The Map of Salt and Stars

by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar

  My voice makes sharp yellow triangles. “Because today is the day you lost your son,” I say, and something soft cracks open behind Abu Sayeed’s eyes.

  Mama dives from the window. I don’t hear her scream.

  It happens fast. That angry high-pitched whirring, like an air conditioner falling from a window or an overstuffed washing machine. A shrieking thrum. Then the weight hits like a slap on my back.

  Silence. Red goes black. There aren’t any colors anymore.

  I CAN’T SEE anything, not even when I blink. My eyes sting like they’re full of lemon juice. I want to rub the pain out of my eyes, but I can’t move my arms.

  Someone coughs, far off. Everything smells bitter yellow. Purple sobs float behind my eyelids. When I crack them open, the room is all gray-black pebbles, like the bottom of a quarry. A tangle of wires pokes through the rubble, revealing shards of mangled plastic screen. Zahra’s phone.

  The phone jolts me back to dinner, to the last thing I remember: Mama standing at the window.

  “Mama?” My mouth tastes acid orange. “Huppy?” I can’t hear my voice over the yellow ringing in my ears.

  “Nour?”

  A hand comes out of the dark. Mama’s wedding ring is covered in gray powder. She lifts a slice of wall off me and pulls me up. The pain comes when I move—big red slashes of pain across my eyes, the feel of the skin on my shins peeling off on the stones and glass, my left temple on fire. My elbows bend back, and they throb even when they’re bent right again. I gash my bare feet.

  “Where’s Huda?” I ask. But my voice gets lost in the ringing, and Mama isn’t listening to me. She talks to herself, pulling me by the hand toward a moaning sound.

  There’s no floor now, just piled up tiles and puffs of ripped insulation. Mama’s got owl eyes under the dust, her hair gray with it. The dust makes me cough and cough. The coughing makes me panic more than the pain, makes me scared I’ll never get another good breath, like the dark will suffocate me.

  I scrabble over Mama’s hand with both of mine, clinging to her wrist. She bends back, prying me off her, and sets me in a corner lined with crumbled drywall. She mouths words—Stay here—but there’s no sound.

  I count my breaths. A pinky-red spiral loops over my eyes, something that looks like an ambulance siren. I notice it a little at a time: it’s the color of one of the neighbors crying somewhere, wailing.

  It’s so dark I can see the street only because something is smoking, flicking heat on my face. I touch my forehead, and my fingers slip off. My face is slimy, like with sweat, but it’s not sweat. The blood sticks to my fingernails.

  “Where’s Huppy?”

  Still Mama doesn’t answer. My legs are unsteady, but I waddle over. Mama pulls on a slab of ceiling that’s cracked the dining table in two like burnt toast. There’s that sniffling, the purple wisps of somebody moaning. I stretch my legs over bricks and crumbs of bricks. Mama yanks up the slab of broken ceiling, and underneath is a torn piece of flowered linen.

  “Huppy!” My insides twist up and the pain drops away. Everything shrinks to Huda’s rose-patterned scarf and my burning lungs.

  I trip on rocks and tile to get to Huda. Mama pulls her up and steadies her, then moves to the cracked table, Huda under her arm. Crying comes from underneath.

  Mama tugs on the table with one hand, holding Huda up with the other. She motions to the table, darting her eyes from me to the broken wood. I try to help her, but I only pull and pull. I yank on it, breathing hard and shallow, spiraling into fear. I can’t do it. I’m not strong enough to lift anything.

  A gray man puts his hand on my shoulder. The powder sits like a beard of fine hairs all over him, sprouting from the bump in his neck and the folds of skin under his eyes. He’s a shadow in the cloud of dust that hangs over us.

  I know I should be surprised at the gray man, but the pain has faded into numbness, and I can’t feel anything. My eyes slip off him, and I focus on the crack in the wood of the table. Through the crack, I study half a porcelain plate smeared with oil and lamb fat. It’s the only thing that makes sense.

  Mama pulls Zahra out from under the table, and the gray man helps her. They stumble away.

  I don’t move at first. I stare through the table, like maybe if I keep my eyes on something familiar, everything else will be the same too. But the broken plate doesn’t look how I thought it would look; the porcelain isn’t smooth the whole way through. It’s crumbly and white on the inside, chalky like a broken bone.

