Crescent

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  She puts her knife down and props her chin on her palm. “Why did you say before that you’re made of powder?”

  He nods. “You remembered that?” He closes his eyes. He is quiet long enough that she thinks he won’t answer her, but then he says, “Have you ever—have you ever been so in love with someone that it just takes everything out of you? Where you can’t think or move or eat or anything, just carry this big, crazy love around?”

  She looks back at her grape leaf. “Well…” she says slowly. “I don’t guess I ever have, really. Not like that.”

  He doesn’t say anything for a moment, and when she looks back up, he’s gazing at her. “I thought there was something about you…like that. Self-possessed. You’ve never let it run away with you. I understand that. It’s a kind of innocence, I think. I used to be that way, but going to Iraq shook me loose from who I was. The deep, wild strangeness of the place. The way the air smelled like dust and herbs, the strange slant of the sun. I couldn’t help myself. I fell in love with a girl there, I almost think I had to—I was so wide open to everything.” He exhales. “When I did—I’d honestly never felt such a thing before. It was like a heaviness that weighed down every part of me, it was so much inside me, in my blood and bones. It pressed on my head and my arms. I’d always thought love made you feel light, but this was exactly the opposite. It was the heaviest thing.”

  She laughs without meaning to. “It sounds sort of awful,” she says.

  He gazes at her. “There’s something about you, really, that reminds me so much…” He barely touches the side of her nose and cheek. “Right here. This place. It’s like her. And around your eyes too, just under the eyebrows….”

  She ducks her head.

  He smiles. “Do I sound strange? I don’t have any perspective. At the time, I let it take me away.” He tips back in his chair. “I knew it was too much, but I didn’t care. It was something that just stripped me clean. I felt pulverized. Like a new man. I loved everything about her and I didn’t care about anything else. I loved her wrists and her laugh and her shoes and her teeth. I was so happy I even stopped taking photographs. I was sure I would feel that way, absolutely and completely, for the rest of my life.” Nathan rubs his palms over the top of his short-cropped hair. “I don’t know if you can understand this. I grew up half-wild. My parents divorced when I was a kid and all I knew about families was what I learned from watching other people. I went into the Middle East without any idea of who I was—there was no needle on my compass, you know? But the people in Iraq—this sounds dumb and romantic—but the thing is, they really seemed to know who they were. They dressed the way their grandparents dressed, they ate the way they’ve eaten for hundreds of years. And they were so alive—I mean, lots of them didn’t have TV or telephones, but everyone talked about politics, art, religion, you name it. They were living under a dictatorship but their inner selves stayed alive—do you see?”

  Sirine nods, but she feels his words skimming over her skin. She concentrates on each grape leaf, working and listening.

  “And when I met this woman—you know it was just an accident—but she was like true north to me. When I first saw her in the market it was like I was seeing the truest thing in the world. I would have done anything for her. I remember—she had this long wild hair like yours. She would tie it up in her scarf and every day, by the end of the day, it would all be fallen down around her shoulders again. She used to say, ‘I want to be a good Muslim but my hair won’t let me.’ Then she’d laugh like it was all just funny. She had the most beautiful, beautiful laugh. It rose and fell like music.” He takes off his glasses and stares at the ceiling. “I’m sorry. I know I’m talking too much. It’s been a long time since I’ve talked about any of it.”

  “And you couldn’t sleep.” Sirine smiles at him. “It sounds like it was a great thing.”

  Nathan lowers his face and replaces his glasses, hooking them around his ears. “Oh. Well. There’re always complications, aren’t there? An Arab girl, a Muslim, an Iraqi. And an American, failed-Episcopalian boy.”

  She begins trimming another grape leaf. “That doesn’t have to mean anything.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know. But for us, it made everything so difficult—to be together.”

  “Different sorts of people get together all the time.”

  “Yes, but then she died.”

  “Oh.” Sirine looks back up at him. And now she can see it—the dark crystal, the shards of black glass inside him—she should have seen this in him right from the start. “I’m so sorry,” she whispers. She can hear her own breath. She wants to ask how. But now she feels she’s said too much as it is. She puts down the knife again.

