“But he said that meat had…” she trails off, considering.
“The Evil Eye?” Aziz shrugs. “I smelled it first. I didn’t smell any kind of Eye on it.” He waves and goes downstairs.
Finally, Sirine collapses into the lawn chair beside Han in the backyard. They sit quietly for a while, watching King Babar watch the neighbors’ butterscotch tabby eat the berries off a bush. Every time King Babar approaches, the cat fluffs to twice its size, then melts back down as soon as Babar backs away.
“You’re coming home with me, yes?” Han says hopefully.
Sirine sighs and looks at the kitchen window just above and behind their heads. “I shouldn’t,” she says. She can perfectly visualize the mountain of cups and saucers. Every dish and pan in the house has been used in one way or another. She hears the faucet running and knows that Um-Nadia and her uncle are standing at their places over the sink.
“Are you worried about the dishes?” Han says softly. “Dishes are eternal. They just keep getting dirtier. Let’s leave them.”
The back door creaks slightly, as if someone had been standing there. Sirine looks up, then rubs her arms and hugs herself. “What do you think of Nathan?”
He shifts his weight in the chair, tips it back slightly. “Nathan.” He chuckles faintly and murmurs something to himself, then looks away, distracted. “That dog of your uncle’s is unearthly, I tell you.
The air stirs and picks up around them and leaves rasp along the ground. Sirine is utterly bone-tired, wrung dry, dizzy and headachy from no sleep, and so she agrees to his plan that they sneak away without saying goodbye to anybody. They pull on their jackets furtively as criminals. Then they tiptoe past the kitchen with the splashing dishes and pyramids of foam, past the abandoned living room with the blaring TV, past the silent imaginary library, down the long hall, and out the front door.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Aunt Camille learned that she’d gone all the way to the source of the Nile for nothing. After boring the entire undersea world with his stories of Hal’Awud, her son had up and headed to the Land of the Setting Sun.
She and the jackal-eared dog named Napoleon-Was-Here dusted themselves off and started walking toward the sunset. What a ridiculous thing, Aunt Camille thought, to be walking toward the sunset. How will I know when to stop?
Unfortunately for her, she decided to put her faith in her dog’s sense of direction. This is because he had helped her find the jinn’s kitchen—which was not very far away—and because dogs have humans bamboozled into thinking that they always know the way there. King Babar, for example, bamboozles on a regular basis. But in reality dogs are only reincarnated monks who didn’t say their prayers right.
Napoleon took the lead and Aunt Camille followed. So it was that they began walking in wide, desert-flung circles. Years passed in this manner. The Bedu and townspeople gave them food and blessings and assumed they were on pilgrimage to Mecca. In that time, Aunt Camille was courted by an Egyptian prince who entertained her in his desert caravan and gave her a tiny slave girl to keep her company. Aunt Camille named the slave girl Hanan, which means kindness and tenderness, and she raised her gently, lulling her to sleep at night with the story of the search for Abdelrahman, my cousin. And when she set Hanan free on her eighteenth birthday, they still hadn’t found Abdelrahman Salahadin and Hanan went away disappointed.
Camille walked in wide, desert-spun circles all over the shoulders of Africa until a nearby tribe got curious and drifted down from the hills to take a closer look at her. These were extremely conceited Bedu, very vain of the fact that they traded in frankincense and not in goats or camels or the usual smelly beasts of the Bedu. Their hair and skin was tinted dusty blue and they smelled of their incense and they spoke Italian and Arabic as well as a sweet and lively chirping language that the ancient Sumerians had called Lulubulu or the Language of Birds. They took a liking to Camille and she discovered that they too were out of place. They were tribesmen originally from the Dhofar Mountains on the Arabian Peninsula. They too knew about Hal’Awud and Dar’Aktr and were very much against them. As it turned out, Dar’Aktr was a person, loud and very white—inordinately white—with bristling eyebrows, hair like a briar patch and a way of speaking that was like the wind beating against the desert. Dar’Aktr was, in fact, the reason why they’d found themselves in this place so far from home. He had moved them here, they said, to do his strange bidding.
