Now poor Aunt Camille began to shake in all her bones and Napoleon-Was-Here was shaking beneath her hand, and despite herself she crept closer along the edge until she cried out, “Good Queen Alieph, have mercy on us!”
And then she heard a laughter lighter than dragonflies and a small white pointed hand slipped along the opening of the cave. Then she saw a glowing, pearl-tipped, golden barnacle-encrusted crown emerging spokes-first. This crown was entwined with long tumbling seaweedy locks of gold and copper and bronze. And then finally the curtains of hair fell back and there was a face. And oh, what a face! White as marble in one light, black as onyx in another, the eyes wide and hooded as Cleopatra’s and filled with the color and the movement of ocean waves. And her mouth, pure and rare and small as a tropical orchid, opened in laughter and was filled with the sounding roar of the incoming tide.
“Oh, great Alieph!” Camille cried out and fell on her knees and her face and the dog did the same. “Please have mercy!” she cried again.
The mermaid fixed her with one of her terrible, beautiful, speckled eyes then and sighed. Camille opened her eyes. And after a dramatic pause Alieph said, “All day long people are coming to ask me favors! Do this, do that. Does anyone care what it’s like for me?”
Camille sat up then and peeped carefully and said, “What do you mean?”
The mermaid arranged herself on the lip of the cave and Camille settled herself on a ledge. Stretching out from tail to crown along the rocks, Alieph sighed again and said, “Imagine if you will the loneliness of the mermaid. We first open our eyes within the womb of the sea, born without the benefit of parents or childhood, eyes full of the green strands of the waves, only sargassum for our clothes. Born without language itself, until the blue whales take pity on us and teach us to sing and the narwhales teach us to embroider.
“We live in exile from both people and fish, at the center of the center of the sea, where no one goes except crazies and wild men, whom we are then obliged to kill by luring them onto the storming rocks. This is our only form of entertainment and usually we don’t even mean to do it exactly—we’re just curious by nature.”
“How many of you are there altogether?” Camille asked.
“Twenty-eight. Alieph, Ba, Ta, Tha, Jeem, Ha…” and she went through the whole alphabet. “Some of course are nicer than others.”
“Yes, typical sisters,” said Camille. “Family gifts are not always evenly distributed.”
“Isn’t that so!” Alieph marveled. “Some are witty and ironic, some are literalists, some are grouchy, and some are beautiful hosts and make a lovely tea tray. By day we swim hand in hand in hand, all twenty-eight, through sheets of light and topaz schools of fish. By night we make our way back on to the rocky shores of the Land of Na.”
“What is that place like?” asked Camille.
“It is black and jagged, made of mahogany, shale, and silver. The rocks turn to ice under the moon and sometimes it thunders so loudly the whole island shakes. Other times huge silent green veins of lightning flash and flash and flash all around and the island glows like a mirror. And sometimes, when it’s very quiet, we can just barely hear the sounds of the great missing civilization that is said to be lost somewhere in the distant heart of the center of the center, where no one ever goes.”
A good place to visit, Camille thought, but she wouldn’t want to live there.
Sirine wakes early the next morning and checks the other side of the bed, patting at it in the dark to confirm that she didn’t let Aziz come inside. She had pulled out of their kiss last night, saying, “Han is your friend!” and he’d smiled broadly and said, “Yes, and your lover!” It’s so early it’s still dark out, but last night’s flirtation with Aziz has already dwindled away to a wisp, an unfortunate figment of her imagination. Her face feels damp, as if she’s just awakened from a fever. She gets up and dresses quickly, missing Han after their night apart. She calls him, eager for the sound of his voice, but no one answers the phone.
She tries not to let herself wonder where he might be so early in the morning. She peeks in her nightstand drawer and the laughing woman in the photo looks at her. She pushes the drawer shut. She will not think about it. No. She drops back on to her bed and closes her eyes. She tries to recall some of the lines of the poetry last night, but can only remember what Aziz said about the taste of eternity right before he kissed her. Did he make that up? King Babar jumps on to the bed and she opens her eyes and he gives her his slightly wise and slightly cockeyed look that seems to say he’s known her through a thousand previous lifetimes. She is pervaded by guilt—though she tries to convince herself now that it was all innocent, a deep uneasiness seeps into her bloodstream, the memory of the previous night tainting the air and unsettling her mind. She gets off the bed and gets dressed.
