She and Han stay up late in the evenings talking. Han puts aside his books and papers, and they sit spooned together on the carpet in the furnitureless room and try to tell each other, in bits and pieces, who they are and where they come from. Han tells her about the foods they ate in Iraq, the clothes they wore, the animals and plants and winds and rocks of his home. He tells her these things in a plain, matter-of-fact voice, as if it is all something that he’s shed long ago, simple artifacts he looks back on with almost no feeling. And then Sirine tries to conjure up her childhood in Los Angeles for him with a similar flux of minor detail: the smell of her classroom, her wool skirts and knee socks, the way she wore her hair in braids, barrettes, ponytails, trying to find a way to smooth it down, make it shiny, straight, and neat. But she finds that she struggles to remember these things, and that certain memories—from the early time before her parents’ death—are especially difficult to recollect.
One night early in October, after they have been seeing each other for four weeks and Sirine has stayed with Han for four nights in a row, she decides that she misses her uncle’s house. She calls and tells Han that she won’t be coming home with him that evening. Then she rides her bike home from work, following the narrow swath of her light through the dense, sugary darkness, the crosshatching of headlights everywhere, and fingers of palm leaves arched over the sidewalk, some moss-soft or stiff as straw and serrated. Edges and holes seem to open up in front of her and shapes loom out of the shadows, aqueous and mutable as fish beneath the water. She whirs past Han’s apartment, tires clicking, but, from the outside, cannot quite tell which window is his.
Now it seems the night is filled with shadowy forms floating out from somewhere inside of her—chaotic and full of longing. She hears scratching in the bushes, voices between the buildings, the city rings with noise, everyone is talking.
Her uncle’s bedroom door is still and shut. She moves past it quietly. King Babar is sleeping in the middle of her bed with a smile on his face—dreaming of eating ants. He opens his eyes when she comes in, following her every move. Sirine opens the windows in her room. With all of her and Han’s talk of lost homes and family she is afraid of dreaming about her parents; she can feel it waiting to unfold inside her. That particular dream. She drapes one arm along the windowpane and wishes she could dream it now, with her eyes open and the night lit up with stars and streetlights, the sky like blue shale and no ghost bodies waiting in the closet.
She doesn’t want to think about Han, but now it seems she can’t help it; he’s already taken over her thoughts, invaded her head. She is caught in his new light, a sea glow that clings to her like swimming in a phosphorescent tide. Han. She feels his name in her mouth. Then she thinks about the covered woman in his classroom, the lovely oval of her face like a rare orchid, and Sirine’s heart rate seems to increase. She imagines her lover with his alabaster eyes, an ivory scarf wound around his head and mouth, disguising him, a fiery dust enfolding him as he fights for an extinct empire. Then she thinks of him, alone in his dusty, windowless office, the corridors filled with charming girls—many of them Arabs, like himself—educated, enchanting, each of them, it seems, with more of a claim on Han than herself.
She detects traces of Han’s scent on her clothes and in the air. She climbs into bed and drifts through the sheets, and Han’s voice is like a river running through the room. She has never felt this way about a man before—her American boyfriends seemed much easier to possess. Now her desire has spread alarmingly, like a jinn flowing out of its bottle.
The air in her bedroom is hot and powder-dry. It hangs over her bed and dusts the ceiling. Mosquitoes drift through her open window like ghosts. The palms along the street give off their high, clean scent, and there’s another scent in the air—smoky and earthy, like leaves burning deep in a forest clearing.
She can see King Babar curled in his spot at the foot of the bed, watching her in his usual anxious, vaguely troubled way. His eyes glitter and his exquisite black nose reflects a spot of light. She cannot sleep. She misses Han. She closes her eyes and an image surfaces in the dark: Han, a young woman, a boy; nutmeg skin, clove-colored eyes.
A breeze picks up and roams around in the curtains. She opens her eyes and thinks she sees a lizard on the ceiling over the bed. She watches it for a moment, then closes her eyes and another memory surfaces: white scalloped edges, black and white, a young woman in a plaid dress, white ankle socks, a round pale face—her mother.