“Moved you?” she asked, incredulous. “How?”
They only shook their heads and made signs against the Evil Eye and said Allah only knows, truly it defies all explaining. He had done his strange bidding, which apparently also defied explanation, and then left them with no way to get back home. They were not unhappy with this arrangement, they added, but it was inconvenient. Camille could see that once you got to know these people they were really fairly agreeable. She told them, in turn, about her naughty son, about how she warned him, about her walk down the Nile, about her talk with the fish. Camille also told them about the time she spent as a slave to the famous explorer Sir Richard Burton, and the tribesmen became excited and said, yes, yes! Ar-Rashad Bur’aton! The frightening, hollow-eyed white man! He was there too! And they all felt somehow vindicated, as if this meeting were meant to be. And it was agreed that if they could help Camille find her way back to her home, Camille would help the tribe find the way back to their home on the Arabian Peninsula.
The day is a sunburst of smog and mist; it shines in the straight-arrow streets and brown wandering canyons and azure reflecting pools. It’s in the wild-field spindles of lavender and heather. It touches the baking rooftops, scaly chicken-foot streets. The spiked plants growing in ditches and open fields. Yellow things sharp as skeletons and horned devilish plants and hard blue scrub gnarled as knuckles. It rises and crosses a semi-lunar horizon, great open page of sky, faintly salty, traces of fruit, citrus, water in the wind.
Sirine has awakened before Han. She props herself on one elbow, studying the brown colors of his skin in the morning. As she does this, she remembers a dream in which Han was leading a double life and had a secret family back in Iraq. His wife was a kind of enchantress who had him under a spell—a woman who looked something like Rana, passionate and brilliant and capable of anything—someone who would summon him back to the Old Country, to his true identity. She dreamed this woman threw off her black veil and underneath she was wearing a garland of yellow flowers in her hair, a red dress like a burst of flames; she looked at Sirine and started laughing.
Sirine rubs her eyes and tries to clear her head. She carefully slides out of bed and goes into the white-tiled bathroom. She peers into the tarnished mirror on the medicine cabinet, turning it and trying to catch the light. She stares at the portrait of herself in the metal-framed mirror. All she can see is white. She is so white. Her eyes wide, almond-shaped, and sea-green, her nose and lips tidy and compact. Entirely her mother. That’s all anyone can see: when people ask her nationality they react with astonishment when she says she’s half-Arab. I never would have thought that, they say, laughing. You sure don’t look it. When people say this she feels like her skin is being peeled away. She thinks that she may have somehow inherited her mother on the outside and her father on the inside. If she could compare her own and her father’s internal organs—the blood and bones and the shape of her mind and emotions—she thinks she would find her truer and deeper nature. She imagines her parents, young, expecting their first child, expecting, perhaps, a true amalgam of their two bodies. Were they disappointed, she wonders, to have an entirely fair-skinned child?
She tries to creep back into the bed soundlessly but Han opens his eyes. Sirine notices flecks of gold in the black surfaces. He looks for her and smiles and her heart bumps. She thinks it is a sort of smile she has never seen him smile before, more intimate and yet removed, not precisely meant for her. “Hey?” he murmurs. Then, “Habeebti? What is it?”
Sirine smiles back and asks what he would like to hav
e for breakfast. He yawns and sits up, and asks almost timidly, “I don’t suppose you could make some more of that frekeh?”
The dish of smoked wheat kernels with olive oil and garlic. She sits still, the sunlight from the balcony skimming through the bedroom. There are bags and bags of frekeh at her uncle’s house, pounds of it at the café, even the Indian market a few blocks away from Han’s apartment sells it in bulk. But she takes a breath and frowns and says, “I’m not sure if I can find more right now.”
She tells Han to sleep a little longer and she walks down to the Indian market by herself. But when she comes back with her groceries she doesn’t have frekeh. She makes scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast. She stirs dollops of heavy cream and cheese into the eggs, letting the bacon grease soak into the egg, slicing squares of buttered toast in half, filling the glasses with orange juice. She serves this to Han while he’s still in bed and he smiles and eats it and doesn’t say anything more about frekeh.
