In the Language of Miracles

by Rajia Hassib

  A woman probably her age with carefully styled silver hair, wearing khaki pants and a sky-blue sweater, stood behind her, waiting for Ehsan to clear the way. His grandmother was oblivious to the woman’s patience, lost in the six or seven kinds of lettuce that Khaled knew she was eyeing in order to choose the one that most closely resembled Egyptian lettuce (romaine, he knew). The woman put her hand up to her mouth and cleared her throat. Ehsan bent down, picked up a head of lettuce, held it closer to her eyes, pulled the wire holding it together straight, and peered down to read the label. The woman coughed, louder this time, and Ehsan put the lettuce back and picked up another one. Khaled, mortified, walked up to his grandmother and pulled her aside by her arm.

  “You’re blocking the way, Setto,” he whispered as he watched the woman bend down, pick up one head of Belgium endive, and trot away.

  “What?” Ehsan looked from him to the woman.

  “You were blocking her way,” Khaled said, letting go of her arm.

  “Well, she should have said something!” Ehsan said loudly in Arabic as the woman pushed her shopping cart away, moving on to the tomatoes. Khaled, blushing, stepped to their cart and waited as Ehsan went back to examining lettuce.

  He watched, his fingers quickly tapping the child seat in the shopping cart, his eyes darting from her to the people around her. He knew exactly what they saw when they looked at her, knew how out of place she looked with her black attire and her exhaustive scrutiny. Everything about her seemed designed to invite disapproval: the way she picked up fruit and lifted it to her nose to sniff at it, the way she licked her fingers in order to peel the edges of the produce bags apart to open them, the way she held the green peppers in her hand, raising them to the light to examine them one by one before placing them back down, the way she seemed to wander aimlessly from stand to stand, walking around in circles in search of God knows what. Even her heaviness embarrassed him as he compared her with the elegant American ladies in their capris and flip-flops. He felt she did not belong there, and it suddenly occurred to him that she was with him, and that her misplacement reflected on him, as well. He looked around to see if anyone was looking at him, too, if anyone was thinking how he, too, did not belong, how her presence with him made him not belong.

  “What’s wrong, habibi?” Ehsan said, placing a bag filled with limes in the shopping cart. Khaled flinched. He had not seen her walk up to him.

  “What’s wrong?” she said again, eyes narrowing.

  “Nothing, Setto. Nothing,” he lied, reaching into the shopping cart to straighten the bags she had placed there so far, lifting them and stacking them against each other, putting them in order, waiting for her to be done.

  • • •

  By the time Ehsan finished, it had started pouring, and by the time Khaled pulled the truck up to the storefront and loaded the groceries, he was soaked to the bone. Back at home, he carried the bags into the kitchen and ran upstairs. He changed into dry shorts and a T-shirt, then stood looking out his bedroom window. The rain was drumming against the roof, and he could see the trees sway with the hot spring winds. His day home early was ruined, and the butterflies that an early sunshine had convinced him he would see were probably all in hiding now. Hiking would be useless.

  Days like these were why he first started his blog. Sitting at his desk, Khaled logged on and scrolled through his last few entries. Earlier that day he had been thinking of the monarch butterfly. He had been interested in monarchs ever since middle school when he learned about their migration, yet his interest had piqued in the past year, with his blog taking an unintentionally obsessive turn toward them. He looked at the pictures he had posted of the different butterflies he came across while hiking, mostly grainy low-resolution photos taken on his cell phone before he developed the habit of carrying a pocket camera with him at all times. He had not seen many monarchs this spring, yet he was always on the lookout for them. The yellow, black, and earthy browns of their wings fascinated him almost as much as the royal blue of the blue morpho did, and their pedestrian status endeared them to him; unlike other, rarer butterflies, the monarchs were ever-present, dependable friends who always showed up when needed. He loved going on hikes and knowing that a monarch or two would likely cross his path. What truly interested him, though, was their migration. He scrolled up to an older blog entry and read it through again.

