Tag: fiction

Outta Here By Patty Somlo

The first time the officer told the boy to drop the bat, the boy began to walk forward. He was just under five feet tall, so the bat may have looked longer than it would have appeared, if held by a boy of greater height. The boy, people in the neighborhood would later comment, had dreamed of becoming a baseball player.

By the second time the officer ordered the boy to drop the bat, the boy had narrowed the distance between them. The officer wasn’t aware that the late afternoon sun had started shooting rays directly into the boy’s dark brown eyes. Traffic had grown heavy on Seventeenth Street, two blocks south of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, where the boy stood clutching his bat in a field infested with weeds and discarded soiled napkins and soda cups, outside an abandoned low-income housing project. The racket caused by cars and trucks passing made it hard for the boy to hear what the officer had been shouting. When the boy looked toward the officer, the bright glare from the sun made his eyes ache and tear, forcing him to drop his gaze.

Still, the boy continued moving toward the officer. Folks in the neighborhood would later claim that even though he had some disabilities – or “challenges,” as some preferred to say – the kid was one of the friendliest and most sociable kids many had ever met. His mother worried about him for all the obvious reasons a parent fears for a child, and especially a special needs kid, but also because he had never learned to keep his distance from strangers, who might do him harm.

The third time the officer ordered the boy to drop the bat, the boy believed he had gotten close enough to hit the ball. He turned slightly to stand sideways and moved his feet eight or so inches apart, the way Billy “the Bomber” Boggs, the famous baseball player who’d grown up in the neighborhood and returned there to live after he retired from the game, showed him several times.

As he lifted the bat, the boy heard a loud cracking sound. No one saw what happened before or after that sound, but a second and third cracking sound followed. The boy was bleeding by then, so heavily it was impossible to see where the blood was coming from, and his short, somewhat pudgy body had fallen, and lay curled practically in the fetal position on the ground.

***
The shooting of DaVon Richards rocked the neighborhood, a principally African American enclave whose tree-lined residential streets fanned out east and west from MLK Boulevard. DaVon Richards, as everyone in the neighborhood knew, could not have hurt a fly. He’d been born fourteen years before with what his mother described as a sweetness almost impossible not to love. His intellectual challenges became more and more apparent as time went on. At first when DaVon went to school, some of the kids, usually boys, made fun of him. In those days, everybody referred to DaVon as slow. But DaVon didn’t realize that he was being bullied and before long, the toughest kids began to look out for him.
In the first hours and days after the white police officer shot and killed DaVon Richards, firing three times, folks in the neighborhood felt numb. The police department claimed that DaVon, a black, intellectually challenged fourteen-year-old, had threatened the officer with a bat that could be used as a weapon. A memorial was started for DaVon with flowers, a handful of toys, including metal trucks, and several baseball gloves. Family, friends and people who lived in the neighborhood gathered in the weedy and trash-strewn field where DaVon had been shot. The media dutifully arrived, along with the mayor, city councilors and the area’s congressional representative. Baptist minister Calvin Butler set up a stage, podium, microphone and sound system, then invited people to come up and share what they remembered about DaVon.

Ali Mansour, who owned the neighborhood’s one convenience store, stood up first. People were surprised to see Mr. Ali, as the older residents called him, crying.

“DaVon came to my store every day,” Ali began, speaking haltingly because he couldn’t stop crying. “He wanted to learn how to use the register, so I showed him.”

Surprisingly, Ali then started to laugh.

“I must have showed him a hundred times,” he said, shaking his head and smiling. “He couldn’t remember how to do it. But he always wanted me to show him, so he could learn again.”

Ali stepped away from the microphone to wipe his eyes. He blew his nose with a light blue handkerchief pulled out of his pocket and then came back to the podium, leaning toward the microphone and saying he was sorry. He stopped crying long enough to explain, “DaVon wanted to learn because he said he planned to open his own store one day.”
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The tributes went on throughout the afternoon and into the night. As speaker after speaker spoke about the loving boy, who unlike most people never complained, got depressed or had a bad word to say about anybody, something became clear to Billy Boggs. In middle age and carrying a hundred pounds more weight than when he’d gone almost overnight from being a poor black kid to a major league, high-salaried baseball player, Billy had long ago lost contact with his two grown kids. He had barely known them when they were growing up because he’d focused nearly all his time and attention on baseball.

A few years back, Billy had started spending time with DaVon, his mother being a good friend and DaVon not having a father around. Sometimes, Billy thought of DaVon as his adopted son. He’d taught DaVon to throw and catch, run and hit the ball. The bat DaVon had been holding at the time of the shooting and failed to drop had been a present from Billy for DaVon’s thirteenth birthday.

The last speaker stepped down. Without thinking, Billy began making his way to the podium. He didn’t have a clue what he wanted to say, but he slid the microphone up to his height and tapped the end to see if it was working.

He looked out at the crowd. The faces were black and brown, white and Asian. So many people had congregated in the field that folks were now spilling out onto the sidewalks. Some even stood across the street.

Billy still didn’t know what he was going to say, but he continued to study the crowd. Then he let himself picture DaVon in his mind, wearing the Giants jersey Billy had given him, the one that had started to get too small.

He could see DaVon, concentrating so hard his forehead had wrinkled up. And then he remembered the thing DaVon nearly always did, whenever Billy sailed an underhanded pitch towards him. Just before DaVon stepped his right foot forward and swung the bat, he mimicked what the play-by-play broadcasters shouted when a ball was hit out of the park. “It’s outta here,” DaVon loved to yell.

The sun had set by the time Billy told that story to the crowd. He let them know that DaVon assumed he would get a home run every time he hit the ball. Billy asked the crowd if they had any idea what knowing DaVon had taught him. Following a few murmured and several shouted responses like, “Love, man,” and “Joy,” Billy answered, “No. It was hope. DaVon Richards taught me about hope.”
***
It only took two weeks for Billy Boggs to raise enough money to build the diamond and buy enough bats, gloves, shoes and uniforms for all the neighborhood kids that wanted to play ball. The city council, with unprecedented speed, helped push through the required permits to have the housing project torn down and that vacant, weedy lot readied to become a new city park.

Billy recruited several police officers to coach in their off-duty hours. He wasn’t naïve enough to believe, as some folks thought, that the DaVon Richards Park and the MLK Bombers would change the world, or even do all that much to address the deep-seated issues that ended up stifling and snuffing out too many young lives.

But as he prepared to swing the bat for the pitch to commemorate the start of the Bombers’ first season and the opening of DaVon Richards Park, Billy Boggs smiled. The bat kissed the ball and Billy watched it sail, over the diamond, past the outfield and beyond.

Billy heard a familiar voice shout, “It’s outta here.” He used the back of his hand to wipe the tears away from the corners of his eyes. Then he looked up, imagining that the ball had just bounced and then stopped on the rough surface of a large and blindingly radiant star.

The Ferry by M.R. Azar

Karim sat in a dark corner at the edge of the port, his legs dangling rhythmically over the silent water. His time on the Island was coming to an end and soon the ferry would carry him back to the mainland.

“I’ve never seen the sea so calm,” he thought.

He tried again to remember why he had come to this place but became distracted by his muddy boots. They cast shadows that floated like ghosts over the rippling tide. He leaned forward and saw a strange face staring back at him through the mist that slept on the water’s surface. It beckoned to him and his heart burst as though he was falling for a moment. The sea now seemed to hold for him a different meaning than it once did. The clear azure world that had once inspired wonder and a thirst for life had given way to a world of shadows and death.

The Island has been a refuge for wealthy mainlanders for centuries. It is a place for them to sink their feet into the warm sand and feel the cool breeze sway against their skin. A place to gaze at the boundless blue sea and colossal mountains that jut out from the earth, shimmering with lights from the ancient villages. A place to stare in wonder at the moon, suspended against the blackest night sky as it projects a rippling silvery bridge that is swallowed back into the sea before dawn.

The mainlanders still came but others had begun to follow–always after dark. The mainlanders did not know, nor care to know, where the newcomers came from. Some said they materialized from nothingness. Others rumored that they crossed an unseen bridge over the horizon when the moon was at its brightest. Few observed that the exodus started when the storms became more devastating and more frequent, when the droughts and wildfires consumed vast swaths of land, when the seas became sewers, and when the armed men arrived. Either way, misery brought them here and misery consumed them.

The daily ferry was the Island’s lifeline to the outside world and the only means of transportation for passengers, vehicles, and supplies. It was also where the affluent mainlanders, destitute newcomers, and hordes of humanitarian volunteers, Karim among them, converged.

Near the ledge where Karim was sitting, colossal spotlights illuminated the night and guided the horde of exiles over the short bridge into the ship’s bow. The ground rumbled beneath him. This was a dismal place. Hundreds of distinct brown faces melted into one another, forming a single faceless mass that trudged forth somberly but deliberately like a funeral procession. A shared yearning bound them: that this journey, which had started and would end differently for each of them, would finally just come to an end.

The horn blared, signaling the ferry’s imminent departure. Karim grabbed his duffle bag and made for the ferry. The line was flowing with urgency as the passengers hurried to board before the ferry vanished into the dark horizon, taking the promise of a worthwhile life with it.

“Where do I get my room key from?” Karim asked the ticket collector.

The man replied with a heavy accent: “Follow the signs to the concierge and they will give you your room number and keys. It’s in the compartment after where they are kept.”

Karim noted the strange description and proceeded to follow the man’s instructions. He walked through the cargo hold, gawking at its unfinished facade, chipping walls, and steaming pipes. He marched up a long flight of stairs that led to the first passenger compartment. He entered the chamber and his eyes were struck by the orange-brown hues that erupted from the outdated wallpaper and carpeting. This chamber was completely barren and dilapidated. Through the flickering lights, he made out the crude camps that lined the corridor. Each colony staked its territory using piles of tattered bags, ripped suitcases, and other artifacts of a grim life.

This must be where they are kept, he thought.

As he weaved a twisted path around the pitiful travelers, a shudder came upon him like a sudden, cold rain. Guilt. It had become a frequent companion, and when it visited, Karim embraced it like an old friend. He revered it and found in the pain it brought a sort of retribution that might balance the universe and bring some justice to a wholly unjust world. Guilt, he thought, was penance for the comfort of his warm bed while his brothers and sisters rotted in dirty hallways and cold stairwells.

Why did he come to the Island? What good had come of it? These people were coming long before he arrived and would continue coming long after he departed. Their struggle was indifferent to his existence.

He would soon be back in suburban Virginia, back to his upper middle-class life, back to staring at a blank laptop screen between sterile white walls that closed in a little more each day, back to his tall red-brick row house on a quiet street lined with white cherry-blossoms and red maple trees, back to his elegant girlfriend, Amal, whose soft shapely legs he constantly fantasized about. Soon, the memory of his time here would fade and be forgotten like a childhood memory.

From this self-reflection sprang a terrible self-loathing. In himself, he began to see the privileged volunteers that he despised because, unlike him, they did not come from across the horizon and, to them, the newcomers were no more than stray dogs to be saved. They descended on the Island with extravagant clothing, raging parties, and penetrating vanity. By the end, it was their own souls that needed saving. Ah! This was a wickedness born unto him, an original sin, one that he could not wash off or repent for. Only a holy savior could offer salvation, but he was not a religious man and so no atonement was to be had for him.

Karim finally reached the end of the hall where two large double doors led into the passenger compartment that was off limits to them. He took a step inside and it was as though he had stumbled through one of those Magical Doors. A burst of light exploded before his eyes and the walls bellowed with a Hellenic blue-white. A large central staircase with a marble face and railing carved with floral festoons led up to the bedrooms. Cafes bustled with fat patrons dressed in summer linens and harsh clinking glass. He had reached the mainlander compartment.

A young woman in an elegant costume and deliberate pose greeted him. “Some Champagne, sir?” she said, drawing out the pronunciation of Champagne longer than it needed to be.

He did not want Champagne. He wanted escape from this awful spectacle. He scarcely could react before feeling a noose tighten around his throat and a boulder crush his chest. He whispered through his teeth, “No, thanks,” and hurried up the stairs to his room.