  “That’s when I turned into powder.” He sprinkles his fingers through the air. “Poof.”

  She stares at her knife and wishes she were smarter about things. Wishes she knew how to say something wise or consoling to him, something that wouldn’t sound frightened or awkward. But then she remembers the time after her parents’ death, when people would approach her and try to explain her loss to her; they said things that were supposed to cure her of her sadness, but that had no effect at all. And she knew then, even when she was nine years old, that there was no wise or consoling thing to say. There were only certain helpful kinds of silences, and some were better than others.

  But Nathan doesn’t seem to expect anything. He stands and stretches and looks as if he’s just finished saying everything he would say. He goes to the door, his hand flat against the screen, then he pushes through and goes down the two steps. He pauses and returns, now both palms floating on the screen. He stares at her a moment. “Save me some grape leaves, okay?” he says.

  Sirine stares at the door; he’s so hard to see, his shadow flickering back and forth. “Nathan? Wait a second. Don’t go—”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Nathan?” She puts down the knife and goes to open the door. But when she opens it he’s gone.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The sailboat tips and sways in the deep ocean water. Abdelrahman clutches his heart and the Covered Man, who is now an Uncovered Woman, holds up one hand. Naked to the elbows, her arms are transparencies, her waist casts no shadow. “Your reputation, Abdelrahman Salahadin, precedes you,” she says. “Since the day of his disappearance, I have hired swimmers and sailors in hopes of recovering my husband, all to no avail. The years have spilt like oil, and the men tell me there will be nothing left of him but bones.” She lifts her diaphanous hands. “I thought, oh Abdelrahman, that if any man could see through the flesh of the ocean, look into the duplicitous minds of the fish, it would be you, famed above all swimmers, a man who has drowned and returned a thousand times a thousand! And yet…”

  Abdelrahman tries to still his heart, strains to hear what fruit might be dangling off the slender branch of “and yet.” The ocean sighs, full of night, and far off, from one of the distant poles of evening, he hears a sound like Satan crying for his lost world. “And…yet…?”

  She says, “And yet…today I have discovered that what I thought was love has become nothing but bones, and what I thought was memory is nothing more than ashes. From the first moment I saw you, oh Abdelrahman, in the marketplace, my soul has seized upon you.”

  Abdelrahman feels the sweep of a hundred emotions, the scorch of invisible wings! He tries to speak but can only laugh, the laugh of the doomed. The muscles in his swimmer’s back flex as he moves to embrace the beloved, she who has reeducated him in both the strength and the fearfulness of desire. He walks forward into the dark boat.

  But there is nowhere to go. Because it seems to him that the floor has melted, the railing has shattered, and once Abdelrahman starts falling he cannot stop. But was that the trace of her fingers on his skin? Was that the sweetness of her eyes closing in love? And was that the jealous voice of the ocean shouting his name as the Abdelrahman falls, swiftly, ungracefully, indubitably, in?

  He spins in the dead black
air of the sea and the last thing he sees through the opaque surface is the face of the beloved crying…or is she laughing? And then a crowd of mixed butterflies, merry and inexplicable this far from shore, flutters over the surface of the water.

  And he tumbles, lost in the dark sea, love fixed like a great hook in his side. Abdelrahman has been stripped of his powers by the force of love. The earth rotates and the ocean opens its infinite catacombs, its underground dominion of bones, and lets Abdelrahman Salahadin in.

  Sirine wakes that morning feeling haunted, stirred up by her late conversation with Nathan. She feels as if her own spirit had risen in the night, separate and darkly liquid, barely contained by her body. It’s an old, familiar, and uncomfortable feeling. To soothe herself, she thinks of certain heroines from her uncle’s stories—warrior women presented with unsolvable fatal riddles. These women conquer palaces and armies, break spells of silence and paralysis, confound sphinxes and jinns, know the seven types of smile, and in the end, just after solving the riddle, they drop their masks, their husband’s clothing, their weapons, their pens, and they are simply themselves again. Sirine wants to be this sort of woman and she lets them inspire her but then she worries that she does not have their cleverness or stamina.

