And Adad could feel the truck-boat, now filled with air-water, becoming something else. A womb. A womb welcoming him—at long last—home.
“And now,” Malik said, “all these years later, you, American boy, you come into my store, in my country, my home, with another letter. Like I say, I do not understand. I think back to the storm, Baba, the police, how America push us out. When I see you, I see all of this. So I show you the gun! And, you know, I still do not understand, Ramadan. I am confuse. I am confuse . . .”
Malik began to cry, and Zahirah rushed over to console him.
“I’m sorry,” Ramadan said. He frowned as he squeezed the bridge of his nose. Ahmet sat next to him and put his arm around him.
“Speak, Ramadan.” He looked at Ahmet, who whispered again, “Speak.”
They stood up together, and Ahmet placed his hand on Ramadan’s back and pressed him forward. Ramadan looked at Zahirah and Malik and said, “What happened to Mustafa?”
The mother and son stared at him and asked, in unison, “Mustafa?”
“Yes, Mustafa.”
“Mustafa Totah?” Zahirah alone asked.
“Yes . . .” Mustafa Totah. So there was such a man, and Zahirah knew him! “Malik, did he get deported with you?”
“No . . .”
“Well . . . was he with Mr. Adad in the storm?” He couldn’t bring himself to ask what he was wondering.
Malik’s face looked even more confused than a moment before. “No . . .”
Relieved but unsatisfied, Ramadan persisted, “Well, then . . . what happened to him? What happened to Mustafa Totah—”
Startled, he interrupted his inquiry—the unanswered question of his life—for the most ghostly of figures, springing from behind Zahirah, suddenly entered the room. Had it been there all along? This queer silhouette had an almost supernatural presence, and the timing of its arrival (just as he had uttered, for the first time, his father’s full name), made him feel he had somehow conjured it into being. Mustafa? Was this Mustafa Totah? Had his ardent pleas for the spirit of his father finally projected before him what had loomed so long only in his mind? If, defying all laws of probability and reason, that same passion had transported him (and surely it had) across thousands of miles into the living room of his would-be relatives, then what couldn’t it do? But no—of course, this was not Mustafa, or his ghost. Dressed like Zahirah, roughly the same height, the form was proclaiming its gender. And when it—she, Ramadan understood now—was about to walk past a corner table, she suddenly stopped, and the hem of her garment swept from the floor, whipping up so far it slapped knee-high against Zahirah. The lamplight behind them revealed that whereas Zahirah was a vision in blue, this woman was a billow of black.
“Mustafa?” Zahirah and Malik had harmonized his father’s name, but for the dark lady it was a solo, her melody to perform—hers and hers alone.
Ramadan staggered backwards, bumping into Ahmet’s chest.
“What do you want with my Mustafa?” the woman asked, verbalizing the claim her manner had already asserted.
Overwhelmed by her presence, Ramadan couldn’t speak, and judging from the wordless huffing at his back, neither could Ahmet.
Zahirah stepped forward and delivered a fast-talking Arabic explanation of the situation, gesturing to the visitors. Ramadan heard his name, and Zahirah finished her account by pointing to the photograph. As she spoke, the other woman did not move, though her coloring altered. Her face, mostly hidden in the shadows of her shawl, had originally been pale, but now Ramadan saw her cheeks dappled with the red of a fresh bruise, adding to her formidability a simmering heat.
“You come from America—and you want my Mustafa! Again? When he come home, he was never the same. America take my Mustafa away from me!”
Ramadan was focused on her my.
“No, Rana.” Zahirah made an apologetic bow to Ahmet and Ramadan.
“Mama . . . ,” Malik said, trying to press his way between his mother and aunt, but Zahirah warded him off with a stiff left arm.
“Is time to speak the truth,” she said. “Speak the truth, Rana. Is time we all speak the truth. Me, too. America did not take Mustafa from you. You take Mustafa from you! You and Adad! This is why Mustafa was never the same.”
Rana clasped her hands over her ears.
