Crescent

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  She walks around his small bedroom, naked and bleary-eyed, feeling like she’s awakened into someone else’s dream. There are objects scattered around: a few books inscribed with gold Arabic calligraphy, a glass bottle filled with colored sands, a string of beads, a folded-up square of silk, a brass letter opener, and beside this, a photograph in a silver frame: a younger Han beside a boy and young woman, each of them with the same nut-brown skin, chestnut-colored eyes. They look happy and complete and Sirine feels a vague jealousy over their apparent ownership of each other. She tries to remember if Han said he had a sister. She replaces the picture carefully beside the letter opener.

  Drowsy, she is about to return to the warm cave of his arms and chest, but she pauses for a moment, listening. Did she just hear something? She stands in the doorway that faces out to the balcony and sees how the cardamom-scented fog is everywhere in the streets, as if it rose from the breath of dreamers inside the streets of houses.

  She turns to go back to bed but then a glint of something catches her eye. And she turns and it cannot be, but the darkness and the fog create the illusion of a gargoyle face peering into the window, as if someone were crouching in a corner of the balcony, watching.

  She catches her breath. But she knows this must be a mirage, part of a dream. She closes her eyes and moves backward, slowly and carefully, until her leg touches the edge of the bed; she lowers herself in and lies there for a while, waiting for her mind to settle, telling herself, it’s nothing, there’s no one out there. She pulls the covers up tight around her neck crawls in close to Han, and, after much turning and resettling, gradually falls back to sleep.

  When she wakes again the fog has vanished and it is morning. Han grinds coffee in a heavy copper grinder, stirs tea full of mint and sugar, and cuts up chunks of cheese, ripe tomatoes, and cream-colored avocados for their breakfast. After eating, they drive to Santa Monica and walk through the early postcard-blue streets. The sun at dawn is already roasting the sky, clouds melted down to ribs and fish bones, the palm trees glistening with heat. Sirine and Han stroll past businesspeople, students, café workers, and tourists, a blur of movement.

  Then a little boy with wide brown eyes and silky eyelashes says, “Look at them, Mommy.” His mother hushes him, grabbing his hand. Sirine glances at Han’s hand, the perfect, coffee-colored skin against her own whiteness.

  The sun is too hot, so they move into the shade and find a building open at the edge of the park, the senior center. It’s shadowy relief inside but a crinkled man in a wheelchair glides toward them over the dim, waxed floors.

  “Center’s closed,” he says. They start to go and he glides closer. “Unless it was the camera obscura you came to see? The key’s on the shelf, you can just go on up, then.”

  They look at each other, turn, and start to climb the squeaking stairs. The air is close and feels heavy with must or mildew like a closet that’s been shut up for too long. At the top they enter an unlit paneled chamber, and at the center of the room is a large, colorful disk covering the surface of a round table. It looks like a painting, but Sirine realizes the disk is full of moving light. “It’s some kind of periscope image,” Han says. He reaches over and turns the camera mechanism and the panorama swirls across the table. “Look, this is a projection from the street outside, close to the building.”

  Sirine strolls around the big table: it is full of the images of moving cars, strolling tourists, rising seagulls. “Wild.” She imagines the room filled with old people from the senior center, all of them crouched over the table, watching people on the streets. “It’s a spy camera,” she says. “This is better than watching TV. You can see what the neighbors are up to.”

  “How interesting,” Han says. “No one would ever suspect all those senior citizens were hidden in here spying on everyone. Not to mention that this contraption came from the Muslims.”

  “This camera thing?”

  Han turns the periscope some more, studying the image. “A first-century physicist, Al-Hazen from Baghdad—he dreamed up the camera obscura.”

  She smiles slyly. “Did he envision it being in the top floor of a senior center?” Glancing down, she notices among the projected images on the tabletop what looks like a single immobile figure in the center of all the activity, a man’s form, seeming somehow to be staring from his place on the table directly at her. “Look at that,” she says, pointing.

