by E. L. Carter
The sign at the ticket booth said “Avram Cohen” with those little white plastic letters, easily changed. Tomorrow would be someone else’s moment. Through the velvet curtain, into the little semicircle of tiered seats with boxes above me and worn green carpet below. The stage itself was made of dark wood, the kind that glows more richly with age. I didn’t head down the sloped green carpet, following gravity and my own weakness. I chose the second row from the back, shadowed by the box seats. Jennifer could take front row center. The chair I chose, partway between the edge and the middle, the most invisible seat in the house, snapped at me when I pulled it, like a hungry animal. I pulled back harder, forcing it open, and slipped inside the jaws.
Clouds congregated in the ceiling and cherubs convalesced along the balcony. The wood needed new varnish. The man in front of me, on the other hand, wore a tie and blazer while his date had pearls and shellacked curls. As the space filled I saw more and more of this: crisp suits, designer dresses, diamonds on wrists, gold watches. I slouched down in the seat in my worn-out purple T-shirt and jeans. I could belong, but who wanted to?
The lights went out. Quiet descended. Avi appeared from the left, wearing a barely wrinkled black suit and a surprisingly white shirt. The clapping sounded genuine, some hoots, a voice near me, “He looks good tonight.” Like a family around a table.
He had built this house. He had pulled them in because of who he was, or who he could make them be in his presence. He bowed and smiled out into the crowd, standing in the sun of the single spotlight. The darkness licked my face, cool and clean.
He played a Beethoven sonata first. It suited him. The grand piano glistened and poured bucketfuls of sad notes all over us. He was using rubatos and fermatas not written into the score. We were swamped with Ludwig’s pain, all washed together with Avi’s. His eyes closed. He leaned over the keys and his beautiful, sleek body, his basketball body, curled up into something else, something he had never shown me. It was almost indecent, like watching a man masturbate.
The evening he kissed me—the last light spread across the sky, a jumbled grey painting by a child who has mixed too many colors together—his eyes somewhere between Dido singing her lament, and me, he hadn’t given this much. This night he had them closed. He was free to love in the empty air between himself and a room full of strangers.
The intro faded out and the first notes of the rondo began, a lighter mood. But something sticky appeared, not light after all, but a dampness that soaked the notes and got caught in my ears. I wanted to shake it out but I was already saturated. He was showing them too much because he was lonely. He was me, banging on the keys with all I had, Mom in the corner by the door and the fact of my loneliness, a terrible secret, hanging in the air as I played. I have tried and tried to see my actions clearly, but I hadn’t seen myself blocking my own view.
We’re a starving race, a starving nation. I was starved for Avi, Avi for his crowd. But in lieu of the nourishment I thought I wanted, I had stolen something else instead. I had stolen a phone call to Avi’s fabulous office lady and turned myself into one of the nuttiest people in America. The day before this one, I had gone to Office Max and printed out a group of forms with fill-in boxes, then leaned over the table by the Xerox machines to fill them out by hand. One was a contract. It said I was going to volunteer in Iraq, accepting all associated risks with sound mind, that I would work to gather information on civilian needs and report them back to Avi’s NGO in California. The other form was a visa application. I copied my passport, had some photos taken up against a blue curtain, and sent the whole mess by certified mail back to California.
I didn’t have to go.
I would go if someone said I should.
Thanks for everything, Avi.
Maybe.
Good-bye?
Avi sopped his way through a Chopin piece and then on to Rachmaninov’s “Barcarolle.” Impressive, but with too many extra trills. It was a regular greatest-hits show, not a dissonant chord to be found. Had he ever heard of Schoenberg? Pierre Boulez? Could he surrender to something that grated just a little on the ears? Avi had sweat so hard his hair was wet and his elegant black jacket had patches all over it. He swayed and shook his head, sending a spray into the air around him. How did he keep his fingers on those slippery keys?
Good-bye, I guess. Say good-bye and head off to war. Just like he accused me of the last time I saw him: living out the rearview mirror.
