“I never did see her again,” he says quietly. And he looks away into the corner of the room and Sirine knows that he is talking about the American woman again. “Sometimes even now, I still dream I’m back in my room, back in Iraq, and Janet is still in the pool, waiting for me. But I never return.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Camille and Napoleon-Was-Here were semi-stranded in the desert with the equally lost blue Bedu. They tried all the way-finding tricks that the Bedu knew—navigating by sun, moon, stars, water, wind, shadows, even following the tilt of the camels in the morning and the slant of the campfire flames at night. But somehow the paths never quite led where they expected them to lead. They were out of their depth, too far from their trade routes. After months of fruitless wandering, it seemed that they’d never find their way back home. Just when they thought all hope was lost, Camille sighed and said, “If only that naughty mermaid, Alieph from the Land of Na, hadn’t decided to steal my son, none of this would have happened!”
At this, one of the oldest Bedu, a man who was so old that nearly all the blue had leaked out of his skin, and who had a long whispery face and runny little eyes, piped up, “Alieph from the Land of Na? I also know a certain Alieph from the Land of Na! You don’t suppose it’s the same one, do you?” Well, and he had good reason to ask. After all, you know how that goes, you tell someone in Azerbaijan that you’re from Texas and they say, you’re from Texas? Do you know Joe Smith? He’s from Texas!
But the old Bedouin got Camille’s attention, and she said, “If this Alieph you know is a wily and shape-shifting mermaid, then we must be talking about the very same one.”
“Then that’s her, all right,” said the old Bedouin. “And if she hasn’t changed addresses, I happen to know she lives not far from here.”
He explained that she’d left the Land of Na to retire to the elbow of the Sinai, and that she’d wedged herself into a cozy cave dwelling between the desert and the sea.
Off they went, Camille, the dog, and the Bedu, on another long walk that took days and nights and nights and days. Until they came to a place that fit right into the hinge of the Sinai where towering walls of sandstone cliffs rose vertically from the Red Sea. And they knew it was the right place because when the waves rushed in you couldn’t hear a thing. But when they crept out, there was a sound like a velvety shimmering that chimed and echoed in the violet-colored caves studding the cliff face and covering the whole of the earth.
Everyone’s eyes got big and their bones began to dance in their bodies and their hearts seemed to be drawn right up out of their chests. “That’s her,” the old Bedouin said. “That’s Alieph from the Land of Na. And she’s calling for us.”
Camille had never heard the like! And though her mind told her to run away as fast as she could, instead her hands started climbing and her legs started following. Just as it is when you become involved with certain romantic entinglers and entanglers, no? The mind says one thing and the body is in strong disagreement.
Without even realizing it, Camille had fallen under the spell of the siren’s call: the sound that contains the scent of berries, chocolate, and mint, that tastes of salt and oil and blood, that sounds like a heart’s murmur, the passage of clouds, the call to prayers, the beloved’s name, and a distant ringing in the ears. She went with her wits about her, though, because Camille, don’t forget, was a bit of a siren herself—and she knew a few tricks of her own.
While the blue Bedu hung back sweating bluish beads of sweat, Camille and Napoleon began hunting. They found a thin ledge that wound along the cliff face; it offered just the narrowest purchase, crumbling and climbing between clumps of sage and burning rocks. And at the crumbliest, sheerest, steepest point, she looked up and spotted the opening to the blackest, deepest cave. The smell of roses was shaking in the air and Camille had to hold on to Napoleon’s bony head to keep her balance and restore her courage.
The air was thinner here and the sound was even brighter and Camille might have turned and run right then and there, but she was watching the face of the cave, which was only a few meters away now. Up until this point, she had been reassuring herself with the thought that there was actually no such animal as a mermaid. Of course, there’s a Mother of All Fish, because everyone has to have a mother. And there’re jinns and nymphs and sylphs, because, well, they’re everywhere. But a mermaid? Preposterous! Until, as I say, she happened to look up and see unrolling from the lip of the cave a glimmering, opalescent, sea-green tail.
