Unbroken Threads

by Jennifer Klepper

  Political and religious shifts, both from within and without, affecting borders, regimes, and alliances, proved that unrest had deep roots that spread mindless of artificial borders.

  Jessica typed and clicked then read and typed and clicked some more. She opened her notebook and drew a circle diagram. Referring to her computer screen and its ever-increasing number of open windows, she tried to follow the dynamics of dictatorship versus democracy, the Assad regime’s fight against the Free Syrian Army, the invasion by ISIS and religious extremism, and the involvement of Iran, the Kurds, Russia, Turkey, and the US.

  The diagram started elegantly, but soon, a new spreadsheet seemed in order or maybe some of Mikey’s flashcards. What she had was a mess of big circles, little circles, lines, and arrows. Her own attempt at bringing some order to the chaos was failing graphically. Sunnis versus Shia. Sunnis versus Sunnis. Allies fighting shared enemies but not always. Enemies fighting shared enemies but supporting each other’s allies. Centuries of bad blood.

  Everyone had stances that were as clear as mud. And of course, all of this was subject to change in the winds of war and politics and religion. The common denominator was that the people of Syria suffered, and the number of refugees continued to grow.

  Jessica stood up and stretched, her joints cracking in protest, muscles thankful for the fresh rush of blood. She didn’t need to solve the problems of Syria, but she did need to figure out how Amina fit into all of it and how all of it would support Amina’s asylum claim.

  After pouring another cup of coffee, Jessica returned to her computer, scrolling through photo after photo of bombed Syrian cities. Buildings in Amina’s hometown of Aleppo stood exposed, whole walls peeled away. She wanted to look into each shell of a building, peek around every corner, and flag down each of the poor souls wandering through the wreckage. Clicking on one image led to another, and eventually, the concrete shells gave way to bloodied bodies twisted from torture, bloated heads lined up on poles, and kneeling men facing away from the guns held up to their heads. All of these recent atrocities stemmed from protests over the regime’s treatment of some young people who spray-painted antiregime graffiti on the walls of their school.

  Spray paint. Millions of refugees.

  Settling back into her corner of the couch, Jessica felt chastened and small, something this case was beginning to make common. Leaving her own home in Iowa had seemed so monumental, so brave—a small-town girl going out into the big world. That and feeling for years as though she could not go back seemed trivial now, though the damage had been done. But this wasn’t about her.

  Jessica picked up Amina’s application and studied the woman who fit into this history in her own way and who now had to prove a basis for her fear in order to stay in America, using an attorney who had just learned where Syria was on a map.

  Just knowing Syrian history wouldn’t win the case, nor would endless Internet research. Jessica needed to get Amina to open up about what could be a harrowing story and let Jessica in. Jessica checked her watch. It was too late to contact Amina tonight, which gave her time to work up the nerve and the pitch for a call tomorrow.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  AMINA

  Amina dried the last dish and put it in the cupboard, lifting the door slightly so the loose hinge would reset as she closed it. The muscle memory of the action reminded her that it had been well over two years since she’d arrived in Baltimore.

  In that time, memories of her home country, once so vivid, had faded under the glow of news images of fighters and destruction. It wasn’t her Syria they showed, the Syria that she remembered. Her Syria was from before the war, where the ruins were from millennia ago, not a year ago, where a girl could dream of a bright future, not of finding a way to survive. The news images, with their gray and dusty sameness, seemed to turn even her good memories to rubble, making her connection with home ever more fragile.

  Small giggles and grunts interrupted her fading memories, and Amina turned to see a jumble of black hair and matching Spider-Man pajamas rolling on the rug outside the kitchen doorway. She walked toward the two brothers, her socked feet quiet on the linoleum floor.

  Amina stood over the mini-wrestlers until one, then the other, looked up and caught her eye. She must have looked very stern from down on the floor, because the giggling, writhing oneness quickly unraveled into two little boys lying flat on their backs and saying nothing. If Talib were not three-quarters the size of Khaled, a stranger would have been forgiven for thinking they were twins, with their matching cherubic faces and deep-brown eyes wide with wonder.