The concert went on—Debussy’s “Suite Bergamasque,” another Chopin piece, intermission. Then the “Goldberg Variations” (he used the damper pedal to excess), more Beethoven, and finally Liszt’s “Ballade No. 2 in B minor.” Overpedaled again.
An ending note shivered through the air. Avi stood. His legs shook. He bowed stiffly, and the audience stood to cheer him. I guess it was hard work making love to 1,000 people. He didn’t perform: he did something else, something even more, and for that he made his living.
I stood and the seat snapped shut, brushing my jeans with its teeth as it closed. I excused my way past twenty pairs of knees and turned up the aisle. At my back, the squeak of wood on wood, his piano bench inching in for the encore. The scattered conversations fell away into a hush as he played the first chord. I stopped. It was a cluster, his first atonal sound.
He was playing the song that I had left for him on the table with his mints.
I didn’t turn to read his face. Was this for me, or them? The opening bar assaulted my back as I stood in the aisle. The tempo was too fast. He was emphasizing the consonant notes and glossing over the rawest parts, the story I had built out of feeling and sound—skipping notes, even, to save his audience’s delicate ears, or perhaps to save himself from the sound of the uncertain, the phrase that doesn’t beg to be completed. I began to walk again, away from my song’s beauty, reinterpreted through a different set of strings, away from Avi and the crowd and whatever they got from it, whatever small sip of nourishment.
Behind the velvet curtain the lights were bright and the piano became muffled and remote, almost unreal. They had Dum-Dums for sale behind the glass counter. A teenager in a white collared shirt smirked at me as I handed him my five. I popped open the box as I headed for the door, squeezed my teeth through the chocolate to the gooey cheap softness inside. Entertainment for dum-dums like me who would walk out on their own song, motivated by the desire not to be famous but real and bold and alive. To look out the windshield. At Baghdad? True love? True love acts in the strangest ways.
FRANCE—EARLY WINTER 1944–45
Brother traps as much as he can. Hedgehogs, rabbits, squirrels. He says we need extra but we can’t seem to get enough. We try cutting the meat into strips to dry but the air is too cool now. A first snow. Brother says we have to do something. We stash our things in a small cave and cover the entrance with stones. Down the mountain again, this time all the way out of the woods in the night, the dark of the moon night, and across the harvested fields to the farmhouse. We wring the chickens by the neck before they have time to squawk. We take all but two, ten chickens in all. Across the field by a different way, and then up the mountain on the far side from the stream. A loop around, and then we walk up the middle of the stream for a way in case they have a dog to track us with. Numb feet. The weight of the chickens strung across my back with stolen baling twine. The twine digs into my skin and rubs it raw.
The whole next day, we prepare the meat. Pluck feathers. Eat one, then hike up past where our things are hidden. Brother says the ground will be cold enough to keep them at the top. We hike for a whole day, above the trees into the knee-deep snow. I ask how will we ever find them again? He says we can leave ourselves patrins. Near a shrubby alpine bush, we dig down through the snow and then pick at the frozen ground until we can fit a chicken inside. After we bury each one, we hang a signal above it, a torn scrap of fabric from Brother’s ripped pants cuffs.
We have enough rabbits to eat right now, some blueberries and cranberries frozen on the bu
sh. At night we use the blankets I’ve made: two layers of rabbit fur, one for above us and one for below. I attached our old wool blanket to the top of one and stuffed it with the chicken feathers. Ten chickens hardly do a thing but it’s better than nothing.
A big storm. The snow so thick we can’t see a hand stretched in front of us. Brother leads us to the cave and we squeeze ourselves inside to wait and watch until the wall of snow closes out the entrance. Eventually it becomes solid, and we lay in the near dark. Brother is furious about the chickens. Those trees will get buried, he says. We’re going to lose the patrins. Nothing we can do but wait, until the blue sky finally shows through the little ledge at the top of the snowbank. No food for three days. Brother bursts out into the thick, powdery land and begins to hike upward. I sit and watch him go.
He doesn’t return that night. I find some rabbit tracks in the fresh snow and set the snare. In the morning I have a rabbit and Brother comes stumbling down, his legs barely holding him up, eight chickens across his back. He lost one. Says it was waist deep up high, and he had to dig his way to each bush. He’s beside himself about the one chicken. This time, now that the ground is cold enough, he buries them near the tall trees, and sets his markers high in the branches.
