I loosen my grip on Sami’s hand. “I’m tired.”
Sami lets my fingers slip through his. “I know.”
* * *
Sami goes home to prepare for the party, and Qamar and I walk back to the subway together before we part ways to change our clothes. On the way, we stop at a corner to watch a pair of swallow-tailed kites circle the block, their white bellies and split black tails sweeping the sky like paper planes. I have never seen one so far north in this country. During brush fires, Australian kites will sometimes take up burning branches in their beaks and drop them into new areas to spread the fire and flush out prey. They call them firebirds.
As we stand stopped, Qamar tugs their yellowed book of Attar’s poetry from their pocket and strokes the leather cover, then opens to a random page. They notice me looking and offer the book to me.
Choose everything.
“Makes me feel better,” Qamar says.
I take the book. Their fingers are warm, their purple nail polish just beginning to chip. Though Qamar and I have spent a lot of time together these past few weeks, this is the first time we’ve been alone. This is the first time I can feel the steady calm of their energy. Something about the way they look at me makes me feel that they see me for what I am. I am understood without having to explain, as though we make sense to each other, as though we speak a common language. I think to myself, It is terrifying to be visible, and then I think, I have been waiting all my life to be seen.
The kites circle lower. I run my thumb over the seam of the leather where it’s been glued to the inside cover of Qamar’s grandfather’s book. It has the feel of something that has been loved for a long time. There is no right time for grief; I know this. It’s taken me five years to go through your sketchbooks and your jewelry boxes, your earrings and your scarves. After you died, it was Sabah who came to the soot-filled apartment and went through your things, and I had to trust her to make decisions about what to keep and what to throw away. You were with me until, one day, you weren’t. It took years for that day to end.
We watch the kites circling, and I imagine them setting fire to the way my life has been before this moment. I imagine the smoke reshaping me. I reimagine myself as my first work, the art that comes before all other art I might one day make, the work I fashion only for myself and for those who have the eyes to see it.
Something tears. I’ve pressed down with my nail at the seam of the leather, and the fragile binding has come unglued. The leather cover peels away from the book. Inside, underneath the flap of leather, the corner of a piece of paper peeks out.
“I’m so sorry,” I say, “I didn’t mean to—”
But Qamar and I are both studying the paper underneath. Qamar takes the book from me, peels back the leather flap covering the inside front cover, and tugs a folded piece of browned paper from beneath it. They unfold it, smooth it, hold it to the light to make out the faded ink.
“It was never just some book from school.” Qamar lowers the paper from the light. “It was a gift from Laila.”
Qamar hands me the letter. I am dizzy. Tucked inside the front cover of Attar’s book, the paper has been pressed by time into perfect flatness. She’s doodled in the margins, copied out a few of her favorite passages, and decorated the dialogues of the birds with their imagined faces. On the back of the letter is a faded pencil sketch of an ibis, marked G. simurghus, study. Beneath it, she has copied out one last line: the shadows cast by that unveiling—
Qamar and I interlace our fingers over the spine of the book, and the kite’s shadows flicker across the grin on their face.
“Where there’s a study,” Qamar says, “there’s a finished piece.”
I ask Qamar if I can give them a hug. When they embrace me, I hear their heartbeat, steady and soft as the kites’ feathers rustling the air.
“I know, habibi.” Qamar sniffles. There is a smile in their voice. “Don’t make me cry on the subway, now.”
I get changed at Teta’s apartment before the gathering in Ozone Park. It’s already dark, and Teta’s in bed. I leave the light off and listen for the rhythmic sound of her breathing. Asmahan is asleep on my bed. The humid afternoon has trapped an unbearable heat in my bedroom, so I slide open the window and breathe in. A twilight rain is coming, and the smell of lightning crackles in the air, mixing with the hot metal of subway brakes.
