Hana sat now with a past that didn’t belong to her. She hated Somar for not surviving the bomb. She hated her sister for missing him so much that she went back to find what remained of his tale. “Leilah left Baghdad with Ishtar in 1980 and returned, alone, in 2008. Not alone, exactly. On assignment. She was a journalist. That was three years ago. Now that I think about it, wow. It feels much longer.”
By 2008, Leilah was a woman who’d married, miscarried, divorced, then thrust all her love into her work. She wrote stories other people couldn’t write because they lacked either compassion or tenacity. Stories that required long distances and crappy vehicles in which to travel. Once she’d traveled on the back of a donkey, which had made her feel fat when it brayed. In Baghdad, Leilah was embedded with American troops, though not a combat regiment. “She was working on a story about the future,” said Hana. “Counting mistakes made, guessing what lessons we learned. Rarely shoot, never panic. These were ideals. Not exactly practical.”
January 6, Epiphany Day. The day Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River. More than two thousand years later—2008, to be exact—the Associated Press bureau in Baghdad called to declare their epiphany, which they were shocked and saddened to report: Leilah had died on assignment. A bomb in a church, they said, though it sounded like a single word said quickly. At least, when spit from Ishtar’s mouth in shocked response. Abombinachurch. Ishtar had been the one to answer the phone. She’d pulled out her endless box of cigarettes and shook her head like nuh-uh and not-possible. She’d said, “What do you mean, abombinachurch?” The bureau had almost no information to share. There weren’t, at the time, many facts available. No body, either. Hana and Ishtar buried Leilah’s record collection instead. It ran the gamut from Nina Simone all the way to 42 Mother Goose Songs with Alec Templeton. They’d cried over an otherwise empty box while a priest spoke Aramaic, a language he’d seemed to think was encoded into Hana. The longer the robed man spoke, the lower she sank in her seat. She couldn’t understand the prayers. She couldn’t understand what had happened. She couldn’t even understand how she felt.
“Nothing was immediately painful in the nights that followed, but everything was sleepless,” said Hana. “I was accustomed to Leilah being gone for long periods of time. Meandering around this country or that one, no phone calls, infrequent e-mails, crumpled postcards with a stamp but no love note scribbled on the back. As if the only thing she wanted to prove was that she was still alive, but not missing us. So her death didn’t hurt so much at first. Leilah was always traveling and her passing was just another trip. She didn’t seem any farther away. Still impossible to contact.”
At the time, Hana still occupied her old bedroom. Not old, because she’d never left home. Ishtar had forbidden it. The bed had grown in width and comfort over the years, and the books on the shelf had changed. But otherwise the old bedroom had remained the same. “We developed a nightly ritual. I escorted Ishtar to the tub and felt no shyness in seeing her disrobe. One night after the bath, when she was completely irrigated with boxed wine, zigzagging as she walked, and smelling like vinegar—by then, I was in bed trying and failing to sleep—she wandered into my room and asked if I was still awake. We had just spent all night talking. Literally just finished. The tub, the stories, her crying, me trying to comfort her. So I rolled over and faced the wall to escape having to open my mouth. Ishtar touched my shoulder and said, ‘Are you there?,’ like I, too, had left her.”
Ishtar poked Hana and asked how she thought Leilah had died. Not where or who killed her, but from the blast itself or the bleeding that followed. How fast did it happen? How much did it hurt? At last, Hana said she didn’t know. She didn’t want to know! The truth came later when authorities released a formal report. “My father died walking to Our Lady of Peace, Sayidat al-Salaam,” Hana said. “A modest stack of stone across the Tigris River from the Green Zone. What we learned was that Leilah had gone to visit the same church in the early morning when the streets were clear. To say good-bye? I don’t know. Who was going to stop her? She wasn’t famous. Not a guest of the ambassador.” The report, quietly released by the embassy, said gunmen stormed Our Lady of Peace during Sunday service when a hundred worshippers begged forgiveness for sins. The attackers shot the lights first. Then the crucifix. Then the people hiding behind the crucifix and in the pews. The executions were followed by a single blast—a suicide vest filled with ball bearings and plastic explosive. The bomb turned the church into a pinball machine. An insurgency group called the Islamic State of Iraq, like they were a country and not men with a violent idea, claimed responsibility. Their statement said, ‘All Christian centers, organizations, and institutions, leaders and followers, are legitimate targets for the mujahideen wherever they can reach them.’ And: ‘Let these idolaters, and at their forefront, the hallucinating tyrant of the Vatican, know that the killing sword will not be lifted from the necks of their followers until they declare their innocence from what the dog of the Egyptian Church is doing.’ ISIS believed, and perhaps it was true, that the Coptic Church in Egypt held parishioners captive if they wanted to convert to Islam.