The keys fumbled in Karim’s trembling hands before he unlocked the door and entered. The room had a low ceiling and a king bed next to an antique oak desk with some writing material. The bathroom sat in the rear. He threw his bag on the floor and sank like lead into the bed to calm his nerves. He woke up to the siren sound of the ferry launching from the port.

“Why did I come here?” he thought again.

Karim always had trouble controlling his thoughts and feared into which murky alleys an unfettered mind might lead him. His mind was on a long chain that night, and it battered against the silence that consumed the room. He could endure no more. He leaped up and reached for the writing material to jot down his thoughts, hoping to banish the ghosts that had followed him from the Island with a pencil.

Keeping a journal made him feel better. He could project onto its pages those feelings which he could not share with Amal. She knew him to be a warm and affectionate person. She had explored his soul like a garden and often found herself lost in it.

But obscured behind the winding grape vines that sheltered her skin from the sun, behind the blossoming gardenias whose fragrance showered her body, behind the gentle chirping of the birdlings that made her heart radiate, raged a storm that Karim hardly could quell. His soul was wounded, and the wound was festering, gnawing at his insides, and rotting his soul. The walls that a lifetime of detachment had erected inside of him seemed to be crumbling. But the writing made him feel better.

In short there are many considerations with anti-depressants. viagra on line recommended for you Male unproductiveness treatment and female unproductiveness treatment tadalafil purchase both are different things. This will tell you if the site view this raindogscine.com canada viagra buy is suspicious. Dry your hands before taking care of this viagra australia no prescription prescription. After scribbling several pages, Karim stumbled upon a revelation and, with it, a renewed vigor. The dim room brightened to his eyes and the low ceiling lifted.

“Yes, that’s what I’ll do!” he said to himself and plunged like a deer through the arches back down into the dilapidated chamber where they were. He would find his atonement by joining his kin and suffering with them.

Karim made his way onto the deck where the moon hung high behind the clouds and the winds rattled. He thought the fresh air might reinvigorate him and indeed it felt to him as if jumping into the cool ocean on a hot day.

He encountered two young brothers, Ali and Moussa, who were kicking a deflated soccer ball back and forth in clothes that had seen better days and shoes that showed their toes. A stray kick sent the ball rolling towards Karim and he performed tricks by spinning the ball on his finger like his basketball coach had taught him. This pleased the brothers very much and they ran to him, trying to imitate his moves, and he taught them how to do it.

Moussa, the older of the two, mastered it on the second try, but Ali struggled with his tiny fingers. The older brother was very patient with Ali and gently guided his finger beneath the ball to teach him. Moussa always looked after Ali. His dad made him promise and Moussa took the responsibility very seriously. They laughed together, and, for a moment, the kids forgot where they were and where they had come from.

But they could not escape their past for long and started with the story of how they arrived on the ferry. They were unaccompanied minors who had made their way from their village under the care of a human smuggler. Their month-long journey saw them riding an overflowing Volkswagen bus, northbound towards freedom. They were ransomed, robbed, and threatened, but gravest of all, fought off the sex traffickers that prowled behind every corner. Moussa protected his younger brother along the way like the bravest knight.

Ali described the cramped bus with its frame rattling uncontrollably as it raced through the tranquil desert. The passenger compartment nearly came apart from the chassis over every hill that it was not designed to pass at these speeds. Only the occasional glow of cell phone screens and cigarette cherries illuminated the endless blackness. The driver did not need any lights–he made a living crossing this desert.

The passengers sat consumed in silence, scarcely holding on to their sanity as they agonized over what might be lurking in the darkness. Ali and Moussa, and everyone else on the bus, had seen the videos. They knew what atrocities awaited those who were caught. Then, blinding lights pierced the darkness through the rear window, interrupting the uneasy quiet. It was a patrol car according to the driver who recognized the headlights. Their luck was boundless tonight, the armed men only asked them to turn back.

The caravan attempted the crossing again the very next night. And there it was at long last, a welcome sign and the final stretch before freedom from the treacherous place they came from. They had finally made it.

Ali turned to Karim in whose familiar face he saw his father’s eyes. He asked him through tears that washed the dirt off his face: “Did you come from the bad place too?”

“No, uhm, I’m just a helper”, his voice crackled. These words brought with them a surge of self-contempt that made Karim’s stomach turn. The cold wind was no longer pleasant to his skin and the children’s voices turned to screeching chalk. He wished them luck on their journey, hurried back inside, and never saw them again.

Inside, he came upon a young man sitting on the floor carefully polishing a pair of Nike basketball shoes as though they were a new BMW. Karim kneeled next to him, complimented his “kicks”, and asked him if he played basketball.

“Yes, I am captain of my team back home”, the young man replied with a quiver in his voice. “I hope I play again soon.”

“I play basketball too. Maybe we can play together when we get to the mainland.”

The man with the Nikes explained that he could not play on the mainland because he had no clothes to wear. He told Karim about a cold night a few days prior when the angry winds struck relentlessly against the boat that carried him to the Island. The boat looked sturdy, but only looked so. It swayed from side to side as the terrible waves crashed against the frame, drenching the passengers and filling the hull with water. They seemed to stand still against the wind despite the full throttle of the engine. They were carrying too much weight but what ballast was there except for their bodies and the few valuables they carried?

After eight hours into what was meant to be a four-hour journey, they were still too far away from land. The engine had stalled several times, stranding them in the middle of this watery graveyard. They were cold and wet in an overloaded coffin and the sounds of children crying and women wailing were muted only by the howling wind.

They made it to within 100 meters of the shore before the boat ran out of gas and the engine shut down for the last time. The boat had been accumulating icy water for eight hours. Without the thrust of an engine, they could only pray for the waves and the wind to propel them towards the rocky shore. Though they were so close now, the dangers persisted. How many others had the cruel black sea swallowed under the same circumstances?

They had no choice but to toss all their bags and suitcases overboard. Everything. Most of them carried only their most precious belongings. Everything else had been lost or stolen somewhere along their long arduous journeys. Those who had packed their cash, passports, or jewelry in their bags were out of luck. Everything was to be tossed overboard immediately –their time was running out.

The barefooted man refused to toss the one small bag that he carried. He couldn’t. Fellow passengers lost patience and snatched his bag to lob it over. He managed to grab one thing before it sunk into the abyss– his Nikes, the same Nikes that he now clutched against his chest as he retold this chilling tale. This was the last remaining artifact of his old life and Karim started to understand the care he gave to it.

After finishing the story, the man turned to Karim and embraced him. To this person, an impossible journey had finally come to an end and he wanted to share his relief and his joy with a friend who had endured the same. The familiarity of Karim’s look, his voice, and his language would do at this moment. He found comfort in their shared struggle and in the raw human connection that it created. Then he pulled away and asked Karim: “Did most of your things survive your journey?”

The words wouldn’t escape Karim’s mouth. A terrible shame again bubbled up from his heart and he knew he would no longer find peace in this world.

He hurried onto a secluded corner of the deck away from the accusatory eyes that he imagined were pursuing him everywhere on this ferry. He saw in each of those eyes the reflection of the devil that haunted his every thought, mocking him for the injustices that he could not make right.

He found himself in a state of singular loneliness as though, to his eyes only, all the colors had dissolved from the world. Despite the howling winds and the roaring engines, he could only hear the metallic whisper of his conscience.

The final chain of his sanity crumbled and the ghosts led his mind into that darkest alley from where he knew there was no escape. He looked down into the water and saw that face once again beckoning to him. This time, Karim’s fingers gently released their grip of the railing and he plunged into the cold bitter darkness below. Here, Karim could suffer alongside his brothers and sisters forever and his guilt washed away into the sea.

A Hostile World By Jihan Shaarawi

Part 1: The Eternal Dupes

The Boy’s father sat on his small wicker chair staring at the newspaper that was brought from the capital. The Boy’s parents managed to send The Brother to the capital to join the public university. Every weekend, The Brother took a bus back to the village with tales of the soon-to-be revolution. That day, The Brother brought back news of The Monarch’s supposed diplomatic trip to England where he was spotted spending his days with European models at high-end bars.

“He is spending the people’s money on alcohol and whores! He should be hung in the streets!”

The Father was known in the village for his short temper and quick tongue. A year earlier, The Father told his employer that he was a “slave driving son of a bitch who should go back to England and fuck that sheep that he calls a wife.” The Father disappeared shortly after the incident and was returned, two months later, bloodied, boney, pale, and thrown amongst his neighbor’s apricot trees. After the incident, The Father only spoke his mind at home and sent his children to fight his battles.

When rumors began to spread in the village that the CIA had entered the country in support of the Liberation Officers, The Boy was sent to a nearby village where it was said that there lived a man who taught English to children. On his first day of English class, The Boy’s mother dressed him in his finest clothes, a cotton button down shirt with holes, dress pants that had to be rolled up at the ankles, and leather shoes that flapped when he walked. The Boy’s father licked his palm and used the saliva to contain The Boy’s frizzy curls.

“Listen to me! You speak to your teacher respectfully! Don’t stare at walls when he speaks! Don’t pick your nose! Remember not to mention why you’re really there. Say you want to learn English so you can work on one of the British farms. Don’t you dare mention the CIA!”

The Boy’s mother carefully tucked in his shirt.

“Baba? What’s CIA?”

His father struck him so quickly it almost escaped his mother’s eyes.

“He has the brains of a donkey. You bore me a donkey!”

“Enough! What will the Sheikh think if you bring him a bruised boy?”

The Boy’s mother splashed cold water on his face in an attempt to soothe the blow.

“Stop crying! You’re not a baby anymore!”

They paid The Neighbor 5 silver coins to take The Boy to the next village. The Boy sat on his neighbor’s cart (pulled by a small, weak, donkey) amidst the crates of apricots. Every now and then, when The Neighbor wasn’t looking, he took one and stuffed it in his pockets. It took forty-five minutes to arrive to the village and by then his pockets bulged at odd angles. This village looked identical to The Boy’s village except for the long line of young boys at one of the huts.

“That’s hut,” The Neighbor pointed towards the assembly of boys, “I’ll be back in the afternoon to take you home.”

Every weekday, The Boy travelled to the neighboring village for his English lessons. His malleable brain picked up the language quickly and he was soon teaching his younger sisters. The Father requested The Brother to bring back English newspapers from the capital. They all huddled around The Boy as he read each word carefully. He often made up the sound of a word if he hadn’t learned it yet.

 

Upon The Monarch’s return from England a huge demonstration was held in front of the palace. The Father decided that there couldn’t be a better time for a family vacation; so they packed some clothes and headed to the capital. They all stayed in the room that The Brother rented with another young man from their village. The Brother was studying engineering at the public university and was poised to be top of his class. He spent most of his days studying in a corner of the room. Every time The Boy passed by him, he glanced at the paper to see what his brother was studying. It was on the second day that The Boy realized that it wasn’t equations that The Brother was scribbling down; he was writing poetry. The Boy waited until The Brother fell asleep to steal the sheets of paper. The next morning he presented the papers to his father.

“I pay good money to have you study in the capital and you spend your days writing poetry? Your comrades are busy protesting and risking their lives and you’re sitting in this room writing rhymes! This is not the time! You know who writes poetry? Rich Europeans. Because their lives are perfect so they have to make up something to keep it interesting. Liberate your country first and then you write poetry.”

The Father lit a match and held it to the papers. In silence, the family watched the pages burn. When the flames had engulfed every word, the father led everyone to get ready for liberation. They needed to be at the square in time to see it all. When they reached the square, The Boy’s father lifted him onto his shoulders.. Crowds of people swarmed out of every side street and with each step it became harder to move. Scattered amongst the crowd were British soldiers on horses. They held rifles in plain sight—as a message to the masses. Students stood in the frontlines of different groups as they spilled in from the streets that snaked into the square. They left The Mother at home with the sisters; a protest was no place for the feminine. The Brother hadn’t spoken a word since his father burned all the pages of poetry. The Father insisted that burning the poetry would be a good opportunity to transition into manhood. He leaned on The Brother’s shoulder as he walked, using him as a cane. He screamed of the injustices done to him in captivity. The Boy had never seen his father so happy. The boys attempted to keep up with the slogans:

“Monarch Monarch of our hearts! May your kingdom fall apart!”

