Crescent

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  He was getting older and he craved the comforts of home and family. He couldn’t find anyone to have a cup of tea and play a game or two of backgammon or bridge with. All these Hollywood people did was throw their crazy parties and drive their shining cars around in circles. One night Abdelrahman was attending one such event. Everyone was there—Frankie, Sammy, Jerry, Dino. Abdelrahman liked Dino—he’d looked deep into his bloodshot eyes and seen a drowned Arab there. As usual, though, Abdelrahman quickly tired of the party and he stepped outside for some fresh air. He stood by the kidney-shaped pool where blond girls were swimming naked in champagne, but he was looking up at the night. His left eye was blurry and his left ear heard a whispering sound. Suddenly there was a thump on his back and a white face with waxy black hair was looming over him. Dino. Abdelrahman Salahadin could smell lethal waves of alcohol radiating from the man’s skin. His eyes were unfocused, and they swam in a way that reminded Abdelrahman of the eyes of the Crazyman al-Rashid.

  “Hey, what’s shaking, daddy-o?” said Dino.

  Abdelrahman merely smiled. He let his gaze drift back to the night, and slowly, gradually, the first breath of a sliver of the crescent moon emerged from the darkness.

  The crescent moon is an important symbol in the Islamic faith. Many mosques are crowned with a crescent moon, in much the same way that churches are adorned with crosses. The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, told his followers to time certain rituals and activities according to the new moon. The first sighting of the new moon marks the beginning of each Islamic month and it marks the end of Ramadan—the great and pious month of fasting—which closes with the ’Id-al-Fitr, the Feast of Fast-Breaking, when everyone dresses up in new clothes, goes out visiting and eating!

  So Abdelrahman was very excited. He knew the significance of the crescent—the reward to the patient, the watchful, those who are willing to wait. His eyes filled with tears and his hands shook. He reached up to point it out. Dino stared and squinted and swayed and finally he said, “Buddy, I don’t see anything.”

  Abdelrahman Salahadin was the first person in the world to see this particular crescent. It hung over their heads, slim as an eyelash, bright as quicksilver, emanating faint music from the cosmos. He smiled happily and Dino, seeing through his drunken haze this tender, yearning smile—the first honest smile he’d seen in years—bent over and whispered to his friend, “You know, sometimes a fella’s got to know when to go home.”

  That night, Abdelrahman sent a telegram to his friend, the Egyptian director Jaipur al-Rashid—also known as Crazyman al-Rashid—who was beginning auditions for his production of a play called Othello written by a mad Englishman. Al-Rashid was going to translate the whole thing into Arabic with an all-Egyptian cast, and he was going to have the actor playing Othello powder his face white. Abdelrahman wrote to his old friend, asking him to save him a part in his revolutionary production: he’d always wanted to try his hand at legitimate theater. Little did he know that al-Rashid had already put up posters advertising his famous friend in the lead role as a publicity stunt. He had been planning to tell the Cairene audiences every night that unfortunately Abdelrahman Salahadin was sick and that his part would be played by the understudy. So this all worked out very nicely.

  And neither Abdelrahman nor al-Rashid had any inkling that, having seen the publicity posters, two special women would be in the audience for the opening night: a mermaid poet and a proud mother. And, well, what can I say? The rest was history.

  So what happened?

  Oh, all sorts of things happened!

  But I want to hear about their big reunion. What was it like? What were they feeling?

  Habeebti, here is something you have to understand about stories: They can point you in the right direction but they can’t take you all the way there. Stories are crescent moons; they glimmer in the night sky, but they are most exquisite in their incomplete state. Because people crave the beauty of not-knowing, the excitement of suggestion, and the sweet tragedy of mystery.

  In other words, Habeebti, you must never tell everything.

  One year later, Sirine is starting to feel like she can breathe again without wanting to cry. Mostly she feels the neutrality of absence—neither happy nor sad, apart from sudden surges of feeling that lick through her, quick and electric as nerve synapses. Only when she cooks, in those moments of stirring and tasting, does she feel fully restored to herself.

