Crescent

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  “Let me repeat, we felt, upon our first meeting, that we recognized each other,” says the Covered Man. “We felt we had existed together even before our bodies were born. We were inseparable from the moment of our union. There was nothing, I tell you, nothing to prepare me for that day when my dear one discovered the sea and ran away over the sand.”

  For some minutes there is little sound but that of the waves giving up their light and the night spilling into the ocean. Abdelrahman Salahadin and the Covered Man are eclipsed and the wind is full of darkness. His hand tightens on the thin lip of the boat. Then he thinks that he might be afraid of the water at night. The muscles in his back tighten, and perspiration breaks along his temples.

  “What happened when your beloved ran into the water?” Abdelrahman asks, his head turned away.

  The Covered Man says, “What happened was the inevitable. As you know, all things are foreordained by God, and all things are foretold within the perfect symmetry of His eye.

  “We made our encampment on the cusp of the beach. Most of the Bedu were too frightened to go near the water. They slept with their backs to the sea. My mate, however, sat with both feet in its path. After thirty days of trading in town, it was time to go. But my beloved refused, wanting the bright arms of the waves. I told the Bedu to go on, that we would catch up to them later. They tried to convince me to come with them. My beloved, they said, had been claimed by the sea. They said I was no longer married to a human being but to a thing with a floating root like a jellyfish.

  “How is one meant to leave behind the object of one’s love? I waved goodbye to my compatriots and slept alone on the beach with only the sand for my pillow. I slept facing the ocean as a lonely lover sleeps facing the door through which their dear one has left.

  “My beloved no longer came back from playing in the waves. Day and night intertwined and on occasion I could see a flash of a shoulder between the waves. Then one day I woke from a dream in which we had kissed as we once used to do, and in that dream my mate touched my face and then said, let me go.

  “I woke and scanned the horizon of water, shouting a name, but it was like shouting into the emptiness between the stars. And I knew then that I had lost my husband forever.”

  At that, the Covered Man pushes back his wrappings, and—did you already guess it? The he is a she! She stands quickly, a tremor running through the nut-brown hull. And though it is in the very belly of the night, the dial of the zodiac turns above them and Sagittarius’s arrow ignites her brow; her beauty flashes before Abdelrahman, blinding him. “I’m sorry to have disguised my identity,” she says, “but I could see no other way.”

  Abdelrahman gropes for the railing but the very floorboards have melted beneath his feet. Nothing in the world is as he thought it was. “Ya Allah,” he breathes. Oh God.

  “Where is she?” Um-Nadia cries out. “Where is that Queen of Sheba?”

  Sirine is yawning. It was quite late when she finally walked out of Han’s big dark car and into her house, too late for her uncle to get up and start asking questions. That night, Sirine had strings of erotic dreams, dream-flesh in her hands, her unknown partners’ eyes were closed, their lashes shining black as figs, their legs scissored between hers. When birds began arguing in the trees, she woke, filled with the sense that she’d spent the whole night kissing Han. Now she scrapes up grease like layers of skin and listens to the buzz of students’ conversations all around her. She smiles to herself and doesn’t talk to anyone. She goes downstairs and rummages through the freezer in the basement, listening to Um-Nadia come in, pace over her head, and call out, “Hello, Queen? Where are you?”

  Finally she walks back up carrying a bushel of onions. Mireille is making a shopping list, tapping on a cigarette. “You must’ve had a good night. Mom’s already calling you the Queen of Sheba.”

  Um-Nadia and Mireille have watched Sirine get coupled and uncoupled many times while the two of them stayed steadfastly single. No one can remember what happened to Um-Nadia’s husband or if there was ever a man in Mireille’s life. They’ve been on their own for years. But each time Sirine acquires a new lover, it seems that Um-Nadia can look at her and see it, or read it in the coffee grounds, or wake in the morning feeling it in her bones.

  “It’s so exciting, this man. If this was the time of Salah al-Din, Han would be a famous general,” Um-Nadia tells the police officers as she brings them their puréed beans and bread. “He would be in charge of you both. And Sirine would be his Cleopatra. Or his Queen of Sheba. Also in charge of you.”

  They raise their eyebrows skeptically.