“Is true,” Malik said, stepping forward, turning and speaking more to Ramadan and Ahmet. “Mustafa tell me. One day after I open my store, he come and he say, ‘Malik, I am very proud of you.’ This make me feel good, you know. It was hard to do this alone. My brother, he move away years ago. And Mustafa say, ‘Malik, this place make me think about your father and his store in New Orleans, but your store is not so good as that one.’ And we laugh and laugh.”
“Is not true,” Rana said. “Mustafa never laugh!” She stuck her chin out smugly.
“I know. But Mustafa laugh when we talk about that time. And when we talk, he walk around my store like he walk in his memory. He touch things—the food, the drink, candy, gum—and he smile. And, yes, he talk about the American girl, the one who call him the funny name. Me and Jamil, we make a joke about it.”
Malik stared at the ceiling. “Mustafa say to me that is when he fall in love with the girl, when she call him the name. Then he say, ‘Malik, it was the best time of my life.’” He eyed everyone in the room. “And after he say that, he no laugh no more.”
Ramadan and Ahmet stood together watching Rana glare at Malik. Zahirah extended the photograph to Rana, who turned her head away.
“Look at this picture.” She showed it to the whole room. “Look at me! I am like the American girl Mustafa leave behind. Malik, you are in this picture, too!”
“Mama!” Malik said.
“Is true. This is why me and Adad marry. This is my truth.”
A flash of light angled in through the windows, and the room trembled. Rana dropped her hands, and Zahirah showed her the photograph again. “This is the picture of what you and Adad destroy.”
Another missile went shrieking outside and thudded somewhere in the distance. This time the lamp in the corner flickered twice before it regained full power. Zahirah looked at Ramadan and Ahmet. “Rana kill love like the men outside destroy the country. Now soon Halep. Bad men destroy the world!”
Rana inhaled and then began screaming at Zahirah.
“What is she saying?” Ramadan asked Ahmet.
Ahmet paused, grimacing. “I don’t know. I do not speak this language.”
Zahirah covered her mouth with one hand, her eyes tearing up. With her other hand, she poked the photograph at Rana, as if it were a smoking gun of proof. Rana flinched with every jab of the picture near her face. The whistling sound from a third missile whizzing overhead entered the room, and with impressive speed and a purposeful trajectory, Rana’s hand shot out from her sleeve and launched at its target—snatching the photograph from Zahirah’s grasp so fast that Ramadan didn’t see it move until Rana had started ripping it apart.
In her destructiveness, she exhibited the precision of her profession, only in reverse, a seamstress committed to disassembling, beyond repair, the fabric of Zahirah’s memories. As she shredded the faded image, she kept yelling the same words Ahmet could not translate, perhaps some patois of fury spoken only in this household. At first visibly upset, Zahirah looked on stoically now, only a glimmer of emotion buried in the crease of the raised right corner of her mouth. It might have been a wince—or a restrained smile, an impossible-to-contain self-satisfaction.
Rana flung the confetti-like remains of the portrait into the air, and one shard landed on Zahirah’s lower lip. She spat it out with a loud puff in Rana’s general direction. This jagged remnant of her past floated up and away. When it finally landed, in a lower fold of her garment, no one even noticed. She rushed out, into the darkness of the hall, and Malik followed. “Ma-ma . . . Ma-ma . . .”
Rana moved in that direction as well, but when the black cape of her back was all Ramadan could see, she
stopped. Her head angled down to the right, toward the corner table, and her robe fluttered, as if, birdlike, she was testing the expanse of a wing. With a swooping pirouette, she spun to face Ahmet and Ramadan. Where a feathery appendage might have flapped, her hand stuck out from her robe, brandishing Malik’s gun.
“Now—why do you want Mustafa?”
“I . . . I . . . ,” Ramadan stuttered. But looking at the same weapon Malik had drawn on him, he felt a calming familiarity. His inability to form a sentence had more to do with who was pointing the gun at him.
“Speak like a man, boy! You behind the boy, speak! You the bad Americans Adad tell me about? The family of the girl? You want to make Mustafa pay for her? You want to take my Mustafa, like you steal candy from Adad?”
Ramadan again felt Ahmet’s warm breath at his back, and those rhythmic pants, like a wordless mantra, stroked him to an even deeper equanimity.