BAGHDAD—AUGUST 2005
Two days after our meeting. Raed is supposed to bring Isra to my hotel today. A driver has been hired. We will be in Jordan tomorrow night.
I have already packed my toiletries, PJs, a change of underwear. The driver comes first thing in the morning. I stare at my backpack and wonder what else I can do to make it from this moment to the next one, and then the next one, until I have made it through enough moments for it to be tomorrow.
I am seeing this hotel room in the past tense, looking ahead into the time it will be a memory. I have lived here for almost three weeks and I have spent almost three weeks in fear. I can’t be too sentimental; after all, departures are my habit. I should be thankful that I’m leaving alive. Despite what I have decided I should or shouldn’t do, contrary to all reason, I realize I’ll miss it here. The intense truth of the moment, the view over the river, the knowledge that life can’t be more pared down than this, more essential or true—not a whole palm tree, not its sweet date, but the small, tough nut inside that means life will continue.
Then the boom comes. A boom, and the floor shaking, and the sound of breaking glass. I look out the window to see glass flying in all directions, in slow motion, flying toward me like a squadron of razor-sharp jets. I throw my body on the ground. They begin to slice through my abaya and into my skin.
Then quiet. I sit up slowly and look around. The room is dusty and full of glass. My backpack is covered in glass. When I stand, the shards fall off my back with a little tinkling sound.
A battalion of sirens begins to wail below me on the street. I pick up my backpack and shake it off. Pull out my cell phone. Dial Raed.
When he picks up, I stutter, “The hotel—a bomb—”
He says, “Marhaba, ustaath.”
I shout, “I don’t know how to get out of here! Isra? Can you help me? The driver. Now. Today?”
He says, “Zehn. Al Hamdulillah.”
“Meet me in front of the hotel! If you can get her, meet me there! I’ll get out of here!”
He says, “As Salaamu alaikum.”
“Fuck, Raed, talk to me in English!”
He hangs up.
I look at my phone. I look at the broken window and the dust and the things that have fallen off the shelves onto the floor. I see the butterfly. Tiptoe through the glass and dust to where it lies. I shake it. I can hear people screaming, footsteps running down the hall.
I look at the butterfly. “It’s going to be okay,” I tell it. Then I open the door and head out into the war.
Down the stairs, toward a bleak opening in the wall, people shouting, ambulances, army guys with camos and helmets and gigantic guns. People are herding other people through a hole by where the door once was and soldiers are shouting orders. I duck into a cluster of people and file out. Past the guns, the barricades, the ambulances, the taxis. Past the press vans and out into the street. I don’t know which way to walk so I just start walking. An American alone on the street in Baghdad, the back of her abaya dripping blood, holding a backpack and a toy butterfly.
No one else is on the sidewalk. Traffic is at a standstill. I pull out my phone and dial Raed again.
“Marhaba.”
“I’m on Saadoun street, walking toward the bridge.” I say it low and fast, my face turned away from the street.
This time he answers in English. “When you get past the square, go right. Toward the bus station. Look for my car.”
I walk with my head down and my backpack hung from my hand. I don’t know who is my enemy. And the people driving by in their cars, looking for someone to hate—do they know either?
I can’t seem to catch my breath. I see the street sign ahead. A car honks. I don’t look up.
Here is the turn. Here is another sidewalk empty of pedestrians. Here is another traffic jam. Another car honks. I wonder if it’s Raed and look up. I look straight into the eyes of a strange man. We lock eyes for a moment. I can’t read his gaze. I drop my eyes and pick up my pace. Listen for a car door opening behind me.
Then I see it, down the row of cars, another beat-up Toyota, but I know that this one is Raed, that he has come. I count down the cars—five, four, three, two, one—and now I am alongside him. I don’t look up. I simply open the back door and pull myself inside. I hear the locks click. The cigarette smoke stings my eyes. Isra is sitting next to me.
