Crescent

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  “Oh, that is trouble on a lawn chair,” Mireille says knowingly.

  “You think?” Sirine asks. “He seems sort of…innocent.”

  Mireille clinks the ice in her glass. “Well, of course—that’s you talking.”

  Now Um-Nadia’s laughter chimes up from the poolside. She stands between the Russian professor and a graduate student in ethnomusicology, one hand on each of their chests, as if to stop them from fighting over her. Then she drops her hands and gestures to Sirine’s uncle with twirling, swimming motions. He shakes his head and remains in his chair but holds up a glass, toasting her.

  “Are you done with these people?” Mireille says. “Let’s get out of here, the jungle drums are starting.”

  Sirine is tired and she feels too shy to stay alone at the party. She starts to follow Mireille, but just as she begins walking, a skinny, loose-jointed young man comes over the hill toward her. “Sirine,” he calls out. “Sirine, Sirine!” It’s Li Pin Chu, a new engineering student who teaches Taiwanese, one of the many students from overseas who gravitate to Sirine’s uncle. He is also deeply enamored of Sirine’s cooking.

  “Oh, great, now this guy,” Mireille mutters. “You’re on your own, my dear, I’m done,” she says, then fluffs her starchy yellow hair and stalks off.

  “Sirine! Here I am. You know the expression: ‘From brightest sky—lightning,’” Li Pin says, holding out his arms as if to fold her in an embrace.

  “Yes,” she says, nodding. “I’m sure that’s true.”

  “Where is your bathing costume?” He has come into the party wearing a terry cloth shirt, geranium-red swim trunks, and flip-flops. He pulls off the shirt. “Ready for swim!” he announces. “What about you?”

  Sirine looks down at her jeans and blouse, touches her collar. “Um,” she says. “The thing is…”

  He looks around then, finally noticing that everyone came fully clothed and that no one is actually swimming. “Uh-oh,” he says. “This keep happening to me.”

  A few of the guests standing nearby glance at him. Sirine bites her lip: the invitations—hand-written and xeroxed—simply said, pool party. She tells Li Pin she’ll be right back and walks out into the maze of valet parking. She finds their car, grabs the old swimsuit she keeps in the trunk, and then scoots down in the back seat and pulls it on. When she comes back to the pool, she sees that there’s a lemon-colored shirt tossed on a bush and Han is already in the water, his tan dress shorts flaring out around his legs. He and Li Pin Chu are gamely trying to give each other pointers on how to swim. “I think you lay down with your face in the water,” Han is saying.

  Sirine watches them for a moment from the slope above the pool, her thoughts hushed and her breathing slow, a sense of something like gratitude rinsing over her. She dives in from the edge of the pool and surfaces near Han. She doesn’t feel as shy in the water. It swells around them, and pulls them off their feet. “Sea nymph,” Han says.

  Li Pin fashions a sort of backstroke by falling backward into the water and propelling himself with just his arms. They watch him do this across the length of the pool, over and over. It’s a warm night and there seems to be almost no difference between the temperature of the night air and that of the water. It seems as if the three of them are living in a place completely separate from the party that drifts above them, just a few feet away. The sky has gone entirely dark now; it floats star-smeared over the span of hills all around. They drift on their backs and close their eyes and talk about childhood games, then toys, then the foods of their past. Li Pin Chu tells them that if he could eat one dish every day for the rest of his life it would be sliced pork and egg in palm sugar. Han says he would enjoy some chicken stewed in onion yogurt sauce. Sirine thinks she might like some reheated spaghetti and meatballs—a breakfast that her mother used to make from the previous night’s dinner. The water laps over her ears and fills her head with a faint roar; there’s a high clear scent of chlorine. She has no idea how long they stay in the water; her fingertips wrinkle but she doesn’t get cold. She’s comfortable and sleepy and Han and Li Pin feel like people she’s known for a very long time. Finally, Li Pin floats over to shake their hands and say goodbye, as if they were the hosts. He climbs out and Sirine and Han hold themselves motionless for a moment, watching the water settle to a molten glow, brimming like mercury with the half-moon light.