  She turns and catches sight of Sirine’s face as she comes up behind her. “What?”

  “Could I talk to you a minute?” Sirine says. “Out back.”

  They go through the back kitchen, past Mireille and Victor, who are continuing their discussion about whether or not men are animals, and out into the courtyard.

  “So here we are,” Um-Nadia says. “All private.”

  Sirine pushes a strand of hair back and tucks it under her hair band. “Han and I barely know each other. I have no idea where this is going to go. It’s too soon for Antony and Cleopatra.”

  Um-Nadia’s pointed black eyes flicker, as if she were reading something written on Sirine’s face. “What’s wrong with true love?”

  Sirine blinks. “Well, as an idea, nothing.”

  Um-Nadia folds her arms under her bosom and sighs heavily. “Okay, Habeebti, all right. Listen to me, let me advise you in this, there’s no mystery—I could have any man I wanted out there, you know, any second I wanted.” She snaps her fingers. “Like this! Look at the way your uncle is always hanging and hanging around. That’s no accident. The fact is that there are certain special ways that women have always gotten their men: through cooking, through acts of love, through pleasing the mother, through making a nice baby. What it is up to the woman to do—if she doesn’t know it by smell and instinct—is to learn her man up and down, front to back. You have to pay attention, Habeebti. He will show himself. He is like a fish, you already have him by the tail, but he’s slippery, he doesn’t want to jump out of your hands but he might not be able to stop himself. You need to grab him by the head too.”

  “I’m supposed to grab Han by the head?”

  “That is what you will be paying attention to see, Habeebti,” she says gently. “Oh, Habeebti, you know that you are another daughter to me?”

  Almost everyone at Nadia’s Café, from the students to the work staff, knows that Um-Nadia’s important daughter Nadia (because “Um-Nadia” means Mother-of-Nadia, so everyone will know you’re a mother) is not, as she says, actually living far away in Dearborn, which, to some, is the heaven-on-earth for Arabs in America, with its Lebanese bakeries and daily broadcast of the call to prayers. They know that Bint Um-Nadia (or, the daughter of the mother of Nadia) died many years ago, but Um-Nadia won’t say the word cancer; sometimes she says Nadia died from “the smoke.” But usually she just says—to strangers and old friends alike—that Nadia is in Dearborn.

  On the day Um-Nadia came into the kitchen at the Café De Venise in Brentwood to steal Sirine from her old job, Sirine could see the will inside Um-Nadia as clear and strong as a physical thing. She pulled off her apron, left behind half-constructed salads with smoked mozzarella, capers, and sun-dried tomatoes, and went back to making the simple and perfect foods of her childhood. In exchange, Um-Nadia sings to Sirine and kisses her hands and tells her she’s pure beauty.

  In the courtyard, Um-Nadia brings her face in close, so Sirine can see the coffee-colored lights in her irises, her mascara-tangled lashes; she smiles broadly and says: “Habeebti, forgive me, I didn’t even see it before—you are so afraid!”

  “No, I’m not,” Sirine says, feeling dull-witted. She takes a step back. “Afraid of what?”

  Um-Nadia claps her hands together, making a pock sound, and bright orange and turquoise birds flap out of the trees. “But that’s a good sign—it’s a
wonderful sign, the best of signs.”

  Sirine’s throat feels tight. She glares at the white tiles paving the courtyard, following their intricate designs. “I am definitely not afraid,” she says.

  Um-Nadia runs one hand over Sirine’s braid tenderly. “But that feeling will go away in time. You must be patient a little bit. Like they say in the old song, even the birds wait for love. There is a time,” Um-Nadia says, lifting one finger like an exclamation point, “when things go out of tune. It’s not all the time. It’s not even a lot of the time. But it is some of the time. And then you have to deal with it all. Everything comes out wrong. You dream about goats and monkeys. People start to look at things wrong. Maybe you think the world looks squashed and flat. Maybe you get stones in the bulgur and you burn the smoked wheat.”

  Sirine sits slowly on the lowest step; Um-Nadia settles beside her.

