Crescent

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  They spend their nights together and Sirine learns about the way Han sleeps. She discovers that he has nightmares, dreams that shake him so he kicks at the covers or cries out so loud she’s startled awake, heart pounding. If she tries to wake him, he’ll stare at her without seeming to recognize her, or say a few unintelligible words, then slip back into sleep. She thinks perhaps if he talked more about Iraq perhaps he wouldn’t have so many bad dreams, that maybe there is a way to talk it out of his system. But she doesn’t say this to him—she just lies awake and watches him. Sometimes he sleeps badly, tossing and waking, and Sirine will wake at midnight in an empty bed and hear him roaming through the unlit apartment, from one window to another.

  One night, she wakes and creeps to the door of the bedroom and watches Han sitting by the window. He is frowning, gazing off as if he were trying to remember something. His face is shining, a spot of light falling from the window over his blue-black hair. The city night seems to be lowering itself, the light enriched and intensified, overbright. There are smudges against the sky, like veils of rain hovering over a faraway city.

  Nadia’s Café presses in on them too much—a bell jar in which everyone is watching and listening. So on days off, Han and Sirine drive east on Wilshire, north or south on Westwood, explore the endless city streets or nose their way into unknown neighborhoods or find the distant, far-flung suburbs and adjacent towns: Pasadena, Corona, Malibu; everything they see is new to them. The tall apartment buildings, glass-sided offices, balconies, and sliding doors lean toward them and they gaze up through the windshield. They drive from the stucco walls and red tile roofs in West L.A. all the way to downtown. They watch the bankers and secretaries filter away in late afternoon until there’s nothing but long blue shadows and empty corridors. Or they drive into the garment district, down streets crowded with stalls of clothes and toys and strings of chilis and green curls of bananas, places that Han says remind him of the streets of Cairo. Sirine buys sweet, dense Mexican candies, pastel-colored Korean candies, crackling layers of tea leaves, lemongrass, kaffir leaves, Chinese medicinal herbs and powders, Japanese ointments and pastes. She tastes everything edible, studies the new flavors, tests the shock of them; and she learns, every time she tastes, about balance and composition, addition and subtraction. Han watches, eyeing the strange foods. When she offers him a taste, he closes his eyes and shakes his head.

  They visit the half-abandoned city park zoo and gaze at the skeletal remains of old cages, flakes of straw, the spirits of forgotten animals. They stroll along Melrose, Sunset, Rodeo Drive, glancing in the glinting jewelry and dress shop windows. Han wants to buy Sirine presents but she won’t even go inside; the empty, luxurious spaces make her anxious. They wander along granite-colored streets, litter loose in the air like ashes, and then realize they are walking over scuffed stars, worn-down names, handprints in the cement.

  Sirine asks Han about himself. She asks about his parents and his memories of school and friends. He comes up with chips of details, bits of recollections of the chalky roads in their village, the grassy green olive oil on their kitchen table, the coal-colored falcon that haunted a tree beside their house. He tells her about going to the desert that started just a few miles from his uncle’s farm—the same desert he would eventually cross when he fled Baghdad, the wind-cut miles of hot, dense sand, and a great map of clouds overhead.

  One day in mid-November when they have been dating for almost three months, they are sitting on the grass in front of the big Languages Building where Han teaches. They are enjoying the clear day, talking. And Han says to Sirine, “I’m not sure if it’s how it really happened or if it’s just how I remember things—the way I want to remember things. It seems like life was infinitely simpler and easier, a slow, steady movement through the day. We worked, we ate, we talked. We did small things to entertain ourselves. My mother and the neighbor women traded each other for whatever they needed, thread and buttons, eggs, olives, light bulbs, chickens. My mother traded her embroidery. And she taught reading and writing in exchange for food and clothing, sometimes sheep. Once someone gave her an old stone tablet that she said was ancient, inscribed in Ugaritic, which is supposed to have been the oldest recorded alphabet. She said our own family used to have a castle in Babylon and that it was lined with mosaics of animals conversing with humans, humans with horns and wings, rooms without ceilings, and floors made of water. And the scent of night-blooming jasmine was rubbed into the stone.” He smiles. “Family lore.”

