The Night Counter

by Alia Yunis

  “With Ibrahim it felt different. When he touched my skin, even by accident, it prickled up.” Fatima blushed. “For sixty years, which Millie would have said was impossible. But it’s true. But I never would have told him that, especially since he married me just to be nice.”

  Sherri Hazad scrubbed her hands harder. “I should be honest and say that what I really want to talk about is Amir Abdullah. Really. And that’s all.”

  “But I deserve to be informed,” Fatima said. “How will I die?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What more do you want me to tell you?” Fatima asked.

  “Any information about Amir Abdullah,” Sherri Hazad said. “Only.”

  “Ah, easy stories. Despite everything he does, he is still one of my favorite topics. Did you know Amir has kibbe fingers, too?” Fatima bragged. “He makes perfect kibbe. Should I let you in on a secret?”

  “That’s why I’m here,” Sherri Hazad said. She took out her notebook.

  “A dash of cardamom in the filling.” Fatima winked. “That’s the secret to my kibbe. I’ve never revealed that to anyone except Amir. He was the only child who asked for the secret. Now you, ya oukhti, have it for immortality.”

  “Okay,” Sherri Hazad said. “Thank you for that information. Now …”

  “He could have been a chef in one of your courts,” Fatima bragged.

  “Oh, I don’t doubt it,” Sherri Hazad agreed. “Courthouse food is not that good. How long has he been pursuing acting?”

  “That’s just a game, I told you,” said Fatima. She hoped she had clarified this acting hobby once and for all. She did not want tales told by Scheherazade one day centuries from now that would call her grandson a member of such a low-class profession.

  “Haven’t you ever wondered how Amir pays for a house like this, decorates it like this, buys the expensive soap on a bit actor’s salary?” Sherri Hazad asked.

  “Are you kidding? He doesn’t pay a penny.”

  “Oh?” Sherri Hazad said, and moved to the edge of her chair.

  Fatima put down her kibbe and motioned for Sherri Hazad to bring her hungry ear closer. This near, Scheherazade’s skin today was not as porcelain as the finest china in the world.

  “His mother—Soraya—pays for everything,” Fatima said, and then leaned back and began forming a new kibbe. “In cash.”

  “Oh,” Sherri Hazad said.

  Fatima pointed toward the envelope by the computer, next to her picture in the wedding dress. “That’s from Soraya,” she said. “I counted it already. It’s always in hundred-dollar bills. Four thousand three hundred dollars cash. She left it and then went to Tiajumama just like that.”

  “You mean Tijuana?” Sherri Hazad said. “Mexico?”

  Fatima shrugged. “Always off to help others, but at least she makes money while she does. Cash only, and almost all for Amir.”

  “What exactly does she do?” Sherri Hazad asked.

  “Soraya embraced her heritage as a business opportunity,” Fatima explained. “That’s how Amir describes it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Some might say shame, aabe. But she suffered a lot,” Fatima said. “That bastard husband of hers. May he rot in Saudia forever.”

  “Oh?” Sherri Hazad said again. “He is Saudi?”

  “No, Beiruti,” Fatima said.

  “Oh, really?”

  “His mother, Tamara, yakhrub beitha, curses on her house, and I started the card club of the Arab Ladies Society together, so he and Soraya knew each other since they were children,” Fatima continued. “Then they both went to Wayne State. He started out as a good Lebanese boy born just two days before Soraya in the same hospital.”

  “Sounds perfect.”

  “He cheated on her and left with another woman,” Fatima said. “Haram. Sacrilege. And it was her best friend, no less. Do you know what that lousy afreet, devil, did next? Moved to Saudi Arabia and worked for the Aramco company as an engineer and got very rich. Then he moved his no-good mother there with him. Inshallah, Tamara drove her son and his floozy to hell because she was loose, too.”

  “Oh,” Sherri Hazad said. “Well, Amir …”

  “You don’t know how many times I would come home from playing basra with the other ladies and find her sitting in the living room with Ibrahim watching the news, crying,” Fatima fumed. “Every time a war started back home, she would say she couldn’t bear to play cards, like she was the only one upset. But then I’d find her in my home, saying she couldn’t bear to be alone with the news. I saw how she was looking at Ibrahim. He wouldn’t notice because he was usually so busy telling Nixon or whoever was president on the TV that he was going to kill him.”

