Crescent

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  Sirine stands perfectly still. “You took it,” she says. “Why did you take my scarf?”

  “I’d like to explain. Can I at least do that?”

  “What do you know about the scarf?”

  “I was in love with Han’s sister. With Leila.”

  “Leila—” She stops, takes a deep breath.

  Nathan runs his hands over the bedsheets, fingers rippling over the waves. The moonlight filtering through the window hits the tops of the folds so they seem to turn into crests of foam. “I used to read about Baghdad in the Arabian Nights,” he says. “It was all magic and adventurers. I thought that’s what it was like there. And when I got older Baghdad turned into the stuff about war and bombs—the place on the TV set. I never thought about there being any kind of normal life there.”

  Sirine leans back against the doorframe. She closes her eyes and folds the silk between her hands. She tries to stay calm, to listen to his version of Baghdad unwind in the room: a city with crowded streets and bars and educated young people, and experimental artists and directors, and stylish tourists from around the world. And Nathan standing in the street trying to take it all in. When she opens her eyes she sees old library books lying cracked open face down on his bed, rolled-up undershirts and socks on the floor; she smells, through the berry scent, an odor of old clothes, film canisters, something bitter and chemical in the room.

  So she keeps her eyes closed as Nathan talks about Eastern domes beside Western multistory buildings, and ancient ruins and contemporary ruins from the war with Iran and then bombs from America, missile attacks that left huge smoking holes in the earth; she hears about outdoor markets filled with hanging skinned rabbits, lambs tethered to posts, fruit stands stacked high with tiny tart oranges or glowing onions or heads of garlic big as fists, the smoky scent of sesame, of freshly baked bread from an open stall. And outlying horizons of sleeping purple mountains.

  Then Sirine hears about the young woman. She was standing at the market with her mother when Nathan walked in. Nathan describes her meticulously: the spill of her black hair, her plummy red lips, the angle of her hand as she inhales a lemon. Knowing that he has to see her again, knowing that he is lost.

  Then, after days of searching, he finds her again. She is hanging out laundry in a field as he is walking by. He stops in his tracks. She knows he’s been looking for her because everyone sees and talks about the American who is walking all over town, taking pictures, looking for the girl he saw in the market. They think he’s a spy.

  He approaches her father and younger brother Arif—her older brother is away at Oxford—and convinces them to let him work in their orchards. Her father has come to believe that American wealth and political influence is the Iraqis’ only hope for combating the dictator in power. He and Arif are interested in this intense young man with the pale gray eyes and porcelain skin. For some reason, they like him, even with his bad Arabic, his picture-taking and questions and hanging around; they recognize his obvious, helpless love for the girl. They know he’s doomed and half-crazy and too in-love; they let him stay there and work, even though they know it’s bad luck and dangerous. Americans attract attention. He keeps a tent in the field where the Bedu orchard-tenders work, but at night he hides himself under a ledge beneath the girl’s windows and sometimes she comes out and speaks to him.

  There’s a sound and Sirine opens her eyes. She’s back in the close room in America. She thinks she sees a movement in the air around him, a sort of wisp. Or just a trick of the light. He stands, trailing his sheet, bone-white with motes of blue shadow. He goes to a corner and she hears a drawer hissing open, then he returns with an envelope. He pats a space on the bed beside him for her to sit and she thinks about it and then does so, tentatively. He slides out a handful of color snapshots. He hands them to her one by one; they reflect the moonlight, photographs of the simplest images: bare salt-stems of coarse grass; the stone corner of a window; the edge of a plain whitewashed house. “This is where I lived,” he says. “For months. This was the whole world. The space below her window.” His eyes are closed. “It smelled like olives. And a bit like the sea.”

  “Han’s house,” she says softly.

  Another snapshot: the back of a man’s head swathed in his white head-covering—a kaffiyeh—his hand reaching for a cup on a round brass table.

  “I wanted to marry her. But I was just a guest in her world—her parents, her brothers. I couldn’t take her away.”