I go into my dresser and reach behind the first drawer, tugging out what I stuffed in there last week, a crumpled handful of spandex like a cropped tank top. I strip off my shirt and the shapewear I’ve been using for months. I pull the spandex binder on over my head, and it’s so tight that it gets stuck around my shoulders. I grunt and roll my shoulders; the house goes silent. I hold my breath and maneuver the spandex below my shoulder blades so I can reach back and hook my thumbs under the fabric. I manage to get it down over my chest, then lay down on the bed to wriggle everything into a forward-facing position. I am already out of breath. When I sit up, it takes me a second to adjust to the feeling of compression, but then I look down, and something in my brain goes silent. My belly is visible, my hands on the waistband of my jeans. I have never experienced such clarity before, the feeling that something, at last, is right.
A shadow moves over the window, and I freeze. Teta is standing in the door, silhouetted by the nightlight in the hall. She shuffles into the dark bedroom toward me, and I reach up to cover my chest. There is nothing to cover; for the first time in years, I can lay my hand on my heart. Somehow I am more naked with the binder on than without it.
Teta lifts her hand and pats my cheek. After all the years I spent clinging to her skirt, believing her to be a leviathan of a woman, she is finally smaller than me, and this is the most painful thing of all, that Teta should grow old and have to reach up to touch my face.
“So that’s what this thing is for,” she says, setting her hand on my shoulder.
I take Teta’s hand and place it over my heart, atop the black spandex of the binder. “It’s not about this thing, Teta. I just want to be able to think about something else.”
Teta sits beside me on the bed. “I knew you when you were in your mother’s belly,” Teta says. “Your mother swore up and down she was having a boy.” Teta opens her closed fist, and the glass beads of her tasbih are curled inside. Rain patters on the sidewalk below the window, humming against the screen at my back. “But courage is the hardest blessing.”
“You were in love with Laila.” I wrap my arms around myself, feeling the pulse of my heartbeat. “Didn’t you try to find her?”
Teta pushes herself up from the bed with difficulty, wincing and stretching her stiff back. “By the time your mother and I arrived in this country, Laila was missing already twenty years. They changed all the names on the records in those days, hayati. Even if she were alive, how could I know the name the Amrikiyyin put on her?”
The binder is a bowl holding my heart inside my chest. “In all these years, you never said a word.”
Teta smooths my hair. “Not everything must be spoken to be real.”
* * *
After Teta leaves the room, there is a ping on my window. The night rain has slowed to a drizzle. I lift the glass as another pebble hits the windowsill. Two figures are down on the sidewalk waving up at me, and one of them has Reem’s halo of reddish hair under the streetlight.
All the way down in the elevator, my shoulders are rigid with anger and fear. I stuff my hands in my pockets when I come out to meet her. I’m still wearing Teta’s old house slippers.
Sami shuffles his sneakers. “I may have texted her this time.”
Reem reaches for my hands, but I don’t give them. “Just hear me out, Noodle.”
A wave of nausea washes over me and I know that if I don’t lie down soon, I will throw up. “I don’t want to talk, Reem.”
“Look, if I don’t say it now, I won’t be able to say it at all, so just shut up and listen.” When Reem uncurls her fists, her fingernails are bitten to th
e quick. “It only happened once, before I met the real estate agent. I didn’t want things to be different. Not like that.
“When I got engaged, I thought my life was coming together. All the arguments, the silences—I didn’t want to feel pain, so I let myself believe marriage would fix it all, and I could forget about everything that came before. It was hard to let go of the comfort of the lie. Then Mom died. I kept the secret too long. Do you know how that feels, to know I’ll never be able to tell her what happened? So I told the real estate agent about the girl, even though we happened before I met him. And we never talked about it again.” Reem steps toward me out of the shadows. “It wasn’t anybody’s business but mine. Doesn’t that make sense?”
I don’t want my sister to see me cry. “We don’t all have that luxury, Reem.”
She reaches back to tie up her hair. Not only is the tattoo on her neck visible—the silhouettes of two birds, one above and one below, turning in midair—but it’s clear she’s shaved an undercut around the base of her head. With her hair down, the undercut and the tattoo are both hidden, but up in a bun, there is no mistaking her or what her half-shaved head signifies. She looks entirely different with her face framed like this. Fine lines have formed around her eyes and mouth since she hit forty, and the crow’s feet she gets when she smiles are more visible.
