“It’s true,” Jem said, speaking to Melvie. “Things are changing for me. I’ve started to see better, like the way I don’t fit in. I haven’t put together a life. I’m still living at home, I’ve been working at a job I hate. I’m so tired of being a child, being good, wanting people to like me. They don’t like me. They don’t like Arabs.”
“Americans don’t like anybody! Americans don’t like Americans!” Melvie said. “And what are we talking about, you are an American. Where do you think Americans came from, when they’re not captured on reservations? They come from other places. That’s what an American is!”
“No, I don’t think so. I think it just doesn’t work like that. It’s not enough to be born here, or to live here, or speak the language. You’ve got to seem right,” Jem said, lifting her palms. “Well, I don’t know how to accomplish that, and I’m starting to think I won’t ever learn it if I haven’t by now. In fact, I don’t even want to learn it anymore.”
“Amen,” Fatima said. “Jesus, Mary, Joseph, praise holy name of Allah the munificent—Jemorah has seen light.”
“But it’s incredible, do you honestly think anything is any different in the Old Country?” Nassir asked Jem, leaning forward. “Maybe you’ve seen Lawrence of Arabia lately and you think it’s all the same, bedouins and sand and camels, all tied up in a time warp, like cowboys and Indians over here. Or maybe you believe, dear friend, that it has all been waiting for you since you left its doorstep in 1970, that you’ll return and find the great peace of the tomb still there, that you can go back to my grandmother’s home and wander without responsibility or care. Just as you’ve preserved it in memory. And well you might, but that world would be only your own, the isolation of a child’s fantasy. If you were to step outside your enchanted circle, you’d find the same sorts of suspicions and intolerances as here. There is nothing unique or magical about the Middle East; it shares xenophobias and violences with all the rest of the world!”
“Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense!” Fatima shouted, each word an intensifying alarm. “At home, she surrounded by so much family, more family than she know what to do with! Peoples who loves her, who protects her, who cut their right arms off and give to her! Not like here in this evil of evils where she is outcast, as I have been in fifty thousand years of suffering here that I have yet to tell a person. In this country they offer with one hand and take away with the other. So she will walk away from this. As it is written, no to your honey and no to your sting! Let her go to the people who are loving her.”
“And what, precisely, do you call me?” Melvie asked. “Her flesh-and-blood sister, pray tell? Let me recommend that you go back, if you’re so maladjusted here.”
“It’s too late for me, naughty girl,” Fatima said, tucking a loose hair into place. “Soon, soon, it become my forty-ninth birthday. Already I am standing on my deathbed.”
“Forty-nine? I always thought you were older than our father,” Jem said.
“Enough talk, talk, talk,” Fatima said, standing. “Nassir need more cakes and coffees, he vanishing before our eyes. It is all settled. We shop for a wedding dress tomorrow. Melvina is bridesmaid. Someone is matron of honor, you choose, of course. There is no time to waste. Your father will be weeping fifty thousand tears of happiness!” she proclaimed, dashing back into the kitchen.
Melvie stood up and snorted. She was still wearing her nurse’s uniform; in the evening sun, refracted through the room, the uniform glimmered, smooth as sheet metal. Her cap pointed, tiara-fashion, at the ceiling. “I will not consent to a thing until I know, exactly and honestly, what it is that both of you want. Especially you, Jem—”
“I’m not completely sure,” Jem said. “I only know that I want to change my life. A new start. It would be difficult in Jordan at first, I know. I don’t expect miracles. But I might fit in some ways, a general, public way, where I could walk in the streets and ride buses and go into stores and feel like it’s okay. There’s all our family there. I wouldn’t be such an outsider,” she said.
“And I’m telling you,” Nassir said, “this ‘home’ that you seek is not there, not in the sense that you mean, not even close. People like you and Melvina, you won’t have what your grandparents might have had. To be the first generation in this country, with another culture always looming over you, you are the ones who are born homeless, bedouins, not your immigrant parents. As you and your sister just said, everything and nothing. You’re torn in two. You get two looks at a world. You may never have a perfect fit, but you see far more than most ever do. Why not accept it?”
