Crescent

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  He holds up his hands as if in offering. “Of course. Anything. Tell me what you want to know.”

  She avoids his gaze and says, “I need to know about the women in your life.” He takes her hands and she squeezes tightly, as if he is holding her up, holding her head above an invisible line. And she almost expects him to laugh or look shocked, or at the very least to shake his head and say, what are you talking about, what women?

  But instead he nods as if in recognition, as if he’d been waiting for such a request, and says, “Of course I’ll tell you—as much as there is to tell.”

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “When I was a child,” Han murmurs, “when I was very young, my friend Sami and I were always looking for ways to entertain ourselves. We lived in a small village at the edge of Baghdad and my father owned a few acres of orchard land where we grew lemons, figs, and olives. But we also lived close enough to the city so that when the well-keeper Abu-Najmeh gave us the bicycles, we discovered it was easy to pedal into the town and explore the neighborhoods and markets. Sami and I got more adventuresome and we began to coast down alleyways and squeeze through shrubs. I couldn’t help myself. I was afraid of the unknown but I was constantly lured by unfamiliar streets. That was how we discovered the swimming pool at the Eastern Hotel….”

  His family wasn’t wealthy—they didn’t have enough money for his textbooks or to send his sister to school. Han sat under the street lamps outside to do his studying because they couldn’t afford electricity. Sometimes he watched birds passing overhead in the night, gulls with sharply articulated wings and blackbirds with long tail-feathers. He ran his fingers over the vocabulary words in his notebooks, writing down his favorites: shelaal, asfoor, mismar, shemsiyya…

  In the Iraq of his childhood, everything went slowly. It took a lizard the entire course of the sun to walk from one side of his bedroom ceiling to the other. Even the morning took its time, slowly easing from grays to blues to greens to yellow light. Han was impatient, however, constantly imagining all the places he planned to journey to, the lives he planned to have.

  And then one day he and his best friend Sami were out biking in a busy, unknown section of town and they noticed, quite by accident, rows of emerald-green trees pruned into the shapes of boxes. Creeping closer, they glimpsed a blue slice of water between the leaves. Han felt he’d awakened into one of those new times and places he’d dreamed of.

  Sami hung back, but to Han the colorful flowers and graceful palms were as familiar as his uncle’s tales about the adventures of Sinbad. Sami cried, “No, no, Han!” as Han slipped in between the shrubs and found himself transported to a world of long legs, red nails, crystal eyes, rows of pale women on chaise lounges arrayed around a perfect full moon of blue water.

  Slowly, Sami followed his friend through the shrubs. Then the two boys, aged eleven, stood there staring, frozen in place. At first none of the women moved, and Han wondered if they were real.

  Finally one of the women gradually reached up, startling the boys, and slid her dark glasses a half-inch down her nose, peering at them. He watched her gleaming lips crook slightly and then she broke into laughter that sounded as though someone were ringing a tiny dinner bell. Suddenly all the women were laughing, the air filled with the sounds of bells, their hair and skin shimmering like jewels.

  The woman with the dark glasses reached toward Han and he moved to her side obediently. Her hair shifted and reflected light like a flame. “So, my little man,” she said in English and took his hand. “Do you like to swim?”

  He’d studied English in school; he was a good student. He realized he understood what she’d said and his eyes grew wide and hopeful. Han looked over his shoulder. He’d swum the Tigris River and he’d read about enchanted swimming pools in the Arabian Nights but never before had he seen one. It looked a bit like a pond, but a pond that had descended from heaven, a liquid sapphire set in marble. “Yes,” he said in a small voice. Sami gaped as if he’d never seen Han before—he was actually speaking to them! In their own language!

  “What a fine, handsome boy,” she said. “What is your name?”

  “Hanif,” he said, again in the small voice.

  “Well, Hanif,” she said. “You’ve got beautiful eyes. Look, Kay.” She turned Han to face the lady on the next chair. “Look at the eyelashes.”