“How does blowing up a Syriac church in Baghdad punish a Coptic one in Cairo?” asked Hana. “Not that it matters. Fear is more important than justice, anyway. They’re not reasonable men. Reasonable men don’t wear clothes that explode.” Ishtar was so mad at Leilah for visiting the church that she wouldn’t say her daughter’s name for weeks after her death. “I found it harder to blame Leilah for going,” said Hana. “She knew Somar and could miss him. A hole. That’s what it must’ve felt like, the longing to see him again. Or at least to go somewhere he’d been. A hole in the ground where the bomb hit made a hole in her heart so big it made every room feel claustrophobic. How do you live with a chest like that? How do you be happy?”
Hana stacked bean casings until they collapsed, which spilled brine onto the table. The brine cleaned the tiles when she mopped the puddle with her napkin, revealing the burlap color was in fact ivory. For some reason she preferred the burlap and covered the clean spot with her dirty napkin. Then she pretended the only two things in the room were her and her drink. Sadly, her drink didn’t last forever. Or even very long. Hana put her arm in the air to summon more beer, but the waiter walked by. He seemed intent on serving the men first. She kept her arm raised until it went numb, then held it steady with her other arm. “Will you also put your arm up?” she asked Charlie. “I want to test something.” Charlie raised his arm and the waiter finally came. “What’s your problem?” Hana asked the waiter. He didn’t hear the question or, more likely, chose not to respond. Hana noticed too late that he had silently responded by leaving the cap on her bottle. Now Hana had to pry it off with her keys.
“I didn’t know you were Iraqi,” said Charlie after a few seconds. He began organizing chess pieces in ascending order of height: pawns, rooks, knights, bishops, queens, and one king. The other king had been lost or wasn’t on the table.
“That’s your takeaway?” said Hana as if she was disappointed but not really surprised. Of course Charlie was impermeable to all but his own suffering. Of course her story had bounced off his nice shirt. Even so, Hana found pleasure in attempting the vengeance and relief in bringing Leilah back to life. Not even Charlie could take that away from her.
“I just find it . . .”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Odd.”
“Odd how?”
“I don’t know!” said Charlie. “You and Dalia came from the same place. It’s just . . .”
“Odd?”
“That’s right.”
“What are you trying to say? That I owe her something?”
Charlie put his head on the table. Either he’d died or he’d drunk too many beers.
“Are you okay?” asked Hana after a few seconds. Part of her thought Charlie had really died. It would be just like him to do that.
“I’m sorry about your sister,” he said finally. “Let’s just le
ave it at that.”
Hana had heard people say the same thing for years. They fell into two categories: people who said it because they thought they had to; and those who said it because they, having themselves experienced a loss of some magnitude, assumed correctly that their words would fail to offer lasting comfort, but nevertheless said them with the hope that their tone or posture—or, damn it, an entirely unscientific prickly feeling transmitted through the air itself—would make plain the following: that while the speaker was powerless to intervene, they nonetheless understood what it felt like to suffer. What comfort the words lacked was thus found in the company of the person saying them. Hana was bewildered to know Charlie fell into the latter category. She was sure he would’ve fallen into the first.
When Charlie finally sat up, he did so with gusto; it was as if a perfectly thrilling idea had shocked him back to life. “I have a friend I want you to meet.” He turned eagerly toward the door. The idea had really taken hold of his attention. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before. Are you ready? Will you go?”
