* * *
B,
The day we buried Maryam was unusually cold, and frost was thawing along the shores of Lake Michigan. Abu Majed and his family came from Dearborn to lower her into the ground, and the old man held her infant to his chest as we chanted prayers and set down flowers. Beyond St. Joseph’s lighthouse, Lake Michigan reflected the milky gray of the sky. Maryam told me not three days before she died that steamers left every day from here for Chicago, bringing fresh fruit and picnickers in the summer. Folks called St. Joseph the Coney Island of Michigan. Maryam said she took that ferry once, years ago.
Our time in Chicago was short, and we stayed inside most days, within the bubble of a terrible quiet. We stayed with a woman named Imm Ibtisam and her daughter, whose sliver of a house was sandwiched between a bar and a soup kitchen. The lake had a cold beauty to it, and the city, too, but when we took our wares out, we drove to the countryside. There was a tension in that city I hadn’t felt anywhere else, a feeling that, should you walk down the wrong street, you might anger someone—Imm Ibtisam warned us of the way the police treated strikers here, as well as of the streets controlled by shadows referred to only by whispered family names. A man had been shot in broad daylight on Outer Lake Shore Drive, she told us, down by the old grounds of the ’33 World’s Fair, and hardly anyone had been surprised.
We left for Minneapolis yesterday. The nights are still cold and damp here, and since we left Dearborn, it has seemed like nothing is going right. People close their doors in our faces, calling us swarthy and suspicious. This week I’ve slept with the baby on my chest every night. Ilyas and I take turns giving her bottles of milk, singing to her, and carrying her in a sling Khalto Tala fashioned out of a shawl. We’ve named her Sawsan, as Maryam wanted, and Ilyas and I, perhaps by virtue of delivering the baby, have become her temporary caretakers, since as far as I know Maryam had no other family in New York. She’s a good baby, quiet and observant, with downy, pink cheeks and a patch of chestnut hair. I am eternally amazed at the smell of her, at her softness, at her newness.
Yesterday afternoon in the truck, chilled to the bone in a passing drizzle, I traced the swirl of her hair. She was sleeping on Ilyas’s chest, a line of drool marring his work shirt. I must have mentioned to him that we had never baptized her, and Ilyas had blinked and pretended not to hear. He seemed not to want to talk about it, which unnerved me. Khalto Tala, on the other hand, opened her bag of holy items and took out a vial of holy water. “You blessed this yourself,” I said. We sold the last of the holy water we brought with us some time ago, and we haven’t come across a priest in weeks.
“Ya binti,” Khalto Tala said, “it’s no less sacred. There’s more holiness in each bone of our bodies than we imagine.”
Ilyas kept his face to the window and stroked Sawsan’s back. A cloud of swallows kept pace with the truck between the road and the sun, casting a curtain of shadows across his face. The birds that have followed us northwest are our only companions these days, shivering with us through the nights. I dream about them as I once dreamed about God in the form of a sparrow, and you become the most beautiful of the flock. I’ve been plagued lately by the strange feeling that the past is not so far away, that things that happened a long time ago are, in some corner of my mind, still happening. Or maybe it’s only you happening to me, over and over again.
Minneapolis lies on the banks of the Mississippi River, across from its twin, St. Paul. The Twin Cities are made up mostly of low brick buildings and factories, of smokestacks and grain mills, of broad avenues shaded by ash trees planted by the Civilian Conservation Corps. All the agricultural production of the Midwest seems to pass through Minneapolis, where grain gets milled into flour or brewed into beer and bottled. Factory jobs like that are coveted these days. A good-sized Syrian population has settled here, too, drawn by the work, and after decades of toiling for someone else, lots of families have opened their own dry-goods stores and bakeries. They gather their children in the parks on Sunday afternoons, their daughters in white, platters of ma’lubeh and mezze spread on the picnic tables.
But the chilly spring here has kept away the picnickers. Ilyas was icy to me yesterday, speaking in short words and ignoring me to feed Sawsan. After we made our door-to-door rounds and the sun began to set, we drove the trucks to the house of a cousin of one of our group, Abu Muhammad, and piled into his foyer, shivering and hugging our arms. We had a small supper and, after exchanging news of family in New York, the families dropped off to sleep. I changed Sawsan and prepared her blanket, but Khalto Tala took her from me, telling me I deserved some rest.
