Crescent

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  “You and me—in Italy?” She feels a riffle of something like laughter rising under her diaphragm. She wants to ask: and who are you again? But he looks at her so earnestly and sadly that she squelches it. “That’s…very kind of you.”

  “Think about it. You don’t have to answer right away.”

  She shakes her head. “I couldn’t leave here. This is my life.”

  “But perhaps you would care to expand that life?”

  She half-smiles. “Not with you.”

  His expression fades a little then and he wipes his hand along the table. “Of course, I felt you might say that.” He looks pensively around the room and Sirine does too, tries to see what he’s seeing, but it’s just the big bins of plastic wrap and shelves covered with containers. Finally he lifts his chin and gazes at her and says, “There are some things I’ve done…I’m not proud of. I may have done some less-than-noble things in my life. Heaven knows, I’m not Han….” He pauses but Sirine isn’t looking at him; she presses her hurt finger against her thumb. “I have to ask you one more thing,” he says suddenly. “Han never left me any sort of message or goodbye. I had no idea—none. I thought he and I were good friends, but…” He stares at her. “I can’t stop thinking about it—I need to know: is it because of what happened between you and me—is that why Han left?”

  “Because of…” she mumbles, wondering what he’s talking about—she’s already forgotten again—then she remembers. “Oh. No,” she says. “No, I never told him. Nothing.” Her mouth feels like cotton.

  “Good,” he says quickly. “Thank God, thank God. Because I couldn’t have forgiven myself.”

  “Hey, Chef—” Victor swings into the room, looking for Sirine, then stops when he sees Aziz. His face darkens and Sirine sits up, the little hairs prickling along the back of her neck.

  “It’s okay,” she says to Victor. “It’s fine. I’m coming now.”

  Victor remains in the door for a moment, eyes narrowed. He bangs back out through the swinging door.

  She quickly turns to Aziz. “Well. I’d really better get back to work. Things get so crazy so fast out there….” She pushes on her knees and stands.

  “Well, then.” He stands, gallant and restored. He kisses her injured hand. “Let me just say, I haven’t stopped thinking about you,” he says. “About all that we’ve had together. You can always call me. Consider Aziz permanently on-call.”

  “That’s nice,” Sirine says, standing. “Send a postcard when you get to Italy.”

  He tries to kiss her hand but she turns it into a handshake. Then she waves goodbye.

  Han left nine months ago. It’s early morning and Sirine is stirring lemon juice into a tahini sauce. The café is unusually quiet for September, the start of the school year, the new fall term. She is stirring and a student comes in and sits alone at the counter. He orders coffee, flicks open his newspaper—the one with the pale yellow pages—the World—and begins reading.

  Sirine barely notices—she might not have looked up at all, but the tahini sauce needs more lemon and the lemon is on the ledge near the counter. When she looks up, the newspaper photograph—smeary, granular, shadowy—of three hooded, barefoot men catches her eye. She looks closer: one man’s head is partially revealed, and she can see the sad slip of his eyes, the way the black shock of hair falls over his forehead; and she knows.

  “Please,” she says to the student, who glances up, pushing on the silver rim of his glasses. “I’m sorry to interrupt. But could you tell me what this caption says?”

  He folds the page and reads for a moment. “It’s about Saddam Hussein,” he says. “This says he has executed these men accused of crimes of defamation and treason. It says they are Western spies and collaborators.” And then the student seems to pause for a moment as well, taking another look at the photograph. He folds the paper up neatly and offers it to Sirine without quite looking at her, his voice lowered, saying, “Would you—would you like to have this?”

  But she is already walking into the back kitchen, past Mireille and Um-Nadia, Victor Hernandez and Cristobal, off the back porch, across the courtyard, through the screen of leaves, and into the bougainvillea bushes. She pushes into the dense, scraping branches, as far as she can go, so her hair and her clothes are caught and torn, and she sinks her face into her hands and sobs.

