I tell you this now, my dear, not to hurt you but to let you know that if you want to see your mother again in this lifetime this may be your last chance. There is no way to undo the murder, of course, and we live in fear of Saddam’s ruthlessness. But it may be that you can still find a way to come home again.
I think of you daily and, God willing, we will find each other again in the next life, if not this one. Do you remember, when we were both in school, you telling me that you never missed saying your prayers? Your faith, you said, was what shaped your character and mind and gave you hope for the future. I wonder, Hanif, do you still say your prayers every day?
There’s a line in Arabic. Then:
With my enduring love, D.
Sirine’s hands are shaking. What murder? She is paralyzed, thinking, I have to ask him. But if she asks she will reveal her sneakiness, the betrayal of his trust. She feels the presence of a dead person rise over them, ineffable and irresistible, a navy-eyed ghost in the corner—perhaps the staring intruder she felt in her sleep.
She creeps out of the bathroom and quickly slides the letter back under his clothes in the dresser. Now she thinks she hears strange, minute sounds all around the apartment, odd ticks and crackles that make her heart leap in her chest. She has trouble making out his form in the dark: she needs to see him. Is he planning to return to Iraq? Had he killed someone? Her mind is blurry with confusion but she is too frightened to try and unfold and reread the letter. She looks around.
And who is this letter from? The letter writer called him “my dearest.” And then, surfacing like a creature hidden in the murkiest water, she recalls Um-Nadia’s stories about women betrayed, their faithless men. She stares at Han’s sleeping form and it seems at that moment as if he were nothing more than a shadow, a ripple of ink running over the sheets. And all of this—everything that seemed to be starting between them—was just a story she told herself.
Sirine thinks of the way her parents disappeared into the Sudan when Sirine was a little girl, as they had so many times before—into Turkey, Africa, India, into famines, civil wars, and earthquakes, sometimes leaving Sirine with weeks, even months, of silence, no addresses, the phone lines destroyed. The last time they disappeared, Sirine and her uncle didn’t know what happened until several days after their death. And unlike the families of victims on the news who speak of premonitions, unsettling forebodings, Sirine had no inkling at the time that anything was wrong.
Sirine feels dizzy and weak-kneed. She sinks down onto the bed. What if he’s planning to go? Han might be married, she thinks. Perhaps he has children. And perhaps he has killed someone. She lies perfectly still, watching the rise and fall of his chest. If she leaves now she will never return: it is too much for her. She begins to do what she always did when she was a little girl—she looks for a sign, any sign. She used to do this so she would know her parents were still alive when they went away: a blue car or a child with a toy or a bird in the tree kept them alive in her mind. And now she knows it is childish and impossible but she is waiting, even as she shakes her head, trying to clear it. Her heart feels diaphanous. Her hands close into fists, her breath caged in her chest. It is too much, too hard. She senses her feelings for Han contracting, retreating to a locked, distant star within her center. Just as she is about to get up, find her clothes and purse and bicycle key, she hears him murmur and turn toward her.
“Sirine.”
“Yes?”
But he is asleep. His hands strum across the bed. “Sirine,” he murmurs, “Sirine.”
She turns, eyes wide, and her gaze falls on the silver frame—he’d moved it to his bedside table and she sees that now it holds the photograph that Nathan took—of Sirine and Han and their lustrous, held gaze, the opalescent moment of love.
Everything inside her holds and then whitens and dilates and she is closing her eyes, listening to his voice, the helpless truth of sleeping. And for that moment, it’s just enough: a way to believe in him.
It’s Sunday, Sirine’s day off. They sleep late and make a breakfast from the fruit trees and garden in the building’s courtyard: sweet oranges, tangerines, tomatoes, grapefruit, avocado. They sit on a fold-out aluminum love seat on his balcony with plates and knives and a bowl of salt. A trail of juice runs along her fingers and Han kisses her palms.