“Our bread is stale, our lives are cheap, go to hell you stupid sheep!”

 

On the ride back to the village The Boy’s father could not contain his excitement. As each new passenger entered the bus, he retold his story of protest. Some listened in amazement; most ignored him.

“Be careful,” the mother whispered, “you never know who these people are. We can’t afford to lose you again.”

The Father couldn’t care less and for three hours he repeated his story. The father continued his political musing throughout the ride home, on the walk from the bus to the village, yelled them at all his neighbors, and finally through dinner, and the ritualistic post-dinner tea with milk.

“You know, I feel as though this time the British will go back to that hole they call The West!”

The Mother accompanied tea with her nightly card readings. The hearts symbolized love and marriage, clubs were money, diamonds were family and home, and spades symbolized career. The Boy sat in front of his mother waiting for his future to be revealed.

“Split the cards with your left hand”

The Father sat on his chair, slurping his tea.

“You know, they say that the CIA pays two hundred pounds a month for interpreters! Two hundred! Can you imagine?!”

The card formation was made up of 2 spades and 3 clubs. The Mother interrupted The Father’s rambling:

“There will be much change in your family life. This change will show you the path to your career.”

“He will become a politician for the government of tomorrow!”

The Boy gave all his attention to his mother. She stopped her reading and smiled, “my brave boy, my beautiful prince, darling love of my life, I could read you the rest but it doesn’t matter. We all know you will be great. Go to sleep.”

That night there was three short knocks on the door, barely audible. The Mother was a light sleeper and they woke her instantly. She shook her husband awake.

“Someone is knocking on the door.”

The Father jolted awake.

“What time is it?”

He fumbled through his small pile of possessions until he found his watch; 1:45 am. The knocking picked up energy.

“Do you think it’s the officers? Do you think one of the people on the bus said something? Why don’t you ever stay quiet? These children need you!”

“Shut up woman. If they were the officers they wouldn’t need to knock.”

The father slipped on a robe and opened the door. The outside darkness covered the face of the visitor. The father’s eyes adjusted to the darkness and he made out the figure of a young student, an acquaintance of The Brother. His shirt was covered in dried blood.

The Boy woke up two minutes before the knock on the door. He felt a chill from the open window and it woke him. When he heard his parent’s frantic voices he crawled on his belly to where they sat. His mother held her head in her hands as she slid slowly to the ground. The student, whom he recognized from the demonstration, attempted to sip the cup of tea but his unsteady hands wouldn’t allow it. His father was stoic. The Boy watched The Father rise out of the chair, walk towards the open door, and out to the fields. The Boy abandoned his hiding place and ran after him. No one in the room noticed his presence. The Boy used his arms to protect himself from the cold as he observed his father, on his knees beside the wall separating his field from the neighbors. Rotten apricots fallen from the neighboring trees surrounded him. His father picked them up one by one and threw them as far as he could. Threw them towards the British plantation; threw them towards the capital.

 

Theme 2: Conspiracy

Bend down and spread your cheeks”

The Lieutenant flipped the switch of his flashlight and aimed the light into the exposed anuses of the prospective cadets. The building was large and discolored. The plot of land once housed the most loyal of The Monarch’s followers, but upon The Liberator’s command it was torn down and turned into The Military Academy. In the eight years since The Monarch was overthrown, The Academy doubled in applications. The Liberator filled the youth with the hope of nationalism.

After his brother’s death, The Boy soon decided that he would abandon his father’s dreams of CIA and become The Cadet. His father died shortly after The Brother’s death. The people in the village whispered that, because of his inability to deal with the older brother’s death, he slowly killed himself by slipping poison into his own tea every night.

“Died of a broken heart,” his mother always said, followed with a sigh.

When he announced his decision to become a Cadet he was met with the approval of all but his mother.

“Nationalism is a tricky disease, my son.”

 

The Mother’s words couldn’t sway him. He made the decision the day his father labored through his last breath.

“Stand straight and put your pants back on.”

The Cadet did as he was told without hesitation. The Lieutenant walked in front of the line of recruits.

“If you’ve made it this far that means you are now Cadets in the esteemed Academy. Our Liberator tore down the symbols of oppression that plagued our beautiful country and built strong, new, and reliable walls. You are the generation who will keep our Liberator’s vision alive through the decades. In your hands lies the hope of the future. Never again will we let our nation fall into the hands of an oppressor and never again will we remain silent.”

The Lieutenant stopped in front of The Cadet.

“Lift your arms over your head.”

The Cadet did as he was told.

“You’re skinny. What does your father do?”

“He’s dead, sir.”

“What did he do before he died?”

“He was a farmer, sir.”

“Very good. Very good. Farmers are the souls of our nation. How did he die?”

“He died of a broken heart after the oppressors killed my brothers.”

“Yes. Tragic. Why are you here Cadet?

“To make sure the population of this wonderful nation is never oppressed again.”

“Perfect. I like your energy.”

The Cadet’s new routine woke him at 6:00 am. They ran for one hour, followed by two hours of standing in formation. Those who fainted or complained of the heat were forced to run for another hour. The Cadet never complained of the heat. The Lieutenant attributed it to his pure farmer blood. After formation, they were served breakfast. Usually beans but sometimes in winter they were given lentil soup. This was followed by General Command and Staff courses. They were served dinner at 7pm and given a free hour. At 8 pm all Cadets were expected to be in their bunks.

It was during the free hour between dinner and bunk time that The Cadet developed a new method of entertainment for his comrades. Using his mother’s technique of card reading, he would predict his fellow cadet’s futures. One evening The Cadet’s bunkmate, decided to test the truthfulness of The Cadet’s skills. The Cadet revealed a future full of love for his bunkmate.

“Alright, I’m slightly impressed. But if you really are as good as you say tell me what my girlfriend’s name is.”

The bunkmate was unaware that he had a tendency to whisper her name in his sleep.

The Cadet paused for moment, for dramatic effect and then spoke her name. This caused a stir in The Cadet’s unit and he soon became known as the master of cards. It was a few days later when one of The Lieutenant’s lower ranking officers came for him.

“Where is the cadet with the cards?!”

All fingers lead to The Cadet.

“Follow me, The Lieutenant wants to see you. ”

The Cadet raced through all the scenarios in his head. Since the ouster of The Monarch, gambling had been declared illegal. Perhaps, The Lieutenant thought he was encouraging the rise of gambling, thus calling for the disrespect and—ultimately—the rise against The Liberator! He knocked softly on the newly painted door.

“Come in!”

With a click of his heel and an exposed palm, he saluted The Lieutenant. The room was painted a dull grey-green and contained one brown desk, two wooden chairs for guests, one leather chair for The Lieutenant, and one portrait of the Liberator hanging high over The Lieutenant’s head. The Lieutenant fanned himself with a nationalist magazine, “The Capital Weekly”.

“Sit down.”

The Lieutenant waited until The Cadet was settled to continue talking.

“I hear stories that you’re quite the fortune teller.”

“We only do it for fun, sir. It’s nothing serious, sir.”

“No need to make excuses.”

The Lieutenant opened his desk drawer and revealed a deck of cards. He pushed them in front of The Cadet. In silence, The Cadet stared at the deck.

“Go on. Show me my future.”

The Cadet scanned The Lieutenant’s face for signs of sarcasm or anger. There were none.

“Ok. Please separate the deck into two piles using your left hand.”

The Lieutenant followed his orders.

“Pick out fifteen cards using your left hand.”

The Cadet laid out the cards in the formation his mother taught him. All the Aces were drawn.

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“Very good Cadet. Very good. Go back to work now. “

Two weeks later The Cadet was called back into the office. Before he could salute The Lieutenant interrupted him, “Come in. Close the door. Sit Down.”

The Cadet settled into one of the wooden chairs.

“What did you see in my cards last time you were here?”

“Money?”

“Do you know what happened to me?”

“No sir.”

“Last night someone broke into my house. They took everything. All my money. All my wife’s jewelry.”

“I’m- I’m sorry. I couldn’t tell if the money was coming in or out.”

The Lieutenant opened the drawer of his desk and pulled out the deck, “tell me what you see.”

It was from then on that The Lieutenant revealed his secrets to The Cadet. Confiding in his fortuneteller, he told him of all the plans. He told him of the foreign hands waiting to sabotage the nation. He told him of the former supporters of The Monarch who waited in small European towns for their chance to rise again.

 

Part 3: Forbidden Fruit

It was with The Lieutenant’s trust that The Cadet went on to become a Lieutenant himself, a First Lieutenant, Captain, a Lieutenant Colonel, and finally The Colonel of the ninth regiment. All this was achieved in the span of ten short years using minimal bribery and almost no torture. As the youngest of his rank, The Colonel compensated his age with seriousness and a large mustache.

The former Lieutenant, now The General Major, held his eighteenth annual “Liberator’s Officers Celebration of Freedom, the Nation, and Justice: in Honor of the Martyrs of the Liberator’s Liberation of the Nation from the Anti-liberation Tyrant” banquet. It was there that The Colonel managed to charm The Ministers of Interior, Exterior, and Culture into marrying his younger sisters. The Colonel’s family was thus promptly moved out of the village hut and into villas that once belonged to The Monarch’s aristocracy.

The eighteenth banquet marked the first year in which The Liberator could not attend. His wife claimed he was in “poor health”. The General Major laughed loudly, “Poor health! The man is an unstoppable machine! Not even the CIA could bring him down. Though, as we all know, they tried and failed.”

The guests sipped their imported alcohol and nodded knowingly. It was during this moment of great admiration for The Liberator (and his inability to die) that The Colonel entered, family in tow. The General Major beamed with joy.

“My boy! My cadet! My fortune-teller! Our honored and esteemed Colonel! Come! Come! Have a whiskey! Juice for the women of course.”

Ever the extrovert, The Minister of Interior left his wife’s side (without a hint of hesitation) in order to catch up with The Liberator’s cousin’s daughter. The Minister of Exterior, the more introverted of the group, rejected the whiskey and settled for water and a corner of the room with his wife silent by his side. The Minister of Culture was not present.

“My Dear! Where is your husband?! How I miss his gracious and cultured presence at my banquets!”

“I’m afraid there’s a soccer match today. He couldn’t miss it.”

The large room, covered in beige marble, surrounded by peeling wallpaper with a flowery pattern, was furnished entirely in Baroque style. Tassels hung from extravagant blue armchairs, a large dark wooden dining table stood in the center of the room with carved figures running down its leg, and a crystal chandelier with a lime green tint illuminated the grand hall of the mansion. The Colonel sat upright in one of the armchairs. He watched his sisters socialize with a world that was once exclusively his. His mother, whom he still lived with, was at the buffet table loading her plate with tiny sandwiches. He squirmed at the sight of her gluttony, at the thought of her cracked and overworked hands tainting the golden, fluffy, smooth surfaces of the miniature food. It was at that moment, as one sister scolded her husband’s wandering eye, another silently sipped her guava juice, the youngest flirted with the high-ranking Generals, and his mother filled her mouth to the brim with bread, when The Colonel began to feel that he needed a mate. He spent the last ten years living almost as a hermit, obsessed with rising in the ranks.

Twirling his mustache he surveyed the room. Most females in attendance were the wives and daughters of his colleagues, untouchables. The only remaining women were the embarrassing creatures he called his family. The whiskey warmed his insides and he began to doze off.

“Would you like more, sir?”

A young servant lowered her eyes as he snapped back to reality. She looked young. She couldn’t be older than twenty. The Colonel didn’t care much for age; all he could see were her eyes. They were blue. He had never seen a servant with blue eyes. He licked his mustache as he allowed himself to take in all of her body.

“Sir, another drink?”

The Colonel did something he hadn’t done in years: he smiled.

“Yes.”

The girl poured him a glass and with a quick smile she moved on to the next military man. The Colonel, reeling from the encounter, zigzagged to The General Major.

“Who is that servant girl?”

“She’s mine. I hired her after The Field Marshal’s wife found herself enraged with jealousy and kicked her out. Some peasant girl I believe.”