“So then it shouldn’t matter if I choose America or Jordan,” Jem said. “It’s the same either way.”
“It shouldn’t, but before you do, allow me to inform you there are certain things about this other potential home that may not be quite to your Westernized taste, dear friend—”
“The truth at last!” Melvie said, sinking back to the edge of the recliner and pushing up the leg rest. “Sing it out!”
Nassir leaned forward, sliding face, arms, and shoulders into a bar of light from the window. He looked tired, as if he carried the distance of his journey in the slant of his shoulders. Strands of hair fell across his brow, down to his unmatched eyes, one opaque, a mask, the other a corridor of black, spiraling into the easing and opening of the pupil. It was here that Jem saw their shared grief: the eye that remembered the other’s loss.
“I remember,” he was saying. “Don’t think I forget about our grief, little cousin. I see her in you, and you, too,” he said to Jem then Melvie. “Don’t think I have lost my allegiance to our early time together. For me, that in itself is enough reason to marry you, if that is indeed what you wish. More than any of these ‘fun and games’ in school, as Fatima puts it. My grandmother panicked when she heard I had received a grant to study in America. She told me, don’t drink the water and don’t look any of the heathen women in the eye. A week before I left, she said, I want you to marry Jemorah when you get there. Believe me, a hundred grandmothers couldn’t get me to do this unless it had importance for me. Say the word, open sesame, and it is my command. But first you must understand, sweet, maybe-betrothed, that your childhood is not back there waiting for you to reenter its halls. I personally do not intend to return to the Old Country until the grant has run its course, and maybe not even after that. If you were determined to move there in the near future, you would probably have to go alone, and our country does not understand or appreciate solitary women.”
“And this one does?” Melvie said, forgetting for the moment which side she was on. “That’s a media-induced illusion.”
Nassir crossed his hands on his lap. “Perhaps so. But I first want you to imagine what our Arab countries are like, how immutable those cultures are. I attended Oxford with another cousin of ours, Rejel, who for his dissertation wrote a family history. Do you know that not once on his family tree—written, no less, for the eyes of the Western world—not once did he mention a single woman, not a mother, aunt, or sister! He whited them out of history, wrote their names in invisible ink, so to speak. Moreover, nowhere in this ‘comprehensive study’ does he mention Fouad and his brothers swindling their own youngest cousin, Zaeed, your husband, Fatima, out of his land and birthright, buying it from him—since he didn’t know better—for the price of his plane ticket to America. Now they condescend to him like a ward out of their quasi-guilty consciences. Farewell, family love! There are so many stories of treachery and deception in our family alone, I could go on like Shahrazad, for a thousand and one nights. In the end our family chronicler was forced to purchase his degree in order to finish—but enough of all that—”
“No, tell us more, please,” Melvie said, pushing the recliner farther back so her feet were parallel with her head.
“Another time. Look, I’ve spent enough semesters in England to learn about how the historians love to cut the world into East and West, chop, chop, to reassure themselves of their superior isolation, right-thinking, et cetera, et
cetera. In the same way, the Muslims speak of themselves and the infidels, the Jews have their gentiles. What you hate in this place you will find in other places. Imagine, if you will, living immersed in endless feuds over kinship, allegiance, and possession—which is what you will find yourself doing in the Old Country. Our border is an open sore; there is nothing in many hearts and minds there now but vengeance and bloodlust. The Arabs call the Jews devils; the Jews call Arabs animals. They are as obsessed with each other as lovers. Every day on the radio, TV, in the streets, you hear the litany of the enemies’ black sins: injustice is paired with injustice, tortures are compared, bombs, kidnappings, the number of women and children killed, each side warring to win the greater moral outrage, the greater injustice, till the war of rhetoric is nearly as painful as that of the flesh—”
Nassir broke off and Jem looked up to see Fatima standing in the door holding a silver tray so heaped with cookies and pastries she looked like she’d held up a bakery; in the other hand there was another pot of coffee. Jem didn’t know how long Fatima had been standing, listening, in the doorway like that, but her skin had gone so white it seemed to lose its edges, and Jem thought Fatima might faint.
