by E. L. Carter
He looks at Raed’s ID, asks us where we are going, wipes his sweaty brow. Ignores me completely. Sends us on our way.
Out of the city on the highway of my brother’s demise, bombed-out cars on the side of the road and the smell of fear in the hot air. Isra holds the butterfly this time, rolls it over in her hands as Raed speeds along the white dotted line between the lanes.
Just before Fallujah we get on another highway and cross the outskirts of Fallujah, Habbaniyah, and Ramadi with the marshes of the Euphrates spread out along the sides of the road. Once we pass Ramadi the palm trees cease. We see no green, no signs of life, just the pavement and the sound of the wind against the metal of the car. Isra sits quietly beside me, her face turned out toward the desert spreading to the horizon.
People usually make this trip in groups because there can be roadblocks, people can hide on the side of the road and shoot at you, they can drive up and cut you off and then rob you or kill you and leave you on the side of the road. Raed says it’s both more and less dangerous to travel like we are: more because we are alone, and less because we aren’t in a convoy of rich American journalists with fancy trucks. Have I ever been this alone? Low scrubby grass, dust, abandoned cars, the occasional camel, the relentless sun, the azure sky. People travel in groups because it’s both more and less safe. Another car, another gun, another flak jacket helps absorb the endless rush of wind and terror across the open land.
We pass the occasional rest stop with cement tables and metal umbrellas, a throwback from another time when people did things like stop and picnic along their way. Later we come to a bridge that is now a bombed-out crater and take a detour, a dirt road. More desert. No one speaks.
FRANCE—LATE WINTER 1945
Brother gets thinner and thinner. He’s so thin his cheekbones pop up against his skin like wooden poles under canvas. The bones of his hands pull against the skin and his arms show clearly the thick bones and the thin meeting at his wrist. I can’t see myself, but I can feel the way my face dips sharply in and out between my cheekbone and my chin. My shoulder blades are so sharply defined that I wonder some nights if I will sprout feathers and fly away.
All the chickens are gone. We eat snow to put something, anything, in our mouths and hold back the pain. When brother gets a rabbit, it’s hard to take the time to cook it. We don’t move around anymore, but stay near the cave and sleep in it every night. It would almost be a relief to get caught: at least then I could see an end to this endless hunger and cold.
I ask Brother if we should go down the mountain, but he says no. He says that it could be a Nazi world and we might be the only Gypsies left. And then one day he’s too weak to trap so I set the snare. I catch a rabbit and cook it into a stew with melted snow. Brother eats but still can’t get up. He shivers in the rabbit skin. The days have gotten as long as the nights again, again there is a long twilight to watch through the darkening trees. I tell Brother, “It will be spring soon. Soon the little shoots will come up, we’ll pick fiddleheads and eat them all.”
He shakes his head and closes his eyes.
I say, “You have to stay with me.”
Finally, through his closed eyes, he tells me the truth. He says, “You were right. I shouldn’t have gone back and seen what I did of the kumpania. What I saw is too much to live with.”
I say, “You saved our lives. Without the blankets, the trap, the cook pot—”
He says, “You have to stay free, Sister. No matter what happens, I want you to be free. For me.”
What is freedom? This life? Trapped in the mountains, pushed up away from everyone and everything—what kind of freedom is this? I say nothing to Brother. Gather myself up against the cold. One more bite of soup. I offer it to him. He says, “You drink it.” Then he opens his bony hand, the hand of an old man, and holds it flat toward me like he’s feeding a horse. On it is a tiny gold butterfly. “Our mother gave it to me. Now it belongs to you. You will give it to your child. That is what you have to do.”
He can’t die. He can’t leave me here on the mountain in the snow and the sound of the wind, the snow thumping to the ground in wet clods—but he does. He dies and the snow begins to melt that very day, to turn thick and heavy and shrink up. I can’t burn his body so I nest him in one of the rabbit-fur blankets, seal up the opening of the cave with rocks, and move up the river, trapped inside my freedom like a rabbit in a snare.