  A week later, a small box arrives at her uncle’s house. It is half-crushed and covered with postmarks and cancellations from Tunisia and Yemen and France. Sirine’s name and address is smeared, written in English and Arabic, in a primitive, unfamiliar handwriting. She sits down right on the first step of the staircase to open it, her mouth paper-dry and her pulse thudding in her ears. The plain tissuey wrapping paper falls away and she pries open the little cardboard box, hands shaking.

  Inside is a blue piece of paper. And Han’s blue prayer beads.

  The silk cord was snapped and reknotted and it looks like it’s missing a few beads. She smells them; they’re cool and dimpled and she presses the beads against the side of her face and her uncle finds her like that, in the same place, on the same step, when he comes home an hour later.

  “Habeebti,” he says and crouches over her, looking at the package. “Oh, Habeebti, now what is this?”

  She holds up the blue paper. It is written on in Arabic, the writing has big gaps, most of it has been inked out by a thick black marker. “Please,” she says.

  He sits next to her, switches his regular glasses for his half-glasses, puts one arm around her shoulders, and begins translating the few remaining traces of the letter: “I knew your…here, in this place…we…he asked me to send…he often spoke of…you must know…and he…very, very much.” He takes off the reading glasses, slides them into his shirt pocket, and puts on the regular glasses. “That’s it.”

  “That’s all it says?”

  “I’m afraid it’s been rather heavily edited.”

  Sirine folds the paper carefully, closes her fingers around the prayer beads. “Then it’s enough,” she says.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The difference between a crazy person and a prophet is that one has followers. So the difference between a waiter and a movie star is fans. And all sorts of fans came to the movie theater to see the ghostly Irishman.

  Peter O’Toole.

  Yes. But once they got to the movie this other actor, an unknown, burst inside their eyes, this one who carried himself like a palmful of water, whose skin was clear as water, but whose eye was pointed and black as an arrow. When he was Abdelrahman Salahadin, he was little more than nobody at all, but when he became this other thing, a movie actor—

  Omar Sharif.

  —then he was everything and everybody. In his left ear was the soft inhalation and exhalation of the desert and the susurration of the ocean winds. In his right ear was the sharp metallic din of America. He became what they call a star in this country. In his right eye there were parties and girls, directors and scripts, money and fast cars. But in his left eye there was a sort of absence, a nothingness, that he couldn’t quite identify. And if he tried to look straight at it, it would just float away in the maddening way that such things have.

  Meanwhile, back home at last in sleepy Aqaba where nothing ever changes, Aunt Camille was concentrating on becoming an old lady. Many years had come and gone since she first set out in search of her lost son and she had finally decided to try and retire. Her other uncountable sons took her for walks, and brought in her mail, and remembered her on Mother’s Day. But every night when she went outside and looked at the roving ocean, she wondered about her missing son, Abdelrahman Salahadin.

  One day she received a letter with the return address: “East of the sun and West of the moon.” She thought it was another ad from the credit card company and almost threw it away. But she realized that the handwriting on the envelope with its odd slant, curves, angles, and funny punctuation looked familiar. She realized it was from her old friend, the mermaid Alieph. She opened the letter
and learned that one of Alieph’s many well-wishers and devotees had taken it upon himself to purchase and import one of those fancy motorized wheelchairs and had brought it to her in her cave so that finally she could get out a little.

  She was crazy about the thing! Finally, no more dragging that great lump of a fish tail around on dry land. But as you might imagine, those jagged rock trails and precipices around the cave were murder on an electric wheelchair. So Alieph decided to put on the hejjab for camouflage and moved herself and her wonderful rolling chair out of the mildewy cave and into downtown Cairo.

  Great news, but there was more. Queen Alieph was out picking up a few things for dinner just a few nights back—a couple people were coming by her Cairene loft for wine and cheese—and what does she see plastered a thousand and one times up and down the alleyways? Posters covered with the face, ten feet high or more, of Camille’s bad son Abdelrahman Salahadin!

  Omar Sharif.