  The whole world turns red from the screaming down the street. Sirens come from everywhere at once. The city has burst like a blister.

  I follow Mama toward the garden, tripping on broken concrete. The neighboring houses look the same as ours. Thick shoulders of metal stick up from the dust. Twisted fences and window shutters poke out like teeth.

  All the buildings on our street have been flattened.

  When I was real little, Mama took me to play in almost every playground in Manhattan. We went to Central Park a lot, but not just there. We went to Seward Park on the Lower East Side, John Jay Park on the Upper East Side along FDR Drive, Carl Schurz Park along the East River with its bronze statue of Peter Pan, and lots of others besides. Something was bound to get left behind at one of them.

  I was only five or six when I lost my favorite doll. It hardly even looked like a doll by then, which was probably why it was so hard for us to find it, because nobody knew what it was. My sitto had made it herself and mailed it to us for my fourth birthday, and since then I’d taken it everywhere with me. It had a funny flat little face like a slice of melon and a paisley dress Sitto had made herself, with Velcro on the back. I had worn off the eyes and the yarn of the hair, hugged off the left side of the mouth, and stroked the little dress into rags. By the time I lost it, it was a lump of brown and pink fabric, but it meant the world to me.

  We searched everywhere for my doll, but we never found it, because we couldn’t figure out which park we’d left it in. I cried and cried. That was the first time I knew something was really gone for good.

  That’s how I feel now, looking at our street. This street, like all the streets I saw in Baba’s Polaroids, with the same tan buildings, the same black-and-white archways Baba and Abu Sayeed stood under with their orange shirts—this street is really gone.

  “Nour—your head—you—”

  It’s the gray man, speaking through his tangled gray beard. I can’t hear what he’s saying.

  “Abu Sayeed?”

  It’s him under the gray. I stare at his mouth moving. No sound comes out. He touches the left side of my forehead, and I flinch and screech. The world bursts open at his fingertips, red fireworks of pain.

  I scramble back over a pile of brick. I’m in the garden, if you can have a house garden without a house. I lie down on the cold stones with the alley in front of me, trying to cool the fire in my head. I swing my fingers out on either side, then touch my ears. My hair is wet. I bleed everywhere.

  Mama hangs Huda over her shoulder and moves slowly toward me. Red spreads down Huda’s chest like jellyfish tentacles.

  I saw a jellyfish once at the New York Aquarium—a box jelly. I still remember its name: Chironex fleckeri, they said. It was small with long white strings. The sign next to the display said its sting could kill you, even though it was only a foot long and its tentacles were floss-thin. I wonder if this is like that. Is pain poisonous?

  Mama lays Huda next to me, and our blood mixes like spilled paint. Mama’s canvases loom up. Some are ripped, others torn clean out of their frames. They’re scattered around the garden, in the alley, and in the branches of the fig. A root has come loose from the dirt, reaching a finger out. I stretch my hand toward it, but I can’t grab it. My fingers are too slippery.

  Instead, I touch Huda’s flowered scarf. Her mouth hangs open, the scarf’s hem torn. Her shoulder is a red pulp of meat.

  “Wake up, Huppy. Wake up!” I shake Huda, but her head only rolls from side to sid
e on her neck. It’s like she’s saying no, like the world is too much for her, like she’s a jinni who’s slept a thousand years in a bottle or a stone. I put my ear to her wrist and don’t hear anything. My belly feels like it’s scalded with ice. I try her chest. There’s a slow rhythm, like music underwater. Her heart is still there.

  I lay my face across Huda’s collarbone, listening to her breathing. In—a long pause—out. I breathe with her. I think of jellyfish, the way they never really look alive but never look dead. Huda is in that in-between place, even though she’s always been strong enough to open all the jars, even though she once won a gold medal in the citywide soccer tournament, even though she’s the only one who knew how to fix my bike when I broke the chain.