  More snapshots: trees with glossy branches against a washed-out sky. “The orchard.” Pointed leaves bright as coins. Black olives. “My world.” Her hand: round, smooth, brown as a loaf. “Leila.”

  It’s a different pose but the same laughing girl, the same curling tendrils and velvet eyes. “Oh yes,” Sirine says quietly, holding it up to the moonlight. “I know her. I found her picture under my bed.”

  He looks startled. “You found the snapshot? I’d brought it at Thanksgiving to show to you. I was planning to tell you about Leila and me. You and Han both. But then I saw you wearing the veil….” His eyes widen. “I got rattled and left. I’d had her photo in the pocket of my coat and didn’t realize it was missing until the next day.”

  Sirine thinks for a moment, then smiles vaguely and says, “The dog—King Babar—he’s a terrible thief.”

  “Could I perhaps have it back?” Nathan asks. “I can’t find the negative.”

  She looks down. “I showed Han the photo right before he left. He took it with him.”

  Nathan stares at her and she sees a passage of feeling run over him. In the uneven light he looks like a man beneath a river current. He frowns and lowers his head. “Han had no right to give away the veil!” he says intensely. “He had no right. Not like that. You didn’t know what it meant. You dropped it. I found it lying on your kitchen floor…. It belonged with me.” He touches the veil briefly, then withdraws his hand. “No. It belonged to Leila. She was wearing it on the last day I saw her.”

  The snapshot—a young man’s grave face, black eyes, a horizontal evenness in the gaze, a flicker of Han’s features. “Arif knew about my relationship with Leila. He was polite but quiet around me, always a little reserved. He’d been imprisoned and released once already before I’d met him and he seemed older than he actually was. I’d been working in the orchard for a couple months when the men showed up. Arif had come from the house; he was running between the trees toward where I was working. He grabbed me and brought me into a shelter they’d dug out beneath the house for storing roots and olives.

  “I realized I could hear everything that was happening in the house: it was all just inches away through the dirt and floorboards. Leila was talking and they were talking, asking for the American who was taking all the pictures. I could barely breathe or swallow; I was terrified, thinking of the stories I’d heard about Saddam’s police. But Leila stood her ground and said there wasn’t any American, that it was crazy. They started to search the house. I could hear them turning things over while she followed them. She insulted them and cursed the government. I pressed my hands against the dirt of the ceiling in the darkness, praying that she would stop. When they took her away, she didn’t make a sound. But later, when we all came back upstairs, I found one of my pictures of Leila lying on the ground by the doorway—it was one of the shots that I’d given to the American man in the business suit.”

  The photographs in Sirine’s hands are dark glass. She slides them back into the envelope and holds them out to Nathan, but he pulls back. “They’re all poison,” he says. “They’re what brought the police.”

  “Han thought the police had arrested Leila in order to get to him. He felt responsible for that.”

  “No—he was long gone by then. The police came because the family was harboring an American.”

  “So the American man you gave the pictures to—was he C.I.A., or—”

  Nathan smiles and shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

  Sirine studies him a moment. “
Isn’t there any possibility that Leila is still alive?”

  At first he doesn’t respond. Slowly, he slides back on the bed, props his head up on one elbow. “The way it works is that a few days after Saddam’s security police take someone away, sometimes they give the family a present. A small sealed box. They tell you that’s it, that’s the remains of the person they took away.”

  “Can you look in it?”

  “If you’re brave enough. But if you don’t look, then there’s the possibility that person doesn’t have to be dead.”

  Sirine drifts her fingertips over the scarf.

  “This arrived with the box,” he says, touching a corner of the scarf. “An artifact. The parents must have sent it on to Han while he was in England.”

  Sirine looks at the scarf; it feels like skin, like melting butter; a puddle in her lap. “At first he told me it belonged to his mother,” she says. “Later he said he was afraid I wouldn’t have worn it if I knew the truth.”