Sirine gets out of bed again, goes downstairs to the abandoned-living-room, as her uncle calls it, and locates the heavy photo album on the bottom shelf of the tall bookcase. She slides out the huge album—swollen twice its size with photos—and decides she will take it and walk down to the tiny Italian café, La Dolce Vita, four blocks down the street. The café is lit only with candle stubs stuck in wine bottles, so it perpetually appears to be closed, but Sirine has always found it open, no matter what time she’s come.
It’s a warm, shimmering night and a few elderly Italian customers in black coats sit at the crooked tables set up on the sidewalk. The single waiter—straight-backed, correct Eustavio—bows, kisses her once on each cheek and says, “Ciao, Maestra,” then goes to get her a milky cappuccino—the drink that he’d decided years ago to serve her.
Sirine scoots herself into one of the four minute wrought-iron tables, her knees banging the iron legs, and she swings open the album so it covers the whole tabletop. Tucked between the pages are pressed flower petals, old letters, a crayon drawing that Sirine made in first grade of her mother, father, and uncle all holding hands, their hair colored in carrot-orange and their eyes all sea-green. The stiff album pages are covered with black pasted-in corners that anchor the edges of the photographs. The photos are black and white, and Sirine’s parents are skinny, grinning like kids. A breeze blows her mother’s skirt up and her hair forward as she sits on a driftwood log on the beach at Catalina Island. In another, she and Sirine’s father lean together inside an archway cut out of one of the giant redwoods. In another, her much-younger uncle is cavorting, turning a sort of failed cartwheel on the front lawn of their old apartment building, the name of the complex done in iron scrolls visible in one corner, the Avalon. It was painted pink. She thinks she remembers that building. Or maybe she only remembers the photograph. Pictures of unknown friends, long-legged, laughing, spilling glasses of drinks, lounging in nylon beach chairs on the grass. Some of these people were in the Red Cross with her parents. She wishes she knew what their names were. She turns the pages and then she is there, wrapped tight in a blanket, a furze of white hair like a star on her head, her tiny face crinkled up, her fingers curling around her mother’s index finger. Sirine brings her face very close to the images, studying them.
“Ah, the midnight photo album,” her uncle says from over her shoulder. He sits across from her at the table, his knees banging into the iron legs. “It’s that time again.”
She grins at him. “You knew I was here?
He shrugs. “Makes sense.”
Eustavio hurries over, kissing her uncle and greeting him in Italian.
“Sì, sì, sì,” her uncle says, the only Italian he knows.
“Uncle, where in Iraq is our family from?” There’s a photo of her father sitting with his feet crossed on a desk covered with stacks of papers, a bemused expression on his face.
“The midnight Iraq conversation,” her uncle says. “Haven’t I told you before? I could have sworn I did, but maybe not….”
“Please, just tell me again?”
“Oh, we were from some little old place. It was called Bab el Shaikh—the Sheikh’s Door—like it?”
“You never talk about it. You never talk about Iraq at all.”
He holds up his hands. “I’m a sentimentalist. Everything touches my tender heart. When you’re a sentimentalist such things resist being talked about.”
A photo: her parents, arms around each other, her mother’s round skirt flying out in a
whirl.
Sirine ticks her fingers against her cup. “Why is that?”
“It means talking about the difference between then and now, and that’s often a sad thing. And immigrants are always a bit sad right from the start anyways. Nobody warns you when you leave town what’s about to happen to your brains. And then some immigrants are sadder than others. And there’s all kinds of reasons why, but the big one is that you can’t go back. For example, the Iraq your father and I came from doesn’t exist anymore. It’s a new, scary place. When your old house doesn’t exist anymore, that makes things sadder in general.”
Eustavio brings them plates of dewy, rose-scented penne cotta. “Wouldn’t you say that immigrants are sadder than other people?” her uncle asks the waiter.
Eustavio straightens up and closes his eyes. He answers Sirine’s uncle in Italian, then he says to Sirine in his accented English, “Sadness? Certo! When we leave our home we fall in love with our sadness.”
Sirine’s uncle nods as Eustavio walks away. “You see,” he says.
Sirine draws her spoon through the thick banks of foam on her coffee. “What was it like? In your hometown?”
