Crescent

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  “Is Leila…”

  “Yes, she’s dead.”

  “But how do you know?”

  “The scarf that I gave to you? It didn’t belong to my mother, it belonged to Leila. My aunt Dima mailed it to me after she was killed.”

  Sirine wraps her arms around her chest. She shakes her head. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He frowns at the window. “I didn’t want to frighten you. I didn’t think you would wear it if you knew.”

  Sirine leans forward, takes Han’s hand in hers. But something has pulled him away from her again, out of her grasp, as if the story itself has filled his lungs and drawn him under. His eyes move but the light has gone out of them. He’s shivering as if with a fever, his skin grayish and the scar at the corner of his eye inflamed and red. She looks at it and his fingers go to the spot. “I got this when I escaped.” He fingers the scar lightly. “One of the men helping me to escape suddenly turned on me and tried to steal my father’s prayer beads. He saw the way I always carried them close to me and assumed they were valuable. I woke one night while he was trying to slip the beads out of my hand and he struck me across the face with a broken glass bottle. I bled so profusely that it frightened him and he ran away. That night I had to walk five miles alone in the desert until I came into a Bedouin camp right at the border. One of the men there said that he had once been a cook and he said he’d seen so many injuries in the kitchen that he could stitch up anything. He sewed my face with his wife’s needle and thread and then they escorted me across the border themselves.”

  “A chef?” Sirine tries to smile.

  But Han doesn’t seem to hear—his thoughts are fragments, reflections that flit across the surface of his mind. He frowns and says, “Have you heard of the Evil Eye? You know, I grew up always hearing about the Evil Eye. It’s a bad spirit that takes things away from others and makes things go wrong.”

  Sirine holds his hand in both of hers. It lies cupped and becalmed, palm up between her fingers. “Sure, I know about the Evil Eye.”

  “I never believed in it until Leila was taken and Arif was arrested. A few years later my father died of a stroke. I think the fear and sadness just became too much for him.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “You wonder if there’s anything you can do. You stay up at night trying to think of the thing that will rescue them.” His eyes look dazed and fluid. “What is the thing? What is it? I sent money and letters and never knew if they received anything. I wanted to come back as soon as I heard about Leila but my father said no. He said my job was to stay alive.”

  Sirine squeezes his hands.

  “And before I left to come here, to Los Angeles, I received a note from my mother’s sister Dima, who said that my mother had gotten very sick and even gone a little crazy living all alone.”

  “That’s terrible.” She thinks, the letter.

  He smiles a faded smile, full of rue. “Well, it’s all terrible, isn’t it? It’s why I started to believe in the Evil Eye. Because I couldn’t believe that so much bad could happen to one family. But it’s happened to the whole country, after all. I wonder if a whole country could be under a spell like the Evil Eye.”

  She looks away.

  “No,” he murmurs. “I don’t know. It’s not right. Things aren’t right….” His voice trails off as he gazes at the bedroom window. Sirine follows his gaze and remembers the night that he climbed out the same window. It seems now like it happened a very long time ago. “Things have changed,” he says. “I need to return, while my mother’s still alive. I want to see her one more time, to be with her—it’s something I should have done years ago. I have to go back.” His eyes open and shut slowly, as if he’s nearly asleep.

  “Come on,” Sirine says. “Not tonight, okay?”

  “Tonight is it,” he says. “It’s all we’ve got now.” But he slides down under the comforter.

  “Han, we both need to rest. We can talk more about everything in the morning.” She brushes the hair back from his face. He looks at her once, with tenderness, then closes his eyes. Soon after that, his breath slides into an even rise and fall. He looks young in his sleep, though he is still frowning, a vertical crease set between his eyes, as if he is working on an unsolvable puzzle.

  The moon comes up in a bare sliver and the room is full of shadows but the air is motionless. Sirine quietly moves to the windows and opens them a few inches. Wind swings through the room, fragrant with the smell of streets and dust and the desert, the last exhalation of the long winter nights. The night sky is silver and spectral, light flares in the windows and bounces off the cars. The breeze feels chilly and she climbs back into bed.

  She slips in beside Han, puts her arm across his chest carefully, trying not to wake him, and whispers, “It will be all right, Habeebi, it will all be fine. You’ll stay here with me and my uncle. We’ll love each other, we’ll get married and be happy. Perhaps we can send for your mother somehow, bring her to this country. We’ll be together and it will finally be all right.” She strokes his hair while he sleeps. And eventually she also falls into a deep, walled-in sleep, dreamless and thick as smoke in her body.

  She wakes when the room is gray with dawn. She is dressed in her jeans and sweater; things seem vaguely wrong. The windows are shut. Her mouth burns as if from eating too much sugar.

  She sits up in bed. The photo is no longer out on the nightstand; in its place there is a piece of paper folded into a sailboat. She touches the blankets and realizes only then that Han is gone.

  The note says: “Things are broken. The world is broken. Hayati, it’s time. I’ve gone. Imagine that I was never here at all.”

