They walk slowly along the beach just above the reach of the waves for nearly an hour, saying little, just listening to the murmuring ocean, until they reach the wooden pier. Then they turn and walk all the way out to the far end of the pier until they can go no farther and lean against the railing. Sirine sees a current of fish in the water, sparkling like gold coins. Aziz props his elbows on the railing. “This is where I like to come when I need to do some big thinking. Or if I feel poetical.”
The moonlight is thick and milky. She can see glistening red threads in Aziz’s hair, and the black disks of his irises at the surface of his eyes. There’s a wind that simmers up, then dies down and swirls in her hair; she brushes it out of her eyes. Finally he says, “Sirine, you know I have nothing but respect for you. My feelings for you are pure and refined.” He looks at Sirine timidly. “And naturally I feel the same way about Han, he’s an extraordinary being. He seduces you with his goodness and his quietness and the next thing you know, you’re telling him your deepest secrets every second of the day.” Sirine leans over the railing. “You’ve simply fallen under his spell. It’s natural. You’re just an American and you’ve got no natural defenses.”
“Aziz,” she says. “I really don’t think—”
He holds up one hand, then drops his fingertips, trailing them along the curve of her arm. “Do you know the story of the zebra and the virgin?”
“You mean the unicorn and the virgin?”
“Yes. Same thing. The zebra with his sad, romantic eyes, he can’t speak. He can only look sad and romantic all the time, so all the single virgins who are crazy for that sort of thing get caught by him and taken away in cages and he keeps them in his house.”
“I don’t think that’s how it goes,” she says, but the brush of his fingertips along her inner arm is coaxing and the ocean air sways around them under the voluptuous moon. The jellyfish tendrils spiral at the surface of the water, and everything is so big and bold, it presses up against her and awakens her senses like anemones to the whirling sea.
“Why are you here with me?”
“I wish Han were here right now,” she says, looking down.
“So do I.” He holds her hair away from her face. “Now I know how the poor zebra feels around all that terrible beauty, unable to speak and unable to run away.”
Some Mexican fishermen with transistor radios and buckets full of bait and catch walk by. She holds her breath until they move past. Then she looks up and Aziz’s face is close to hers. She notices the fine, precise shape of his eyes, black as Han’s and for the moment just as vulnerable; his lips are full and crescent-curved. She feels light-headed with the lilt of his breath on her face and she feels herself sliding, weakening, intoxicated with the pleasure of attraction. The wind picks up and roars over the water.
She puts her hands on the railing, tries to hold on to the plain, silvery smooth wood. She holds as still as she can, even when he lifts his fingers to her face and she can feel the vibration of desire begin its delicate tattoo, rising to the surface of her skin. She takes another breath and lets its long, steady force settle her.
For a moment they simply watch the waves wind and unwind, surf breaking into backwash. And then she lets go of the railing. Aziz holds out his hand and Sirine takes it. The wind picks up, full of sparkling points of rain; they lower their heads and run. The car is warm and close with the smell of damp wool and breath and somehow her hand stays inside his. She lets Aziz take her back to his studio apartment in Culver City. Her mind is blank as a window shade. The rain shuffles and rattles against the windows and streams down in beads. They kiss, then make love on a couch that pulls out into a bed, and the sound of the city traffic drowning out her thoughts. Afterward, the warmth of the sheets draws her into a half-sleep. She dreams of being lost in a dense forest where thundering footsteps come rushing toward her, and she wakes with her heart hammering, disoriented by the slippery pillows and their spicy perfume. She wakes Aziz and makes him drive her back to her uncle’s house even while he tries to talk her into spending the night.
“Probably we shouldn’t let Han know about us right now,” Aziz says tentatively as he pulls up in front of the house. “You know these Arab guys. They get jealous and murder people with their bare hands.”
She grabs the door handle. “This will never. Ever. Happen again,” she says and refuses his handshake. She runs into the house, and takes a steaming shower and rubs at her skin with a hand towel until it stings all over, her pale skin turning rosy. Then she sits stony-eyed in her bedroom window for hours before falling asleep.