“I will marry her. Please arrange it.”

The General Major, in a fit of hysterical laughter, spilled the remains of his whiskey on The Younger Sister’s dress. The Younger Sister, who had been allowing The General Major to pour whiskey into her guava juice all night, giggled in ecstasy.

“My boy, she’s just a peasant girl. You’re too good for her.”

“You forget that I was once a peasant boy.”

“Different times my Colonel. Different times. But I suppose we could train her as we did you. The only problem would be her age.”

“Change the birth certificate?”

The General Major caressed the youngest sister’s arm and gazed with longing at her chest. He waved The Colonel off.

“Yes yes! Easily done! Come here tomorrow night and we’ll arrange it.”

The Colonel, in a drunken stupor of lust, searched for the servant girl amongst the guests. She reminded him of the girls he grew up with in his village. Their simplicity always attracted him. She was nowhere to be seen. The Colonel pushed through the crowd of Ministers and Generals until he reached the kitchen. At the counter stood the girl, her loose black outfit covered every inch of her body and a light black cloth hung loosely around her head allowing soft strands of her dark hair to fall out. At the sound of The Colonel’s entrance, she turned.

“More Whiskey?”

“No. You. I want you.’

“I’m sorry?”

“You’re coming home with me tonight.”

“Is The General Major exchanging me for another girl?”

“You’re my wife now.”

The Colonel lunged towards the counter in an attempt to wrap his arms around the helpless child. She screamed and ran towards the hall; he pursued. The sight of the hall stopped the lovers in their tracks. All the guests stood in silence, staring at the grand entrance. The Field Marshal was reading from a paper.

“ -It is with deepest regrets that we announce the death of our Liberator, our savior, and our nation’s father,”

The sisters screamed in despair and fainted into their husband’s arms, the youngest into The General Major’s. The Ministers and Generals began to silently pray into their whiskey glasses. The Colonel reached towards the servant girl as she tried to use this opportunity to escape. He pressed her head into his chest, she tried to pull away, but he pressed her head tighter against his chest.

 

Part 4: Disaffection

 

Report For the Beloved People of the Nation on National Salvation and the Incident of the Fundamentalist Attacks on the Beloved Nation:

We, the cabinet of the military council, hereby issue this report to clarify and create an honest and transparent account on what transpired on the 14th day of April.

Since the death of our beloved Liberator the nation has found itself infested by the disease of fundamentalism. These fundamentalists spoke in the name of religion when, in fact, they merely used religion to topple the pillar of the state. As we all know, the nature of their hate and violence began shortly after the death of The Liberator when they decried The Successor’s ascension to power. They used the Western ideal of ‘Democracy’ to accuse our dear Successor of being an unworthy father of our nation. They gathered in squares and chanted. This, being an innocent act, was allowed to flourish due to the kindness of The Successor’s heart. He, being aware that they were simply mourning the death of our most distinguished and revered Liberator. The events that took place are almost too tragic to write. However, it must be mentioned that these poor fundamentalists brought it upon themselves.

Who are these fundamentalists and how can you spot them?

They are usually in groups and disguise themselves as students or hardworking men and women. They claim to be thinkers and artists, yet are never seen at any of the national theatre events nor do they participate in the annual “Portrait of the Nation” award.

Why must we be wary of them?

Using the same rhetoric as the English who colonized our nation, these fundamentalists use ‘liberal’ ideals that go against this so-called “religion” they follow. If they were truly pious people they would understand that the Successor has been blessed by God’s will. How can these pious people not recognize salvation?

What happened?

The fundamentalists finally revealed their true nature and attempted to attack the state. Using concealed weapons and makeshift tear gas; they spontaneously attacked our brave young policemen. The state had no other option but to act quickly! Gunmen climbed on the roofs of civilian houses and were prepared to shoot anyone on the ground. So we were obligated to send the tanks in. They also had three bombs hidden in residential buildings! Thankfully the state was there to defuse them. Many have accused the state of using excessive force. However, I’m certain the judiciary will understand this need on the state’s part to maintain justice and liberty. Tragically fifty-three fundamentalists perished in the events that unfolded. Many were trampled in the stampede that their own colleagues created. Some were even used as human shields by their more cowardly counterparts! These deaths were not a result of the state’s violence, as some would suggest, but negligence on the part of the fundamentalists. The remaining threats were apprehended and sent to an undisclosed location. There, our young Lieutenants in training will interrogate them and, if God wills it, we shall have a safe and healthy state.

 

Thank you and May God and The Successor bless you,

The former Colonel of the ninth regiment, Interim Field Marshal.

 

Part 5: Charade of Doom

After the Incident report was signed, the former Field Marshal was asked to retire and The Colonel took over. They say this new Field Marshal is a man of integrity, not afraid to make decisions and take charge. When asked what should be done with protestors, the then Colonel’s answer was “make them disappear.” This gained the respect and admiration of all his colleagues and it was unanimous that he must be the new Field Marshal.

The Field Marshal leaned on his dark wooden desk. A portrait of The Successor hung above his head. It was only a year into his time as Field Marshal that the generals and ministers filed into his office one day. They locked the door behind them and all vowed secrecy. They filled him in on the plan, they told him the reasons, the necessity of it. In one short hour they planned the execution of The Successor, promising the Field Marshal that if he went along with their plan he would be named the new Leader of the nation.

The plan was executed quickly and flawlessly. The Field Marshal received the news from a young lieutenant.

“The Successor has been shot at the national parade. Fundamentalists have been apprehended.”

The Field Marshal stood, and with no hesitation, began walking down the hall. The young lieutenant (a nephew from the youngest sister) walked at his heel.

“Boy, you’re sweating on my boots. Go home to your mother and tell her to buy a pretty dress.”

The Field Marshal’s villa was larger than anything he could have imagined as a boy. The halls were surrounded with doors, all leading to dark rooms that smelled of dust and cleaning product. They only used half the rooms in the house. He passed the kitchen where his wife slaved away making meals, though he brought her dozens of servants. He climbed up the wooden stairs. He passed his daughter’s room, where once he found a boy with a hand under his daughter’s blouse. That boy was later sentenced to six months in prison for indecent exposure. He passed his son’s room where once he found a boy with his hand down his son’s pants. That boy was later sentenced to six years in jail for debauchery. He finally reached the room at the far end of the second floor hallway, his mother’s room.

His mother had gone deaf and blind in her old age. They say her blindness was caused by the venom of a snake that the CIA planted in her garden. They say she went deaf because the CIA planted a bug in her ear in order to spy on her son. They say The Field Marshal, ever the hero of the nation, stabbed her ears.

The Field Marshal opened the door to her room. It creaked. She sat in her usual spot in the middle of the king sized bed. His mother, who never adjusted to a life of luxury, threw out the furniture she didn’t need. All that remained was the bed, the side table and a closet. Every time The Field Marshal walked into the room he remembered her imperfection, his embarrassment at her peasant manners, her inability to change. Immobility and excessive card reading caused her to develop a hump. Yet, even her hump lacked perfection, it was slightly off center. Her hands ran over a deck of cards as she split them with her left hand. He moved slowly so he wouldn’t startle her. He sat near her; the mattress sank and creaked under his weight.

“Who’s there? Don’t hurt me! Don’t you know who my son is?”

The Field Marshal edged towards her and ran his fingers over hers, their signal that it was him and not a fundamentalist. She smiled and felt his hands.

“My boy! My beautiful, powerful, wonderful boy! Let me read your fortune!”

“We had him murdered. Do you know what this means?”

“My delightful little Cadet! How I love you!”

“This means that I will be the new father of the nation. I can finally be what your husband could never dream to be.”

She ran her hands over the cards frantically.

“I feel hearts in these cards. You will find love! Love everywhere! It crosses over with diamonds! This love will give you wealth! Oh my brilliant Colonel! You will take over our amazing nation!”

The Field Marshal looked at the cards, there were no hearts to be seen. He stroked his mother’s hair.

“I can’t wait until you die. The last piece of my youth will die with you.”

“Oh my boy! My darling Cadet! My brave soldier! My adored Colonel! My revered Field Marshal! Our nation’s beloved Dictator!”

His mother wept for her love and devotion to her son and thus for her love and devotion to the nation. The Field Marshal picked up a bowl of soup left on the side table and fed his weeping mother.

They say the CIA filled the mother’s soup with miniscule amounts of arsenic until she finally died, taking his memories of innocent youth with her.

 

 

 

Randa Jarrar’s Him, Me and Muhammad Ali – A Review By Eman el Shaikh

Randa Jarrar’s Him, Me, and Muhammad Ali is brimming with nostalgia. Not the inert kind, that encloses and preserves memory in amber-colored warmth, but the disruptive kind, that threads everything with an aspiration for the distant and interrogates memory persistently. The thirteen short stories in this collection are threaded with a potent, cutting nostalgia: nostalgia for the wholes that now lie fragmented, for other spaces and times, for faltering imaginings, for possible worlds that never existed. This nostalgia is promiscuous, recruiting history only to watch it dissolve in an array of contingencies and tensions.

This collection of stories palpitates and trembles around these tensions. Pleasure and grief weave together to create an intricate sensory synthesis. Faith and doubt play together dialectically, peeking out, whispering to one another, and being tucked away when they cause too much mischief. This balancing of tensions does not result in a permanent anxiety. Rather, Jarrar masterfully draws upon them and inflects her writing with humor, surprise, and elegant subversions.

These tensions persist, exploding the life-worlds Jarrar brings forth and yet binding them together. And it is in this and through this that Jarrar’s meditation on Arab identity arises. She shatters Arab and Arab-identity identity and lets the fragments speak and refract kaleidoscopic life-worlds that Jarrar makes palpable. Her characters are too abundant to be collapsed into single subjectivities, and so they overflow, replete with tentative imaginings of belonging, dreams of flight, grand visions to capture the moon, small hopes to survive another day, and triumphant subversions of inherited trajectories.
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Though Jarrar’s use of magical realism is striking, her imagination lives most visibly and profoundly in the writing of the ordinary lives of Arabs and Arab Americans, which through her beautiful, poignant, and witty writing are wrought as a very different kind of magic. There is magic in unexpected and partial love affairs, in strategic mistranslations and omissions, the switching (and inventing) of fortunes, and the persistence of the pursuit of pleasure. And pleasure is the most magical aspect of these stories. Across nation, class, gender, and age, one can trace a commitment to—indeed, an ardent belief in—pleasure, which often sits alongside and converses with many “familiar oppressions” in order to give birth to this set of marvellous stories.

 

My Father’s Daughter by Kathy Shalhoub

My father once told me that women were all the same; they made promises they didn’t keep.

I was a freshman sitting cross-legged on my dorm bed holding the receiver to my ear.

“They’re full of bullshit,” he said. I couldn’t remember his face but his voice sounded so much older than his fifty-seven. It sounded like someone else’s and very far away.

“I really will come see you this summer,” I said again after his declaration. I was ready at last.

“Whatever. Happy Birthday. I love you,” he said.

I didn’t reply because I didn’t want to lie.

I am four years old and I’m a Princess. Dad is the King. In a house of six people I see only him. My brother and sister are invisible. My mother is at work and Teta, my grandmother, busy in the kitchen. We sit on the marble steps that connect upstairs with downstairs. He soothes my knee where I have fallen. A dark blue bruise is brewing beneath the skin. The tiles are cold. He picks me up and carries me up the stairs.

“Is my Princess okay?”

I am safe and warm in the throne of his arms so I smile and nod.

“You know, your Grandfather was a Count,” he says. His English is accented. “You have blue blood. Royal blood,” he says, his chest swelling and his eyes looking deep into mine. Teta passes by and rolls her eyes.

I lift my chin an inch higher. The blue knee makes sense now. Some months later, I am in the garden carrying a box of tools for my brother. It is too heavy and my hands are sweaty. It starts to slip and I can’t hold it. I drop it on my ring finger and the finger splits open. I bleed crimson.

I am five years old. I am bouncing on my dad’s leg and laughing. The TV is on and a blonde Miss Universe struts around the stage with her diamond crown. The perfume of tobacco on his fingers is warm and delicious.

