Yes, bitten. He didn’t know who those lovely people were on the shining screen or what they wanted or how they’d gotten there. All he knew was that he wanted to be alongside them.
The next day, Sirine returns to work. She stirs tabbouleh and drops cardamom seeds into demitasses of black Arabic coffee, as she has a thousand times before. And she prays no one saw her grab Rana’s veil at the concert last night. The students come in and while no one says anything, she has the feeling that they’re sneaking looks at her.
She plants herself in front of the big cast-iron burners. The burner plates look fierce and black as teeth. She moves the skillets over the flames, shakes them one-handed with her steady forearms, so the onion slices flip and sizzle. Gradually, she loses herself in the rhythms of work, a potful of rice, grilling kabobs, drinking coffee, the flame leaping under a blackened pan. She works until her mind is cool and undisturbed and there’s only her hands and six tall blue rings of flame. And she starts to recall her dream, but all she remembers is the sound of rain against the windows—though apparently it didn’t rain last night.
The gradients of light alter in the window; time takes on a rare, shapeless form in the kitchen. Sirine is unaware of the customers around her, the hum of conversation, the TV, the forks and knives clattering on the plates, the silver hood roaring over the grill. The lunch rush dwindles away. And Han doesn’t come. Sirine hasn’t stopped working for several hours when a hand touches her shoulder and a man’s voice says quietly, “Chef?”
She turns. Victor Hernandez’s white kitchen jacket is buttoned to the neck, his army boots half-tied. He looks down, tentative. “Sorry to interrupt. It’s just that, it’s just…”
“That’s all right Victor.” She turns away to stir a bowl of parsley, lemon, and tomatoes. “What’s up?”
“Well, your friend,” he says. Sirine stops stirring, turns to look at him. His long, narrow Aztec eyes. “Han? He came here last night,” he says.
“Han? Was here?” She points at the floor.
“He left something for you—in the kitchen. I was working late, this was around one-thirty, two. Even Cristobal was gone. So I heard these sounds on the back porch. It spooked me, you know? So I went to see and it was Han sitting back there on the steps.”
Sirine smoothes down the front of her jacket, considering. “Did you talk to him?”
Victor nods. “I thought he’d been drinking. His eyes looked kind of red and his skin was shiny. Though now maybe I’m not so sure if he was. He looked really sad. I sat with him and he said he’d been thinking about going back to Iraq.”
She becomes aware of her heart speeding up. “He said that?”
“I almost know how he feels. I mean, I was born here and all, but sometimes I wish I could just go off to someplace like Mexico.” He gazes at Sirine a moment in a gentle speculative way. “Anyway, he talked his head off. He said that there wasn’t anything for him here in America. He asked me if I ever felt like it was all a big lousy dream.”
Sirine presses her fingers over her mouth. A whiff of garlic and hot peppers. “What did you say?”
“I said, no, man! I said, America is most definitely not a dream. But even so, I think he still has that idea in his head. I mean about going back. I’ve seen it happen a lot, you know—my friends, they get to, like, a certain point.” Victor looks around, as if checking for spies. “But, Chef? You cannot let him do it.”
She feels her heart thrumming. She studies his face, the bronze, flat sides of his cheekbones.
“You know, he was telling me what it was like where he comes from, about the guardia they have there, and their crazy dictator, and it was reminding me of something. And then I remembered it was Cristobal. You know Cristobal is from El Salvador?”
“No, I didn’t know.”
“They firebombed his whole family. The guardia. All dead. They were just little farmers from nowhere. Out in the country. He got out of there, I don’t know how. You should see how messed up his legs are.”
She closes her eyes.
“Chef, listen, I’m telling you, you can’t let Han go back there. They’ll kill him for sure. Places like that, people like Han are the first ones to go. They stick out too much and people notice them and start talking. That’s how it always goes.” He starts to pick up a stack of dishes, then sets them down again. “You know something else he told me? He said that they think that the word Ole comes from the word Allah. It was from when the Arabs came into Spain a million years ago. I was thinking it could even be true—like, at the bullfights, they always yell ‘Ole!’ when they stab the bull, I’ve seen it myself, and you know, I think he might be right.”
