Part 7 (2/2)

Maybe adaptability is a form of bravery.

YOU MAY HAVE ALREADY GUESSED who the blond policeman loved, but I was still unsure. There were many dark-haired women in this city. I kept his poem, an intimate kind of mystery that we didn't talk about.

As the days pa.s.sed we adapted to this, like so much else.

I wondered, though, and I dreamed.

Some nights, restless, I rose, untangled myself from Lema, and moved silent as dust past Nisrine and the sleeping children to the kitchen, where I indulged in feeling alone. I sat still with my head on the table. I kept the lights off.

The city was unrecognizable at night. Looking out, all I could see was black; the dark monuments to the president, the unlit hole of our garden where, one night, I thought I could see Adel standing-deep in the darkness of our garden, bending and straightening: Was he searching for something? Was he restless, like me?

Now I know why he was searching. I didn't then, but my heart went out to him: a man alone, savoring his aloneness, like me.

Our garden was our sc.r.a.pbook; it could tell you everything. All along its paths were small traces of life at Madame's and the station: orange peels, smoked cigarette b.u.t.ts, stray strands of Nisrine's cut hair. It had been a long time now and I wanted to forget, but her hair lingered. We kept finding it in unlikely places-a rung of the swing set, a swallow's nest the children found, wrapped around a stray cat's tail.

Beside Nisrine's hair, the jasmine also bloomed along the bushes and the fence of the garden. The flowers bent, small and bone white, their perfume evaporating up into the night, over our balcony, and into the stars, where if there had been a light I would have seen it, the way Adel combed carefully through the bushes, hand on each leaf until finally when he straightened-a dark line like dusk, the night sky like smoke-he held a strand of Nisrine's stray hair.

It was night, and I was too far away.

What I saw was the man, his long shape and bare head in the moonlight. Later, his movements took on a sudden lightness. He lifted his arm, looked at his finger, and my heart, too, went up in gladness that whatever he was searching for, he'd found.

WHEN WEEKS Pa.s.sED and I still hadn't heard from the university, Baba called a friend, and his friend found a tutor for me. My tutor had studied in London for one year and now he had lots of students, so he was used to foreigners. On the phone before we met, he said his name was Imad but his London friends called him Matt to show affection, which Madame thought was funny.

”Matt?” she said. The word mat meant dead in Arabic.

”Matt.”

”Matt mat, Allah yerhamo.” It was what you said when someone died: Allah yerhamo. G.o.d rest him. Madame shook her head. ”Bea, you in the West have strange signs of affection.”

Before my first lesson, there was a rush to get ready, and the family helped me. Nisrine ran a lint roller across my jeans. Lema lent me a necklace of red beads.

Madame stood in the doorway, skeptical. ”Don't tell him anything, Bea. To be a tutor you need a license. That means he talks to the government.”

She made me turn around so she could see that my s.h.i.+rt covered the top of my jeans.

The first time I met Imad, he wore a burgundy vest and had chapped lips that he said came from the salt in the ocean. His parents were from a beach town. In cla.s.s, it was only Maria from Spain and me, and we each had a different vocabulary. I told Imad that someday I wanted to read the astonis.h.i.+ng text in the National Library, and he told me he could help; he would teach me cla.s.sical poetry.

That day, to start, we read a poem and made up similes. Maria was being gregarious. She described her hands as hard like amethysts. I described my eyes as round like lentils, which made Imad laugh.

Maria said to him, ”Ooh, is that cashmere?”

Imad said yes.

”Ooh, can I touch it?”

So Maria and I both touched Imad's burgundy vest across the table.

”Very nice,” Maria said, ”very nice.”

”It's vintage,” said Imad.

I was also being gregarious, but without trying. I was wearing the red necklace from Lema. For conversation practice, Maria told a story about a pointy pair of Egyptian shoes that a car ran over. She meant the car ran over her toe-or the pointy part of the shoes. In Maria's stories, it seemed, it was always important to note what she was wearing. When it was my turn, I told a story about how I dropped a pickle gla.s.s on my toe when I was in high school, and it broke my toe but not the gla.s.s.

Imad leaned over to correct me. ”We say jar, not gla.s.s, Bea.” But, he said it nicely.

On my way back to Madame's, everything felt light and giddy. Lema opened the door for me.

”What's with all the prettiness, Bea?” She made me turn around once, and called her mother to come look. ”Uh-huh, see what one necklace does? Now you look like a girl.”

It was the day my mother was supposed to call from America. On the phone, I could not stop babbling, and imposing the best of this country's wisdom.

”Here, we make tea with cardamom,” I said. ”Have you ever tried tea with cardamom?”

”Here, we never eat on the run. Are you eating on the run, Mom? You should let it digest.”

I was enjoying being generous.

”How much is this phone call? You want to hang up and I'll call you back?”

On the other end, I could imagine exactly how my mother stood in the door the way she had always stood, the way her mother must have stood, because we all stood that way-my mother, my aunts, me: head and stomach forward, neck and shoulders curled into the back making the shape of a clamsh.e.l.l. Her arm drew imperfect angles at her hip; her hand rested against her elbow. My mother said, ”Don't turn Arab on me, Bea.”

THERE WERE NO BIRDS IN THIS CITY, only the doves that the mosques let out in the evening to fly overhead, and remind us the sky was empty when they were gone. They floated in lazy circles above the slate rooftops, their wings like sooty fingerprints on the clean-swept sky. We lived near a mosque, so we always saw the birds from a distance, as small blots on our horizon. They had been let out now and circled above us, proclaiming their absence. Blown by the small winds, they swept low over the police station, where a blond man stood on the rooftop, waving.

Abudi flew a plastic-bag kite off the balcony.

”Look, Bea, it's a bird!”

”It's a kite.”

”It's a fis.h.!.+”

The kite flew with the other doves, trying to catch them. The wind rustled the trees. The kite dipped and veered into the garden, where it caught in the bushes.

Nisrine and I came running. ”Abudi, your kite!”

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