She nodded and smiled occasionally. Her bottle of orange juice was empty now; she was cradling it in her hands, soaking up the vanishing chill from the glass.
“You need the list of numbers, make sure you have the list when you get a phone. Program the numbers into the phone, just like you do here. It will be a simpler phone, easier to operate,” he said.
He had already told her twice and called her several times about everything she needed to do and have once she got to Wichita. His deliberate and insistent way in going over what she, at twenty-six, needed to do was infuriating. Her body was hurt but her mind was always fine.
She took a deep breath and looked at him. She could always escape him best when she got lost in his face. She knew where every line started and exactly where it ended. At forty, Nadim had started to get some gray in his short black hair. She knew when his hair got long enough for a haircut and what he would look like the day following one. It seemed to Zahra, at times, that she made him up in her many morphine-induced hallucinations and never figured out how to make him go away when she returned to reality.
“I was your age when I left for my residency,” he commented.
“You were a year younger,” Zahra asserted.
The story of Nadim leaving Lebanon after completing his medical school was etched in her mind. She knew it possibly better than Nadim himself. He was twenty-five. His mother and father took him to the airport on a Sunday morning and he has never really cared for Sundays ever since. It was June and the sun was just coming out. His father told him, “Fear nothing, for Allah is inside your ribs and between your shoulder blades, like an armor.” He never saw his dad after that morning. Nadim’s father was diagnosed with lung cancer that fall and died 59 days later, on a Monday in March. Zahra heard that story many times.
Nadim used to tell her stories to help her go to sleep when she was in the hospital, during her long recovery from surgery, when the pain was too bad and the morphine wasn’t working as well as it once did. Nadim talked more when he thought she was asleep; those were the best parts. Zahra learned to fall into a light sleep and float on clouds of stories. The worst part was when she woke up, startled by sharp cramps in her shrapnel-torn abdomen, and he was gone. She never asked him to sit next to her bed and tell her stories. She hated waking up and finding him gone; it was better not to start, because the end always left her lonely and achy, like withdrawal from a drug she never cared for in the first place.
“25, 26, same thing!” Nadim said, he was using his “pay attention” voice, which was a little louder and more enunciated. His eyes widened and his pupils enlarged.
Today, Zahra wanted their time together done. She wished it was Sunday so they could both hate Sundays. It was Friday afternoon. The volunteer lady in pink was now on the phone with the upstairs kitchen, counting soda cans, pudding cups, and chicken rice plates she needed sent to the café. The only things the café cooks ever made there were fries and hamburgers; the rest came from the main kitchen. The woman tapped her crooked finger with red nail polish on the table in front of her. Her voice resonated through the empty café.
“No, no, no, that is not what I said. I said twenty servings of today’s special, yalla, yalla, send it quick,” she ordered.
She seemed pleased with herself when she hung up. She looked at her reflection in the glass partition separating her from the hospital lobby and ran her fingers through her blond straw-like hair. Her face was wrinkled and dotted with an assortment of dark spots.
Zahra thought about Nadim coming back to the doctor’s café after she was gone. She pictured him talking to Mrs. Nabila and drinking the same juice: Balkis, orange mawardi. What she has always known him to drink there.
“How are you doing with leaving the city?”
“Mniha,” she said.
She was not good though, but she was not going to tell him about any of it. She never did before, and it was too late to start now. He was sending her to another continent, another culture, and the chances were they would never see each other again. How she was doing was her problem today. Just like it was before.
“Mniha? That’s it? Are you worried about the bag on the way?”
Zahra squeezed her eyes hard and looked towards Mrs. Nabila to see if she heard him. She felt a flush fill her and spill over her face and chest. The woman at the counter seemed absorbed in her reflection; if she had heard Nadim, she didn’t show any signs of understanding what he was talking about. Nadim felt her uneasiness. He got close to her and almost whispered.
“I mean, do you feel comfortable emptying the bag on the plane?”
Zahra looked away, her face ablaze.
He worried about her colostomy and acted like the bag was his fault. He frequently came to her with colostomy “success stories,” something about someone with a colostomy who figured out one thing or the other about living a full happy life and “staying open to the possibilities.” The only possibility she was interested in was getting rid of that colostomy and not, literally, smelling like crap. When Nadim started his colostomy “pep talk,” she stayed quiet until he finished.
She wanted to hear about Hajji, Nadim’s mother and Zahra’s companion for the past few years. She wanted to hear about his job. More than anything she wanted him to tell her that he would miss her and wished she was not going.
“How is your mother?” Nadim asked.
“She acts all sad about my travel. She is convinced I will find a husband after I get my green card,” Zahra said.
Nadim giggled, he was relaxed again. He could bring up her mother any day and they would chuckle.