  Minutes pass, and they feel like hours. Zahra stumbles from one corner of the garden to the other, dazed, then wobbles down. Mama finds a shredded towel to press to Huda’s shoulder. When Huda’s bleeding slows, Mama and Abu Sayeed search the rubble, looking for something. Mama bends down to pick something up. She crouches and rocks back and forth, the length of her navy skirt trapped between her calves and her thighs, letting off little puffs of gray dust. She’s got something in her hands—the shard of broken plate. She holds on to that piece of broken plate like it’s her rosary or Baba’s misbaha. She stares at it, mouthing something. I watch her lips. The sfiha, Mama says. The waste.

  Mama gets up and walks over to the corner of the garden. Her latest map, the one with the layers of acrylic paint, sits drying by the garden gate. The map is unframed and unfinished. The white sheet has blown off, but somehow nothing broke through the canvas. It sits decorated with clumps of dust. Mama fishes out a burlap bag from the wreckage of the kitchen, the kind that held the rice we bought in Chinatown. We use the bags for storing old toys.

  Mama takes the map and separates the canvas from its wooden supports. She rolls the canvas up and stuffs it into the burlap, wrapping it tight and tying on a strap to carry the bag. I turn away while she hunts for more things to save: a sooty prayer rug, a couple of pairs of flattened sneakers. She roams the ruins again, shuffling, looking for something she won’t leave without. She crouches and scrapes away bits of wall and tile as though she’s digging into old leaves. From underneath, she pulls out a dented metal box with its lock melted off. Inside are our passports, including my stiff blue American one, and the Syrian family book where all our names are officially written down. The family book has lost the sheen on its lettering, and its red face is soft and whiskered like old leather. Mama thanks God as she picks up our documents, the only things we have left to prove we’re a family.

  I press my face into the garden stone. It smells burnt and yellow-green, the color of filth and sick. Zahra’s eyes leak tears into smashed figs. Abu Sayeed limps through rubble and charred wood, inspecting the burnt shell of Zahra’s phone. He jumps back when he cuts his finger on a broken jar. I smell burnt cumin.

  A night breeze flicks up the edges of Huda’s hijab. The breeze tugs on a smoldering piece of newspaper from deep in the cut-open house, shredding its ash into the alley. I read the Arabic headline while it burns, translating bits of words: Morocco. Spain. That scrap of newspaper photo, the man with the potbelly, his gentle brown eyes laughing. Underneath, the circle of red ink boils and blackens, the name inside it curling into smoke.

  Feathers Over the Sun

  The expedition left the khan and followed the Orontes River south into the wide swamps of al-Ghab plain. In some places, systems of dams and aqueducts sent water to irrigate the surrounding farmland. In others, the water collected in pools where black catfish swam. The coastal mountains lay to the west, and to the east sat Bani-’Ulaym Mountain, with its steep sides and many springs that drained into the valley.

  For almost a week, their camels picked their way along the riverbank. Al-Idrisi buried himself in his notes and sketches, copying every detail of the twists and curves of the Orontes River and marking the length of al-Ghab plain. The expedition plodded on to the south until they came out onto the fertile plains surrounding the city of Hama, green and gold with farmland. The breeze swept its fingers through lush grasses and groves of pistachio trees, and in the fields, the old ruts of wheels cut into the red earth. The occasional group of Bedu herded their goats and sheep through the distant groves. The Orontes snaked away before them into the very heart of the city of Hama, where merchant caravans streamed through the gates.

  They stopped in Hama for the night. That evening, Rawiya slipped away from her companions. The city wasn’t as big as Halab, but having been built along the banks of the Orontes, it was filled with trees and flowers and the clean scent of water.

  In the center of the city, Rawiya found the Orontes again and one of Hama’s norias, the great wooden waterwheels first built by Byzantine rulers several hundred years before. The noria was connected to an aqueduct that sent water through the whole city. Rawiya listened while the damp wood creaked and wailed in rhythm. It sounded almost like music, she thought. She returned still humming that low note, as though the noria were singing. Mother, she thought, the note an ache in her chest, if only you could hear it.

  The expedition left Hama the next day, following the Orontes toward the city of Homs. When the time came for their morning prayers, they used the river water for wudu to cleanse themselves before praying.