He thinks it over a bit. “I’d say pretty much same as here. But small. And no movies. Dry and hot in the summer. Wet and cold in winter. Nothing much going on. There was a vegetable market where they kept the best tomatoes in back. A little white school, wooden desks. Everyone was always getting into everyone else’s business, I remember that. Nobody owned much of anything, no cars or TVs. We had some donkeys. Your father and I, we enjoyed rock-throwing wars with the kids who lived up the hill.”
“Han’s brother was arrested and he’s still in prison,” Sirine blurts out. “Han says he can never go back again.”
A photo of Sirine at two, sitting in a blow-up wading pool, one of her bathing suit straps slipped off her shoulder.
Her uncle stares at her, closes his eyes. Finally he rubs his fingertips over his eyes. “Oh no. Terrible. Yes, now, that, you see—that place is a different Iraq you’re talking about. Different from the one that I and your father grew up in. I’m so sorry for Han.” He presses his knuckles against his mouth and thinks for a moment. “Is there that picture of the two of us? When we first got here, we used to be skinny as Frank Sinatra used to be.”
Sirine finds it: knobby elbows, spindly necks, knobby knees, their pants hang two inches above their ankles, their arms thrown across each other’s shoulders. “We grew the biggest mustaches we could. We were pretty sure that would make the girls go ape.”
Sirine traces one finger over the photograph; touches her father’s mustache.
“Habeebti,” her uncle says, his voice curls around her head like a wisp of smoke. “What’s got you all jumpy? Is Han scaring you? All those stories of his?”
“Oh no—” She starts to shake her head. Yes.
“I think we’re all safe over here, my dear. Why look for Saddam Hussein in the broom closet?”
Sirine folds her arms over her chest.
“Habeebti,” her uncle says, “you can do this fine. Your uncle is the scaredy-cat in the family—your father wasn’t. He was brave. You can tell just by looking at him. Look at that mustache! Nothing frightened him. He would go anywhere…. He fell in love with your mother like jumping into the lake.”
Sirine looks at the photograph, the dim faces, and she wishes she could remember what her father’s voice sounded like. She thinks it might have sounded like her uncle’s voice. She takes a bite of the custardy penne cotta and it melts into a dozen separate flavors. She can smell oranges and lemons, cherry and wood, and even the soft silk and wool of Persian carpets, the smell that she thought came from Iraq.
Back at home, Sirine falls asleep on the living room floor, the big photo album under her head like a pillow. Her uncle drapes a blanket over her, and King Babar tucks himself up tightly beside her. She dozes and her dreaming shades into remembering, a bit of memory spinning above her head, unraveling, as it often does, into a thing that she thought she’d forgotten.
Perhaps she was four. The little girl might have been the same age as Sirine, and Sirine stared at her through the glass eye of the TV screen. The screen was round and curved. When the TV first arrived, Sirine thought it was a fish bowl and she was disappointed when they turned the light on and people were inside.
But she grew to like seeing the people too. She looked at the little girl on the TV. She touched the glass of the screen and electric sounds crackled against her hand. “What is her name?” Sirine asked.
“I don’t know,” her uncle said. “Perhaps it is Meena?”
“Yes,” Sirine said. “It probably is.”
The little girl looked at Sirine. Sirine could tell she was seeing her. Her eyes were shaped that way. Even though the TV was black and white, she could see the little girl’s color. She pressed her wrist against the little girl’s face to see the difference between them better. “Look,” she said. “She’s colored-in. Like Baba.”
“Yes, like your baba.”
Sirine sat about eight inches from the TV and put her finger in her mouth. The little girl had a swollen belly and there were flies crawling at the edges of her eyes. Sirine wanted to ask about these things but she didn’t. Then a big word was there and her uncle said the big word was Bangladesh. “Mama and Baba,” Sirine said.
“Yes, Habeebti,” her uncle said. That is what they all called Sirine, Habeebti. My dearest. “That’s where they are.”
“Do they know Meena?”
“Difficult to say. We’ll have to ask them when they get back,” her uncle said.
When they turned off the TV, the little girl turned into a tiny point of starlight in the center of the screen. Sirine put her finger over it.