“You will be Miss Universe one day,” he says, gripping his pipe between tea-stained teeth. Maybe, but I have yet to see a Miss Lebanon on the show.

But when he lifts me up and sits me in his lap I feel like Miss Universe. I am loved. That summer we are on the beach, me in my one-piece stripy bathing suit and blue floaters sucking at my arms, him in his Speedos. He is so tall and handsome. His hair is dirty blonde. The tips curl perfectly around his ears. Golden body hair sparkles on his bronze skin. He gives me change and lets me go buy a Merry-cream. I feel like a grown up.

I hurry back to share my ice-cream with him but he’s not on the slippery white benches that surround the pool. His blue towel is still damp with sweat. I look up and scan the tall hairy bodies all around. I see the back of a man in Speedos standing near the wall overlooking the crashing waves. The oil on his bronze skin glistens in the sun.

He is talking to Miss Universe in a tiny turquoise bikini. The chocolate and vanilla swirls melt onto my hand and drip down to the hot cement.

I am six years old and it’s been a long, sticky summer. The electricity is out again. This is normal in Lebanon. It is late afternoon and my sister and I have exhausted our list of games. Mom is still at work. Dad is awake and better today.

“Get changed,” he says. “Let’s go outside and take pictures.”

My sister doesn’t want to participate. I run to change out of my nightie and into my new ballet outfit. Outside in the dimming sun, hibiscus flower in my hair, I am the most beautiful girl that ever existed.

“My prima ballerina,” he says.

I preen.

That school year I begin ballet classes – a gift from Aunt Hoda. At home after class, I dance in front of the mirror, sing to myself, do a plier, a pirouette. My father wobbles in the doorway.
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“You want to be ballerina?” His voice sounds strange.

“Yes!” I screech, and jump at him to pick me up. He squats down instead.

“Then you gonna be a poor starving artist all your life,” he says.

Dad likes taking photos but he is an engineer. We are poor anyway.

I am seven years old and we are in the red-tiled kitchen. My father is very angry with my brother for not eating his tomatoes. The number of tomatoes does not equal the amount of anger. My brother puts a slice of tomato in his mouth and gags immediately. It’s a texture thing. My father thinks he’s being difficult. He undoes his belt, and in one move whips the leather from his pants and across my brother’s back.

My brother flinches but says nothing. I run out of the kitchen and into the living room. My father comes to find me. I shrink into the corner of the couch. He sits next to me and drops an arm across my shoulders.

“Don’t be scared.” He knows I am because I’m crying. “I would never hurt you.”

I know he wouldn’t but I am sad for my brother, and relieved it’s not me.

A bottle of Smirnoff and a row of beer bottles later, my father staggers into the kitchen in his underwear and grey robe. It feels like he’s been away for a long time but there’s war and I know no one can travel these days. I hurry in after him wanting us to spend time together. I want to hug him but hang back in the doorway. He struggles to open the refrigerator, sways in its mist, still gripping the handle while he scans the inside.

He stoops and plucks the bottle of French’s mustard from the door, wobbles, spins a little then falls on his bum, legs spread out. Laughter bubbles over his lips.

I do not go closer. I do not look into his face. I do not hug him. I focus on the bottle of mustard he still holds. It is very yellow. The King begins to fade and his Princess does too.

I am 10 years old. The man standing next to me outside is my father. I am crying because there’s a dead kitten on the concrete underneath his car. Or maybe I’m crying because Teta died so recently. He pats my shoulder like a baby pats a dog. Stiff. Awkward. Pat, pat, pat. We both seem disconnected, an old toy put together with improvised pieces.

“It’s okay, I’ll take care of it,” he says. “Daddy will always be here for you.”

He hasn’t been anywhere else, but I still miss him. I have never called him Daddy either. I take his words and carefully wrap them up. I put them inside my heart where they still burn.

A few months later, Aunt Hoda is dropping me off at home after a day at her place. A Red Cross ambulance is parked outside our house, the siren is off but the orange lights are spinning. Something happened to Teta? No, Teta died months ago. I sprint inside. A man is lying facedown on the floor next to my parents’ bed.

Mom tells me he’s going to hospital to get better. After that I sometimes see his name embroidered into towels I help mom hang outside. Then one day the towels stay home. I don’t say goodbye and I don’t say I love you because I don’t see him again. He is back in his country, getting better.

My father told me once that women were all the same, they made promises they didn’t keep. I don’t know if he was talking about my mother or me but in either case, he was right.

I was an engineering freshman sitting cross-legged on my dorm bed holding the receiver to my ear. I couldn’t remember his face but his voice sounded so much older than his fifty-seven. I promised him I would visit that summer. Winter got there first.

 

 

 

Iman Humaydan’s The Weight of Paradise, a story of memory, violence, and the elusiveness of homeland

“The homeland that killed us in its name”
Fiction Book Review
by Eman M.A. Elshaikh

Iman Humaydan’s latest novel The Weight of Paradise is a poignant evocation of the fight to defend and restore memory through the cyclical violence, exile, and suffering which seeks to annihilate it. Set mostly in Beirut in 1978 and 1994, the story lives “in the heart of the apocalypse” during the Lebanese Civil War and also emerges from its debris, struggling to piece itself together into an authentic whole. In this Beirut, even small distances are difficult to traverse, as the paths are encircled with violence or buried beneath its aftermath.

“Reconstructing, reconstruction,” laments Sabah, a central character who ties together and ruptures the narrative at different points. “Every day on radio and television they talk like this, too. Maybe they want to build and construct so that people will forget.”

Indeed, the novel feels like a rejection of forgetting, as the characters in their own ways are obsessed with retrieval. The novel interrogates memory and its antagonists masterfully. It probes the process of destruction and reconstruction and the ways in which they are irretrievably bound up in death, violence, and historical revisionism. In doing so, it is an unflinching portrayal of the violence that lives alongside the characters, who “had become skilled at managing their lives in its shadow.”

Humaydan intertwines the story of Maya, a recently widowed writer and mother who returns to Beirut from Paris in 1994 following her husband’s passing, with the stories Maya finds forgotten in a suitcase in an abandoned building. In the suitcase, Maya finds Noura, Kemal, and Sabah, and she instantly becomes obsessed with unpacking their history through their photographs, letters, and diaries.

She seeks out the eccentric but heart-breaking Sabah, an older woman living alone in the old Beirut neighbourhood of Khandaq al-Ghamiq, waiting for her disappeared husband to return and tending to her small garden, even through bombs and gunfire. Living virtually as a recluse, she initially meets Maya with hesitation, but ultimately tells Maya about Noura and Kemal’s lives as well as her own.

Shilajith was found after scientists noticed wounded animals frequenting caves which cialis no prescription cheap contained large deposits of the substance. The connection with the inner guidance system viagra cost people can understand their own feelings and set their priorities while searching their true soul mate. Generally, there are two basic side effects from generic viagra pill Tongkat Ali. You will be shocked to death if you try viagra purchase to use it again. Sabah’s stories and recollections provide Maya with the connective tissue that brings Noura and Kemal’s story together. She learns about Noura’s self-imposed exile from Damascus after a tragedy in her family and how this exile becomes permanent once Noura starts writing the truth about what happened. She learns about the violence that follows such truths and will stop at nothing to silence them. She learns about Kemal, Noura’s lover in Istanbul, and the fragile life they try to build together. But these stories and their tellers are often treacherous, and Maya, like Noura, fights to save truth from oblivion.

Humaydan’s main achievement with this novel, which is full of despair and yet buoyed with a promise of love and hope, is in allowing the reader to “enter history through countless endless gates,” and in doing so, reread history. It imbues the narrative with a subtle promiscuity that disrupts even the reader’s own recollection. In doing so, it forces us to confront the silences and lacunas in our stories and how they can both ruin us and save us. It is also a meditation on the dangers of invented memory and the need to bear witness always. This force is present even in the sweet love story between Noura and Kemal. In her diary, Noura writes, “with him, my doubts about history books started to gain power and take on new meaning.”

Humaydan writes in a poignant and confessional voice, which shines most brightly in the pages of Noura’s diary and the letters from Kemal, where they write about loss, violence, and lost homelands. They trace their wounds together and look for origins and resting places. In their histories, one finds Arabs, Armenians, Kurds, and Turks and the lands that shift and subsume them under violent nations, lamenting “the homeland that killed us in its name” and yet finding fragments of homeland scattered everywhere.

Though these deliberations on homeland and its erasure are thoughtful, there is also a questionable sense that the violence and oppression of the Middle East are somehow primordial or inevitable. The various scenes, in Damascus, Beirut, and Istanbul, are seemingly always engulfed by death and violence. In these places, both the repressive state and its resistors, both communists and capitalists alike are irrationally cruel. A looming tyrannical government occludes all individuals, who are anonymous, interchangeable, and sublimated within classes or sects. It threatens to destroy indiscriminately and without reason. Government actors, like the ubiquitous and senseless “mukhabarat” are equally anonymous and robotic, incapable of poetry and truth. Though the novel is committed to history, these places seem to exist outside of it.

Perhaps this indictment of these societies as irretrievably violent is in fact an indictment of men, who in the novel are either absent or violent. Even the boys in the novel attain masculinity through violencing women, who in turn “retaliate against oppression by oppressing themselves.” In this novel, men push women out of their homelands, punishing them for their desires and their consciousness. “Oppression pushes women to emigrate, to flee,” Noura writes, “it’s the kind of oppression that often comes in the form of a man.” Indeed, Kemal, who was dressed as a girl in early childhood in order to avoid a curse against the family’s men, seems to be the only exception.

There is no denying the beauty of the intricate lives woven together by Humaydan in this touching novel. However, in The Weight of Paradise, some of these threads are too thin. The reader is riveted by the textured inner worlds of Noura and Kemal but is left craving more of characters like Sabah and Maya. Sabah’s fascinating story still craves excavation, as her inner life remains opaque. The reader gets glimpses of her effervescence and her desire to fly and senses the decay of that spirit over time. Through the moving stories of her two lives, her desire for freedom, and her will to be a witness, the reader does not truly get a sense of her pain, but merely its imminence. Maya’s voice is poetic yet truncated, and though the backdrop of her life is sketched, the reader gets only a hazy sense of its detail. Through the suitcase, Maya inherits a reservoir of memory and seems to exist primarily to dip into it. Because of this, the novel ends before its force can be fully explored and resolved. In other words, the problem with The Weight of Paradise is that it was too brief.

The Weight of Paradise is a powerful call to question our histories, and in doing so, it is a call to question the violence that lives at the heart of it and possibly at the heart of our natures. “But this is us: we feed the poor, we laugh at a passing joke, we love, we mourn, we dance, but we also kill our neighbours in civil wars. Since we are like that, how can we describe ourselves?

Left

By Lena Zaghmouri

What struck me most about Mom’s family was how their pictures looked so different from what Mom told me they were actually like. They looked so put together and all-American, untouched by any troubles. Just two white married parents and one cute kid that always stood in front of them in pictures with a big smile and her arms open, embracing the world and the photo that would capture that emotion forever.
In reality, though, Mom’s parents were divorced, and Mom said Grandma’s main concern was finding her next boyfriend or husband, Grandpa’s the new family he inherited from marrying his second wife, which was soon after he divorced Grandma.
Grandma looked sweet and virginal with blond hair and light brown eyes, but she had countless affairs since Mom could remember.

Grandpa looked kind with dark blue eyes, thin brown hair, a soft manly smile, but Mom told me he would become irritable and beat her for the smallest mistake when he was angry with Grandma. Mom had a collection of bruises on her arms and back that she showed me to prove it. He would let plenty of things slide if things were going well with her Grandma, but that was rare. He was easier to be around once her parents divorced during Mom’s early teens, but then he never wanted to be around her anymore either. Mom was part of his past life, the one he claimed was driven by anger. He needed to minimize contact with that as much as possible.
But Mom having a child out of wedlock with a Palestinian reawakened Grandpa’s latent anger. He called her a shameful slut and washed his hands of her and was unwilling to meet me, his olive-skinned granddaughter with a weird name like Isra, one he probably couldn’t even pronounce right.