She looks at me with her wooden begging-bowl eyes and says, “Farasha.” Her hair is brushed and braided. She wears what could almost be a pair of capris, but is actually pants several sizes too small.
“Farasha?”
“The butterfly,” Raed intercedes. “Did anyone see you?”
“Here.” I place the buttefly in Isra’s waiting hands. She lets it rest while she studies it for a long moment, then gently, with her right finger, she touches one of the sequins.
I turn now to Raed and lie. “I don’t know if anyone saw me.”
He turns the car then, best I can tell away from the river, the other direction from Jordan. We begin to drive in what appear to be circles of different sizes. I try to map it in my head. Down a block. South, right? Then he turns right and we should be heading west, right? A few streets later he turns right again. North?
Finally I call across the seats, breaking the law of silence. “What the hell are you doing, Raed?”
His voice seems to fly from the back of his head. “Keeping you alive. Now shut up.”
I turn to Isra. She stares out the window, her eyes blank. The butterfly lies limp in her lap.
I just might explode. I might go off like that bomb back there. I take a breath. Another. Mrs. Bird would say we don’t need to meet a bomb with a bomb.
Eventually we head north. Out of the city and into farmland. Raed says, “We can’t cross the desert at night. I have a place for you to stay. Tomorrow, we go, at dawn.”
“The taxi driver?”
I see the back of his head shake. “Me. I am your taxi driver.”
In the setting sunlight, we drive through a gate and down a dirt driveway to a long, low farmhouse. Raed doesn’t tell me who they are. A family greets us. The women don’t introduce themselves but they fawn over my cut-up back and take me to a bathing area where I can finally rinse the glass out of my skin. A woman procures a clean abaya for me, a little too long, and I try not to trip on it as I shuffle out to the main area for dinner.
The family feeds us tea, and lamb out of a bowl that is passed from person to person. Isra eats huge mouthfuls and the family laughs. Raed says they have killed the lamb especially for us.
After dinner, Raed passes me a bag that contains the new clothes I had him buy for Isra, Isra’s passport, and a letter from Abdul Adl granting permission for me to transport Isra over
the border. I take the bag to the common room where we will sleep, then wash Isra in the bathing area and brush out her long black hair. She stares at the wall, stares at the image of Sleeping Beauty on her PJs, stares at the butterfly, and she does not smile once.
Where had I been at four? Fat and innocent, deep in childhood, and teetering on the edge of an unfolding world. Everything was a symbol but real too, the butterfly was alive, quivering with light—when I moved my hands it really flew. No wonder she stood stock-still like that.
We curl on a mat together in the gathering dark, she on the farthest edge she can squirm to, the butterfly clutched to her breast. The other girls whisper among themselves in the darkness.
At dawn the family rises for prayers and I pack our things away, roll up the sleeping mat, and meet Raed at the door.
Driving along the edge of the city toward Fallujah, we find ourselves in a line of cars. A checkpoint. When it’s our turn, the soldier—a towheaded boy ten years my junior with a burly, padded, bulletproof body—leans over toward the backseat, and I stare into the blank, reflective gaze of a pair of military sunglasses. He doesn’t see me. Isra and I don’t exist; we are nothing, the appendage of an invisible enemy.
Raed has told me to be quiet. He always tells me to be quiet. But I’m mad. I lift my gaze to meet the reflective place where his eyes should be and I say, “Could you please take those off, I can’t see who you are.”
Raed spins his head around and gives me the hate stare. The soldier taps his hand against his gun and asks, “Excuse me, Ma’am?”
“I said, I can’t see you with your sunglasses on. It’s hard to communicate with someone you can’t see.”
“I’m not asking you to communicate, Ma’am. I’m here to check your car over for safety.”
I don’t let it go. “You stopped us. You stand there with your gun with the safety off, and I’m still a human being. Therefore we are communicating, right?”
The soldier shakes his head. “I don’t understand what you mean, Ma’am.” Even my American accent doesn’t penetrate him. I sit in the back of an Iraqi car in an Iraqi outfit with my Iraqi skin tone and my Iraqi companions. I am invisible. How easy it is to create an enemy: a tiny sleight of hand.