  Han squints and the images shimmer for a moment and refocus and he is looking just beyond the point where the man had been standing to an empty park bench facing the ocean. The man is gone. “Look at what?” he says. “What did you see?”

  “I thought—I don’t know—it’s too weird.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’ve been seeing things lately.” She puts her hand over the spot where she thought she saw the man and the images move over her fingers.

  Han insists they walk outside to the place—she remembers the bench, a certain stand of tiger lilies—but the man is gone. Or was never there in the first place. She looks back toward the senior center and now she sees it—the rotating camera obscura, perched on the rooftop under its own little peaked roof, almost invisible.

  “Just because he isn’t still here doesn’t mean he wasn’t there in the first place,” Han says gallantly. “In fact, that’s probably exactly what it does mean.”

  “My uncle says it’s the Arab disease. Where you keep thinking the C.I.A. is following you around.”

  “Having anyone follow me around tends to make me nervous.”

  She glances at him and for some reason she says, “Nathan does. I mean—follow you around.”

  “Let’s see,” Han says, amused. “Could Nathan be C.I.A.? He wears those tight glasses and he’s always staring at people and taking pictures. But on the other hand, he’s also totally loyal—his Arabic is surprisingly good—he even knows the village slang. He’s certainly the hardest-working student I’ve ever seen. And I think basically he’s pure of heart.” He sits on the slatted park bench and holds one hand out to Sirine. She sits, sliding inside the crook of his arm. The park is situated high above the beach and they watch the waves spinning in and out. She is taken with Han’s phrase, “pure of heart,” and thinks to ask what he means by this, but she hesitates and instead she says, “I’d love to be able to speak Arabic.” She leans back, the sun warm on her face and shoulders.

  He looks pleased, his chin dipping toward his chest. “Really? You’d want to learn? It’s a tough language to pick up.”

  She smiles and shrugs. She grew up around Arabic conversations and she feels the presence of Arabic somewhere behind her mind, like a ghost language—crisp, clear, and ocean-blank. And she feels guilty that she can’t speak it.

  “You’re not really fluent in a language until it’s pretty much invisible to you,” Han says. “When I translate, I deal with words as conscious things. You stare at the pages and you know what everything means, in both languages, and you wonder how on earth to make both languages—with all their history and innuendos—mean the same thing.”

  “When you put it like that, it sounds sort of impossible.”

  He rubs his palm over his forehead a moment. “Trying to translate Hemingway into Arabic is like trying to translate a bird into a river. Not only do you have to translate the words, you also have to try and translate the feelings and ideas for all kinds of things from one culture to another—like what faith or courage is.”

  “I barely know what those things are in the first place.”

  Han smiles and looks away, makes a little sound.

  “What?”

  “I was thinking of myself when I was ten years old. How I could never have fathomed something like this. That someday I’d be sitting in a place like this, with a woman like you.”

  Sirine tries to imagine Han as a ten-year-old boy, which she finds is a bit difficult—there is some aspect of him that strikes her as eternally adult. Then she thinks of the photograph she found in his room—the y
ounger Han standing beside a child and a young woman. “Where are the rest of your family?” she asks.

  He doesn’t answer right away. She waits, watching the water. The Santa Monica waves are soft and undulant, lacy with foam. Finally he says, “My mother’s side of the family are in Nasra—in southern Iraq. My father’s sister Dalal lives in the north. I have some other relatives who’re scattered around the Middle East and Central America since the Gulf War. And my mother and brother are all still in Baghdad.”

  She waits a beat, thinking, and then says, “And your sister?”

  As soon as she asks that, she thinks she sees something happen inside Han, an infinitesimally small but distinct sensation, as if a tiny internal organ had collapsed. But he only shakes his head and says, “She’s there, in Iraq with the others.” Then he says, “Okay, now you tell me—where is your family?”

  Sirine holds out her hand. “Here. That’s it—my dad and uncle were originally from Iraq but I don’t know where exactly. My mom’s from Santa Barbara—you know, California—and I don’t know her side of the family. My parents are both dead, I don’t have any brothers or sisters. It’s all pretty much just been me and my uncle for a long time.”