  The sky is a glassy turquoise, warm enough for Sirine to feel lulled and sleepy. She leans back on her elbows and lets her neck spill backward, drinking in light. It’s a Sunday so the campus is quiet and there’s a hushed, chapellike quality in the air. She squints up at Han then, and realizes that his eyes are shut, his face contracted with grief. “Han, what is it?” she asks, alarmed. It is that look, she is beginning to recognize it: the look of his sleepless nights.

  He turns his face away and for a moment he doesn’t answer. Then he sighs and says, “It’s the light, the air.”

  She squints at the sky.

  “For a moment—for a moment, I forgot where I was. I forgot that this was America. I was on the banks of the Tigris. I could see the sun through my eyelids. My sister was about to call me in to eat. It’s like the light broke into me and brought it all back and then I had to return to this place.”

  She nods, but her throat aches. She brings her face close to his and throws her leg over his, as if she could press herself down into him and the two of them into the earth, into that place and moment, and hold them both there safe and sound.

  “I don’t understand it,” he says. “I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

  “Maybe…it’s a little like…like the way death is,” she says carefully. She isn’t exactly sure how to say what she means; she goes slowly, trying to pick her way through her thoughts. “There’s nothing about being alive that lets you get what death is. I mean—when someone close to you dies, there’s no way to really understand it, is there? You can sort of know it in your head, but all your body knows is that you’re not seeing them or touching them—so all that means is they might just be down the block or in another city.”

  He nods. “Yes.”

  “And it’s so hard to let yourself know that you’ll never actually see or touch them again. To let yourself take in that thing, that you’ll only be able to know them through your memory now.”

  “Yes, yes. And for me it’s even worse, somehow,” Han says. “This is a terrible thing to say, but I feel it would be easier if I knew they were dead. If I knew I’d only have to go through with the experience of leaving them once and never again. Lately, I’ve started waking up and feeling like it was just yesterday that I left. Or just an hour ago.” He rolls up to a sitting position and holds his head, his fingers spread through his hair. “Twenty-two years ago when I left for England, it sort of felt like I was anesthetized for surgery…like falling asleep—”

  “You were letting yourself forget,” Sirine says.

  “Only now I’m afraid,” he says.

  “What are you afraid of?”

  He rubs his temples. “That I haven’t forgotten any of it, nothing at all. I’m starting to think that it’s all been there inside me all along. And since I’ve met you—it’s starting to return. I’m beginning to feel it and see it. Every time I turn a corner lately, I seem to turn onto Sadoun Street or the Jumhurriya Bridge. Every person I talk to turns into the vegetable seller or my grade school teacher.”

  “Since you met me?” she asks in dismay.

  He takes her hand. “No, it’s good; I’ve been talking and thinking about things I haven’t thought about since I left Iraq. Having memories that I’d pushed so far aside it’s like I didn’t even know I’d lost them. It’s like I want you to know everything that I know, I want to take you through my history, so it’s inside of both of us, so you know who I am—really know.” The sun whitens the sky and he shades hi
s eyes with one hand. “But sometimes when I start remembering…sometimes I’m afraid I won’t be able to stop.” He pauses briefly. “Abu-Najmeh used to say you have to go away three times before you can really get away from anything.” He smiles. “I’ve only left Iraq twice so far.”

  Sirine watches Han and for a moment it seems that she can actually see the ancient traces in Han’s face, the quality of his gaze that seems to originate from a thousand-thousand years of watching the horizon—a forlorn, beautiful gazing, richer and more seductive than anything she’s ever seen. And that somehow corresponds to a sensitive and silent element inside herself. She has a moment, like a flash of recognition that flares in her, and then she closes her eyes.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Old stories and memories—especially the old stories that gather in the collective unconscious of a family—are like mirages. Illusory and fantastic, and yet they are frequently based on some reflection of reality. You want to know if Aunt Camille was really talking to a fish? Very possible. She was that sort of person. Was it the Mother of All Fish? Well, perhaps it was just a distinguished-looking fish. Perhaps it was just the conjurings of loneliness, after Camille had been trapped as a servant in an Englishman’s chilly house in the desert. Maybe there was no wicked seductress-mermaid, but perhaps there really is a perverse compulsion to go to places where one does not belong. The thing about listening to a story like this, Habeebti, is not to fret over chasing down the details, but to let the spirit of things show themselves. Learn how to just let it be.