Nadim started to dislike her mother soon after the accident. He was the only one in the hospital who saw right through her theatrics of love and devotion to her daughter. Zahra was simply a meal ticket to Fatima. Once Zahra’s engagement to a wealthy man fell through because of the stigma of her injury, Fatima turned her wounded daughter into a second-best lottery ticket. Neighbors treated her like the mother of a martyr for years. After an entire year of recovery in a hospital bed, Zahra was ready to go home, but Fatima’s one-bedroom apartment was too “inconvenient” according to Fatima. Fatima gave Nadim many reasons why Zahra couldn’t get to her follow-up appointments in order to learn to live with her colostomy. Nadim, in frustration, suggested he might find Zahra a long-term care facility. He then asked Zahra if she would move in with Hajji, his mother, whose memory was failing and who could use someone like Zahra to keep her company. A few months into living with Hajji, Zahra realized that she was never moving back in with her mother. Fatima got rid of Zahra’s pillow. The bed the two once shared had one pillow placed in the center.
Zahra’s time with Hajji eventually turned into a job, the only job Zahra felt comfortable doing without feeling bad about her colostomy. Fatima acted surprised when Zahra informed her that she would continue to live with Hajji. She told her daughter that it was very difficult to live alone but that she would be willing to live alone so that Zahra can have a job and help with the “house.”
“I left Lebanon for seven years, only came to visit once,” Nadim said. She already knew that it was for his father’s talet, the third day after his burial. He missed the burial. Muslims don’t wait to bury the dead, not even for a faraway son.
“When I came back, it was the same country; different on the outside, same on the inside. I doubt people there ever change.”
“You said you changed and that it was worth leaving for seven years.” She was repeating his words to him, hoping he would start talking about himself and stop mentioning the bag.
“I did change. I was ready to change, to see what moved people, what colored their world, to be free and to meet myself. You will meet a side of yourself, a side you didn’t think existed Zahra. It will be worth it in the end.”
Leaving the country was Nadim’s idea. He had been talking about it for years, like an enchanted ride he wanted her to get on to get as far from her current life as possible.
Z
ahra resented herself for not being able to feel excited or happy about her immigration to America. It was as if she was in an empty room, waiting for someone to tell her what was next. She knew leaving Lebanon couldn’t undo the last ten years of her life. Nothing could. The reason she agreed to leave was Nadim. For years, he talked about opportunity, about a world where people who were different were not shoved to the side like trash. Nadim cast this miraculous image before Zahra. All she saw was a mirage.
However, when the day finally came, Zahra didn’t have it in her to let him down. America meant that she could come back changed someday, with stories and courage like his.
“Take care of Hajji and of yourself,” she said.
Her throat was so tight that she didn’t try to breathe deep. She collected her small bag from the chair next to her and was getting up. Nadim’s pager had gone off a couple times; he had reached and pushed the button to stop the beeping without even looking at the screen. That always made Zahra nervous. He was a heart doctor, the kind that made a difference between life and death. Nadim always said he was a tool in God’s hands. She had stopped believing in God before they met.
They shook hands, Nadim tried to get close to hug her, but she turned her face. He understood her body language and tapped her on the right shoulder instead.
“Be happy, Zahra, it’s possible!” He handed her a paper bag and asked her to open it once she got to Kansas, and a book for the road—The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera. He spoke about this book many times, but she hadn’t read it yet.
“I signed it for you,” Nadim said. He giggled and she looked away.
This was not the time to give her his favorite book, as they were parting ways, possibly forever. She clutched the book tightly, put it in her backpack, and started to head out. That was how it felt to leave one’s heart behind, Zahra thought.
Chapter Two
The air felt hotter after being in the café with air conditioning. The first moment of walking into it was the worst; heat carried people’s misery much more efficiently than the artificial frostiness of Mrs. Nabila’s empty diner. Beggars on the sidewalks of the hospital called, languorous and out of refrain.
“Yalla ya helweh, alef, alef,” a tiny, bronze-skinned girl called to Zahra.
The little girl was no taller than three feet. She had big green eyes and hair, sticky from henna, poking out of her little head in every direction. Zahra knew that beggar—she always hung around that corner, seemingly unsupervised. She usually asked for 500 liras or a sandwich. She wanted a thousand today.
Little beggar girl got a raise, Zahra thought as she shook her head “no” to the little girl and kept walking. The girl was too hot to follow her up the street into main traffic, like she had done on cooler days.
A few feet up the street was the van stop. This used to be the worst part about heading back home—the crowded sweaty van. Zahra could wait for hours at the intersection and unless she was willing to spend money for a full cab, a taxi, no car would take her back to Hara. Today was the last day the van ride would exasperate her, the last time she would hope the smelly men would keep to themselves, the last time she would be stuffed into a van with a broken door and more than ten passengers.
The next morning, her neighbor would be taking her to the airport. She told Nadim he couldn’t, that was the only thing she asked him to do for her, let her figure out her airport ride. She touched her middle, over the oversized black T-shirt; a squishy bulge met her hand. Zahra felt her face get full of blood and her throat constricted again. The van seemed full, but the driver was still on the sidewalk hustling more passengers.
Greedy, slow driver, she thought. Zahra needed to be still, as any extra movement or extra emotion meant a likely leak under her shirt. She sat next to a woman with two toddlers and a baby and looked out the window. The woman shushed her screaming baby.
“Yalla, yalla mama, kaman shuway,” the woman said in a Syrian accent.
