Kassim descended and trotted to Mount Marwah, ascended that, and then returned to Safaa. Given the 107-degree heat that day in June, he was relieved that the Mounts were mounds rather than mountains and that the distance between the Mounts was a matter of meters rather than kilometers. He made the prescribed seven circuits, completing the reenactment of Hajar’s frantic search for water to keep her son Ismael alive in the desert until Ibrahim’s return. He was never struck by the irony that men were expected to jog the Sa’y while women were cautioned to proceed with a measured decorum, yet all were replicating the desperate ordeal of a woman. Hajar herself could not have been more uplifted when the Well of Zamzam miraculously appeared than Kassim when he drank from the sacred well. He could feel the water of the Zamzam Spring, a tributary of the Waters of Paradise, flow through him like grace.
The Sa’y complete, Kassim submitted to the final ritual of the ‘Umrah, the halq, the shaving of the head. Now he was ready to go out of Ihraam, out from being a pilgrim, a searcher, and return to the known world.
He exchanged the two panels of white sheeting for the white shirt and discreetly pinstriped suit that had seen better days. They seemed like the clothes of a past life, as indeed they were. For him, the halq was transformative. Shaved bald and beardless, he felt fresh, newborn. This exhilaration of rebirth would carry him through the long days of travel overland and by air, across continents and across oceans. It carried him almost as far as the door of the flat in Mile End.
He had not let the family know when to expect him. Overseas calls were prohibitively expensive. An unjustifiable indulgence after all his other expenses.
His wife and daughters might be at the shopping mall gazing at all the things he could not buy for them. Reem might be playing in the first-floor apartment of her little friend. His mother could be at the Halal Meat & Grocery rejecting cuts of lamb as not good enough for the celebration of her son’s return, expected one day very soon.
When he inserted his key in the lock of the door, he stood frozen for fully three minutes. Then he removed the key and slid it back into the pocket of his suit coat and turned and walked softly down the stairs.
Back on the street, he couldn’t help but contrast this neighborhood—its jangle of voices, the shabby residential and commercial buildings and abandoned warehouses—with the dignity and splendor of the Grand Mosque. But both were peopled by seekers from elsewhere, he reminded himself as he passed the Greek restaurant with its Mediterranean blue and white walls and the little Portuguese grocery and the squat brick building—was it a temple? a school?—with its Hebrew inscription over the double doors.
What was he expecting from his family? He asked himself this question as he circled the block for the sixth time. It was on the last circle that he told himself that the answer was that he should not expect anything from his family, but he should expect much from himself. After all, it was he alone who had made the journey. Only he could be expected to have been changed.
As he completed his seventh circuit, he paused to inhale outside the steamy café where the old Italian men hunched over their playing cards and their espressos. He thought of the kahva that his mother would prepare for him, even thicker and stronger than espresso, made from finely ground beans with pinches of sugar and cardamom dropped into the boiling pot.
The stairs to the third-floor apartment did not seem so steep as he climbed. He turned the key decisively in the lock. When the door fell open he was surprised to see all three of his daughters, his wife, and his mother gathered in the living room, as though waiting for him. Except for meals, he couldn’t remember the last time he had seen them seated all together. They stared at him but no one spoke.
“I have not been gone so long that I should be a stranger to you,” he smiled.
Still they were silent. His daughter Hala, who was never at a loss for words, leaned forward, her mouth gaping.
“Is it my baldness that alarms you?” He brushed his palm over his scalp. “Already the hair is growing back.”
Still nothing from them.
“I have been reborn in the love of Allah, but I am still your father, husband, son,” he said, nodding around the room at each of his daughters perched along the rolled-up mattress draped with carpeting and at his wife and mother sitting stiffly on the brocade couch. “When I change from these much-traveled clothes and shave the stubble from my face, I hope you will then at least be able to recognize me.”
Still no one spoke. Kassim wondered if something terrible had happened in his absence. If another family member had been killed. Or if Allah had sent a plague to their small flat that had left his women dumb. For a fleeting moment, he pictured a future with no nagging, no scorn, no conversations that excluded him, but then shook off the vision as unworthy of a returning pilgrim. Later Najwa would confess that she and their middle daughter had both heard his footsteps stop at their door, heard his key in the lock, and then heard the footsteps that could only have been his retreat and had been paralyzed with fear. They had told the others and, for the time it took Kassim to complete his circles around their neighborhood, they had huddled together in the windowless living room thinking the unspeakable: that Kassim had abandoned them. And they thought of all the reasons why he should have done so.
While he stood puzzling, Reem ran into the bedroom he shared with Najwa and came out carrying the hand mirror that lay on their dresser. Seeing that cheap plastic mirror that Najwa had picked up at a flea market reminded Kassim of all that had been lost. Throughout their time in Lebanon, his wife had used the heavy, gold-encrusted vanity set that had been a wedding gift from her aunt and uncle. Najwa had personally packed the set into one of the crates that had accompanied them to Canada but it was missing when the crate was opened. Azar cursed the Customs officials, but Najwa blamed the housemaid whom she had long suspected of coveting the set when she brushed her mistress’s hair. Kassim resolved that he would buy his wife a new vanity set, one suited to their renewed life together.