  Her life today, so far away from Syria, included helping take care of these two packages of joy. They grounded her in this house, though their faces were high-resolution reproductions of faces from home. Through them, she felt a tangible connection with home, where family had been her stability.

  She clapped her hands, eliciting blinks from matching long eyelashes. “Guess what? I went to the library the other day.” She emphasized “library” as she would “circus” or “Legoland.” It had the anticipated effect, with both boys widening their eyes and dropping their jaws.

  “Did you get us some Thomas books?” Khaled asked. “Talib likes those.”

  Amina had checked out every Thomas book from their local branch multiple times, first for Khaled then again when Khaled had insisted his little brother wanted to check them out.

  “No, but next time I will,” she assured them. “This time, I found a special book that they don’t have at our library. I got it at the big library.” She spread her arms to indicate the block-sized Enoch Pratt. She checked the clock above the sink. “Where’s your baba?”

  The smallest boy rolled over and pointed awkwardly toward the front door with one arm pinned under his belly.

  Big brother Khaled translated. “Still at work.”

  “I’ll let you stay up a little bit late tonight so you can see my book,” she said conspiratorially. It wouldn’t be that terribly late, but the mere idea of staying up after their mom had gone to bed early made the boys giggle. Amina ushered them onto the brown chenille couch in the dark living room and turned on the matching floor lamps at either end of the couch. The boys immediately started fussing over who got to sit where, each wanting the full couch to himself yet not able to bear being apart from the other.

  She stared at them, pulling her eyebrows inward in an attempt to recapture her earlier stern visage without breaking a smile, until they stopped fidgeting. “I will sit in the middle.” She lifted her bag from the coffee table and pulled out the book before squeezing between the two boys at the center of the couch. She set the book on her lap ceremoniously. “This... is a book with some magical pictures.”

  Khaled gasped, causing Talib to gasp.

  “Pictures of Syria.”

  Khaled’s gaping mouth morphed into a frown, as if he’d been tricked.

  She reassured him. “Your mama and baba are both from Syria. You know that. That makes it your home, too. Think of how exciting it is that the big library has pictures of your home in it.”

  She opened the travel guide, a book that had once served to introduce adventurous travelers to an old and exotic location but was now a devil’s mockery of an unrecognizable place. The boys’ minds were pristine, though, protected due to their age from the news she refused to watch.

  She hadn’t been thinking of the boys when she’d checked out the book earlier that week, but now she felt inspired to share it with the living visions of home sitting next to her. Perhaps their joy and innocence would weave their way into her own memories, regenerating the connection that was crumbling into the rubble.

  On the first page, aged pillars stood dark against the sky, separating an orange-gold setting sun from the deepening blue sky it was leaving behind. “These are ruins at Palmyra. They are over two thousand years old.” She opened her eyes wide to indicate that they should be astonished. “Do you know how old Baltimore is? It’s less than three hundred ye
ars old. Baltimore is like a little baby compared to Palmyra.” She leaned in and touched noses with each of them before turning the page. “This church is almost two thousand years old.” The rough stone walls of the Chapel of Saint Ananias glowed in yellow light, while a plastic fan marred the solemnity of the chapel.

  “I thought you were Muslim, like us.”

  “I am, but Syria is like America. There are Christians and Muslims.”

  Khaled seemed satisfied with her response and turned the page to a scene of crystal-blue waters washing up on a beach dotted symmetrically with grass umbrellas. “Did you go here?”

  “Yes. I went on a very special trip to that beach once.” Memories of windblown hair silhouetted against a watercolor sunset and of sand in the sheets of a wedding bed stung her eyes. She turned the page. “But I liked to play in the snow.” She pointed at a winter photo in the countryside. “Are you excited for winter?”