  King Babar, however, has no interest in Sirine’s waking moods. To him, the world is as it is: pure happiness, as long as he can be with the one he loves. He waits for the delicate vibrations of consciousness in the room and then leaps in bed beside Sirine. She kisses him on his purplish muzzle and then dresses.

  She hears voices on her way out of the bathroom: one—murmurous, rising and ebbing—is her uncle’s, one—clever and sly—sounds like Aziz. They are talking inside her uncle’s library and as she enters, the pungent scent of cardamom and coffee is revolving in the air. It seems to emanate from the Persian rugs and the spines of unread books as well as from the bronze coffeepot at the center of the table.

  “Hello, Habeebti,” her uncle says. “You remember our famous poet friend.”

  She crosses her arms and grins at Aziz. “You don’t seem like the early-riser type to me.”

  Aziz is lounging in the overstuffed velvet chair by the fireplace—which her uncle calls his too-easy chair. Sirine notes that he has a large plate piled with her gh’rayba sugar cookies in front of him. “It’s not early, it’s just very very very very late. I haven’t been to bed yet. I plan to go home after this midnight snack and sleep until dinnertime.”

  “Aziz was just now illustrating how Middle Eastern politics are an endless enigma.”

  “I’ve never known when to shut up,” Aziz says. “I thought writing poetry would teach me that, but I’m a miserable case.”

  “Join the club,” her uncle says. “The Miserable Case Club.”

  “Oh yes, that club,” Sirine says. She pours herself a demitasse of the coffee and sits beside their chairs on the Naugahyde couch. “What happened?”

  “Well, nothing actually happened,” Aziz says. “This is university life we’re talking about.”

  Her uncle nods and fingers the gilt edge of the porcelain cup.

  “I very nicely and sweetly told a woman in my Arabic poetry class that she had to stop saying that contemporary Islam is a woman-hater religion. At least in class she does.”

  “You did? So then what did she say?”

  “She didn’t say anything at first. But she did throw a pen at me. And then she said I was trying to oppress her. Me! Aziz! And here I am, the world’s biggest feminist and lover of women!”

  “Not necessarily the same thing.” Her uncle reaches to Aziz’s plate and knocks a little sugar off a powdery gh’raybah cookie. “Apparently our dear poet here mixed up some ideas about religion and poetry in the classroom.”

  “I merely pointed out that there’s a tradition of Islamic poetry which uses the notion of the ideal womanly lover as a tribute to divine love. In other words, sexy love poetry that’s actually about heaven. And vice versa.” He makes a cutting motion with the flat of his hand. “I’m innocent,” he says.

  “Innocent as a yellow monkey,” her uncle says. He and Aziz look at each other. Aziz rolls back in his velvet chair with a laugh that’s half-roar and half-wheeze.

  “I’m not a professor!” Aziz says. “I never claimed to be! Someone read my little book and called me up and told me to come here and say things to the students. Half the time I don’t know what I’m saying. I throw out some thoughts and then hope one or two of them sticks. It’s all words to me. When I sit to write I just want to make things clean and clear. Like looking through windows.”

  “Poor Aziz,” her uncle murmurs. “Always cleaning the windows.”

  “Are you Muslim?” Sirine asks.

  He shrugs. “Who knows? I am Aziz, I am large, I contain multitudes. I defy classification. And it just seems to me like Islam has a hard enough time in this country. So, okay, it is the patriarchy and the oppressor and ten million other things besides. That’s what religion is supposed to be! But how are the Americans in my class going to learn anything about anything with this woman yelling like a terrorist?”

  “Well,” her uncle says, “if this poetry-class woman—”

  “Rana,” says Aziz.

  “Rana? She is Arab?” her uncle says.

  Aziz puts up his hands. “I don’t know what she could be.”

  “Well, if this Rana-something really had faith in her convictions, then she shouldn’t let something like one little poet get her exercised.”

