Guapa Page 5

  But we lost so much for this crisis. So many people we went to school with, shared lunches with, and stood alongside in assembly have vanished into thin air in the six months since we first went to the streets that frosty January morning. Nadia is in jail. She played Sandy in our high-school production of Grease, which only ran for two nights before it was shut down after one of the parents complained that the hand jive was too provocative. During Nadia’s trial last month, they paraded her out in a cage, wearing one of those humiliating white prison suits. While they read out her ridiculous charges she made a V sign with her fingers and smiled defiantly, in what seemed like just another one of her performances. Rami and Shadi, who were the basketball stars of our class, both disappeared on the first day of the shooting, their bodies probably holed up in a prison cell somewhere or else thrown in a ditch by the road outside the city. And Joud, our valedictorian and the smartest girl I knew, simply went to sleep one afternoon and never woke up. When I went to her funeral, her mother pulled me aside and confessed to finding an empty bottle of pills stashed under her mattress.

  “Tell me she’s going to heaven?” She sobbed, clutching my shoulders. “Please, Rasa, tell me she won’t go to hell for what she did.”

  Taymour’s name flashes on my mobile screen. I reach to pick it up and Nawaf bats my hand away.

  “Stop looking at your phone like an expectant father. Don’t you want to hear my opinion of the events?”

  “Since when do you have an opinion?” I say.

  “Well,” Nawaf says, ignoring me, “the takeover will only burnish the president’s antiterrorist credentials, making his crackdown look less severe, perhaps even justified … who knows, maybe the regime engineered al-Sharqiyeh’s fall …”

  I reach for my phone. My heartbeat quickens as I open the message: We can talk but not today. Busy.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” I tell Nawaf and Basma as I walk out of the room.

  In a cubicle in the bathroom I call Taymour. He picks up on the fourth ring.

  “I know you’re busy but I just need to hear your voice,” I say. “Please?”

  “Rasa, nice to hear from you,” Taymour says cheerily. I can hear a commotion of excited voices around him.

  “Can you go somewhere quieter?” I ask. “Where you can speak more freely?”

  “Unfortunately, no,” he replies in the same cheery voice.

  “Please tell me we’re still okay?”

  “That’s great, that’s great. Listen, I have to go.”

  “Where are you going? Just promise me I haven’t lost you.”

  There’s a silence on the other line. Taymour’s heavy breathing crackles through the phone. “You haven’t lost me,” he finally whispers. “I just … I just need time. Last night was too dangerous. And we’re not out of it yet.”

  “I know but we can’t give up. Give me a bit of time and I’ll find a way, okay? I promise I’ll find a way we can still be together.”

  “I have to go, Rasa. We’re going to do some preparations … then the family lunch … really got to go, sorry.”

  “Just give me a bit of time,” I say, but Taymour has already hung up.

  I sit on the toilet with my head in my hands, feeling relieved to have spoken to him but also guilty, because the sound of his voice awakens my hunger. It is ravenous, this hunger. It gnaws on my insides all the time. I am like an addict hunting for my next fix. I crave moments when we can be one, even if just for a moment. A stolen kiss and a knowing glance across a sea of guests at a party. Accidentally walking into each other in crowded bars, our bodies pressed together for a brief moment, our fingers touching as he hands me a drink or a cigarette. For a while this was enough. No one questioned these public moments of intimacy. We were simply best friends. In private, we laughed about close calls and covered each other in kisses. I stroked his face, his arms, his body. I lay on top of him and pushed into him, felt the hairs on our chests bristle against each other as I breathed into his ear, desperate for a part of me to infiltrate his tough exterior. I wanted to be as close to him as it was possible to be.

  I notice my hands are shaking and there is a ringing in my ears. I feel as though I’ve knocked over a dish and stained one of Teta’s expensive tablecloths. I haven’t lost him yet, I try to reason. He said that himself. We can fix this. There is still hope. There’s always hope.

  A few weeks ago Teta went to visit an old friend who had moved to the provinces. She packed her bags for the night and took Doris with her, leaving me in charge of the house. Taymour immediately came over. It was the first time we had spent the night together and woke up in each other’s arms. His morning breath tasted of victory. I made us both coffee while he went to buy some fresh pastries and we spent the morning on the balcony, reading the newspaper, listening to Fairouz, and watching the world wake up. Um Nasser glanced at us suspiciously from her balcony, and I explained that Taymour had come for a morning coffee. It was a glorious day. I wanted to wake up next to him every morning, cook his favorite foods, do his laundry.

  “This is what our life could be,” I said to Taymour.

  He glanced up from the paper momentarily. “In a less cruel world, perhaps.”

  “Is this world really that cruel?”

  Taymour was silent for a while. He looked out across the messy arrangement of limestone buildings that extended to the horizon. “For a long time the world seemed empty to me. Nothing I did gave me any joy. I was resigned to live this way, dead to the world. But then it changed. The night we met. It was the most important night of my life. You showed me how to feel.”

  “And now?”

  Taymour looked at me and smiled. “And now I don’t know whether I love you or hate you for that.”