It’s not exactly that something has changed, Sirine thinks. That’s too definite. She hopes that she’s wrong—she hopes that nothing has changed. When she’d asked him to tell her about the women in his life, she thought that might reassure her. And he did tell her, as simply and clearly as someone with nothing to hide. But that night, after he tells her about the American woman named Janet and the pool at the Eastern Hotel, she lies awake at night after Han has fallen asleep, wide awake, listening to the silence in the room, staring in the darkness. It isn’t necessarily a bad or ominous feeling, nor is it necessarily expectant or hopeful, but it is definitely a heightened, vigilant state, a kind of waiting, her concentration hovering at the surface of her body like a dragonfly.
Throughout the next day at work she catches herself thinking about the woman in Han’s story and suddenly she realizes that her heart is pounding and her breath is speeded up. She walks into the closed screen door at the café, trips over the slightly raised threshold between the two kitchens. By the end of the day, her arms are covered with small red scorch marks from the grill and there are knife cuts on both her thumbs. She avoids Um-Nadia for fear that she will take in Sirine’s injuries and add them up like a sum. But that evening as she’s closing up, the café deserted except for Cristobal swabbing the back kitchen, Sirine bangs her forehead against a hanging pot—a pot she has walked around almost daily for years. It makes a dull ringing sound that resonates all the way to the back of her skull. She puts one hand on the counter, the pain starting to flicker through her forehead. And suddenly Aziz is there, sliding behind the counter; he takes Sirine by the hand, leads her to a chair, and finds a cold rag to hold to her head.
“What are you doing here?” she asks while pressing on the rag, too embarrassed to look directly at him.
He squats and angles himself so that she can’t avoid facing him. “I came to get you a cold rag.”
“Thank you.”
“Are you all right?”
She waves one hand at him. “It’s…” Her voice trails away. “Happens all the time.”
“Actually, I came to ask if you’ll go see some whirling dervishes with me.”
And maybe it’s the bump on her head, maybe it’s Aziz’s kindness and the gentleness in his hand as he tends to her, but Sirine smiles at Aziz and says sure, I’ll go with you. Why not?
That evening she asks Han if he’ll come with them, even pleads a bit, but he smiles absently and tells her to please enjoy the whirling without him. There’s finals to grade that week, and he must research his new book if he ever wants to get tenure. He tells her to go on, have a good time, to enjoy herself, and to watch out for that devil Aziz.
On Friday when Sirine and Aziz drive to Santa Monica Community College, she is already regretting her decision to go. She tries to keep her knee from bumping his in the little car and she keeps her hands tightly clasped in her lap. They’re going to see the Mevlevi dervishes, also known as the whirling dervishes—a thing Sirine has heard of but never imagined actually still existed. She and Aziz sit in the bleachers at the college’s gymnasium with about two hundred other people—some wearing conservative suits and dresses mixed in with others who wear dashikis and dreadlocks, sandals and braids, many of them hugging each other and calling out greetings. She can smell traces of a previous night’s basketball game—the scuff of rubber-soled basketball shoes, wisps of old sweat and salt and floor varnish, as well as hints of patchouli and jasmine oils. The program tickets cost fifteen d
ollars—“A small price for a glimpse of heaven, don’t you think?” Aziz asks as he pays for them both.
Rumi the poet that Aziz called his spiritual mentor, turns out to have lived a thousand years ago. Sirine reads in the program notes that “Sema” is the name of the whirling prayer ceremony, that Rumi was the founder of the dervish order, and that Sema is “a journey through the universe before God, a spiritual intoxication that takes one to the true existence by means of ecstasy.” She scans the audience, feeling expectant yet skeptical about this impending journey. She hasn’t thought about issues of the spirit since her visit to the Women in Islam group—which didn’t seem to have much to do with spirituality anyway. It seems that whenever she tries to deliberately seek out something like God, she gets distracted, her mind winds back to her body, and she finds that instead she is thinking about something like stuffed grape leaves rolled tightly around rice, ground lamb, garlic, onions, currants, fragrant with green olive oil.