  The camels dipped their heads to drink. The long tail of servants stopped behind them, setting out mats and prayer rugs along the sandy riverbank. Three times they washed their hands up to the wrists, their feet up to the ankles, and their faces, passing their wet hands over their hair. When they finished washing, they prepared to find the qibla, the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca, so they would know which way to face while they prayed. To do this, al-Idrisi brought out an astrolabe.

  The astrolabe was a flattened silver disk. Its front surface was ticked and carved like the geared face of a clock, delicate as spiders’ silk. This carved covering, called the rete, indicated the positions of the sun and dozens of stars when the instrument was correctly aligned with the heavens.

  Turning the astrolabe over, al-Idrisi pointed to a chart engraved on the back which listed a number of cities and the corresponding angle of the sun at given times of the year. This was called a qibla map. “Once we find the location nearest us on the chart,” he said, “we can use the angle of the sun to find the qibla.”

  “Those charts have always confused me,” Bakr said.

  Al-Idrisi twitched up the corner of his mouth, and Rawiya thought she saw him smile. “Perhaps you would like to try, Rami.” He handed her the astrolabe.

  The astrolabe was just wider than a large pomegranate, still warm from al-Idrisi’s pack. Sunlight glinted off the silver face. Rawiya studied the fine-carved points that indicated the stars, noticing the puzzling symbol of an eagle.

  Rawiya turned the disk over and squinted at the qibla chart. Never having seen an astrolabe before, she was nervous. She scanned the list of locations. A curve was provided for each of several cities. She knew if she could find the right entry, she could use the curve to figure out the relationship between the location of the sun and the direction of Mecca.

  There. She spotted the qibla curve for the location closest to theirs, ash-Sham—Damascus.

  “I’ve got it,” she said. Bakr and al-Idrisi crowded to her, following her finger toward the horizon. “If the sun is here, then the qibla must be”—she turned to the south—“there.”

  Al-Idrisi smiled his catlike smile. “Very good.” He dropped the astrolabe into Bakr’s palm, and Bakr scrambled to catch it. “See, Bakr, if you spoke less and observed more, you might understand.”

  The expedition faced south and knelt in prayer. As they finished, they raised their faces toward the rising sun. A great white bird circled them, blocking out the light.

  “What a bird!” Bakr cried. “That must be the largest ibis I’ve ever seen.”

  But both Rawiya and al-Idrisi knew it was no ibis. Rawiya touched her sling in
its leather holster. The sun leaned on the crutch of a mountain, flat as brass. The bird’s cream-colored belly cast rippling shadows, his talons flashing. Rawiya’s whole body tensed.

  “Mount the camels,” al-Idrisi cried. “Flee!”

  The expedition streamed down the hill past the farm fields toward the shelter of Homs, beyond the elbow of the Orontes. The creature swooped down, larger than any eagle, his wingspan as wide as a ship was long. His white and silver feathers shone like mother-of-pearl. His screech could shatter diamonds.

  The beast gained on them, rushing like a wind over their heads, scattering their frightened camels. Rawiya shouted to the terrified servants, urging them on. She tugged out her father’s sling and her pouch of sharp stones.

  “We’ll never make it,” Bakr cried.

  Al-Idrisi bowed his head to his camel’s neck to cut the wind. “Homs lies there before us,” he said. “In the city, we will be safe.”

  The creature’s wings swirled dust about their ears. The iron gates lay ahead of them, but the bird was regrouping again, drawing himself up into an arrow, ready to strike. He would soon overtake them outside the gates.

  Rawiya pulled back on her camel and turned to face the gigantic bird. She rushed to set a stone in her sling and pull back the strap. Her fingers resisted. Her torn nails nicked the leather and stuck.

  “Rami,” al-Idrisi cried, pulling back his own camel.

  “Turn back,” Bakr cried. “You’ll be killed.”

  Rawiya squinted into the wind, holding her breath, waiting for the bird to come into range. She aimed for his eyes.

  The creature shrieked, extending his talons, blocking the sun. His rancid breath struck Rawiya’s face, stinking of cracked bones and rotting liver.

  Rawiya let the stone fly, but the hurricane of wings jolted her aim. The stone hit the beast deep in the feathers of his belly. He screeched and pulled up, diving over the gates of Homs trailing a deep green shadow. Rising, he dropped feathers long and pale as swords and disappeared behind the hills.