The Beauty of Your Face

by Sahar Mustafah

  Afaf wipes her mouth with the towel Bilal holds out for her, still clutching the side of the toilet bowl. After Nada left, she could barely sleep. Nausea pulled her from her bed.

  “It could be viral. Something you caught from hajj,” Bilal says, gently gathering her hair and twisting it away from her face as Afaf retches again. A trickle of bile, sharply bitter, burns her throat. She sits back on her haunches, breathless, trying to muster speech.

  She shakes her head. “I’m pregnant.” And as soon as Afaf says it, she knows it’s true, like someone on your doorstep, someone you hadn’t been expecting, but you know has been waiting there for some time before they finally ring the bell.

  Nurrideen School for Girls

  THE MUSLIM woman folded and unfolded her hands and he could see her become afraid again as he pointed his rifle at her.

  “How am I your enemy?” she implored him. “You don’t know me. Or any of the girls—” She seemed to choke on this last part. He wondered how much she’d heard of the ambush in the music room while she’d been locked in here. He looked around the confessional, then at the ceiling, a dusty vent directly above her head.

  “I know everything I need to, lady,” he said, watching her tears fall into the folds of her headscarf. How could she stand that thing on her head? But he was all for modesty, was sick to his stomach seeing the way women dressed nowadays, calling attention to their bodies, then blaming men for having the wrong idea.

  The woman said, “Tell me about your pain.”

  “What pain?” he said. He wouldn’t share anything with her, make himself vulnerable, allow her to play mind games with him. There was no use in giving his pain a voice, permitting it a space outside of his body. He could bear its low, constant thrumming as long as it remained contained inside of him. He and Eileen managed without ever talking about the things that happened to them—things others were responsible for. If Eileen had nightmares about her ex-boyfriend, she never told him. And he’d never mentioned a thing from his past. They were like injured birds, no longer able to fly, sidling against each other in a nest.

  The woman looked again at her shoes, snot dripping from her nose. “I know about losing people you love,” she whispered.

  The sirens were closer now, then an eerie silence engulfed the building like the moment before an explosion. The only sounds were coming from the woman’s sniffles and the soft tapping of his boots. He was certain the SWAT team was poised to capture the building—the calm before the storm.

  “I don’t give a shit what you lost,” he told her. He looked closely at her now. Her lips were pale as she chewed on the lower one. Her eyebrows were dark like brown felt. Was her hair the same color? Or a charcoal-black like the Indian woman in his apartment building?

  The family had moved in at the start of summer: an Indian man and his wife, their twin boys, and a newborn. He’d been in their apartment twice, once to repair the lockset on the front door. It was damaged by the corner of a wooden dresser the movers were hauling in. The new tenant had stood over him, smiling and watching while he removed the metal plate and drilled a new one. His wife stood in the narrow hallway, her shiny black hair in a long ponytail. Against her shoulder, she soothed a swaddled baby, startled by the shrill noise. She patted its tiny back, and softly murmured in its ear.

  The new tenant gave a nervous chuckle. “These things happen, I’m sure,” he said, his accent thick. He glanced at his wife, who remained silent and unsmiling.

  “This ain’t Calcutta,” he told the man, shaking his head as he drilled. “You gotta be careful around here.”

  The new tenant’s smile disintegrated and he didn’t say another word to him after that. The man turned toward his wife and spoke briskly to her in their language. She lingered for a few more seconds, then turned down the hallway and disappeared into a bedroom.

  Two weeks ago, he’d been called to Unit 204. A windowsill was in need of caulking. During his layoffs, he serviced Willow Wood Apartments. The management figured him for a handyman—he was the guy from Unit 103 who drove a white utility van. He could make a little extra on the side while collecting unemployment.

  That morning’s email work order was brief: moisture seeping through a kitchen window. He checked his toolbox for some weather stripping and a tube of caulk and headed to Unit 204.

