Crescent

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  Later that night, somewhere lost between late night and early morning, the phone rings. Han gets it and she hears him speaking Arabic; he seems to be arguing with someone. She hears the words Iraq and Baghdad and at that moment rising out of the logic of dreams she feels with a startling clarity—the clarity of the obvious and the long-denied—that something is coming to claim him.

  The next morning, Sirine sleeps through the alarm and when Han tries to wake her, she can barely open her eyes. He feels her forehead, then calls the café and talks to Mireille, who tells him to keep Sirine at home, she and Um-Nadia will cover for her. Sirine listens to Han and the muffled voice on the other side of the receiver and she knows that Mireille will be worried. It is the first time in nine years that Sirine hasn’t come in to work. Han has to go to school but he pulls a heap of covers over her and stacks several Hemingway novels by the bed and then kisses her three times on the forehead. She listens to him pull the door shut behind him and thinks it will feel strange to be alone in his apartment without him. But then the sleepiness quickly reaches up like an undertow from the back of her head and pulls her back down.

  When she wakes again, it is after one in the afternoon. She sits up in bed facing the balcony and watches the wind ruffling over rooftops and trees. It seems as if the silky palms are being swept around by a kind of light: she can see it glittering in the sky and rinsing over everything. She realizes slowly that it is raining. She sinks back into the blankets and listens to the drizzle, soft and dense as moss, furry over the roof; it fades and then builds until it sounds like it’s seething. The apartment rings with the rain hiss. She takes in the odd emptiness of the things around her, Han’s clothes hanging collapsed on their hangers, the bedsheets crumpled and half-warm on the bed. She enjoys the sense of such total isolation; it’s a sweet, dull ache like a toothache that she wants to press against.

  It will be her fortieth birthday this year. She closes her eyes and imagines that, instead of her fortieth, it will be her hundredth, imagines the loose fit of her skin and hair, her body floating away from her. Then she imagines her own deathbed, dying, the gentle ease of spirit from her bones, her body caving in and melting. First she feels fear and grief, the consciousness of pure oblivion, then that dissolves, turns into something almost pleasurable; some center of tenderness rises to the top of her solar plexus, as if she could feel the shape and outline of her own soul. She thinks of the billowing skirts of the whirling dervishes and is just starting to sink into this feeling when there’s a knock at the door.

  Sirine sits up and lights flash behind her eyes. She wraps herself in Han’s bathrobe, creeps into the next room, and stares at the door. She pads toward the door, stopping partway, her pulse ticking so loudly in her ears she can barely hear. For a moment, she wonders if it’s Rana knocking. Then there’s the sound of a dog whining and snuffling and she says, “King Babar?”

  Her uncle calls out, “Habeebti? Are you there? It’s only us chickens out here!”

  She opens the door and King Babar bounds in. She picks him up and he pushes his hard head against her face, licking her mouth and eyes and whipping his tail against her arms. “We were very concerned when we heard you’d called in sick. We decided to come check up on you.”

  They come in and her uncle looks around and says, “Where’s the furniture? Habeebti, you’re living like a Bedouin in a goat-hair tent.”

  Sirine is flustered and embarrassed. “Oh, I know, I’m sorry, there’s nowhere to sit, really.”

  “It’s all right,” he says. “It’s very interesting.” But when he tries to sit on the floor, he makes a groaning noise and gets stuck about halfway down. He struggles back up.

  “Wait.” She constructs a chair and table out of stacks of Han’s books. Before sitting, her uncle looks at them and says, “Let’s see, The Iliad and The Collected Works of Shakespeare. That will do nicely.”

  She brews a pot of black tea with mint and finds a plate of date-stuffed cookies and sweet cheese knaffea pastry left over from last night. She brings out the cup and pot and pastries, and her uncle says, “Now, now, I won’t eat without your company.”

  Sirine looks at the food; she knows she should be hungry. She stacks up her own book pile to sit on. “As you can see,” she says, gesturing around the place, “I’m fine here.”

