He finishes his tea and gets up to go, saying he has a class to teach, but Nathan remains at the table. Sirine notices he’s wearing his big camera on a strap slung around his neck and his overstuffed book bag takes up the chair next to him. He puts his camera on top of the bag next to him. Then he changes his mind and puts it on the table.
In the afternoons, Nadia’s Café tends to be a place for students; the faculty usually go home to wives and families. Each time a professor appears, a current runs through the café. The students get interested. And it seems that through his association with the faculty, some of this mystique has rubbed off on Nathan as well. The students glance at him. Abdullah, a stem-thin young engineering major from Yemen, gazes at Nathan’s camera, and Gharb and Jenoob, new students from Egypt, try unsuccessfully to draw Nathan into an argument about the legality of taxes.
Sirine finishes deskewering six plates of lamb shish kabobs and three plates of chicken, drizzling oil over ground beef and hummus, over smoky puréed eggplant, over a bowl of olives, and splashing four tabbouleh salads with lemon. She wipes down the counter, then leans against it, looking at Nathan.
“Nice camera,” she says
His gray eyes swing up to hers, then move quickly away. “Yes,” he says. “Isn’t it?” He holds it up lovingly in both hands. “Want to see it?”
She shows him her hands, which are glistening with onion juice and garlic skin. “Thanks, but…” she says.
His gaze is still and direct and terribly serious, his expression intent and overheated. Then he looks back at his coffee, stirring it left-handed and pouring in sugar with his right. “I have some new prints I just made up. Perhaps you’d like to see,” he says casually. He pulls a folder out of his book bag and slides a photograph out of the folder. It’s big as a sheet of typing paper, glossy and muted, snowy-gray tones, and it takes her a moment to register what it is: an image of Sirine and Han standing just inches apart, their faces shining, slightly out of focus; they look like they’re moments from kissing, but they’re both holding plates and plastic wineglasses. Sirine wipes off her hands carefully and takes the photograph by its edges. She thinks for a moment that the paper feels warm like the coil on a range, the sensation sparking through her body. It is such a sweet image: as if someone had managed to take a photograph of the moment of love, a prismatic mist caught shimmering in midair between them. “Oh my,” she says. Then looks up at him. “When was this? I don’t even remember this.”
He shrugs, modest and embarrassed. “I hope you don’t mind. I don’t ask for permission—I mean, I can’t. My photos sort of come over me, it’s like, when the spirit takes me. I see something and then, that’s it, I’ve got to get that shot.” His eyes glow behind his glasses. He touches the photo. “This one was at the reception for Aziz. You were just standing there talking and I was sort of hidden in the crowd. And you both looked so—well, like this…” He gestures toward their images. “As you can see. But I mean, I don’t mean to intrude—if you don’t like it—” he adds hastily, reaching for it.
“I love it,” she says, holding it closer. She feels a pang of discomfort that their personal lives should be so public—so seeable—but then it seems that this must be more a result of Nathan’s ability—that he sees what others can’t, like a doctor or a priest—someone you trust to be blasé and professional about intimate information.
“You do? Honestly?” His lips are pale, his eyes lowered, his lashes dense as pieces of felt.
The door jingles open just then and Han comes in. Nathan quickly slips the photograph out of Sirine’s finger’s and back into his bag. When he looks up, his eyes seem to take on light and depth, as if this were just who he’d been waiting to see. He lifts his book bag in Han’s direction. “I developed some old rolls of film today and there’s some prints I thought you might like….”
Han smiles at Sirine as if Nathan were their private joke, but Sirine looks at the bag, her curiosity snagged despite herself. “Please,” she says.
Nathan carefully withdraws another folder, swings it open, and spreads a number of large black and white prints over the table. The images are charming and graceful: men with long rifles, long swords, fringed, elaborately wrapped headdresses. There are backdrops of sweeping white valleys, photos of older men with peaked faces, younger men with fine, triangular cheekbones.
“God,” Han breaths, sifting through the prints. “Look at these.” He picks up a shot of a lonely, long-shadowed caravan across a watery horizon of dunes. “These are the Iraqi desert tribes, aren’t they? Bedouin.”