Being alone is a kind of death camp. A slow laboring toward the end.
IRAQ / JORDAN BORDER—AUGUST 2005
The first stage of the border greets us. American soldiers again. This time they look at my American passport, goggle at me, and smile. I push my hijab back a little bit on my head and look at the one holding the passport full in the eyes. Desire flicks over his face like a ripple and then flattens. I don’t think this one has lost his compassion, only his freedom to express it. I say, “What’s a nice guy like you doing in a place like this?” I want him to want me. I don’t want to be his enemy.
He replies, “The question is, what are you doing here?”
“How long have you got?”
He doesn’t smile. He nods to Isra. “She yours?”
“At the moment, yes.”
“Well, then, I’ll tell you this. You officially need to get your ass over that border, Ma’am, whether they go with you or not.” A bit of friendly advice.
I say, “There’s no ‘whether or not.’ I’m escorting the child to Amman.”
He smiles now. “There’s always a ‘whether or not’ here, Ma’am.” With that, he hands me back my passport. “I wish you the best of luck.”
We go on—into the weather, the hot dirty weather and the knot slowly curling itself up, strand by strand, in my stomach. I say to Raed, “What did he mean?”
“He means you never know. How long you will wait or whether they’ll let us go. He’s right, they may turn us back, but you could be safe in an hour. You should go without us if they hold us up. I’ll take the girl to Amman.”
“The letter from Abdul Adl doesn’t have your name on it.”
He frowns. “Don’t push your hijab around on your head. It’s not a baseball cap.”
With that we drive under a pair of metal arches, one for each nation, and through the land between lands, the hot, dusty, uninhabitable nowhere where a thousand tents flap in the wind, their burden the nobodies who inhabit them. At the Jordanian border the officers take our passports and disappear. We wait for two hours or more in an institutional room with a clock on the wall that is too loud, sitting side by side with a row of people pushed against us on a bench, each in their own private story, their own drama of escape.
Finally a man beckons Isra and me into a room where he asks me, “What is your relationship to this girl?”
I say, “She’s like my daughter. There’s a term in your language I think, ‘be raqbatik.’ I am taking her to her aunt in Amman.”
“What is the name of the aunt?”
I tell him and he leaves the room. Isra and I stand next to the Formica table and stare at the blank wall across from us. I put my hand on her shoulder and she doesn’t move away. A few moments later the man comes back.
“You may go, miss.”
“To Jordan?”
He laughs then, holds his stomach with both hands and laughs so loud Isra leans toward me and grabs my abaya for safety. “Yes, miss. To Jordan.”
FRANCE—FALL 1945
It doesn’t matter anymore. Not that they catch me or drag me off or withhold food or make me work. They already made me do all those things to myself. I don’t cook the meat anymore. When I get a rabbit in the snare I wring its neck and rip it open on the spot, let the blood gush into my mouth. All summer I have wandered like a ghost from tree to tree, from one side of the stream to the other. A ghost already and my heart still beats inside my chest, my breath still goes in and out. Some nights I lie and hold my breath for as long as I can, but eventually the will to live claws at the inside of my lung
s and they suck in air, away from the ancestors, into this awful moment. I am alone, rejected even by death.
But it’s not death or the ancestors that keep me here in this dream, it’s Brother’s request—the one he didn’t let me agree to or not—that life goes on, and that my life becomes another life, that our family continues. I don’t know why. Does he think it will get better? Does he think that somewhere down the rutted cart track the war will end?
I won’t survive another winter. I won’t be able to do what he asked if I stay here on the mountain. So the morning I wake up to a world quiet and crystalline, to flakes melting one by one into the slowing stream, I gather up my rags of clothes and the rabbit-fur blanket, the old cook pot and the snare, the gold coins sewn to the inside of my dress, and stagger down the mountain, through the forest of fallen leaves, and away from the stream, the stream that has been my mother, its water her milk.