  The monarchs migrate north to south in the fall, heading to Mexico. Sometimes a single butterfly can travel up to 3,000 miles. Their migration is different from other butterflies because it is two-way and they come back to their grounds in the north in the spring. Because their life cycle is shorter than the duration of the migration, the butterflies that return in the spring are never the same as the ones that migrated in the fall. They are their children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren.

  He read through the post again, his fascination with this aspect of monarch migration as intense as it was when he first learned about it years earlier. Of everything he knew about bugs in general and lepidoptera in particular, this one piece of information was the catalyst, he knew, the reason he had never outgrown his childish fascination with insects. Many of his friends developed that same interest for short periods of time, mostly in elementary school, walking around with squiggly bugs hidden in their pockets, ready to fling them at the closest unsuspecting girl. Yet for him the fascination never waned, and he carried it with him, first secretly as the other boys learned to scowl at such childish obsessions, then openly again after he learned to snub all those who snubbed him. His father had first encouraged the obsession, seeing it as an indication of both future machismo and future scientific inclination, a stepping-stone toward a medical career for his son. Later his father would look at an eighth-grade Khaled walking out of the house with a magnifying lens and a butterfly net with knotted eyebrows and a glare. “He’s still only a boy, Samir! Let him have fun,” Nagla would come to her son’s defense—and, much later, Samir would walk in on Khaled, pick up one of the various entomology books that inevitably lay scattered in his room, and, lips turned downward at the corners, would comment on how biology was a good premed choice.

  Once, and only once, Khaled tried to explain his fascination to his father. He was lying in bed, a book in hand, when Samir walked in and started flipping through the books that lay scattered on and around the nightstand. On the top bed, Hosaam was on his laptop, his earphones plugged into his ears, the loud and deep thud-thud of rhythm vibrating through the bed’s frame and making Khaled’s own mattress tremble. Khaled watched his father pick up one book with a large monarch on the cover and flip through it, lips pursed.

  “They migrate, you know,” Khaled started, putting his own book down.

  “Who? Those?” Samir showed Khaled the cover. Khaled nodded.

  “They migrate twice every year, from north to south in the fall and from south to north in the spring.” His father looked at him, one eyebrow raised. “I thought you’d be interested in that.”

  “In what? Butterfly migration?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you serious?”

  Samir looked down on him with a smirk. Khaled blushed, picked up his book, and stared at a random page. He could feel his father’s gaze on him as well as his own regret for having tried to communicate, for having subjected a topic so dear to him to his father’s unfailing sarcasm. He stared at the open book, unblinking, until his eyes watered and his father eventually walked out, tossing the book he had held back on the floor.

  Looking at his blog post, Khaled remembered what he had originally intended to tell his father, what he had hoped his father would recognize: the fascinating possibility of finding the way back to a home that one has never known. No one knew how the second- or third-generation monarchs found their way back north when they had never been there before. Even now, when he was too old to believe in any of Ehsan’s fables, Khaled would sometimes remember her stories of lost boys following unseen clues home and imagine that the butterf
lies, like those boys, had an inner compass that directed them to where they were supposed to be, and the idea of a home that one carried within filled him with hope and peace. His father’s inability to appreciate such ties flabbergasted him.

  Still staring at his weeks-old blog post, Khaled noticed a new entry from Brittany. Heart thumping, he focused on the date, afraid he had missed an old communication—but he had not. She had been on his blog this morning. Check out this link, her post said, followed by a hyperlink to a travel website. Quickly, he clicked on her link and saw an advertisement for a monarch-tracking trip to Mexico, a companion to the article he had sent her earlier. So she had read his article. She had also been interested enough to look up the topic further and send him a link in return. He grinned.

  “You want to come and drink a cup of coffee with me?”

  Khaled jumped. Turning around, he saw Ehsan standing in his doorway. “It’s only me, boy. You look like you’ve just seen the Jinn.”

  “Sorry, Setto. Didn’t hear you coming.”

