Crescent

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  One week after Han left, a blue aerogram letter arrives at Sirine’s uncle’s house, postmarked from London. Sirine immediately recognizes Han’s neat block script in blue ink. Her hands begin trembling so that it takes her a minute to slice a serrated knife through the edge. Her breath is seized up and her heart pounds so it feels like a fist inside her chest wall. She sits down and holds the letter in both hands and it takes a moment before she can focus on the words:

  Between planes—Heathrow Airport, January 10th, 2000.

  Dear Sirine,

  Can’t stop thinking about you. But it seems that I have left my body, my body travels without soul or consciousness, which remains in America, with you. This personal division is the only reason I was able to climb out of our bed and leave you while you slept the other morning. Now I feel like I’m watching myself go. I can’t stop myself.

  There are many reasons why I have to return to Iraq, though I’m afraid to write them here, afraid of seeing the reasons written down. Just as I was afraid of speaking the other day while you cooked for me and talked about forgiveness. Too soon then.

  Is it enough to say that I didn’t want to go, that I never thought I could do it, that the thought of leaving you was even worse than the thought of what is waiting for me in Iraq?

  Nothing is enough, I know that now, but it’s too late for me. I’m driven by the prospect of return: my country won’t let go of me—it’s filled me up. You know that. And a certain fear—an emotional fear—has suddenly lifted and freed me.

  Sirine, I don’t know what’s going to happen. Would say that I am coming back to you if I thought I could. I’ll contact you if there is any way to do it, but this seems unlikely. The most I hope for now is just time—to see my family, our home. Beyond that, I’m afraid there won’t be options.

  I won’t ask for your forgiveness, only that you let yourself remember me and to know that I loved you so much. More than I knew I could.

  Always,

  Hanif

  She lies on the bed, the letter in her hand, close to her face. The transparent paper looks blue as a vein of blood. When she exhales, the paper trembles. She reads it over and over, staring at the place where he writes, “I am coming back to you.” He says that he loves her, that he cannot stand to leave her: yet he has left. She rereads it until she can’t see the words anymore.

  She tries to fill herself up with work. The days compress, hard and square as blocks, as if time has edges, and she gives herself barely enough time to move from sleep—which has turned treacherous and untrustworthy—to kitchen. She pedals wildly through the traffic, dodging between cars, turning close enough that she can feel heat rising from their bumpers and metallic hoods. At work, she loses herself in chopping, mincing, skinning, crushing. She stirs without seeing or smelling, and she cooks by rote, never tasting. She knows the food doesn’t taste the way it should, but she no longer much cares about food. On breaks, she ruffles through the newspapers the students leave on the tables, looking for news about Iraq, or just looking at the photographs in the Arabic newspapers.

  A few of Han’s colleagues stop by the café to check on Sirine, and once she thinks she sees Aziz conferring with Um-Nadia out front, but he doesn’t come back to the kitchen. Um-Nadia tells Sirine later that she informed Aziz that he was “too much” for Sirine right now. And Nathan never comes in at all. Sirine doesn’t want to see anyone but Han. Somehow, seeing his friends presses on a painful, tender spot in her, her guilty suspicion that she didn’t deserve his love in the first place. So she tries not to look up from her work at all. She pushes herself until there isn’t room in her for thought. After a few weeks she realizes that she is not really waiting for Han. Not in the way she was at first—so consciously and expectantly. And this makes her sadder. When Han first left, she couldn’t help herself. In those first days it felt as if her heart might slip out through the center of her chest. But now she can pull herself back from that soughing grief and stay tucked up tight.

  One night her dreams intermingle with a distant, foreign scent. She’s left the coffee too long on the stove and it’s burning. Han is there in the room, waiting, but she can’t find a matching cup and saucer. If she doesn’t bring the coffee soon, he will leave. The cupboards have hundreds of dishes; she hunts and hunts but none of them match and she can smell the coffee burning.

