I opened my sack and pulled out the wad of old linens, trying to stop the bleeding, but they were soaked through before I could stand. Your mother was in and out of consciousness. I tossed aside the soiled linens and checked for the baby’s head—he was already crowning. You were frozen by the doorway, all color drained from your face. I had seen this reaction before during some of my mother’s deliveries, when fathers or siblings came out of the bedrooms where women were giving birth, the same terrified look in their eyes. Controlling my voice, I asked you to get something to soak up the bleeding. Feeling you watching over my shoulder terrified me.
Your mother cried out. You dropped something. A contraction came, and I urged your mother to push. You ran back into the room with a jug of water and knelt beside me. Soon the dome of the head emerged, still wet, eyes squeezed shut. Then the tiny figure was on my mother’s soaked linens, purple and unmoving.
We cleared the mucus away from the baby’s mouth and turned it, waiting for a cough. It didn’t cry, not even when I rubbed its back. We took turns blowing air into its lungs. When you began to choke on your tears, I breathed into the limp body again, and again, and again, until what felt like hours had passed and someone in the room was sobbing and a hand tugged me up by the shoulder, not unkindly.
“It’s over,” my mother said.
My hands and yours were on the baby’s head, cupping it like a stone. I had been muttering the Our Father and the Hail Mary over and over without end, the ameen of one prayer running into the beginning of the next. You had been whispering beside me the Muslim prayer for the dead: “To Allah we belong and to Him we shall return.”
It had been over before we’d arrived. My mother lifted my chin and told me to follow you outside. Your mother would survive, but not her child.
I found you by the corner of the house, shaking. You walked, stunned, down the path toward the fields. I realized I had never noticed the sex of the baby and wondered why this had ever mattered to me or to anyone. The air stank of metal. I bent over at the waist and vomited. When I looked up, you were staring out over the barren earth toward the retreating night, waiting.
* * *
B,
Sometimes a day passes where I forget. More often, I don’t.
I don’t know if my mother thinks about the sibling you lost. Sometimes I think she gave in to my father’s dreams of Amrika because she thought it would shake me out of my guilt. But I don’t like to think about that.
My mother was never a talkative person, it was true, but I knew as well as my father that when she declined to argue about his plan to join Khalto Tala in Amrika, she had as good as agreed to it. He went about making arrangements immediately, which wasn’t too difficult. Everyone knew someone in those days who had a son or an uncle or a cousin who had left, and the young men who had returned from abroad—some temporarily, some indefinitely, and most all of them with enough money in their pockets to put a new roof on their parents’ house or pay a sister’s dowry—were full of advice for how to avoid the tricksters and the scams, the boats that would take a family not across the ocean but only to Greece or to Italy, where they would be marooned without funds to return.
My father found a young man who gave him a contact in Beirut, and my mother told us to gather a few things into a trunk. I didn’t have much—none of us did—but I tucked in a book of prayers and the rosary my mother had given me when I’d been confirmed, my two Sunday dresses, a pair of patent leather shoes my mother had saved up for six months to buy. She had adopted my father’s stories: she told us that in Amrika we would have to dress well, that American women were fair and elegant and rich like Parisians, that I would have to practice gliding in my good shoes down cobblestone streets. But I had never had good balance, and as a child I tended to walk barefoot, all the better to remain out of sight and in peace. On top of these things I laid your wing, wrapped in its brown paper and tied with twine.
My mother convinced your father to let you go with us to Beirut, and to this day, I’m not sure why she did. She claimed it was because your mother needed a special medicine, and she was in touch with a supplier in Beirut who could get it for well below market price. I hadn’t seen you since that night. Maybe my mother thought we deserved a chance to patch things up between us. I’ll probably never know the reason. I think your father agreed because he couldn’t withstand both your grief and his own.
It had only been a few weeks since the stillbirth when you arrived at our house for the journey. You hadn’t been to school in weeks. Sometimes I’d slid the lessons under your door, but you never came by to thank me.