“Exactly, exactly,” Nathan says. “There may be a few of the marsh Arabs in here as well. Maybe some Kurds.”
Han picks up a shot of a solitary laughing man, one hand in his lap, the handle of his scimitar pressed against his chest, the whitest teeth inside a dust-dark face. “These faces,” he says softly.
And Sirine is struck as well by the steady, patient gaze of these subjects, as if they’d spent lifetimes watching the horizons, as if distance and time were built into their very bodies. She admires a shot of camels, their disdainful, intelligent faces.
“You’ve really captured something here, I think,” Han says. “It’s remarkable.”
Nathan looks down, pleased and seemingly a bit disoriented by the praise. Han turns the photo of the laughing man. “This could practically be the brother of our well-keeper—Abu-Najmeh. He had this same kind of laugh—that took up all of his face. And he always put his hand like this, over his heart, like he was taking a vow.” Han looks at Nathan. “Did you live with these people?”
Nathan gazes into the black eye of his coffee cup, shakes his head. “Only visited. I traveled all over Iraq but I kept moving. The more I saw, the more I wanted to see. Until I finally stopped in Baghdad for a while.” He glances at Sirine.
Han shuffles through more prints and stops on one of mountains filled with folding cloud shadows. “Here,” he says. “This landscape?” He shows it to Sirine. “I loved this place.”
Nathan nods. “Oh, the Masrah Valley.”
“My father has family there. We used to go visit them in the spring. I can almost smell it,” Han says. “The air smells like dry caves and roasting weeds and bones.”
“And salt and olives and coffee,” Nathan says. “And the air is white dust.” Nathan gathers up the prints and slides the folder to Han. “Please, I want you to have these.”
Han hesitates and glances at Sirine.
“It’s nothing,” Nathan says. “I have the negatives. There are plenty more where these came from. Please.”
Sirine looks away; she pulls another print from the folder and stares at it in surprise. It’s a city scene: a brash swipe of neon across twilight, carpets hanging from towering windows, arches and keyhole doors, streaks of cars and motorbikes, stacked-up apartments, a scribble of Arabic and English, people cutting between cars, a boy carrying a silver tray, everything looks soot-stained, tilted, dizzying. A crazy place: she holds it with the edges pressed into her fingertips as if it might catch on fire. It tugs at her, makes her feel she is falling forward, as if, if she held it a moment longer, she would tumble onto that gray asphalt.
Han glances over. “What are you looking—”
Nathan notices. “Oh, I’m always getting my pictures mixed up, that’s Baghdad.” He starts to pull it out of her fingers when he stops and looks up, frowning. “Sirine, is there…smoke?”
She finally looks away from the photo and realizes there’s a dark curl of something burning seeping from the back kitchen. She shoves back her chair and bangs through the swinging door. It’s the big cauldron of rice—she’d left it on a low flame and forgotten about it. Now the back kitchen is filling with smoke and the top of the rice pot is a streaming black cloud.
Sirine hefts it off the stove and hurries out into the back courtyard, hoping that Victor hasn’t gotten around to replacing the café’s sprinkler system batteries. Um-Nadia, Mireille, and Victor are all standing around in the
back smoking. They squint at her as she lugs the cauldron down the steps and sets it on the slate tiles. “I thought I smelled something,” Mireille says.
Victor lifts the lid and waves at the great wash of smoke with it. “Whoa,” he says. “Somebody burned the rice.”
“You burned the rice?” Um-Nadia asks; she looks astonished, even excited. “You never burn the rice.”
Sirine rubs her forehead. “What a mess. What a mess.”
“You never burn the rice,” Um-Nadia says again, now openly smiling. “What an interesting thing to do.”
By the time Sirine goes back into the kitchen, Nathan has left and Han tells her he has to get to class. After he leaves, she notices something is propped beside the grill. It’s the photo that Nathan took of her and Han, one of its edges singed from its proximity to the heat; she can smell the burnt paper. On the other side of the photograph there’s an address and a notation that says simply, “Nathan’s studio.”