Onto the road—maybe a Nazi road, in a Nazi world. Maybe I’m the only Gypsy left, like Brother said. With no others, no family, am I even a Gypsy anymore? A small black car approaches. Faces that could belong to any nation peer from the distant windshield. I take another step. Each time my foot touches the gravel I hear the echo of gunfire coming from it. The sound of the motor, closer now. I look up. The faces have a strange blankness to them, as though I am neither friend nor enemy, neither Gypsy nor gadji, big nor little, rich nor poor—I simply do not exist. Am I a ghost already?
The car whooshes past. Just as it comes alongside me, I glimpse a face, a small child up against the glass in the backseat, her eyes lit up with curiosity.
Nothing more happens, hour after hour, only the occasional car passing, faces pressed to the window or turned away, and the crunch of my feet on the gravel, a slow, steady beat, ghost bullet after ghost bullet slamming into the ghost of my heart.
Finally, a town. I turn away from the road to hide in some dried stalks of weeds and drop my bundle. I remove a few coins from the inside hem of my dress and clutch them in my hand. They have meant so little for so long. What good is a coin you can’t spend?
Into the dress shop first. A woman stands at a low counter halfway across the store from me, her fingers busy with a bolt of calico cloth. I make a noise in my throat and she looks up. Her blue eyes hit me, the force of them so strong I step back into the threshold. She keeps pushing me back with her eyes until I fumble with the coins in my hand and hold one out toward her, pinched in my fingers like you would offer a bone to a watchdog, hoping it won’t take your fingers with it. Her face begins to change as soon as her eyes leave my face and settle on my hand: a slow-motion contortion from hatred to hunger to something blank and polite and safe.
I have to work to think of the French words. “I-I would like a dress, please,” I stutter.
She fits me and alters it while I wait. When it’s ready, a simple brown dress with long sleeves, I change in the fitting room and ball up my rags, the hidden fortune inside. Now food. I don’t know what to choose. Smoked meat. Bread. A pastry. Just the smell in the store makes me crazy. I gather up bundles in wax paper while a tall man behind the counter looks at me with something almost kind, not sympathy but maybe pity.
As I’m paying he says, “Your accent, you are not French. Are you visiting?”
I look up at him. Is he testing me? What does he think I am, my hair full of tangles and my skin like maple sap? He looks directly back at me and I avert my eyes. Maybe I shouldn’t trust him, but I need to know. In my slow French, I say, “No, I am not from the area. I wonder, is it … safe … here? Has it been safe?”
He sucks in air. “You must come from … very far away.”
“Yes. I have been traveling in the east. For more than a year.”
He smiles as if to a child trying to lie her way out of a stolen cookie. “Yes. Well, you should know. The Allies liberated France last year, in the summer they came in. And … do you know … that the war is over?”
I say nothing.
“In May, Mademoiselle. It ended in May.”
I still say nothing.
“And now it is almost December again.”
I say, “Thank you.” The tears are welling up, so I turn from his kind face and walk out as quickly as I can.
JORDAN—AUGUST 2005
It’s like the war never happened. Speeding through the dark desert along a rough highway, Raed full of coffee and intent on the road. Isra has fallen asleep. No masked men here, no roadblocks, no hijackers, no Kalashnikovs, only dark and wind and headlights on the tarmac.
How can a war come and go so easily across an invisible line or a barbed-wire fence? It can only disappear so quickly, so definitively, because it has no intrinsic truth: war is a state of mind, a state of mind manifested as a creation, a terrible work of art. And just as quickly the mind understands peace, the child falls asleep, the muscle in my right leg, which I didn’t even know I was holding, suddenly lets go and begins to shake. Even Raed sings softly to himself under his breath. From one state of mind to another.