  Han couldn’t tell if the friend was even looking at him behind the big black glasses. “Darling,” the friend said in a lazy drone, “I could gobble him up.”

  “Go ahead,” the woman with burning hair said. Han realized she was speaking to him. She lifted one long, glowing leg—the first bare woman’s leg he’d ever seen—and pointed to the water with her foot. “Go on, someone ought to make use of this ridiculous thing.”

  Han looked at Sami and then looked back, round-eyed and speechless. He knew how badly Sami wanted to run away. But Han wanted to stay.

  He slipped off his white shirt, folded it, and placed it on the grass. The women lay motionless on their chaise lounges, a few of them rippling through magazines, languid boredom rising from them like steam. He circled the pool, the marble inlay warm from the sun, infinitely smooth, but there seemed to be no starting place to the thing, no sloping bank or rocks. He lowered himself, squatting, to the edge, ignoring Sami’s whispered pleas, and extended one foot toward the blue. But a shadow in the water—a cloud? an airplane?—distracted him and he lost his balance. His foot slapped flat against the water’s surface, which shattered into a million flaming tiles, and in he went.

  Eyes open, ears open, mouth open, hair waving on end. His head filled with the weird pulse of the underwater and the sound of his own beating body. His aunt had told him that the water—like the air and fire—was filled with its own kinds of jinns. But when the bubbles cleared, all he could see—his lungs bursting, sinuses aching—was the perfect world, clean and cold and crossed with slanting veins of light. He surged to the surface, coughing, throwing back his hair—a ring of bright droplets—and cried to Sami, it’s great! Sami walked to the edge and, staring at Han, he jumped in.

  They came every day, sneaking away from the other boys. The two of them would carefully fold their shirts on the grass, then spend their days in the water. They became acrobatic and entertained the women with handstands and cartwheels. They made running leaps into the pool—knees tucked up into their arms, sailing high in the air—that sent arcs of spray over the lounge chairs. The women shrieked and held up their hands; one or two would flap their magazines angrily and slip on their robes.

  Han got to know the women arrayed in their chairs around the edge of the pool: Helga, Houlani, Dee Dee, Sarah, Dot, Gina, Kay, Renate, Connie, Dominique, Margaret, Ginger, Lisel, Pehar, Farnaz, and Janet. They were the wives of diplomats, visiting dignitaries, politicians, and businessmen. Most of the women at the pool had no jobs or income of their own. They oiled themselves and read romance novels and tilted mirrors under their chins. Han had trouble imagining that they could be of the same species as the women in his village—women constantly at work clearing rice, threshing wheat, sweeping the floors, embroidering sheets, their skin toughened, eyes radiating lines from years of looking across fields and high walls of camel thorn climbing into the sun.

  The women at the pool seemed half-formed to Han, caught between childhood and adulthood—they were clearly older than he was, yet as slender as children, their skin tender as larvae. And they had the petulance of children—they would egg on Han and Sami, coaxing them to do their tricks in the water, until inevitably they grew bored and turned back to their magazines.

  Janet never looked bored. She watched Han closely, or so he hoped—more closely than Sami, who was also bright and diverting and good at English, though perhaps not as fluent or clever as Han. Each day when the boys finally came out of the water the sky looked swollen and shadowy and the late summer air was still hot. The boys’ skin would be shriveled, their shorts sagging around their skinny hips. Janet broug
ht out extra towels for them—soft and thick as cream, embroidered with the monogram of the Eastern Hotel.

  She took an interest in Han. She was different from the other women, though perhaps at first she seemed the same, with their air of both expectation and boredom. But he noticed the way her eyes narrowed when he told her stories of his life outside the swimming pool—he saw that she listened.

  Sami would lay back in his towel, onto the crackly, sunburnt lawn that had been so painfully grown and fertilized and trimmed in order to circle the marble patio, and he would doze in the sun. But Han sat beside Janet’s chair, cross-legged on the marble, and told her about the intricate embroidery work his sister did on linens, his mother’s painstaking sift through the lentils, the daily pounding of spices—sesame, thyme, sumac—the air filled with a fiery mist. He told her that his mother, like Janet, also lived in a society of women apart from their men—who had other sorts of work and different kinds of relaxation.

