A Word For Love Part 7

I lay on the bed. So that I wouldn't worry about Baba, I concentrated on the blond policeman. How sweet his smile was with the dimples. How he had just met me, and talked to me immediately about poetry. How impressed he had been that I knew Arabic. I had always liked talking about poetry, in Arabic.

Beside me, I could feel Nisrine. Her hand rested against her chest like a small bird.

We were almost asleep when we heard a car oustide the apartment.

Madame said, "That's Ha.s.san, I can feel it."

We opened the blinds and watched Baba get out of the car. He held a hand to his eyes, to shield them from the station's lights. We watched while he slowly made his way by himself in the dark night, the lights following him like animal eyes all the way up the curb, toward our house. When he entered our building, they slid away.

THE NEXT MORNING, fear followed me. I worried about being arrested. I hid Adel's poem and wouldn't look at it, I was too worried about police. I worried just looking out our window at the billboards that held the leering face of the president.

At Madame's, whatever it was, I didn't want anything to do with it. About how Nisrine couldn't clean right, or Abudi wouldn't do his homework, or Baba's late nights. I was scared. I didn't want anything to do with them, so I closed the door to the bedroom. It was rude. I didn't care.

But the house was small, there were always policemen at the window, and children who wanted in. So, instead, I closed myself in the bathroom. The toilet would accept only certain things. Not paper, there was a basket for that. Not snot, you did that in your handkerchief. You could tell by the smells who'd been in. Nisrine had the smell of wet spinach.

Dounia turned the light off on me.

Lema said, "Mama! Look what your daughter is doing. Just look at her."

"Dounia! Naughty girl!" Madame knocked on the door. "Bea. You can hit her when you come out of the bathroom, and I won't say anything."

I came out of the bathroom.

"Go to sleep, Bea, you look tired."

"I'm not tired." But I went toward the bedroom.

Then Baba said, "Baba."

Silence.

He said again, "Baba."

Lema said, "Bea, he's calling you."

"Yes, Baba? You want something?"

"Nescafe."

"Nescafe."

So instead of the bedroom, I went to make Nescafe in the small kitchen. Nisrine was putting away the gla.s.ses and singing in English. She helped me to boil water.

"My love is your love," she sang.

When I returned with the Nescafe, Baba was still there on the sofa, one eye a half-moon, the other sleeping.

"Thank you, Baba," he said when I came in, and I realized he'd been calling me Baba like he did the children, and this is how I knew things really had changed. Abudi drove a tin truck beneath my feet. I held Lema's hand at night. I was part of a mother and a father and three children and a maid, and we all sat together at the dinner table and Dounia always wanted to tell a joke like Nisrine did, but it had no punch line, it was just another story, and we all washed our hands and then we ripped the flat bread into strips and used our fingers on the bread to pick up olives, except Lema, who got a bowl from the cupboard and a knife and fork to cut her meat because she was fourteen and going through a phase. And all of us were called Baba. As if we were one person with fourteen arms called Baba, as if there was no difference between us and Baba, and so, I must no longer linger in the garden and talk to strangers, I must stay at home with Madame, and if police came, I might be afraid, but I must sit still anyway until they were gone, because I was no longer free, even if I was American.

I liked a blond policeman. Sometimes, I imagined he was Qais, and I was Leila. I had cut a maid's hair. But, I was a young woman called Baba. And I had no choice, anymore, but to be on the side of this family.

HOME.

SOMETHING MOST AMERICANS don't understand is how to learn a new language, you have to surrender. In Arabic, there were not only new words, but a new alphabet, and new sounds. My throat and tongue felt different speaking it. I had to retrain not only my mind, but my body, and in doing this, I had to let go of the logic I used in English. Like a child, my tongue felt heavy until I learned again to speak with it. But eventually, this surrender became what I loved. I p.r.o.nounced letters that most Americans didn't dream existed. The rasping kha, like falling gravel, the sad, like a windy boat. I gave in to these new sounds; and giving in, I set my tongue free.

Like learning to speak, part of living at Madame's meant giving up certain routines. We drank coffee late at night, here. I was used to being independent, but Madame laid out my clothes in the morning. We worried about oil, each plate had its own separate sponge.

When I wrote this to a friend in America, she wrote me back: Doesn't it bother you, you're like a child? You're twenty-one, what if you want to bring a man home? Go out and explore!

But, I was exploring, just not the way my friend imagined.

Each day at Madame's, new words unfurled before me. I wrote them down in a little notebook, and in the evenings I went through them, memorizing them one by one, imagining them as they might appear in the astonishing text. Sometimes, Nisrine helped me.

I remembered the excitement of my first texts in Arabic, how even simple words opened worlds for me. I imagined fluency, like jasmine flowers from the policeman's poem, in bloom after a long rain.

Of course, I cared about being twenty-one and grown up and independent. But I liked living at Madame's.

For the first time, I was part of a large family. For an only child, sometimes this can be enough.

Like Arabic, which I first loved through surrender, I was beginning to see how dependence could be a form of learning. Learning is a form of being free.

BEFORE MADAME, Baba had a different wife and a different family. They lived with him in the same rooms full of sunlight that we lived in and, unlike Lema, their firstborn was a son. He was born just a few years before I was.

In the 1980s, when his son was two, Baba was put in jail. Some men came to his factory where he bound Qurans. They took him in their car, and one of the men slowly forced Baba's head down into another man's lap so he couldn't see, and when Baba returned from jail ten years later, he didn't have a family anymore. He'd only been two miles away, underground, but no one knew this, even him, and now his brother ran his factory-he didn't have that either-and his wife had given him up for gone and loved another man, so he had to start from scratch. But he had a house, and he had resistance.

When I thought too much about Baba I got sentimental, and I began to see jail as the answer to all my questions. It was why Baba's hands looked very old around the knuckles and why, when he prayed, we saw the withered bottoms of his feet; they'd withered up from the beatings in jail.

Baba liked food. He bought the best food for our apartment, and a computer with a big screen. There was a large window in his kitchen that he could look out-in jail there was no window, just a lightbulb, when it was on that was day, when it was off that was night-and he had three new, healthy, post-jail children and Madame, his wife, and he built all this. All this was his to be proud of.

I was learning to live with Baba's resistance; to accept fear in the background, a dull thrum.

Still, I worried, especially when I remembered his secret free elections doc.u.ment. It was such a small thing, to write down some complaints and sign them. It seemed unfair that it could lead to so much trouble. If only I had known what was to come.

Baba had lived with the police a long time now. For more than thirty years (ten of those in jail) he had worked for the resistance, and he did this the whole time living beside the Central Police Station.

I thought back to how Lema and I had played prettiest policeman, and I'd only liked the blond one, but when Baba had found out, instead of being mad, he laughed. How can you laugh when a woman like your daughter picks a favorite from among the police? But maybe Baba's reaction said something about how adaptable we are as humans. When we must, we can get used to almost anything. Like Nisrine, who didn't talk to me at first after I cut her hair, and who hadn't left the house except once to get groceries. But if she minded, she didn't show it. She kept trying to grow her heart. She beat the rugs in the morning. She sang in the kitchen and made faces at Dounia.

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 shirt 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 astonishing 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 fish!"

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!"