  “Kill him?” Sherri Hazad said, and dropped another kibbe. “Have you heard anything about any current political leaders? Anyone you’ve heard people saying they’d like to kill? Just out of curiosity.”

  “Don’t get me started on that list,” Fatima said. She stood up to get more water for her hands and stepped right into the kibbe Sherri Hazad had dropped. Frustrated, she bent down to clean it up. “Haven’t you learned anything from the servants who rule your palaces for you? Or are they just trained puppets?”

  It was hard to tell if Fatima was talking about Middle East political regimes or food. Sherri Hazad formed another meat and wheat ball and began drilling.

  “Let’s go back to Amir and Saudi Arabia for now,” she suggested. “So does Amir ever go to see him there?”

  “Who?”

  “His father.”

  “What father?” Fatima said.

  “Soraya’s ex-husband,” Sherri Hazad reminded her.

  “He’s not Amir’s father. Ibaad el-sher. Keep evil away,” said Fatima.

  “Oh, sorry,” Sherri Hazad said.

  “Do you want to know the big secret of Amir?” Fatima hissed. “This is the big one.”

  “God, I hope so,” Sherri Hazad said.

  Fatima motioned for her to come closer. “Amir is an immaculate conception,” she said, and leaned back, wishing she had on one of her glasses to witness Scheherazade’s jealousy that she, Fatima Abdul Aziz Abdullah, had a miracle grandchild.

  “Oh?” Sherri Hazad said.

  “Oh, nothing,” Fatima explained. “Soraya didn’t have Amir until thirteen months after she got divorced and the creep was long gone to Saudi. Immaculate, ya Allah.”

  “Oh … well. … But what if Soraya was …” Sherri Hazad stuttered.

  “Soraya what?” Fatima said, lifting up her hand to stop any smirch to her daughter’s character by anyone but herself. “All my girls married the first man they kissed. Khallas, that’s all. After Soraya found out that the other woman was having a baby with her no-good man, she cried and cried, for a child is the one thing everyone should get out of a marriage, no matter how it ends. It was as if God heard her tears and gave her Amir.”

  “Okay, okay, then,” Sherri Hazad said, struggling for words. “So, moving on, um, to the best of your knowledge this daughter is now supporting Amir from money made in a Mexican border town.”

  “She’s been everywhere helping, as she calls avoiding her own family,” Fatima said. “Circuses and festivals all over the world. And she makes people think she has mystical powers like you.”

  “Don’t believe all the wild stories you hear about my job,” Sherri Hazad advised.

  “No need to be modest,” Fatima said. “Could you start making the hummus?”

  “Umm …” Sherri Hazad said.

  “Ya bint el-hara, weren’t you trained to do anything?” Fatima exclaimed. “Look for the can with the picture of chickpeas on it. Just open it and put it in the food processor.”

  “I can do that.” Sherri Hazad sounded relieved.

  “So help me, if Amir lets any of his disguises get in the hummus today,” Fatima vented.

  “Disguises?” Sherri Hazad asked.

  Fatima began dividing the kibbe into smaller batches. She kept out ten to fry for tomorrow. The
rest she started bagging to freeze for her condolences.

  “I told you what you wanted to hear,” she said. “Now you tell me how it’s going to happen.”

  “What’s going to happen?” Sherri Hazad asked.

  “There’s only four days left, so just tell me. Is it going to be big?” Fatima said. “An explosion of drama and emotion?”

  “Let me look into that a little more on my end,” Sherri Hazad said. She put her notebook in her purse. “Do you mind if I come back later?”

  “How much later?” Fatima scolded. “I want to know now. You are not being fair.”

  “That’s a complaint I often get,” Sherri Hazad said. “I will come back, I promise. And you’ll call me if you know more.”

  “Ha,” Fatima said, wondering what was written on the silly card she had just handed her. “Before you go, at least look at the clock for me.”

  “It’s about four-fifteen, madam,” Sherri Hazad said.

  “Strange. Randa hasn’t called today,” Fatima thought aloud. “I wonder if she’s heard anything from Gaza.”

