In the Language of Miracles

by Rajia Hassib

  “You should talk to Ahmed first,” Loula said. “He might know someone who could get you a cheaper place. Sometimes these places they recommend cost an arm and a leg.”

  “I don’t need a cheap place.”

  “Just to save up, you know.”

  “Thanks, but I think we’ll be fine.”

  Loula did not answer. Born in Brooklyn to an American mother, she was Samir’s first cousin whom he had seen only intermittently when she vacationed with her parents in Egypt. He suspected she was taking them in only because his uncle had insisted. Months earlier, Uncle Omar had assured Samir that he would have welcomed him in his own home had he not lived in Detroit. Loula was the only person Uncle Omar knew who might offer Samir temporary shelter.

  Ahmed, her husband, Samir had met only once, and he had detested him. Tall and lanky, Ahmed had sat down in Samir’s father’s living room, legs crossed, the heel of his shoe facing Samir’s father in unabashed neglect of Egyptian manners, and had spoken in an Arabic scattered with unnecessary English expressions that his then six-year tenure in the United States did not warrant. In contrast, Loula had talked almost exclusively in Arabic, stuttering as she searched for words, pronouncing the letters in a heavy accent that belied her features, so Egyptian she seemed fit to play the role of Cleopatra. Considering that she was born and raised in New York, Samir had found it fascinating that she could even converse in the language. He did not understand how she had ever ended up with Ahmed.

  In the station wagon, Samir tried to let Om Kalthoum’s voice soothe him again, but he failed. He did not know what had offended him more: Loula’s implying that he would not be able to afford the hospital housing (which, to be honest, he was not entirely sure he could), or her suggestion that he ask her husband for help, a man who, Samir suspected, knew nothing more about Brooklyn than he himself did. Whatever knowledge Ahmed had amassed in his years spent in the United States, Samir was sure he would be able to catch up on shortly. He did not need help from anyone, and certainly not from other Egyptians whose only claim to expertise on all things American lay in the limited experience a few years had to offer. Closing his eyes, Samir reminded himself he would have to veer away from any unpleasant confrontations with Ahmed during the days or weeks he’d have to spend at his home, and, most important, he’d have to make sure he got out of there as soon as possible.

  To his chagrin, however, he and Nagla ended up staying with Loula and Ahmed for three months. Only a day after their arrival, the human resources lady at the hospital, portly and with too-blond hair, had looked at Samir over her reading glasses and told him, one more time, in a slow English that implied he might have had trouble understanding the language, that housing for the residents was currently full. He’d have to wait until June 30, when the senior residents would move out and make room for incoming interns. Samir, explaining again that he had been told accommodations might be available a month or two before his starting date, had to sit and listen to her explain to him that the key word here was might. Nothing was available. Short of paying for a hotel room for eighty-some days, Samir had no other choice but to impose on his cousin’s hospitality.

  Loula was not as indisposed to having them as he first imagined. She and Nagla managed to use a mixture of broken Arabic and English to communicate, and in a matter of days Samir could see, to his relief, that the two got along well. Loula introduced Nagla to a plethora of baby products she had never heard of, from changing tables (“Really? A piece of furniture just to change a baby’s diaper?” Nagla had later whispered to him) to baby gyms, swings, and all sorts of bottle-cleaning accessories. Nagla slowly started cooking Egyptian food for Loula and Ahmed, taking over the kitchen and preparing dishes of stuffed eggplants and green peppers, musakka, and baked fish in a casserole of potatoes, garnished with celery and marinated in lemon, cumin, and minced garlic. Within weeks, Nagla was spending as much time in the kitchen as she had at home, sometimes by herself and often with Loula by her side, trying to learn the exact way to wrap grape leaves around their stuffing. Nagla, Samir realized, was much, much more comfortable than he was.

  Even Ahmed did not seem to mind having them, but Samir suspected that was mainly due to how much Ahmed enjoyed telling him exactly what to do.

