She blinks. “How do you mean?”
“How do I…?”
“What about me makes you feel that way?” She feels bold to ask this, to ask in such a direct way. But he has described exactly the thing that she also feels—the sense of plunging, so fast and so far.
He shifts on to his elbows and holds her, holds himself poised over her, looking, his breath stirring in her hair, so quiet and intent on her face that for a moment she thinks he won’t answer. But then he finally says, “You are the place I want to be—you’re the opposite of exile. When I look at you—when I touch you—I feel ease. I feel joy. It’s like you know some sort of secret, Hayati, a key to being alive—to living….” He kisses each of her fingertips, saying, “Right here and here and here and—”
She laughs and says skeptically, “I know that?”
“Partly, it’s in the way you know things. For most people, if they know something in the way that people think they’re supposed to—like owning or capturing it—then I think they don’t really know it at all. But somehow, for some reason, you’re different. You’re able to let the knowing just exist inside of you, or around you, or on the surface of your skin. It’s like knowing how to hold still enough for wild birds to come and sit beside you.”
“And are you the wild bird?”
He smiles slowly.
She remembers something then and tells him to wait a sec. She pulls on his shirt, soft with his aftershave and sweat, and goes to her bicycle, propped up by the living room door. Then she comes back with Nathan’s photograph and hands it to him. “This is for you. You didn’t see this yesterday.”
He turns on the bedside light and stares at the photograph, turns it slightly, marveling. “My God,” he murmurs. “That’s us. Where did this come from? I have no memory of this being taken.”
She nods. “Nathan took it when we weren’t looking. On the day we first met.”
“That devil.” He tilts his head back. “He sneaked up on us?”
“He says he doesn’t ask permission. Does it bother you?” Sirine asks, wondering if she should feel bothered.
He props the photograph against the bedside lamp, gazing at it. “I suppose it should. But it doesn’t. It’s beautiful, the two of us together like that.”
He starts to hand it back but she shakes her head. “Please, you keep it,” she says.
He nods and looks at it for a long moment as if reflecting, then gets up. “And there is something I want to give to you,” he says and goes to his pile of books and picks up his prayer beads and the silk scarf. He hands her the folded scarf. “I want you to have this.”
The material is so soft between her fingers it feels like dipping her hand into water. The material floats and gleams in her lap. She’s a little afraid of it and she doesn’t unfold it. “Thank you,” she says. “But this is—this is too much. I really can’t accept this.”
He curls his hand around the edge of her hair where it falls into her face, draws it back. “Please,” he says intently. “I want you to.”
She smiles, fingering the material. “Where did it come from?”
“They sent it to me after I’d escaped. They wanted me to have a reminder.”
“Of what?”
He gazes at her and she has the impression that he doesn’t know what to tell her. Finally he says, “I never actually had much time with my family. When I was a teenager, I went to boarding school in Cairo. Then when I was twenty-two years old, I left Iraq for good. My parents had very little money to help me get out and it was dangerous for me to leave. But it was dangerous to stay. It was 1980 and Saddam Hussein had declared this terrible war on Iran. I would have been conscripted or imprisoned. Most people were too frightened to try to escape from the country, but they would help me. Everyone helped me escape—my family and friends. People brought money, they charted my route. Abu-Najmeh gave me his short dagger for protection and I ended up using it as a bribe for a soldier who stopped me outside of Baghdad. My friend Sami found a cabdriver who took me forty miles in the middle of the night out into the desert. I had to escape through the desert into Jordan where my family had friends, first in an open jeep crowded with other refugees, and then on horseback with a group of Bedu, and then finally on foot for two days.”
“You crossed the desert on foot,” she says, amazed.