She answers the phone out of instinct; it’s six-thirty, she’s had an hour and a half of sleep. “Mm?” she says.
“Sirine? Rouhi, is that you? I wanted to catch you before work.”
“Han?” She pushes herself up in bed.
“Aziz just called and said you liked my apology.”
She catches her breath and the whole night comes back to her, thunderous then leaden; a sickening sensation, like being awakened by nausea. The physical memory of the softness of his mouth. The wrong mouth. She closes her eyes, inhales deeply through her nose.
“Sirine?”
“I—I’m here.”
“So you liked it? The basket of apples? I saw them at the farmer’s market and thought they were prettier than roses.”
“Apples?” The bronze-colored apples. She recalls their juice, the cool snap between her teeth. “But—Aziz—”
“I was afraid if I brought them myself…I don’t know. I thought you’d still be mad. So he volunteered to do it for me. I didn’t dare call you, I felt so bad about the other day. I can’t even explain myself in a way that I can understand. Maybe it was like being possessed. What is it that Americans say: something came over me?”
“Oh, Han.” She covers her eyes with her hand. “It’s all right.”
“I keep going over it—yelling at Nathan and you and storming out of there like that. I thought—it’s crazy—but I wasn’t ready to see those images. It was such a shock—to see my cousin’s face like that. I wasn’t expecting it. I hadn’t seen her or any of my family in twenty years. And there she was, and it was like I’d just left yesterday. She and her mother and sisters came to our house the night I left and they gave me some bread and olives. That was the last time I saw any of them until Nathan’s exhibit. It startled me so that I didn’t know how to react. But later, when I calmed down enough to think about it…I realized how moving it was to me—to see her again, after all these years.”
She makes a sound, then stops herself: she wants to confess.
“Sirine,” he says. “Do you forgive me?”
“Han.” Her throat feels snagged. She takes a breath. “There’s nothing to forgive. Not for me anyway,” she adds quietly, a sort of pulse inside the movement of her voice. She hears a tapping outside her windowsill and looks up, startled. A redheaded bird is pecking at the frame, its wings open and fluttering. She says, “Han, about the scarf—I didn’t—I—”
“No, no,” he says. “Don’t even say anything. Sirine, none of it matters. That scarf was just a thing. If you lost it or not, things are things and that’s it. A scarf is a scarf is a scarf, right? You, on the other hand, are the whole world.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Did I ever tell you about the way your auntie Camille once offered a necklace of tears to the Queen of the Camels to carry her to the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates? Because everybody knows that the difference between people and animals is that animals can’t cry and people can. But the Queen of the Camels refused because that particular confluence is considered by some to be the cradle of civilization, the place where Adam and Eve lost their innocence, and hence the place where the camel first took up her burden.
To recap: Aunt Camille gave birth to my felonious cousin Abdelrahman Salahadin, who sold himself to slavers and escaped by faking his drowning in the Red Sea. She tracked him down by seducing the terrible Sir Richard Burto
n. She walked to the source of the White Nile, conferred with the Mother of All Fish, struck deals with jinns and mermaids and the blue-skinned Bedouin tribe.
And did you also know that when Camille was an old, old, old lady and finally learned to read and write, she discovered that her naughty son Abdelrahman had changed his name and moved to California? I’ll tell you what happened.
Remember the part where the blue-skinned Bedu are all talking about Hal’Awud and Dar’Aktr? That was in 1960.
In 1959 a director came to Wadi Rum, in the south of Jordan, to think about how he would film his new film called Ben-Hur. Of course it all ended up getting filmed in Italy, with American-type actors. But he had this idea to use all sorts of local Arabs to ride through his big war and caravan scene. He discovered the handsome Crazyman al-Rashid shoeless in Wadi Rum—this was before the Crazyman had been kidnapped by the sirens in Aqaba. The director invited al-Rashid to be in his movie, along with several Bedu tribes he’d relocated for extras. Their part, of course, ended up on the cutting room floor. But anyway, this was the start of the Crazyman’s obsession with angels and flaming chariots, lights, and cameras, and action—all of which he described to Abdelrahman Salahadin while they were both prisoners of the mermaids.
