Part 28 (2/2)

In the story, the shepherd knew this. He stayed beside Qais, and loved him, and loved Leila, but eventually, Leila left and Qais went crazy, and both were lost. I had first known the shepherd as the keeper of Qais's poems, and I had been drawn to him for this image, but now, I saw this was not the most important part of him. Rather, he was a man who felt deeply; sometimes, the only way to express deep feeling is through a story.

And so it is that I learned the astonis.h.i.+ng text was not just a text of love, but also loss. Or, if it is of love, then it is only because the line is so fine between loss and love; because we almost never feel loss without first feeling love, and perhaps the opposite is also true.

I had been looking all along for a language of love, and I finally found that what drove the shepherd to write, what would drive me, too, was loss. Loss moved his beautiful words, and this was not a choice. He wrote, because he had nothing else left to do.

And, years later, I would sit in a room in a warm house, winter out my window, a box of poems and letters laid before me, and think, Since I left Madame's, since that day with the text, I have tried to run away from words, but in the end, for me, too, there is nothing else left. By this point, I knew that words were not the same as experience; that love is something you feel, not something you read. But, having felt love at Madame's and lost it, and having seen the world of those I loved come undone around me, I turned back to words. Imperfect though they are, they are still something.

And, perhaps in turning back, I can thank the shepherd. (And Adel, who grew tired of his poems, so sent them to me.) I read through the text that day feeling both joy and sorrow. Joy at the power of memory, sorrow at how all three of these-Qais, and the shepherd, and Leila-were powerless against what they felt.

Toward the end the shepherd began to give up, and in my heart, I, too, felt myself release, wallow in his hopelessness, think we are all done for, powerless against what we feel. But then, at the very bottom of the last page-a signature.

I turned to Madame. ”What's that?”

She wiped her eyes. ”It's the sign of the shepherd.”

I had thought Qais was the poet. ”The shepherd wrote this?”

”Yes.”

So, he hadn't given up, he had kept trying. From loss had sprung the most beautiful words.

While I wrestled and keened before all this, Nisrine, who knew loss and love, whose family was far away, who had just lost a deep love, a constant ache in her heart, also learned her own quiet lesson.

She leaned over to me, her voice watery. ”Qais loved Leila, and yet he couldn't help her.”

I paused. This lesson was hers, not mine.

”Love does not always mean help. Sometimes, you have to be like the bird and fly yourself. Remember the bird in my story, Bea? How, all by herself, she flew away?”

The bird, who had followed her heart, who was neither Qais nor Leila, and so had learned to live on her own.

In the car on the way home, Madame and Nisrine and I were silent. The children felt our fragile mood.

Nisrine squinted at street signs, as if she were memorizing them.

We rode the elevator in silence, but it was a silence we entered together, and we were kind to one another; we took arms, held the door, helped with shoes.

In the kitchen, Madame told Lema and Nisrine and me to fold the laundry, while she put milk on to boil. Abudi came in as we were folding and took a s.h.i.+rt to put under his s.h.i.+rt, beside his belly.

”Look, I'm pregnant!”

”What did your mother-in-law say?”

”I left her celebrating. She was throwing rice off the balcony.”

The phone rang. Madame answered it. She leaned against the stove, listening, then she hung up and came over to where Nisrine and Lema and I were, to help us fold.

”That was Moni,” Madame said. ”Ha.s.san's been charged, they know who informed on him, it was that tutor. He said Baba and his friends were at the Journalists' Club. You didn't tell your tutor Baba was at the Journalists' Club, did you, Bea?”

For a moment, I didn't say anything. Like Nisrine with the gas a long time ago, I wanted to blame Abudi. I had been so careful not to tell about Baba's doc.u.ment. But, I remembered us, locked in.

What about the father?

He's at the Journalists' Club.

Where the doc.u.ment was. The place police knew was for resisters. Where the resisters had signed.

Abudi knew better. Abudi didn't talk to strange men.

All day, I had been learning lessons about words, and perhaps here was my last one: that more important than all the words in Arabic is the ability to keep silent, to know when not to speak.

Lema was folding laundry. She'd made a neat pile of our s.h.i.+rts on the kitchen table, and another neat pile for our underwear. She took my s.h.i.+rt and balled it in her fist, to crumple it. She looked at Madame.

”She just stuffs them in her drawer, anyway. It's our work, and she messes it up.”

The milk boiled.

Nisrine came over to me. She said, ”It's OK, Bea. It was a slip, you didn't mean it.”

Madame got up to turn off the gas. She spread dried yogurt and jelly on bread for the children, then handed Nisrine and me each a bowl with what was left.

”No, thank you, Mama, I'm not hungry.”

”Finish it, Bea, we've all had our share.”

I was the reason Baba was in jail and so I was deeply in debt. I didn't know how to make it right, so I pretended family debts were like money debts, with a finite number, and I looked for little forms of payment, to make it up in small, jelly-bowl-size increments.

”You finish it, Mama. I'm not hungry.”

Madame pa.s.sed the bowl to Abudi, and my debt kept looming.

Lema said, ”Go home, Bea. You must be tired of us.”

”Yes, Bea, go home.”

At Madame's, we were wary with strangers, so we were careless with one another instead. When Madame was angry, she hit Dounia. When I was upset, I closed the bathroom door and didn't care that others needed it. Abudi was the only boy. He ordered his sisters to get him his shoes and Nisrine to make him his snacks. He lay in waiting to kick them, and when Madame found out she didn't beat him. This was Abudi's privilege, kicking and not being beaten.

I also had a privilege: mine was carelessness with information. Because I was foreign and American, I met strangers in the street and talked openly to tutors and police, and I wasn't taken.

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