He rubs the back of his neck. “Well, the smallest corner of it. But yes, it was the desert and I was most definitely on foot. I’d been warned by the Bedu that there were armed men everywhere, Saddam’s guards, mercenaries, Kurdish guerrillas, all sorts of soldiers hidden in caves and trees. The sane ones were bribable, but the crazy ones were only half-bribable. I had a few foreign coins that a friend had given me so it would be harder for them to count. I didn’t eat and barely drank for those two days. It was a hundred and ten degrees before noon and freezing at night, and I never knew when a soldier or border guard might appear from anywhere. All I had when I left were the clothes I was wearing and a bottle of water. And this—wrapped around my shoulder, under my shirt.” He holds up the prayer beads so they run between his fingers; they look to Sirine like a necklace made of blue tears. “These misbaha beads were from my father. They’re lapis stones. To help me say my prayers,” he adds. “But I found that my prayers had left me, so I used them to worry on instead. And this was from…” He touches the silk scarf, then frowns as if he can’t quite remember. “This was from my mother. I kept it on my bed in England.”
He slides the shirt off her shoulders, then opens the veil and slowly drapes it across her reclining body; the silk floats over her skin. It is about four feet by four feet, black with faint shifting tones of gray and rose, embroidered along the borders with a precise, intricate design that makes her think of red berries. “This is the traditional pattern of my mother’s village in the south. All the villages have their own design. If you study them, you can figure out where a certain embroidery stitch has come from.” He hands it to her. “She used to wear it over her hair.”
Sirine lifts it and drapes the silk on her head as she has seen the veiled Muslim women do, winding the ends around her neck.
“Yes,” he says. “Just like that, exactly. Ah ha. Now I see an Arab woman in you—an aristocrat, ancient royalty. Here and here…” He touches her eyes and lips. “And here.” He runs his hand along her naked body, then slides it around the cusp of her hip. “It looks exactly right on you.”
“You mean being veiled?” She touches the edge of the scarf against her throat. “Or being naked?” She pulls one edge of the scarf down over her face. “Like this?”
He touches her cheekbone and kisses her softly through the material of the scarf. “Mm-hm. Either/or.”
She fingers one edge, then slides it off. “It’s a beautiful thing. But really—”
“No, please.” He pats the scarf back. “I have my beads.” He holds up his hand so she can see them looped around his fingers. “I have these. But I want you to keep the scarf.”
She wants the scarf but there is also something about it, a vague sense warning her away. “It’s your only memento,” she protests.
“Ya elbi,” he says. My heart. He wraps the scarf around her shoulders and sinks back into the bed beside her. “Look at you, just look. It was made for you. It’s necessary that you keep it.” He ties two corners together. “My mother was wearing this when my father fell in love with her.”
Sirine leans toward him but doesn’t touch him. She needs to face him, the tide of his memory. She touches the veil, then she asks quietly, “Do you miss your family?”
He studies her, his expression quiet and contemplative. “I do and I don’t. It’s hard to get information from Iraq, so few letters get through, and the ones that do are usually so heavily censored that they don’t make much sense. I suppose my brother is still in prison and I hope that he and my mother are still alive. But I have no way of telling for sure. And there’s no way for me to know if I’ll ever see them again.” He pauses. “
I always think about them.”
She can’t help it; she asks, “And your sister?”
He waits, still watching her. And then she feels it again: the sense that the two of them are inside the story together. It feels like something unraveling. Sirine breathes high in her lungs; she and Han are so close together, their arms interwoven. But he doesn’t answer her. Instead he says, “And you, Sirine? Do you miss your parents?”
Her shoulders ache, tensing upward. Light comes through the window in bright spots like clean white sailboats. This is something she never talks about. She looks back at his face and then down into that cracking light, the memory.
Slowly she begins talking. She tells him about her parents’ jobs as relief workers. How they were often away from home, always in the worst places, the most dangerous, war-torn, ruined. She tells about her father’s belief that most of the world’s greatest contemporary problems could be traced to the American obsession with commerce, and her mother’s certainty that Americans were just as devoted to nature, religion, friends, and family as the Arabs were.