  “So you’re really going to take that hospital housing place, huh?” Ahmed asked him one day. They were sitting on the back deck, where Samir found out anyone wishing to smoke had to go. Samir had not expressed his annoyance when Loula, seeing him light a cigarette inside the house only minutes after his arrival, had politely said, “Feel free to use Ahmed’s ashtray.” She ushered him to the deck, opened the sliding doors, shoved him outside, and closed the doors behind him, coughing. He had found the adjustment a bit cumbersome, especially considering how cold the weather still was in April. Especially considering that he frequently had to endure Ahmed’s company.

  “I am taking the housing offer, yes,” Samir said, bending out of his chair to flick his ashes into the ashtray on the table between them. Ahmed was smoking a cigar, and the wind, changing direction, blew the odorous smoke Samir’s way. He got up and walked to the railing, stood leaning against it and looking at the hill in the distance.

  “In Flatbush? You’re going to live in Flatbush?” Ahmed asked. He was sitting in an oversized wicker armchair, both his feet resting on the coffee table, the cigar dripping ashes on the deck. Samir, hiding a vague feeling of alarm that started to creep up on him (what was wrong with Flatbush?), looked calmly at Ahmed and nodded.

  “It’s close to the hospital.”

  “You don’t have to live close to the hospital. It’s Brooklyn! You can take the subway, you know.”

  “I’ll be on call a lot, and I don’t want to be too far from Nagla in case she needs me.”

  “You can get a place in Bay Ridge. That’s where all the Arabs live.”

  “I don’t want to live where all the Arabs live,” Samir said, his teeth clenched. “I want to live close to the hospital.”

  “Well, I don’t blame you,” Ahmed said, crossing his feet. “I wouldn’t want to live too close to Arabs, either.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Samir said, irritated. That man could not sit without showing the soles of his shoes.

  “I’m telling you, they’re not the best company, when you live abroad. Still, Nagla would make friends. And you’d be close to all the shops selling Egyptian food.”

  “What do you mean, they’re not the best company? I’d love to live close to other Egyptians.”

  “Oh, so you’d love to live with fellow Egyptians, would you?” Ahmed asked.

  “Yes!” Samir lied. He knew exactly what Ahmed meant, how people always warned to veer away from Egyptians and Arabs when you lived abroad, how they always said Egyptians would help you at home but stab you in the back the moment you set foot off Egyptian soil. One of his fellow medical students had sworn to him, only weeks earlier, that an Egyptian resident at a Florida hospital had assured him he need not apply there because they never took foreign graduates unless they achieved the highest scores in their medical equivalency tests. This same resident, he later found out, had scored in the seventy-sixth percentile and had still secured a spot. “He just didn’t want me there, competing with him,” his disgruntled friend had told him.

  Everyone said Egyptians abroad acted as if preserving their own little piece of success required they make sure no one else shared it. Samir secretly believed this to be true. (“They will snoop into your business all the time, too,” this same expert on expatriate Egyptians had whispered to him. “Come into your home unannounced and open your fridge just so they can see if you’re living at the same standards you had in Egypt or if you had to tighten the belt.”) Still, he hated to admit all this in front of Ahmed, and, even worse, hated to hear Ahmed criticize Egyptians and Arabs, as if he were not one of them. It was one thing to know the faults of your own people, he thought, but something completely different to speak so irreverently of them, as if yo
u had somehow become better by virtue of a few years spent in the United States, in a large Connecticut house, with imported Cuban cigars that dripped ashes on the deck’s gray wood.

  “Yes,” Samir repeated. “I would like to live close to other Arabs. But I’ve already signed the lease on the new apartment.”

  “Oh well,” Ahmed said, his lips twisting in a sly grin. “I guess Flatbush it will be, then.”

  “Yes. Flatbush it will be,” Samir said, gratified to have the last word.

  A few months later, Samir had realized that Ahmed might have had a point regarding Bay Ridge. Nagla, having to stay home with Hosaam as Samir worked eighty-hour weeks, had grown irritated with isolation. She knew no one, and even as he encouraged her to take Hosaam to the park to meet other parents and make new friends, he knew she was too self-conscious about her limited English.