  Along with the letter, Alieph also included a few of her latest poems, which were going to be published in a certain trendy literary magazine. But Camille didn’t have time for poetry appreciation. She whistled for Napoleon-Was-Here, started packing her bags, and she wondered: what were they wearing in Cairo this time of year?

  The evening after she received Han’s beads, Sirine is at work when she slips and drops an entire panful of roasted fish in tahini sauce. The kitchen floor is covered in sauce and fish and Sirine stands in the middle of it, hands out, not breathing. Um-Nadia looks through the swinging door and says, “Habeebti.” She comes out with a mop and looks Sirine up and down, then says, “Habeebti, go home before you kill someone.”

  Sirine doesn’t argue. She goes into the back kitchen and pulls her rain slicker on over her chef’s jacket. Mireille offers to give her a ride, but Sirine shakes her head. She walks into the cool, glassy air and climbs on her bike. All of the petals have fallen away and the leaves are tattered, but there are still some remaining scraps of the flowers Han wove into her wire bicycle basket. They flutter as she pedals and she realizes she prefers this—the shredded, witchy look of the old leaves—to the new blossoms. She imagines covering her whole bike in torn vines and sailing down the streets with all her trailing twigs and tendrils.

  Lately she has started thinking about her last evening with Han, remembering the things he had said and done. The way he covered his eyes when she showed him the photograph of his sister and said, no more photographs, I’ve seen too much. She wonders: why did he say that?

  She thought she would just go home, but instead she finds she’s heading into Westwood Village. Even though it’s been months, she remembers the way through the streetlights and neon signs and shopping crowds and then the village lights taper away and the neighborhoods start along the winding walkways, under the big, arching palms. She rolls down one street, then another. For a moment she thinks she is lost, then she remembers a particular curve in the road, some bamboo wind chimes, a group of banana trees. The night sky is a high, curved vault over her head.

  She finds the house with its broken roof tiles and dark windows and crooked door. Slowly, she rolls her bike across the lawn and up on to the concrete front steps. Sirine knocks and calls out, “Nathan!” He hasn’t been back to the café since Han left and she wonders if he even still lives there.

  She has come hoping for a photograph. It doesn’t matter what it looks like. She thinks somewhere in that darkroom there will be at least one more picture of Han. She must reassure herself that he did exist, that she loved him. Almost nine months have passed; last night after she received his prayer beads, she laid awake and realized that she could not conjure up his face. If she could only see him again, study his brow, the line of his mouth, the expression in his eyes, then she thinks perhaps she could find out what she didn’t know about Han—what she should have known.

  She knocks again and again, and when no one comes to answer, she tests the door and it’s open. “Nathan?” she says. She glances around, then enters the dark, jumbled-up living room. “Nathan, are you home?” She feels for a switch and turns on a dim overhead light that makes the room shadowy and that smells of burning dust. “Nathan?” She walks slowly through the room, around piles of clothes and books, rumpled papers, empty bottles. “It’s me, Sirine!” But she’s having trouble raising her voice. The stillness makes her want to tiptoe. She approaches the darkroom door. The red light is on and the door is partly open, so she pushes softly and peeks inside. It’s empty except for the trays of solution and some prints hanging on the drying line.

