After the Last Border

by Jessica Goudeau

  Hasna had been speaking English. She nodded and walked away, pushing the cart aimlessly along the hall before realizing she had left behind the list of rooms she was supposed to clean. She stayed around the corner on the other end of the hall until she heard the elevator ding that indicated her coworker had gone.

  About a month after she learned about the executive order, Amal called from Jordan. They had finished their last interview and had been offered resettlement—to Canada.

  She kept repeating the city after Amal, “Quebec? Que-bec?” as if, by saying the name, she might undo the cavern opening in front of her.

  She could not breathe when she thought of it. Amal and Samir, starting a new life in a cold city, Quebec. Her granddaughters in coats and scarves, learning English and French. They would live in a small apartment with wood floors, she thought; there would be snow caked in the windows, maybe a fireplace. She looked at the most recent picture of the girls on her phone and imagined their chubby legs lengthening, the lines of their faces becoming more angular. She would miss it, miss all of it. One government decided her city was worth destroying, another government decided their lives weren’t worth saving, and now her family was shattered.

  The next day was her day off. She left her bed only to pray and to use the restroom and drink water occasionally. Rana and Jebreel must have made lunch or dinner, she did not know. She stared at the play of light on the ceiling in her darkened bedroom for an entire day.

  * * *

  —

  Amal called her when they arrived in Canada and Hasna pressed her face close to the phone as if she might reach through it to her granddaughters. They were tired. It was cold—February in Quebec felt dark and daunting. Amal had asked the Canadian officials when her parents could come, or she could go visit them in the States. They were kind, she said, they apologized profusely, but for now, it seemed, it was better to wait.

  Amal pressed: how long? Her voice paused.

  “What did he say?”

  When she looked into the video, they could not make eye contact—Amal looked down slightly, at Hasna’s face, and Hasna caught the way she twisted the side of her mouth to keep from crying. “They said definitely we should wait until you get your green cards and possibly until we’re citizens, or you are.”

  “That’s five years or more.” Hasna’s voice was a whisper.

  Amal could only nod.

  * * *

  —

  Time moved differently after that for Hasna. At some point in late winter or early spring, Laila called to say they were going to Greece. They would not go on a boat, she said. But they could not stay in Turkey anymore. It was almost as dangerous in Turkey as it had been in Syria. Hasna did not ask what that meant. She did not think Laila would tell her.

  A few weeks later, Yusef called—they were in Greece, in a tent near the beach. They were going to try to find someplace safer. They would call when they could. As she had every day that Laila had been in Syria while she was in Jordan, Hasna kept her phone on and charged all day and night.

  Hasna now recognized that the worst agony she could imagine was not death—it was her children being in danger or stressed when she was powerless to help.

  * * *

  —

  One morning when Hasna had been working at the Hyatt Hotel for eight months, she was cleaning a room obviously occupied by young men. That day, she had more rooms on her list than she usually did. She was working quickly, her mind on the latest phone call with Yusef—he was looking for work in a small Greek town whose name she could not pronounce—when she tugged too hard on the bed sheets. They came off suddenly and she stumbled back. Her foot caught on a ten-pound free weight she had not seen by the bed; her arms tangled in the sheets, she tried but failed to catch herself on the desk behind her. She sat, stunned, for a few minutes, then pulled herself up as best she could. She tested her ankle—it was sore, but she could stand on it. She stumbled through her day, her wrist swelling alarmingly as the day went on. At the end of her shift, she took her loaded cart to the laundry area where she was supposed to leave the sheets and towels. She filled her arms with sheets, turned to drop the load, and collapsed. Something in her ankle cracked.

  The next day, Um Khalid drove her to the doctor. She had sprained her ankle and broken her wrist. The doctor told her she could not work for several weeks. He gave her crutches and a wrist brace. When Hasna called her Arabic-speaking shift manager, she was sympathetic, but the hotel could not hold her job open for her. She told Hasna to call as soon as her arm and foot were healed enough to stand comfortably for several days and to load the heavy sheets. She admired Hasna and wanted to hire her again, but there was no medical leave policy for housekeeping.

  Hasna had no choice but to call the Syrian Americans who had supported them before when she lost her last job and ask for their help again. One of the mosques kept a fund for Muslim refugees in need, and they promised to help pay for their rent for a few months. Their caseworker had put them on a list for a housing assistance apartment when they were still under the care of RST; if they got accepted for that program, their rent would be a fixed percentage of their income, but the waiting list was at least two years deep. Until then, there was nothing cheaper around her. It galled Hasna to take charity yet again, but she could see no other option.

  Within the last six months, many of their friends had already moved on to other apartments—with one or two adults in the family who could find jobs, especially if a grandmother or teenager could care for the younger children, they could afford nicer places. Hasna had gone to visit them on her days off, feeling an absurd spurt of jealousy of these women with their slightly larger kitchens.

