The Map of Salt and Stars: A Novel

by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar

  “But—” I stop walking. “How do we do this?”

  “By knowing who we are,” Huda says. She kneels down in front of me. “Let me tell you something. The doctor said it might not work right anymore.” She adjusts her sling. “Even if it does heal.”

  “The metal in your arm?”

  Huda shifts her eyes, like she’s looking at something in the distance. “To tell the truth,” she says, “it doesn’t feel like metal anymore. It feels like a part of my body now. Part of the bone.”

  We walk again. Part of the bone, she said. As though this new bone is slowly changing her, changing the person she used to be.

  We spot the skinned goats in the window. The butcher shop is just closing, and a man fiddles with his key in the lock.

  “Wait!” Huda runs to catch him, explaining in Arabic that we need lamb to celebrate the Eid. The man jerks his head toward the door and opens it.

  “Come on,” Huda says. “We might catch the girl who cuts the meat, if we hurry. He says she’s washing up.”

  Inside, the shop smells like blood. Water runs somewhere, whooshing silver white.

  Huda rounds the empty meat case. A small lady in a black headscarf is hunched in the back room between racks of goats and chickens, washing her hands in a basin. Popsicle-cold air floods us when we walk in, round billows of translucent blue against my skin.

  Huda talks to her in Arabic. The girl listens and then shakes her head.

  Huda turns her chin to the side, that clipped, disappointed look. “They just sold out of their lamb,” she says. “They’re about to close up.”

  The girl wrings her hands, brushing off something sticky. I reach up and trace her knuckles.

  “You haven’t been a butcher very long,” I say.

  They both look at me. Huda asks, “Why not?”

  “Because,” I say. “Her hands are smooth. If you wash them all the time and touch blood and stuff, they get cracked and dried out. Like Mama with her turpentine.”

  Huda translates, and the girl laughs. She launches into a string of Arabic. She stutters, clamping her mouth shut. It’s like the words are locked inside her, hidden pearls strung along the copper wire of her voice.

  “She says her hands will dry out eventually, if she keeps salting meat,” Huda says. “She used to play the oboe.”

  I cover my mouth with my hands like ladies do in the movies. “That’s my favorite instrument!”

  “She says her father is up in age,” Huda says. “They lost their home when their neighborhood was shelled. They lost their business, their grandparents—” The girl says more, but Huda stops translating and looks away.

  “So she came here?”

  Huda clears her throat. “She brought her father to Aqaba,” she says, “and moved in with her cousin. This is the only job she could get.” They bat more Arabic back and forth. “She says there is a ferry to Nuweiba tonight, if we can wait. It leaves late, just before midnight.”

  I pick up one of the girl’s hands. I see it right away—the crooked middle and ring fingers, the unnatural twist of the thumb. Something heavy must have crushed her right hand, breaking all the tiny bones. She will never play the oboe again. I look down at my own fingers, wondering if the crumbled brick and the asphalt and the soot have left invisible marks in my bones too.

  The girl leans down, the edges of her hijab brushing my face. She sees me studying her hands. For a moment I see myself reflected in her pupils, swallowed by a bottomless blackness. Then she motions for me to follow her to the basin of the sink.

  I’m not tall enough to look in. She lifts me from under my armpits, gravity sucking at the bottom of my shoes. The basin is full of blood.

  We leave the shop with a few scraps of goat’s meat wrapped in brown paper. Huda doesn’t say anything, but I catch her wincing and realize we couldn’t have afforded lamb. The goat cost all the money Mama gave us.

  We walk back toward the van. On our way back up the hill, two older boys block our path. The shorter of the two hangs back, hair matted across his forearms with sweat. The taller boy has his hands in his pockets and a birthmark on his slim jaw in the shape of a dimpled egg, and he might have reminded me of the princes in Baba’s stories if he didn’t have such a scary look in his eyes. Both the boys wear strange smirks, their eyes half-lidded. Something about their faces makes me pull Huda by the wrist, trying to walk faster. These boys look different from the boys in the square—not angry, but bored, like they’re about to steal a couple of sodas from a mini-mart just because they can.

  The boys say something in Arabic to Huda, but she ignores them. Under her breath, she says, “Keep walking.”