He wondered why Reem saw fit to bring him the looking glass. Because he was not comfortable with his looks, Kassim had learned to avoid glancing in mirrors. He didn’t want to see himself, nor see others looking at him. He even managed to be oblivious of his image in windows and, most recently, the mirrors in airport bathrooms.
Reem held the streaked glass up to her father’s face and he saw what they had seen when he came through the door, what they could not stop looking at. There was only a short growth to be sure, but there was no denying the evidence of one’s eyes. All the hair on his scalp and cheeks and cleft chin and along the plane of his upper lip was growing back in the luxuriant dark brown of his youth.
Body Language
3.
She had an idea that riding en couchette would be like a slumber party: four women, complete strangers, from the earth’s four corners, thrown together for one cozy night. Betsy envisioned a kind of esprit de cot inspiring the air in their small cabin, producing a chorus of “Frère Jacques” followed by several rounds of “Bruder Jacob” in a burst of international harmony.
She had spent the afternoon and evening on a train from Tours and an eternity in the station at Lyon. She began a postcard to her sister in minuscule script: A place not to be is the train station at Lyon. The time not to be here is night. A convention of jackals, she shivered as she looked around. Every breed of miscreant had at least one voting representative present. She affixed a stamp to the card picturing the overwrought gothic Cathédrale Saint-Gatien she had visited in Tours and set off in search of a postal box.
When a patron of a bar in the station lurched out into the night and nearly collided with Betsy, he seized the situation as an opportunity. As he curled his fingers around her hip from behind, her first thought was what Greg would have done to him. She didn’t wait for a second thought. Fellow lechers, she shuddered, and gave the local one a backward jab with her elbow into his ribs. She left h
im wheezing as she headed for an empty platform to contemplate just how sheltered she had been, maybe not in every way, but in many.
She had gone from the confinement of her parents’ house to her dollhouse of a marriage, then fled that for the refuge of her sister’s home. Being a “townie,” she hadn’t even experienced the measured liberation of a Jesuit college dormitory with strict curfews. Her parents had paid her and her sister’s tuitions but declared dorm room-and-board not in the family budget, and her summer earnings were never enough to permit her to live on campus. Betsy supposed the apartment on Kilbourn was one reason she had jumped at marrying Greg even before she completed her undergraduate degree. She realized with a jolt that this trip was really her first time being on her own in all of her thirty-two years.
Shortly after midnight, she sought to board her sleeping car for Nice. The numbers outside of the cars were confusing—one single digit and below that five digits, nothing to correspond to the Voiture 44 printed on her ticket. She stopped a conductor, literally translating I go to car 44 and relying on inflection to turn the statement into a plea for help. He answered her over his shoulder and left her to salvage meaning from the scant phrases she understood. She thought she had puzzled out his instructions but would never trust her ear. Just the night before as she went out to dinner from the small hotel in Tours, a woman in the lobby sought Betsy’s confirmation of the beauty of her baby. Betsy was pleased to be consulted and assented heartily, heaping all her small vocabulary of admiration on the sleeping child’s head. Only later, reviewing the woman’s increasingly appalled expression and slowly replaying their exchange, did Betsy realize that she had fervently joined in complimenting herself on her own appearance, her charmante robe, her joli visage. She had walked the streets of Tours until she was confident that any of the hotel guests who had overheard her would be settled into their beds for the night.
So, every five yards, she would stop a conductor or another traveler to confirm that she was headed in the right direction, that these cars were the wagon lits, that this was the train to Nice.
It was inside a car that she found the elusive 44 posted. She arrived at the berth assigned to her, an upper, and was dismayed to see it barren not only of linens but of mattress as well. A finely made, finely dressed man entered the dim compartment carrying a thin suitcase and a still thinner attaché case. He looked like she imagined a member of the diplomatic corps would, with even the imagined tidy moustache.
Betsy realized that the unfurnished berth could not be hers after all. Again she had made a mistake; some small error in translation had turned each step into a misstep. Perhaps there were two cars numbered 44, this for men and the other for women. She begged the man’s pardon and showed him her ticket. He nodded politely.
“Non, Monsieur,” she insisted. “Oú est la voiture quarante-quatre? Je vais oú?” He frowned. She hoped she’d made something like sentences. She hoped he wasn’t nauseated by her vowel sounds.
“Ici, Madame.”
Here. Together with him and God knew who else. Betsy felt herself flush to the roots of her hair. Despite the fact that she was one full week out of Milwaukee, seven days of traveling abroad on her own, her expectations had remained steadfastly midwestern. It had not occurred to her that sleeping quarters could be shared by unrelated travelers of both sexes. It became a point of American honor that this man never be permitted to grasp what struck her now as a fatally telling presumption on her part.
“Mais, ma couchette—voilà!” She extended her arm to illustrate this passable explanation for her confusion. He looked up and then over at his own upper birth and mumbled what Betsy was sure could be characterized as “a mild oath.” His bunk, too, was devoid of bedding.