So what happened to Abdelrahman?
Abdelrahman Salahadin may or may not have been the true name of the movie star Omar Sharif. We’ll simply never know for sure. But who really knows anything for sure in this strange and notorious world?
Omar Sharif!
Mm-hm.
And all that talk, that Dar’Aktr and Hal’Awud, those were…
Arablish. Dar’Aktr is Arablish for director and Hal’Awud is—
Hollywood.
Yes. And when the blue Bedu talked about Ar-Rashad Bur’aton, they weren’t talking about the English explorer and slave owner Sir Richard Burton, they were talking about the Welsh, drowned-Arab of an actor, plain old Richard Burton, who also happened to be hanging around on the set, since he was about to start in his great role in a different movie as Marc Antony, and wanted to take in a little desert atmosphere. They just got the words all scrambled up. You see, the Bedu can never leave well enough alone. They love to improvise, improvise, improvise!
At the café, Sirine and Um-Nadia become preoccupied with the special iftar—or fast-breaking—menu for the month of Ramadan. Muslims all over town hear about it and more customers crowd in, loitering outside and waiting for tables—Iranians, Saudis, Palestinians, Lebanese, even Malaysians, Pakistanis, and Croatians. They come early in the morning, before sunrise, then later after the sun goes down and the day’s fast ends, ordering special treats like killaj pastry, qatayif pancakes, zalabiyya fritters, and ma’mul cookies. Sirine no longer has time for anything but cooking and baking. She thinks, in brief, unguarded moments, about what happened between herself and Aziz. She hasn’t told anyone—and prays that Aziz won’t either—but she carries the thought of it around with her, like a wheeze in her breath. Her anxiety is a bone stuck in the center of her body. Um-Nadia and Mireille treat her like she’s sick; they keep a discreet distance, watching her in worried glances.
They get so busy, Victor Hernandez starts to help out as a sous chef, chopping up bowls of onions and garlic and peppers, making salads and mixing marinades. He brings in a bagful of chili peppers one day, some long and narrow and shriveled as old fingers, some petite and glossy as young fingers. He roasts them under the broiler and in a dry skillet, then slides off the charred outer skins. And Sirine uses slices of the soft inner hearts puréed into the baba ghannuj and marinades for the kabobs.
“They say that pepper is good for love,” Victor tells her, then raises his eyebrows at Mireille, who turns pink. “It brings heat to the blood.”
But Sirine accidentally smears some of the chili oil on her fingers and they burn even through her calluses. She runs cold water over her fingers till her bones ache.
Han apologizes to Sirine all week long, bringing her gorgeous fruits with spikes and horns, edible peels and blood-red seeds, baskets of berries from the other side of the world. But the presents only increase her guilt and anxiety, so by the end of the week she can barely eat anything, her stomach knotting against food. He can tell that she’s unsettled and he asks if it’s because of the scene at Nathan’s exhibit, or the fact that he didn’t call her right away, or because she thought she saw him with another woman, or some other reason altogether. All of which she denies. One day, after serving the tremendous ’id meal that celebrates the end of Ramadan (including a whole stuffed lamb, baklava, and knaffea pastry with sweet cheese), she comes out of the café on a break and discovers that there are branches of scented jasmine and flowering bougainvillea twined and wired around the rim of her bicycle basket. She laughs for the first time in days, and when she bicycles to Han’s apartment that evening she picks up the scent of cooking food from all the way down the hall. He stands waiting for her in the doorway.
It is like the first night of their love affair again. There are plates of food set out on a blanket on the floor of his living room. Even an azure cotton tablecloth and a pitcher of yellow daisies, a fragrant steam in the air.
She stands above the setting. “What’s going on? What is all this?”
Han takes her hands, turns and kisses them. He says, “A simple offering.” He seats her on the floor and flourishes one hand over the food. “An ’id al-iftar for the Queen of Sheba.”
“And her army,” Sirine says. There is a platter of Moroccan chicken tagine with preserved lemons, couscous studded with pistachios and currants, rice covered with butter-fried almonds. “This is incredible. I didn’t know that you could cook like this.”