“I know privacy is a luxury,” Reem says. “Don’t you think I know that? Why do you think I’m telling you this?”
My sister is not young anymore. When I was a kid, I used to get mistaken for her daughter. Any beauty we have is the beauty you gave us both, just as her smell, when I hug her, is the same as yours—sandalwood and jasmine and olive oil soap. One day people will say I could have been a beautiful girl, if only I had tried harder, if only I had gone the right way, if only I’d done as I was told, if only, if only. I fold my nails into my palms and imagine that day, imagine washing my face and knowing beyond a doubt that it belongs to me, imagine their faces when I tell them my sister and I are both more beautiful than we have ever been.
EIGHTEEN / LAILA
B,
* * *
Badra,
Forgive me—
* * *
Little wing,
What a surprise to find these pages still intact after all these years. I had quite forgotten who I began writing to, then went back to the beginning and began to read, pulled out the wing I’d tucked beneath a stack of loose sketches and watercolors, touched the feathers for the first time in almost a decade. I want to say I don’t know why I didn’t write for so long, but the truth is that I couldn’t move on until I left you behind. Even invoking you brings a sting of heat to my chest. Do you know how hard it was to write your name after Ilyas and I returned to New York with Sawsan in his arms, when Khalto Tala sewed my wedding dress from a bolt of silk and lace donated by Mr. Awad so that she could send me down the aisle with a train the length of Broadway and a floor-length veil?
In truth, it was a beautiful wedding. Ilyas and I were married on an October afternoon, with Sawsan on my mother’s lap in the front pew. He met me at the front of the church in a navy suit with a white peony in his lapel. It was after the wedding, though, after the feasting and celebrating in our neighborhood was over and it seemed the whole community had eaten their fill of bitlawah and drunk three cups of coffee each, that Ilyas and I snuck out of the building in the night to promise ourselves to each other before a proper witness. We were supposed to move into our new apartment in the community house—I’d just begun my job giving arts and theater programs for the children of newly arrived families, and Mr. Shaheen’s sister had come just that morning to help us move in some donated furniture and unpack the dishes my parents had gifted us for our wedding. But Ilyas and I escaped to Central Park, to the place where we’d spotted a night heron wading in the lake a few weeks before. There we whispered our own, secret vows before the divine that exists in every living thing, which was, as far as Ilyas and I were concerned, more important than the witness of any priest.
We’ve kept our promise to each other to raise Sawsan as our own daughter. She is eight years old now, and beautiful; sometimes I wish you could see her. She is precocious and curious, always running here and there, asking questions—why fig trees don’t flower in the spring and why airplanes don’t flap their wings. The purple birthmark on her cheek never did fade. Perhaps one day, when she’s older and the world is different, we’ll tell her how it came to be.
What else can I tell? Not everyone is with us anymore. My father passed of a heart attack one day in Central Park, not far from the lake, and sometimes I still visit the spot where Ilyas and I said our vows in the night and watch the heron glide across the water in the autumn. The widow Haddad passed away in her sleep last year. She left the pigeon coops to Khalto Tala, who gifted them to me, saying that she was an old woman and wanted the birds in young, capable hands. The neighborhood has grown and shrunk and grown again. America went to war, and Issa—who had become an American citizen by then—signed up for the Air Force. I couldn’t understand his decision, nor did I agree with it. But to war he went, and by the time he came home with a steel knee and a medal for rescuing the crew of a downed plane, we had received our eviction notices.