After Victor leaves, Sirine goes into the back kitchen. Han’s gift is there in a vase on the table—a bouquet of velvet-red roses.
The woman in the Near Eastern Studies office says she has no idea where Han might be, but then a slim girl in jeans comes out of a room with an armload of paper. “You’re looking for Han? I think he went to the afternoon lecture.”
Sirine gets directions to the lecture. It’s just one floor down and it turns out to be in the same room where Aziz gave his reading at the beginning of the term, only now the French doors are closed and the carpet looks muted and granite-colored. She can hear the speaker’s voice out in the hallway as she approaches; the sound is pleasant and dull as static. All the folding chairs are set up, but there is only a small scattering of people. Han and Nathan sit together in the last row. Han’s head is tipped forward, as if he were sitting in church.
The speaker’s voice rises and Sirine stops inside the doorway to listen. The man says, “Now, according to UNICEF, fifty thousand Iraqi adults die because of U.S. sanctions every year, and five thousand children die in Iraq every month because of the American embargo of food and medicine. The sanctions deny people access to basic health care, clean water, and electricity—they’re a systematic violation of the Geneva Convention, which prohibits the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. In the past few years, tens of thousands of people have fled Iraq—many of them are professionals, trying to escape the terrible economic and political situation.” The speaker looks up from his notes and sighs. He looks over the audience and says, “If twenty-five people die in a plane crash in the U.S. it makes headlines. But five thousand Iraqi children? Or a hundred political dissidents? Even if all of Iraq has acted wrongly and belligerently in every way since the day America started selling them arms, how is it possible that the deaths of five thousand children a month is not burned into our minds?”
She hears a murmur: Nathan is whispering something to Han; he turns his head and spots her in the doorway.
Han whispers to Nathan, then slips out of his chair. Behind Han, Nathan turns and waves to her. It’s an odd gesture—more of a signal than a wave—his fingers outspread as if in warning, his expression pleading. She frowns and tilts her head, but then Han comes toward her. His face looks gaunt and flattened, blue wings of shadows under his eyes. He approaches her, leans in close, and murmurs, “Sirine, I’ve been wanting to—Can we go somewhere?” He holds out his hand and she takes it.
The speaker’s voice rises and Han turns back for a moment to listen to him. “Let me tell you all something,” the man says, his voice charged with emotion. “Let me just tell you this. America simply cannot continue to pillage the natural resources and economies of other countries, to heap its desires and values, its contempt and greed on the backs of others, and not expect there to be consequences. Let me tell you this: there are always going to be consequences. I don’t know when or how. But if things continue as they are, there will certainly be consequences. We do not live in a vacuum. We are not the only nation in the world. We have been doing terrible things to countries like Iraq for a very long time. Things that Americans believe they don’t have to learn about. You may want to live a life of benign indifference to the rest of the world, but understand that as long as you live here, murderous things are being done in your name. We have a moral obligati
on—a pact—to live as fellow citizens of the world. We have broken that pact through our indifference to others. And someday, something terrible is going to happen to us.”
Her uncle’s house is quiet at four in the afternoon. The late sunlight washes out the brick walls and fades the red tile roofs on the houses around them to tones of peach and coral. Today is the shortest day of the year, the wind is slight and gray as a sigh, and it seems as if the world is easing into a long sleep. Sirine brings Han into the entryway and she feels disoriented, as if she is five years old and encountering it again for the first time: the scent of her uncle’s wool and silk carpets, the musty furniture with the cigarette burns, the old oil paintings of fine ladies in filmy dresses and sea captains and men wearing monocles, and the scent of a thousand leather and canvas and paperback books crowding the shelves and the leftover traces of endless pots of coffee and cardamom.
But they don’t go into her uncle’s library on the right or the abandoned living room on the left, or her bedroom up the stairs. Instead, she takes him in back into the kitchen and sits him at the round speckled white table. She sits down across from him, crosses her hands, takes a breath, and says, “Han, I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I lost your scarf and I’m sorry about making a scene at the dance and I’m sorry—oh, I’m sorry about everything.”