  The boys step in front of us. We try to dodge them, but they block the sidewalk. I try to tug Huda past them, but the taller boy grabs Huda in her bad arm. She cries out, and he tries to shut her up.

  “Huda!”

  They force her into a side street, a little alley. I run after them, kicking at the back of the short boy’s knees. He glares at me, whispering angry words I don’t catch. His open palms hit me in the chest, and he shoves me down. I hit the pavement hard, skinning my lower back, and the wind is knocked out of me.

  Huda shouts for help in two languages.

  In some tiny corner of my brain, I know what this is, even though I don’t have a word for it. I want to close my eyes. I want to throw up. My whole body is thrumming, like the tips of my fingers will burst open. Under my cheek, the sidewalk stinks of dust and sea salt. It reminds me of winter in New York. Winter was the season of salt.

  “Help!”

  I follow the boys into the alley where everything is shadow. The tall boy has Huda up against the wall, bending over her so the dim light hits a mole on the back of his neck. The short one grabs at the pleats of Huda’s long skirt, lifting them up over the tongues of her sneakers, over her brown calves. He presses himself against her, the buckle of his belt clanking as he struggles to undo it with one hand. Huda kicks and squirms, and the tall boy pushes her skirt up over her knees.

  The boys exchange words in Arabic—Down. It takes both of them to push her to the ground, and the tall boy gives a shout when Huda yanks out a fistful of his greasy hair. Then he slaps her, and she goes still.

  Clank goes the buckle against the asphalt.

  Huda rips her head from under the boy’s hand. Her scream is weaker, breathless. “Help—”

  But no one is coming. I reach into one of my pockets, stuffed with Abu Sayeed’s stones. I come up with a chunk of basalt. My hands are shaking, curling clumsily around the rock like the oboe player’s crushed hands. I aim the stone, closing one eye, but it sails over the boys’ heads.

  “Run.” Huda thrashes her head and kicks. “Get Mama.”

  But instead I rush at the boys, clawing at their shirts and reaching for their eyes. I remember what my gym teacher at PS 290 said, when I went to my old public school in the city—that I was small for my age. I jump on the tall one’s back, pulling him away from Huda, but the short boy throws me off. The air is rancid with sweat and fear and the blood on my back. Somebody screams a sound that doesn’t come from Huda or me, a chest-deep roar that is as red as a severed tongue.

  I reach up one more time, digging my nails into the tall boy as he struggles with his zipper. I claw three gashes into the soft skin on his shoulder. He yells and tries to punch me, but I duck. I bite into his arm. He screeches, dropping back against the wall. I jump at him, slicing my teeth into his chest.

  I am liquid. I am locked outside myself. I am fire.

  Somebody’s hands reach over my head, and there is shouting in Arabic. Either I am pulled off the boy or the boy is pulled off me. I collapse across Huda’s bare thigh, the both of us still on the ground. The left side of her face is stung with a long welt, and blood and hair are clumped under her fingernails.

  I’m still burning. I stare at my fists from somewhere beyond, above the alley. Somebody is screaming again, round and red. I don’t hear it. I see it instead: a rub
y color, like when I’ve just woken up and the alarm is only a shape in the air.

  Hands touch my shoulders. I throw them off. I curl myself into a ball on top of Huda, sobbing into her flowered hijab, wanting to beat my head against the wall.

  “Nour. Nour.” My chin is pried up, and Abu Sayeed’s face swings into view. “Are you all right?”

  “Where are they?” I don’t recognize my voice.

  Abu Sayeed says, “The sons of dogs are gone,” and spits.

  Huda pushes her skirt down, avoiding touching her own skin. Abu Sayeed helps her sit up. She wraps her arms around herself and breathes in and out, letting go of air.

  I can’t. I bottle up my breaths until I feel I’ll explode. There are no more words left in me. I am not safe, and I can’t keep anybody else safe either. I am not Rawiya. I repeat it over and over: “I’m not. I’m not.”

  Abu Sayeed leads us back to the van. Mama flits around us, her eyes wide. “Huda, Nour!” She scrapes her hand across my prickly skull and checks Huda’s sling. “What happened to you?”

  I hug Huda at the waist. “Tell her,” I say.

  But she doesn’t. “We can cross the gulf tonight if we wait,” Huda says, her voice tight as a metal box. “The ferry leaves at midnight.”