  Both boys nodded like one of the bobblehead dolls on the shelf above their beds. She turned page after page of a ministry of tourism’s glossy vision of a Mediterranean destination, with sweeping views of green landscapes, ancient castles, and busy, bustling marketplaces. She closed her eyes and could feel the places, breathe the aromas, and be there again in its not-always-glossy but always-familiar and deep-rooted reality.

  The two heads leaning against her shoulders brought her back to the present. It was bedtime. She closed the guide. The front door opened, and Fayiz closed it slowly behind him when he saw Amina hold a finger up to her lips. He set a black bag on the ground, removed his square-toed black shoes, and lined them up next to the other shoes by the door.

  One small head swiveled upward toward Amina, deep brown eyes struggling to stay open long enough to ask a question. “This is your home now, right?”

  “I hope so,” Amina said.

  Khaled burrowed his head into her shoulder. “Do you want to go back to Syria?”

  “I do someday. And I hope you can visit, too.”

  “Why did you leave?”

  She turned toward Fayiz with sad eyes. The boys were so young, too young to understand why millions fled the home they may never know, yet almost old enough to feel the pain of being an outsider in the only home they did know. “Because I wanted to meet you two.” She hugged them both but not hard enough to break the spell of twilight.

  Fayiz extracted the boys from Amina’s embrace and carried them upstairs to their room, his strong arms allowing enough security for the two little boys to fall asleep in transit. Soft footsteps on the stairs receded, leaving Amina alone in the middle of the couch, illuminated by two overlapping circles of light.

  She opened the guide again. This was the Syria she wanted to return to, her home, not the Syria shown on TV and in the newspaper. As much as she knew she’d had to flee, the emptiness of loss hung heavy with second thoughts and regrets about those she’d left behind, those who had helped her escape what they could not.

  She’d been wrong. The boys’ closeness to her, their warm bodies and soapy postbath smell, hadn’t enhanced her memories. It had accentuated her loneliness and her faded dreams of building her own family, dreams that were once in vivid color when imagined from beneath white sheets in a room overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The GPS told Jessica in its sexy British accent that her destination was ahead on the right.

  Three phone calls and two text messages to Amina had gone unanswered. She’d spaced them out so she didn’t come across as a stalker, but she wasn’t entirely disappointed Amina hadn’t returned her calls.

  However, the dread of talking on the phone with a Syrian who didn’t trust lawyers was being replaced by the dread of going back to Rosalie after a week and not even having spoken with the woman Jessica had insisted on pursuing. She only had a couple more days to get the situation worked out, so she had to be more forward.

  According to the file, Amina worked at a Baltimore restaurant called Bathanjaan. Middle Eastern cuisine was not a thing in small-town Iowa, where Jessica had grown up. In fact, Jessica couldn’t remember any kind of “cuisine” back home. Spaghetti was about as exotic as it got in Jessica’s little spot out there in flyover country.

  Finally, she spotted her destination—a ground-level restaurant in a three-story brick building. The faded painting of a watch on the side of the building proclaimed that the structure had once been the home of a watch store. In this newly gentrified neighborhood, the architectural and design elements of a bygone era lent a comforting credibility to the businesses that served a new world. “Bathanjaan” was printed in script on a large picture window, through which Jessica could see a busy lunch crowd.

  Jessica thought back to her days at H&C, both the busy time and the lunches. For an associate who came into the office at 7:00 a.m. and didn’t know if she would leave at 7:00 p.m. or midnight, lunch was the adult equivalent of recess. And recess in DC had allowed this Iowa girl to indulge in all kinds of “cuisine.” She’d particularly loved a pho restaurant just a block away from the firm’s building and a million miles away from Iowa. Between daily lunch outings and night after night of delivery for the overworked associates, Jessica had made up for a lifetime of cuisineless living in just a few short months. She couldn’t recall any Syrian restaurants close to her old office, though, so this would be a first.