  He lifts his hand from her shoulder, touches her loose hair, and looks at her thoughtfully. “Which is why you’ll never leave L.A., isn’t it?” he says.

  She starts to protest, then hesitates. She glances over Han’s head and notices the camera obscura rotating under its peaked cap on the building top. The wind rises and shakes the rosebushes and kicks up some sandy dust. “I guess I’m always looking for my home, a little bit. I mean, even though I live here, I have this feeling that my real home is somewhere else somehow.”

  He shades his eyes with the V of his open hand and for a moment she can’t read his expression. “What makes a place feel like home for you, then?”

  “Work,” she says. “Work is home.”

  “How American of you,” he says, smiling. “And is work family as well?”

  She looks at him a second. “It might be.”

  His breath is light and transparent against her brow. He doesn’t say anything. They watch the creep of the far gray water and Sirine listens to the deep two-part pulse in Han’s chest. Then she feels him take a breath. “There is something else I think I haven’t mentioned,” he says softly. “About my brother.”

  “Yes?”

  A flurry of wishcatcher seedpods float through the air, touch his hair. He clears his throat and sits forward. Whatever is in his mind pinches his temples; his eyes lower. He runs the back of his hand over his forehead. She waits, staring at his shoulder blade; she has a rising sense of pressure, like fingertips pushing in against her sternum. “You don’t have to tell me.” Her voice is very quiet.

  “He’s my younger brother,” Han says slowly. “His name is Arif. I haven’t seen him—or my parents, for that matter—in over twenty years.”

  “You haven’t been back in twenty years?”

  “I escaped to England not long after Saddam Hussein came to power.”

  “That must’ve been terrifying.”

  He smiles vaguely. “It sounds more interesting than it was. Basically I had a scholarship and no easy way to get to England. Arif was only twelve years old when I left the country, but he’d already begun working, in the grand Iraqi tradition, on overthrowing the leadership—reading and writing mainly subversive poetry—if you can imagine.”

  “I think my uncle writes some of that. There’s lots of rhymes?”

  “That’s it—rhymes and bold pronouncements.” He grins broadly. “I set a bad example. He’s almost ten years younger—and he got the idea that I was some sort of daring revolutionary gone into exile. I wanted him to leave the country when he still had the chance, but he refused to go. He said he had his work,” Han says, rolling his eyes. “He was arrested and imprisoned before his thirteenth birthday. That was twenty-one years ago. And I can’t return to help him.”

  Her breath feels high and tight in her chest. “Why not?”

  “Mm. Why not.” He weaves his fingers together, a sort of half-prayer. “There are many why-nots in Iraq. It’s a tricky place for Iraqi men—there’s the army, jail, torture, hangings. I’m wanted by the government for dodging army duty. For one. There are plenty of other aggravating factors.” Han stares at his praying fingers. “The ruler is famous for his ruthlessness. When his sons-in-law returned to Iraq after breaking out of the country without permission, Saddam’s idea of mercy was allowing them to apologize for escaping before having them executed. If Arif is still alive…” he pauses. “If Arif is still alive, it might make things worse for him if I reentered the country. But then again, perhaps not. Perhaps it wouldn’t make any difference at all. That’s part of what makes this so painful. The frustration. And just not knowing.” He studies Sirine’s face again with his meticulous gaze. Then he folds his hands under his chin. “How can I talk about it? I don’t even know how to think about it. And now I’ve probably frightened you with all this drama and intrigue.”

  “Oh, I don’t scare that easy,” she says casually, but she isn’t so sure. It’s so hard for Sirine to imagine—the threats, the imprisoned brother—as they recline in that creamy Santa Monica air. “They would kill you?” she asks. She slides her hand over his; she has no intention of letting him go anywhere. “For real?”

  Han ticks back his head—the sad, Arab gesture. The one her uncle has taught her means something like, aren’t you listening? His expression seems a sort of surrender: the loss of a thing that he has already lost before. He looks away.