  Her uncle picks up a copy of A Farewell to Arms, squints at the title, then shakes his head. He sighs over his cookies then and says, “No, I’m glad—here you are, creating your life like you’re supposed to. Of course, Babar and I miss you. It’s a lonely business, eating alone. I never met that someone that I was meant to eat my dinners with. Not like—” and then he stops. Sirine waits, thinking he will say: not like your mother and father. But he doesn’t finish his sentence. She looks at him closely. She always thought that her uncle and father looked alike, but over the years it seems that her uncle’s features have come to replace the memory of her father’s face. There are things that she doesn’t like to see: the way his hair, once wavy black, has gone gray, and the old-mannish slip of his oval glasses down his soft nose, and the way his irises have lost pigment, turning tea-colored. There were times when she was still a little girl, after her parents had died, that she would forget, and call him Baba, “Father.” Then he would hold her and say in his gentlest voice, “Now, Habeebti, don’t forget, I’m your Ummo. Don’t forget about your Baba.”

  Sirine senses that her uncle knows more about love than he lets on. Like the flirtation he carries on with Um-Nadia—only going so far and then veering away. His life seems like an oasis of meditation and tranquillity, even though she knows this isn’t fair, that he is a person like herself, after all, and there must be many things she has never known about his private life. And sometimes the thought comes to her that perhaps he never married because his life became entirely and unexpectedly taken up with raising a young girl. Just as Sirine never went to college or managed to marry, but devoted herself to learning to cook her uncle’s favorite foods. She would like to ask her uncle what he really thinks of Han. If he believes that Han is a good man for her. But the questions are too personal. It seems they ask too much of her uncle.

  Instead, she lets King Babar leap into her lap and strokes his head so the skin around his eyes widens, then relaxes, over and over. “Hello, my king,” she says.

  “Look at him,” her uncle says. “He was a pasha in an earlier life. He was a rich and ruthless cross-eyed sultan and your slavishly devoted husband.”

  The dog’s head is warm beneath her hand. She kisses the knob on top of his head and King Babar rests his chin on her knee. They sit quietly together for a while, sipping their tea, Sirine’s mind taken up with unaskable questions.

  When Sirine returns to work the next day, Um-Nadia follows her into the kitchen, looks her up and down, and finally she asks, “What’s wrong with you?”

  Sirine laughs nervously and finishes the last sip of her coffee. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says and leaves the porcelain cup on the counter by the stove. Then she fries the cauliflower, and she has just started layering the eggplant and carrots in the pot when she looks up to see Um-Nadia peering into her coffee cup, turning it and squinting as if she were studying a textbook: looking at the coffee grounds. “Um-Nadia,” Sirine says, “no, please…” She reaches for it but Um-Nadia has already lifted her round, startled eyes. She holds up the cup and says, her voice hushed, almost reverent, “I never would have guessed it—there’s another man!”

  Um-Nadia pulls her into the back kitchen. She points to a chair and Sirine plunks down at the table. Her shoulders sag toward the chopping boards, the smells of onion, ginger, lemon, parsley. Um-Nadia draws a chair up close and Sirine tilts her cup, peeking in at the scattered coffee grounds inside the rim, their bits of dashes and curves that remind her of the lines of Arabic. “How do you do that?” Sirine says.

  “That’s nothing.” She flips one hand back, then leans in. Um-Nadia’s eyes are kohl-rimmed today
with flaring edges. She slits her eyes to long black lines, crosses her legs and crosses her forearms over her knees. “Tell, tell, who have we here?”

  Sirine closes her eyes. She stands, takes the cup to the sink, fills it with water, rinses it clean and puts it in the drain, then sits back down. “You can’t tell Mireille or Victor.” Um-Nadia makes a zipper motion over her lips. “It’s Aziz,” Sirine says.

  Um-Nadia thumps her hand to her chest. “No.”