  She has started to taste her own cooking in a professional way again. Detached, critical, and overly scrupulous. It tastes somewhat different from how she remembers it. Her flavors have gotten somehow stranger, darker and larger: she stirs roasted peppers into the hummus and apricots and capers into the chicken. And she walks into the basement storage room one day and discovers Victor Hernandez kissing Mireille on the butcher block table among the onion skins. Mireille, then Sirine, burst into laughter. Later, Sirine realizes it’s the first time she’s really laughed in a year.

  A month later, Mireille is engaged to Victor Hernandez and Victor moves in with her and Um-Nadia. He makes three different kinds of mole sauces for their wedding dinner, and chocolate and cinnamon and black pepper sweetcake. Mireille gives Sirine, as a bridesmaid present, a book about a woman who cried into her cooking and infected her guests with her emotions, and this story, somehow, gives Sirine a kind of comfort. She thinks about it for weeks afterward and wonders if it is possible to do the same just by standing near the food. Her customers—the young Arab students, professors, and the families—seem more serious than before, more given to brooding, hugging, and thinking. And on several occasions someone—usually a student—has burst into tears while eating the soup or tearing the bread. Um-Nadia wants to send Sirine to the big school, the culinary institute up in San Francisco, to make her into a master chef, to learn to cook, she says, “French things.” Sirine isn’t sure she wants to do that. She suspects that Um-Nadia just wants to give her a vacation and get her to meet new men. But the only thing that gives her any pleasure is stirring and tasting and swimming back and forth from the back kitchen to the front.

  For her forty-first birthday, her uncle and Um-Nadia—who, Sirine has noticed, have started to bump their shoulders together when they stand side by side washing dishes—give her a new set of prayer beads. They’re irregularly shaped bright blue stones with gold flecks and a gold silk tassel. She fingers them. “Thank you,” she says, clicking the beads together. “They’re lovely.” Her uncle and Um-Nadia look emotional, the feelings close and crowded in the room. “It’s a reminder,” her uncle says. “So you don’t forget to say your prayers.”

  “They’re lapis,” Um-Nadia says. “Like the sky.”

  “A beautiful thing,” she murmurs.

  That night she takes Han’s prayer beads out of her pocket and kisses them and then puts them in the drawer of her nightstand, along with her new set, and slides it shut.

  Early in the morning after her birthday, while Um-Nadia and her uncle are drinking tea and talking downstairs, Sirine lounges on her bed, poring over the Kitab al-Wusla Ila’L-Habib, or The Book of the Link with the Beloved—another birthday gift, which her uncle had left wrapped in shining paper outside her bedroom door during the night. A translation of a medieval cookery book, the book itself seems five hundred years old—each of its brittle brown pages crumbles a bit as she turns them, giving off the scent of dust. The recipes, which include all sorts of extinct wild game, internal organs, molds, and fermentations, intrigue her. She is studying a hare stew when there’s a noise at the door downstairs and then the sound of Um-Nadia’s laughter, which is softened in such a way that for some reason the skin on the back of Sirine’s neck stands up in pinpricks. The laughter scrolls up through the floor, filling the air around her.

  Sirine eases to the door gently and puts her ear against it, pressing her face against the recessed wood panel. She doesn’t know why she’s being secretive. She opens the door then and looks down the stairs. Um-Nadia and her uncle are standing by t
he half-opened door, their faces silhouetted by the gray early morning light. Um-Nadia is laughing her musical, three-note laugh and Sirine sees her hand move forward to touch her uncle’s face. Her uncle catches the hand then and kisses her fingertips. Sirine, who was about to call to them, stops herself. She feels waves of heat and then cold passing over her.

  She carefully slips back into her bedroom, to her cookery book, and lies on her stomach, a heavy, inevitable feeling rolling over her. She doesn’t open the book; instead she runs her fingers over the cover stamped with the title, the gilt lettering all worn off. There’s a tap at the door and she puts her face down on the book and says, “Come in.”