  “So how about that coffee?”

  “Not right now, thank you.”

  “Come on. It’s one cup of Turkish coffee, and I’ve already prepared it,” she said, walking away from his door and heading down the stairs. Khaled stared at the empty doorway, his head bent to one side, his eyes narrowing. What was the point of asking a question if it was really an order? His father did this—Why don’t you give up this bug nonsense and go to medical school? Ehsan certainly did it. His mother, too—Can you take your grandmother to the store? For a few seconds he considered staying where he was, ignoring Ehsan, pretending she was not sitting downstairs in the kitchen waiting for him. Then he got up, sighing, and closed his laptop before heading down himself.

  • • •

  Two small cups stood in the middle of the breakfast table, filled to the brim with steaming Turkish coffee. Ehsan sat down and reached for hers, started sipping at it as she looked out on the pouring rain. Khaled pulled out a chair and sat across from her, sniffing the rising aroma of dark roast coffee spiced with cardamom.

  “I haven’t had this since the last time you were here,” he said. She nodded, still looking out the window. He knew she could remember it as well as he did, the way she used to make coffee for him and Hosaam and have them sit down and drink it with her in the mornings. He remembered how bitter the coffee tasted when he first tried it, how its coarse grounds felt like fine sand on his tongue, but he was so happy to be included, so proud he was finally old enough to try the favorite drink of his mother and grandmother, that he did not mind the taste. He even grew to like it, by the time she left. Not as much as Hosaam, who continued making it for himself for months after she was gone. To Khaled, the ritual was always associated with Hosaam. He thought that was perhaps why Ehsan had not once made the coffee for him in the months she had been here.

  “It’s good coffee,” he said, trying to get his thoughts off Hosaam. He had sipped at it a bit too eagerly in an attempt to finish it quickly and rush back to his room, and now his tongue burned and prickled. He looked up at her, wondered how come she could slurp the scorching liquid with such ease. She was still looking out the window. Waiting for her to talk, Khaled became aware of the drumming rain, the monotonous sound soothing. He tried his coffee again, took a small sip and let it swirl around in his mouth.

  “So, tell me what happened.” She turned her empty cup over in its saucer.

  Khaled swallowed, almost choking on his coffee. He coughed. “What?”

  “What happened to your brother. Tell me what happened.”

  “You know, Setto,” he said. She shook her head.

  “I know what they told me. I want to know what you know. What you saw.”

  Khaled’s heart raced and he grew dizzy, seeing her image sway in front of him. He waited for a moment to regain his bearings. She had been here almost a full year and not once had she talked to him directly of his brother. Why start now?

  “What do you mean?” he asked, his voice hoarse. The coffee grains clung to his throat and almost made him gag.

  “How was he, the last few months? How did he behave? Your mother used to call and tell me stuff, but . . . I want to hear it from you,” she said as she turned her cup upright again, straightening it and looking at the lines the coffee grounds had drawn on the inside surface of the delicate china.

  Khaled watched her turn the cup around in her hand, hold its inside surface to the light and look at the lines, biting on her lower lip. She was trying to decipher the future, he knew, to read clues from God or angels or someone, he didn’t know who, someone who knew what was going to happen to her next and who she believed would send her encoded messages. She had done the same with his cup, before, as well as Hosaam’s. Khaled had held Hosaam’s cup in his hand on the last day she was there, three years earlier, and had stared inside, had seen a dark line squiggled on the side of the cup, its end bifurcated. I see a snake, Khaled had said. Hosaam had snatched the cup from his hand, That’s my cup, he had said. Then the cup fell to the floor, shattering just as Ehsan hurried to grab it from the fighting boys. For the rest of the day, the last day she had with them, she had followed Khaled around asking, What did you see, exactly? What did you see?

  He watched her turn the cup in her hands and waited. Her face was contoured with concentration, and for a moment he wished she’d see something good, something bright and happy that would come through just because she said so.

  “What do you see?” he asked.