  “Would you have?” Nathan smiles at her. Then he turns onto his back and gazes up at the ceiling. “Sometimes I think it was a dream, but I’m inside the dream as well. For days after the police came, I was so frightened that I stayed hidden in the cellar, the rest of the family living and talking and moving over my head. But on the morning they brought back her scarf, I came out and took my camera and walked down the main street of the village. I wanted someone to arrest me and take me away. But no one came. It seemed as if no one saw me at all. That helped me feel better. It was like I’d already become a ghost, like Leila. I hitchhiked back to the city and a few days later I talked my way onto a plane. I came back to the States. I was a ghost—I felt like I could walk through walls, like I didn’t have any body at all.

  “For years after that, all I could do was work, look at things, photograph them. I couldn’t think about anything. But when I heard Han was coming to teach here, that was when I started to suspect that I was still alive.”

  “You’d never met him?”

  “No, but for the whole time I knew Leila, she never stopped talking about this older brother in England, how smart and brave he was, how he’d won scholarships to important schools. So then I was working for a photography studio in Glendale and an Arab client mentioned that Hanif—the famous translator—was coming to campus. I couldn’t believe it. I drove out to Westwood to see if it was true. He was giving a talk—it was part of his interview for the job. At first I could hardly look at him, he reminded me so much of Leila. It was the oddest sensation, like blood coming back into your body after you’ve had frostbite—a terrible burning all over, starting in my gut, going all the way out to my skin. I felt awake again for the first time in years, I wanted to be near him every second.”

  “You must’ve hated me,” Sirine says. “Taking him away.”

  “I didn’t!” Nathan protests. “At first it was—strange, but then I started to feel like you were a sort of gift. I was getting to relive my old love by watching you and him together. That’s why…” His voice trails away and he closes his eyes.

  “All the photographs you took,” Sirine says. She holds up her handful of prints. “Like a photo album.”

  “That’s not all,” he says. Nathan rolls over so he’s facing away from Sirine. A car passes the window, so close its headlights scald the room, the photographs flaring in Sirine’s hands. “I told him everything, you know.” He swallows; she can see his throat moving. “The night before he left.”

  She thinks. She remembers finding Han and Nathan on campus, the talk: five thousand children die in Iraq every month. She remembers Han’s expression as he came to her; his silence. A feeling of dread climbs over her. “Nathan, what did you tell him?”

  He doesn’t answer right away. She can see his throat working. “It’s been so painful to live with these secrets,” he says. “You have to understand. I never realized that Han held himself responsible for Leila’s death. I should have guessed it, I suppose. They say that for some people, the guilt of surviving the people they love is worse than death itself. All this time, I kept quiet about what really happened—I thought of that as my own punishment. To live like this—shut away from everything, and to never, never tell anyone what happened. I couldn’t stand the shame of it. I couldn’t stand myself. I thought of killing myself but living seemed a better punishment. I’m responsible for Leila’s death. My carelessness drew the police to her. When I met Han, I saw inklings of Leila again. I wanted so badly to be close to him, I would have done anything to keep him from knowing what I had done.”

  “But then—that’s what you finally confessed.”

  Nathan closes his eyes. “He came to my house—it was very late, a few hours after the Arab music concert. He was upset after you’d left. He blamed himself for dancing with that student. He said you’d refused to speak with him when he called you at home afterwards and then you ignored him when he came over to the house.”

  “When he came over?” She frowns, then remembers: dreaming of rain—the little stones he threw at her windows.

  “He started blaming himself for all sorts of things. He brought up Leila. He told me that he was responsible for her death. And that’s when I told him the truth. When I told him, I had a feeling, almost a physical sensation like the air itself was shattering. I no longer had to carry that knowledge around by myself. Han didn’t believe me at first. He kept saying, ‘They took her because of you?’ I thought he would kill me—I thought that he would hate me. But he just looked confused. He said he was going to go home, he said he had to think about what I’d told him. He even thanked me. I think in some way he might have been feeling freed as well.”

  “Freed to go back to Iraq.” Sirine glances toward the window, the wet sidewalks and long moon-cast shadows. She can sense her feelings shifting. Nathan turns and looks directly at her, and she feels a premonition. “There’s more,” she says.