♦♦
Grandma came to visit on rare occasions; the first time I remember was when I was five. She was upset that Mom had a child out of wedlock, but she was more forgiving. She was between marriages, and Mom had just kicked Baba out for good. Mom would complain about what a deadbeat Baba was to Grandma sometimes.
“Honestly, Carol, I’ve always told you if you just lost fifteen or twenty pounds, you could get yourself a decent man,” Grandma told Mom.
She visited once or twice a year, usually during the holidays; she would bring me a new Barbie or something as a Christmas gift. Grandma ignored me and vented her frustrations with the world and the men in her life to Mom.
But now, three years later, Mom had cancer, and Grandma went back and forth on whether or not she would take me after Mom passed away. Sometimes she said it would be nice to have someone to live with, someone to help out and spend time with her, but then Grandma would say the last thing she wanted to do was take in an eight-year-old at her age, especially one with a father like mine.
Mom didn’t trust her, though. “She’ll want you when she’s alone, and as soon as she gets a man, Grandma’ll find a way to get rid of you.”

♦♦

Mom told more positive stories about her family when she put together the photo album for me, her hands newly thin and lined with pale blue veins. She didn’t have energy to put it together before, and once in a while she said there was no point in it because what did all those pictures mean? Most of the people in them I had never met and probably never would.
Still, we sat in the full size bed we slept on at Baba’s place while she put it together. Mom explained who and what was in each picture before she pressed it down on the sticky surface. “Well, hopefully, Isra, your grandma will visit when you live only with Baba,” she said. “Maybe this will make her turn around.”

♦♦

Mom went into the hospice the next day, and Baba picked me up after school every day so we could go there and see Mom. Sometimes Baba would be in the room alone with her, but usually they kept me there to alleviate the tension between them. We had been living at Baba’s, but I was sure my parents weren’t together, and they wouldn’t have even spoken to each other if Mom wasn’t dying.

Every time Mom said she was tired and needed to rest in the hospice, I was sure that she was going to die then, and I would cry inconsolably, even though Mom assured me she wasn’t leaving yet. Baba would take me out of the room and try to comfort me for a little bit, but he would soon become angry and tell me to be strong. Plenty of people had gone through much worse back home in Palestine, so my pain now didn’t matter.

♦♦

Grandma came soon after Mom went into the hospice. She would take me to see Mom for the week or so that she was still awake and not drugged beyond comprehension.
And suddenly I wasn’t invisible to Grandma anymore.
Grandma now picked me to vent her frustrations about the man she was in the process of divorcing and Grandpa as well. “I talked to Carol’s father, and you know what he told me? He can’t get the time off work! Can you believe that?” She sighed and clenched her teeth together. “‘This is your child,’ I said to him. ‘Can you just pull your dick out of your wife’s pussy for two seconds and remember you have a daughter?’ You know those kids his wife has aren’t his. She had them with the guy before. I don’t see what’s so great about her. She’s as plain as wood.”

♦♦

Grandma took me out for ice cream once Mom slipped from consciousness, and she said she couldn’t stand to see her daughter suffering to death and that her granddaughter didn’t need to see it either, so Baba let her.
Though I loved ice cream, I wasn’t excited about getting some that day. Most of it melted on the back of my hand and dripped on the table, and Grandma had to take me to the bathroom to clean up. I could tell she was irritated I saw her roll her eyes in the mirror, and she told me that I had to eat like a civilized girl.
Kamagra Oral Jelly and its Side Effects are extracted, to let you know completely what option you should take before trying out sildenafil viagra generico. levitra basically is a brand name of the generic drug tadalafil. These extensively studied adaptogens http://frankkrauseautomotive.com/testimonial/great-dealer/ generic cialis may similarly work by mimicking stress itself, according to Swedish researchers Alexander Panossian and George Wikman. Some men cheapest cialis prices are incapable of holding on for more time due to stress and mental depressions. For example- Kamagra is an effective medicine pills viagra canada which enable ability to fight against erectile issues. We went to the hotel she was staying in—she would spend the night at Mom’s apartment whenever she came before, but she hated Baba and his apartment—and she put cartoons on for me while she criticized all the men she had had in her life, reserving the worst for Grandpa. “I swear once I married that guy he became such a drag,” she said. “We were so young, and all he wanted to do was stay in and drink beer. Even convincing him to go out to the movies was like asking him to drink cyanide.” Grandma cringed at the thought of him. She moved on to her three other husbands: the second was too mean; the third had affairs; the fourth, the one she was in the middle of divorcing, was a drag like Grandpa, but it was more understandable because he was almost a senior citizen.
I didn’t say anything. My lack of response must have been made her sad; Mom always had some kind of commentary for Grandma, even if it was negative like telling her she should grow up or learn what monogamy was all about. “I’m not even sixty years old, and my daughter is dying. You’re not supposed to bury your child; it’s the other way around. Of course, it’s no picnic to lose your mother at your age.” She wiped a couple of tears that came from her overfilled brown eyes. “You know things are going to be different, right?”
Everyone used that phrase—“things are going to be different”—though they already were different. I hated spending time with Baba, having him prepare my food or ask him questions. He never knew the answers, and he would get irritated by them. “Don’t ask dumb questions,” he always said to me.
Baba was scary, too. Most nights I could hear him crying out in his sleep. When Mom was there she told that it was just because Baba had been through some terrible things since he was even younger than me, and he remembered them in his dreams, but I was sure that he was possessed. It was worse without having Mom there to tell me to go back to sleep.
I had to live without my mother.
At school everyone had a mother that I knew of. A few lived with their grandmothers or someone else, but they at least visited their mothers sometimes. And their grandmothers liked them a lot more than Grandma liked me. They didn’t talk about men all the time, and they didn’t tell their daughters that if they lost weight, they could find a decent man.
But I had a feeling that Grandma was feeling sorrier for herself. She was losing her daughter, the one she could turn to between men. She also started to put on a little bit of weight, especially in the middle. She probably would never be able to find another husband, at least not a decent one.

♦♦

Though it was almost my bedtime, Grandma had no plans to take me back to Baba’s or call him to ask if I could spend the night with her. “Who cares what he thinks?” she told me when I asked if I was allowed to stay. “He isn’t worth a shit anyway.” She took me to the store and bought me some pajamas and a night light, though I stopped using one over a year before. “What about a toy or something?”
“No, I don’t want to play.”
“You sure are a mellow child.”
After I took a bath and changed into the new pajamas, Grandma talked more about how the man she was currently divorcing was trying to hide his assets and get out of paying her as much alimony. “It’s not like I’ll be getting much. We were only married for a year and a half,” she said. “Couldn’t stand him any longer than that.”

♦♦

Baba pounded on the Grandma’s hotel door so hard I thought he must have bruised his knuckles, shouting at Grandma to open the door or he’d call the police.
Grandma didn’t hold out for long, but she wouldn’t let me go without letting Baba know that she thought he was a worthless Arab.
“You don’t deserve a say in the matter!” Grandma said. “You haven’t been there for most of her life, and all you’ll do is lock her in the house until she gets married!”
Baba told her at least I wouldn’t learn to be a whore like she was and charged past her and pulled me by the hand. “My daughter comes home with me!” he yelled as he brushed her aside to leave.
He left me in the pajamas Grandma got me, and he talked to me for over an hour, which he never did before. “She is a sharmoota, a slut. Do not act as she does, Isra. You do not want to live as her.” He told me that he couldn’t believe that a woman could act that way. His mother, my sitti, he said, would have never spoken to a son-in-law the way she had. Well, he wasn’t really a son-in-law. He never married Mom, but it should be the same thing to these Americans because they didn’t believe in marriage the way Palestinians did, so Grandma should think of him as her son-in-law. And Sitti definitely wouldn’t have carried on that way, marrying all kinds of men for money or whatever the hell she believed she would get.

♦♦

Baba woke me up in the middle of the night and told me to put my shoes on. Mom had died, and we were going to see her one last time before she went to the crematory. I was still tired, but my heart was thundering in my chest, so it was easy for me to stay awake.
Grandma was at the hospice before we were, her face red and streaked with tears. Mom lied on the bed, no oxygen tube connected to her, pale and gaunt, her hair a darker brown than what it was before, her lips still red. I cried, and my chest felt so light that I wondered if the center of my body was still there. For over a week now, Mom had been unconscious, and the only way I could tell she was still alive was that she sometimes made a soft grunt when she was in pain. Then a nurse came in and gave her some more drugs to keep her quiet and comfortable.
Baba picked me up and carried me out of the room. People hadn’t picked me up for years on a regular basis, and by then, I was only five or six inches shorter than him, but I guess he still thought I was four. He said we should go back home and let them take Mom away.

♦♦

Grandma held the memorial service at a small banquet hall. I spent most of the time sitting at one of the middle tables next to my father, chewing on one of the black cloth napkins, my dripping saliva warming the back of my hand. I watched my mother’s relatives, trying to see if I could remember them from the photos, and if I could recall their names or if Mom had ever spoken of them. But I couldn’t place most of them, and they were just as distant from me in real life as they were in the pictures. They seemed uncomfortable around me and my father and gave us short, awkward condolences. They spoke amongst themselves, telling their stories about Mom, what she was like as a child and a teenager.

That day they all had had a close relationship with her when she was alive.

I slipped out and sat under a tree in the picnic area, crushing some of the dried leaves, mildly enjoying the slight pricks in my palm. Grandma found me out there and kneeled down as far as she could to speak to me. She was reconciling with her husband. “I might as well,” she said, tearing up. She always wiped her tears daintily. “Who else will have me at my age? And I can’t live off alimony. I should just pack it in and face reality.” She wished me luck with my father, though she doubted he would be a good one. “I hope he doesn’t send you back to his country, but what can you do?”

Evil Spirits

By Haya Anis

I need to pee, Fatima thought as she nestled deeper into her fortress of cotton blankets. She ignored the gnawing at her bladder and stayed put. She felt something watching her. Evil spirits, she rationalized. She sensed their stealthy onslaught. Their presence was tangible and ominous, their aura dark and murky, like the waters of a voidless swamp. Her blanket was her only protective shield. She made sure everything was safe and covered, save for her nose and mouth; she needed to breath, after all. It was still dark outside; the call for Fajr prayer sounded an hour earlier.
I should have prayed earlier, she lamented. Prayer required ritual ablution. Ritual ablution required access to running water. Access to running water required a trip down the eerie, unlit hallway to the bathroom. The bathroom. The bathroom, where the evil spirits congregate and revel in their deviance. Or that’s what her mother tells her, anyway. For all she cared, the congregation of evil spirits hovered above her head tonight, waiting, waiting for her to reveal the slightest bit of flesh to feast on her festering soul. Never, she thought, and sunk deeper into her fortress of cotton blankets.

The air conditioning unit murmured softly. Outside, it was hot and humid. The morning dew stifled the air, offering conveyance to insects, the bloodthirsty and otherwise. It was 4 A.M now. Or was it 4:30? Fatima was too afraid to check her phone on the nightstand beside her bed. She knew light attracted mosquitoes. She knew because she once witnessed a mosquito haplessly fly into a light trap set up by her aunt in the heat of a summer night. Poor mosquito, flew to its own demise. It died noiselessly, save for a frazzle, like the one emitted by a frayed wire twisted and turned too much. A noise so small, proportional to the magnitude of a mosquito’s life. Fatima felt bad for the mosquito, but it was better that way; she didn’t want to spend her night itching swollen bites. So Fatima didn’t check her phone. She didn’t want to attract leftover mosquitos that may have entered earlier in the day, when the windows were open. The windows are shut now.

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Fatima opened the door and looked down the long, narrow hallway separating her from the bathroom. The bathroom looked menacing. Its door gaped like the mouth of Goliath, the shadow within breeding fear in Fatima’s heart now. Fatima quickly shut the door. She threw down her prayer gown and scuttled back to her bed.

I’ll pray when I wake up.
But she never did.

The Test

By Craig Loomis

The government is planning to study a project that will identify homosexuality through a clinical test, which will be added to the list of medical tests one has to undergo to obtain a visa. If an individual is tested as a homosexual that person will have an unfit stamped on his medical report and will automatically be disqualified from the visa application.