  A bearded man, fully engaged in checking his cell phone, held the door for Jessica. The thoughtless act of thoughtfulness allowed Jessica to laugh to herself and release some anxiety. Scanning the room unsuccessfully for Amina, Jessica’s eyes turned almost involuntarily upward. Colorful strips of cloth gracefully draped the ceiling, complementing the complex aromas and intermingled conversations that filled the restaurant. The dining tables around the perimeter of the room framed a waiting area in the center of the space. No, it was more a gathering spot than a waiting area.

  Jessica bypassed the hostess stand by the door, drawn almost magnetically to a table placed in the center of a circle of cushioned chairs. The low table was actually the stump of an unfamiliar tree. Irregularly shaped around the diameter, with bold waves and asymmetric juts, the tree spoke of a gnarled and lengthy life. Its caramel tone, interwoven with vanilla and mocha, seemed to be an image of a barista’s masterpiece. It looked almost like a cross section of brain, with cavities coursing through the swirls. Actually, it was more like a damaged brain—the “after” images they showed to ward people away from doing drugs—with black nothingness where vibrant gray and white matter used to be.

  It made for a less than practical coffee table. A misplaced cup wouldn’t stand a chance of staying upright for long, but the table had a gravity to it that seemed to be holding the building itself in place.

  Just as she reached out to graze her fingers across the burly slab, Jessica felt a light touch on her shoulder. A woman with Middle Eastern features, wearing a Western maternity dress and leggings, rested a menu atop her swollen belly.

  “Just one?” asked the heavily accented woman.

  Jessica followed the woman to a round two-top by the window, glancing back at the table, trying to take a mental picture of it. She had worked a lot of wood at her home. The more interesting pieces carried a generation or two of meaning that emerged as she sanded and refinished. The last owner of the Donnelly home had had a big dog, whose claw marks on the front door Jessica had sanded smooth. Another owner, the original family, had notched their children’s heights in a closet doorframe every year. Those marks she didn’t touch, letting the children live on. This table, though, carried more—more generations and more stories.

  Jessica had looked up the Bathanjaan menu online before her visit. Feeling adventurous and not afraid to try lamb for the first time, Jessica ordered the kibbeh arnabieh. Before the woman left the table, Jessica asked if Amina was working today. The woman stiffened and shook her head before beelining for the kitchen, as if Jessica was with Immigration and Naturalization Services, doing recon for a raid.

>   The lunch crowd was a metropolitan mix. Some elderly men looked Middle Eastern, but they were outnumbered by white, hipster-looking twentysomethings and more professional types of all ethnicities. An old woman sitting in the corner alone caught Jessica’s eye and smiled. She had a plate of bread on the table in front of her and held a book.

  Jessica wished she had brought her own book, which she needed to finish up for book club that night, but she’d only been able to get it from the library a few days before. Finding some online book spoiler summaries for the month’s selection, All the Light We Cannot See, would have to do. With no sign of Amina, Jessica clicked on her phone and started typing.

  She soon found herself deep in an Internet rabbit hole that led away from a promising summary of Anthony Doerr’s book. Instead, she was reading about something that had nothing to do with books or any form of intelligent thought, so she jumped when a man said, “Hello.”

  The man bowed slightly toward her and set two dishes on the table. “I am the owner. I understand you were asking about Amina Hamid.” His accented voice was gruff, but his face was mild and inquisitive.

  Jessica fumbled her phone into her purse. “Yes. Is she working today?”

  “I’m sorry. She is not here.” His cautious response didn’t quite confirm that she worked there or that he even knew her. “May I ask why you are looking for her?”

  Jessica wasn’t sure how much the owner knew about Amina or that she was seeking asylum. Jessica was already skirting the rules of confidentiality, and the owner’s circumspect comment inspired wariness on her part. “I’m a friend. Can you tell her that Jessica Donnelly stopped by?” She didn’t hand over her business card. Amina might not like that she referred to herself as a friend, but she surely wouldn’t like Jessica presenting herself as an attorney.