  “I mean, it was Aziz for two seconds. I don’t even mean that. It was never Aziz. It’s just that—I was going through a—a confusion about Han.” She closes her eyes, sighs. “Aziz and me, we just had this one little thing just one night—it was so stupid and I wasn’t even interested in him and I just…I don’t know—he was being so nice—”

  “Yes, yes, it’s always these ‘nice’ ones.”

  Sirine traces the edge of a chopping board with her fingertip. “I haven’t told Han yet. But I’m going to. I can’t take it anymore, carrying the thing around in my head all the time. I’m just going to have to do it—”

  “No!” Um-Nadia cries, her voice like a quill. “You mustn’t do that at all, at all. It’s much too dangerous. If you tell, either it will kill him or he will have to kill someone else.”

  “Kill somebody? Han?” Sirine says. “No—”

  “Habeebti, you would not believe in ten million years what people are still like. Ask me, I know.”

  Sirine shakes her head. “Not Han. Never.”

  “Sure, sure, not Han. You think he’s special pure. But still, even so.” Um-Nadia slides her pack of emergency cigarettes out of the pocket in her housedress and knocks one out, turns it unlit between her fingers. “Remember the story about my friend with the bad husband? You know, where he keeps flying back and forth?”

  “Oh, and when he dies of a heart attack, she finds out that he’s been keeping another wife and family back in Yemen or someplace?”

  “Right, so my friend…what did I say was her name?”

  “Uh—Munira, I think.”

  “That’s her. Yes. I remember, she was just exactly like you. You always make me think of her, you know that? She couldn’t believe it either. She thought the world was one hundred percent modern. She thought that once you got to America, nothing bad could ever happen again.”

  “But her husband kept flying around.”

  Um-Nadia points the cigarette at her. Sirine can see where the shell-pink polish is frayed at the edges of her nails, traces of pink lipstick on the filter. “And you see how that all turned out.”

  Mireille pokes her head in the door, but she closes her mouth and steps inside when she sees Sirine’s and Um-Nadia’s expressions. She sits beside her mother at the table. “What’s going on?”

  “What happened to Munira?” Sirine asks Um-Nadia.

  Um-Nadia looks at Mireille for a moment. She puts the cigarette back into the pack. “Well, she died.”

  “She died?” Sirine feels oddly stricken. “I didn’t know. What happened? Was she old?”

  “Tch.” No.

  “So—what?”

  Again she looks at Mireille. Mireille tucks her chin onto the heel of her palm and says, “Her name wasn’t Munira, it was Nadia. That story’s about my sister Nadia.”

  Sirine sits back.

  “She died of a broke-heart, a month after the husband went,” Um-Nadia says. “She couldn’t take knowing what she had to know.”

  “She had stomach cancer,” Mireille says to Sirine.

  “Where do you think it came from?” Um-Nadia asks Mireille angrily. “Do you think it just appeared in a puff of smoke like a jinn in a lantern? The husband gave it to her with his sneaking and lying and lying and sneaking. It was like living with a serpent and every night that she slept with the snake he put more of his serpent poison into her.”

  “Ma…” Mireille rubs her face with her hands. “We don’t even know if it’s true—about that secret family. We don’t know if he even knew those people. He didn’t have any pictures or letters or any signs of them at all. For all we know, that other woman was just a scam artist who wanted to collect his life insurance.”

  “I know what’s true!” Um-Nadia stands up, scraping back her chair. Some of her hair falls out of its bun, her eyes red and wide, the lipstick edged into cracks around her lips. “I know exactly what’s true. Don’t you ever, ever tell me that I don’t know. I am your mother and believe you me, I know.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  When Aunt Camille was a very, very old woman and I was a very, very young boy, we happened to be on the earth at the same time for a short period. She took that opportunity to tell me about my cousin Abdelrahman. She told me about his drowning career, and her search for her naughty son, and so on and so forth.

  She told you herself? But, you mean they’re true, those stories?

  You’re going to get philosophical on me? True, not true, real, not real. Who knows what’s what?

  But the people—the people in these stories, they existed?

  Look at it this way: there is truth inside everything living and dying and more, you just can’t always recognize it at first—like the innocent seed that starts the uninhibited mejnoona tree.