“That’s it? We’ve done all the blood tests?”

“Afraid so.”

“An urine?”

“Same.”

“Feces? Don’t forget feces. Nobody wants to look at the feces.”

“Lah, lah, we’ve looked at everything. There’s nothing there.”

He drums his fingers on the tabletop, until, “There must be something we missed. All that drips or oozes, or . . .? Something, Sah?”

It is late, and except for a small desk lamp that pools a weak yellow light across the desk, leaking ever so softly onto their legs and arms, the rest is grayblack lab. It is a bedroom-size government lab with a gang of steely machines neatly arranged around them. A Bunsen burner bubbles over there, a gassy blue flame flickers here. The many computers are at rest, ghostly gray and eyeless. A twinkle of tiny blue lights means one of the machines is thinking. And although the signs are clear, no smoking, the one wearing three gold rings is smoking a cigarette, flicking ash into a paper coffee cup. They wear white lab coats with nametags: Dr. Mohammad and Dr. Abdullah. Reams of paper full of charts and graphs and long columns of numbers cover the table. And so, the one continues to smoke while the other drums his fingers along the tabletop.

“Now what?”

“Yes, indeed, now what?”

“They want something reliable, something accurate. A test that can be applied at the airport if need be, in some back room, something with instant results. Sah?”
The smoker nods to this. Somebody, somewhere is talking too loud. Both of them look around to see how that is possible if they are on the eighth floor and they are the only ones in the building, and it’s late, and . . .

“How about an X-ray?”

“X-ray?”

“Sure, of the pelvic region. That might turn up something.”

“X-ray?”

He picks up a chart, reads it, turns one, two pages before dropping it back on the table. The sound of someone, somewhere talking too loud grows weaker, then louder, then disappears. Blue lights twinkling.

“How about a lie detector test?”

“They’d lie.”

“Of course, but the test would catch them, Sah?”

“It would have to be a yes or no question. Lah, lah, we need something more solid, more medical, something like a pregnancy test. Something we can see, something that does not take a specialist, a doctor, a PhD, something that says red for positive, blue for negative. Something like that, like a pregnancy test, Sah? Either you are or you aren’t, there’s no in between. You see?”
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He gently lifts the vial of blood from its gleaming steel holder, asking, “And when do they need this test?”

“It’s top priority. The director even used the words ‘national security priority’–just like the movies.”

He fingers the vial of blood, and there is a police siren and then another, and then, back to the hush of a late night lab.

“My grandmother swears that a person’s face tells all.”

“Face?”

“Tells all. Actually, it’s the eyes.”

“The eye color?”

“Lah, lah, of course not.” Taking a long puff from the cigarette, filling the lamplight with a newer, brighter fog. “The space between the eyes is what she’s talking about. She says the greater the space between a person’s eyes, the more, . . . the more suspect that person is. You see? She says everybody knows this.”

“The more suspect? Your grandmother says this?”

“Nam, 82 years old this month,” he says proudly.

“And you believe her?”

He shrugs, saying, “All we would need is a tape measure.”

He holds the vial of blood up to the lamp light, peering to get a better look. “Again, what did he say about this blood?”

“The director says it’s the real deal. Says this is a sample we can use. He says it’s genuine, authentic. Those are his very words, ‘authentic blood’ from, he said, a most reliable source.”

Turning the red vial this way and that, until the two of them are looking at it together, squinting into the soft light.

“Where did he say he got it?”

Done looking, he quickly slides the vial back into its metal holder. While the one lights another cigarette, making a new smoke, a new fog, the other begins to stack the many papers into one neat pile in the center of the table.

“I didn’t ask.”

Nothing But Alexandria

By Marina Chamma

Ten minutes were left for the express train to make its final stop into Alexandria’s Misr Station. For most of the two-and-a-half hour ride from Cairo, Rania’s head rested on her spotless, single-paned first class seat window. While she didn’t care for the luxuries of cleanliness and comfort on this trip, she had not been given much of a choice.
“A lovely lady like you travelling second class? Impossible!” the jovial middle-aged ticketing clerk at Cairo’s Ramses Station had told her the day before, as she tried to buy a regular one-way ticket to Alexandria.
“Thank you, that’s very kind of you,” she smiled, trying to keep her cool, “but I don’t want first class.” The clerk reached out for the booklet of first class tickets regardless.
“This is a first class ticket that will get you there in less than three hours!” he proudly exclaimed, as if the standard travel time to Alexandria couldn’t even escape Egypt’s obsession with haggling. Rania frowned, unconvinced.
“Besides, second class is only for Egyptians,” he triumphantly noted, ending the need for any further discussion. All the Egyptian movies Rania had watched as a teenager in Beirut had not been enough to keep even a short conversation going in the Egyptian dialect. Her colloquial Lebanese crept in soon enough, making it impossible to fool the natives. But being Egyptian or not wasn’t only about language. Luckily for the ticketing clerk, however, Rania had neither the time nor patience to argue about the definitions of a foreigner and whether she could even be considered one.
Rania had looked aimlessly out of the window throughout the ride. She took in as much of the hustle and bustle, the slums and crowds of the Cairo suburbs as her eyes could handle. Once out of the city, the vastness of the Egyptian hinterland was much simpler for her eyes to absorb. But the landscape was anything but monotonous, both arid and dusty, fertile and green, depending on how close the fields were to the bounties of the Nile.
Only after the train made its second to last stop at Tanta Station on the Upper Nile Delta, halfway through the trip, did the vast panoramas suddenly disappear. Rania could see nothing but Alexandria in front of her, without even closing her eyes. Its wide boulevards, chaotic narrow side streets and corniche – whose view into the city was blocked by endless rows of shiny new buildings, suffocating the remaining arabesque-styled villas that had yet to be brought to the ground. The way she saw Alexandria was drawn from the history books she read, the random documentaries she had watched and occasional dreams that were frighteningly lucid. No matter how different the city turned out to be from that of her imagination, she knew that once she arrived to Misr Station for the very first time, took a taxi heading northeast towards Al Ibrahimiyyah district and walked up Qena Street, she would find her grandmother’s house, just as it had been left and just as she had imagined it, waiting for her to bring it back to life.
As the train left Tanta Station, Rania suddenly felt a frantic urge to go through the neatly stacked contents of her brown leather messenger bag, most of which had been gathered during the past month. Handwritten notes scribbled around an improvised family tree going back to the 1860s. A list of family friends of her maternal grandmother with Levantine, Greek and Italian-sounding surnames with what would have once been their phone numbers and addresses in Alexandria. Rania knew she would be lucky if any of their descendants still lived there, let alone if anybody in the neighborhood recognized their names. The names of friends and relatives of her maternal grandparents who once lived in Cairo, whose numbers and addresses were also decades old. It was impossible that everyone had left without a trace and she would knock on their doors on her way back if she had to. Copies of the obituaries of her grandparents taken from three local newspapers, with nothing more than dates and standardized shallow epitaphs with post-mortem reverence for the dead. Photocopies of land deeds and a random collection of black and white passport pictures and colored family pictures delicately arranged in a rice paper notebook, every picture on a separate page. Delicately folded and placed at the front of the stack was a copy of the letter that had made the trip inevitable.

Barely one month had gone by since she had found the letter. Wandering at home on a lazy Monday evening, Rania stumbled upon a cardboard box everybody has in that ubiquitous dusty little corner of their attic. Mom must have thought it was filled with my faded teenage mementos and sent it here with the movers, she thought. The box was bursting at the seams and most of its contents came tumbling down as Rania removed the lid. There was everything from her baby pictures, souvenirs from family vacations, birthday cards from aunts and uncles, cassettes sent by her cousins as recorded letters and a small plastic box with two of her intact milk teeth. She found one of her favorite pictures of her mother as a fashionable, single 20 something year old, posing on a balcony overlooking an endless sparkling harbor she didn’t recognize. As she kept going through the box, five pages of elegant cursive handwriting suddenly fell into her lap from an envelope that was placed upside down. It was a letter to her mother and aunt Mona from her grandmother, written shortly before she had died. Coincidentally, Mona, the keeper of the family history and only one who would help her decipher what she had just found, would be visiting her in Beirut in a couple of days. Rania didn’t believe in signs, but if she did, she knew this is exactly what one would look like. It was a sign that she was ready to get her answers, to start uncovering the truth.

Rania’s maternal grandmother Rose and grandfather Hani were third generation Lebanese living in Egypt, their own grandparents having escaped Mount Lebanon’s simmering sectarian warfare of the mid-1800s in what was then part of the Ottoman Empire. They formed part of the community of Levantines, Greeks, Italians and other Mediterraneans, who settled primarily in Cairo and Alexandria, and made these metropoles so cosmopolitan. Each of these communities preserved some of the features of their countries of origin and never let go of their attachment to it. Together they forged a unique identity, a blend of Egyptian and the best and worst of their own cultures brought together in Egypt, their ultimate home.
Rose was born and raised in Alexandria and Hani in Cairo. They had met in Beirut, both back in the motherland for a month-long summer vacation with their respective families in the late 1950s. Hani couldn’t take his eyes off the charming brunette who had walked past him in one of downtown Beirut’s most popular confectionaries, while Rose was immediately captivated by the young man’s mischievous smile and captivating stare, more than compensating for his unassuming physique. The fact that they were both from Egypt and their families knew of each other only facilitated their relationship. After a six-month courtship, involving crowded afternoon gatherings in Beirut, lunches in Cairo and long strolls on Alexandria’s harbor, they got married and Rose moved to Cairo. Their two daughters were born and raised in Cairo, Rania’s mom married early and moved to Beirut, while Mona stayed until her father died.
Rania was ten years old when her grandfather passed away in 1982. How she and her mother had hastily flown into Cairo from Beirut on a stormy winter night, and rushed to see Hani for the very last time, was one of those memories that remained intact in her mind. For the next two days, Rania was confined to her grandparents’ apartment in Cairo’s Heliopolis district, left under the supervision of relatives she had never met. She realized something was wrong when strangers started flocking to the house, all dressed in black, paying their respects in an eerie silence and heading out the door quickly thereafter. Only hours after the condolences were over, Rania and her mother took the first plane back to Beirut and Mona was sent to Boston under the care of a distant relative. Rose sold the family’s Cairo apartment and moved back to her native Alexandria into her parent’s house with an unmarried sister and cousin. Mona had begged Rose to settle in the safety of America instead, but she had adamantly refused. It appeared as if Rose couldn’t stay in Cairo after her husband’s death nor could she live too far away from it either.
For Rania and her mother to go to Alexandria to visit Rose was never an option. They would go to Athens, Paris or Limassol to meet instead, or Rose would come to Beirut whenever a lull in the always precarious security situation allowed for it. The bond between grandmother and granddaughter was kept alive and strong through phone calls and letters, sometimes accompanied by pictures other times with checks, a grandmother’s gift to her one and only niece at the time. Back then, Rania was too young to ask why couldn’t her grandmother send less checks and let her go visit her in Alexandria instead. Even if someone was willing to explain, Rania wouldn’t have understood the answers anyway.
During one of many visits she had taken to visit Mona and her family in Boston throughout the years, Rose died of a sudden heart failure days before going back to Alexandria. Her wishes were granted and her body laid to rest in Alexandria, far from her daughters but as close as she could to her husband in Cairo. Rania had just turned 20 and had been two weeks since she last talked to her grandmother. Rose’s unexpected death was a blow to Rania that took years for her to recover from. The fact that she couldn’t lay a flower on her grandmother’s grave in Alexandria to bring some closure made the healing process longer and as an adult, made the mystery of her grandmother’s life, and subsequently that of her grandfather’s, even more intriguing. With nobody willing to answer her questions, Rania sometimes resigned herself to the idea of never knowing and living with her self-adapted version of the truth instead.
But it wasn’t always easy. The physical similarities she and Rose shared, her mother’s occasional slip of tongues of “you look so much like your grandmother” or “Rose would’ve said the same thing” only increased her frustration about not knowing. Her desire for the truth was intensified by what she felt was a conscious attempt to keep the truth away from her. “I don’t know” or “ask Mona,” Rania’s mom always used to say to avoid her questions. Rania knew there was more to her grandmother than her never-ending pool of family anecdotes, and more to her grandfather than her austere memories of when she last saw him. As she grew older, Rania also realized that this thirst for the truth was becoming a quest for something very personal, for discovering part of her own roots, to better define who she really was. While most Lebanese, especially those whose families had emigrated to faraway lands, went back to Lebanon to uncover their roots and with it some of their identity, Rania knew she had to take the opposite route and walk out of that little nation to get what she wanted.
Suddenly, the letter appeared. It was a treasure buried right beneath Rania’s eyes, one she had never in her wildest dreams believed even existed. The letter read like an abridged family history and will of sorts, as if Rose knew that whatever took her far from her home and late husband, even a trip to see her daughters and grandchildren, would one day suck life right out of her. Attached to the main envelope was an unmarked envelope filled with black and white and colored pictures, individual and group pictures of what looked like better and happier times. Based on the date handwritten on the back of them, the last one taken was a colored picture of Rose before her last trip to America. Her allure exuded a faded yet pure and simple elegance, but not enough to erase the melancholy radiating from her stare. Yet she stood tall and proud, resting on an ornate black iron railing of a balcony, overlooking a harbor that Rania also didn’t recognize.