  Let the tomato be a tomato.

  So the Mother of All Fish called up the local lady of the lake, a Tunisian mermaid named Kan Zamana, who stretched indolently on the rocks, her spangled tail scales gleaming and her soft brown shoulders glowing, and Kan Zamana told Aunt Camille what happened to her son. She said that Abdelrahman had been transported to the mermaids’ undersea cave in the Land of Na, a pleasure palace for abducted sailors, guarded by the Nisnas—half-formed monkey creatures with one leg and one arm. And that was fine for a while; Abdelrahman was a model prisoner, handsome, well behaved, pleasant company. But it came to pass that another Bedouin arrived at the undersea cave shortly thereafter, this one named Jaipur al-Rashid, but whom people called Crazyman al-Rashid.

  It seems that before being abducted by the mermaids, Crazyman al-Rashid had had his own remarkable experience—but no one would listen to his story, and when they did, no one believed it. He claimed to have been abducted by some sort of desert version of space aliens. Crazyman al-Rashid had worked himself into such a lather trying to get someone to listen to his story of camelless carriages and fiery angels that when the mermaid named Alieph finally agreed to hear out his tiresome story, he got so worked up while telling it that he walked straight off a pier. The merfolk—who can’t tell the difference between up and down, much less right and wrong—dragged him down to the inky blue cave where Abdelrahman Salahadin was kept and there the Crazyman proceeded to agitate his captive audience of one by filling his head with crazy stories. The Crazyman went on at such length and in such flamboyant detail that he infected Abdelrahman Salahadin with his madness. Abdelrahman became obsessed with the sights and sounds the Crazyman spoke of, convinced that he had to see them himself.

  Upon hearing this report, Aunt Camille became excited. “So my son is there now?”

  “We had to let him go,” Kan Zamana said. “Nobody could stand him. The Crazyman eventually settled in quite nicely, eating peeled sea grapes and parboiled seaweeds and sleeping till noon. But after brushing up against this undesirable, Abdelrahman Salahadin had lost all his manners and all his couth. Worst of all, he inherited the Crazyman’s obsessions. The two of them were forever yammering on about Fil’Imm this and Fil’Imm that. And something called Hal’Awud. And the Dar’Aktr, always with the Dar’Aktr!”

  But what were these auspicious words? Aunt Camille wondered. Fil’Imm, Hal-Awud, Dar’Aktr. Were they some variety of angel or jinn? Apparently they were entities so powerful and yet so tedious to hear about that Alieph and the other sirens decided they would rather give Abdelrahman back his money and set him free than listen to another word.

  “Then he isn’t with the mermaids at all!” Aunt Camille cried with equal parts relief and dismay. “Then where, pray tell, is he?”

  The lazy mermaid propped herself up on one elbow and pointed. “Last I heard, madame, Abdelrahman Salahadin has gone to Hal’Awud, in the terrible and frightening land of the setting sun.”

  Six thirty-eight A.M. on Thanksgiving morning, Sirine is in the kitchen mincing garlic and King Babar lies at her feet. The kitchen is overheated and fragrant with the scent of roasting turkey. The night before, Um-Nadia came over with her small wooden box stuffed with handwritten recipes, dishes Um-Nadia hadn’t prepared or eaten in the thirty-five years since she and Mireille had left Lebanon. Some were recipes for simple, elegant dishes of rice pilafs and roasted meats, others were more exotic dishes of steamed whole pigeons and couscous or braised lambs’ brains in broth. And they discussed ingredients and techniques until late in the night. Um-Nadia eventually fell asleep on the hard couch in the living room, while Sirine’s uncle dozed across from her in his armchair. But Sirine stayed up all night, checking recipes, chopping, and preparing. She looked up Iraqi dishes, trying to find the childhood foods that she’d heard Han speak of, the sfeehas—savory pies stuffed with meat and spinach—and round mensaf trays piled with lamb and rice and yogurt sauce with onions, and for dessert, tender ma’mul cookies that dissolve in the mouth. She stuffed the turkey with rice, onions, cinnamon, and ground lamb. Now there are pans of sautéed greens with bittersweet vinegar, and lentils with tomato, onion, and garlic on the stove, as well as maple-glazed sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, and pumpkin soufflé.