  I look up at Huda, but she won’t look at me. I wonder if almost can cost you as much as did, if the real wound is the moment you understand that you can do nothing. I reach up and touch my shaved head, brushing dirt away. Huda tugs the pleats of her skirt down, pressing the folds flat, like it’s all she can do not to scream.

  The sun goes over the lip of the horizon, and the bronze fades off the water. The Red Sea isn’t really red at all, and it’s not blue either. It’s black as onyx, like the empty spaces between tectonic plates, the holes in Manhattan. Can those empty places ever be filled in? Can you make a map of something that isn’t?

  I slip my hand into my pocket, feeling for my green-and-purple half-stone. I must have put my hand in the wrong pocket in the alley. I wonder, if I had thrown the weighty half-stone instead, would I have hit the boy square in the eyes?

  Nobody speaks. I look at Yusuf, tracing his jaw, the way his hair is cut the same way as the hair of the boy I gashed. That first morning in the apartment in Amman, Yusuf slammed the door hard enough to set the window frames shaking. His gray tee shirt is stained with sweat, smelling like the boy who pulled up Huda’s skirt. I turn away. I can’t look at him anymore.

  The salt breeze pours black water into me. It sinks deep, into a place I can’t name, a place I can’t chart.

  Sea of Blood

  The merchant ship landed safely across the Gulf of Aila. Rawiya and her friends led their camels from the ship while the servants brought their packs. They had reached the peninsula called Ard al-Fairouz, the Land of Turquoise, and arrived in a small Bedu camp scattered with goat-hair tents. Dry mountains rose in front of them almost out of the sea, and as soon as they left the shoreline palms behind, the road became uneven and treacherous. They followed a twisting mountain pass between cliffs and fists of rock standing like figures watching them. The cliffs were striped yellow and red at their bases, like someone had scraped their bottom halves with a knife. Where there was no rock, there was only sand. Without water, they were forced to cleanse themselves with dust instead of performing wudu before prayer.

  After two days’ journey, the mountain pass sloped down onto a sandy plain dotted with hills and acacia trees. Even here, there were few plants and no water. They traveled for a week across the stony red earth, following a caravan road.

  The first water they saw was the northern tip of the Gulf of Suez. A cheer went up among the servants, for they knew that within another week they would reach the Nile Delta.

  The going was easier and flatter after that, and they were all in a pleasant mood. Soon they saw a thin green line on the horizon. The desert ended at a line of trees spreading north to south along the Nile River. There at the head of the delta stood the city of Cairo and its neighbor, a center of textiles and porcelain called Fustat.

  Rawiya started when they came to Cairo’s gates. Huge gashes were cut into the stone as though they had been gouged out by great talons. Khaldun too jolted in his saddle. Each gave the other a questioning look, but they saw nothing else amiss. For now, the skies were clear of stalking shadows.

  Dismounting their camels at the gates, the expedition plunged into noise and flowers and music. Tall stone houses rose around them, window frames of carved wood with engraved beams, doors hand-cut in lattices and crescents or flung open to reveal glassware or porcelain plates.

  Al-Idrisi led them deeper into the city as they tugged their camels along. They squeezed past merchants, holy men, and women with children. They went single-file along streets lined with palms and filled with oud players and tale-tellers. Rawiya bought a new set of sharp stones for her sling. Bakr admired colorful linen scarves while al-Idrisi hung back, eyeing the crowds.

  Bakr held up a scarf in wine red and lapis blue, a pattern of interlocking vines sketched along its length in white. “I never know what my mother will like,” he said. He folded it and eyed a second scarf in apricot and peacock blue. “Khaldun, you’ve seen the ladies at court. Which would you choose?”

  Rawiya touched the hem of a beige scarf and blinked away the thought of the one her mother used to wear. “Your mother will love anything you buy for her,” she said.

  But Bakr snorted a laugh. “You don’t know my mother,” he said. “My mother is the reason I’m here.”

  “What, to get away from her?” Khaldun asked.

  Bakr laughed. “To prove myself. To prove my worth as a merchant like my father.” He studied the scarves again. “My mother is a hard woman to please.”

  “But she didn’t choose this journey,” Rawiya said. “You are the one who has to be pleased with it.”