She watches Han as she talks. He holds her hand and his eyes follow hers. And her voice doesn’t tremble, so she goes on and tells him about sitting with her uncle and waiting for her parents, watching the news and waiting. She tells about the way she sometimes thought there wasn’t really enough room in her parents’ relationship for her—they were so focused on each other, they traveled together and refused assignments that would split them up: and they left her behind.
“It wasn’t the same thing as crossing the desert,” she says softly. She leans back against the wall behind the bed. “But in a way that’s sort of how it felt. Waiting for them to come home. Looking at the days on my calendar as something to be crossed off, blanked out. I remember asking my uncle almost every morning: ‘Is this the day they come home?’ And he would say things like, ‘Not until the afternoon before the morning of three and a half evenings in a row.’”
Han laughs and strokes her hand. “Your uncle…”
She closes her eyes, feels his fingers run between hers. “I think I wished half my childhood away waiting for them. And then one day I stopped. I got up and made us breakfast and I forgot to ask if this was the day. And it was such a relief that I kept on forgetting. I just stopped waiting. My uncle was the one who would talk to me and read to me—not them. He loved me just the right way.”
Han nods, watching her. “Meaning, he was there,” he says.
“That was the biggest thing. Just that.” She looks past Han’s shoulder to the white, glimmering window. “I even stopped feeling excited when my parents came home. I tried not to show it, but I can remember when I started not wanting to go to my parents’ house when they came back. They’d be gone, sometimes a month, sometimes more—which is forever to a kid. After a while I felt like I barely knew who they were. They were these adults who seemed to think I was supposed to love them. Like I owed them my love.” She lowers her eyes, surprised to feel her face going hot. Her throat tightens, the memory cold beneath her skin. “My mother used to seem…sad—sort of confused, I guess. She’d be so excited to be coming home, she’d be crying as they walked in the door, and she’d squeeze me so hard. And I’d be…just…limp.”
Sirine tells Han: She must have been seven years old when her mother began having her nightmares. Her parents’ first few nights home would be calm, almost uneventful, considering the dramatic things they’d been doing—a month of treating burn victims in India or helping starving women and children in the Sudan. But then there would be a night when Sirine would awaken—at first she wouldn’t even understand what was waking her—her senses befuddled by deep sleep. It was a sound like something tearing the night into two pieces. Sirine would be so frightened she’d be pinned to her bed, paralyzed as if the breath were punched out of her chest. Then the sound of her father’s voice, calling through her mother’s scream: “Sandra! Sandra!” as if he were calling to her from another shore, calling her back home. But she never woke from her screams: sometimes they intensified, and sometimes they dwindled immediately. Sirine’s father would stand in Sirine’s doorway a few minutes later and whisper, “Habeebti?” But for some reason, she would keep her eyes closed, her breath soft and shallow, as if she were frightened or embarrassed to have heard her mother’s cries. In the morning, no one would speak of the screams at all.
When Sirine was nine, the screams stopped but instead she began to hear her mother crying at night. “I can’t bear it,” she heard her saying. “I can’t do this. I can’t do this.”
And her father’s low murmur in answer: “You can, Sandy, you can.” And then one night, when the crying continued, she heard his voice saying, “All right, all right, all right…” A few days later, Sirine’s mother told Sirine they were going to stop traveling. They’d asked to be transferred to office positions in Los Angeles and they would be staying home. With her. They had just one last job away, to help an African village with its rebuilding. Then they would be home for good, she promised, squatting, almost kneeling as she spoke, searching Sirine’s eyes as if asking for forgiveness.
They left and Sirine never saw them again.
Sirine believed that she had wished them out of existing.
“Well,” Han says. He cups her hands carefully, as if she were made of eggshell. “Children think they have these mysterious powers, don’t they?”
Sirine shakes her head. She doesn’t know what she knows: she doesn’t allow herself to think of such things—she hasn’t in years. She tucks her chin in toward her chest and feels the start of a body-deep sliver of pain—the dark space that yawned open when she realized that her parents died. She can’t say any more then; she looks at Han and he looks back and she sees that he understands the thing exactly. He reaches over, draws his scarf around her, and gathers her into his arms. She feels the delicious luxury and safety of enclosure, lays her head against his chest, and breathes.