He instructed her to wait there, to do nothing, that he would assume responsibility for her comfort as well as his own. Betsy was relieved that, if she must pass the night in male company, at least this particular specimen seemed to be a gentleman. She wondered what their other two sleeping car companions would be like. When she had been certain of females, she had imagined chatter followed by easy sleep. Now she supposed she ought to prepare herself for silence preceding a symphony of snores.
He came back with a porter, who fled, throwing his hands into the air, denying any accountability. Next her gentleman expressed their combined indignation to the conductor, who reassigned to them the outfitted bottom berths and gave them the entire compartment to themselves. Betsy felt it unlikely that her sole companion was a snorer.
When they were alone, she asked in a combination of broken French and pantomime where she should change into her bedclothes. He raised his hands, palms up, and bowed his head at the same time, making a present to her of the privacy of the compartment, then stood sentry outside the door until she emerged in her embroidered Indian cotton gown to take his place. Betsy blinked at the framed pictures flashing past the window until he reappeared in the corridor, dapper in his creased pajamas, navy blue trousers and complementary but not matching shirt. His sandy hair was short and wavy and coarse, the only thing coarse about him, Betsy felt sure. An odd thought came to her: he will never go bald. There was something almost too fastidious about him. Maybe it was his moustache. It looked like it might have been penciled in above his lip. Without the camouflage of suit and tie, she saw that he was not as old as she had first assumed, perhaps only a few years older, not yet forty.
The compartment was stifling. He apologized on behalf of his nation for the failure of the air conditioning. They eased themselves onto their respective pallets and lay looking out through the open window at periodic bursts of light, like camera flashes in the night.
Twice, farther down the line, other passengers tried to enter the compartment. Holders of the reservations for the two lower berths, no doubt. In the first instance, Betsy’s companion politely directed the intruder to the conductor as the proper repository for his wrath. He then locked the door and on the subsequent attempt responded not at all, except to smile at Betsy. She imagined him accustomed to telling others what to do, heading a company or a consulate.
It was only then that she recognized the conspiracy of circumstances and vented a nervous giggle. As she prepared for this trip, she had tantalized herself with the prospect of international alliances, international dalliances. After all, she was a thirty-two-year-old woman traveling alone, not looking for love, not even for companionship—she had brought the last volume of The Alexandria Quartet along for company. (It was Durrell who had said, “Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.”)
She had lusted after Europe when an ocean away but had found nothing enticing about the males thus far, certainly not the scruffy teenager who had followed her out of the Louvre or the white-suited man in the Tuileries who offered to buy her an aperitif, and especially not the fat-fingered patron of the bar back in the station at Lyon.
And now here she was alone with an impeccable Frenchman, sealed in until morning. Fate had thrown them together and locked the door. She shifted on her bunk and he made an identical movement. She sat up to unravel the cocoon of sheeting from about her feet and moments later he did the same.
It was a dance.
She glanced over and found him staring at her.
After a few minutes, he let his hand loll out into the space between them. She considered his hand, considered reaching out to it. It fingered the air and then retreated, scurried back under the sheet like a frightened squirrel. Suited up and carrying the slimmest of monogrammed attaché cases, he had struck her as a paragon of efficiency and composure; now in pajamas and struggling with wadded sheeting, he seemed vulnerable. It was all too much like a vintage movie, more slapstick than romance. Betsy redoubled her efforts toward sleep.
Twenty minutes clacked by.
Something hurtled in through the open window. The fluttering noises caused Betsy and her fellow traveler to sit upright at the same moment. “A bi
rd!” Betsy exclaimed in wonder.
“C’est impossible!” The man reached out and flicked the light switch by the locked door. “Mon Dieu,” he cursed while a small scream escaped from Betsy’s throat as a bat dove kamikaze-like from point to point in the compartment, veering off just short of the walls.
She watched the man lie back and fumble under his cot until he found his shoe. Then he lay still and gestured to her to do the same. She tried to flatten herself against her mattress, briefly raising a hand only to twist her hair beneath her head so no loose tendril could ensnare the creature as it skimmed over her. The humans lay frozen while the other mammal chased through the air as though shot from a miniature cannon, darting in straight, short lines. Tense minutes ticked by before the bat settled on the floor between the cots. The Frenchman raised his shoe and brought it down swiftly.
“No!” Betsy shouted. Then she saw that he had not brought the sole of his shoe down upon the bat but the opening, which he held firmly in place, unable to move lest the captive escape.
Betsy sat up, looking around the compartment for something, but she didn’t know what. She reached for her backpack and took from it the box of Belin crackers she’d bought in the train station.
She pulled out the cellophane liner with the crackers and then separated the cardboard at its seams. Holding her breath, she carefully slid the flattened cardboard along the floor and under the man’s shoe. He swung his legs off his cot and together they lifted the makeshift cage and thrust it out the window. He raised the shoe and they waited more than two minutes, giving the bat ample time to make its escape into the dark night. Then they drew their arms back inside and turned to face each other in the narrow passage between the cots and erupted into laughter.
The Opposite of Chance Page 3