  His gaze retreats; he shakes his head. “I didn’t want to—I swear, Sirine. I never, ever would have hurt you deliberately. Never. I never meant for any of this to happen.”

  She tries to swallow, but her throat feels tight and swollen, a current races from her scalp to the base of her spine. “Tell me.”

  He shakes his head again. “It was after…all this—after I’d told Han what had happened between myself and his sister. He said he didn’t blame me. He even said he thought of me as a brother. I don’t know. I suppose I was careless because I had finally told my secrets. I felt so much lighter. I told Han I wanted to give him copies of the shots I had taken in Iraq. I invited him into my darkroom. There were prints in the chemical bath. I’d lost track of what I’d been working on. You know, I never label anything. And he was standing there while I was going through some folders, and when I looked back, he was staring at a photo in the rinse bath. I’d forgotten all about it….” His voice withers.

  “What photo?” Sirine asks softly.

  “Of you.” He nods. “And Aziz.”

  Sirine goes very still, so quiet she can feel the pulse in her neck and temples. She can hear the blood in her head. She watches as Nathan stands and pulls another print out of a pile on his dresser. He walks over and silently hands it to her, then sits. “I followed you to the beach. I shouldn’t have, but I was worried. I didn’t trust Aziz. But that was all I did. After the two of you left the beach, I didn’t follow you—any further.” His voice is prim and discreet.

  Sirine turns the print so it catches the light from the window. She sees herself and Aziz at the pier: they lean into each other, their faces so close, about to kiss, his hand on the back of her head; her face is open, drowsy; she looks as vulnerable as a child. “Oh God,” she whispers. “He saw this?”

  Nathan rubs his face with his hands. “I shouldn’t have taken it, I never should have taken it. I knew that at the time. But I did—I took it. It’s like an instinct with me, when I see something…striking. It was the only one I took. I regretted it right away. I meant to destroy it.”

  �
��But here it is.”

  “I forgot about it—honestly.”

  Sirine looks toward the window. From the street, the headlights from a second car fill her eyes; she doesn’t blink; she lets the light burn all the way through her head. She feels it pass through her to the opposite wall, passing through her skin like thought. Han saw this.

  “I knew he would go back to Iraq eventually,” Nathan says. “No matter what anyone might have said or done.”

  “Did he—did he say anything? I mean, when he saw this picture?” Her voice is faint.

  He hesitates a moment, then says, “He said he’d had a funny feeling….”

  “A feeling.”

  “He said he felt somehow that it didn’t mean anything—” He hunches over. She waits for him and he lifts his head. “But that he still didn’t know if he could forgive you.”

  Neither of them speaks. Sirine reminds herself to breathe. She looks around the room. She considers trying to explain herself to Nathan, why she went off with Aziz, but there’s no point to it now. She finally lets herself look at Nathan’s face again: it’s like crepe, crumbling inward, as if there were no substance behind the surface. “This is why he went back to Iraq,” she says flatly. “This picture.”

  He reaches over; his fingers graze the back of her hand. His skin feels cool and dull as wood. Then he touches her hair, slides his fingertips along one curling lock. “It was Han’s choice to go.”

  She looks away toward the windows; there are silver ropes of rain under the streetlights; the moon whitens the sky. She stands and moves toward the door, then stops and places the scarf on the bed. “Please keep it,” she says.

  He picks it up slowly, as if frightened of it, and looks at her.

  “It belongs with you,” she says.

  He holds the scarf to his chest; she turns away.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Back in the Forbidden Temple of the Queen of Sheba—also known as Hollywood, California—Abdelrahman Salahadin was tiring of pretending to be a movie star. Forty years of movies had come and gone and he was tired of women who were sparkling in the evening but crumpled in the morning light. He was tired of playing Russians and Frenchmen, tired of Italians playing Arabs, tired of tall white actors playing short brown Mexicans. He was tired of electric lights that never turned off, of noise that never gave way to silence, and tired of money. Yes, if you can imagine: the man who’d sold himself a hundred times and more for a bag of gold coins was finally tired of money itself.