  Plus, the apartment itself proved to be small and dark, with only one bedroom and a windowless living room stuck between the kitchen and bedroom. Even though they had both been relieved finally to take possession of their own apartment, walking in for the first time, Nagla’s smile was not what Samir had hoped for. Her muffled comments and occasional “Oh, that’s nice,” as she walked from room to room felt more like polite replies directed at strangers. He knew she was comparing this space with the one they had left in Egypt, which his father had purchased for him years earlier, with three bedrooms and a large, airy living room, the full front of it made out of sliding glass doors that opened to an eighth-floor balcony with a view of the Mediterranean. The apartment in Egypt, he had felt like telling her, was better, yes, but what else was better? What else?

  Time, he had hoped, might help Nagla get used to the apartment that was to be her home for the next three years. He was wrong. Only three weeks after they had moved, he walked home from work late one afternoon and found a fire truck parked in front of the four-story brick building. At the foot of the front steps stood Mrs. Russell, the landlady, talking to one of the firefighters. When she saw him approach, she pointed at him and said something to the firefighter, who laughed softly and shook his head. Samir, curious but not necessarily alarmed because he could see no fire, had tried to walk past them and up the stairs when Mrs. Russell held him by the arm and spoke in slow, deliberate English.

  “You must tell your wife to be careful, or she will burn the building down!”

  When he looked at her, puzzled, she repeated her admonishment, word for word, only slower and louder. “You . . . must . . . tell . . . your . . . wife. Be . . . careful. Building . . . will . . . burn . . . down!” For added emphasis, she pointed at the building, lifted both arms high above her head, and then let them both drop.

  Upstairs, Hosaam was sitting in the crib Loula had given them, holding on to the rails and crying.

  “Nagla?” Samir called. There was no answer, but he could hear whimpering. Before turning to head into the bedroom, Samir glanced toward the kitchen and saw a patch of dark soot on the ceiling. The entire apartment smelled like burned oil.

  She was sitting on the floor, in the corner between the bed and the wall, her legs drawn to her chest, her face buried in her knees, sobbing. Samir, speaking softly, sat down next to her.

  “Nagla, what happened?”

  Looking up, Nagla covered her face with both hands and said, “I . . . was cooking. The . . . alarm,” she said, sobbing, “the fire . . . alarm . . . went off. I didn’t know it would. I was frying eggplants. I wanted to cook musakka.”

  Samir brushed her hair away from her face.

  “I tried to get up . . . on a chair, to see how to turn it off. It was very loud and . . . Hosaam . . . was sleeping. I could not, and I went to ask for help . . . I went to Mrs. Russell. When we came back . . . I forgot, you see, I had the oil on the stove,” she said, sobbing again. “It was on fire. I grabbed the pot and threw it in the sink, threw flour on it, and put it out. When I turned around, Mrs. Russell was not there. She called 911. She said . . . she said . . .”

  “Shushhh,” Samir said, pulling her closer to him.

  “She said this is not Africa, you don’t do that, you don’t set fires in the house,” Nagla said.

  “Shushhh, it’s okay, habibti, it’s no big deal. It’s okay.”

  “I was so embarrassed, Samir! I was so scared and so embarrassed. I mean, Hosaam was here alone, when I went to get her,” she said, pulling away from him and looking him in the eyes. “I felt so, so stupid! What if something had happened to him?”

  “It’s okay, habibti, nothing happened. It was only an accident.” He pulled her arms away from his neck and reached for her hands.

  “Ouch!” she said, snatching her hands away from him.

  Only then did he see her hands wrapped in kitchen rags, the palms burned where she had held the hot skillet, both hands peppered with already-swollen blisters.

  Hours later, as he sat in the emergency room waiting for other doctors to treat his wife, Samir had thought about that apartment, that small apartment belonging to strangers who could tell him and his wife what they could and could not do, and he had thought of how miserable Nagla had been. He would, he promised himself, holding Hosaam tight, make it up to her. She would have her own home.