  Her uncle stands alone in the doorway; he blinks and looks around the room for a moment, then at Sirine. “I guess that was you just now? On the stairs?”

  “I’m sorry.” She rubs her nose. “I didn’t mean to spy.”

  Her uncle gestures to the armchair as if asking for permission to sit, then he simply sinks down on top of all of Sirine’s discarded clothes on the seat. “Sorry—my back.” He folds his hands. “So you saw.” He looks at her out of the corner of his eye. “Are you shocked?”

  At first she thinks she is, but when she studies his soft face, she knows that she isn’t shocked at all, that she is happy for them. Just like she is happy for Mireille and Victor. And that all of this happiness is touching a very sensitive place. She leans back against her sloping headboard, trying to think how to explain herself. Finally she just sighs and says, “It’s…Han.”

  Her uncle nods. “Please tell me.”

  “There’s something…bad—really bad—that I did.” She stares at her knees. “I didn’t want him to know. I tried to keep it from him, but he found out and that’s why he left.” She presses her lips together tightly, squeezes her hands flat between her knees. Finally, she glances up without raising her head.

  Her uncle sits back, taps one finger on the bridge of his glasses. Then he says, “You know, for the longest time I felt like I’d betrayed your father.”

  “You—how?”

  “It was my idea to come to America. Not his. I wanted adventures and sightseeing and all this sort of thing. Your father wanted to study engineering in Baghdad and stay out of trouble and work for the city. Nice and plain and simple. He never liked to leave home. He was quite happy where he was. But oh no, I couldn’t let it go. I talked and talked and talked about America until he gave up and said, fine, enough, okay, let’s go. It turned out once we got here that I was the one who stayed home and he had the adventures. It turned on some kind of big switch inside of him. He and your mom were always traveling everywhere. And you know, that’s why it happened. That’s why they died,” he says softly. “Being somewhere he wasn’t meant to be. I’ve often thought—maybe, if I hadn’t talked him into coming here in the first place—maybe he would still be alive now.”

  Sirine tucks in her chin. “But you don’t know that. Anything could have happened. And if he hadn’t come here—then I probably wouldn’t be alive now.”

  “Yes. You see? That’s how these things go. I finally had to decide for myself that that was what was meant to be.” Her uncle shrugs. “The way I look at it—you should feel glad that Han found out about the bad thing. It’s the only way to know if someone can love you—if they still love you even after they know about the bad thing. Or the twenty-eight bad things. All of it.”

  “But Han is—” She stumbles over it, the word. Instead she says miserably, “Han isn’t here.”

  “So you do it. I’ll help. You can know about the bad thing and I’ll forgive you.”

  “Do I have to tell what it was?”

  He rubs his chin. “I don’t know. Do you?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. She rolls to one side, props her head on her hand, and tries to think about it, but her head feels fuzzy, her thoughts confused. She tries to imagine Han forgiving her and is washed over by a sense of loss. “I can’t,” she says quietly.

  “Then let me make a suggestion—let’s eat breakfast.”

  She nods, relieved, and slides off the bed and the two of them go out into the unlit hallway. It’s so early the house is still dark and when she looks toward the window above the front door, it looks like the city lights are out.

  They go downstairs, the lit doorway from Sirine’s bedroom sliding over her shoulders as she descends. The night fills the rooms of the house, tidal and oceanic. Across the room she sees her uncle’s night-blooming flowers are fully opened.

  Sirine turns on the kitchen light. There’s a recipe from the medieval book that she wants to try—an omelet fried in oil and garlic, a stuffing of crushed walnuts, hot green chili peppers, and pomegranate seeds. She goes to the cabinets and the refrigerator and begins to work while her uncle sits at the table and opens his history of Constantinople. She stands at the table, peeling and mincing onions, then fries the omelet lightly, turning it once, and its aroma is rich and complicated. Then Sirine and her uncle sit together in the library and eat.