His face looks papery and empty, his eyes bloodshot, almost burnt. Sirine feels that all the blood has drained out of her face as well, a thin buzzing fills her ears. “Why, what are you sorry for?” he asks, squinting at her. Then there is a blooming in his cheeks, a color deep as beet juice, red triangles covering his cheeks, and suddenly his eyes widen, he laughs softly, and says, “Sirine, my one true love.”
They stay at the table for a while, not speaking. Sirine feels a mixture of anxiety and release. She wants things back the way they were, yet everything is not right. It frightens her to sit with him like this, not speaking and not looking at each other, so finally she stands and begins opening cabinets, hunting out rice, onions, and garlic. While Han sits and gazes into his private distance, she assembles a meal: chunks of lamb grilled directly over the gas flame, gleaming skewers of onion, tomato, zucchini, a scent of lavender in the oil. There is a bag of frekeh in one of the cabinets and she considers this for a moment but then shuts the door. The aroma of garlic, grilled lamb, and open fields fills the kitchen. She brings it to the table on a big plate with rice cooked with saffron and toasted pine nuts. She tries to eat a little of it herself, but the meat is tasteless; she can barely swallow it. So instead she sits and watches Han eat, hoping, in this simple act, to draw him in.
When he finishes, she rummages through the refrigerator and finds the tin can of powdered coffee. She pries off the plastic lid and spoons up the slick, glossy ground, adds it to a demitasse of water—a teaspoon of sugar, stirring over heat, waiting for the rise of foam in the open pot. She can’t find the cardamom, so she adds a curl of lemon peel. She feels light-headed and overtired, so she makes a cup of tea for herself and brews it in a glass with sugar. It tastes faintly of stone and she thinks it must be old, but she drinks it anyway.
The sun has long since set by then and she watches Han’s profile illuminated with the flares of headlights through the kitchen windows—the neighborhood commuters heading home. He fingers the edge of his coffee cup, turns it slowly, and makes a noise.
“What?”
He smiles, then says, “You cook like an angel.”
She hides behind her teacup, watches him a moment. He’s not in the room, not really. She needs to ask what is wrong. But in truth, she’s afraid to know, and he seems to sense this himself. She takes another deep breath, puts down the cup, and leads him up the stairs that rise out of the entryway, with the polished wooden railing and the boxes of street light cast from the panes of glass in the front door. Sirine takes Han to her bedroom, which she’s slept in almost since the beginning of her memory. She sits him on the bed with the ivory-colored comforter and the curved dark head-and footboards and she holds his hands in hers. Then she turns to the nightstand drawer and slides it open, and for once she doesn’t hear the musical laughter twirling into the air. The photograph is silent as she picks it up, this image she has memorized; she is not sure why she is doing this; it feels as if she is pressing on something, pushing through cobwebs. She hands the photo to Han. He smiles in a distracted way, without looking at it, sits on the bed, and rubs his eyes. “No more photographs.”
“What do you mean?”
He holds his hand over his eyes a moment longer and says, “I’ve seen too many.”
Then he lowers his hand. He looks at the photo and his head moves back. “Where did you get this?” The corner of the snapshot trembles in his fingers. He stares at it and she can hear the breath rushing through his body; his expression is clear as a flash of light: it seems as if she can see the intricate workings of his thoughts, vascular and intimate, racing like blood cells. “I lost the only photo I had of her. I never thought I’d see her again.” He looks up: his eyes are too bright. “This is my sister Leila.”
“Before the war,” he says. “Before the Americans bombed Iraq…”
Sirine slowly curls back on the bed, blinking. He leans back beside her. He is going to tell her, whether she wants to hear or not.
“My parents sent me to the private boys’ school in Cairo,” he says. “My American friend Janet sponsored me, covering my tuition and costs, and I entered a world of the mind that I’d never dreamt existed before. I stayed away from my home for five years, spending vacations and summers at the school with the few other children whose parents had essentially abandoned them. I loved my family but they seemed to be of a world I’d left behind. I could have gone on to the University of Baghdad but Saddam took over in 1979, the year I returned to Iraq. In 1980, he declared war on Iran over some disputed territory. Suddenly there were book and paper shortages as well as food and water rationing. Scholarships were nonexistent and my American funding—well, of course it had stopped.