  She wakes for good at three A.M., gets up, and when she opens her backpack, she discovers the coffee cup that someone had wrapped in a towel weeks ago. Its grounds are completely dried out now and they’ve fallen away from their intricate patterns; the cup has barely any scent at all—even when she tips her nose down into it. She goes into the kitchen, with King Babar following, his nails ticking on the floor, and she puts water on to boil. Then she fills the cup, pouring steaming water over the old grounds and stirring until it makes a thin, grayish brew. The flavor is gone: it’s gritty and faintly bitter and she drinks it all, gazing into the night in the window over the kitchen sink. Whatever fate was written in his cup, she thinks, she wants to share it.

  On the day of her fortieth birthday, Han has been gone for two months.

  At the café, they give her presents wrapped in shiny paper: a feathered hair ornament from Mireille, a pair of good heavy knives from Um-Nadia, a box of Mexican crushed peanut candies from Victor, and from her uncle, a recipe book from Syria published in 1892, On the Delights and Transfigurations of Food, that he accompanied with his own handwritten, pasted-in translations. “Congratulations, Habeebti,” he says. “You will always be my little chicken.”

  She has a slice of cinnamon-pepper-chocolate cake baked by Victor Hernandez’s mother. There are no birthday candles and so no wishes, for which she is grateful. Um-Nadia tells her to take the rest of the day off, but she refuses, saying she would rather work. So they unlock the doors to the café. Sirine cooks breakfast and she sings the birthday song over and over, just under her breath, senna helwa ya jameel, lovely year, oh Beauty.

  That night, after she’s done with work and alone in her bedroom, she sits on the bed beside the dozing, dreaming King Babar, and stares at her old Syrian cookbook. The recipes are pared down to the essentials: simple equations, the ideal calibrations of salt to vegetable to oil to meat to fire. They’re little more than lists, no cooking instructions or temperatures, but scattered among the pages are brief reflections on the nature of animals, forest, flowers, people, and God. Sirine browses through the book, lingering equally over the reflections and the lists of ingredients, which seem to her to have the rhythms and balance of poetry. There is one for a roast chicken that she decides she may try preparing for a daily special: chicken, saffron, garlic, lemons, oil, vinegar, rosemary. Following the ingredients the anonymous author has written and her uncle has translated: “Praise be to Allah for giving us the light of day. For these creatures with air and flight in their minds if not in their bodies.” Is it a prayer or a recipe? She reads it several more times and can’t tell.

  She puts the book on the floor beside her bed and switches off the light but she doesn’t sleep. It feels as if her body is a taut string, resonating with dark music. She lies on her back with her eyes open. She dangles one arm over the side of her bed and lets her fingers brush over the old cover of the recipe book. Tomorrow she will make a new dish. But, she thinks, Han will never taste it. She remembers that she had seen the date of her birthday circled in Han’s calendar—her name enclosed with a red heart. She thinks that if he were still alive, he would have found a way to call that night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Back in Hal’Awud, the British director, who wasn’t rich and famous for nothing, had cast the lead role of his movie: he’d selected a tall, crazy, drowned-Arab of an Irishman with see-through skin and see-through eyes and a voice like water in a well. He was to be the star of the show. And the movie wasn’t called Sherif Ali ibn el Kharish of Arabia, now, was it? It was called Lawrence.

  Of Arabia.

  Yes! The Of Arabia part comes se
cond, you see. No one particularly cared about the Arabian-of-Arabia, they cared about the Irishman who came dressed in Arab’s clothing and the English director’s idea of desert music, which went like this, ah-ahhh—da-dahh dada dahh-dahh.

  And so he stole the movie, just like that. Just like real Lawrence stole the trust of the Arab tribes and just like the gringos stole California from the Mexicans, Peter O’Toole stole the movie from Omar Sharif, to whom the movie rightly belonged. Who was actually the true brilliance and beauty and intelligence of the story.

  Are you sure Omar Sharif used to be Abdelrahman Salahadin?

  Everyone in Hollywood changes their name, right? Look at Woody Allen. He was called Allen Konigsberg, which, in my opinion, is a much more melodious name.

  But are you sure?