Outside, Ilyas sat on the front porch in his shirtsleeves. He hardly seemed to respond to my presence. I was tired of his stony air, so I asked him why he’d been so upset when I’d suggested we baptize Sawsan that morning. He told me he wasn’t upset, but that he didn’t see why it mattered.
“So if she were your child,” I said, “you wouldn’t want to give her the gift of faith?”
A bat fluttered by over our heads. “Faith isn’t a gift you can give,” Ilyas said. “It’s something we find for ourselves.” He stretched his legs, then got up and started toward the blue truck. I followed him.
We drove through downtown Minneapolis toward St. Paul. The night was cold again, and the barges on the Mississippi rippled the water as we crossed the bridge. We passed the court and the boardinghouses and left downtown for St. Paul’s neat rows of single-family homes and grassy lawns. As we drove, the streetlamps glittered over the angles of his jaw and the river of arteries in his neck.
Eventually we came to a stop in front of a plank-sided barn. Ilyas got out of the truck and swung open the old wooden door. Inside, the barn was filled with a rustling and a soft chatter. Ilyas lit a carbide lamp, and the shapes in the dark resolved themselves into wire cages, then into birds. He said that our host, Abu Muhammad, also owned this property, where he raised birds for sale. After dinner, when the men had talked amongst themselves, he’d invited Ilyas to have a look. I held my tongue about whether he’d be pleased we’d come in the middle of the night.
Ilyas took a ring of keys from inside the barn, and we tramped our way through the field at the back of the property, toward the marshlands. A fence ran along the edge of the water. When we reached a padlocked gate, Ilyas used a silver key to open it. “This area is protected,” Ilyas said, “so nobody comes trespassing and bothers them.”
“Them?”
Ilyas led me through the dark, cautioning me of thorn bushes that overlay the path. When we emerged into a clearing with a pool of water, Ilyas crouched down and waited, and I followed suit. We waited in the shadows for what seemed like hours, the moon arcing over the still water. I shivered. And then, just as I was about to tell Ilyas that I was getting a cramp in my calves, a shape came gliding over the pool, a steely body with a slim neck and a large head, ending in a heavy bill. The bird landed by the water’s edge, and as it shook its head, the moonlight glistened on the water droplets on its yellow plumage, a pale golden stripe running from between the eyes to the back of its head. It moved as slow as a ghost, setting one leg in the water and then the other, so that only the flash of its crest made it visible in the darkness.
Ilyas told me it was a yellow-crowned night heron, rare in this part of the country. This one had been coming here for years, protected by Abu Muhammad’s care.
“We’re lucky,” Ilyas said. “It’s a good omen.”
“This is what you have faith in?”
Ilyas turned to me in the dark. “I have faith in things that are beautiful and good,” he said, “and don’t tell other people what they need to do to be loved.”
“You are beautiful and good,” I said.
When I leaned in to kiss him, Ilyas stiffened. He tasted of thyme and smelled of musk and earth. I liked kissing him. When he curved his body into mine, I slid my hands up his chest, and that’s how I discovered it.
I froze, and Ilyas jerked back.
I wh
ispered, Your chest—
Yes, he said.
You’re a man?
Yes.
I looked at Ilyas and saw a boy, exhausted and afraid. He held his breath. The night heron glided to the opposite bank of the little pond, slicing the water with its legs. The moon passed behind a cloud, and for a moment the heron’s yellow crown was the only light.
“This is who you are,” I said.
“I’ve been nothing but honest with you about that.”
“But when you were born—you weren’t called Ilyas.”
“My parents abandoned me,” Ilyas said. “I don’t give a damn what they called me. Is that what matters to you, what they saw when they looked between my legs?”
I took his hands. The night heron swiveled its head at the movement and lifted itself, its wings two silent sails.