  But that night, when Um Khalid dropped her off—driving smoothly in a black sedan her son had helped her finance and heading to her new apartment several minutes away—Hasna realized she was not jealous because of their kitchens. She was jealous because, without her children, her body would be the only thing that propelled them forward. She had never imagined a life where she was the only person working, where there would not be sons and daughters to bring energy and drive, where she was not the hub of an ever-spinning wheel but a solitary pole supporting Jebreel and Rana.

  In the middle of the night, Hasna woke up unable to catch her breath. She felt she would stifle in the close apartment. Careful not to wake Jebreel or Rana, she limped to the front door, where she had leaned the crutches above her black ballet slippers. She opened the front door and slid outside. The night was not cool, but there was a breeze and she gulped in air gratefully.

  She went to sit on the benches beside the tennis courts the local boys used as a soccer field. After a few minutes, she struggled to her feet. She could feel her ankle swelling, so she lifted it behind her, but she could not bear to be still. Slowly, agonizingly, she followed the sidewalks between the buildings, making her way from one end of the complex to another, the rhythm of her movement—crutches, foot, crutches, foot—comforting her. By the time she went to bed, dawn was lightening the sky.

  At least once a week, and often for several nights in a row, Hasna haunted the apartments. When her ankle healed, she no longer used the crutches, shuffling on her still-unsteady ankle, clutching her wrist to her side, walking.

  * * *

  —

  Um Khalid’s daughter, who was a little older than Rana, got married. A friend of a friend knew of an eligible young man in a nearby town looking for a bride. They negotiated the marriage contract and Abu Khalid asked Jebreel and some of their former neighbors to come and serve as relatives at the jaha. Later, Hasna and Rana rode with some friends who had a car to the rented conference room at a strip mall a few miles away where the women would have the henna night.

  Hasna tried to imagine what it would be like in a few years when Rana married; she wondered how they would find anyone suitable in this new country. The difference between this small, d
ank hall where they gathered with the dozen Syrian girls near Rana’s age and the large clan gathering for Laila’s wedding with Malek was stark. White circle tables with bouquets of flowers dotted the floor where the girls took selfies and checked lipstick and compared manicures, their rented formal dresses rustling as they moved self-consciously. The mothers, wearing their nicest black dresses, told stories of the nights they remembered in Syria, comparing regional traditions and foods in the never-ending small talk at their get-togethers that kept their country alive.

  One of the other women came from Aleppo but had grown up in a village not far from Daraa in the Horan region. When Hasna mentioned an old song about a bride’s grief at leaving her mother’s home, sung at henna nights in Horan for generations, that woman remembered it. Hasna and her relatives had sung it for Amal and Laila on their henna nights. She began it now and the other woman joined in.

  Please prepare my pillows.

  Tonight I am sleeping with you.

  Tomorrow I am leaving my sisters.

  Oh mother, oh mother.

  I left the house

  and did not say good-bye to my sisters.

  Oh my daughter, don’t cry,

  You will make me cry.

  Your brother is very loving,

  he will come see you on Eid night.

  Oh how beautiful were

  the nights and the parties and the singing.

  How beautiful, the sleeping

  among my sisters and cousins,

  staying up late on the roof

  with my sisters.

  Oh mother, oh mother.

  I left the house

  and did not say good-bye to my sisters.

  Hasna could barely finish the song. How beautiful they had been, the nights of feasting and throwing candy and staying up late playing backgammon and discussing children and watching them fall in love and holding her grandbabies under the grape-laden arbor and soft fairy lights of her jasmine-scented courtyard. Her voice wove a lament to everyone she had lost, everything she would never have again.

  * * *

  —

  As the bride left the henna night to join her groom, Hasna watched her daughter. Soon Rana would leave too. So often her life in this new country felt unreal to Hasna, as if everything here were made from cardboard when at home it had been stone. But watching the bride cast eyes at the groom when he arrived to pick her up, and the giggles of Rana and her friends, Hasna realized it was not the same for Rana—in a few years, this new life might even feel more real than their life in Daraa ever had.

  Assad had done everything in his power to do away with the Syrian people who rebelled against him. International forces had made it clear that Syrian lives did not matter to them. Though many people had been kind to her in this country, Hasna knew many of her friends also sensed the hostility that rankled just beneath the surface. It felt as if the world would have been happy if Syrians were wiped off the face of the earth.

  And yet, this boy and this girl had found each other. She might not be able to find a bride for Yusef—she might never see Yusef again—but she would someday find a groom for Rana. They would create new lives together here. There would be children born in this country, Allah willing, new little ones who carried the basalt stubbornness of the people of Daraa in their veins. And Rana’s children would always be bound to Hasna’s other grandchildren, even if her darlings were scattered around the world, even if they were never in the same room again in this life.

  After they got home, Hasna prayed, long past the allotted time, late into the night. Rana slept in the dining room nook, her gentle breathing punctuating Hasna’s prayers. Jebreel went to bed and Hasna knelt until her feet were as numb as Laila’s had been on the truck ride to Aleppo, until she felt her body wither and atrophy into itself. She prayed and prayed. She had been praying that Allah would bring her children here, but that night, her prayer shifted.