This was how Hana had imagined relationships with her coworkers would’ve begun. A simple invitation. To lunch, to dinner. To a party of some kind. Yet a relationship with those people felt suddenly unattainable. Weeks had passed and she’d made little progress with either Joseph or Yezin, and even less with Noha and Fadwa. The women were practically figments of her imagination. Was that Hana’s fault? Or theirs? Maybe Hana was just bad at making friends. The sick rain cloud in her chest poured doubt everywhere. She stood up, revealing the cramp in her ass from the hard chair, and followed Charlie. She didn’t care where she went so long as she didn’t go back to her apartment. Waiting there would be her sister’s ghost and ten missed calls from Ishtar begging Hana to come home.
* * *
The dust-brown city turned yellow as the sun died and the streetlights burned to their own deaths, flickering. The taxi stopped in an intersection where the streets met at weird angles. Sharp corners battled wide ones for the title of Most Egregious Urban Planning Mistake. Down one street was a tribe of goats eating garbage. Hana could more or less intuit her location from the length and direction of the drive. North along the corniche to the Imbaba Bridge, then west for ten minutes into the labyrinth. After the taxi dropped them off and became a cloud of exhaust, Charlie said, “This way.” He walked toward a set of steps leading to a long yellow hall. There was a man sitting on the steps. He was smoking and drinking a Coke. As Charlie and Hana climbed toward him, he said, “Where from?” To Hana, the question contained an unknowable pain. Where from? implied where going? The man clearly hadn’t gone anywhere in a long time.
“Montana,” said Charlie as if that word didn’t mean much.
“Michigan,” said Hana. The simple answer was unsatisfying. But the real answer was too complicated. “And you?”
“Baghdad.” The man’s body was a black shadow in the yellow light pouring from the hallway behind him. His Coke smelled like some other drink. “Tomorrow I think I go back.” He lay down across his step, covering the entire width of the stairs, and looked up at the sky. Hana looked up at the sky, too, but there were no stars. The light of the city bounced off the pollution so that Cairo looked covered by a shroud.
“This way,” said Charlie.
After passing the man—by necessity, stepping over him—and crossing the stone floor, the ascent continued. Five flights of slick, worn stairs. The edges had been rounded by years of bombing by feet. Hana thought the stairs had endured rather proudly. The dark upward climb was intermittently lit by dim bulbs. The higher they climbed, the more Hana struggled to breathe. “The secret,” said Charlie, “is exhaling through your nose.” Hana told him to stop talking. When they finally reached the fifth floor, the dim yellow bulbs in the landings became white fluorescent tubes in the hall. Hana saw the Arabic number sitting cockeyed on a red door. Charlie knocked. He knocked again and smiled at Hana. She put her hands on her hips, stared at the ceiling, and cursed every cigarette she’d ever smoked, which was not many. One every now and then when she was feeling especially stressed.
“What are we really doing here?” It occurred to Hana, later than she might’ve otherwise liked—the information was no longer useful—that this wasn’t the sort of building in which she could imagine Charlie socializing. “And why’d we take the stairs?”
“The elevator was broken. You didn’t see the sign?” Charlie continued to knock on the door. When there was no answer, Charlie knocked harder. Then said, “Salaam, Dalia?”
5
Dalia’s plan to fall asleep was interrupted by a timid knock on her door. Whoever tapped the wood either regretted the decision or wished to have knocked under improved circumstances. She’d heard a similar knock earlier that day. It had been light at the time; she’d cracked open the door without thinking much of it. A woman named Nura had extended her hand, palm facing God, through the crack. She’d asked for money. As every neighbor, Nura was like the man on the stairs. Seen often but not really known. Was she from Karbala or Basra? Was she married? Did she have children? The grim persistence with which she’d begged suggested she had several. “I know who you are,” said Nura. She’d heard, by way of the man on the stairs, or some other man in the hall, or maybe on another floor—she didn’t know or wouldn’t say exactly who told her—that Dalia’s husband had, with God’s good fortune, made it to America and, blessed still by God, found work. Nura said she knew there was money, as if Dalia had been withholding that fact. Her timid knock was thus revealed as an imposture. Resentment took hold of her face. “Please. Something small.” What Dalia had was already so little. Making it smaller would be the same as making it disappear. She shook her head in lieu of saying no. It felt less cruel that way. “I’m begging you.” Nura leaned against the door and started pushing it. Dalia, seized by the memory of her former bawab, pushed back with all her might, but Nura, seized by the needs of her children, was too vehement. The door flew open, thrusting Dalia off-balance. She fell and Nura fell on her. The air in Dalia’s lungs flew away. So, too, went the urge to inhale. In that instant, totally alone in a still and dark place in her mind, Dalia finally saw how to leave Egypt. All she had to do was hold her breath.
