether Jules’s sucking bothered Julie, whether it was noted in her “Have Refrained from Commenting On” section. She would sometimes watch Jules as he sucked, rubbing that grinning clown’s head hard against his own. Her eyes would narrow as she stared at her son. At his sucking? At the impossibly large head snapped off the strange rubber doll she had bought for him before he was born? Did Jules trouble her? Yannis had no idea.

  Jules was such a good boy, maybe the best boy ever. He said the kinds of things that made his father remember curiosity. Jules asked Yannis why humans didn’t have wings to fly like bees or why they couldn’t breathe underwater. Jules thought it would be splendid if stars were connected by a pulley system that children could hold on to and then swing from constellation to constellation. Jules was attentive and generous, rarely short with his little sister, never once jealous of the attention she had drawn away from him, at least in the beginning, before it was taken away from them both. He was patient and quiet, could spend hours alone reading or examining things under the microscope Yannis had bought him for his birthday, demanding nothing from anyone. Julie’s silence and her sadness were accepted by Jules without judgment. Yannis sometimes caught his son’s eyes, worried like beads, caressing his mother, loving her with his gaze but asking for nothing, knowing, maybe instinctively, she had nothing in her to give. His son was an angel, and when he smiled, too rarely, his dimples twinkled like stars in a twilight sky.

  Zoé had a small pink backpack precisely the size of her back. She was a tidy little girl, pond brown eyes, sandy blonde hair bobbed and fringed. More a doll than a child. Zipped up inside her backpack she had puzzles and books and bright plastic capsules she collected from the center of chocolate eggs. She had a scrap of blanket she dragged everywhere with her, to school
, to parks, to the market, to bed, on flying cats. She sucked her thumb, like her brother, and she rubbed her tatty blanket scrap against her nose. Zoé’s voice carried. She could be quiet for hours and then, suddenly, loudly, she would ask a question or demand attention, unaware of the way her voice rippled her family’s stagnant silence. But now, on the hydrofoil, she was as quiet as her mother. She held her scrap against her nose, her thumb in her mouth, her four other fingers out like a small fan. She would sleep for the three hours it would take to get to Sifnos.

  Julie pulled a book out of her purse with a gesture that mirrored her son’s. She was glad Yannis was handling the children, smiling at them, doing what a good parent should do, everything she could not do herself. She pulled her knees close to her chest and ignored everything around her. She tried as hard as she could to ignore Yannis sitting beside her, taking apricots out of a plastic bag, the excruciating way he bit into the fruit and allowed the juice to drip over his lower lip onto his chin, not wiping until a second before it would have been too late. It was maddening, but not enough to say anything about, not enough to break her cocoon of silence. She didn’t have the energy for that, for speech, for chitchat, for tenderness. It was simply too much. She wanted only the comforting parameters of the dumb novel in her hands. No more than that. She hadn’t spoken a word since the morning. Yannis had done everything. He had packed for the kids, for himself, for her. He had made the children laugh as he dressed them. He had checked all the faucets, switched off all the lights, pulled out all the plugs from the sockets. He had called a taxi and taken out their suitcases. He had locked the front door and pressed the button for the elevator. He had checked them in at the airport. He had bought the tickets for this ridiculously named hydrofoil to Sifnos, Flying Cat III. Not I, not II, but III.