  She looks once behind her, then goes in. Clipped to the line there’s a photo of Aziz in his smoking jacket, his face full, sultry, and self-satisfied, his hair tossed back. There is one of Sirine frowning, peering into a crowd of people at the Department of Ethnomusicology concert. She studies that one for a moment—she wasn’t aware of Nathan taking that picture. Then she spots a print of her and Han drinking tea in the kitchen at her uncle’s house. She pulls it off the drying line, excited, studying Han’s face closely. The familiar lines of his face ripple over her skin—the scar at the corner of his eye catches in her breath. Han. She turns to the other photos then and discovers there are more surprises: her and Han together in front of the Persian grocery store; outside Han’s office; there’s even one of her and Mireille watching Han from the hallway as he teaches his class. There’s a shot of Han kissing Sirine in the courtyard behind the café, and then there’s a shot of the two of them making baklava in the back kitchen. She discovers more shots of the two of them and she quickly flips through them. It is as though the whole of their relationship has been somehow invisibly noted and catalogued. Han is the hero and Sirine the love interest. There are moments she remembers or half-remembers, and others that she doesn’t remember at all: her head on Han’s chest; a backward look he gave her; a forkful of food he places into her mouth. Their faces are so open, their gestures so tender, she feels her raw grief return—the put-away feeling of the past months—tearing at some hidden place in her body, and the tears that come up so easily these days, waiting for anything to release them. It is a kind of sweetness, molten and overwhelming and filled with flashes of pain. And through this grief, she is stunned by the level of concentration, the sheer amount of stealth and discipline and single-minded focus, that acquiring these images must have required. Somehow, she feels less horrified by these images than she thinks she ought to feel. There’s a glow about them, the light caught in such a way that an onlooker might say the photographer was discreet and respectful, even reverential. She never realized before how important Han was to Nathan, or how consumed Nathan was by their relationship. And now that Han is gone, there is something gratifying, even moving, about this attention.

  She rubs her eyes and temples and experiences an upwelling of pity for both herself and Nathan, a sense of his loneliness and isolation, lost here among his images. Both of them locked into separate griefs. She grabs a couple of prints furtively and starts to back out of the room. Her shocked grief finally begins to give way to a sense of dread and unearthliness, as if the more she looks at herself, the less it seems that is really her in those pictures, or that anything in the world is the way she thought it was. The way people who’ve almost died describe looking down at their own bodies as their spirits fly away.

  She hesitates in the doorway a moment, frozen between fear and an urgent, insistent desire to sweep up all of the photos to protect herself and Han from this intrusion. She spots another print—Han is holding her, his head propped over hers and his eyes shut. That is the one she wants. She slips back into the room to pick it up and in that moment something comes to her, buried beneath the bitter odor of developing solutions and chemical baths—so faint it might almost not be there at all, but so familiar she can’t help but turn her head and inhale—a scent of berries.

  Once she steps out of the darkroom, the scent is easier to detect. She moves into the darker back half of the house, the photos in one hand, the other extende
d; she is listening, inhaling slowly and carefully, tasting the air. She comes to the edge of another door and barely pushes. It takes a second for her eyes to adjust. There’s one big uncovered window in the room; the moonlight spills across the floor and illuminates a bed with a motionless form at the center covered head to toe by a large square black scarf. She comes closer, tests the edge of the scarf for its texture, the fine work of the knots. Her heart feels as if it’s swelling with blood; a supple throb of pulse throughout her entire upper body, wrists, face. She inhales and the scent is everywhere, an intricate lace of fields and fruit. And now it is the scent of Han himself.

  Very gently she begins to pull the scarf toward her, the figure beneath so still, she could be unveiling a statue.

  The gauzy silk releases swells of its particular scent of earth and rare rain, infusing Sirine’s senses, her memories rising like tea leaves in a cup. The last of the material whispers away from the figure underneath, and Sirine is looking at Nathan, asleep and curled naked on the bed. His skin looks bluish and smooth as mother-of-pearl in the dark, his penis curled between his legs like a seashell. Trembling, she lifts the cloud of material to her face, breathing it in.

  After a moment, she realizes she wants to go. She turns and takes a few careful steps toward the door when she hears a sound behind her and turns to see Nathan sitting up on the edge of the bed. He looks at her as if wondering if he’s dreaming. “Sirine,” he says softly. “I wanted to return it. I really did. I’ve wanted to return it for months. I couldn’t think how.” He pulls a bedsheet around his body, turns his face to the window.

  She turns and starts to leave, waits, then turns back again. He is still there. Now he looks like a monk—sunken cheeks, hungry lunar shadow eyes, a body inhabited by an old spirit.

  She holds the veil up against her chest.

  “I recognized it right away,” he says. “As soon as I saw it.”