THIRTEEN /
SABAH LEAVES FOR DETROIT on Thursday morning, so Sami arrives at Teta’s apartment on Friday, his arms laden with blue bags of flour. Sami bounces down the stairs to the street, and I follow, tugging on a knit cap to keep Abu Sabah from freaking out about my haircut. I check Teta’s mailbox on the way out. A note from Aisha is folded neatly inside: Didn’t see you at jum’ah last week. Come with me tomorrow? She must have dropped it off last night. The tea-stained paper smells like gardenia blossoms. Reem is rummaging around in my bedroom for an old hijab she can use to go to jum’ah later at the Islamic center. Abu Sabah will be there, and Sabah’s cousins. There will be questions about me from the aunties, of course, as they sit cross-legged in the women’s room upstairs and read Qur’an, and about Teta, too, whose back hurts her too much to come. They will cluck their tongues at my absence, wonder why there isn’t a boy in my life yet, tell Reem about their sons in business school. I replace Aisha’s note and bang the metal box shut.
Sami is waiting for me on the sidewalk. Hoyt Street is usually pretty quiet in the early hours, but Atlantic Avenue’s dawn silence is almost unsettling. The sidewalk is littered with stray napkins and cigarette butts among the black circles of old gum. A white woman on her phone strolls down the other side of the street, and two teenagers hurry by us making weekend plans in Spanish. I’m struck by the feeling that I know none of my neighbors. Folks come and go so often now it seems pointless to get to know them. When Teta was in the boldness of her middle age, everyone on a block knew each other and asked after each other’s children. In Yorkville, before it all burned around us, before I moved in with Teta, you used to stop into the Yemeni bakery around the corner for fresh bread and ask how the owner’s son was doing. You used to wave hello to the sisters down the hall, Russian immigrants in their nineties whose husbands had long since passed away, who would invite us in for tea and round sugar-dusted cookies. The woman who owned the laundromat down the block, whom you’d known for twenty years, kept my baby pictures in her wallet.
When I touch my palm to the brick of a building, the street is flooded with the sound of hoofbeats on cobblestones, the creaking of wooden carriages, the honking of old automobiles. Men argue in Teta’s Arabic, now the dated dialect of grandparents and great-grandparents and the long dead, while lovers clasp their pinky fingers in alleyways and children answer their mothers in a language only one of them can understand. This place remembers all its strangers.
We arrive at Sabah’s shop before it opens. Her father is already there, counting out the register and signing for a shipment of dates. He waves us in from behind the front windows, rising up on his tiptoes to make himself seen over the crowded displays of ouds and tawleh boards and tasbih. When we open the door, the bell chimes and the silver medallions stamped with Ayat al-Kursi tinkle and swing on their silk cords. Abu Sabah asks after Teta and after Sami’s health, pours blessings like salve on both our dead, and invites us each to try the puffed chickpeas he just got in. We dip our hands into the basket on the counter, dusting our fingers with turmeric. Abu Sabah disappears into the kitchen and returns with three cups of black tea and a tray of Turkish delights. We eat; Sami recounts the white couple who suspected one of his silk knots was a bomb and laughs; Abu Sabah tells us the Colombian family who lives next door just had a baby. I’d forgotten the ways in which this shop, this neighborhood, can still be a womb.
When we’re finished with our tea, Abu Sabah shoos us into the kitchen, and Sami and I tie aprons around our waists. Sami needn’t have bought flour: Sabah has set out everything we’ll need on the table, with instructions for how many batches of bitlawah, ka’ak, and ma’amoul we’ll need to make. I start by measuring out the semolina for the ma’amoul, and Sami crushes pistachios according to my directions.
“This is the most domestic I’ve ever seen you,” Sami says, suppressing laughter.
“You don’t make much of a domestic goddess yourself.” And just like that we’re back half a decade ago, cracking jokes at 3 a.m. on the 4 train toward Utica, drunk on sleeplessness and youth, and neither you nor Imm Sami are dead yet, and I can still imagine that my strangeness might reverse itself, and there is still a place in the world for joy.
We spend the morning making date and pistachio ma’amoul, then move on to batches of bitlawah. When the shop opens for the day, we deliver towel-covered trays of cookies to Abu Sabah, who stuffs them into boxes for hungry customers who haven’t yet had breakfast. Then we retreat to the kitchen again, our private world, the vein of memory we’ve opened.