Looking at him in the sheer morning, the air billowing like curtains, she feels hopeful and restored, as if recovering from an illness. The memory of the letter in the night seems more manageable in the light. She thinks there must be a way to ask about it. They are being tested, she tells herself—though she isn’t sure why—and the only way to pass this test is to hold very still.
Han breaks a tangerine into sections and feeds them to her one by one. Then he cuts a lemon in half, sprinkles a spoonful of sugar over the cut top, and bites into it. Sirine looks around at the wandering palms and the dusty street. Just that morning the radio weatherman had said it would be an Indian summer scorcher. She slices open an avocado and sprinkles it with coarse salt before handing it to Han. “Oh, Leila used to do that,” he says softly. “Salt on the avocado.”
She looks at him. “Leila?”
A point at the center of his eyes freezes. He puts down the half of butter-colored avocado. “My sister, Leila.”
“I didn’t know her name.”
“I didn’t mention it before?” He touches the pale avocado on his plate but doesn’t pick it up.
She feels pricked by the sense that somehow she’s missed something. “Not actually. You haven’t said much about her at all.”
“I haven’t, really?” He smiles, but his smile looks half-broken. He puts his hand on the back of his neck and sighs. A crisp breeze kicks the dust into spirals beneath the balcony. Then he tries for a better smile and says, “I suppose I haven’t. She’s younger. She’s with my parents….” His voice trails off.
His eyes are dark and brilliant, almost phosphorescent. He takes her fingers in his, sifting through them one by one. The abandoned fruit peels have already started to curl up on the plate, dried like little jewel-toned palms; there is the mild incense of oranges and lemons in the air. “Sirine forgive me this terrible question, but—do you trust me?”
She immediately feels guilty. She looks down, then back up. “I think I do.”
He nods. “Of course. We’re still in the beginning part of learning each other, I know that. I need—if you can manage this—I need a little more time. There is more I need to tell you, but just—not yet. But I will if you can wait. I promise. Is that…can you do that for me?”
She leans forward, opens her mouth, wanting to try and ask him more, but she also feels a sort of warning, a sensation like leaves skittering across her chest. Maybe she doesn’t want to know everything yet either. So she simply stands and begins picking up their dishes. The silverware rattles in her hand. She carries everything quickly in to the kitchen sink and feels so light-headed she wonders if she got enough sleep last night. She lets the hot water run hard into the sink so the steam courses up around her face. She picks up the sponge in one hand and a plate in the other and looks toward where Han is still sitting on the balcony. He has pulled his blue prayer beads out of his pocket and clicks through them, rubbing each bead over his forefinger with his thumb.
She leaves the dishes and goes back out on to the balcony. She feels a tension inside her pressing out like a tide. She sits beside him on the love seat, crosses her arms over her chest, and says, “Is it true that Muslims can have four wives?”
He laughs, startled. “What’s this?”
She feels foolish but the question is in the air now. “Just something I heard,” she mumbles. “Something I’ve always wondered about. Mireille says they do.”
He extends his arm along the back of the love seat. “All right. Well. I guess technically, if you go by Islamic code, then yes, four wives. But there’s a big catch: Muhammad said, if you marry more than one woman you have to treat them all equally. Which lots of
religious scholars say is pretty much impossible.”
“Why impossible?”
He curls his arm around her shoulders. She feels the rise and fall of his rib cage. “It’s human nature to have favorites,” he says quietly, stroking her hair.
“Do you feel—” She stumbles, guilty and anxious, thinking of the hidden letter. She squeezes her palms together. “I mean—do you believe that your religion—that Islam—defines who you are?”
She can feel him hesitating, his head moving as if to try and look at her. “That’s an interesting question,” he says guardedly. Her palms grow damp and she wonders if she’s given herself away. But when she doesn’t speak, he sighs and says, “For me, it’s more complicated than that. I’ve heard of people defining themselves according to their work or religion or family. But I pretty much think I define myself by an absence.”
She dares a glance at him. “What absence?”
