She gazes at it a moment. She didn’t see him cover the cup, but there it is like a sign or a secret message to her. She picks up the cup and saucer, very carefully, in both hands, and realizes she will not be able to ride her bike like this. Her uncle has already driven to school, so there’s no car. The city bus is too risky between the crowds and the potholes, so finally she decides to call a cab. The name on the driver’s license propped in the window is V.S. Ramoud. He helps Sirine into her seat and asks no questions, driving slowly, eyeing the reflection of the cup and saucer in Sirine’s hand in his rearview mirror.
When she walks into work, Um-Nadia spots the coffee cup and immediately she’s brisk and intent. “All right,” she says quickly. “All right, come back into the kitchen. Right away.”
They arrange themselves at the kitchen table with Victor and Cristobal looking on. Um-Nadia stares at the cup and then at Sirine. “Is this your cup?” she asks. Sirine shakes her head. Um-Nadia turns the saucer slowly, scrutinizing it. “Was there a wish?” she asks.
Sirine says, “I don’t know.”
Um-Nadia lifts the saucer and the cup sticks to it for a moment before releasing with a faint pock. She nods. “The wish will come true,” she says. She turns the cup, reading the drifts of dried grounds lining the porcelain interior. Her forehead wrinkles with concentration and her lips move silently and Sirine, Victor, and Cristobal all wait. Finally, she looks up from the cup, her eyes fretful and evasive. Then she says quickly, “It’s fine. Everything is just fine.”
Sirine waits, staring. Finally she says, “That’s it? ‘Everything is fine’? What about love or journeys or trouble? Can’t you see anything more?”
Um-Nadia glances at it briefly, as if she would prefer not to look. “No,” she says and sets the cup upright on its saucer. “There’s nothing of interest here. Besides, it’s all silly superstitions. You should know that. Arabs don’t believe in these old-time ways anymore. We’re an advanced civilization. No time for the Dark Ages!” With that, she stands, carries the cup and saucer to the garbage bin under the sink, and drops it in. “Lunch rush is coming!” she says and walks out.
The remaining three stare for a moment in the direction of the garbage, then move to their separate jobs. Later, when the back kitchen is empty, Sirine returns and discovers that someone has fished the cup out of the garbage, wrapped it in a dish towel, and tucked it into her backpack.
The day is a blank slot; she moves like a sleepwalker, chopping and stirring, lifting the spoon to her lips; but everything tastes like wet cotton to her. It is impossible not to wait for Han, not to be trained on the sound of the front door; she refuses to think that he is not coming back. All around her people are talking, laughing, and eating; their noise and heat swirls up, surrounding her yet apart from her. It seems that the students are already losing interest in discussing Han. Then a family comes in: an Arab man and a fair-haired woman and two pale, dark-eyed children. She lets herself imagine that this is herself and Han and their family, that her life is shared in the close spaces between herself and her husband and children. She closes her eyes and stirs.
On her break, she sneaks into the back kitchen and calls the police. Her breath comes in short, tight gulps. She says she wants to report someone missing.
“How long has the person been missing?” the officer asks.
Sirine hesitates, not entirely sure, her sense of time scattered. “I think it might be forty-eight hours.” She gives some of Han’s background information—identity, appearance, address, profession. She tells the officer that Han is her boyfriend. But she’s startled when the officer asks if she has any ideas as to where he might be. She thinks for a moment, then says, “Yes, I think he’s gone back to Iraq.”
“What makes you think this?”
“Well. He left a note. That’s what it said. And he took his things. But it was just so strange and sudden….”
“Why would he go to Iraq?”
“Well, he’s from there. Originally. But it isn’t safe for him. I think…” Her voice wobbles. “I think they might hurt him.”
“Who might?”
“You know—Saddam Hussein…”
There’s a pause, then, “You think Saddam Hussein is going to hurt your boyfriend?”
This sounds strange to her. For a moment she’s confused. Then she says, “Wouldn’t he?”
There’s another pause. “Miss,” the officer says. “I’m not sure this is actually a police matter.”
“Can’t you just—isn’t there a way for you to still look for him?” He said that they would kill him. But she realizes that it is like the other day with the airlines agent, that she is already sounding slightly mad.
“Miss—”
Mireille and Victor come into the kitchen carrying dishes.
Sirine hangs up.
That night Sirine stays late at work; she is partly avoiding home but she is also still hoping and waiting for Han. She ends up helping Victor and Cristobal swab and scrape. As they work, she notices Cristobal’s fine, smooth hands, their precise fit to the mop, the way his hair falls in glistening black strands into his eyes. Like Han’s. There used to be an ongoing procession of new custodians working there, Arab or Asian or Mexican. But Cristobal has lasted for nearly two years already and he frequently appears with cousins or friends who help him clean. He gives them kitchen leftovers and pays them some of his tip money. She glances at him and feels drawn closer, wants to put her hand on his warm skin. She remembers that Victor had said Cristobal was from El Salvador and she would like to ask him: What will happen to Han now? What will they do to him? It seems that Cristobal must somehow know the answer to that. But of course, she thinks, he doesn’t; they’re from different countries, how could he know such things? Still, she finds herself moving closer to him, almost unconsciously, scraping the grill, wiping the counter, until he looks up at her, startled, and moves away. She waits until he moves into another room and then she puts her hands up to the front of the satiny metal hood and tries not to let herself start crying. If she starts now, she thinks, there will be no stopping.