This is why I am writing again in these pages, I’m afraid: we are to be thrown out into the street. After nearly eight years in our apartment here in the community house, I’m hard-pressed to imagine life anywhere else. Even Ilyas, who used to get so annoyed at the mold that could never quite be scrubbed away or the mice scurrying between the floors above our heads, has grown to love this place. Some of its flaws have even become dear to us. My parents gave us the leftover orange wallpaper they’d used in their own apartment, the one we first moved into with Khalto Tala in the tenement down the street, and I’ll admit that the familiar water-stained color comforts me. There are two missing bricks in the wall of the bedroom, out of which cockroaches and a strange smell sometimes escaped when we first moved in. At first I liked the feel of the opening and used to put my ear to it as one might a shell, listening for the sounds of the sea. But then, after I caught Sawsan doing the same, a fear rose in me that maybe the sea really was there in that darkness, and that I was listening into the past, and that if I reached my hand inside you might reach back. I begged Ilyas to paper over it after that. But moisture would collect in the hollow and cause the paper to peel, and though he did try to glue it down, it’s opened back up every time, and since then we’ve left the hole alone. My mother, who has been living with us the past few months since her memory has started to fade, likes to complain about it. But I’ve claimed the empty slot in the wall for these pages. Now that Sawsan is old enough to read and my mother has learned more English, the memory of what you meant to me would cause my family more harm than good. I keep this notebook in the wooden box Khalto Tala gave me, the one she brought with her from the bilad with its mother-of-pearl, and hide it in the hole made by the missing bricks where the sound of the sea on the corniche lives. This secret space has become as much a part of the apartment as our own bodies.
My mother has her own sacred, if not secret, space. I found a desk for her in the corner of the bedroom where she’s set her candle. It even has a little drawer for her rosary, her book of hymns, the stone she took from our garden when we left—in short, her sacred objects. She rarely leaves the house anymore, except to visit my father, so she spends her time taking them out, dusting them, putting them away again. How she used to dance the dabke with us above Abu Hamdeh’s shop during a hafleh! It’s hard to see one’s parents grow old.
I’m writing all this down to memorialize the world we know, B, which I suspect will soon be gone. For years, city officials spoke in idle terms about building a tunnel beneath the East River to connect Red Hook with Battery Park. But the entrance to the tunnel would have to be placed somewhere, and officials won’t sacrifice the waterfront. Instead they chose a neighborhood only its residents will miss: ours. The Syrian Quarter is
to be demolished save for half a street, protecting only St. George’s Church. It seems the community house, with its medical center, its nursery, its library with more than a thousand books—all of this has already been bought by a private investor. Who knows what will become of it? The surrounding tenements will most certainly be demolished, if not now, then eventually. Without the workers of the community house handling the maintenance of the tenements, I don’t see how it can be avoided.
On the night the first notices arrived, there was no song or poetry, no backgammon or bitlawah or kunafeh. There was only thick coffee that grew cold over heated discussions long into the night. But there was nothing to be done. Not long after, one man who tried to stay in protest was nearly killed when the workers swung the wrecking ball over his head, and he fled the shower of debris. Families started to flow out of our community like blood from a wound. Sawsan is still too young to be cynical, but she is old enough to understand betrayal. Having known nothing else but this country, this city, I thought she would take it the hardest, but in her own curious way, she seems to already be familiar with the way her fellow Americans view us—for how could I call Sawsan anything other than American?
It was, in fact, Issa for whom the news was most a blow. My brother always had his dreams. Like our father, he was once a seeker. But he returned from the war a different man. I gave Sawsan the seed he once gave me and told her to ask him to help her plant it, but she returned shaking her head. The next day, I found the seed on my brother’s windowsill, a bit of dust clinging to its hull.
* * *
I received a letter today from my friend Dr. Benjamin Young, the ornithologist I met a lifetime ago at the New York Public Library, detailing his recent efforts to create a bird sanctuary in upstate New York. I found Benjamin’s card in the move and wrote to him on a whim, including a couple of the sketches I’d done of the birds I followed into the Michigan forest. To my surprise, he wrote back to tell me he’d observed the same birds years before doing field research near Albany, headed westward. He’d tracked and studied them for weeks, finally coming to the conclusion that he’d identified a new subspecies of ibis—Geronticus simurghus, he called them, after the legendary bird of Attar’s Mantiq ut-Tayr, which he’d read during university when he’d studied Persian. He’d brought his finding back to his colleagues only to be dismissed and ridiculed, though he did write to me in that first letter that it moved him to see the birds again. You can have all the truth in the world of something, he wrote to me, but the world will see what it wants to see, and maybe it’s for the best to keep some beautiful things to ourselves. We’ve kept in touch ever since, though it’s rare that our paths cross in person since we’ve started families of our own.
The Thirty Names of Night Page 23