“I am not afraid!” Rana shouted, though the gun wavering in her jittery hand belied such valor. “Zahirah say I kill love. Maybe she is true. But only to save Mustafa.”
She alternated her aim from Ahmet to Ramadan. “And if I kill love to save my son, then I kill you, too!”
“No!” Ahmet said, followed by a whisper—“Tell her, Ramadan . . .”
“I kill you!” Rana yelled again, pointing at Ramadan, steadying her hand.
Finally, Ramadan said, “If you kill me, you kill Mustafa.”
Her face went quizzical, and her lips moved, mouthing his words. After a pause, she said, “Speak English, boy! Who are you?”
Her stare was ravenous with yearning—the need to know—reminding Ramadan of himself. She looked the way he had felt the day Clarissa had told him he had a father, made him aware of just how little he knew and just how hungry he was for more knowledge. But now that he knew, he no longer felt the sting of his ignorance—of all ignorance, really—shame. Maybe in answering Rana he would be returning something to her more precious than Zahirah’s photograph, if just as fragile, assuming you ever find it, ever possess it at all. When he spoke, he did so as if he were delivering a gift, the same one he’d received since entering this house, the thing that comes with knowing—dignity.
I am Ramadan.
Ramadan Ramsey.
My mother is Alicia Ramsey, the American girl.
The one Mustafa loved.
Adad is my uncle.
Zahirah is my aunt.
Malik is my cousin.
Mustafa Totah . . . is my father.
You—
Perhaps it was the rare nature of their relationship, as revelatory to him as it must have been to her, that muted him, for he was face-to-face with Mama Joon’s only equal. Rana, his one surviving grandmother, could have pulled the trigger and not caused in him a more extreme adrenal surge. Can you kill someone as you are resurrecting him? Unlikely. Rana had fired one of the biological bullets that had bled him into the world, but she wouldn’t pull this trigger. And what was that flickering in her eyes? What had set her lashes aflutter? A wish to behold him as clearly as possible—and for the first time—as hers?
When, instead of rushing to him, Rana started to collapse, he thought, I know the feeling. Malik had been pointing the gun at him when he had fainted—and yelling, “Who are you?” This time, Rana had aimed at him and asked the same thing. He had just answered the question, for them and himself, with similar results. When she hit the floor, the gun dislodged from her hand and skidded across the room, stopping when it hit Ramadan’s right sneaker. Squatting to pick it up, he wondered: Is there something about that question—no matter how carefully you answer it—that can lead to a fall?
* * *
“I KNEW THIS! I knew this! I knew you Totah!” Zahirah came running down the hall and strode over the black splay of Rana to get to Ramadan.
She took his face in her hands and kissed both his cheeks. As she held him, he saw Malik stooping beside Rana, patting her face, trying to revive her, and she started moaning into consciousness. Ahmet was stepping forward to help but paused when Malik looked up with a half-grimace and said, “Ramadan, come.”
Zahirah released him, and he went to his grandmother’s side. Her mumbling began again as they lifted her and, with Ramadan backpedaling, shuffled over to the sofa. She was much lighter than he expected, and it was strange to him that this woman, who seemed so densely packed with anger, should feel like this in arms, a deflated blow-up doll, slack and wanting for air. The backs of his calves rubbed the sofa’s edge, and Malik slid his arms along Rana’s legs, which put Ramadan in the solo position of holding her torso. This shift tipped him back and forced him to sit down with a plop. Malik swayed Rana’s feet to the far end of the sofa and stepped away, leaving Ramadan alone, cradling his grandmother. Bounding onto the cushion helped revive Rana, and he looked down at her the way Zahirah, when he awoke earlier, had been looking at him. Her lashes performed, to reverse effect, the same fluttering motion as before she fainted. Then, as she stared at him, he felt an affection he hadn’t experienced since Mama Joon’s eyes had closed for the last time.
“Mustafa!” Rana said. Did she think he was Mustafa? he wondered. Did he look that much like his father?
“No,” he attempted to correct her. “I’m Ramadan.”
Rana reached up and caressed his cheek. “I know who you are.” She propped herself up on her elbows. Then, reacquiring her toughness, she said, “I am not crazy. Mustafa—we must call Mustafa!”