On her way to work, she swerves at the last second and bicycles to Han’s apartment. Just before she knocks, she holds her breath and presses her ear to the door. Does she hear voices? She knocks and the interior sound seems to hush. She calls his name. No one answers.
All day, Sirine waits for Han to appear. She calls twice during her breaks and there’s no answer. Every time the phone rings, she looks up, but it’s never Han. It seems she can still taste Aziz on her lips. She squeezes the handle on her frying pan till her knuckles ache, one thought in her head: Han knows.
That night, Sirine stays late at work hoping that Han will still come or call her. Tomorrow is the start of Ramadan, a month of daily fasting, broken by an iftar, a special meal after sunset and a bite before sunrise. Han has told her that the idea behind the fast of Ramadan is to remind everyone of the poor and less fortunate, a time of charity, compassion, abstinence, and forgiveness. And even though Um-Nadia claims to have no religion and many of their customers are Christians, they all like to eat the traditional foods prepared throughout the Middle East to celebrate the nightly fast-breaking during Ramadan. There are dishes like sweet qatayif crepes and cookies and creamy drinks and thick apricot nectar. Sirine decides to distract herself by looking up some of the more unusual dishes in honor of the month. She stays up late that evening, mixing batters and thumbing through old recipes, until she realizes that the moon has set and it is hours later than she had planned to go home.
Her bicycle is parked in the kitchen courtyard. The moon looks heavy and luxurious, almost full, and there is a dense drizzle that disperses a salty fish scent through the night. She pedals as fast as she dares, afraid of skidding, and sometimes the edges of sidewalk-planted palm trees scrape at her face and soak her hair and hands, the street puddles flinging mud up to her knees. She’s riding back to Han’s house.
She turns the corner and notices several blocks ahead a couple strolling together under the streetlights. Their backs are toward her, but there’s something about the way they move, a familiar tilt of the head, a swing of the arm, that is enough to make her slow down, squeezing her hand brake and squinting through the mist. She gains a little more ground on them and it comes to her that she is looking at Han, and that the person at his side is covered in a head scarf and black robe. The water thickens the air, refracting the light; she can’t see clearly. She catches her breath. They appear to be holding hands.
It seems the air itself has turned liquid, impossible to breathe, impossible to see through. The couple’s hands appear to touch, then separate. They incline toward each other, then move apart—at one moment vaguely formal and aloof, in the next playful and familiar as lovers.
Sirine dismounts and walks closer with her bicycle, silently easing forward. Her feelings are molten, a pure, ancient heat, like nothing she can ever remember feeling before. She is shaking and sweating. The couple turn toward each other and seem to stop. Sirine stops, squeezing her handlebars, three blocks away, her whole body shaking, the night around her as cold and gray as lead. His hand seems to go to the woman’s face. He lowers his head. It’s hard to see. Are they kissing? Could such a thing be happening? The streetlights seem to get
brighter and more intense, a blue and white flash, and suddenly Sirine senses the terrible delicacy of their bodies, of her own body, her knees trembling, her skin just a membrane of sugar; she looks down at her own hands, knuckles white on the bars, pale and tiny as starfish.
She thinks: he belongs with this woman.
She waits alone under the drizzling streetlight long after they’ve walked away.
She thinks about going to her uncle’s house, to her bedroom with the shining sleigh bed, with the window at the foot of the bed, with the one nightstand, with the linen drapes, with the little dog waiting at the center of the bed. But she doesn’t want to go back there. She waits until almost all she can feel is the damp and the cold in her bones and then she climbs onto her bike at last and goes to Han’s apartment.