“I came back from Cairo obsessed with just about everything cultural—literature, painting, drama. I wanted nothing to do with what I said were the ‘betrayals’ of religion and money. I said and did as much as I could to cause my parents as much unhappiness as possible. I was always angry with them—I felt as if I had gone on to a new place in my life while they had remained stubbornly behind. Now I saw our poverty all around us—everything—the dirt floor in our house, the warped glass in our windows—all of it offended me. At night the sky flashed with bombs; it was impossible to sleep. I had nightmares of flying in pieces through the air.
“Saddam started forcing young men to join the army and my parents wanted me to stay at home, out of sight. Instead, I went out late at night with Arif and Leila, visiting our friends, discussing theories about economics and foreign policy and the workings of the world.” He stops and looks at his hands a moment, rubbing them slowly together. “I guess that’s why I love Nathan’s stories about Baghdad—he’s had more adult experience of the city, the life that I’d wanted to have, but I was too young when I went away. When I grew older, some of my school friends started saying that America was the great traitor, consuming goods and resources—and never really giving anything back but baubles, cheap entertainment. Smoke and mirrors. And I began to understand. The street signs in Baghdad are written in Arabic and English, and you see Disney characters and American-style T-shirts everywhere. Trinkets. Junk.
“But America had also sent me to my new life and I couldn’t imagine turning back from that. I wanted to be a writer and a visionary—like Hemingway—I was excited by the possibilities of languages and world travel. I wasn’t any good at stories or poetry, so I sank myself into politics instead, a ragged language, publishing diatribes against Saddam Hussein in underground newspapers. I wrote under a pseudonym, Ma’al—I thought it sounded dangerous and mysterious.”
Han closes his eyes and rubs at his temples. He lifts his face again, and his eyes are s
tark. “I let Leila and Arif distribute these newspapers among their friends. I encouraged them to go from door to door handing out mimeographed copies of my articles. They even read my work at public gatherings while I remained ‘in hiding’—it was a game. Leila was sixteen and Arif was twelve; both of them thought I was brilliant.
“Eventually, of course, Saddam’s security police heard about my writings and learned where I lived—someone tipped them off. They came to our home and pounded on the door. My parents hid me in the olive cellar under the living room. I could hear Leila stop them at the door. They told her they were there to arrest the so-called Ma’al, author of treasonous and defamatory articles that attacked the Iraqi president and supposedly the nation of Iraq. But it seemed this wasn’t the real reason they were after me: they said that they had information that I’d had dealings with a certain American businessman—a known C.I.A. informant. My twelve-year-old brother stepped forward and told them that he was Ma’al.
“The cellar was filled with great glass olive jars; my hands slipped over them. There was the bitter smell of the brine mingled with the damp earth of the cellar. The sounds of boots, cold sharp voices over my head, a small sound my mother made in the kitchen before my father hushed her. I could see through a crack in the foundation and I remember how the dust and weeds around our house were all gold and tramped down, everything was so yellow.
“I hid in the olive cellar and let him offer himself; they arrested him. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t think they would actually arrest a child. I assumed it was done just to frighten us—that they’d take him in for a short while and then let him go. I was the one they were after. So as soon as the police drove away, I knew that they’d be coming back for me. I left that evening. But they didn’t release Arif. I learned later that they came back in the same week and arrested my friend Sami. And a few years later, they came and arrested my sister Leila as well. They said she was affiliated with American spies. They took them all away. The police might have thought that this would bring me back to Iraq, but it didn’t. I let the police take them away. Once I was in England, I tried everything I could think of to track them down—calling friends and writing letters—I might as well have been trying to find someone on the moon. I wondered if Janet understood how dangerous it had been for me and my family to be associated with her. It began to seem as if my time at the private school had been a kind of brainwashing, with so much exposure to Western thoughts and values, a glorification of the West. Even after she’d spent all that money on me, I’d never learned Janet’s last name or what she and her husband were really doing in my country. But she knew that Saddam Hussein was coming to power. She knew all sorts of things she shouldn’t have known. And while I never really learned their motives, eventually I understood that in some way—deliberate or not—they were the ones who’d betrayed me.
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