  “My daughter Nadia”—the lifted finger again—“she got herself tangled in one of these knots. That child was pure gold—do you know what I mean by pure gold? I mean every speck of her was all the way alive. But she started to go into one of these wrong times. You want to protect your children, don’t you? You let them out of your body but you never let them all of the way out. Nadia started to look at things the wrong way, it was like she was trying to drink the water in a mirage. I tried to bring her water. I would bring her fresh, clear water in my own hands if she would let me, but do you think she would let me?”

  Sirine touches Um-Nadia’s hand. Her skin is airy and light as a wish.

  Um-Nadia shakes her head as if disagreeing with some unspoken argument. Her fingers close around Sirine’s. “So warm! Your blood is overheated. I think you’re getting yourself worked up.” Um-Nadia purses her lips and slivers her eyes. She taps her lips with one finger and then she says, “There’s love-crazy and then there’s just plain love. If your parents were alive they would have showed you how to be in love. But you’ve only got your poor idiot uncle, so you’ve got to learn it all by yourself.”

  Mireille swings into the kitchen. “We’re out of tabbouleh salad!”

  Sirine starts to rise, but Um-Nadia waves her down. “Never mind,” she says to Mireille. “Make do. Cut a tomato.”

  “A tomato!” Mireille bangs back out the door, indignant.

  “Where was I? Yes! Look at your Han. His face fills a woman up. I hope you don’t mind me saying that,” she adds coyly. “And he has the kind of nice big spirit that men used to come with. Now they have to buy them or make them up. But there are other concerns.”

  “About Han? What do you mean?”

  Um-Nadia waves her hands, palms up before her as if shining a window. “I look and then I look again. I see Arab men come here from far away all the time. They all come to me because we make something like a home in this country. It helps. And most of them stay.” She raises her eyebrows. “But lots of them go.”

  “That’s natural,” Sirine says.

  Um-Nadia closes her eyes and shakes her head. “The world is full of shadows and X rays and things are upside down when we think they’re right ways up. Men especially get confused. Like the husband of my friend Munira—did I tell you about her? She’s the one who found out her husband had a secret extra family back in Lebanon. It’s classic. Men lose track of where they are. They miss their mother and father and sister. They don’t know how to carry their homes inside themselves.” She looks closely at Sirine. “You need to know how to do that.”

  Sirine wraps her arms over her chest, leans back so she feels the edge of the wooden step pressing into her.

  Um-Nadia points with her chin and says, “Let’s pour you some coffee, Habeebti. Then I’ll read your cup.”

  Sirine shakes her head. “No, I don’t like that. I don’t want to know.”

  Mireille bangs back into the kitchen. “We’re out of tomatoes! Shall I serve leaves and twigs?”

  Um-Nadia raises her eyebrows at Mireille. “Use your creativity.”

  Sirine touches the brightly flowering bush beside the steps, runs her hands over the petals. “I just think it’s too soon for all this. I don’t feel right. I feel like I’m getting sick or something.”

  “Yes…yes!” Um-Nadia stands up in her teetery little shoes “You feel like this.” She breaks some flowers from the tree and shakes them at Sirine so the petals scatter wildly. Then she pulls some jasmine blossoms from the next plant, crushes them in her hand, and holds them to Sirine’s nose. Sirine’s head fills with the damp, sweet scent. “You feel like this smells. That’s how it works. That’s exactly how fast it is. Never mind one kiss.” She throws the blossoms into the bushes. “Less than one second is all it takes.” Um-Nadia puts her hands on her hips and nods knowingly. “You never knew what love felt like before.”

  By ten that night the customers have all gone. Um-Nadia counts the money in the register and Mireille checks her shopping list. Cristobal and Victor Hernandez clean and swab. On warm nights they all move back and forth from lingering at the tables outside, chatting with a few straggling customers, to the work inside, and then back out again. Um-Nadia leans against the doorjamb sharing a cigarette with Nathan, contemplating the white night and the masses of papery bougainvillea flowers growing in a patch outside her door. “Movie-star flowers,” she murmurs. “Mejnoona.”