  She begged Allah to keep his hands on her loved ones all around the world. Hasna’s hope diminished to one thin thread: If they could not be together, inshallah, that they would at least be safe.

  Epilogue

  MU NAW

  AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA, JANUARY 2016

  Naw Wah is eleven and she is running. It is unseasonably warm for January, even in Austin; her shoes are off, and she is racing with bare feet through clipped grass. Saw Ku mowed the lawn early yesterday morning with their new lawn mower so that the children could enjoy the backyard. Mu Naw steps out of the kitchen to call them in to eat, but she pauses first. Her three children running in their backyard with their cousins and closest friends is a sight that takes Mu Naw’s breath away. They have no idea, these children ranging from toddlers to Mu Naw’s oldest—a newly minted teenager—what they mean to their parents gathered in the house. It is dusk and they are screaming to one another, encouraging Mu Naw’s niece, who is chasing the others. It is a game they learned in school and Mu Naw does not understand it, but she doesn’t have to. All children all over the world play some variation of this game; she did too. Except her children play it in a place with no war, no starvation, no brilliant minds wasting away in a village school taught by teachers who are barely literate themselves.

  Almost a decade has passed since they arrived in Austin, and her children don’t even think in terms of safety and freedom anymore. Those things are such a part of their lives, they rarely feel grateful for them. But their parents never forget, never take their joy for granted. She and Saw Ku passed their citizenship test a few years back; they raised their hands to pledge allegiance to this new country that wanted them and Mu Naw cried when she heard Lee Greenwood sing “. . . at least I know I’m free.” In ten more years, perhaps this same group will return to this house as doctors, engineers, nurses, teachers. She is struck by the profound simplicity of that thought—they can be anything they want to be. And they will. Their parents’ every choice has led to this: children in the backyard she and Saw Ku own, raising their voices and laughing without realizing that their laughter is a miracle, is a gift, is the most impossibly precious noise in the world.

  * * *

  —

  Mu Naw and Saw Ku invited the entire Karen Baptist church over for tonight’s house blessing, all fifty people. Saw Ku, his brother, and two of their friends from church had gone to purchase and slaughter the live goat they needed for many of tonight’s dishes. They brought the goat meat back to Mu Naw and spent hours cutting it into the sizes she needed. Mu Naw sniffed, tasted, stirred, mixed, and simmered various dishes. The meat marinated all night and they finished as many salads as they could prepare in advance, but she still got up at 5:00 a.m. to cook everything else.

  The children helped during the day, peeling garlic cloves, cutting carrots and shallots, preparing the beans, singing while they worked, chopping and snapping in time to Karen praise songs, Burmese pop songs, American folk music.

  Mu Naw felt again in her kitchen the familiar sense of capability she often did when cooking—she was good at this and she loved it. She could time her dishes down to the second so they all came out hot. She knew how many spices to add—when to boil, when to lower the heat. As she cooked, she allowed herself to dream about the garden they would plant in the spring. They had already picked out the plot for their raised bed, based on the area of the yard that got the best morning sunlight; they were debating now where to plant the trees.

  The feast that took shape under her hands held flavors from every region she had lived in—Burmese meat dishes, Thai soups, American salads. She pushed their table to the side—it was their original table, the one with the white tile center and the blond-wood trim; she added folding tables she had borrowed from a friend. A few minutes before the guests arrived, she filled the tables with large foil-covered aluminum pans.

  Saw Ku answered the doorbell. For thirty minutes or so, as each family arrived, she showed th
em around the house, smiling and laughing and receiving their compliments. They peeked behind doors, opened cabinets, explored every inch of the rooms. The women could see their home as it took shape in Mu Naw’s mind—the walls they would fill with colors, the pictures they would hang, the furniture they would buy.

  * * *

  —

  Mu Naw stands at the back door to call the children and they run into the house; several mothers yell out for them to wash their hands and a sweaty, jostling line forms outside the downstairs bathroom. They gather in a circle in the living room, parents’ hands on children’s shoulders.

  As their voices quiet, they look at Mu Naw expectantly. After the prayer for the meal, they will grab heaping paper plates full of food and squat on the dark wood floor. The children will snatch plates from their parents and run to eat outside. They will let the children play until it is too dark to see, and the parents will gather in each of the rooms to pray blessings on every part of this new home, because they are Christians and they cannot accept the full bounty of God’s goodness without thanking him first and asking him to keep his hands on those he has protected for so long, those he has brought so improbably far.

  But Mu Naw realizes that here, in this expectant moment with a houseful of beloved friends and family members, the blessings have already come. She breathes in, the fusion scent of pepperoni and som tom, of sticky rice and goat meat, the faint vanilla aroma of the house spray she likes, the earthy smell of children running in grass. She breathes out, takes in each of the faces that have walked with her through every difficult and wonderful part of the last several years, who are family, who make this home.