Halfway into a batch of bitlawah, Sami tips a bag of flour over. He tells me not to step in the mess and kneels down at my feet to clean it up with a damp rag. For a moment I am standing over him. He is close enough to curve his wrist around the back of my knee. There is not enough air in the room. His crown of black curls bounces when he stretches his arm to cup the flour with the rag, scraping it toward him with his hair dangling in his eyes. You showed me a frillback pigeon once, a bird descended from the rock dove but bred for the ornamental curly feathers on its wings, a mane of ringlets soft as mohair wool. The frillback was your proof that the beauty of ordinary things often goes unappreciated right under our noses. Sami turns his face upward to look at me. There is something new in his eyes. His T-shirt, cream-colored with narrow robin’s egg stripes, hangs from his shoulder blades, revealing his collarbones. His arms are subtly muscled, his Adam’s apple a marble of bone he has swallowed. When I imagine kissing him, I see myself lifting him, surrounding him, taking his head in my hands, my thumb on his jaw. I imagine his face pressed between my legs. I am never female in these fantasies; I am a hurricane. Sami’s chest rises and falls, and I realize that, with nothing in the way, he can hug his loved ones closer to his heart. My two desires—the desire for him and the desire to be him—disappear into the hollow of his throat.
Sami rises with the flour in the bowl of his hand and tosses it into the trash. We put the bitlawah in the oven and listen to Abu Sabah greet a neighbor in Arabic who’s come to pick up some burghul and ful. Sami leans back on the table and wipes his brow. A rounded vein runs the length of his forearm.
“Aisha Baraka asked me to go to jum’ah with her today.” I draw a circle in the flour on the cutting board.
“You going?”
“Nah. I’m hiding out here until it’s over.”
“Girl. Who are you hiding from?”
Sami means well. He means to include me in that sisterhood of femmes, a sacred circle to which Reem belongs. But it’s a place I’ve never been at home.
“Please don’t call me that.”
Sami looks at me as though seeing me for the first time. “Okay.”
“I don’t go to jum’ah because I don’t know which door to use,” I say, and it sounds so much more helpless than I planned.
“Listen,” Sami says, “you don’t have to go to the masjid to talk to God.”
For the first time there is pity in his eyes. I cross my arms high over my chest, hiding nothing but desperate for something to do with my hands. The slip of paint on brick has been my only form of prayer for longer than I can remember. In this m
oment, I want to be tugged out of my own flesh like a soft crab. In Attar’s epic poem, the beloved confounds the one who seeks the divine, tests their faith, leads them beyond everything, even their own earthly bodies.
We finish the baking, reassure Abu Sabah that we’ll be back tomorrow, and then head to Crown Heights so Sami can change his flour-splashed T-shirt. His neighborhood has changed, too, as the Bajans and Trinidadians have been pushed out of the rowhouses south of Eastern Parkway that many of their families have owned for generations. On the subway, Sami nods off and tilts toward my shoulder, and even through my shirt, I burn at the touch of him. Something about the intimacy of this touch makes the riders around us snap to attention, frowning and staring at my short hair, my flattened chest, my baggy clothes. A teenage boy lifts his cell phone and starts to film us, whispering commentary to his camera. I meet his eyes with a glare, but he doesn’t look away, as though I am an animal he is observing. I have seen that stare before, seen other lovers drop each other’s hands to escape it. Yesterday, a man on the subway asked me if I was a boy or a girl, then ran his eyes the length of my body, and I felt less than human. I wrap my arm around Sami’s shoulders.
When we arrive at Sami’s place, he strips off his top. I avert my eyes.
“That shirt looks good on you.” My voice is uneven.
Sami laughs. “I could see you in stripes. Here, try it on.” He tosses it to me. I slip it on over my own shirt. It’s much too big on me, but the over-washed fabric is soft and thin. “Cute,” he says, pointing up and down.
“Thanks.” Something in the pit of my ribs swells to bursting. The shirt smells like Sami, damp with his sweat. But when I look down—that implacable lump. The urge to rip off the shirt and throw it across the room is a physical need as solid as breathing, as real as the desire to peel off every inch of my skin.
The Thirty Names of Night Page 17