Part 29 (1/2)

But, Baba was taken.

He would have gone to jail at some point, no matter what, he had signed a doc.u.ment. But, because of me and my tutor, he had gone now.

Of course, I wanted to make it up, to undo what I spoke, I saw how fluency isn't vocabulary- Madame stopped me. There was more.

”Moni says the blond one is no longer police. There's a rumor that his father beat him, because he found out about a love affair. They took away his uniform.”

And now we all looked at Nisrine, who had relinquished Adel, whom we had watched tear up his poems one by one.

She stood beside me, her arm in my arm. I felt her stiffen.

So, this was why he had not come for her, because they had been found out. In the end, it was not Madame who we needed to hide their love from, but his father who had beat him. We could see the pain of this information.

And, I know now how it all connected: A simple sentence, He's at the Journalists' Club.

A simple confession, to save a tutoring business.

A simple report, in the wrong blond man's hands: Adel had been reading Imad's confession; it had been on his desk, he had seen the note about Baba, and he had been planning to help us, when his father came in. His father, who was already angry at his son for loving the wrong woman.

If he had not loved that woman; if she had not loved him back; if I had not loved them both, would the rest have happened?

Qais wrote poems for Leila, and when he lost her, he went crazy. I am sure afterwards, regrets ran through his head: If he hadn't sent Leila poems, then. If he had worked harder and kept more sheep, then. If he had been kinder to her father, then. If he hadn't stood before her tent so obviously, what might have turned out differently?

In Arabic, like in most languages, these thoughts are called the subjunctive, and they are formed by combining the past and future tense. And I am sure the same thoughts that occurred to Qais so long ago also occurred to Madame and Nisrine in that moment, like they occurred to me.

If we had not- If I had not- If our hearts were not what they were.

Nisrine did not like the subjunctive.

Adel had once said, If I could touch you- And she'd stopped him, When you touch me.

If you love me- Hush, I do.

All this time, Nisrine had waited in a house where she loved, but also hurt; where she cared, but did not always feel wanted; a house that had closed in around her, that she could not seem to escape.

From the astonis.h.i.+ng text, she had taken this lesson: that missing is everywhere, and grows large. That love cannot always help; that sometimes we must simply take hold ourselves; that it is better not to be Qais and Leila, but rather to be like the bird in her own story who flew when she needed, and followed her own heart.

From Madame, she had learned that a man she loved lay hurt, maybe in need of her, beaten for her love. She must have felt the responsibility of this, too.

And here, because I don't want to tell what happens next, because I want so badly in this story, like in life, to delay the moment-I will tell you instead, this: that love is a wide-open s.p.a.ce. That it can be friends.h.i.+p and pa.s.sion and leaving and unrequited all at once. That I have loved and kissed many times in my life, but no love has changed me like Nisrine.

It was too much. Earlier, she had said, It's an impossible situation.

I stood still that day, and listened to my part in Madame's information.

Nisrine didn't, she moved.

She squeezed my hand, then ran to the front door. ”Adel!” she cried. It was locked. Madame tried to grab her, but she slipped away; her veil caught for a moment, then unraveled and her hair fell out. She made for the balcony, and I don't know if she meant to call to Adel again, or to climb hand over hand on a rope like he had, or if she only wanted to stay a moment outside, to feel cool air on her face-I will never know, I can only guess.

The balcony was wet with melted snow, and the rail jiggled.

”Nisrine,” I called, wanting to help, to share in this moment. She didn't look back.

She went out with her arms open, slipped, knocked against the rail, which gave-loss stretched out before me.

She fell, her veil a white wing behind her, five floors down to the garden below.

AFTERWARDS, I remember very little. I seemed to float. Men came and went in formal uniforms. Madame took care of them. Eventually, she called Moni, who came to get me in her car and take me to my agency, where they called my mother to send a plane ticket for me, and just like that-even in that state, I felt the injustice of this-I flew home.

AMERICA.

ALL THIS HAPPENED A LONG TIME AGO, yet it is still vivid. Memory comes when you least expect it, jogged by simple things-the way my older mother holds a knife, just as Madame used to; translucent purple, the color of parsley in iodine; the sound and shape of so many words that remind me of Nisrine.

This is the problem with missing: it doesn't stay in one place, but spreads out and changes the landscape.

Memory takes the smallest detail, and turns it luminous, so you miss even the mundane parts of a person, the ones you didn't know you would.

Nisrine had a knowing air about her, sometimes. Like Madame, she used little things-housework-against me, and because she wouldn't tell me why, she left me with no way to make it up.

She knew more about love than me, she'd had more experience, and she let me know this, not by saying it, but by her silences, her tsk tsk gestures, like I sometimes let her know I'd had more opportunity for Arabic cla.s.ses; we didn't want to be that way with each other, we just were. It was part of what made us, us.

And yet, Nisrine had the ability to end any fight she wanted, this is true, I'm not exaggerating-she was simply that funny, I remember the rub like warm coats on our stomachs, falling over each other, laughing-and she was that kind, and I loved her that much.

And, how do you come back from that love, or, once lost, the missing? Once changed, how do you return to a previous, pristine world? In the Quran, like the Bible, the changed world is earth, the place the first lovers went after they were banished from Eden, and there, they found sorrow and pain. They were taken aback, cried out, This is not what we expected! But of course, this is the curse of knowledge: to see all earth's imperfections, always.

And, isn't there some truth to this story, even now? That the act of knowing is really just the confrontation of sorrow; the gathering of our forces, and finding a way forward, toward love, still? Isn't that, anyway, what we hope?

And, what if the love that we found was not meant to be shared just between two people, but by many; a fiery, starry substance that grows when it's kindled, so that the more you love and are beloved, the more light?

What if we really can hold all the hearts we ever wanted, and when we die, we are able to flit among them-the person who dies is able to visit any country where there's someone who loved her, and so for Nisrine, whose loves spanned continents and ages, then there is infinite travel, infinite coming and going, an infinite amount of light. What if death were not death, but adventure? Would I miss her, then, this much?