Finally, there is no more work to do. The chairs are all upended on the tables, the floors gleam, and Sirine has to go somewhere. She bicycles back to Han’s building but dreads going into its empty, extinguished rooms. She wheels around to the back of the building where his balcony faces out but there are no lights on there. Han isn’t inside. She doesn’t even stop, just swerves away, tires swirling in the gravel, and pedals to her uncle’s house.
He meets her at the door holding an open book, a history of Constantinople. “Someone in Turkish Studies told me it was good reading,” he says. Then he squints at her face. He sighs, puts down the book, and opens his arms. “Come,” he says. She moves into them, smelling the good tobacco dust and coffee grounds and crumbly book smell of her uncle. “Ah, Habeebti,” he says, “Habeebti, Habeebti.”
“He’s gone,” she says out loud, for the first time.
“I know. I know. His crazy decision.”
“What will happen to him?” she cries into his neck.
“I don’t know, Habeebti,” he murmurs. “That’s not a place to go back to. Not now. Not in this world.”
“Will he come back?”
Her uncle doesn’t answer.
She follows her uncle into the library and sits next to him on the horsehair couch. She touches the rough material, inhales the mustiness and weak light and eucalyptus scent. She tries to take it in. She tells herself, I’m home again.
Her uncle rubs his hands over his face. She looks up out of her tears and says, “You’re tired.”
Her uncle looks distant and contemplative, slightly sadder than he used to be; he folds his hands, then cracks them, pushing out, then sighs. “I grow old.” His pants are loose and rolled up above his bare ankles and he has a belted plaid flannel bathrobe on over this.
“No.”
“Oh, for certain.” He smiles at her and when she seems about to start
crying again, he pulls her back into his arms. He smoothes her hair and hums and says, “Your mother was a big crier.”
He rocks her a little and lets her soak the corner of his shirt and finally he gives her an old crocheted doily from an end table to wipe her nose on. “Thank you,” she murmurs. He smoothes her hair back and she thinks of the way he would try to brush her curly hair for her in grade school: it always got bigger and frizzier the more he brushed, so full of static that it crackled.
He sighs again, then says, “There’s no telling about the things in the world. We have to learn patience, Habeebti.”
She closes her eyes. “How? How do you learn that?” He pulls an afghan up over her shoulders and she lets herself slip beneath the warm currents of the room, the memory of stories he told her when she was a girl.
“Patience comes from strange places,” her uncle says. “From the moon and stars, from sighing and breathing, and from working and sleeping, to name a few.”
Sirine is almost asleep as he tells a story.
“Not everyone knows this, but in addition to the real mountains there are purplish ghostly mountains that sleep behind them. And you should never look too closely for too long at just about anything unless you’re willing to let yourself perceive this other world, the world behind the senses, the world not of things but of immutable, unknowable being.
“This was the way I felt on the day your father met your mother. We had lived in this country together with a gang of other immigrant friends—all of us half-crazy with missing home, our parents, our language, our food. So one day, my younger brother comes home and he says to me: today I was out walking and I met my destiny coming toward me in the street. Well, how do you like that? Even though we were thousands of miles from where he was born—there she was, destiny, waiting! I felt it again on the day they married. You could feel it like something in the air. That was the terrible Day of the Terribly Hot Suits when I sweated all the way through my jacket and down to my socks. I was so sad on that day that I thought I would feel that way forever. I thought I was sad because I would never have such love in my own life.
“Finally, when your mother was pregnant with you, then I understood what the something in the air was. I touched her stomach and I could sense you in there, swimming in your purple fish light. You were such a mystery: I imagined you there with fiery feathers, a face like a gold mosaic. And even though up to that point your mother wanted to call you Maybelle and your father wanted Samar—and I was secretly favoring Dishdasha the Great myself—I knew when I touched her stomach, maybe three inches over your head, that you were called Sirine. And that after you, anything was possible.”
Later that night, after the stories and feeding the dog and turning off all the lights, Sirine climbs upstairs. She turns down the blankets on her narrow bed, as she has done so many times in the past. But now it feels different. She feels skinless, barely assembled. Everything hurts. She lies in her bed and feels Han’s absence open in her like a wound. She shivers; her tears are gigantic, swelling inside her. She has never felt this way about anything before. She pulls the covers up to her ears. Curls knees-first into herself. And just when she is certain that she can’t bear it, can’t bear any of it, King Babar hops up onto the bed, presses his woolly head to her face, and stretches his body along her chest. And eventually she sleeps.