  Sitting in this bathroom now with nothing to show for our relationship except for a pack of lies and a guilty conscience, the realization that I will never be able to bring him into my bedroom again is sinking in. That bedroom, it’s not enough space for us, for the potential our love could be. And to stay like this, ignoring our desires, we might as well be dead.

  I wash my face and look at my reflection in the filthy mirror, at the drops of water clinging to my despicable face. Is there anything more pitiful than an Arab who attaches emotions to his homosexuality?

  When I return to the office Nawaf looks up from his phone.

  “What did she say?” he asks.

  “Who?”

  “Your girl. That message must have been from her. I can see the hunger in your eyes, habibi. What did she say?”

  Basma looks at me with an amused expression on her face.

  “Basma, can I talk to you alone for a minute?”

  She follows me outside the office. As soon as she closes the door behind us the events of last night spill from my mouth in hushed and panicked whispers. When I’m done she takes a breath.

  “Are you absolutely certain your grandmother saw the two of you?”

  “Yes, definitely. And I don’t know what to do or where to go. I’m trying to get in touch with Taymour but he’s not really listening to me, and of course he’s busy …” My voice trails off.

  Basma is silent for a moment as she considers the options. Finally she shrugs. “There’s only one thing you can do, habibi. You deny. What are you expecting, to open up new highways in this poor old woman’s mind? Deny everything. She saw nothing … that’s what happened. If she says otherwise, convince her old age has made her crazy. Because nothing happened, right?”

  “But —”

  “Nothing happened, Rasa.” Basma pats me on the back and opens the door to our office.

  Nawaf is rolling another joint. He looks up as we walk in. “We really cannot function like a team if you’re excluding me from conversations.”

  My phone rings, saving me from responding.

  “Rasa, it’s Laura,” the voice on the other line says.

  “How are you?” I ask, cautious. Laura is one of those journalists, young, American, ballsy, and despera
te to make a name for themselves. They strut around the country with no fear, asking questions that would have gotten them killed if they hadn’t had a Western passport.

  “I need you for an important interview I’ve arranged. Can you pick me up?”

  “Today’s a bit mad …” I begin. The last thing I need is to be dragged along on some adventure, and Laura is exactly the kind of journalist who would do that.

  “I’ll pay you double. Please?” she says.

  “What’s the assignment?”

  “I’ll explain when I see you. The meeting’s at eleven, and it’ll take us at least an hour to get there.”

  I sigh and tell her I’m on my way.

  Although she never outright said so, it was no secret that Teta held my mother responsible for Baba’s death. My father got sick less than a year after she left and died six months later, and Teta lay the blame squarely on my mother’s deviance and subsequent departure, the heartbreak and trauma of which allowed the cancer in Baba’s body to fester.

  If my father blamed anyone, he did not make it known. He had always been a private man, who had worked hard for a future that was snatched away from him. That was Teta’s mythology of him at least. Most of his interactions with me were driven by his determination to remind me that life was too difficult to waste time challenging things you could not change.

  This ideology, a pragmatism that bordered on fundamentalism, was largely driven by Teta. She had always been pragmatic about death, too. Throughout her life she was never far from grief: Her father was struck down by tuberculosis when she was sixteen. Her mother was killed a year later, when a stray bullet flew in through the kitchen window and lodged itself in her neck as she was making coffee. Teta enjoyed four years of marriage before her own husband died of a heart attack, only a few months after she gave birth to my father. Baba was all she had left, and then he died, too. But it was in his death that she developed a hierarchy of mourning. The death of her son was the pinnacle, elevating her suffering beyond that of anyone else, including my own.

  “It’s natural to see your father die, Rasa,” she explained to me a few years after his death. I was in high school then and we had just sat down for dinner one evening. “The human body is prepared to experience the loss of a parent. But nothing can ever prepare someone for seeing their child die.”

  But that conversation happened much later. When Baba first got sick, I was twelve and Teta said only one thing to me: “Not a word to anyone. You understand?”

  The next day I told Maj my father had cancer. “Not a word to anyone,” I threatened. “You understand?”

  Teta refused to let a doctor see Baba, preferring to create her own healing remedies. She boiled carrots and zucchinis and potatoes and asparagus for hours, until they released the most rotten stench in the house. She then mashed them furiously into a gooey brown pulp, added a sprinkle of salt, and took it to his room. Why did my father go along with this? As a doctor, surely he must have known the futility of her potions, but if so he did not say anything. Standing in the hallway, I listened for voices coming from the room, but they both spoke too quietly for me to hear anything other than the scraping of the spoon against the plate and the soft, smacking noises of my father chewing the vegetable mush. I waited with my ear against the door until the creaking of the bed would send me running to my room so they wouldn’t know I had been listening.

  Meanwhile the country was changing. In al-Sharqiyeh, everyone was angry about the markets opening and the rise in the cost of bread and fuel. They went out in the streets, shouting and burning tires. They stormed downtown and threatened to march all the way to the western suburbs, which quickly split from the rest of the country and was sucked into the global economy. I was oblivious to all this. In my world the only change that affected me was the sudden appearance of some great American chocolate in the supermarket down the road. My favorite was Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. I had never eaten peanut butter before and the taste was sublime. Though they were expensive, Teta was willing to give me the money for one Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup a day, if it meant I spent more time outside of the house and less time asking about Baba.