  Sherri Hazad sat back down. “Gaza?”

  “If you’re going to stay, add the tahini to the hummus,” Fatima instructed.

  Sherri Hazad looked for the jar that said tahini and began pouring its contents into the food processor. “You were saying about Gaza?” she shouted over the food processor’s whir.

  “Her daughter Dina should be in Gaza now,” Fatima informed her. “Her mother was not so clear on her whereabouts yesterday. She went to Beirut, even southern Lebanon, too, can you imagine? But she has not had a chance to go to Deir Zeitoon yet. Soon, inshallah.”

  “Inshallah,” Sherri Hazad mumbled, still pouring tahini.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Putting in the tahini,” Sherri Hazad responded.

  “You should have stopped doing that by now,” Fatima said. “Just let the food processor run for three and a half minutes.”

  Sherri Hazad was good at obeying orders and left the food processor to whir on its own. “Why was Dina in Beirut?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” Fatima said. “She started law school in Los Angeles 188 days after I came here, but she was too busy to come visit, and then all of a sudden she decided to go to Lebanon. That’s what Randa says from Texas, but Randa’s life is a web of lies. It’s hard to keep up with the truth with her. Maybe you can go figure it out.”

  Sherri Hazad looked at her: no hearing aid, no eyeglasses except reading glasses she couldn’t use to read. “This is not how I wanted our meeting to turn out,” she said under the din of the food processor.

  “What?” Fatima asked.

  Sherri Hazad turned off the food processor and saw Fatima’s nearby glasses next to the cash envelope. She picked them up and tightened the ends with her hands. “You should put your glasses on. It’s safer in these troubled times.”

  “Was there a time when things were not troubled?” Fatima countered, and put them on her face. “Hey, I think they fit.”

  When she looked up, Sherri Hazad was gone.

  Fatima shrugged. She moved to the food processor. The hummus was very gray. “Who puts half a jar of tahini in?” she said to the food processor.

  She went to the chrome fridge to get some lemons to counter the tahini. Why was she having so much trouble outsmarting a woman who didn’t even know how to make hummus into revealing what could be so terrible about her death that she kept avoiding telling her?

  WHAT FATIMA HADN’T seen without her glasses was the real Scheherazade, who had awoken to the surprise of daytime chatter in Amir’s home. When Scheherazade had found the serious female in the kitchen, she had looked on from the stairwell. She wanted to see Fatima’s reaction when she finally figured out this woman was not her. That did not happen.

  Scheherazade pulled out the hearing aid and faraway glasses and put them on the vanity for Fatima. No matter how blind she was, how dare Fatima confuse her with a bumbling woman who wore pants—with no embroidery. She wouldn’t go see Randa as Fatima probably was taking for granted. But Scheherazade was also hungry, and the aroma in Fatima’s kitchen propelled her instead toward Gaza—and the chance to get some good labneh and tamarind juice.

  It did not take Scheherazade long among the crowds, bullet holes, and collapsed buildings of Gaza to see that she was not likely to find Dina, for nearly no one who had the choice to be somewhere else was there. She continued to fly across the Mediterranean, across lands that smelled of the sweets and spices of Fatima’s kitchen. Off the sea, Beirut gleamed with tall buildings and newly engineered cobblestone streets, so many of its pasts gone and rebuilt over, although several craters of war remained. Beirut, the Paris of the Middle East, the Geneva of the Arab world. That was what people had been calling Beirut for nearly sixty years, as if it had to be compared to a great European city to prove its worth. As the afternoon call to prayer began over the sound of honking, Scheherazade spotted Dina. This was a city of women who spared no expense or effort to achieve beauty, but the shiny waves of one girl’s flowing locks stood out. The girl did not have the bumpy nose, but she had the vibrantly lush hair Fatima had had that first day she’d met her, although Dina’s was perfectly blond.

  DINA HAD NOT made it to Gaza because it wasn’t the kind of place to go to when one already had a broken heart. Well, actually two broken hearts. At least in Beirut there were places to escape misery.

  Dina’s perfect thighs stuck to the vinyl of the taxi’s backseat, and she was stuck somewhere between Texas and Gaza and somewhere between pissed off and depressed as hell.