She lifted herself from Ramadan’s lap and rattled off an Arabic command, which dispatched Malik back down the hall. Her manner went soft again when she turned and stared at her grandson.
Ramadan sat still, his face blank with astonishment. Somewhere Mama Joon was smiling at the medium of this miracle—his father was but a phone call away. Petrified, he experienced a numbness worthy of his posture, and though his lips were parted, he was breathless. Odd—on the precipice of tapping into, of virtually touching his origins, he should become this effigy of himself. A bloodless boy. On the verge of conversing with the one who had given him life, he had lost the powers of animation, lost full access to the state that had facilitated his inquiry in the first place.
Rana reached up and, just as Zahirah had done, stroked his curls. A tingling swept across his scalp like a brushfire, lighting the wicks of his senses. The deep breath he took felt like his first. Rana’s scent, a blend of something feminine and edible, incited a hunger so atavistic that for a second he sucked his tongue. Blurrily, he saw Malik rushing back into the room, extending his hand to Rana. The sudden movement of metal cooled Ramadan’s palm, as Ahmet sat beside him and slid Malik’s gun, which he was unaware he was still holding, from his hand. The unmistakable sound of cell phone dial tones added music to the moment, but nothing was as melodious as what he heard Rana say.
“Mustafa?” She was speaking into a small flip phone. “Mustafa . . .” She closed her eyes and began to shiver. Through tears, she stammered out sentence after sobbing sentence, none of which Ramadan could understand—except for the last word, his name.
Then she handed him the phone, and he pressed it to his ear.
“Ramadan?” Mustafa, even in his tentativeness, spoke the name as if he’d been waiting for this call.
Ramadan had regained all of his senses now, but not the ability to speak, at least not to his father.
“Ramadan?” Mustafa said again. “Is this . . . my Ramadan?”
Another missile passed overhead and, only seconds later, the boom of a blast, not outside, but through the phone, near wherever Mustafa was. Was his father really as close to him as these sounds of war were making it seem?
“Allahu Akbar!” Mustafa said. Ramadan couldn’t tell if he was expressing gratitude for his own life or—could it be?—for Ramadan’s.
With a spontaneity he had never exhibited when saying the phrase, Ramadan responded, “Allahu Akbar!”
“Allahu Akbar, Ramadan,” Mustafa said.
They exchanged amused sighs.
Ramadan looked around and saw everyone in the room reacting. Malik stood mouthing the holy chant to himself. Rana got up and embraced Zahirah. Ahmet looked on with more fascination than when he had first read Zahirah’s letter, appearing stricken with both happiness for Ramadan and disbelief at the realization of his own prophecy.
Ramadan asked, “Are you okay?”
“I am okay,” Mustafa said. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” Ramadan said. “Where are you?”
The sound of another explosion came through the phone. They exchanged a second round of Allahu Akbar, and Mustafa said, “I am in the war. We fight—we fight for freedom.” After a brief pause, he continued, “Ramadan . . . I wrote you a letter one time—a long time ago—but it came back to me.”
“You did?”
“Yes. The day before that big storm in New Orleans, Uncle Adad called to tell me he saw you.”
“He did?”
“Yes. He saw you and your grandmother at his store. He say you run out of the store because you hear music in the street, and she chased you and call, ‘Ramadan! Ramadan!’ Uncle Adad tell me this was when he know you was my boy. He say he can see me in you. I tell you that was a happy day! It made me remember my dream. It made me feel like I could still have what I wished for the most. The thing I thought I lost forever the day I come back to Aleppo. It is hard to live with no dream. But hearing about you, you know, that gave me hope. I never know before then that you was alive. That you was real. It was like to me that was the day you was born! I know it sound crazy, but it is true.”
“No, it’s not crazy. Guess what . . .”
“Huh?”
“That was the first day I ever heard about you, too! Just like your uncle told you about me, my aunt told me about you. That same day.”
Ramadan saw himself, after Clarissa had told him about Mustafa. Five years old. Throwing the tantrum of his life. Screaming like a baby. Finally, alive.
“I got so mad, so angry.”
“But why, Ramadan? When I hear about you, it make me happy. Why when you hear about me it make you angry?”
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