It’s well past midnight but she doesn’t knock and she doesn’t listen for voices. She lets herself in with her key. If the woman is there now, at least then Sirine will see her face. But when she opens the door Han is sitting alone cross-legged in the corner, surrounded by books and pages of translation notes. He’s not looking at any of it. Sirine is at once both relieved and oddly disappointed. She hears the intricate currents of sound in the corners of the room: he is listening to the beautiful Lebanese singer. He looks up when Sirine enters, but doesn’t seem surprised. He looks at her slowly and dreamily, as if only half-recognizing her. Then he smiles, pushing himself up off the ground with one hand. “Habeebti, I was so lost in the music. For a moment I thought you were someone else.”
She is panting and shivering. She notes that his hair is dry and he is wearing a dry, white sweater: the man she saw under the streetlights had on a dark suit. Had he changed his clothes?
“Han.” Her hair and jeans drip a small crescent on to the floor. “I’m sorry it’s so late. I got lost in this old recipe book, I got so involved in the descriptions, and I—I…” She trails off, staring at Han. Then she says, “You didn’t call me all day.”
“I know, I know, I wanted to, but…” He fans his hand over his books and papers. “Students have been hounding me over their finals. I finally slipped out of the office and spent the day hiding in the library, working.” He holds out his arms to embrace her, then exclaims, “You’re soaked!”
She steps back. “I thought I saw you.”
“You were in the library today?”
She looks down. “I thought I saw you outside, walking home. With another woman.” She waits and hopes he will speak. She tries not to say anything more but then she does anyway: “You were kissing.”
“Kissing! I was? Kissing who?” His face is clear, wide, and open. He moves toward her and his hands slide around her shoulders, gently, as if she were a glass bird. She wills herself not to move. He draws her up close and kisses her and lowers his face into her hair.
She tries to back away. “Han—”
He lifts his head. “I’ve been thinking about you all day. I was going to call you as soon as I got back but I hadn’t realized how late it was and the café was already closed. I still sat up hoping that you would come over.” He runs his hands over her arms. “You’re so cold!” The heat from his palms is dry and soft.
But she pulls out of his grasp. “It looked just like you.”
“Sirine, you can’t be serious. How could I ever kiss another woman?” he says. He encircles her with his arms, his breath warm and intimate. “How could I kiss anybody but you? I’m yours. I’m utterly lost to you.”
She frowns, stares at his stacks of papers.
“Come on.” He leads her into the kitchen. “Look what I bought for you today.” There are small bags on the counter. She opens them and looks inside before reaching in: chocolate-covered almonds, a bottle of lavender-scented wine, a small silver fish with a blue eye on a silver chain. “To keep you safe,” he says, handing her the amulet. “See? The blue helps protect against the Evil Eye. And fish, of course, are good luck.”
They go to bed, just a few hours left in the night, and Sirine lets him hold her inside the arc of his arms. She lies in a state of half-sleep for some time, replaying what she thought she saw in the street—the set of the man’s shoulders, the back of his head—wasn’t it Han? His bedroom closet door is half-open and she sees the dark, block shapes of suits. If she touched them would one of them be damp? She feels crazy and guilty and turned around. Everything she sees seems to be distorted by her own guilty conscience. She considers waking Han and telling him about kissing Aziz. But she thinks she doesn’t have the courage. She argues with herself over what to do, and eventually she drifts into a half-dream, a childhood memory: the image of the African girl on the TV set, the way Sirine held her arm against the little girl’s arm on the screen, comparing the difference in their color. She tries to say something to the little girl; she knows there is something important that she must tell her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Curled on the cool stone floor of the cave, the dog Napoleon-Was-Here pressed against her legs, Aunt Camille listened to the mermaid Queen Alieph talk about her life in the ocean and her home on the rocky, fantastical Land of Na.
“It was essentially a mundane, domestic life. We spent all our time sewing clothes that we couldn’t wear and tricking and tormenting sailors. But then one day all that changed for me.”
