Prose

I go to my mother later, when he’s asleep. She’s making kibbeh for the next day. I ask her how she does it. She thinks I mean the kibbeh. With my hands, she says, and that’s all. But when that’s not enough? I press. Surely sometimes it’s not enough to use your hands. It’s enough, she says. She punches down the dough, wets her fingers.The lamb and onions and bulgur go deep into the dough, into the hole she makes with her thumb. I wait until she’s done and then, while she washes her hands, I pop one into my mouth, raw.The lamb tastes like an iron cross and the bulgur cracks like glass under my teeth. I’d thought it would be warm, like a fresh sacrifice. It’s not. It’s cold.

I write my grandmother to ask her how she goes on living in the face of so much pain. I ask her about the shelling and the explosion outside of the masjid in their neighborhood. I ask her about Um Zeyna. She writes back and the paper smells like cumin. Her handwriting is all capital letters. She tells me the weather has been cool. She tells me three young women and their children were torn to pieces by the explosion on their way to worship. She asks me if my mother gave me the prayer rug she sent me for my birthday last month. I say out loud that she did, that it’s in my room, under my bed. Then I remember she can’t hear me. The lettering gets shaky, hard to read. She tells me there are bad people in the world, mostly bad men.There are bad men in Syria and bad men in America just the same, even though she’s never been to America. She tells me maybe I should try to imagine all the bad men in the world like goats, so they’ll be harmless. She tells me that in the Bible, the People of the Book put all their sins into a goat and drove it out of town. She tells me that after they drove out the goat they were cleansed of temptation. I ask her: What happened to the goat?

The next day I talk to my friend Håkonen. His family is from Norway. I ask him how they go on living in Norway. He says they wear thick coats with fur hoods in the wintertime and sometimes they go to Spain in January when the Hardangervidda is frozen over. What if they can’t get out? I ask. He tells me about a twelve-year-old girl he saw on the news. Her family left Syria and made the crossing into Lebanon to live in a refugee camp. Her parents lost everything they had, he said. They couldn’t eat. Then her family married her off to a much older man, Lebanese, who claimed he would help them get out of the camp. He took the girl and never came back. Håkonen asks me what I think about that. I tell him I don’t know. I tell him maybe I would die if I were her. Die? he asks. I tell him I can’t imagine doing anything else.There are all kinds of pain, he tells me. People feel all kinds of things. On my way home I think about the things the refugee girl must have felt.Then I try to picture the old Lebanese man as a goat. I call him the goat-faced man. I picture the refugees chasing him out of the camp with pitchforks.

I write my grandmother again to ask her how she is. I ask her if Um Zeyna’s udders are still inflamed. I don’t hear from her for a month. When she writes back, the paper smells like char. She tells me they’re shelling the slums daily now, that she doesn’t know who’s doing the shelling anymore. Then she tells me Um Zeyna is gone, that some men came with guns and took her the night before last.There are no more goats in Syria,she tells me,just bad men.

I put the letter away. I eat dinner with my mother and father. The kibbeh is warm now but the lamb tastes flat and all the life is gone out of it. After dinner my father watches the news about the refugees in Lebanon and cracks pistachios. I wonder which one on the television is the goat-faced man. In the kitchen my mother asks me if I’ve heard from my grandmother. She asks me how Um Zeyna is. I tell her there are no more goats in Syria. She asks me how they’ll do it from now on. Do what? I ask her. Make goat cheese, she says. I tell her I don’t know.