  A severe winter storm had cloaked the branches of maple trees lining the western stairwell. Slowly melting snow dripped from the ledges of the walkway. The parking lot was empty except for a minivan that hadn’t moved for weeks; it was caked in a pristine layer of snow. He’d made a mental note to call the building’s association to find out whether someone had abandoned it.

  He reached the second floor and stood for a moment at the landing, catching his breath. Black-capped chickadees lined the railing, then flew off to the electrical poles when he advanced on the walkway, his toolbox clanking. The units did not have a balcony; some tenants placed stools outside their doors to sit in the summertime on the walkway.

  There was music playing inside Unit 204 and he heard muffled talking. He rang the bell once, then knocked on the door, but no one came. A minute passed. He turned the knob and the door opened.

  “Hello,” he called, craning his neck inside the unit. A worn leather sofa with rows of beaded pillows and an easy chair were arranged around an area rug. Beside the sofa, infant rattles and tiny stuffed animals spilled from a cane basket. He peered down the narrow hallway that led to the single bathroom, two bedrooms, and kitchen. He stepped into the unit, closing the door behind him. Heat instantly warmed him through his work jumpsuit.

  The unit bore little resemblance to his and Eileen’s place, though it was an identical layout. A flat-screen television faced an oversized sofa. The new tenants had installed shelves on the walls, holding varying sizes of framed photographs. Some looked recently taken: the man and his wife—visibly pregnant in one—their twin boys standing in front of them. They were dressed in suits and ties, with garlands of flowers around their necks. The woman wore a purple sari with silver embroidery, her black hair parted down the middle and pulled into a tight bun.

  In a large black-and-white photograph, an old man and woman stood before an orchard, and in another, several young men knelt beside a wading water buffalo. On a separate shelf were school portraits of the twins. They smiled timidly with missing teeth. They were identical, though he could see one boy’s eyes were set slightly wider, and the other boy had a tiny mole on his chin. Between the frames, single-stem dahlias—yellow, orange and pink—poked out of small brass urns.

  The voices and music grew louder as he walked down the hallway. From the kitchen, a spicy-sweet smell emanated. He stopped at the master bedroom, its door open, and he could see a small television set mounted on the dresser that had gouged the door plate earlier, during the summer.

  The Indian woman was sitting on the edge of the bed, her partially naked back to him. She was nursing her baby, one side of her linen peasant shirt pulled off her shoulder and the fabric draped in a soft pile around her waist.

  He gripped the handle of his toolbox hard, not making a sound as he watched. The baby made garbled noises as it suckled. He stood listening and it felt like a long time before she turned her head and saw him. Her dark hair was in a braid, a few loose strands framing her face. She quickly stood, frightening the baby. It stopped suckling and gave an indignant shriek at the disruption.

  In a flash, he saw the woman’s breast.

  “Out! Out!” she shouted at him. She shielded her baby against her chest, the empty sleeve of her shirt falling at her side as she slammed the bedroom door in his face.

  He heard the lock turn and stood there a moment. When the woman’s high-pitched voice rose again, shouting into a phone, he hurriedly left, the contents of his toolbox rattling inside its metal walls.

  Back at his own unit, he carefully closed the door behind him and set his toolbox down on the carpeted floor. Jeni ran to him and he knelt down, burying his face in her
fur, the dog’s panting in rhythm with the quick thudding of his heart. He approached the bedroom and listened at the door where Eileen was sleeping after her night shift. She liked to sleep with the clock radio playing soft instrumental music. The strumming of a guitar mingled with her snores.

  He locked himself in the bathroom and unzipped his jeans. He pulled down his underwear, lowered the lid of the toilet seat, and sat down. Against his closed eyelids, the Indian woman appeared, her small round nipple protruding from a prune-dark areola, her shining black hair falling out of its braid. Leaning back on the toilet seat, he breathed deeply and stroked himself. When he was finished, he balled up the soiled tissue paper and flushed it down the toilet.