  • • •

  That thought was the one comfort he held during his three-year residency. Every trouble Nagla faced, he blamed on that apartment. Every time it snowed while he was at work, he would look out the window and think of her, trapped in a claustrophobic apartment with Hosaam, alone and undoubtedly weary of the boy’s understandable whining as he, too, suffered from loneliness and boredom. If they had been in a large house, things would have been easier for everyone. Hosaam would have had more room to play, maybe even a backyard with a swing set, and Nagla would not have had to feel, as he suspected, that the move from Egypt had been a downgrade. The house would also be something concrete she could report back to her family; she could send pictures, show her mother and brothers that she was living well, that he had provided for her well, just as he should.

  They started house-hunting a year into his residency. Samir would have started earlier, if he could, but it took him months to convince his father to sell his share of the family’s automobile dealership to his brothers and wire him the money.

  “Selling out now will cost you in the long run,” his father had cautioned.

  “I need this money now, Baba,” Samir said, vexed that his father interfered in his plans.

  “But how will you know where to buy? Why New Jersey? You’ll have to commute for the next two years. And what if you decide to move to another state after you’re done with your residency?”

  “I won’t commute for that long. I’m sure it will take us some time to find a good house, and by then I’ll be closer to the end of my residency. I just need to start looking. And I like New Jersey. I’ve been researching the job market there. There is one small town I’m particularly interested in, a place that could definitely use another internist. I’m sure I’d be able to set up my own practice there in no time.”

  “Insh’Allah you will be able to,” his father corrected him.

  “Yes, insh’Allah I will,” Samir said, irritated. His father, who had met Ehsan only a handful of times, sometimes acted so similar to her that Samir wondered if he should encourage the widower and the widow to spend their final years together, walking around their apartment, burning incense and reminding their offspring to say “God willing” whenever they spoke of their futures, lest they jinx the whole thing.

  Samir, pacing the kitchen of his apartment, had heard all of this before, all his father’s arguments against buying a house, all the precautions and what-ifs. But his father was talking to him from the balcony of his apartment with the Mediterranean view, sipping Turkish coffee his maid had prepared while he read the morning newspapers. Meanwhile, Samir was pacing a nine-foot-square kitchen, whispering so that he would not wake Nagla and Hosaam, wondering why he had to talk his father into sending him his inheritance, w
hich he’d signed off to him already.

  “I was actually considering waiting a bit, Baba, only things have changed now. I have some good news,” he said, waiting for effect.

  “What?”

  “Nagla is pregnant.” He tried to sound as cheerful as he could, pressing one hand hard against his forehead.

  His father’s exclamations of joy he had anticipated, of course. One more grandchild, one more heir, one more grandson (hopefully), one more human being to carry on his father’s genes. Soon, Samir explained, Nagla would be too tired to house-hunt. If they could find a house now, he would have enough time to renovate or paint or change the carpets, so that Nagla and the kids (plural) would be able to move in as soon as he was done with his training, if not before that. Summerset, only an hour away from New York, was a small town where good houses were not abundant; if they found one, they would need to snatch it up before it was gone. “All I’m trying to do,” he told his father, “is make sure my kids have a good home to live in. I only have your grandchildren’s best interest in mind.”

  They found the house a couple of months before Khaled was born, just when they were both ready to give up house hunting in anticipation of the arrival of their second child. They had both gotten out of the car, stood in front of the white house with green shutters, and looked at it for a while before going in. Samir saw Nagla’s face brighten up in a way he had not seen since Egypt, and he knew that this was their home. The wraparound porch. The red door. He did not care that it was four decades old, that three of the upstairs bedrooms shared one small bathroom, nor did he care that the carpets needed to be changed or that the porch awaited repainting. That the kitchen needed to be remodeled. Nagla stood in the breakfast-area bay window and looked at the backyard, a sunny patch of flat grass that faded into a forest of trees.

  “This looks like something I’ve only seen in movies but never imagined I’d own!” she said.

  “You like it?” Samir asked.