  “Oh, nothing,” she said, putting the cup down. “The usual stuff. Nothing new. Now, tell me.”

  “I don’t know, Setto. What do you want to know?”

  “How was he during the last year or so? Your mother kept complaining about him but never really told me what he was doing. What happened to him, do you know?”

  Khaled shook his head, as if the motion would hurl away the images that came flowing into his mind with her questions: Hosaam’s calm face as Samir handed him a couple of college applications, followed by his brows knitted in concentration as he sat at his desk and, as soon as his father was out of the room, took a pair of shears and cut each application in hair-thin strips, then, holding the strips in bunches, cut those again, until the bundle of applications turned into a pile of fine strands that he then flushed. Hosaam’s disappearance into the attic, that space that he had claimed years earlier and that Khaled had envied him, and the onset of unnerving silence—no outbursts of loud music, no crescendos of drumbeats. When his grandmother asked what had changed, Khaled remembered the distance in Hosaam’s eyes whenever he looked at him, a new vacancy behind them that implied anything could now move in.

  He didn’t want to remember, and he loathed talking about his brother. It reminded him of the police interrogations the days after the murder. Did you see anything suspicious? Was he in contact with anyone new? Did he develop any new religious affiliations? Did he pray more often? And of him, trying to refrain from asking why on earth they thought it made sense that Hosaam did what he did out of religiousness. Really? Killing his ex-girlfriend and himself because Allah told him to do so? But he knew better than to question the police, so he just told them all he knew. Almost all he knew. Everything he thought would be relevant, anyway.

  “I really don’t want to talk about this, Setto,” he murmured, gulping the last of his coffee. His grandmother nodded.

  “I know, habibi, I know. I didn’t mean to open old wounds.” She lifted his empty cup and turned it, laying it upside down on its saucer.

  “How do you know what the patterns mean?” Khaled asked, nodding toward the upturned cup.

  “My grandmother taught me how to read the coffee grounds. She was famous for her ability to find things out. People eventually grew scared of her,” she said, smiling and shaking her head. “One time she read the cup of one of her sons in front of a dozen or so people. They said she looked down, peered inside the cup, then reached for her slipper and flung it at the poor man.�
� She laughed. “She had seen in the pattern that he’d taken a second wife in secret. Called him a coward, and he, a grown man, stood shaking, humiliated in front of the entire family. They say women would smuggle their husbands’ cups to her after that incident.”

  “Was she right? About the second wife?”

  “Of course she was!”

  “But that’s more like finding a secret out, right? Not exactly foretelling the future.”

  Ehsan shrugged. “Sometimes. Sometimes you can do both.”

  “But Baba always said it is haram to foretell the future. Called it a sin. Kazab almonagemoon wa law sadafu,” he said in slow Arabic. His father had repeated the popular saying so often in his presence that he had memorized it. Fortune-tellers lie even if they accidentally tell a truth. Always repeated in association with Ehsan, Khaled now remembered.

  “That saying speaks of reading the stars, like the Arabs of old used to do. Not of reading the coffee,” Ehsan retorted. She was being literal, Khaled knew, hanging on to her interpretation of one word. He considered saying that, just to keep the conversation going and to insure that she did not speak of Hosaam again, but he decided against it.

  “So why do you do it, Setto?”

  “Old habits,” she said, taking his cup and peering inside. He fixed his eyes on her face, felt his heart racing. Nonsense, of course. Nonsense and superstition.

  “But didn’t you always say there was no way to avoid God’s fate? That what was written on the forehead had to be seen?”

  “Sometimes,” she said, still peering into his cup, turning it toward the light.

  “How come sometimes? You think you can change the future if you see it in that cup?” He pointed toward the cup in her hand but noted his own hand trembling. He put it down, resting it against his thigh.

  Ehsan put his cup down, sighed, and looked at him. “Why are you being so difficult, habibi? Why is it always questions, questions, questions? Can’t you let an old woman have her—”