Their aunt slowly placed the tray—cakes and all—straight down on the floor, at her feet, as if that was precisely where it was meant to go. And then, just as precisely, she stepped over it, coming into the center of the room where Jem could see her ashy forehead, her hands and throat white with perspiration. “What are you saying, my foolish nephew?” she said to Nassir. “Am I believing my ears? What you are saying about my country, my heart and soul? You, who lost the father and brother to these horror, these enemy.”
Nassir nodded. “Exactly, exactly. I lost them, and for what? I am tired of hating. I have Israeli friends who lost even more! It never stops; it’s a game without end. Why shouldn’t we be the ones to say stop?”
“Is not any kind of a game!” Fatima shrieked. Her neck stretched to the chords, straining. “I forbid you use such word in the house of my brother. Is no kind of game, you stupid, stupid boy. For all you lose and you learned nothing. You think you can go just cross the ocean and wipe your hands like the Roman kings? What I care for these people you think are your friends? What of my losses? What of my parents’ shame, driven off the good land and sacred home the father’s fathers built? When we were homeless and dying without food, what of the four starving babies I had to bury still alive, living—I, I, I?” she said, pushing her palms in their faces, as if the mark of it was there to be read. “Can I buy a bar of American soap and wash these away, as you have washed up your self? Babies I buried with my mother watching so this rest could live, so my baby brother can eat, so he can move away and never know about it. These why he came here, then,” she said, turning to Jem and Melvina. “To get away from knowing. No one would tell, but still he knows there is something to fly from, praise Allah he was born so fortunate! Born a man, not to know the truth—”
Jem was hardly breathing. She was watching her aunt, trying to understand what she’d said. Suffering shone on her aunt’s face, white as water. Fatima stood very still, standing inside the hollow place her words had cleared away, wrapped in sorrow and tears, which never left her eyes but seemed to fill the length and breadth of her body, her flesh filling with tears. Fatima stood silently, hands curled around her elbows, and when finally she spoke again, her voice was made of tears: “This the first time I say it out loud,” she said. “I think, maybe if I don’t say it, maybe, does it go away. But it don’t. It comes, it comes, it comes! I have no kind of peace. Their spirits stay with me; there is nowhere else to go. The saints and sinner live together. When I am sixteen, and a foolish girl, standing outside alone in the dangerous street, in Jerusalem, the Israelis come for me; this is my punishment, at the hands of God. I think they will kill me, it will be starving me to death, for all the food those babies would eaten. It is on their hands now, in the camp of my enemy, bad place. I think, now an end to my bad thoughts in this room of theirs without doors. It is nothing to the room I live in, in myself!” She struck her chest with a closed fist. “Here there no escape. And they let me live. After four days alone with misery, I am let go of their prison, I am left even by enemies. I am returned to die again, again, again. And this you say,” she said, turning on Nassir, “this is a laugh, a joke, a game, as they say in this Godforbidden country. That is what we playing at—to put a smile in your spoiled mouth!”
“Auntie,” Melvina said. Fatima flinched for just a fraction of a second then Melvie opened her strong arms and took her in. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” she said into Fatima’s hair, standing and holding her, the two women moving back and forth, like a cradle. “They forgive you, they all forgive you—can’t you hear them? They’re here, in the air, all around us. I can hear them, they forgive you.”
MELVIE STEPPED BACK from Fatima, holding her shoulders, her gaze lowered, softened. The light in the room was like butter; it slipped down their skin and gilded their hair. No one spoke; then Melvie said, “Aunt Fatima. It’s all right. You can talk to me. Please. I want to know about you and our mother both.”
Fatima stared at her niece who’d never before asked her a single question, never asked her for a thing. Fatima looked at that solemn face, and every accusation, bitter prejudice, and self-justification flew from her like drops of water.
“Your mother,” she said slowly, “I don’t know.” She closed her eyes. “I really—I don’t remember….” But she did. She remembered the pale eyes that wouldn’t close. She had flown back, though she’d sworn never to return, after the death. The eyes had stiffened open; the body seemed still faintly warm from its fever, though it was almost two days dead. The girls couldn’t have remembered it. Melvina, she told herself, was just an infant at the time; Jem gazed at a point somewhere slightly over her mother’s body.