“Well, I’m no longer a believer but I still consider myself a Muslim. In some ways, my religion is even more important to me because of that.”
“How can you be Muslim if you don’t believe in it?”
“I don’t believe in a specific notion of God. But I do believe in social constructions, notions of allegiance, cultural identity…. Oh.” He looks away and Sirine is quickly afraid that he’s impatient with all her questions or he thinks she’s not intelligent enough for him. But then he says, “The fact of exile is bigger than everything else in my life. Leaving my country was like—I don’t know—like part of my body was torn away. I have phantom pains from the loss of that part—I’m haunted by myself. I don’t know—does any of that make any sense? It’s as if I’m trying to describe something that I’m not, that’s no longer here.”
“I think I can get it,” she says timidly.
“Exile is like…” He sits forward, elbows on his knees, his prayer beads wrapped around one open hand, his hands grasping for some sort of form or image. “It’s a dim, gray room, full of sounds and shadows, but there’s nothing real or actual inside of it. You’re constantly thinking that you see old friends on the street—or old enemies that make you shout out in your dreams. You go up to people, certain that they’re members of your family, and when you get close their faces melt away into total strangers’. Or sometimes you just forget this is America and not Iraq. Everything that you were—every sight, sound, taste, memory, all of that has been wiped away. You forget everything you thought you knew.” He drops his hands. “You have to.”
“Why?”
“You have to let yourself forget or you’ll just go crazy. Sometimes when I see some of those homeless people on the street—you know, the ones walking around talking to the air, shuffling around, old torn-up clothes—sometimes I think I’ve never felt so close to anyone as those people. They know what it feels like—they live in between worlds so they’re not really anywhere. Exiled from themselves.”
Sirine feels a sensation like ghost fingers trailing down her spine; she shivers and hugs her elbows in close. “So—is that what you did? I mean, you let yourself forget?” she asks, hoping he’ll say yes.
But he says, “I’m trying to.” And then, “Sometimes it’s so hard. I had no idea, none, when I left my country, what a life-changing thing it would be. It’s much harder than I’d ever thought could be possible. I wasn’t prepared for how much I would miss them—and for how much worse simply knowing I can’t return makes me feel. And of course there’s no way I could have known any of this before I’d left, when I was so young and excited and thought I was ready for anything at all.”
Sirine gazes at him, waiting for him to return to the balcony, put his arms around her, to say that she’s more than made up for all this loss in his life. Instead, however, he closes his eyes, his shoulders lowering heavily, and he clicks through his prayer beads.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Aunt Camille had finally found her way over the broad back of Egypt, to the door of the Mother of All Fish, only to be stopped by the lack of an appointment. Wouldn’t you know it?
So Aunt Camille’s delicate shoulders slumped and Napoleon-Was-Here lowered his heavy dog-head and the crocodiles wept and the jacaranda blossoms fell out of the purple sky. “No,” she admitted to the guard-jinn. “I don’t have an appointment.”
Now, this was not a hard-hearted jinn. He was a big softie in actual fact. But the Eternal Golden Rule is: an appointment is required. After all, the world was filled with all sorts of hungry-eyed fisher sorts who thought there was no sweeter, milkier dish than a fillet of Mother of All Fish with a garlic-lemon sauce on the side. And these sorts always came without an appointment.
The jinn had to try and navigate between being a Mr. Softie and having a jinn’s natural love of rules. He was a nephew of the Sphinx and second cousin once removed of Rumpelstiltskin. He considered asking her one of the vintage jinn, gate-guarding riddles, unsolvable to all but the hero. But he immediately divined that she was the co-hero of this story, giving her a clear, natural edge.
Instead he hemmed and hawed and made small talk—as best a scarlet-eyed jinn can make—and essentially blocked Camille’s way until the muezzin of Lake Tanganyika had time to climb his tree and begin his call to prayer. At that moment, time stopped and Nature looked up; the birds stopped twittering and the leaves stopped rattling, in order to let their souls be diverted by that sweet, drifting call, onto the path of prayer. Relieved, the great jinn grabbed her hand in his meaty, sweaty paw and said, “Let us pray!”