Later, Sirine and her uncle sat on the Hard Couch and watched the news. The news had two serious men and their names were Huntley-and-Brinkley. And their music before the news was frightening and loud and it ran through Sirine’s body like rain. After that, there was a show about Perry Mason and his music was long shadows.
But when they listened to the loud music and looked at the serious men, Sirine knew they were looking for her parents. Her parents were always in the places that the men talked about. And even though she never saw her Mama or Baba on the TV, she knew they were inside of the box, somewhere.
CHAPTER TWELVE
So Aunt Camille makes ready to set off on her trip to the Nile. But this raises an interesting point—namely, that a trip is never just a trip and a place is never just a place. In some Arab countries, if someone talks about Malta, well, they’re talking about the far side of the moon. If something is so beautiful that you can’t bear it, you say it’s sent you to the Garden of Paradise. If you claim that you’re willing to travel to the source of the Nile, then you’re actually saying that you will wait forever and a day for what you want. And people who’ve fallen madly in love? They say they’ve moved to Baghdad.
The morning at the café is bright as chrome, jangling into Sirine’s nerves, so deeply hot: the peculiar sort of late autumn Angeles heat that smells of bone meal, lime, and dust, clothes baked dry on the lines, seaweed and ocean salt dried and hanging like a high-water mark in the air; even the roar of airplanes seems lower, soaked into the heat like the sound of rising temperatures. If her dreams came, they left her clear and scoured out by morning—she remembers nothing. She had awakened with a crease in her cheek from the photo album that she’d dragged into the bed, King Babar sitting at her feet, watching her with his jealous, liquid eyes.
She starts the coffee for the café breakfast crowd, inhaling the rich aroma: usually this scent is a comfort, but somehow today it is a small knot under her chest. She goes to the back kitchen and pauses in the doorway, looking out onto the courtyard: the sky is filled with arrowhead clouds, streaks of cobalt and powder-blue, a whiskery wind.
Mireille is doing her chin-tightening facial exercises in the mirror of the open bathroom door. She has drawn cat-eye edges at th
e corners of her eyes with liner. Victor Hernandez is wiping plates and looking at Mireille in his usual way—a little heartsick and lost. Sirine should be chopping tomatoes but instead she steps out on the back porch, nursing a peculiar and delicious loneliness. She sits down on the cool back step. Um-Nadia comes out with a pot of coffee and a cup and sits down next to her. “What are you thinking and thinking of, Habeebti?”
Sirine rests her chin in her hands and stares at the flowering bougainvillea with its bold sprays of colors. “What do they call that again, the crazy woman tree?”
“The mejnoona. Love-crazy.”
All morning Sirine winds the bread dough in and out of itself, spins cabbage leaves, fat and silky, around rice and currents. She puts new ingredients in a salad, a frill of nuts, fresh herbs, dried fruit. Um-Nadia samples her salad, which tastes of ocean and beach grass, and she seems startled. “It’s so good,” she murmurs.
Sirine hums and stirs. She sifts through bags of wild rice. While Victor rushes around, assembling the usual plates of hummus and tabbouleh, she makes a mustard out of crushed grapes, a cake with lashings of cinnamon and pepper.
That afternoon, Nathan and her uncle come in and he is telling Nathan about the seven kinds of smiles: “There’s also the Smile Through Tears, which is up and down, when you’re trying to be noble; the Innocent Dog Smile, when there’s something to hide; the Pretty Face Smile, for when you want everyone to admire you….”
Sirine starts to pour some tea, but Nathan shakes his head.
“Nathan’s an excellent chaperone,” her uncle says. “He listens. Much of the time.” She brings her uncle a plate of ma’mul cookies stuffed with dates. Her uncle holds up one cookie, “Look at this. Arabs will stuff anything—a tomato, a cabbage leaf, a cookie. Both the medieval cookery manuals—the Cookery Book of al-Baghdadi and the Kitab al-Wusla Ila’L-Habib, also known as the Book of the Link with the Beloved—contain recipes for savory eggplants stuffed with meat. Did you know that Shakespeare’s favorite food was stuffed eggplant? And there’s some who say that Shakespeare’s name was actually Sheikh Zubayr.” Her uncle waves at Nathan. “There’s a nice thesis topic for you.”
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