Khoorosh the grocer is sitting at a table eating lunch. He looks up from his plate of stuffed cabbage and gestures with his fork. “That American boy left that for you,” he says. “He is a little disordered, I am here to tell you. Sometimes he comes to the Victory and takes pictures of stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?” Sirine asks.
Khoorosh wipes off his big mustache in two swipes with his napkin. “Crazy stuff. Boxes of tissues, baby food, celery. He makes me too nervous. I said he’d feel better if he ate some food instead of making pictures of it.”
“How weird.”
“He’s one of these types, likes to argue, asks a million opinions—how do I feel about this president, that dictator, Shah versus Ayatollah, Iranian Jews, Iraqi Jews, Palestinian Christians, Muslims in Hollywood—I don’t know what,” he says, waving it away with one hand.
Sirine looks at the door. “What do you say?”
He takes a big bite of cabbage and shrugs. “I say I’m a small businessman. I don’t have time for politics, I don’t have the money, I don’t have the energy, and I don’t have the special interest. Plus, I enjoy most of the people in the world just fine.”
“Well, then. Lucky for us,” Sirine says to him, leaning on the counter.
He grins at her, spears the last forkful of stuffed cabbage, holds it in midair, and says intensely, “You, I love.”
She spends the rest of the day with her elbows tucked to her sides, barely looking up from the food or the stove. The dizzy picture keeps coming back to her, tugging at her thoughts: Baghdad. She never wants to go anywhere, she thinks. She never wants to leave her home.
But that night when work is over, she goes back to Han’s apartment again.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Aunt Camille, Sir Richard Burton, Mrs. Sir Richard Burton, and a dozen or two carriers, trackers, runners, guides, and all-around helpers crossed the shifty, brassy Sinai into Mother Africa, made a left at Cairo, and accidentally took the long way down the Nile. Burton made a better translator than explorer and a better party-thrower than translator. But you know how some people are, they’re good at one thing so they think they must be good at everything.
They followed the sparkling, sprawling water into places where it turned into spun silver and milk. But it’s strange the way these water names worked—the Blue Nile doesn’t look blue and the White Nile isn’t white, and you might not think the Dead Sea has much personality but it bites and scratches the minute you get in and leaves a crust all over you if you don’t take your shower.
Anyway. Finally, they headed toward the source of the Nile—Lake Nyanza or Tana or Albert or Tanganyika—also called Victoria—depending on which direction you’re coming from and whose villages you’re pillaging. But does the river care about the names of its sources? Even the Lebanese can’t make up their minds to be Arabs, since some Phoenicians were in the neighborhood two thousand years ago.
Nevertheless, they came to a crossroads, at which point there was a tremendous mishkila about which lake was the truest source of the Nile. Sir Richard argued for the largest source and the Missus argued for the oldest, but Aunt Camille was looking for the soul of the river. Eventually she decided—as these decisions are so often made—not according to science or history, but according to the dictates of the innermost voice. She would go to the lake with the most elegant name, the word that unfolded like the layers of begonias—Tanganyika, the same lake that was also named after a mustached and sour-faced old English queen. Tanganyika/Victoria would be the best of both worlds, she thought, North and South, Africans and colonists, chickens and eggs, and so forth.
So that is where they took her, to the steep green bank of Lake Tanganyika. The water spread itself out like a ball gown before her; it unscrolled its deep green waters, fish hung suspended in its currents like bits of jade and topaz. They left her alone there, with one young African bearer and one jackal-eared dog, and eventually the bearer realized that no one was really watching him and he slipped away into the cracks of the jungle. Which was fine with Aunt Camille. That night the water looked languid and bottomless, specks of light bobbed on its surface like metal scales. She saw things out of the corners of her eyes and heard things out of the corners of her ears and she unfurled her Hariz carpet and slept full-length under every star in the sky, crickets chiming all night long.