The weather had begun to change the day we left to cross the mountains, and the morning was cool. We shivered in the back of the truck that would take us to Tarablus and then south along the coast, wrapped in a blanket against the chill. The temperature dropped as we rose, the cold air crisp with the scent of cedar. My parents and my brother had long since drifted off to sleep, rocked by the uneven road. I laid my hand on the seat in the back of the truck, next to yours. Our fingers brushed with each bump. We did not speak.
Beirut was a maze of cobblestone streets crowded with trams and Pullman cars. Horse-drawn carriages carted piles of fruit and sacks of rice and cracked wheat to the markets. As we descended toward the port, the breeze stank of smoke and salt. The tang of sea air was weak but inescapable, like a caress when one is dreaming.
We snaked our way through the narrow streets, past the brick and plaster houses of Gemmayzeh and then into Martyrs’ Square, lined with young palms and squat automobiles. We passed cafés where old men in tarboushes smoked arghile and played tawleh, young men selling tea or watermelon juice, and clumps of French soldiers smoking cigarettes. We continued down until we spotted St. Georges Hotel sparkling like a fat white shell on the water, the harbor filled with boats.
My father hurried us down to Ras Beirut, where a man was waiting for us on the corniche: our contact, who would provide us our tickets for the ship that would take us to Amrika. The car let us out on a broad avenue where pastel houses on stilts abutted dark slabs of rocky coastline. Fishermen waded out into the water, and young men laid their broad backs onto old rugs tossed across the rocks, smoking shisha and trading boasts. You and I wandered off along the corniche, ignoring the blare of automobile horns until we reached a curve of seashore where the rocks jutted out into the green water. The sea lapped the silvery rocks like a baby’s tongue on its milk teeth. It seemed all at once to be dreadfully quiet.
“Promise me,” you said, “that you won’t forget me, no matter what happens.”
It was the first thing you’d said to me since that night. You placed your hands on my shoulders. Your skin was warmer than I expected.
The salt pricked at my eyes, and I blinked it away. I laughed when the water rose between my eyelashes, and the laugh became a sob. I didn’t want you to remember me such a mess. I didn’t want this to be the image you carried forever. I didn’t wipe the salt from my cheek. I was afraid any movement might make you take away your hands.
I told you I should give you back your wing. When you squeezed my shoulders, lightning crackled behind my sternum. You must have told me to keep it; I don’t remember. I reached for you and kissed you on both cheeks, and something in the belly of me boiled over. Did you hear the pounding of my blood in my ears? God forgive me the nameless thing I felt for you. I should write down that I am ashamed. I should write down that I repent. I do not.
The wind and the end of your kerchief were in my mouth. I held you close and fixed my eyes on the arch of Raouché Rock jutting from the sea. The huge cliff was surrounded by a cloud of white-and-gray rock pigeons whose nests lay in the crevices of the stone. On our walk along the corniche, a pair of boys had placed bets on which of them would have the courage to climb those rocks and jump. The sea below them was wild and sharp as glass, and the birds struggled against the wind that blew in from the open sea. The boys were nowhere to be found.
We parted. I wiped
my face with the back of my hand.
“Tell me something beautiful,” you said.
I opened my mouth and out came the only thing that I had ever known to be as beautiful as it was true: that I had once met a woman who knew how to fly.
You clasped my chilled hand in yours and lowered your gaze to our fingers. I hoped I’d said the right thing. My mother always used to say that people in mourning prefer not to talk about the earth.
“What a wonderful thing,” you said, “for just one instant, to be so close to God.”
The breeze tugged your hair across your lips. When my father had been injured in the revolt, I’d dreamed a flock of starlings had passed over our village, and their tears turned to pomegranate seeds. The seeds fell to the ground, but the earth was weary, and the seeds wouldn’t take. The starlings circled, coaxing the earth toward fruitfulness. As they passed, the birds sang a psalm my mother had quoted to me many times, a line from the Song of Songs. I thought of it then, standing on the corniche so close to you that I could feel you breathing.