  “No one’s tying her down,” Aziz says grumpily. He eats another cookie, then shakes his finger at Sirine. “Yes, yes,” he says. “You understand me. Anyone who can make these cookies understands me. It’s uncanny how that works. Most women know the true Aziz. I’ve always sensed that. They see something deep inside of me. You do, don’t you? Don’t be modest, you read me like a book.”

  “Maybe like a brochure,” her uncle says.

  Sirine shrugs but feels flattered that a famous poet would think she understood him. Aziz gets to his feet, takes Sirine’s hand, and bows at the waist until he’s almost perpendicular to the floor. He closes his eyes and kisses her hand so tenderly it seems she can feel a trickle of warmth beneath her skin.

  Her uncle reaches over from his chair, grabs the back of Aziz’s shirt, and tugs him back into his chair.

  “You do understand,” Aziz says after he plunks back down. His grape-black eyes look liquid. “You have redeemed me and I must think how to repay you.”

  “Oh, now,” Sirine says and tries to look demure by smiling at her knees. She notices a little kiss-print in powdered sugar on the back of her hand.

  “Truly,” her uncle says to Aziz. “In fact, we beg you, no thanks are required.”

  But Aziz merely winks at Sirine and bites into a cookie.

  It’s slow at the café so Um-Nadia sends Mireille and Sirine out to the Wednesday afternoon farmer’s market in Westwood. The two women comb the tables and stalls full of gleaming tomatoes, black-eyed sunflowers, pomegranates full of blood-red seeds. The air smells like burst fruit. Heat rolls in across the neighborhoods, emptying the streets, rippling above the cars. The two women fill bags with knobs and globes of squashes and another bag with garlic and another bag with cucumbers.

  “Best walnuts in town,” a tanned young farmhand tells Sirine and Mireille. “They’re fresh, perfect, and they taste like butter.”

  Sirine cocks an eyebrow. “At these prices? They better.”

  He smiles, his teeth impossibly white. “Hey, you gotta pay for the good stuff.”

  Mireille bats her eyes at him. She’s wearing her mother’s false eyelashes today and they wobble a bit. “We’ll take two pounds,” she says archly.

  After they get the bag and walk off, Mireille nudges Sirine and says, “I’ve got an idea, let’s go sit in on Han’s class.”

  Sirine’s stops and looks up the street to the lip of the campus. “Oh, now,” she says. “I don’t know. I mean, for one thing I don’t know if
he’d want us to do that.”

  “Sure he would! Isn’t he teaching today?” Mireille asks. “Let’s go up there and watch him. Don’t you want to know what kind of a teacher he is?”

  Mireille is forty-two, two and a half years older than Sirine, but she can never remember what age she claims to be, so she’s apt to tell people she’s anywhere between twenty-six and thirty-five. She likes to spend her tips on beauty treatments—facials, pedicures, makeovers—waxes her eyebrows into surprised arcs, and cuts the plastic surgery ads from the paper, preparing for the day, she says, when she’s brave enough to get a face-lift. She does half-pushups on the counters in the back kitchen whenever she remembers to.

  Sirine hesitates but, as usual, Mireille is able to talk her into doing something she isn’t sure she wants to do. The two of them walk up toward the massive campus. Sirine is always surprised by the crowds of students, how lively and free-spirited they seem, and what a world apart the campus is. Sirine and Mireille go into the Languages Building where her uncle also teaches, and they stroll through the corridors; most of the classroom doors are closed, the sounds of teaching muted and watery. But then Sirine thinks she hears the edge of Han’s voice around the corner. For a moment she nearly panics, feeling conspicuous and a bit like a spy. But then Mireille grins and pulls her toward Han’s voice. Sirine follows, her palms sweat-cool and heart bouncing, and he’s there. The door of the classroom is open a crack and she can see Han standing at the other end of the classroom. She’s so startled to see him she can hardly believe he doesn’t look right up at them.

  “Come on, let’s go in,” Mireille whispers.

  Sirine wants to but something holds her back. She feels forward and undignified; she is also caught off guard by the sight of his gracefulness in the classroom. He looks so complete, so perfectly at ease as he teaches—the way she feels when she cooks—that she doesn’t want to disturb him.