Later that day, back at work, Sirine drapes her scarf over a peg in the back kitchen where it won’t get dirty. She would wear it tied around her waist but she wants to protect its mild, elusive fragrance, afraid of smothering it in the kitchen smells, the frying onions, garlic, lamb, and oil.
During the afternoon stillness when the heat concentrates in the air and the palm trees turn to glass, Sirine is sitting with Um-Nadia in the back kitchen when the phone rings. Um-Nadia picks it up and Sirine can tell by the way she says, “Yes? Oh-ho. Oh no, you bad man—yes, yes, you bad thing—no, no, you are, you bad, extra naughty…” that she’s talking to Odah the Turkish butcher, who’s had a crush on Um-Nadia for at least as long as Sirine’s known him. Um-Nadia always tells Odah that she is saving herself for the mysterious Mr. X. Now she cups her palm over the receiver and tells Sirine, “He says he’s put aside some special legs of lamb and for you to come and pick the best.” Sirine unties her apron; she considers wrapping the scarf around her neck, but the window thermometer reads eighty-nine degrees. Everyone has been saying what a warm autumn it is.
Sirine walks along the lip of Westwood Boulevard. The big street looks cooked and yellow as a lizard skin in the late afternoon; there are Iranian restaurants, markets, and bakeries up and down the block, quiet now but mobbed at the dinner hour. This is a scene that she’s looked at almost every day for over eight years. There’s the swoop of traffic over the hill, the gray curbs, cement-busted sidewalks, and the busy jumble of Persian businesses—Shiraz Beauty Salon, Victory Market, Shusha Bakery, and Shaharazad Drugstore, with their shop signs written in English and Arabic script, and long, velvety-looking sedans and scrappy little compacts parked nose to nose along the streets.
Sirine doesn’t quite come to the corner; she waits for a break in the cars and then runs across the middle of the street. She walks past an open fruit stand where they give her free kumquats, past a fallen power line, power company workers, and some police who ask her what tonight’s special is, past the Persian Marxist Revolution Bookshop, where the cl
erks wave to her, down to the Topkapi Butcher Shop at the bottom of the street. It’s a compact place, sleek and enameled as a tooth. No one can speak much above a whisper in there or voices will clatter and echo all over the place. Odah’s shop is always crowded with Turks, Arabs, and Persians, as well as Italians, Poles, Bosnians, and Russians; almost all of the customers are identically dressed women in black babushkas and heavy black shoes. Sirine’s uncle calls it the old lady store.
Usually Odah has one of his countless sons or nephews just run the shipment of meat up to Nadia’s Café. But Sirine doesn’t mind coming in to look over the wares and to watch Odah and his handsome sons hustling from the case to the scales, handling the big joints, the meat with its fresh bloom of marbling and blood.
She is somewhere deep in the ragged line that starts at the door and leads up to the counter, watching a tiny woman who apparently speaks no English gesture to one of Odah’s sons—trying to demonstrate the cut of meat she wants—when someone stumbles into the line. The old ladies gasp and their purses swing on their arms. Sirine turns and recognizes the back of the man’s shoulders. He seems to be half-crouching, trying to hide himself behind the line of customers. “Aziz?”
He turns, peering around anxiously, a film of sweat beading over his temples. “Who?” He pauses and finally recognizes Sirine. A big smile breaks across his face and he says, “It’s Cleopatra!” He scoops up her hand and kisses it.
There are loud grumbles and several of the elderly women shove Aziz out of line. Behind them, one white-haired woman with electric-blue eyes shakes a knuckly finger at him and says, “No budging!”
“Who are you hiding from?” Sirine steps out of line. She looks out the big front window and spots the edge of a woman’s black veil whipping up the street. “Hey. Isn’t that that student?”
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