The audience settles down, Aziz sighs happily, and a troupe of musicians climbs onstage. A man steps forward and intones one of Rumi’s poems, repeating the line, “Don’t go back to sleep.”
There is more poetry then and some music and song in which the singer’s voice rises and trembles in place like a body of water, transfixing Sirine with its dignified, unearthly sound. She hears snatches of lines: “Listen, if you can stand to…the soul lies down in that grass…the musical air in a flute…a rose lost in its fragrance.”
At last about twenty dervishes emerge from a door in the back of the room. They walk to their places, aligned in a circle, and then very slowly they begin to turn. The music gradually intensifies as the dervishes spin faster: eyes closed, heads tilted, their arms gradually lifting—one palm up and one down, their long skirts billowing around their ankles, floating about the floor as they move so they appear to be footless.
Some of the dervishes are hopping a bit, some are smiling, heads slightly canted to one side, but all seem to be enraptured, fixed on some unmoving, internal object: in all that whirling, a point of stillness. Still spinning, they begin to move around the floor in a circle. Then they fan out and cover the floor.
Pinned between listening and watching, Sirine feels transported, in the presence of something like a miracle. She leans forward, forgets to think about anything. All that matters is the swirl of the movement, so familiar to Sirine, giving thought over to the body: repetitive, sustaining. Like stirring a pot.
At the end of the evening, the dervishes line up, still and solemn—none show any sign of dizziness. Sirine thinks they are going to shake hands with the man in charge. (Aziz whispers that he is the sheikh.) Instead, as they approach the sheikh, each dervish bends an arm, elbow forward, so their hands are raised, and clasps the sheikh’s upraised hand, and, sweetly, they simultaneously kiss the side of each other’s hand.
After the closing ritual, she feels that she is waking from a dream. She sighs and then realizes that her arm and leg have drifted somewhat, and that she’s been touching Aziz.
She pulls back. “I’m sorry,” she says.
“Oh, come back,” Aziz says. “It’s lovely.”
She looks away, her face and neck hot.
They walk down the street, Sirine still buoyed by afterimages of the dervishes, their hypnotic movement. The wide sidewalks bordering the campus are shuttered with panels of streetlights and Sirine and Aziz walk through flickering boxes of light. The air is balmy, filled with a mystical quiet, and even Aziz seems subdued. The performance has thrilled and disoriented Sirine: she can’t tell if the muffled roar around her is from cars or the ocean or the wind. They walk a bit aimlessly, hands in pockets, not talking, past the parking lots, past shops and alleyways. She feels happy and easy to be walking beside Aziz like this, and then she wonders if she shouldn’t be wanting to get right back to Han. But she doesn’t really.
Eventually the sidewalk runs out. It ends at a vacant lot bordered by rows of light bulbs strung up between poles, like a defunct car lot. The lights swing in the breeze and scatter wild shadows over the lot. “Well,” Aziz says, surveying the scene, “I guess it’s the end of the line.”
But Sirine still feels restless, not quite ready to go back home. So they go into a small café with just a cobalt neon cup over the door that they’d passed earlier. The place is empty and echoey, its floor covered with black and white tiles, and a mosaic of antelopes in a field covers the counter. The woman at the counter has sleepy black eyes and curtain-straight black hair sliced across at her eyebrows and above her shoulders. She looks at Sirine as if she recognizes her, then bows her head while taking their orders, the shining hair swinging forward in blades.
Sirine sits at one of the wrought-iron tables and rolls herself forward, elbows on the table so her hipbones don’t press so hard into the ironwork chair. The silent woman brings them their lattes in blue ceramic bowls, swirling with steam and a faint drift of nutmeg. Sirine cups both hands around hers and gazes into it like into a lantern. She remembers the line, “Don’t go back to sleep,” and smiles.
“What?” Aziz tilts his head to look under the cascade of her hair.
She pushes her hair back and sits up. “What we just saw—that’s a sort of Islam?” she asks.