  No one answers the phone at his apartment. Sirine grabs the keys to her uncle’s car and drives through the early morning streets just starting to fill with commuters. She lets herself into his apartment with her key. Most of his books and clothes are gone, his suitcase, his toothbrush, his lapis prayer beads. And her yellow hair barrettes.

  His stacks of notebooks and writings about Hemingway are also gone: the pages of Arabic handwritten in blue ballpoint on lined white curling pages that were Han’s translations. “Big Two-Hearted River,” A Moveable Feast, and The Old Man and the Sea.

  She drives to campus but it’s winter break and the place is nearly deserted. She tries all the doors to the Languages Building until she finds an unlocked entrance in an outdoor stairwell. But the building is empty, ghostly with the absence of students, the corridors echoing. She walks down the hall, listening to the sound of her footsteps repeating through the floors. She finds Han’s office on the third floor, rattles the doorknob, looks at his name stenciled on the glass, and looks at the row of chairs lined up and waiting for him outside the door. She feels a black wave of despair mounting inside of her.

  When Sirine gets back to her uncle’s house, the sun is starting to rise. Her uncle meets her at the door. “Habeebti, that was Lon Hayden on the phone. He just found out that Han left a message on his office phone sometime last night and he said that he resigns!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  So Abdelrahman Salahadin had enough with drowning. He would try his hand at being a movie star. And even though he’d never acted before and he had started out with only three words of English—Hal’Awud, Dar’Aktr, and Fil’Imm—he also had devil-man good looks, smooth skin and smooth eyes, and a wide swimmer’s back. So he got a few minor roles here and there to start; he played Mexicans and Italians and this sort of business. He gradually got more ambitious, wanting bigger parts, so he started asking around and heard about this and that. He also heard tales about a movie that had been made before his time that was called El Shaykh.

  The Sheik.

  Yes. That. A plum role. Arab incarnate. But they’d given the part to an Italian! Some know-nothing named Rudy So-and-So, because no one in Hollywood wanted anything to do with an actual Arab. Back then the directors and producers didn’t think of Arabs as terrorists, they thought Arabs were more
like something from the Bible. Of course, they didn’t have time for that sort of nonsense. Besides, they thought someone with actual dark skin might run amok, do something unpredictable. So there were other Arab movies with great parts which went to Italians, some Irish, even a Spaniard or two, I hear. There was The Ten Commandments, which was shot over by our Aunt Nejla’s house. And Greatest Story Etc. was done on Abdelrahman’s grandfather’s farm. And Barabbas, in which the director offered the part of a sultan to a crazy blue Bedu, Crazyman al-Rashid, who was visiting from out of town and stole some camera equipment and wrecked it for everyone.

  Anyway. It just so happened that there was a new Arab movie starting up. With a famous English director. A lot of money, music, sand, the works. Here, finally, was Abdelrahman Salahadin’s chance for something big. It was, in fact, to be filmed in the swirling stretch of Wadi Rum desert, right in the backyard of Aqaba where he had grown up. It was a long shot, he was still an unknown, but you have to understand that even though he’d spent years marinating in the Red Sea, Abdelrahman Salahadin was still young and beautiful. Beautiful. With clear skin like yours and black shining eyes like your father’s, with a spine like a dagger and a head of hair as dark as midnight on the Nile.

  When he walked onto the stage at the audition, all the Italian actors fell silent. The director was very far away, hidden among a sea of empty seats, and when he nodded, Abdelrahman opened his mouth and cried out, ‘A small, barbaric people!’—which happened to be one of the more interesting lines in the movie—and his voice split open the air of the theater like a spear and everyone knew that he would be the star of the movie.

  Except, of course, how could he be the star, this Jordanian, Syrian, Lebanese, Egyptian, Iraqi, Palestinian, drowned Bedouin of an Arab?

  All day, Sirine works with one eye on the front door, as if she were holding her breath.

  The café fills with more students than Sirine has ever seen in there at once. Every table is crowded with young men from all the Arab countries; some of them go and borrow chairs from the Shaharazad Drugstore across the street. They’re arguing in Arabic. Every single person seems to be shouting, the cords standing out in their necks. Many of them also watch the door, as if expecting Han to appear at any time.

  Victor Hernandez stays in the kitchen working frantically with Sirine, doing salads, soups, and dips while Sirine works the grill: Cristobal and Um-Nadia both run dishes to the tables. “What is this?” Victor asks Mireille when she stops to wait for a pickup. “What’s going on out there?”

  Mireille glances at Sirine; finally she says, “They’re saying that Han quit the university and went back to Iraq. They’re arguing about why he left, or if he had to escape, or Saddam Hussein was involved or the C.I.A., or I don’t know what.”

  Victor swivels to look at Sirine. “He did it—he went back!”

  Sirine ducks her head under the roaring hood. The heat of the grill seems to pass right through her body and the grease chatters and snaps like teeth.

  She works without a break, turning out skewers of lamb and chicken, braised shanks, grilled fish, until her arms feel limp and her back is tight. The students stay, making a commotion all day. They eat and wait and argue an hour past closing time, until Um-Nadia takes a broom out of the closet and stands in the middle of the place, shaking the broom and shouting: “Imshee! Go home everybody now! That’s enough of everything and I got a headache!”