  It is Sirine’s favorite time, when the night turns black as bitter chocolate and the stars pop out. Han walks up just after closing and Sirine can hear their voices out front—Han’s is soft and rich, and Um-Nadia is so excited and flirtatious that she’s practically singing. She ceremoniously ushers Han in through the back kitchen, delivering him to Sirine. While the others are lingering out front, Sirine stands with Han at the back door. She has just finished making a tray of kibbeh and she wipes morsels of the raw spiced ground lamb from her fingers. They laugh and flirt and whisper to each other words so quiet no one can hear them.

  Sirine smiles and shyly trails a finger down the front of his shirt. “I have to work late tonight,” she says.

  “Are you sure?” He cocks his head and she laughs and nods and then nods again. He touches her hair then and strolls backward for a few steps before turning into the night.

  She stays after all the others have gone home. She doesn’t turn the lights on but works by the moon and the streetlights and by touch, spreading small brined grape leaves flat on the cutting board, slicing out the tiny stems, wrapping the star-spoked leaves around rice and meat. It’s a soothing task she likes to save for the solitary meditations of evening: her first chance to think over the night before in Han’s apartment, which seems already somehow much more important than an ordinary first date. But Um-Nadia’s coaxing makes her anxious and uncomfortable and she senses again that her feelings are rushing away from her, that it’s wiser to pull back a bit, to try and understand who Han is a little better. She sighs and eats a grape leaf straight from the brine, her mouth puckering on its tart, raw taste. The night is so still she half-imagines she can hear the distant music he was playing: now it is ingrained in the faint shush of the breeze as she puts the knifepoint to the leaf. She lets the feeling creep over her until it vibrates under her skin, luxuriating in the sweetness of the recollection. At the same time, she is growing conscious of her fear of the dark. She’s annoyed with the sense of her own weakness and childishness, and she tries to push the fear away. Instead, though, the anxiety tightens around her like a net. She won’t let herself look up at all the creaks and clicks she hears in the old building—sounds that are also there in the daylight, she knows. The prickling moves along her spine, and just when she decides to turn on the lights, she looks up: “Oh my God.” She puts down her knife and presses her hands against her apron, her heart pounding.

  Nathan is standing just outside the screen door.

  “You’re still here,” he says quietly.

  “Oh my God. You startled me.”

  “Sorry, sorry. Didn’t mean to creep up.” He turns his face slightly; through the mesh of the screen hi
s gray eyes look like shadows. “It’s a photographer’s vice, I guess.” He tips his forehead against the screen and looks up at her. “I went home but I couldn’t sleep.” Sirine stares at him. “I thought, just—maybe someone would still be here…maybe want to visit,” he mumbles.

  “Well.” She rubs her fingers over her temples. Then she tries to match the knife back to the leaf but her hand slips and she slices the leaf in two. She sighs. “Well, come in if you want.”

  He pushes through the screen door. “Really, I’m sorry. People tell me I do that. Sometimes I have to remind myself to make noise.” He sits across from her at the table, in one of the uneven-legged chairs, and rocks forward, then back. “You’re stuffing grape leaves.”

  She glances at him. “You know about grape leaves?”

  “I bummed around the Middle East for a couple years. In Jordan. And Iraq.” He rocks some more. “I was studying Arabic—just for the heck of it—and I decided I wanted to photograph the area. Once I started doing that…” He shrugs. “I kind of went crazy over it. I wanted to learn everything I could—the history, the people, the food, whatever….” He clears his throat. “Am I bothering you? Should I just go home?”

  She shakes her head but focuses on rolling the leaf, getting each corner precisely folded. “I thought you didn’t like food.”

  “Now. But then, I used to feel like the closer I was to physical things, the closer I got to the soul.”

  She smiles and looks up, not sure if he’s joking, but instantly sees his seriousness—which makes him so easy for the others to tease. She feels a flicker of guilt and says, “Would you like some baklava?”

  He touches the point of the grape leaf she’s trimming. “A night like tonight, with a big moon outside keeping me up—it makes me sort of sad.”

  She raises her eyebrows.

  “Oh, I’m used to it. What do they say: ‘The cure for sadness is called sadness’?” He laughs at himself. “I look at things and I know—how good it would be to taste your food, what a good thing it is to eat baklava. Enjoy the smells and flavors in a kitchen. But it’s just, there’s not much point anymore.”