Alieph reached back and produced a fat, water-warped book from a shelf inside her cave. “I found this,” she said, “in one of our shipwrecks.” It was a tattered volume of the work of Herman Melville. “I’d seen chests of gold doubloons and yellow sapphires and turquoise rubies, but nothing quite like this before. I didn’t know what it was, so I brought it to a narwhale friend, who, with his blackboard pointer built right into his forehead, is the most scholarly and learned of all fish. I had already learned the language of the whales, of the jellyfish, and of the seahorses, and the narwhale grudgingly agreed that I should understand both sides of my nature—the oceanic and the terrestrial—so he was the one who taught me how to speak and read Arabic.”
“I was wondering where you got that accent,” Camille said.
“Yes, everyone thinks I’m from Malta!” she said, slapping her fish-thigh, and the two of them got a rise out of that. At last, Alieph sighed and checked that her thick spindles of hair were covering all the necessary parts. “I left my sisters and my land,” she said. “Because after the narwhale and I read that book I realized that in my heart of hearts I was a poet, not a shipwrecker. I came here to try and write but people keep bothering me about special favors. Half of them are working on their novels, the other half on their memoirs. No one ever wants to see what I’m working on, so when I get impatient I end up luring them onto nonexistent ledges where they plummet to their deaths. The poor men—they’re especially easy to lead astray. One needs only to call and they follow.”
“Well, I’d love to see what you’re working on!” Camille announced.
Alieph’s face lit up. “Oh no, not really,” she demurred. But when Camille insisted, Alieph’s cheeks filled with blood and her oceanic eyes gleamed. So they went into the cave and passed a delightful day, reading and commenting on Alieph’s poetry. Camille made some editorial suggestions, as the narwhale had taught Alieph a highly idiosyncratic punctuation and grammatical system. They drank cups of thick seaweed tea and munched on cuttlefish fritters with squid ink sauce and at the end of it, Alieph said, “You know, no one has ever asked so many questions about me before. I have thoroughly enjoyed myself and I have decided not to kill you after all. Instead I shall tell you exactly how to get back to your home and your bad, bad son Abdelrahman Salahadin, and you will tell him to work on reforming his wicked ways.” Because even though Aunt Camille never once mentioned the reason for her journey to Alieph’s cave, mermaids and sirens always know the unspoken wishes in people’s hearts.
Alieph pointed out a winding, hidden back way, a path that snaked across sandy outcroppings and threaded through weeds and hid under streams and climbed over boulders. It looked wild and tre
acherous and impassable, with brambles and briars and sharp rocks and hidden rivers, but this was their one and only chance. Camille and Napoleon-Was-Here and the blue Bedu all braced themselves and then they went into the golden bush. After seven days and nights of bad spills, itchy rashes, cuts and scratches, and nasty bug bites, they found themselves at an isolated, wind-blown station for the Transjordan train, the train that would take all of them all the way home again.
Um-Nadia has Victor Hernandez stand on the shaky ladder and string Christmas lights around the inside of the café. She stands beneath him, giving a lot of instructions (“That doesn’t look like Christmas that way. Put it higher—higher—make it go in circles”) and holding the slump-legged ladder in an offhanded manner, so it wobbles every time he reaches up with another length of wires. Finally, Mireille comes out and nudges her mother out of the way and Victor looks down and smiles at Mireille. Mireille pretends not to notice, but then she can’t help herself and smiles a tiny, one-sided smile up at him.
Nathan comes in. His hair is unwashed and stringy, his eyes dark as peppercorns. “I’ve been working nonstop,” he tells Sirine and Mireille and Um-Nadia. He gives them black and white postcards. On one side is a grainy image of a child, hair flying and hands out, either running or about to fall. The other side announces a photo exhibit called “From a Small Village.” “It’s my term final project. The official one. The first one in the beginning of the year was just to warm up,” he tells them. “It’s starting in an hour. I was too shy to give these out to anyone till now.”
Um-Nadia studies her invitation after Nathan leaves, then fans herself with it, watching him walk back up the street. “Poor thing. No color, no in-focus, no nothing. You can hardly even see what it is. It’s like having a headache. Like Aziz with his no-rhyming poems. I keep telling Nathan he should go see my cousin Basil the plumber. He’ll train him, get him rolling, the whole works.” She studies the Christmas lights critically for a moment, then says, “All right, let’s close the café and go to his party. It’s a charity case.”
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