  It’s still hours before the first guests will arrive and Um-Nadia and Mireille move through each room with rags and furniture polish, vacuuming, dusting, and sweeping. At one point, Mireille comes in, leans on the speckled kitchen counter, and observes Sirine as she works. “Something smells good,” she says. “What is that?”

  Um-Nadia stands in the door and waves one hand so her bracelets ring. “It’s like the old-time Arabs’ cooking.”

  Sirine smiles, tilts her head, and chases some bits of celery and onion in a frying pan with the tip of her wooden spoon.

  By noon there is: Han, Mireille, Victor Hernandez and his cousin Eliazer, Aziz the poet, Nathan, Um-Nadia, Cristobal the custodian, Shark, Jenoob, Abdullah, Schmaal, and Gharb—five of the lonely students from the café—Sirine, and her uncle. King Babar greets each of them, standing on his hind legs and putting his dusty paw prints on their pants.

  Mireille is setting the table and Um-Nadia is serving mazza in the library. But the students and Aziz go straight into the abandoned-living-room to watch parades and football on the ancient fibrillating TV with its cap of bent antennae and crinkled aluminum foil. The students lie on the three layers of carpet, about three feet from the TV, complaining at some length in Arabic because there isn’t a remote control—as Aziz translates to Sirine. Aziz sits all the way at the far end of the room on the couch and asks them to explain everything about parades and football, and they don’t seem to mind, patiently instructing him. “Who is that floating man?” Aziz asks.

  “That isn’t a floating man,” Schmaal says. “That is the Giant Bird.”

  Aziz smiles at Sirine. “Three years in this country and this is my first of all parades.” He sighs, then squints at the light-washed screen. “It’s a bit like a demonstration, isn’t it?” he says.

  “Only no rocks,” Schmaal says.

  “And with music!” Gharb says.

  Sirine goes into the kitchen to check on the turkey. The windows are bright as coins, the room saturated in light. Everything glows—the butter, a handful of chopped tomato, a bowl of parsley—ripe colors clear as a painting. She feels the light passing through her. She is stirring gravy when a pair of arms come up from behind her and c
ircle her, and she hears Han murmur in her ear, “I missed you.”

  She smiles, blows a strip of hair up from her forehead, and leans back against his solid chest. “I’ve been working all night.”

  “I can tell. And what is this aroma?”

  She leans her head back, smiling. “Do you recognize it?”

  Han lowers his nose to her neck.

  “You made me meat loaf, so I wanted to reciprocate.” She gestures at the pans. “An Arabic Thanksgiving. It was my idea—what do you think?” She lifts the lid from the pan of smoked green wheat kernels and dips in a spoon. “Here. Taste.”

  He holds the spoon in his mouth for a moment. She knows what he is tasting, how the broth is flavored with pepper and garlic and lustrous, deep smokiness. “And try this,” she says. Vibrant vegetable greens, garlic, and lemon. “And this.” Herbal, meaty, vaguely fruity.

  He places the spoon on the counter. He closes his eyes and inhales. “Han?” She laughs and places a hand on his chest.

  He touches his lips.

  Thanksgiving dinner is vast and steaming, crowded over the tabletop in hot platters bumping against each other. There are three open bottles of wine, all different colors, and there seem to be far more plates and silverware than are actually needed. Among the guests’ contributions, there’s a big round fatayer—a lamb pie—that Aziz bought from the green-eyed girl at the Iranian bakery; six sliced cylinders of cranberry sauce from Um-Nadia; whole roasted walnuts in chili sauce from Cristobal; plus Victor brought three homemade pumpkin pies and a half-gallon of whipping cream. Nathan wants to keep his camera on the table, even though with its bulky lens it’s as big as a soup tureen, so Um-Nadia and Mireille and Victor all scold him until he moves it.