  The dish is sweet, tender, and so delicious that it’s virtually ephemeral, the eggs dissolving in their mouths. Sirine is hungry; she eats more than she has at a single meal in over a year. It’s good—she can taste that. For the first time in over a year, she can taste her influence on the food. She licks her fingers when she’s done. Her uncle puts down his napkin, says, “Alhumdullilah, thanks be to God.” Then he nods, points to the empty plate, and says, “The eggs have forgiven you.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  So Abdelrahman performed in the greatest role of his life on a rickety unknown stage in Cairo with a faceful of white powder, under the guidance of a half-crazy director. He was a great hit—no one actually expected the famous American movie star to show up for a play in Cairo. But then his face was painted white, so most of the audience didn’t recognize him. But his mother did. Abdelrahman fainted at the cast party when he saw his mother for the first time in forty-one years. Aunt Camille approached him, tall as a door, her every finger glittering with sea-colored gems purchased for her by her other sons. And there was the Covered Man—now the mermaid Queen Alieph—in an electric wheelchair behind her. Camille was so proud of her son. She realized that he’d spent his whole life acting: first as a drowned Arab, second as a drowned Moor.

  They hugged and kissed and laughed, and Abdelrahman forgave the mermaid Alieph for bewitching him, and she forgave him for being a bad prisoner. And in the end, this is also a story about what a good thing it is to forgive—a relief to the one who did the bad thing, and a great relief to the one who gets to forgive! And they all moved into a nice flat in Cairo, playing backgammon and drinking sweet mint tea and reading poetry. Aunt Camille and the jackal-eared dog grew ancient together—one more miraculous than the other—and they died, one at sunup the other at sundown, on the exact same day. But in this story they’re not dead yet. In this story, the dogs and the mermaids and the mothers and the sons all lived together forever. Until the next big thing came along.

  There. Are you happy now?

  It is a cool morning for late spring. Sirine stands near the grill as it heats up. One by one the lonely students filter into the café. There are birds arguing in the trees over the window, above the kitchen sink. Victor, an official sous chef, is chopping onions and garlic; Cristobal is now a line cook, and a kid from Senegal named Percy is the new cleaning person.

  It is almost two years since Han has left and he has started to recede from Sirine’s dreams. They weren’t even together that long, she tells herself, a matter of months. But she still sometimes looks for him, unconsciously scanning the crowds.

  On this morning, however, she is remembering a dream she had that she could breathe underwater. She recalls the pulse of ocean currents in her head, her arms soaring, a dizzy happiness in her chest. Now the dawn is saffron-colored in the windows and the café is glowing. She is stirring a pot of leben yogurt, which is heated slowly, carefully, tenderly, and hopefully, layered with butter and o
nions and heady and rich as a high summer night. She cannot stop stirring because it is a fragile, temperamental sauce, given to breaking and curdling if given its way. So she must wait and stand and stir and stir and stir and look and look. And she is standing and stirring and looking out the window and then toward the dining room.

  One student sits at the counter and flicks open his paper. Sirine doesn’t read the American papers, but she still turns reflexively toward the Arabic papers—especially the ones printed on the soft green and cream-colored pages. On this morning her gaze brushes over the front of the student’s newspaper, and when she sees the photo, she barely registers it. But then something makes her look again. And then, for the third time, she blinks and looks closer and it’s a photo of a man who resembles Han, but cannot be Han.

  “Excuse me, please,” she says to the student.

  He curls the corner of the paper in to look at her, then sees that she’s looking at the photo on the opposite side.

  “Can you tell me what that is?” She points.

  He patiently turns the paper over and reads the short article, whispering to himself in Arabic. He shakes his head and laughs and says, “It’s a crazy story. It says this guy’s a political prisoner who broke out and then escaped from Iraq by following the migration of these animals across the border into Jordan. He says he’s on his way home—I don’t know where.”