Women are meant for death, she thought. These bodies bound for no good in this world, where any man might kill you. They were all guilty, the living. Wasn’t the night sky with its pink-and-blue belted clouds the sky of loss? Weren’t women like black orchids, in the sorrow of their bodies, meant to be used up, to wither like roses, left in rockers, over sewing and TV, left without men or children, knowing their lives had never really been their own?
“You remember,” Melvina said. “Tell me. I know you remember.”
Fatima carefully bent to the tray of pastries on the ground and picked it up. “She had long hair,” she began. “Bangs, and she hate lipstick. She wearing size eights dress and loved many purple clothes most of all. Hair like the color when the sun goes down.”
ALL EVENING JEM and Nassir listened to Melvie and Fatima’s voices murmuring through the floorboards, like the spirits of the ifrit touching the soles of their feet tucked under the kitchen table. Jem heated up a cauldron of stuffed grape leaves and lamb that Fatima had smuggled over in her car along with the cookies and cakes.
“So Uncle Fouad was lying again,” Nassir said, spearing into another grape leaf. “They do know how to cook in this country.”
“Some more than others.”
Fatima’s husband, Zaeed, called. “You needing a rest? Should I come there and take her home? What stage she is at now—screaming pontifical, weeping martyr, or plain sulking?”
“I think we did something new, tonight,” Jem said.
“Really! In honor of cousin? Maybe you should marry these guy, Jemorah. He sound influential.”
Nassir was scratching at his glass eye when Jem got off the phone. “You know I can remove this at will,” he said, tapping the eye. “Want to see? It looks fabulous on a Christmas tree.”
“Not right yet,” Jem said, looking from one eye to the other. “Doesn’t that hurt?”
Nassir sighed and finished the last bite of yogurt and lamb. “Let me tell you something, dear cousin of mine. Since tonight is the night of unburdening secrets. My secret is not so phenomenal at all.” He sat back and ran his hands over his belly. “Ev
eryone assumes that the eye’s loss was wreathed in tragedy and violence, a childhood casualty of war. Maybe something that happened under the hands of expansionist Israelis or sword-wielding Muslims. Not so.” He looked at her, eyes hooded.
“How then?”
“A soda-pop bottle.” He shrugged and grinned. “A soda bottle and my young stupidity. The advent of carbonated water was a wonder from the mysteries of the West. As children, my friends and I loved to shake the pop bottles so the stuff would shoot spray when you opened them. We were idiots—self-mutilation was inevitable.”
“Oh no.”
“Oh yes, of course. Now then.” He reached over and patted Jem’s hand. “Don’t look so troubled, it’s the way of the world, O possible-bride-to-be. Fate handed unsuspecting me a bottle with a half-opened cap, and I shook it hard. When the cap shot off, it perforated my eye. Our village doctor finished the job by removing the eye and cutting it in two, like a grape, with his penknife. Why? Who knows? To see what it would look like perhaps? Then, nick-nack, he throws it in his dustbin and that’s the last we ever see of my left eye. A tragedy in two acts.”
“That’s terrible,” Jem said. “You seem so blithe about it.”
Nassir leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and spreading his palms open. It looked as if he were tipping the balance of his thoughts forward. “You and I, Jemorah. I very well remember what that time was like for us. Don’t you?”
Jem looked at him; she saw the marble walls again, the tiles checked black-and-white, receding into passages, loss.
“I’m not saying it wasn’t hard, but merely senseless. I can’t put a reason to it any more than I can to your mother’s death. If Fatima thinks she can look to the home country and find her meaning there, then I don’t begrudge her. But most of the people who come to America, the immigrants, they think that this is just another place like home, a thing they will be able to hold and understand. It’s not that easy. Our family”—he paused a moment and rubbed his face in his hands, then looked up—“our family is mejnoon, you know? Crazy, nuts. Half Muslim, half Christian, they switch back and forth when the mood possesses them. Or they come to this country and pretend to be Presbyterians. Do you understand any of this?”
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