Rania was absorbed in her thoughts, but could have sworn to have heard the first of several bilingual announcements that their final stop into Alexandria’s Misr Station was approaching. She pushed her mental rewind button one last time, wanting to make sure everything was intact in her mind before getting off the train.

Barely ten hours after landing in Beirut and Mona was already resting on Rania’s cough, getting ready to be interrogated. She knew this was bound to happen one day but just as Rania, didn’t quite know where to start. Before opening their first bottle of white wine, Rania had already put their second to chill in the fridge. It was going to be a long night.
“I told you I found the letter,” Rania announced, “the one nobody ever told me about and pretended didn’t exist.” Rania untangled her feet and walked up to a small drawer at the far end of the living room. Mona watched as Rania brought back two envelopes attached to each other. She was surprised they had remained almost intact, with their clear blue tint, bright red and navy diagonal borders and “Air Mail” and “Par Avion” emblazoned on the bottom left corner in bold.
Mona closed her eyes for a moment. She clearly remembered how she had hand delivered the letter to Rania’s mother two months after their mother passed away. They had opened the letter together and spent the rest of the day laughing and crying, wondering how things went so wrong and how their lives would have been if they hadn’t.
“We don’t pretend it doesn’t exist,” Mona said calmly, “but what do you expect your mom and I to do with it after all these years?” Rania stared at Mona in silence. “The letter is what’s left of our history. Look at it as you would any other history book, you read it, learn from it and try to never forget it.”
“But what about justice or at least telling people the truth? Why did I have to know by mistake? Don’t I have the right to know too?” Rania said, frustrated that she had to even justify her right to know.
“Well, now you do,” Mona drily replied.
“Oh goddammit Mona, they’re my grandparents too. I never really knew how grandpa died, nor why we could never go to Cairo, nor why Rose had to move to Alexandria. She died and it was all completely over, as if they only existed as your parents and my grandparents, not as human beings on the face of the earth in their own right.”
Mona nodded in silent approval.
“So there’s nothing left in Cairo, right?” Rania asked.
“Yes” Mona replied, trying hard to stay calm. “Mom sold the house right after Dad died. Hani had no siblings, so nothing is left.” Rania knew Mona didn’t like to talk neither about Cairo nor her father too much, they were two wounds that had still not healed after all these years. It was because of how Hani died so unexpectedly, and the way she was snatched out of college in Cairo and siphoned off to Boston without with no choice but to comply. The wound remained so deep, exacerbated by stories of how much Cairo had changed since she left, that Mona had refused to go back since.
“What about Alexandria?” Rania continued, “is there anybody left there, a relative or neighbor of Rose, do we know if there is a house or at least know where it was?”
“Addresses and names of relatives and friends are in the letter,” Mona said, “but they haven’t been verified in decades. Everything else I know Rose told me during the last years of her life.”
All five are equally effective but have slightly different activity. viagra effects women is considered to work slightly faster than levitra. generico levitra on line may work up to 36 hours after taking the tablet. Although most of us get energy from the foods and beverages consumed by us however some people sample generic viagra suffer from erectile dysfunction. The other important advantages of going for using Kamagra UK products instead of other ineffective and unreasonably expensive sexual ED drugs are as follows:* Fastest appalachianmagazine.com levitra purchase online worldwide delivery and next day delivery in UK provided by efficient Kamagra Fast.* Complimentary pills.* Discounts on ordering the products again.* Free 24/7 live assistance by Kamagra experts. Side effects Head pain, giddiness, light-headedness, flushing, nasal blocking, dyspepsia, queasiness,etc. are some most cheap viagra generic seen side-effects accounted. Rania stared at Mona with her eyes wide open. She was waiting for Mona to corroborate in her own words what she had read about in the letter. Mona took a deep breath and went on.
“I think about it more often that you think, so does your mom, but then we forget. The same happens after the questions I get from my own kids or from your mother, because of your own questions. Sometimes it hits me, the need to know the truth, for someone to account and to bring closure to us all. But then I think it much better for time to heal and take care of it for us.”
It was hard for Rania to fully comprehend her mother and aunt’s ability to remain so passive in the face of their father’s death and Rose’s struggle to live a relatively normal life afterwards.
“But what about Cairo? It’s part of who we are as a family. Don’t you feel like you want to go back? Don’t you feel part of you belongs there?” Rania asked, voicing her own questions on her identity and belonging more than a concern for those of her aunt’s.
“When it comes to the bond with the place we grew up in,” Mona explained, “you do suddenly discover this desperate need for a sense of belonging. The need to belong not only to a place, but to a certain space, culture and time, no matter how far that place is or how detached that culture may be from the one you now consider your own. Still, it has to exist and be protected in a safe place in your mind. Without it, there’s a part of your soul that is missing and constantly restless, wondering around with no place to feel at ease. I may never go back nor see it again but know that the Egypt to which I belong remains in a safe place in my mind and that’s all that matter to me now.”
Rania already knew the answer to her next question, but decided to ask anyway.
“Would you come with me if I went?” Mona looked away, her nostalgic stare quickly turning into something bordering on anger. Without looking back at her niece, Mona’s initial answer was simply silence.
“Shou?” what, Rania asked, “What do you say?”
“Rania, do you think this is a game? There is nothing to see there,” Mona’s tone clearly irritated, turning back toward Rania, looking intensely into her eyes, hoping to make herself clear. “I know I will barely recognize Cairo if I ever go back, let alone Alexandria.” Mona reached out for her glass of wine, took a slip and went on.
“You asked if there was anybody left, a relative, a neighbor or a house. I don’t really know and I’m not sure I want to find out. Relatives would have surely passed and their sons and daughters probably don’t care about the past. Old neighbors may have already forgotten or still saddened to even think about it. If Rose’s house it still standing in Alexandria, it probably no longer belongs to us, just another lovely old house, like they don’t build them anymore, with a breathtaking view of the Alexandria harbor. So it’s probably best to keep things as your grandmother left them, in that letter and in our minds.”
“But what if…”
“What if what!” Mona shouted, starting to regret having allowed the conversation to go this far. “Neither Alexandria nor Cairo are anything like the romanticized image you must have of them,” Mona continued, angrily. “I’ve come to terms with that and with fate itself, that my dad is gone, however that happened, and the way that mom dealt with it, no matter how much I agree or disagree with it. I’ve kept the family memories instead, the happy and sad ones and will leave my kids with those same memories and nothing else.”
“I want to go,” Rania whispered, partly to avoid another furious reaction from Mona and also because she wasn’t quite sure what she would do there herself. But there was something she felt she had to see or try to find. A road she had to walk up, someone recognizable she would bump into and talk to, who would tell her stories that belonged to her family that were still missing from that history book Mona mentioned. She believed and somehow knew that her grandmother had left the letter for a reason. It wasn’t for them to reclaim any material goods, but to start uncovering the truth and part of her own past with it.
Her aunt looked at her, then turned away so that Rania couldn’t see her and smiled. Mona knew that no matter what she said, she wouldn’t be able to change Rania’s mind. Her stubbornness is truly like Rose’s, Mona thought, and maybe that letter was meant for nobody else but her.

My Beloved Girls,
Something tells me I should write this letter once and for all before it’s too late. I’ve always felt that every day that passes since the day your father left is a luxury I have done nothing to deserve. You and your families are the only thing that has kept me going, but that will all come to an end soon. I hope it will.
There are things I was able to tell you and others I was never able to gather the strength to say. I hope this will be the first step for you to get to the truth, to fight the system that caused us so much misery, but without fighting the country or its people that we are also a part of. By the time you are ready for this, Egypt would have changed so much from the one we knew, that you would need to have to come to terms with that too.
They killed him, I know they did. The results of the autopsy became a state secret only a handful of officials knew the details of. Ghassan told me Hani was killed and I believe him. I never dared called him again to ask for details, after the last time I saw him at the hospital, for fear of putting him in greater danger than he already was in. Your father wasn’t alone. They all had something big planned, as big as the damage and corruption they saw unfolding in front of their eyes every single day they went to their public offices for the past ten years. Hani seemed to be the weakest link and so he was eliminated. They had set their eyes on us too, in case we got anywhere near wherever they buried him or if we tried to make some noise about what happened. Part of me died the day he did, the rest slowly melted away at my powerlessness to bring him justice or from knowing that I wouldn’t be able to lay next to him the day I died. The safest would have been for me to leave Egypt, you both had already been taken care of, but Alexandria was the farthest I could stay from him, even if it meant that they could come after me and silence me one day. I am sorry for not having done more to keep his memory alive or for not letting his death go in vain. I hope you will, I guess it’s never too late.
Know that everything you ever wanted to have, know, read and see is at home in Alexandria, 59 Qena Street. You’ll know where to find it if you ever decide to go back, to open the wounds of the past, even after all these years, to bring justice, closure or whatever you believe is right, you are his daughters after all. And if you’re asking whether it’s safe, I would say that by the time you see this letter again and are ready to go back, so much time would have passed that it would be more than safe to go back. Go back for him. Even if it means you will not recognize your country nor your city, not find the spirit that made us who we are, or its soul, part of which meant it was the entire world in one place…just go to see me, to go to find him, go back for him…

Rania could no longer remember how many times she had read the letter. All she knew was that it had only taken these four paragraphs to convince her that she was going “back for him” and Rose, no matter what it took.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we will be soon arriving to Alexandria’s Misr Station. Please make sure to take all your belongings…”
Rania’s nerves began to take hold of her senses and she couldn’t stand still. She stood up to get her carry-on luggage from the overheard compartment and didn’t sit back down. She opened her messenger bag one last time, making sure she had not left anything on board. She doubled-checked on her unbound notes neatly stacked in her bag’s outer compartment. Mona had finally agreed to cooperate and gave her everything she either had on paper or could unearth from memory. She was staying at a small bed and breakfast, close to where her grandmother’s house once was, initially booked for a week, though she already felt she would need more than that.
Rania slipped her hand into a smaller compartment of her bag and without looking took out a medium-sized black and white picture. It was the earliest picture she had of Rose, wearing a dark v-neck dress slightly above the knee, sculpted by a wide leather belt and brightened by an imposing pearl necklace. She looked straight into the camera, with a look of refreshing beauty and witty charm. Standing next to her was a shorter and darker man, with the most mischievous of smiles and captivating of stares, soon to be her husband. There were no guarantees that anybody would recognize the couple in the picture, but there was no way Rania would ever go to Alexandria without it, without them.
Before the train took a sharp turn left, as it prepared to make its final stop, Rania got a fleeting glimpse of the sea. It was a different kind of Mediterranean to which she was accustomed to see in Beirut, but it was somehow familiar. She was already hit by a feeling of deja-vu, of having been to or at least seen this wide stretch of Alexandria’s harbor somewhere before.
“Ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Alexandria, Misr Station.”