  But Bakr wasn’t listening. He lifted the red-and-blue scarf. “This one, I think.”

  The vendor wrapped the scarf in clean, plain linen. They pushed onward through the crowds.

  “This place,” Rawiya said to Khaldun, “is a honeycomb of a city.”

  “They sing jeweled songs about Cairo for a thousand leagues in all directions,” Khaldun said. “The fear in the city now—it’s a pity. The fear of spies. Warring factions are looking for an opening after the last caliph’s death.”

  “Death leaves holes,” Rawiya said. “That’s how it is.”

  “Holes?” Khaldun tilted his head toward her, a glance so quick Rawiya almost didn’t notice.

  “Sometimes a person dies,” she said, “and leaves a hole too big to fill.” She ducked her head to avoid a merchant and his camel. Movement stirred in the crowd behind them, and Rawiya hesitated before she turned back to Khaldun.

  “Like the death of a beloved king,” he said, “or an imam, or a priest.”

  “Or a father.” Rawiya sidestepped a column of children, bumping into Khaldun to miss them.

  He caught her arm, steering them past a crowd of merchants. Rawiya stiffened and blushed at the touch of his hand.

  “The bond between father and son is strong,” Khaldun said, clapping her on the shoulder. “He is still with you.”

  “Good fathers never abandon their children,” Rawiya said, “not even when they die. All parents, really.” The image of her mother came rushing back to her, the thought of the pain her absence had caused. Rawiya said quietly, “Only I wonder if sometimes their children abandon them.”

  Someone shouted from behind them. Rawiya turned and saw movement in the crowds again—the flash of a pomegranate robe.

  “You need not feel guilty for leaving,” Khaldun said.

  Rawiya slowed down, motioning to her friends. “Someone is following us.”

  When they turned, a man ducked into a silk shop behind them.

  Khaldun frowned. “You’re right.”

  The expedition pressed on, passing under the shade of blankets hung over the doorways of shops to protect cu
stomers from the sun. Rawiya and her friends turned off into an alley. Banners of colored paper fluttered in the breeze. Stacks of textiles waved their hems, attended by sleepy-looking vendors sitting on cushions, their eyes still sharp.

  Behind them, up the zigzagging street, the crowds parted for a group of exhausted but angry men leading their horses. Their leader raised his arm to stop them, and his elaborate gold tiraz flashed in a shaft of sunlight.

  “Sir . . .” Rawiya tugged on al-Idrisi’s sleeve.

  Al-Idrisi turned. “It seems we know more people in Cairo than we thought.”

  They ran, their camels opening a path for them. They dodged the crowds, diving between shop signs and old men hawking tea and hats, between merchants with monkeys and women with small children. They knocked over vials of spices and jugs of oil and flour, spilling a mess on the street.

  They hurtled into a side street, crowded with wrought-iron and brass lamps, their glow flickering. Laundry lines lurched in their wake. They dodged stray cats and men buying lusterware dishes decorated with copper birds and fish.

  Rawiya, Khaldun, al-Idrisi, and Bakr darted into a building with its doors open to the breeze. Al-Idrisi sent the servants scattering into the crowd, instructing them to regroup at the city gates.

  They had entered a textile factory. Boiling cauldrons of fresh dyes and huge spools of wool, flax, and linen were clustered around the dusty factory floor. On a far wall, a wooden ladder led up to a loft with a window to the street.

  “Spies!” Ibn Hakim’s voice came shrill behind them. “Traitors to the caliph!” Scimitars hissed out of their sheaths.

  Rawiya shoved al-Idrisi behind a stack of wool scraps and ducked behind a pot of indigo dye with Khaldun. Bakr scrambled behind a spool of linen.

  Ibn Hakim and his men burst in. “Cowards,” Ibn Hakim bellowed. “You have insulted the wrong man. Your treachery will be rewarded with death.”

  From behind the pot of dye, Khaldun drew his jeweled scimitar, and Rawiya wrapped her fingers around the neck of her sling.

  The first guard spotted the toe of Bakr’s boot behind the spool of linen and came at him. Rising up from behind the cauldron, Rawiya let a stone fly, hitting the guard in the back of the head. He tripped, pulling down the hem of a linen tunic with him. The whole rack came crashing down on his back. The dye workers, who had hidden themselves, cried out with their hands to their heads.