“Well…” Han seats himself across from her. “I can’t. But it turns out that Um-Nadia can.”
“I can’t believe it. She never cooks anymore.”
“She brought all the ingredients over today and I helped her,” he says. “Well, I chopped things. Are you impressed?”
“Impressed is not even the word….”
“I wanted to try to do something.” He gazes at her helplessly, touches her fingers. “You’ve been working too hard. You look thin and tired, Hayati.”
“Oh, Um-Nadia’s always worried. She must’ve told you that.”
He ticks his head back. “I can see for myself.”
Han fills Sirine’s plate and feeds her a morsel of lamb from his fingers, as if food is their private language. They talk about school and work. The words flow into the eating. And she eats and eats. The flavors are intense in her mouth, the sweet-almondy fruitiness of the pistachios beside the smoky sour taste of the sumac, delicate saffron, and herbal notes of olive. Her stomach starts to ache, unused to so much food. Han eats little himself, instead bringing bites of meat and spoonfuls of rice to her mouth.
When, finally, she cannot eat another bite, she sits back, laughs, and fans herself with one hand. Han will not let her help with the dishes; he tells her to relax, relax, and begins stacking everything himself, the dishes clattering.
She sits back against the wall and watches the stars from the balcony doors awhile: their fine heat and color seem to pass right through her. Some of them glitter and some of them wither or wink out into the darkness. She stretches, then carries some dishes into the kitchen, where Han stands in front of a sparkling pyramid of suds.
“Did you want to save the rice?” she asks.
But his back is to her and the water’s running. When he doesn’t respond, she puts down the dishes and goes into the bathroom; she washes her face and smoothes her unsmoothable hair. Adjusting the medicine cabinet mirror, she examines the clear green glass of her eyes, checks their corners for wrinkles, then notices how gray strands are starting in her hair, barely discernible against the blond. While she is looking, she notices a faint, fruity perfume. She frowns and inhales, and then it comes to her: the scent of ripe berries. Han’s scarf. Eyes wide, she turns, inhaling, hands out like a sleepwalker. She checks the towels, look
s under them, and sniffs. There are two worn towels folded on the glass shelf beside the shower, both embroidered with the initials “E.H.” She looks in all the drawers and cabinets and even behind the shower curtain. But no sign of the veil. And then the scent begins to dissipate, as if it had all been in her imagination. She grips the sides of the sink with both hands and looks into the mirror and tries to will the fading scent back. Cold perspiration breaks over her forehead and she is struck, horribly, by a wave of nausea. She lowers her head, tries to breathe slowly. But her mouth floods with saliva and she flips up the toilet seat, then she is vomiting hard, her stomach clenching. Her shoulders bunch and her eyes stream and her nose runs and she is helpless to do anything but hold herself over the toilet. It shudders over her, knotting her stomach tighter.
When it finally passes, she sits down, then lies on the bathroom floor, presses her cheek to the cool tile. For some minutes she can’t quite think or move, lost inside the hollow chamber of the bathroom.
Finally, she flushes the toilet and brushes her teeth and tongue twice. She has to come out and she feels miserable, thinking of the beautiful meal, wondering how to explain this to Han. But once in the kitchen, she sees he’s had the water running all this time—he hasn’t heard anything.
“Hayati,” he says, smiling and taking her in his arms. He puts his nose to her hair and says, “Where were you?”
That night they make love; it is quick and silent. She feels frail, her bones are glassy and brittle inside her body, and her stomach feels caved in. She has guiltily avoided sex with Han ever since the night she slept with Aziz. When they begin making love, Sirine feels herself frowning, as if she were concentrating on a dangerous, secret activity. She waits for him to detect her betrayal, to see it in her face. But he closes his eyes, his expression faintly imploring. She is surprised by how easy it is to do this, how available betrayal is. Afterward, she lies on her back and Han cradles her in his arms. She feels weak and loose-jointed. He touches her forehead and runs his fingers along her sternum, then runs his hand down to her stomach and the cradle of her pelvis bones and rests it there.
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