  Han sighs, then turns and dives under the water. His back crests, then disappears as he moves silently across the pool.

  “Look!” Li Pin says, standing on the rock ledge beside the pool, his face lit up as if he were watching something miraculous. “He does know swimming!” Han surfaces at the far edge and waves at them. “Well, what do you know about that,” Li Pin marvels. “He is filled with invisible writing.”

  Sirine waves to Li Pin, then dips back under as well; she notices then that the pool is lit up with small amber lights embedded in its curving floor, so the pool water looks huge and empty. She thinks of night swims in the bottomless ocean when she was a girl and the thrilling cold of the Pacific. But this water is heated, as warm as a mouth. She and Han dive and redive, swimming beneath the surface as if exploring the rooms inside a bright silent house. Sirine’s hair twirls and soars over her head. At one point, as they swim around each other, their hands and legs brush and they burst to the surface, gulping air.

  “So you do swim,” Sirine says.

  Han looks pleased. “Perhaps a bit.”

  “How did you learn?”

  He is quiet for a moment, submerged to the shoulders; the rippling pool lights play over his face and neck. “Isn’t everyone sort of born swimming? I think it’s probably something you either remember or you let yourself forget.”

  Sirine sinks back into the water. “You mean like riding a bicycle?”

  “Essentially,” he says and dunks his head for a moment, then comes back up and laughs and says, “I mean, if you were born riding a bicycle.”

  They drift into one of the quiet bends in the pool that’s just a few yards from where her uncle is sitting. He’s telling stories to a small group of academics, some of whom look drowsy. Others look confused and bored as they scout around for new party arrivals. “I don’t understand,” Fred Perlman from the History Department is saying. “This is a true story? Or it isn’t?”

  “No, that’s the gorgeousness of it!” says a dark-eyed woman in a leather dress. “It’s just like acting in commercials—you just have to give yourself to it, let yourself be it, and it all comes true.”

  Sirine’s uncle nods and points at the leather-dress woman, then rocks back in the lounge chair, searching for his cup of black coffee. “You see? Now she understands everything.” He tries to prop the coffee back up in the grass. “Now, where were we? Ah yes, Abdelrahman Salahadin is consulting with a seahorse….”

  Sirine is so warm she doesn’t want to leave the water, so she sits on a shallow lip inside the pool to let her legs float. Han props himself up across from her and his head tilts back. She can’t make out his expression in the darkness: he seems elusive and far away and yet also quite aware of her. She’s exhausted from the heat and the swimming and feels she could fall asleep in the warm water.

  He moves to her side. “Look there.” Han points to the sky. “An Arab crescent.”

  She looks at the paper-fine moon. “Why do you call it that?”

  “It reminds me of the moon from back home.” He looks at her. “It’s a good omen.” He rests his head against the lip of the pool. They listen to her uncle’s story for a while. “Abdelrahman Salahadin,” Han murmurs.

  “What?”

  He raises his head slightly and his eyes are black and shining and still. “Your uncle’s story. It’s so familiar.”

  “You’ve heard it before?”

  He doesn’t move his head. “Just the feeling of it.” He seems to be smiling faintly. “In Iraq, everyone tells jokes and fables. It’s too difficult to say anything directly.”

  They listen as her u
ncle describes the ways of mermaids. Sirine smoothes her hair back with a wet hand. Her hair feels thick and stiff with chlorine. “You mean like fables are secret codes?”

  “In America, you say ‘secret code,’ but in Iraq, that’s just the way things are. Everything’s sort of folded up and layered, just a bit more complicated. Here it’s all right out there, right on the surfaces. Everyone’s telling you exactly how they feel all the time and what they’re thinking. Trying to pin everything down.”

  “Is that bad?”

  Han swirls his legs through the glossy water and Sirine feels little underwater eddies along her legs. The soles of her feet are flexed, her legs gently switching back and forth in the water. “Oh no, not bad. It’s just different,” he says. “Like, here you only need to know one language, but in lots of other places you need extras. I’ve gotten used to saying several things at once. Just in case any secret police came around.”