  More questions sift through her mind. But then a sleek black bird perches in the palm just over their heads, yelling at them, and Sirine realizes it’s gotten late. The sun is up and the insects in the trees around them hiss like steam kettles. Sirine will be late to work and Mireille will make the coffee, which will put everyone in a bad mood. She looks through the grove of wandering palm fronds, the trunks crosshatched and speckled like gray flannel. A movement in the trees startles her. For a moment she thinks she sees a young man’s face, nutmeg skin and clove-black hair; he is moving through the trees, watching over his shoulder and running away from them. But he is far away now, a dot of light between the trees, so far away he might as well not have existed.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  At the stylish home of Sir Richard Burton, the air was full of tiger-striped hornets and bees dangling their gold-pollened legs, and the sky was full of dark blue storms. Aunt Camille had been sleeping and waking and meditating on her Hariz carpet on the side lawn, sometimes joined by a jackal-eared dog named Napoleon-Was-Here. She was waiting for Burton’s help in locating her naughty missing son Abdelrahman Salahadin, and at the same time she was in the midst of becoming Burton’s unwitting muse and collaborator—a muse, of course, being the ultimate collaborator. She was such a bad slave that she’d come out the other end of her total indifference and emerged as a kind of royalty. All the household waited on her—the servants, the foreign scholars and students, the English explorers, and even Burton himself—bringing her glasses of tea and plates of German butter cookies. Camille had performed a much greater service for Burton than any raft of slaves with feather dusters. Burton was writing about an ancient queen of Baghdad, the famous storyteller of the Arabian Nights, Shaharazad, but Camille had been the one to show Burton who Shaharazad might have been, with her patience on the lawn, her indomitable throat, her steely wrists, her supine spine. She demonstrated the height of physical beauty itself: fifty-nine years old, sleeping in the outdoors, the morning long and white as an eyelid, her waking form slicing through his sense of the possible. She woke his imagination and lit his consciousness like a torch.

  Burton fell in love with her, even though he was as married as a man can be. But who doesn’t fall in love with the wrong one every now and then? The point is that Mrs. Richard Burton, who was by now used to everything—gypsy tribes, worm infestations, wandering in dust storms—this sam
e Mrs. Richard Burton was having some trouble acclimating to Queen Shaharazad sleeping on the lawn. “And who is she again?” she asked her husband as he gazed longingly and lyrically at the not-quite-naked figure in his imagination. “A slave,” he murmured.

  “A slave. Yes. Whose slave exactly?”

  “Well, she’s our slave, dear. Presumably.”

  “Ours. Presumably. But she serves no one. Correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “And—not to put too fine a point upon it, but…what does she want?” And seeing Sir Richard’s blank face, Mrs. Sir Richard decided it was time to go to the lawn and look into things.

  Did Camille tell her? Sirine asks.

  My dear, apparently you have not been adequately briefed in how to listen to a story. You have to let the story come to you, you cannot fling yourself upon it. So. To make a long chapter much shorter than it should be for Sirine-with-her-watch: yes, Aunt Camille said to Mrs. Sir Richard, “I want to be taken to the source of the Nile. My payment will be that I will release your husband from his enchantment.”

  Now, Sir Richard was not too sure he wanted to be released—as imprisoned people always get confused about whether they actually want to get out of their chains. Luckily, his wife was more clearheaded about the whole situation. She called for the African guides.

  On the day they left, the sun was a yellow silk ribbon; they had helpers and carriers, lifters and toters, and one jackal-eared dog with glistening black eyes. “Napoleon-Was-Here!” they called for the dog. “Come!”

  Han begins to come to Nadia’s Café regularly: Sirine makes him dinners after everyone else has left and watches him eat, pleased and shy, as he praises her and tells her over and over, this is his favorite meal. They go for walks in the evening or out to the movies, and she goes home with him twice, then three times in a row, forgetting to call her uncle and tell him that she will be out. But when she calls to apologize on a fourth night away, he says, “I already know, Habeebti.”