The rest of the story is hearsay and conjecture, but this is what she reported: she was awakened early the next morning by a voice like a bell in the back of her mind. The air was filled with a shimmering curtain of insect buzz and the voice came like threads of honey looped over a bowl of milk. “I am guardian of the Nile,” the voice reportedly said. “And I hear you’re looking for me.”
Sirine bicycles to Han’s apartment that evening. She’s worn out from work, her mind soft. Nathan’s photograph of the two of them is in an envelope in the basket attached to her handlebars. She sees a bar of light under his door and knocks quietly. He opens the door, breaks into a wide smile. “Sirine,” he says, as if he hasn’t seen her in years. “I missed you last night.” He circles her with his arms and hums something with the rising and falling of Arabic music, and they move around the living room floor—not quite a dance, but more than a shuffle. They laugh and turn over the beige carpet, past the stacks of books, pages and pages of notes, pencils, index cards, pads. She sees things in swipes—coffee rings on papers, rumpled shirts, loose socks. The orderly, precise room of their first date is gone. They dance around open books, open music cassettes, a few plates covered with crumbs, coffee cups stuck to saucers, over a couple of crumpled student papers, and finally into the bedroom.
She’s all giddy laughter. A tiny voice in her head warns her that she should just slow down for a moment—try to get her bearings. But instead she lets him pull her on top of him as he falls back on the bed, the two of them rolling around each other like rolling together down a hill. He holds her close and they start kissing so deeply she can barely catch her breath; colored lights flash behind her eyes. Han tugs at his shirt, ignoring the buttons, lifting it straight over his head. She hikes her skirt around her hips and skims her panties off. She climbs on top of Han but then he flips her and lifts her hips, entering her from above, their lovemaking intense and silent, the giddiness spilling away. When she comes, she closes her eyes and feels again as if she is flying forward through the length of her body. Then they make love again, barely resting in between. They make love too many times until both of them feel burnt and half-skinned. She inhales the scent on the inside of his neck and inside his hair. The smell of salt. They rub their feet against each other, kiss and shift around and can’t find a place to put their arms. She is buzzing with her desire, from their stream of kisses, from the exotic night in a still-strange room, the two-horned moon framed in the balcony door, tipped and waiting like a goblet to be filled. And when they finally fall asleep it is like falling into a well, echoing, bottomless, and dark.
Later, Sirine wakes in the early morning fog again and she is holding Han’s han
d. The clock radio says it’s already five-thirty and she has no sense of having slept at all. She gets up to go to the bathroom and the fog is like a gauze against the dark windows. She sees the books, the letter opener, some opal prayer beads with a silver tassel, but the photograph of Han and the boy and young woman is gone; oddly only the empty silver frame remains.
Han is awake when she comes back, waiting for her. He opens his arms, reaching for her. “Come back to bed.”
“I can’t. I really have to get going. I’ve been getting to work too late.” But then she climbs back into the warm bed and lays her head against his chest, combs her fingers through the curling hair.
“Ya elbi, ya hayati,” he murmurs.
“What is that?”
“Elbi means ‘my heart,’ hayati means ‘my life.’ Ya eyeni, ‘my eyes.’” The words shimmer over her. “Say more,” she says.
“Ya wardi, ‘my flower,’ ya thahabi, ‘my treasure….’” It is like a litany of body parts, pieces of the earth and air and things physical and metaphysical—my rose, my seventh heaven, my fig tree, my gold, my senses—as if everything were tied together inside this love-talk.
“It’s like a poem,” she says, strumming his chest with her hand. “It sounds more like love in Arabic.”
“Than in English? Oh, I don’t know about that. Romeo and Juliet came from England. Though they’re Italian in the story.” He yawns luxuriously, skims one hand over her hair. “The Americans would say you’re ethnocentric.”
Sirine laughs. “What would the Arabs say?”
“Probably that you’re right.” His eyes ripple over her. “My American Queen of Sheba.” She draws her fingertips down slowly over his face and he closes his eyes for a moment. “Sometimes I look at you and feel that I’m free-falling,” he says, then opens his eyes. “Like falling out of the tops of trees or something.”
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