  But Abdelrahman? He survived? He really went to Hollywood?

  You know, there’s an art to listening to a story—it requires equal parts silence and receptivity. Yes. There was an Abdelrahman; he was your great-cousin. Did he survive? Well, maybe he didn’t drown, maybe he did. After all, there is a drop of the drowned Arab in all of us. I know I personally have a great deal of one in me.

  So he died?

  All right, let’s talk about the theoretical end of the story. Since we’re talking theory. And since it isn’t healthy to abandon a story.

  Every year at the end of the winter term, the university’s Department of Ethnomusicology puts on its concert. It’s a major event that draws Arab and American students as well as community people. The program chair, Mazen Mahmoud, is a celebrated Libyan oud player, and the program always features music from several Arab nations, including Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. This year, the program says, the concert will feature instrumentals and singing, as well as classical and popular Arabic music, and concludes with an open dance.

  Han and Sirine run into Aziz and Nathan at the auditorium. This is the first time Sirine and Han have seen Nathan since his photography exhibit and for a moment everyone is stiff and uncertain. Then Han holds out his hand and Nathan takes it and bows slightly and with dignity, but he is clearly relieved, Sirine can see that. Nathan’s hair is slicked down stiffly—there are still channels in his hair from his comb—and he’s wearing a corduroy blazer with suede patches at the elbows. He looks like a boy dressed up for his school picture. Han apologizes for the incident at the exhibit, and Nathan says, aghast, “No, please, it’s all my fault,” and embraces Han awkwardly, with one arm. Aziz is wearing what looks like a velvet smoking jacket with a tasseled belt and brown suede shoes. “This is me as an English poet,” he says. Then he takes Sirine’s hand and kisses it with ceremony before she can pull away.

  “You know this is an important performance,” Nathan says sternly.

  “And there’s dancing at the end,” Aziz adds, showing them the program. “Of course this means we’ll have to share Sirine.”

  She glares at him. “I don’t know how to dance,” she mutters.

  “And neither do I,” Han says, putting one arm across her shoulders. “So we’re fated to be together.”

  It’s open seating in the auditorium and already crowded but Nathan spots an open row. There’s some uncertainty about who will be seated next to whom. They start down the row, then back out twice, switching places. Sirine wants to sit on the outside, next to Han, but she ends up seated between Han and Aziz with Nathan on the other side of Aziz. “When you finish your graduate degree,” Aziz says to Nathan, “then you too will get to sit next to the beautiful woman.”

&nbs
p; Nathan folds his arms and looks away, his face dark.

  Finally, the lights fall and the curtain opens, and there is a huge, multi-level orchestra of student and faculty musicians on stage. Mazen Mahmoud faces the audience brandishing a conductor’s baton. The audience hushes expectantly.

  The conductor swoops his baton through the air and the orchestra launches into the first number, violins sawing, flutes tilted, three men rippling their hands and fingers over their drums; it is pure drama and intensity. There are several instruments that Sirine has never seen before—Han whispers their names—kanoon, rebab, oud. Sirine marvels that these young students are proficient on such unusual instruments. She presses her shoulder against Han’s, leaning into him and as far as she can maneuver from Aziz’s arm and knee. She feels microscopically aware of both Aziz’s and Han’s bodies, the nearness of their skin, the rising of the hair on one arm, the invisible touch of a knuckle or an inch of thigh.

  But as the night proceeds she is led away from herself, into the music itself. The songs are complicated and rhythmic, and they resonate for Sirine in the depths of her consciousness. She realizes that some of them are songs she remembers her father playing on his turntable, the stereo playing arm riding up and down with the waves in the records, her father singing to the music as the sound rose and fell. And even though she didn’t understand the words, she still understood innately that the music was emotional and thrilling. All her uncle listened to was Italian opera, which seems, now that she thinks of it, not all that dissimilar. She sits forward into the listening, captivated by the theater of the performance, the energy of the sound that fills the air and vibrates up the floorboards and through her bones.