He looks amused. “Depends on who you ask. Some think so.”
“Were they really praying?”
He seems to be thinking about an answer, but it might just be an excuse to let his gaze wash over her. His skin looks coppery in the café light and his lips plump and sensitive, curved into an eternal smile—as if it were his natural expression. He draws his index finger around the lip of the cup and Sirine notices he’s wearing a rosy gold ring with a green stone on that finger. There’s a faint mark, like a margin, circling the base of his finger and for some reason this sets off a frisson inside her.
“My scholarly opinion is, you’re looking especially radiant and enticing tonight.”
She laughs and folds her arms, but she finds she wants to spar, push back at Aziz. His eyes on her are shiny and bedeviling.
“Don’t be bad,” she says, smiling.
He shrugs. “It’s who I am. I am Bad Aziz. I was born this way. Might as well ask a cat not to cry.”
“Well, thanks for the warning, then,” she says. “I never knew your true identity.”
“My true identity is there for the knowing.” His calf brushes hers under the table and he grins. “I’m an open-and-shut case. Ask me anything. What do you want to know?”
She looks into her cup, barely sipped. Some part of her mind is caught in the memory of the floating skirts, outstretched arms. “All right. Where are you from?”
“The Mother of the Arab World, of course. Damascus. The fancy part of Damascus, where the intelligentsia live. By the city gardens.”
“How long in this country?”
“Five long years.”
“Favorite music?”
He ticks them off, bending each finger with his index finger. “Cheb Khaled. Oum Koulthoum, of course. And Abba.”
“Age?”
“Verrry late thirties, meaning forty-eight.”
“Um.” She thinks for a second. “Bad habits? Smoking, drinking, running around?”
He grins broadly, waves at her. “D.”
“D?”
“All the above.”
She lifts her eyebrows. “Oh my. You are bad. Should I be afraid?”
“Afraid?” he says. “Of me?”
She smiles and closes her eyes and there are the pale, serene faces of the dervishes, the white robes rising open and the whirling filling the room like a snowstorm. But then she opens her eyes and Aziz is close to her, holding his hands over hers, his eyes daring and romantic with long, inky lashes. He is saying, “Aziz is quite harmless.”
And she only waits for a second before she withdraws her hand.
Sirine has her key out before she’s even reached her door. Do not look at him, she tells herself. Do not look. A normal woman woul
dn’t have done this, she suddenly thinks. A normal woman wouldn’t be out at night alone with this kind of man. Or perhaps she means a good girl? She tries to remember how many blocks away Han lives, but she can’t. And Aziz is behind her, placing his fingertips on her shoulder, and there it is, she can feel the pull of attraction inside her again, quickening in her throat.
“What was the line from that poem?” Aziz murmurs, half to himself. “Now, why can I never think of such things when I need them? It’s something like, ‘We have the taste of eternity in our mouths.’ That’s it, isn’t it?” He is grinning and stroking her arm. “Come on, lovely Sirine, my siren, don’t you want to know what such a thing tastes like?” He pulls her a little closer, a little closer, a little closer. “‘Dissolver of sugar, dissolve me.’” His head tilts slightly; his eyes are just a dark fringe of lashes, and there is his curling upper lip, a soft exhalation of breath. She closes her eyes for a second, just a quick second, as if she is drowsy. She holds her breath, pulls back, but her breath slips and Aziz’s scent fills her head, sweet orange blossom and almond, and his breath rushes against her face and it’s like giving way to the force of an ocean current and the next thing she knows, her hands have fallen open, helpless at her sides, and they are kissing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Back at the lip of the cave of the mermaid Alieph from the Land of Na, Aunt Camille had just witnessed the unrolling of a great green tail. She stood, but could not feel the ground under her feet; she gasped, but could not feel the air in her lungs. The air filled with a sound of shimmering and humming, and the humming rose and converged until it was a voice, a voice made of honey and husks and roses and prayers and weeping and wine and ocean waves and desert light, and the voice was saying, Camille, Camille! Come closer, closer!
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