  “So stories about, like, fish are actually about—”

  “Could be anything. Maybe about war or birth. Maybe it’s a way to talk about a journey, or to reflect on love.”

  Her laughter bubbles up nervously. She slips below the surface for a moment and opens her eyes. She can see his body, his flickering legs, the angle of his chest rising up to the surface of the water. She’s so warm, the water sizzling in little bubbles all over her skin.

  That night after the party, just before she heads upstairs to bed, her uncle stops her in the entryway. “So?” he says; there are grass stains on his pants and his voice is light and muzzy from too much wine and coffee. “What you think?”

  “Of?” She crosses her arms and leans against the stairs’ curved railing.

  He raises his eyebrows. “You know. Him.”

  Sirine smiles and looks away, but she closes her eyes for a moment. “Oh. I don’t know. Of course, he’s very sweet. And not bad-looking.”

  “Sweet…doesn’t that mean strange and stupid in girl-language?”

  “But there’s also something complicated about him—it makes me…” She wobbles her hand.

  “Complicated?” He scratches the stubble starting along his jaw and looks contemplative. “Well, but he’s an exile—they’re all messed up inside. But I thought girls are supposed to love that.”

  “What do you mean, ‘exile’? Because he left Iraq?”

  “Because he can’t go back. Because anything you can’t have you want twice as much. Because he needs someone to show him how to live in this country and how to let go of the other.”

  “Lovely. A project.” She gives him a little air-punch on the shoulder, but she thinks about this all the way up the stairs. Han seems to have some sort of internal light that makes him intriguing and, at the same time, a little bit hard for her to look at directly: he’s so charming and educated and worldly. But it’s more than that. Most Arab men have always been eminently polite to her, filled with an Old World propriety, so formal, they seem almost not to see her but to see an outline captioned: Woman. Han, she’s noticed, looks at her. Even though they barely know each other, she already has the clear, uncanny sense that when he looks, he sees her.

  When Sirine goes to bed that night she still feels the buoyancy of the pool water beneath her arms and legs. She lies in bed, floating. As she falls asleep, the sensation of floating mingles with a dream of Han swimming deep below the water. She’s swimming near the surface and she can’t find him but she knows he’s down in the dark depths beneath her, swimming in endless circles.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Okay, now it’s a typical day in the little port city of Aqaba. Abdelrahman Salahadin has evaded the latest slaver by faking his drowning and swimming to shore. He lies low for a few weeks, and when he thinks the coast is clear, once again he makes his way through the reed-split sands, this time on his way back to market. His feet are sinewy, his soles soft as hands from walking over beaches. No one can tell him who he is. He is Abdelrahman Salahadin, son of a freed Nubian and a burdened Iraqi Bedouin.

  Slavery has been outlawed in most Arab countries for years now. But there are villages in Jordan made up entirely of the descendants of runaway Saudi slaves. Abdelrahman knows he might be free, but he’s still an Arab. No one ever wants to be the Arab—it’s too old and too tragic and too mysterious and too exasperating and too lonely for anyone but an actual Arab to put up with for very long. Essentially, it’s an image problem. Ask anyone, Persians, Turks, even Lebanese and Egyptians—none of them want to be the Arab. They say things like, well, really we’re Indo-Russian-Asian-European-Chaldeans. So in the end, the only one who gets to be the Arab is the same little old Bedouin with his goats and his sheep and his poetry about his goats and his sheep, because he doesn’t know that he’s the Arab, and what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.

  Anyway, Abdelrahman’s eyes have the hard, lacquer shine of beetles, and when he laughs people stop their conversations. Now he steps into the dusty clearing of the marketplace and proclaims himself for sale, and everyone looks up.

  “Fifty dinars,” he shouts, “for this hair, these eyes, the sweat of my shoulders, the width of my chest, fifty dinars to claim me!”

  Years ago, Abdelrahman found his wife in bed with another man, and he knew in a flash he’d been right all along: he recalled the dark time before his discovery of the truth, the many nights that she’d whispered he was mad, smiled into his eyes, and convinced him that he was crazy; he’d realized that it is as easy to be mad as to be sane. He left their home vowing never to be betrayed again.