  The taxi driver rolled his 1984 Mercedes 190E through another red light along the Corniche, which was crowded with Friday afternoon walkers trying to catch a Mediterranean breeze on a very humid summer afternoon. The driver lit a cigarette, using the cab’s NO SMOKING sign as a flint. When she had arrived here, the law student in Dina would have said something, but now she absently waved the smoke aside and closed her eyes. Today both of her boyfriends had broken up with her—via e-mail. Cowards. Losers. Assholes.

  Dina had come to Beirut for love and to make up for (a) being so lucky in life, as one of her boyfriends called it in his e-mail, and (b) being oblivious to reality, as the other one had said in his e-mail. But she wasn’t feeling lucky or oblivious right now. Nor was she feeling way sweet, way generous, way cool, or way hot—all words written next to smiley faces to describe her in her high school yearbook, right next to a picture of her in the air cheering the Kinross Falcons, one of the most well-funded football teams in one of the most expensive schools in Houston.

  A tiny fist clutching a lottery ticket shoved its way through the taxi window. “Auntie, is this your lucky day?” shouted a little Lebanese boy wearing a tattered “New York Jiants” T-shirt. He had patches on his skin that were a mixture of dirt and vitiligo. He fanned the ticket in front of her face. She basked in the fanning for only a moment.

  “Get lost, kid,” the cab driver said to the boy. His cigarette smoke formed a carbon monoxide blanket in front of Dina’s eyes when he turned to her. “Sorry for the intrusion, miss.”

  The boy, unfazed, stuck his head back in and gave her an exaggerated frown. She forced herself to turn away.

  “I guess it’s not your lucky day, Auntie.” The boy shrugged, waving the tickets one more time. Dina looked back until the boy had been folded into the strolling masses.

  “Occasion, occasion, get your lottery tickets here,” was the last thing she heard him say.

  “You know, before the lottery tickets, before the war, they used to sell Chiclets,” the cab driver said as he rolled up the windows of the Mercedes to fend off another boy approaching with more tickets. “This is better. No dentists needed, and there is hope in lottery tickets. What good is there in American chewing gum? No offense, miss.”

  No one in Beirut saw Dina’s Arab features, and she didn’t point out the fact that she was not only American but Texan, too.

  IT WAS BECAUS
E of Jamal Masri’s fine butt that Dina had spent the last month in Beirut. Jamal had sat next to her on the first day of her business law class at UCLA the last winter quarter. He had soft black curls that framed eyes as big and green as those of Fluffy, her mother’s cat. He had handed her a flyer with a brown girl in rags sitting on a pile of rubble. It was for an antiwar protest. “I thought you might be interested in joining us,” he said with an accent that was there in that barely-there-sexy-foreign-accent way.

  “Why?”

  “Bitar is a pretty well-known Palestinian family,” he said, pointing to the name on her notebook and pronouncing it as only her grandparents did. “So are you of the Nablus Bitars? We’re probably related, if that’s the case. I’m a Masri. Jamal Masri.”

  No one had ever identified Dina before by family name or village. It made her uncomfortable. Just being Texan—heck, just being Houstonian—was enough identity, never mind American and Arab. Nor had it ever occurred to her that Arabs could be so hot. She pictured Yasir Arafat, Saddam Hussein, or her grandfather Ibrahim when she heard the words Arab man, which she rarely did except when she was watching the latest terror alert on FOX News. Jamal, however, was unmistakably hot. She forced herself to think of Jake.

  “I have to study on Saturday.” She handed him back the flyer, failing for the first time to give a guy a perky smile. “Sorry about that.”

  “They’re interviewing me on KPFK tomorrow morning,” Jamal said to her on the way out of class. “Check it out.”

  Dina asked Jake later that night what KPFK was. “Oh, Pacifica Radio.” Jake laughed. “A bunch of crazy, liberal, Arab-loving, Spanish-speaking Jewish homosexuals.” Jake was actually quite open-minded compared with most of the people she’d grown up with, and so she knew that he had laughed without meaning any harm to anyone crazy, liberal, Arab, Spanish-speaking, Jewish, or homosexual. The next day, Jake caught up with her on campus and handed her his iPod. “I downloaded this for you.” He smiled. She stuck in the earphones.