  At six o’clock that evening, his doorbell rang. He and Eileen were watching Wheel of Fortune. Her shift at the restaurant began at eight o’clock. She sat on a sofa opposite his leather recliner, already wearing her uniform. On her feet were a pair of fuzzy pink slippers. She knitted from a ball of pastel-green yarn as she guessed the word riddles.

  The doorbell rang again and Jeni barked at the intruder.

  “I’ll get it,” he said when Eileen shifted on the couch.

  Through the peephole, he saw the Indian tenant, his hands on his hips, waiting.

  “Who is it, hon?” Eileen asked, laying her needles across her lap.

  He opened the door. He hadn’t noticed the first time how much taller the Indian man was—two inches, perhaps three—and much thinner than him. He’d gained twenty pounds since he was let go from Excel.

  The tenant dropped his hands to his sides. “Please do not enter my home without my permission,” he said, the black pupils of his eyes shining like marbles. “And only when I am present, sir.”

  Jeni barked at the stranger.

  “Quiet, Jeni!” Eileen commanded, pulling the dog aside by the collar. She stood behind him, listening and not saying a word.

  He was silent, too, and the two men looked at each other, the Indian waiting for some kind of assurance, and when he got none, he walked away, shaking his head.

  He closed the door, unable to look at Eileen.

  “What the hell was that about?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “They had a leaky window.”

  “Was his wife alone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  “And, nothing. I didn’t do nothing, Eileen. Relax.”

  “What did you do?”

  “No one answered the bell. I walked in.” It was hard looking at Eileen. “I had a work order.” His eyes dropped to her fuzzy slippers, which were turning gray along the edges of the soles.

  “For Christ’s sake! What the hell is the matter with you? You don’t go into someone’s apartment without being invited in.” She grabbed her needles and ball of yarn, slamming the bedroom door behind her. Jeni whimpered and scratched under the door for a few moments, then returned to the front room.

  He sank into his recliner, tired all of a sudden. His muscles ached as though they’d been pumped taut with air and were slowly expanding under his skin.

  He’d gotten away with a warning. As far as he could tell, no one else had been notified. He stared at the television screen for a long time; the images of contestants spinning a wheel and wildly clapping did not register in his brain. All he could see and hear was the Indian man, facing him, his thick words playing back: Please do not enter my home . . .

  The tenant had called Unit 204 “home.” He looked around his own unit, a place he and Eileen had inhabited for twelve years. There were no real tokens of a family within the space, nothing really to call it home.

  He and Eileen had never discussed children—they were both in their late forties when they met. She spent her free time knitting baby booties and caps for her coworkers and her sister’s grandkids, whose pictures she had tacked up on the refrigerator. He looked at a basket full of balls of yarn at the foot of the couch where Eileen had been sitting. The basket he’d seen in Unit 204 was brimming with toys. And on the wall were photographs of people in places he’d never see. They’d all had places they came from that they wanted to remember. He’d wanted to forget places. He’d left each place he lived, shaking each of them off his back. Still they clung to him.

  He sat on the couch, Eileen sulking in their bedroom. Anger brewed, replacing his earlier fear of getting caught. He’d been humiliated by that filthy brown man. How dare the man show up at his doorstep? Who the hell was he? Why didn’t they all just stay in their own damn country?

  When Eileen left for work without a word to him, he unlocked his metal storage cabinet in the second bedroom and withdrew his Ruger semiautomatic pistol, the one he’d shoot at the range. He tucked it inside the front of his pants, pulled on his jacket, and left the apartment. He knocked loudly on 204 and the Indian man appeared, his eyebrows furrowed.

  “Yes?”

  “If you ever threaten me again, there will be trouble.” He flicked his jacket back, revealing the butt of his pistol pressed between his belt and stomach. “This is my country. You don’t belong here. Do you understand me?” The words spilled from his mouth and at first he wasn’t sure he’d actually uttered them out loud. He’d heard them a dozen times inside his head, read them online week after week. Now the words hovered in the space between him and the Indian man, whose face slowly drained of blood. He felt a strange satisfaction, like a first drag on a cigarette, once you conquered the coughing and unpleasant taste.