  In the western suburbs all was calm, except for the sound of construction next door. Omar’s family was building an extension to their villa. It seemed that as the people in al-Sharqiyeh grew poorer and angrier, Omar’s house became bigger and more extravagant. Like the cancer growing in my father, Omar’s house was experiencing its own growth, with new floors and rooms being built at different angles on the villa, spilling over the rest of the neighborhood.

  “My dad wants to build a games room,” Omar explained when I asked about the construction. “We’re going to get a Jacuzzi in there, and a snooker table.”

  Omar’s games room became my sanctuary. His family installed a big television that you could watch while sitting in the Jacuzzi, which showed all the American television programs, with no subtitles and no censoring. It was fantastic and I sat there in the bubbling water, eating peanut butter cups and watching The Golden Girls. I felt like I was in America, like I was just another character in the movies and none of what was happening was real.

  This was a good distraction because when Baba started getting really sick he refused to see me. Perhaps he did not want his son to see him so weak, the shame of it would only finish him quicker. Though I pleaded with Teta to be able to see him, she remained his fierce protector in the six months he spent dying. She kept him hidden in his bedroom, away from me and anyone else, as if seeing him might ruin any chance of his recovery. Perhaps she thought I had too much of my mother in me, and that simply by looking at him I might make him sicker.

  A few weeks into the summer vacation, while Teta was out buying more vegetables, I waited until she was far along down the road and then ran to Baba’s bedroom. Peering through the keyhole, I had a good enough view of his side of the bed. He was lying there covered up to his neck by white sheets. His eyes were shut. His chest was not moving.

  I opened the door and tiptoed into the room. The shutters were down and only a few rays of sunlight peeked through the slats. The air was stuffy with incense and a sweet odor I had not encountered before, like a cold pancake. I stood by the bed and watched Baba’s still body. He looked nothing like the memory I had of him in the months before he got sick. His head seemed shrunken and his hair was as brittle as straw. The bones in his face jutted out so sharply they could cut you. His eyes were sunk so deep in his head they looked like volcanic craters, and his skin was yellow and stretched across his face like a tabla. The man lying on the bed was not my father.

  I ran out of the room and slammed the door. In the living room I turned on the television. A cooking show was on, and I stared at the screen. A man in a chef’s hat was finely chopping parsley, back and forth, back and forth. My father was dead. My stomach turned, as if the chef was using his knife to chop my insides. I stared at the screen, tears running down my face, the image of my father returning in waves and flashes. Teta walked through the door half an hour later, carrying plastic bags heavy with zucchinis and potatoes. She froze when she saw my face.

  “Did you go into his room?”

  I nodded. She dropped the bags of vegetables and darted across the hall. I tiptoed behind her. She entered his room and closed the door. I stood listening on the other side. For a moment there was silence, and then a heavy wail escaped the room. From behind the door I could hear Teta sobbing as she pleaded with God to bring back her son. I walked down the hall to the living room and sat on the sofa. The chef on television was chopping onions and parsley to make tabbouleh, which reminded me of Omar’s vomit from that day Maj got us beat up after school in the third grade. I felt sick to my stomach, a combination of the image of the tabbouleh and Baba’s death.

  The phone rang. It was Omar.

  “Are you coming over today?” he asked.

  I peered down the hall. Teta was still in the room. “I can’t,” I said.

  “Tomorrow?”r />
  “I’m not sure.”

  Omar was silent. “Is your father okay?” he asked.

  “Let’s hang out tomorrow,” I said, and hung up.

  An hour later Teta emerged. She walked into the living room and straightened her skirt. She sat on the sofa next to me and lit a cigarette. For a few moments she smoked and stared into the middle distance. Finally she spoke.

  “He’s gone.”

  “Did he go where Mama went?” I asked.

  “No. Your mother went to hell.”

  I was twelve.

  My father’s burial was the only public moment in what had otherwise been a private death. After the funeral Teta refused to have any guests over. Conversations that would begin were quickly diverted. It was a day of shame and secrets, unspoken but hanging in the air.

  We returned from the burial to a terrible silence. As Teta unlocked the front door I burst into tears. Teta ignored my sobs and went straight to her room. She did not come out until the next evening. I spent the day walking around the house, examining objects that now appeared in a new, more uncertain light. A fork, a vase of flowers, Teta’s ma’amoul tray, the red tassels on the living-room pillows. Items that held an echo of a past that seemed, if not necessarily loud and happy, then at least full of people. Now it was just Teta and me. I picked objects up and turned them around in my hands. I brought them to my nose to catch their scent. The objects were heavy with the absence of my mother and father.

  As the sun went down, lengthening the shadows in the house, the wind began to howl and the sky darkened with the threat of rain. The sound of traffic floated in through an open window in the living room, alongside the calls of a neighbor ordering her children back home. Inside there was only silence, and I thought of my father slowly rotting under the ground.