  Well, one is never sure. The point of everything is that Sharif too was a drowned Arab. Which was what made him so beautiful and tragic. And that once you let them see the drowned Arab in you, then you’re lost.

  A moral!

  Only because you’re looking for one, which means that you are looking in the exactly wrong direction.

  Well, that is a very strange ending.

  Oh no, there’s always more to the story of Abdelrahman Salahadin. Don’t worry.

  I didn’t know that business about the Queen of Sheba. That she was so beautiful. That it could make you go crazy.

  It was one of her more salient characteristics.

  The days are a dream of chopping, stirring, and frying, the nights a span of cleaning and talking. Every evening after everyone is gone, the tea is drained and the dishes are rinsed, every night Sirine cries just a little less, a little less, with King Babar’s stern and loving eyes fixed on her from the foot of the bed. Sometimes she dreams of a barking dog.

  They start to close the restaurant earlier, and every night Mireille, Um-Nadia, and Victor Hernandez come to her uncle’s house and they talk until words fill the room like an incense. They talk, Sirine thinks, as if it’s very important that she not think about the last year. As if to drive Han out of their memories, as if it didn’t matter that he is no longer in the world. Um-Nadia starts to mention handsome customers who’ve come into the café. Then she raises her eyebrows at Sirine. One day, Victor comes over with his bachelor cousin Alejandro but Sirine barely looks at him as he sits stiffly embarrassed and silent at the counter.

  Sirine spends a lot of time alone inside her thoughts. She has started to wonder about things, about whether Han really loved her, or if she’d just been a distraction until he returned to his real life, about whether he chose to leave her or if something had forced him to go. And about what happened to him. And then she wonders if it’s somehow worse not knowing these things than actually knowing you’d never really been loved at all. One night she is suddenly so angry at Han for leaving that she thinks perhaps none of it matters as much as she thought it did. Maybe a death is just a death. She didn’t betray him—he betrayed her! He betrayed their love, he betrayed her trust and faith. He allowed her to think he would be with her always. She props her elbows on her bedroom windowsill and looks for the crescent moon. There are so many slight things she can distinguish between with her senses: she can smell the difference between lavender and clover honeys; she can feel the softening progression of ripeness in a pear; and she can sense how much heat is rising in a panful of gravy, lentils, garlic. She knows all of these subtle things through her skin, but she doesn’t know the simplest things, like—did he betray her?

  Of course, she betrayed him.

  Sirine can’t quite get it; can’t completely take it in.

  That he is gone, unutterably gone, beyond her ever calling him back to her. She cannot conceive of the sacred, foreign language that has separated them; she no longer knows what Han is. She believes that at one time the elements inside Han and herself had called to each other, like the way ingredients in a dish speak to each other, a taste of ginger vibrates with something like desire beside a bit of garlic, or the way a sip of wine might call to the olive oil in a dish. Now she feels there is no one to resonate to her; that person is no longer on the earth, and the earth has gotten much colder and much more unknowable.

  One day, she bicycles to work after the sun has come up, and the air is white and fleecy with fog. Everything is so white it makes her think of snow. She thinks she’s seen snow once—paper-light flecks that stirred in the air like cinders and vanished before they ever touched the earth, a freakish cold snap, her breath coming in bursts like blooms of steam. Now the fog is so dense she has to pedal slowly, watching the palm fronds and cars looming up out of it like ghosts.

  The fog tries to seep inside the café, a filigree around the door, rolling over the threshold. “It’s like another world,” Mireille says, wide-eyed.

  Everything feels softer, all edges blunted, as if magic has trickled into the street. Customers walk in and then turn and look back out the whitened window, staring as if they can’t quite believe it.

  Sirine ties up her hair, puts on her heavy white jacket and apron. She feels steady and capable—in her element. But her feelings are all contained and held away because there is always, also the feeling born out of Han’s absence—nothing is exactly right anymore.

  She slices an onion in half, peels away the amber skin, the crisp white body wet between her fingers. She places it face down. She knows how to cut an onion. Or a tomato. Or a clove of garlic. She knows how to cut so the fragrance and juice are captured. She chops quickly, fingers curled in, away from the blade, going fast. The door chimes ring and the door rattles open. And she sees Han come in.