You are altogether beautiful, my darling. There is no flaw in you.
FIVE /
THE FIRST FUNERAL I attended was held under a black froth of wings. The deceased was a crow that had been gashed in the belly by a red-tailed hawk. By the time the body dropped to the ground, the other crows in the neighborhood had already sent up their alarm calls. It was fall, and hundreds of them were gathered in the trees in Ruppert Park. This was back in Yorkville, across 2nd Avenue from our rent-controlled apartment, the one it took a fire to get us out of. The birds had been scolding earlier that morning, so the whole neighborhood knew there was a predator nearby. But the hawk had picked off a young crow, and the rest had mobbed him, screaming.
That was the day my body started conspiring against me. I’d gotten my period. It was so light I tried to ignore it, but you’d found the underwear I threw in the trash. I hoped this was a nightmare that would go away if I pretended it would. You called me into the bathroom to show me how to use a maxi pad. You said I should be happy. You said I was going to be a woman, and my body would change.
Up until that moment I had believed everyone was wrong about my body and what it could do. I knew what I was when I looked in the mirror, or when I hung from the monkey bars, or when I caught crickets in the park, or when I played street hockey with the kids on my block. I knew what I was when I read a book in the corner of the library or made fairy houses in the park with the girls from down the hall. I knew what I was no matter how I rolled or jumped or curled or stretched, and I knew what my body was supposed to feel like, even if I couldn’t name it.
I tore the lump of the maxi pad from my underwear as soon as you left the room. I still believed I could will my body to become what my mind knew it should be: free and strong as a coil of brass wire. My chest and belly felt swollen and full, and every movement reminded me of how wrong I felt. I moved slower. A chasm had opened between me and my skin, as though I were fumbling around in a too-big pair of gloves. The only words I had back then were for what I knew I wasn’t—a girl. But how to explain this feeling that my body was a tracing of something else, and not all the lines matched up?
The sound of flapping entered from the bathroom window, which faced the park. Through the glass, the rising tide of wings devoured the heads of the maples and the beeches, summoning a wind that swayed the traffic lights on 2nd Avenue. Beyond the iron fence, the tiny park was an ink blot of feathers. Our building was mostly home to immigrant families back then, families who’d lived in the same building for thirty years, and the old aunties down the hall had been complaining about the crows all day. Now they were afraid. This was a bad sign.
I rushed downstairs to see the commotion. The sky above our block was gray-green. I burst out the front door and sprinted toward the park, and tufts of black feathers flecked my cheeks.
The air was filled with the caaw-caaw-caaw of grieving crows. There were hundreds of them, one of the enormous flocks that sometimes gather in autumn in the northeast, congregating where there’s food to be found. Behind the iron fence, in a clearing beyond the red-and-blue jungle gym, there was a circular gathering of several dozen crows. In the center was the mangled body of the young dead crow. Both its wings had been ripped from its body, hanging by thin slats of red muscle.
One at a time, each of the crows left the circle and hopped into the surrounding thicket, emerging with a small twig or a piece of dried grass. One by one, they placed their offerings on top of the body, hiding the twisted wings and the open beak that lay glinting like an obsidian shard in the low sun. More and more crows began to arrive, each bringing something to lay on the corpse, until the clearing was a sea of glossy backs. You’d told me once that crows mourn their dead. You’d never told me how.
Each bird laid their gift atop the dead crow and flew off. I did not yet know that, sometimes, it is impossible to mourn in the presence of others. When all the crows had left their offerings, the crowd dissolved into the twilight. The glittering wings gave way to an uneasy bruise of purple-and-green sunset. I was left alone in the clearing with the body, buried under twigs and leaves and grass, my blood slick between my thighs. Only the tip of one wing was still visible, a hole in the afternoon that swallowed the hint of light.