  Janet laughed and tossed her brilliant hair and said, “Do you think I live like this all the time?”

  And Han blinked, uncertain, because it was all he knew of her, so that is what he’d assumed, that she lived in an eternal summer season, in her bathing suit by the pool.

  But after two months of this daily pleasure, one day Han and Sami came to the pool and some of the women were gone, their chairs folded and put away. When Han asked about them, Janet sighed and propped her head on one hand and said, “It’s nearly the end of the season, thank God. We’re going home.”

  And by the following week, all the women were gone, including Janet—vanished without a trace or a goodbye. The boys stood on the blank marble ring, the chaise lounges empty, just the cold crystal of the water clear and unbroken as an alien sun.

  Han returned to the pool several times after that—even though the air was turning distinctly cooler and the days were starting to shorten. But the women didn’t return. Eventually the chaises disappeared and a wrinkled black covering was spread over the top of the pool. Han and Sami went back to their old gang of friends. But something inside of Han had been altered. He felt impatient and dissatisfied with his friends, even with school—which he’d previously loved. Though he dressed the same and looked the same, he had changed.

  Winter came and went; Han passed his twelfth birthday and some of the boys in his school were taken out to help their fathers with their work. Han was to help his father in the orchards that summer—he had been looking forward to it. He would finally be old enough to work among the men. Then he was to return to school in the fall. His father and mother both recognized Han’s unusual gifts. There was even talk of eventually sending him to the University of Baghdad—though the money would be a problem, his mother pointed out. Oh, money is always a problem, his father responded.

  Han began working in the orchards, climbing the highest, softest branches for the olives. Early one morning before work, Han was between sleep and waking, dreaming of plucking the hard, black olive berries, when there was a tapping at the window. Han got up, yawning, and Sami was there. “The ladies,” he said, his cheeks pink with sweat. “They’re back!”

  Han sneaked out of the house and he and Sami made their way to the pool in the dim predawn. They crept through the hedge and there they saw the folding beach chairs, once again arrayed in a circle, a pair of sunglasses on one, a pair of delicate green sandals beside another—and, soft-gray and shimmering, the pool, its cover peeled away like an old skin, the water clear and still as thought.

  But there was a problem—Han and Sami were twelve now and their fathers expected them to be at home helping in the fields.

  Han concocted a story about a special meeting at school, so he was able to leave the orchards early that day. That afternoon, he bicycled straight to the pool and greeted Janet. Then he told her, his voice trembling, that he would not be able to spend the summer with them again.

  But Janet merely opened a straw bag by her chair and pulled out an embroidered cotton purse. From this, she removed several bills and said, “Could you teach me to speak Arabic?”

  When Han’s father saw all the money and heard what Han had to say, at first he was stunned and even indignant—struggling to imagine why a wealthy American woman would pay a twelve-year-old to teach her a language. He asked Han, “How did you meet? When? How did you come to speak to each other? What does her husband say about this?”

  Han looked at the ground. He had never met Janet’s husband—though she wore a ring, he wasn’t even sure if such a man existed—and he couldn’t bring himself to lie to his father anymore. Perhaps she was not married, Han admitted, but her female friends were always with her.

  “How many friends are there?” his father asked.

  Han thought it over. “Perhaps fourteen or fifteen?” he said.

  His father burst out laughing. “Fourteen or fifteen friends? Have you stumbled into a harem?”

  And Han—who’d never actually seen such a thing as a harem, who’d only heard stories of them in books like the Adventures of Sinbad the Sailor—wondered if he had.

  Luckily, his father was not like ordinary fathers, who might have refused to spare their sons in the fields. His father knew from one glance at all that American money that his son would make many times more teaching this woman than he would barefoot in the olive trees. And even better—he would be working with an American: this, he sensed, might unlatch more important things for his son. He let his questions go unanswered.