  She cuts off the very tip of her index finger. Not much. A sliver of skin, it cuts so easily, like a bit of onion, she doesn’t realize she’s done it until she looks down. Her breath a ragged gasp. Then she looks back up and it isn’t Han at all. It’s Aziz.

  Aziz cries out, “Ya Allah, your hand.” There is a crimson thread of blood running down into her palm.

  Um-Nadia grabs her and says, “In back!” and she steers Sirine through the swinging door. They run frigid water over the tip until the water blooms red, swirling with blood. Um-Nadia swabs the wound with disinfectant and has Sirine hold her cut hand up while Mireille locates the bandages. “Maybe she needs stitches,” Mireille says as they bandage her.

  “Tch,” says Um-Nadia. “Stitches. Stitches, what for?”

  “Sirine?” Aziz says. He pokes his head through the kitchen door.

  “Look what you made her do!” Um-Nadia says to Aziz. Aziz looks aghast and teary-eyed. He opens his mouth but doesn’t speak. “I told you not to come.”

  Mireille looks at Sirine. “Should I smack him?”

  Sirine shakes her head. Um-Nadia and Mireille install Sirine in a kitchen chair, put her feet up on a stool, and tell her to hold her finger elevated. “I’m fine now,” Sirine protests. “Really, it was hardly a scratch.”

  “You’re in shock,” Um-Nadia says. “You don’t know if you’re fine or not or what. I will tell you if I think you’re fine. And you’re not fine.” She holds up her hand in Aziz’s face. “Three minutes,” she says. “Then khullus.” And she goes out. Mireille follows and sneers at him on the way.

  “I’m so sorry,” Aziz says quietly, standing in front of the refrigerator.

  “Oh…” She waves her bandaged hand. “Really, this is nothing.”

  He nods and stares at her hand as if he doesn’t believe her. Then says, more quietly, “I’m also sorry about my own behavior. I feel like I let you down. I wanted to come and see you after Han, you know—but I just…” He shakes his head, the wings of his shoulder blades bunched up in his back. “At any rate, I was fairly certain you wouldn’t want to see me. I didn’t even leave my apartment for a week, hoping he’d call. I felt immobilized.” Sirine studies his hand with the too-tight gold ring. She doesn’t say anything. She knows what he means, knows just how he feels, in fact. But she doesn’t have the energy to offer him even this consolation. Finally, he li
fts his head. “You look tired. Are you sleeping at all?”

  “Sometimes. Not often,” she says, then smiles.

  Aziz sits across from her at the table and settles his chin in his hand. “Yes, I know. No more bad habits for me either—like sleeping. I keep thinking of—God—Han actually going back there—and then I get stuck there in my head too, you know? Thinking it over and under. I still can’t believe he did it.”

  “Yeah.” She looks away. “I try not to think about anything at all.”

  “Yes.” He clears his throat, shifts his weight. “Well, I’ve been wanting to see you, of course, but there’s also another reason why I came—I—I just wanted to let you know—my little book and I have been invited to an artist’s residency in Italy. It’s supposedly some kind of honor. I’ll be leaving here for good at the end of the term.”

  Sirine looks back but doesn’t quite meet his gaze. She takes in this news as she takes in most information these days—through a layer of gauze, a muffling silence—it has no real importance or meaning for her. Her grief rests in the outermost layer of her skin, weighing down her features and making her too sensitive to touch. Then she does look at him and now that she knows he isn’t Han she barely recognizes him at all. She has to remind herself that they slept together one night; that she once tormented herself over this fact.

  “And I thought—this might be ridiculous, I know, but I thought perhaps you might consider coming with me?”

  She tips her head, curious, as if he were speaking another language. “Where?”

  “Well. Italy. You could stay with me. I mean, we wouldn’t have to—to do anything—you didn’t want to do. We could just go together as good friends. But perhaps it would be a change of pace. Something new to look at. Take your mind to a nice, new place. You could stay as long as you wanted.”