  Abdelrahman Salahadin proclaims himself for sale in the market as is his habit. The customer who approaches him now is short of stature with eyes soft as gloves; he is wrapped up in face, headdress, and full robes white as a bird’s breast. His voice is pure refinement. “Hello, slave,” he says. He looks him over, circles him three times, checks his joints, and inspects the whites of his eyes. Finally he says, “Yes, yes, fine. I’d like to buy you. Pick up your things and let’s go.”

  “My price is fifty dinars,” says Abdelrahman.

  “I will pay you one hundred,” says the covered man.

  “I will meet you tomorrow morning at such-and-such hiding place among the reeds at the lip of the Red Sea,” says Abdelrahman Salahadin.

  “No,” whispers the hidden man, whose voice filters through his wrappings like the sound of nostalgia and lost love, and from whose person seems to emanate scents of eucalyptus, cypress, and the Tigris River. “You must come with me now. I am apt to lose all interest by tomorrow morning.” With that, he drapes a filament of gold thread around Abdelrahman’s wrist and leads him away.

  Sirine learned about food from her parents. Even though her mother was American, her father always said his wife thought about food like an Arab. Sirine’s mother strained the salted yogurt through cheesecloth to make creamy labneh, stirred the onion and lentils together in a heavy iron pan to make mjeddrah, and studded joints of lamb with fat cloves of garlic to make roasted kharuf. Sirine’s earliest memory was of sitting on a phone book on a kitchen chair, the sour-tart smell of pickled grape leaves in the air. Her mother spread the leaves flat on the table like little floating hands, placed the spoonful of rice and meat at the center of each one, and Sirine with her tiny fingers rolled the leaves up tighter and neater than anyone else could—tender, garlicky, meaty packages that burst in the mouth.

  The smell of the food cooking always brought her father into the kitchen. It was a magic spell that could conjure him from the next room, the basement, the garage. No matter where he was, he would appear, smiling and hungry. And if it was one of his important favorites—stuffed grape leaves, mjeddrah, or roast leg of lamb—he would appear in the kitchen even before the meal was done cooking. When she was a little girl, Sirine thought that this was why her mother cooked—to keep her husband close to her, attached to a delicate golden thread of scent.

  Sirine’s parents died when she was nine. They were emergency care personnel for the American Red Cross, killed in a clas
h between tribes while on assignment in Africa. On the day she learned of their deaths, Sirine went into the kitchen and made an entire tray of stuffed grape leaves all by herself. Then she and her uncle ate them all week, sitting at the kitchen table. Sirine sat on a telephone book propped on her chair, legs swinging, eating and watching the back door.

  Years later, when Um-Nadia first hired Sirine, Um-Nadia said that she had several dreams in which she and Sirine’s mother discussed Sirine’s career and that Sirine’s mother had said, yes: Sirine is a chef, through and through. “So I’ve checked your references,” Um-Nadia said. Then she also read Sirine’s coffee grounds and said she could see the signs written in the black coffee traces along the milky porcelain: sharp knife, quick hands, white apron, and the sadness of a chef. “Chefs know—nothing lasts,” she told Sirine. “In the mouth, then gone.”

  Sirine goes to bed so early sometimes there’s still a gray scrim of light in the sky, then she rises before morning light. Um-Nadia says that great food needs darkness. It requires letting the dough inhale the very early morning and letting the kabobs drink up wine and garlic all night long, and—on occasion—it requires stuffing the small birds, squabs, pigeons, and other sweet, wild game under the round moon, “when they have let go of their songs,” Um-Nadia says. Sirine dreams of cooking and wakes to thoughts of cooking—even when she can’t stand the old smells of rancid butter and oils hanging in her hair. She still wakes too early, to grind and salt the lamb by hand, to fan the parsley over the chopping block.

  Her uncle’s dog King Babar walks through the sleepless predawn with her; the air is thick and humid. He sits on her bare feet as she prepares some marinades to take in to work and he gazes after her, eyes melting with an expression of unutterable love, as she leaves for work, as if it is all too much, too much, for one poor, ungroomed, mutty terrier to bear.