* * *
I haven’t seen Aisha Baraka since the night you died. She was the one who warned you about the letters. She’s the only one who would know if there was any truth to what you claimed in your notes—that you had spotted a rare species of migratory bird that most ornithologists didn’t believe existed. Aisha was the one person you told everything.
You trusted Aisha because she was like you: a visionary, a believer, and not only in the divine. Aisha had the foresight to tell you when you were onto something and when to call you on your bullshit. Not that you always listened to her. You got more than one anonymous death threat for trying to set up the Islamic community center, but Aisha warned you about the one that threatened fire. She asked you to lay low for a while, even offered to take us in until things calmed down. But you refused to let them break you, and that was the last time she saw you alive.
Finding Aisha is as easy as following my feet. The two of you used to go swimming every Friday after jum’ah at the 92nd Street Y in Carnegie Hill. Aisha has lived in Yorkville since before the wave of gentrification that reached the neighborhood in the late nineties, turning it into a clone of the rest of the Upper East Side, kicking out the tight-knit immigrant communities that used to live there. Her husband died when she was in her forties, and she never remarried. She’s lived in the same rent-controlled apartment for almost thirty years now, and as far as I know she’s never leaving that apartment, no matter how much money the landlord offers her.
At the Borough Hall subway station, I walk down to the 4 platform on the Manhattan-bound side. I ignore the cream-colored silk cords tied into repeated overhand knots on the turnstiles, and again ignore the thick braids of gray silk that decorate the square pillars on the platform. There was a suicide here not too long ago, a girl who threw herself onto the tracks, which I guess is what Sami’s knots are trying to get us to remember. The knots sway when the trains go by. The trains are delayed; construction, as always. I don’t want this languid time to think about where I’m going. I adjust my binder and ignore the deep twinge of pain starting in my right breast. I curse the swimsuit in my bag, curse the Y, curse gendered changing rooms everywhere.
By the time I get to the 92Y, I’ve almost changed my mind about going to find Aisha. I hurry inside the building and hand the woman at the front desk my ID, then avoid all eyes in the women’s locker room and change into my one-piece swimsuit in a stall. I crumple my binder in the pocket of my jeans, tie up my hair into a swim cap, and struggle to cover my fat bun with the plastic. Jellyfish tentacles, twisted feathers, and eight-pointed stars doodled in black pen decorate my belly. I draw them when I’m alone late at night and feeling like my body isn’t mine. Looking down at
my chest still makes me feel distant and small. I reach to flatten it like I do after a shower. I suppress the urge to scream. Then something in me goes limp with resignation, and my mind quiets itself.
I walk to the mirror to convince myself that I am here, in this body. The last time I came here with you and Aisha, you caught me checking my face in the mirror and teased me about my vanity. I spent the whole afternoon struggling to picture my own face, imagining I wore the skin of everyone I came across. My own face has always felt unreliable. I never see the person I expect.
The pool is empty except for a few older women doing calisthenics in the shallow end. In the far lane, a Black woman in a burkini swims laps with such powerful strokes that she could be training for the Olympics. Aisha. Together, you could have put the American relay swim team to shame.
I slip into the pool and make my way over to the slow lane. So far Aisha hasn’t noticed me. The water envelops me up to the shoulders, and relief washes through me. With the water supporting my weight, I can almost pretend that my physical self does not exist. This is the constant wish I’ve harbored since the day the bleeding started: that I could exist outside myself, that I could disappear the wrongness in me. When I was a kid, I never wanted to leave the pool. I used to throw tantrums at the end of open swim. I told you it was because I loved swimming, because I wanted to feel like a dolphin, because I wanted to pretend for another five minutes to be a mermaid. Looking back, it wasn’t that I wanted my body to feel magical; I wanted it to feel transparent.
I enter the lane, treading water. Aisha is at the other end of the pool. When she reaches the wall, she takes an extra breath and carves her body down into the water, rolling and pushing off the wall to continue her stroke. She cuts through the pool, perfectly coordinated, so at home in her body that she seems to be a part of the water itself.
The Thirty Names of Night Page 7