Zahra wanted to tell the starving baby that his mother was lying, it was not shuway—there would be a lot of time before they got to where they needed to be. The baby seemed to read Zahra’s mind and screamed louder. One passenger started to leave the van, told the driver he was not paying to go deaf. The driver surprisingly started driving with a wave—“go”—after the crabby customer barely gotten out of the door.
The music got loud, almost drowning the infant’s wails, and there was finally some breeze coming through the window. Zahra looked out at the fancy stores lining Hamra Street, and she hoped people on the van stunk worse than her bag.
Hajji’s face came to her mind. Every afternoon just about this time, Zahra used to cut up fruits in cubes and move Hajji to the balcony of her fourth floor apartment. They would both sit away from the railing and watch the cars on the street, the pedestrians, and the shops underneath the building they faced.
There was a grocery store, which Zahra avoided like the plague. The man who ran it always insisted on asking Zahra a million questions about Hajji, he then proceeded to ask Zahra about herself, and finished his long monologue by telling Zahra that she is a fine woman and that Hajji is lucky and well-loved by Sayidna Mohamed for having such a caring and lovely nurse.
Zahra always felt the urge to correct the grocer that Mohamed couldn’t logically love Hajji and allow her to completely lose her memory like she had, and that she was not a nurse. Zahra usually let him finish his tirade and eventually figured out how to avoid walking in front of his store. Instead, she walked around the block and down the street to another grocery store, a real supermarket. That supermarket had more expensive vegetables and fruits, but the price difference was well worth it, and nobody seemed to care about who Zahra was and where she worked.
Zahra thought about Hajji sitting on the balcony without her, with the new help. After Zahra’s trip was finalized, Nadim hired a nurse from the Philippines to replace Zahra. Over the last week before Zahra finally moved out of Hajji’s house in anticipation of her trip, she explained Hajji’s routine to Connie, the nurse. Connie demanded to have the weekend off, but promised to find a friend of hers to stay with Hajji then.
Zahra felt something like worry infiltrate her mind and weigh her chest down. She knew that Hajji didn’t know who was sitting next to her—lately, Hajji had stopped talking all together. Her emotions seemed as nonexistent as her words. Zahra continued to care for Hajji as if Hajji knew that the fruits were well-washed and all cut in the same size, that her blankets were always washed, and that her hair was combed and put up in a perfect gray bun. When Zahra brushed her hair, Hajji made faces similar to those a protesting toddler would make, but never pulled away or complained the way a toddler would. That face was the only expression that Hajji made lately, and it became what Zahra looked forward to in the morning.
Hajji spent her days looking at the soap operas on TV. Zahra made sure to find her new episodes since the satellite receiver had over nine soap channels. Zahra could smell Hajji’s sweet soapy smell on her clothes, a week after being gone from that house. It made Zahra tear up every time she noticed it. She always squeezed her eyes tight until the tears passed and the only thing left was a dull ache in her chest, where her heart must be.
Two days after Zahra left, Nadim called to ask her if there was a special trick that she used to brush Hajji’s hair. He told her that Hajji started to scream anytime Connie got close to her with a hairbrush. After two days of not being able to brush it, Connie asked Nadim to call a hairdresser to the house to cut Hajji’s hair.
Chapter Three
She got off the van with everyone else. The entrance of Dahia was always very busy. It always made her think of Dante’s Purgatory.
It was a shame, thought Zahra that another author, Palahniuk, didn’t visit this place and ride an overcrowded van before he wrote his stories about hell. He could have been more literal—no need for similes here. Hell was a city where, no matter how hard men worked, they could still not afford to spare their childre
n need. It was a city where many of those same men thought women had only three reasons to exist; to tempt them, to taunt them, and to submit to them. Hell was a city with two faces; one where broken, overfilled vans brought mothers who begged all day on the side, the other full of multimillion-dollar apartments. Hell was that those cities were both called Beirut, one for the rich and the other for the underprivileged.
She couldn’t think of the name of Palahniuk’s book. She kept trying to remember, it was a good distraction. She had a couple more streets to walk and then she would be home, one last afternoon and one last night for her in this city. Nadim gave her the book about Hell last fall. It was written in English. Nadim said she needed to read English books because that was all she was going to find in America.
Fatima, Zahra’s mom, was home, having coffee with the neighbor Oum Raja. The two women were sitting across from each other on a straw rug, in line with the breeze from a fan. A brown wooden tray with coffee cups and a small silver carafe separated the two women.
“Salam alikoum Oum Raja, Salam alikoum Mama,” Zahra said.
The two women nodded, and Zahra walked through the living area to the bedroom and shut the door. She grabbed the clear saline squirt bottle and the gauze, then put them back. She could empty the bag for now and wait until the neighbor left to change it. Zahra walked back through the area where the women were now absorbed in reading the coffee cups. The women didn’t bother look up from the cups. There had to be a scandalous revelation in the coffee grinds, Zahra thought.
She entered the bathroom and carefully locked the door. Fatima had moved the chair out of the bathroom again. She sighed and kicked the bucket on the side. At least it was full so she could use it to flush the floor hole after emptying her bag.
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