  One of the twin boys poked his head under his father’s arm where he was holding the door slightly open. The Indian man swiftly commanded his son back inside. To him, the man loudly said, “How dare you . . .”

  He zipped up his jacket and returned to his unit, walking slowly and deliberately, ignoring the neighbors on that floor who’d come out to hear the commotion.

  The Tempest police showed up a half hour later at his door, their squad car lights rotating in the parking lot, casting a noiseless, cacophonous glare.

  “Good evening, sir.”

  He could see them gauging the danger he posed, peering over his shoulder into the apartment. But they didn’t ask him to come outside.

  “A Mr. Ba—” The first officer deferred to his partner.

  The second officer tapped his notepad with a pencil. “Bat-na-gar.”

  The first officer nodded. “Yes. Mr. Bat-na-gar stated that you brandished a gun, sir,” the policeman said. “Do you have any weapons on the premises, sir?”

  “Yes, I do. And they’re all legal and licensed,” he told them. “You can come in and check all my paperwork.”

  “Listen, sir,” the second one said. “You might have rightful ownership, but you can’t intimidate your neighbors with firearms.”

  “I didn’t,” he lied. “I went over there to talk. You gonna believe that piece of shit over me? I’ve lived in this building longer than him. I maintain every unit. I was born in this country, goddammit.”

  The policemen looked at each other. He remembered the guys in one chat room complaining: Pussy police won’t stand up for justice anymore. Too worried about being politically correct.

  “Sir, we’re just trying to get to the bottom of this. Your neighbors said they saw you leaving Mr. B.’s place. Consider this a warning, sir. Keep your weapons safely locked up and call us if you’re experiencing a problem. We wouldn’t want a little argument to escalate, now, would we?”

  He hadn’t seen the Indian man or his wife since that day, only their twin boys, whom he’d watch from his first-floor unit as they climbed into the school bus like they did this morning.

  A bell rang, jarring him back to the confessional. He aimed the rifle at the silently weeping Muslim woman. She was as foreign to him as the backdrops he’d seen in those photographs in the Indians’ apartment, as distant as the faintly inked places on Mr. Hillocks’s maps. But today he’d get closer to knowing.

  “Take that thing off your head,” he commanded. “I want t
o see your hair.”

  Here and Now

  1

  AS THE shots echo through the ceiling vent in the confessional, Afaf’s first thought is Azmia.

  Which period is her daughter in right now? Which classroom? What floor? But she can’t focus. It happens so fast—one moment she’s praying, and the next she hears gunfire, which she takes at first for firecrackers. Then screams echo through the ceiling vent. The blood drains from her legs, and she falls back against the wall. She calls Lou again, but he doesn’t respond. She is alone. With trembling fingers, she presses 911 on her cell phone.

  “Please state your emergency,” a Tempest police dispatcher demands.

  “Shooter in the building. Nurrideen School. Fifty-five West Chelsea Avenue.” She is amazed at how precisely she provides the information; it is a mysterious force that allows her to construct a coherent sentence.

  Her mind suddenly splinters from sheer terror as she tries to focus and remember. Remember what? What should she do next?

  Run away as fast as you can. Bits and pieces come rushing back to Afaf from the police trainings she and her staff are required to complete each year.

  The shots had come from Miss Camellia’s music room. The first-floor exit is only a few feet away. She can be in the parking lot in less than a minute.

  But she won’t leave Azmia.

  She calls Bilal.

  “There’s a shooter in the building.”

  “Where are you?” His voice is thick with fear.

  “I’m safe.”

  “And Azmia?”

  “I don’t know—I can’t remember which period she’s in. She hasn’t texted me.”

  “Calm down, draga moja,” he soothes, and that term of endearment sends her body into wracking sobs. “Breathe, Afaf. Breathe deeply. Get ahold of yourself.”

  A siren cries in the distance.

  Once the police arrive on the scene, our primary mission is to stabilize the danger. Medical assistance is secondary after enforcement agents clear the threat from the building.