In the late-night dark, Amman glows like the chandelier of some ancient and impossibly wealthy sheik. It appears as a floating paradise where people walk down the street like nothing is wrong, like nothing has ever hurt them and so they expect no one ever will. Isra’s aunt’s neighborhood is on the outskirts of the city, and as we drive through the residential streets we see and hear nobody. This time, though, it’s not from fear, but simply because the families who live here are asleep. The aunt has left a light burning on the porch, and I carry the sleeping Isra up the stairs in my arms along with my backpack and the butterfly. At the metal door, the curious faces of two small children greet us from inside. A woman stands behind them, and when she opens the door I see full into her eyes: she loves Isra, sleeping on my shoulder, has loved her since before they met.
A’idah wears modern clothes with a simple hijab. She greets me in English, “Welcome. We are so glad you came, and—” she pauses to look at Isra, “I can’t tell you how hard it has been, so far away—.” She stops then, and kisses me on the cheek. “You must be tired.” She turns and leads me and the curious girls across a neat living area with a couch, a teapot, and a blue rug, down the hall to the girls’ room. As we enter, the girls stage-whisper to their mother, who shushes them with a sharp outbreath. I see shelves neatly lined with toys and three beds. A’idah points to one with a fresh-looking flowered spread, then rushes ahead of me to pull it back. “This will be Isra’s,” she whispers.
I hold on tight to Isra’s little body in my arms. In a moment I will put her down and she will be home where she belongs, in a room of toys with two new sisters, a loving aunt, and peace. I don’t know why I didn’t see this coming—her own room, her new life beginning just like this. A’idah sees me hesitate and stands quietly by the bed, her eyes inquiring.
“I’m so happy for her right now, but so sad for myself. Do you see?”
“You have no children of your own.” I shake my head and she looks at me with such pity I shake my head again and turn away. When I have collected myself, I turn back and lean over the bed, lowering Isra down. When her back touches the sheets, she moans and clings to my neck. I crouch next to her with my arms still around her, gently holding her in her new place, until she burrows back into the peace of sleep and I step free.
I place the butterfly next to her on the pillow so that when she wakens she will have something to orient her. She will wake up to the adoring eyes of her two new young sisters and a shelf full of treasures to run her fingers across. She will begin this new story, and ours together will become something different, something I can’t yet see from here.
A’idah leads me across the hall to a guest room with a little glass pitcher of water by the bed, a red carpet, and sheets that are crisp and pulled tight. I say good night to her and take off my abaya, fold it up hand over hand before digging out my tank-top and boxers to sleep in. Tomorrow I can once again wear the long skirt and V-neck T-shirt that I last took off in Dubai th
ree weeks ago. I splash water over my face and hands and then curl up into my first good night’s sleep in just about forever.
FRANCE—WINTER 1945–46
When I walk through the streets of the city I hold my head high and keep my eyes straight ahead, so that I look like something other than what I am. Something free, something that belongs. I hold the truth of who I am so far inside myself that no one turns their head. No one points. We pass without touching and move on.
The Romani here have lost their pride. They steal just for fun and wash themselves in a stagnant tub, and I do not belong with them. It seems like this war never happened—the funerals are long over, the ghosts have been appeased, the stories told and told again so many times already that the truth has been squeezed out of them. I hear no word of the caravans. The gadje are like ghosts of people drifting by, little bubbles of oil in my stream. Everything has broken apart, crumbled without effort like a lump of flour you squeeze between your fingers.
Who am I? I’ll eat anything. A roast pig. A bit of bread dropped in the street. I don’t wash. I show my legs to the men. I have ceased to belong to any civilization I know of. One day I walk down the cobbled street, down past rows of cars, past the storefronts with their awnings. I walk until I reach the end of town, where the woods rise around me like great arms, and step into the place where I was reformed into a new and unknown thing.
The war is over.
Was it over when Brother died? Was it over while I froze on the mountain? Or before that, as the death squad aimed and fired at each being who bound me to this world? The war has only ever been a state of mind. It doesn’t matter who signed what with their glistening, useless pens. Did it matter that they signed while I was starving? Does it matter now that I have lost everything?