Later that morning, while she’s at work, Sirine realizes she can’t remember where she’s put her scarf.
“Your beautiful scarf? You lost it!” Um-Nadia cries.
“I didn’t lose it,” Sirine says, rattling through the cabinets and shelves in the back kitchen. “It’s somewhere.”
Um-Nadia tells Victor and Cristobal to look everywhere, then she calls Sirine’s uncle at home. “Tell us the scarf is there,” she cries into the phone. She waits and waits and then listens and nods as if confirming the inevitable. She puts one hand over the receiver and says, “No. Vanished.”
Mireille turns to Sirine. “When do you last remember wearing it?”
But Sirine doesn’t have a last memory. There is only something hazy from yesterday about bringing out dessert, something about draping the scarf on a chair.
“I don’t think I saw you wearing it at all,” Mireille says.
“Actually…” Victor says, “I might have seen it on the floor in the kitchen.”
“That is our Sirine,” says Um-Nadia.
Nathan stops in for baklava and coffee. He looks hungover and somehow wrung out, his eyes hollow with fatigue, and he doesn’t have his camera with him. He apologizes for leaving dinner so suddenly but says he was suffering from a terrible headache.
“Have you seen her scarf?” Um-Nadia asks, throwing up her arms.
“You didn’t lose it?” His eyes are dark as lead. “I saw you with it right there in the kitchen. I remember. Where did you put it?”
Sirine makes everyone swear they won’t breathe a word of this to Han. She bicycles straight home after work. She turns over all the pillows and cushions in the living room. Looks under the chairs in the library. She goes through the laundry basket. Then she thinks she spots it folded on the counter in the kitchen, her breath rises in her chest, but it’s only a kitchen towel. “I didn’t lose it,” she says to herself. “It’s definitely somewhere.”
Her uncle looks behind some books in the library. “What are you doing?” Sirine asks. “It’s not there.”
“This is where things are hidden in the movies,” he says.
She almost doesn’t bother to look upstairs, but then decides to do it just for good measure. The bathroom (she has a sudden, wild hope that Aziz was trying it on) is empty, the towels hanging straight as soldiers. Her bedroom looks blank and empty as well: there’s the dark cherrywood sleigh bed, the clean walls, the cream-white comforter. She makes a circuit around the bed, looks back toward the hall, and then hears a sound like crying under her bed.
She drops to her hands and knees. It’s King Babar, crying in a high, strange whine, as if he were injured. He’s stretched on his belly under the bed—a place he rarely goes unless he’s done something like pull over the Christmas tree or eaten all the dinner rolls.
Sirine squints under the bed. “King Babar,” she says gently, holding up the edge of the comforter, “what’s wrong, honey? What did you do?”
He’s in the middle of the floor under the bed. He rolls his big guilty eyes toward her. He sighs and moans and she reaches under the bed to try and console him and then realizes that he’s lying on top of something. She reaches under him while he complains, then he growls. Surprised, she says, “Babar, no!” and slides out a white legal-sized envelope. It’s old and just folded over, not sealed shut, and inside there is a color snapshot.
She slides it out. A close-up of a girl—a young woman, really—with brilliant spice-black eyes and long, curling black hair that flies in thick locks around her face. She is laughing and pulling the blowing hair away from her face with her hand—or trying to. Her skin is glowing amber and something about her smile ignites the whole shot.
Sirine holds the photo in both hands, the girl’s laughter rising into the air, chiming in all the corners and singing in the hallway; her hair—dark but wild and curly as Sirine’s—rises and falls, and her eyes fix directly on Sirine.
She looks away from the photograph but then looks back again. “Where did this come from? Where did you get this?” she asks the dog, who’s leaning against her leg now.
She studies the photo closely: the grain of the girl’s skin, the crease at the corner of her smile, at the edge of an eye. Slowly she starts to realize: this is the same woman she saw in the photo in Han’s bedroom. His sister? For some reason this strikes her as vaguely alarming. How did it get there? Her breath races in her chest.