  Victor, Cristobal, and Cristobal’s specially-called-in cousin Eliazer all begin cleaning. Sirine sinks into a chair. She feels translucent, as if she’s lost her skin and bones. Her head still hums with the roar of the hood and the din of the arguments. There’s a lingering, earthy scent of chopped parsley. She closes her eyes for a moment, listening to the white ringing in her ears.

  Mireille sits across from her. “Some of the students were saying he was a spy.”

  “A spy?” Sirine drops her arms into her lap. “A spy? For who?”

  Mireille shrugs. “The C.I.A., the Iraqis, whoever.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Someone else thought he was one of Saddam Hussein’s secret sons.”

  Sirine rubs her temples. “Why are we talking about Han in the past tense?”

  “Did he tell you anything at all? Is he coming back? Did he really go back to Iraq?”

  Sirine looks down, feels her face crack, as if she will cry, but it seems she’s run out of tears. She tries to say, I don’t know, but there is no air in her lungs. Mireille scoots her chair so close that their knees are touching; she grabs Sirine’s hands tightly. “It’s going to be all right. He’s going to come back, I’m sure of it. I can feel it.”

  Sirine shakes her head. “I don’t know what to think.”

  “Then listen to me—I know how he felt about you. Any idiot could see it. Maybe he got scared but he’s coming back, there’s no question.”

  Sirine stares at the floor. “Got scared of what?”

  Sirine returns to Han’s apartment that night and calls the airlines, dragging the phone into his bed. When she says in a wobbling voice, “Yes, I’d like to buy a ticket. To Baghdad,” there’s a long pause on the other end.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman finally says. “There are no commercial flights from the U.S. into Baghdad.”

  Sirine blinks, squeezes the receiver. “You mean—you mean I can’t go?”

  “There’s a travel ban for Americans. I don’t think they would let you in even if you drove yourself to the border,” the woman says.

  Sirine rubs her hand over her forehead. Tries to think. “What if I was an Iraqi?”

  Another pause. “Well, I suppose you could try flying to Europe or a different Middle Eastern country and then fly on one of the carriers that does go into Iraq. There aren’t that many. Or maybe you could fly into a neighboring country and drive across. It’s very dangerous there, you know,” the woman adds.

  “Why?” Sirine asks. “What would they do to me?” She looks at his balcony and remembers the night she thought she saw a gargoyle out there watching her.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Do you think they would arrest me?” She presses her lips together—realizes she sounds hopeful and crazy.

  “Miss—I—I—really don’t think—”

  Sirine quickly hangs up.

  The phone is ringing. It is so dark for a moment she can’t remember where she is. Even the city lights look dimmer and more distant, blurring through her consciousness as she wakes, her face turned toward the balcony. But she wasn’t really asleep, was she? She couldn’t sleep. She waits but the answering machine doesn’t come on and Han still hasn’t come home to answer it. It keeps ringing. She sits up, wondering if he would call his own apartment.

  She goes out to the phone in the other room, picks up, and murmurs, “Hello?” But no one speaks.

  “Hello?” she asks, more loudly this time.

  Still silence; Sirine feels it shift into a silence of waiting or expectation. She hears something tiny, molecular, trickling over the phone line, inside the whorls of her own ear. She exhales, and in that exhalation she murmurs, “Han?” Then instantly realizes her mistake. Her breath feels raw, her heart peeled away as a bulb. There is something unearthly and sinister there, she feels it in the receiver. The monstrous thing, waiting for her, attached to her mind, hanging by the slim line in the middle of the night. She wants to throw it away from her, run, but it dangles there, silently breathing, slithering into her ear. Her mouth tastes burnt and bitter, as if filled with soot.

  Sirine closes her eyes and forces herself, shaking, to slowly replace the breathing receiver. It wants her, the quiet thing waiting on the line. She doesn’t know why. She looks around the half-empty apartment and it seems in that cool, midnight hour to be filled with ghost-shapes.

  She takes off her clothes and pulls on one of the shirts Han left hanging in his closet, then gets back into bed. She curls up in Han’s clothes and covers and scent. Her sleep is light, filigreed as lace
; she’s frightened of dreaming. Sirine tosses and several times she imagines she hears the scratch of his key in the lock. She stares at the dim red light from the clock radio switching the hours. Finally, she falls asleep in the very early morning and then drags herself awake at nine. She’s late for work, but unable to hurry, barely able to splash water on her face or to squint at her reflection in the mirror, her eyes aching, as swollen as if she’d been crying all night. She bicycles back to her uncle’s house to see if there’s been any word from Han.

  But there are no notes, no messages on the machine. She goes upstairs to her bedroom and stares at the unmade covers. Then she changes into work clothes, moving slowly but automatically, curling away from thought. Easier to be numb and disoriented. She goes back downstairs, picks up her jacket and keys, and has her hand on the door when something makes her turn around. She looks into the kitchen and sees it, still on the table: Han’s coffee cup from his last night there. But for some reason the saucer is inverted over the demitasse, the way it is done for fortune-tellers, so the seer can shake the cup and read the pattern of the coffee grounds after the coffee is drunk.