She dreams she is a child again. Her arms are plump and soft, her hair is tangled wild. She and her uncle have just come home from the beach and there is sand, as usual, in her clothes and shoes. It is the day that her parents are leaving once again for Africa. The boxy gray suitcases had to be left open all night to air them out. They stand lined up, packed and orderly as soldiers in the entrance. Her mother’s suitcase is small and her father’s is even smaller, and both of them contain photographs of Sirine. They always show her the photos before packing them away. “See?” her mother says. “We’re taking you with us.” In the dream, they are together, her mother crouching to gather Sirine up. Her mother’s lilac scent and shining hair falls over her. They watch Sirine’s father at the end of the hall, grinning at them and combing his own hair back, hand over hand. “The secret to a good marriage,” her mother whispers, her hands cupped around Sirine’s ear, “is to never really know your husband. Not all the way.” Her mother’s arms are long and white like Sirine’s, her hair is a shiny auburn flag. Her father comes over and he scoops her up in one arm and shows her how to shield herself in case a bomb ever drops, by putting her thumbs in her ears and covering her eyes with her fingers. She marvels at how smart her father is. His arms are strong and dark as trees and his hair is woolly tight. His chest is covered in curling black hair.
Then the dream goes to the place where she does not want to be. Watching the two men—now she knows they are newscasters, Huntley and Brinkley—and their theme music that makes her think of slanting rain. She is calm as she was on that day, sitting next to her uncle on the hard, horsehair couch; they are listening to the palm leaves that sound like rain through the open door. The night through the screen is sparked with crickets, warm and mild, even though it is only a few days before Christmas—Christmas Eve Eve Eve, her uncle said—and they’ve seen the pictures of the snowstorms in another place, cars sliding sideways like toys along white streets. Then there is a commercial for Twenty Mule Team Borax cleanser and Sirine is thinking that next is her favorite show, Lost in Space. But then the news is back—if only they had changed the channel, she thinks, perhaps none of this would have happened. The talking men are showing Africa again today. There is fighting there—but there is always fighting in the places where her parents go, or earthquakes, or starving children, or something terrible. There is no place safe except beside her uncle on the horsehair couch. Her father says it is all about oil and greed. Earthquakes are not caused by oil and greed, her mother says. I’m not so sure, says her father. But now Huntley and Brinkley are talking about guns and fighting in the streets and American relief workers. And Sirine knows this part didn’t happen exactly this way, but in the strange, terrible dream it is happening; they see it on the news: Her parents are there on the village road. The tribal soldiers in foreign uniforms on the other side, facing them, the guns shining in their hands. Her parents are with their friends, Mohana the engineer, Ruthie the teacher, and Laura the nurse—they are young people laughing and holding drinks on the lawn chairs in photographs. Now they are on the TV and their death is in their faces, five American relief workers, the reporter is saying. A war, they said—was that what it was? An uprising. Were they Muslims? No. Her uncle is saying no. She heard the reporter say it but she didn’t see it, not really. But in this dream that she can’t break out of or stop or rewrite, it is happening on the screen in front of her: Mohana then Laura then Ruthie. She sees her father hit with a single bullet in the head, a tiny hole. Instantaneous death. And her mother hit with bullets in the legs and wrist; she dies the next day in a village clinic from blood loss and septicemia, blood poisoning. She and her uncle heard it on the TV and in her dream they watched it happen. Her parents went out and they never came home. Their bodies were shipped back in plain board boxes, unopened. But to Sirine, they were buried somewhere in the middle of Africa; she never saw them again.
There was a small will—almost no property or savings. In the event of their deaths, her uncle had been recorded as Sirine’s legal guardian. They had arranged it—Sirine learned—in the same month that she was born. As if they had known.
After their deaths, her uncle took her up to the flat roof of his house—two blocks away from the apartment where Sirine had lived with her parents. He said, “This house is yours and you will always be my only daughter and my only child forever and ever.” He held her so tightly she could feel his ribs, his slight, perishable frame against her shoulders. She felt that day—she knows as she dreams this—the way she feels this night, thirty years later: mortally wounded, ancient and silent. And all the tears left her body, almost forever.
Until sh
e wakes the next morning and feels the dampness cool as air across her face. And she knows, in her half-awake state, that she has had the forbidden dream, the dream-memory that she keeps shut away. She realizes with a soft pang, like remembering an old loss—something that should no longer mean anything but somehow still does—that she is already ten years older than her parents were when they died.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Back in her hometown of Aqaba, Aunt Camille was pleased to see all the familiar sights and sounds that she’d left years before when she went in search of her naughty boy. Her many sons prepared a welcome-home feast of mensaf, made with baby lamb stewed in onion-yogurt sauce prepared on a bed of rice and bread. They fed their mother as well as the entire displaced tribe of blue Bedu, and they tried to convince the blue Bedu to stay on in Aqaba for good. But the whole point of being a blue Bedu is to drape yourself in sweet incense and to wander around the Dhofar Mountains. So, after three days of feasting and reminiscing, Aunt Camille bade them a tearful farewell at the train that would finally take them home.
She turned and faced her nineteen sons then, and realized that one had brought his laundry, another had some mending, and some others hadn’t had haircuts since the day she left town. She sighed and realized that something inside of her had changed while she was on the road: Aqaba looked even smaller and sleepier than she remembered it. It had none of the vivid richness and warmth that her memory had lavished upon it: this was just a place among places. Something inside of her had grown larger, she realized; she thought she’d given up on finding her son, but something was calling her back to the search.
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