Nura rolled off when Dalia gulped air a few seconds later. Though Nura didn’t flee or scrounge for money. She just lay on the floor next to Dalia while her breathing normalized. The dust of their scuffle—a specter of ash, powder, and lint—glowed in the light from the door. A young man walked by, looked in, then kept walking. He said something like “Dear God” or “What’s this?” No such mumbling could be unraveled. Maybe he said, “My life has been destroyed.” Or, “I have lost everything.” Dalia turned to see Nura, who wept quietly to herself. Then Nura turned to see her. There was no point in apologizing. The wall between right and wrong had collapsed long ago. It had been surprisingly fragile. “I don’t understand why you’re here,” said Nura. “You have a husband in America with a job. Everyone says you should go.” Dalia said it wasn’t her choice. It made no difference whom she loved or where he’d landed. Her case, besides, had been rejected. “No,” said Nura. “Don’t say that. It’s not true.” One’s fate informed the other’s fear. That was how it was and would always be in a building of marooned emigrants. “My own case is . . .” The way Nura trailed off indicated her case had been lost in the void. She’d been waiting for months. Probably much longer. “God willing you have more luck,” said Dalia. In the air was the salt of blood they’d spilled on their journeys. Either that or it was the sharp smell of wet laundry that had been washed without soap. In time, both women sat up. Dalia gave Nura twenty pounds, which Nura was ashamed to accept. Twenty pounds equaled $3, officially; and only slightly more on the black market. “Shukran,” said Nura. She left with her head hung so low she couldn’t see and, before Dalia could warn her, smacked her head on the door. Embarrassment was a waste of energy. She kept walking without saying anything or turning back.
&nb
sp; Hours had passed since the first knock had announced Nura. The second knock, alighting only moments ago, sounded just as timid. Had Nura come back for more money? Or did the most recent knock have more insidious origins? Maybe Dalia’s former bawab had finally found her. She couldn’t imagine her former bawab knocking timidly. Though she could imagine him performing a timid knock. By now, the sun had fallen. Dalia’s sole window looked out on a dark alley. The amount of light the window let in was less relevant than the time it indicated. Day just felt safer. The timid knock struck again. The height of the knock implied someone taller than Nura. A man, probably. The door’s busted eyehole had never been more cruel. Dalia saw an array of colors separated by myriad cracks in the glass. The colors wouldn’t coalesce no matter how much she wanted to see what awaited her. “Salaam, Dalia?” said a voice, muffled by the wood it traveled through. “Are you there?” She would’ve recognized that voice from any distance, through any material, at any volume. “Charlie,” she said to herself. She mistook her relief for yearning. In doing so, Dalia cracked open her door. The mistake didn’t go unpunished. Her eyes swept past the man she knew to the woman she never wanted to see again. It took all Dalia’s willpower to resist slamming the door in her face. What was her name again?
“The rejection notice, I think, was a bit hasty,” said Charlie. “Don’t you feel that way? Sorry I didn’t call first. I know I should have. But this is, as it were, off the cuff. I mean, unofficial. Don’t tell anyone we’re here. Really, we’re not supposed to . . .” He glanced at . . . Hana, wasn’t it? “Can we come in? It won’t take long, I promise. I wish it could wait. If only Omran weren’t so . . . well, you know. I mean, you married him. He’s stubborn as a—”
Live from Cairo Page 17