“What is this?” she asks, urgency tightening her voice. King Babar stares at her, panting, smiling.
The feeling comes from outside her body, like a vibration in the air, trembling in the ground. The hidden picture seems like a type of dark magic. She thinks of the hexes that she’s heard from Um-Nadia: the ribbon tied to the crib leg to protect the baby, the special string of beads to invoke certain spirits, the mirror that provides a passageway for spirits. For a moment the photo shimmers, obscured by the light. It doesn’t feel safe to touch it. She hides it in the bedside drawer.
That night she stays over at Han’s house again. She almost says something about the photo but then decides against it. She dreams that Han has a hidden wife who has stolen her scarf; the wife taunts Sirine with it, running just ahead of her, too fast, the scarf rippling behind her like a banner. She runs into the ocean with it, the waves throwing off long violet spools of foam.
Very late that night, the phone rings and wakes her up. Sirine feels Han ease out of the bed and creep into the living room. He speaks in Arabic, his voice falling and rising softly. Even though she can’t understand the words, she hears something so gentle and imploring in Han’s voice, she can almost see the lights above the desert mountains and smell the currents of the Tigris River. She thinks of the photo tucked in her nightstand, singing with laughter.
Sirine lies very still, eyes wide open, taking in darkness. Her breath is tucked tight inside her, her hands curled shut. When she was a little girl, she would lie awake and alone in the extra bedroom in her uncle’s house when her parents were traveling for their work. There was a particular grade of loneliness to those isolated nights, her parents as gone as if they’d never really existed at all. She would lie awake and try to imagine who she would be when she was grown up—thirty, forty, fifty years old. It was like trying to look through the sky, layers of yellow haze, to a faraway location. She would speak to this future self, conjure those selves up that she felt somehow already existed around her. When her parents returned, they would always be excited to see her and would usually have an odd little toy for her from one of the countries they’d worked in—once it was a straw doll from India, another time a sort of puppet from Thailand, drawn on paper and propped up on long sticks. Sirine always wondered if the toys had belonged to sick children. Her mother would squeeze her a bit too hard and too long and her father looked as if part of him were still back in the places they’d just left, his eyes empty, not quite focusing on Sirine. Later, she always stuffed the presents to the bottom of the garbage can out back.
But now Sirine dozes, half-listen
ing to the shushing, water sounds of Arabic drifting into the room. She thinks longingly of her old life before Han, of sleeping in the safe narrow bed, King Babar warming her feet. Her uncle with his favorite tomato salad and Um-Nadia with her tea with cardamom and everything is fine, the way it always is.
When Sirine wakes again, the sun still hasn’t risen but the light is on in the kitchen. She gets up, dresses, and goes out. Han sits at the kitchen table studying the Los Angeles Times. Sirine sees more dark photos in the pages and looks away from them. Then she notices pale yellow newsprint underneath a stack of student papers. “What’s that?” she asks, touching its edge.
He pulls it out, shows it to her. “Oh. That’s the newspaper from Jerusalem.”
“I didn’t know you read that.”
He smiles as if a bit surprised himself. “I don’t usually. I just get curious sometimes, I guess. I picked it up at the newsstand on campus.”
“Did you read it? Is there anything interesting in it?”
He looks at her now. “Not really. I mean—the usual atrocities. Do you pay attention to foreign politics?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I mean, I know I should.” She stares at the yellowish newspaper, half-curled on the kitchen counter, the smeared photograph, Arabic spidering across the pages: a secret code for something. She twists her wrists, pulls on her hands—an old habit from childhood when she used to wipe her hands in her apron while hoping that the baklava will be crisp or the lamb will be tender or the grape leaves will hold together. Han watches her a moment, then gently places his hand over hers. “Habeebti, what is it?”
She looks down, twists her hands over her elbows.
“Please, what?”
Finally she looks directly at him. “I need you to tell me more,” she says, her voice shaky. “I don’t know enough about you yet. If we’re—if we’re going to be—whatever we’re going to be. I need more.”
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