Aunt Camille knelt and said her prayers, which consisted largely of: Dear God, please let me get past this jinn. After a respectable interval, then, she finished her prayers and all the other woodland creatures and spirits and entities finished theirs. Everyone sighed and then went back to work. All but the jinn, who just bowed and prayed and prayed like there was no tomorrow and no today. It occurred to Aunt Camille that he might just pray until the next call to prayers was announced in a couple of hours, and that he could, in fact, keep this prayer business going indefinitely, thus blocking any and all progress toward the fish-mother. So she made another plan. She called to her loyal companion, Napoleon-Was-Here, crossed her fingers, and said, “Do you smell if this crazy jinn has a mutbakh—also called a kitchen—anywhere around here?” Well, the dog put his long educated nose into the air, twirled it around, and sure enough, off they went.
It’s late in the day, the light red and burnished as if it is coming from far away. But there’re still a couple students waiting outside of Han’s office door—both young women in short skirts, with backpacks and chewed-up pencils. Sirine sits with them and listens to the voices behind the door with its frosted glass: one low and languorous as a dark river, the other younger and milder, sparked with feminine laughter, ringing like a spoon in a glass of tea; their shadows ripple in watery slivers over the window. Han pokes his head out the door then, spots Sirine, and smiles. “I’ll just be a few more minutes….” He indicates the waiting students.
He stands in the door and the student he was speaking to slides past him—Sirine notes—so she brushes very slightly against him. “Thank you, Professor,” she says, eyes lowered, a faint smile on her lips. It’s the covered woman, the veil tucked tightly in at her chin, just framing her face—but Sirine wonders, isn’t she wearing lipstick and eyeliner? Han calls another student in and closes the door. The covered woman turns to go—Sirine is trying to remember, is this the one who threw the pen at Aziz?—when she turns and says, “Aren’t you Sirine?”
Startled, Sirine sits upright. “Do I know you?”
The woman’s eyes are black with wine-colored flecks and her lashes are so long they have a slight dip, like a canopy. “My family used to eat at Nadia’s Café all the time—when I was just a girl. I used to love watching you work inside your kitchen. That was years ago—I’m a student here now,” she says. A modest smile. “And Hanif—I mean, the professor—has often mentioned you.”
“He’s mentioned me?”
; “Oh—not like in class. Privately.” Now she covers her smile with her fingertips, as if she’s revealed something. “I mean, during office hours, of course. He speaks of you…very warmly. He said something about me wearing the hejjab”—she indicates her veil and black coat—“and we just started talking about it. So few of us wear the veil in this country. And he told me that you seem to show a bit of an interest in Islam.”
Sirine isn’t entirely smiling. “He told you that? Privately?”
Now the student pulls up a chair and sits across from Sirine; her expression is level and a bit intense. “If you think you’d like to learn more, I belong to a group….” She tears a scrap of paper out of a notebook and begins writing on it. “Women in Islam. We meet once a week. Please come. If you’re the tiniest bit interested. It’s so important to have women like yourself attend, you’re such a model to the younger women.” Sirine stares at her. The student’s face is open and polished as a shell. She reaches over and fingers Han’s scarf, which Sirine has wrapped around her neck. “That’s great. These stitches. You look so…almost Arab in it. You’re Iraqi, aren’t you?” she asks.
Han must have told her that as well, Sirine thinks. “Half,” Sirine says. “My father.”
“Like Han!” She grabs Sirine’s hand. “I wish I were Iraqi. I love Iraqis. They’re the best of the Arabs. Baghdad is the mother of the whole Arab world. Now you really, really have to come. There’s a meeting this Sunday afternoon—are you off from work? I’ll look for you.” She stands then quickly bends and places a tiny kiss on Sirine’s cheek. Sirine smells jasmine and clove perfume.
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