  Han steered his bike with one hand, dodging down narrow alleyways, cutting around stray dogs and chickens, water-bearers and jewelry vendors, knife-sharpeners and fruit sellers, women carrying trays of bread on their heads, boys carrying silver trays full of tea glasses and pots of hot tea. In Han’s other hand he carried a tablet of white paper, two pencils, an Arabic-English dictionary, and a thick Arabic grammar book to teach her the beautifully shaped characters of Fus-ha—or classical Arabic—the language of the Quran.

  Sami was not as fortunate—his father kept him at work in the fields, and Janet had not offered Sami a handful of money to teach her. So every day, Han climbed all alone through the hole in the hedges to meet with his student.

  For a week, maybe even two, Janet copied the exercises Han assigned, trying to curve her fingers around the swoops and dashes of Alieph, Baa, Taa…trying to curve her lips around the guttural sound of the letter Eyn, the rasping Ghayn, and the heaviness of Dahd. Inevitably, though, after fifteen minutes of struggle, she’d start gossiping with her friends about the embassy parties. And Han would be back inside the pool, diverting the women with flips and dives.

  They attained an ideal world this way. Han swam or laid on the grass on a hotel towel, listening to the women speak, basking in the sun, dazzling afterimages of water and chlorine fog passing over his eyelids. There were women there from what seemed like every country in the world, and in their company he developed his aptitude for languages. He was able to spend a few weeks listening to conversations in German, Hindi, or Italian, and discover the rudiments of the languages taking hold in his brain. Some of the women spoke to him in English and some in their own language, and he found that if he listened closely enough that the words’ meaning would eventually reveal itself, glimmering through the sounds like fruit on dark branches.

  After two weeks of half-hearted exercises, Janet pushed aside the books and papers and said to Han, “Maybe it would be better if we just practiced talking instead.”

  Han was relieved: it was always a huge task to get Janet to practice her alphabet and each time he taught her a new letter she seemed to forget the letter that had gone before.

  But the extent of her Arabic seemed to go no further than the hotel lobby: she could ask for fruits, ice cream, hairdresser, car, maid, towels, vodka, nail polish, flowers, blankets, and dry cleaning, and could say in almost perfect Arabic, “I want,” as well as “give me.” But no matter how much he coached her, he could not seem to expand her vocabulary. The conversation lessons wer
e set aside like the writing exercises when Janet decided that their time would be better spent perfecting Han’s English and that she would continue paying him a stipend for the pleasure of doing this.

  When Han returned to school in the fall, the language teachers were amazed by his advancements in English, Italian, and Farsi. And Han’s family had enjoyed the wages he’d brought in all summer. There were treats on the table like sesame candy, and pressed apricots, and frekeh with smoked pigeon breast, and an extra sheep in their stock. Han’s father was content to allow this arrangement to continue through the following summer as well. “As long as your friend needs the lessons,” he said, silencing Han’s mother.

  Sometimes the desert winds kicked up and swirled sand from miles away into the air, and sometimes thunder boiled in the sky. But mostly there were long, hot, transparent days of swimming and talking. Janet seemed fascinated by what Han told her of his life outside the pool and she asked him many questions. She in turn talked about her life in a place called Lincoln, Nebraska, about table-flat fields filled with rows of corn, planted acres that started just outside her back door, and how the open desert reminded her of the plains.

  By the end of their third summer there was starting to be discussion of revolution in Baghdad—the rulership was said to be corrupt and the Iraqis had an idealistic hope for a new regime. But Han’s father was not convinced that the new party would be any more just or effective than the last and he said so at their table and in town. The neighbors, in turn, began to talk about the fact that Han did not have to work in the orchards like the other boys. Han’s family, which had always been regarded as a bit aloof, was now viewed with open suspicion and resentment: why was there another sheep in their field? Rumors started flying about the place that Han was bicycling off to every day, and his friends started calling him Eye Spy.