The Ruins of Us (39 page)

Gripping his neck, Faisal gasped for breath.

“Ya Allah!” He tried to swallow. “I don’t
know
what happened between them! That’s just it. I . . . all I know is that she was leaving.”

Rosalie felt very hot, and briefly, her vision blanked so that the water and the customs building and Majid’s feet were just an empty, whitewashed room. She closed her eyes.

“Perhaps Coleman can explain. Perhaps, then, there’s a perfectly good explanation, eh? Is that what you think, ya Faisal?” Majid tore the tape from Dan’s mouth. Immediately, spots of blood appeared along his lips. He was silent.

Majid turned back to her triumphantly. “It’s truly a miracle that Faisal came to be the way he is, living in your household.”

She opened her eyes, and the images separated out again.

“You have no idea about our household. We had love in our household. That boy was loved; he is loved.”

“Children need more than love. They need examples.”

“This isn’t part of our message,” Faisal said. “We can’t try people for morality crimes.”

“Leave her and follow me back inside. If you still believe in our message; if you still believe in Sheikh Ibrahim’s right to live.”

“Faisal,” she said.

She watched her son. He was an obedient boy. For those in power—parents, teachers, imams, kings—obedience was a good trait. But to the weak, the oppressed, the subjugated, obedience only meant more of the same, the continuation of the status quo. Just then, Rosalie did not want her son to be obedient, a good foot soldier. She wanted him to be a human being, to draw upon the strength of his own instincts to say
no
.

“Come now, yallah,” Majid said. “For the sheikh.”

Dropping the shovel in the sand, he nodded in the direction of the customs building. He took Dan by the elbow and began walking away. Rosalie felt the sluggishness of her blood as it moved thickly through her veins. Would the desert take them all? With all the breath left in her chest, she groaned. Faisal turned around to look at her.

“Zool . . .” She needed to get out. Immediately. The pressure of the sand was unbearable. With every remaining bit of energy, she heaved against it, felt her eyes bulge with the pressure, but there was no give. “Zool!”

She heard retching, saw Majid doubled over, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“You need help,” Dan said to him. “We all need help.”

“Don’t talk to me,” Majid said.

Rosalie let her head loll to one side; she was too tired to hold it upright any longer. In the distance, she saw the blinking red light of a tanker. The blinking light moved in time with her heart, but she knew—knew with cold certainty that it was moving away from her.

And then Faisal’s feet appeared in front of her. She strained her neck upward, saw him holding the shovel suspended in front of him like a pendulum, as if he weren’t quite sure what to do with it. Biting his lip, he started to dig.

“Yes,” she said. “Please.”

“Faisal, stop!” Majid said. He turned toward them, tried to run back while still holding on to Dan and gripping the gun. “They will listen to us. Somebody will hear us, have patience. I have seen too many people die—so many of our innocent brothers and sisters. This will send a message. Stop!”

Now Faisal knelt in the sand, the shovel fallen at his side. With deliberate movements, he scooped the sand away from her neck and shoulders and then leaned in close, burying his face in her hair. He drew a long breath and, through the dirt, smelled her as she had always smelled—like skin and soap, and more faintly, like a kitchen full of cooking things: salts and oils, a faint smell of garlic.
Mother,
he thought.

Inside his boot, Faisal felt his grandfather’s dagger cold against his leg. That night he’d taken it from his father’s study seemed millennia ago, from a time before his family, before his tribe, when the sea covered the peninsula. From a time when he was a mollusk waiting to be buried under a thousand layers of earth, waiting to sludge into something more valuable. Everything that happened before this moment in time did not matter. He scooped the sand away from his mother’s neck. Her eyes were closed, her head tilted to the side.

He was telling her to wake up when he felt the blow of the shovel against his back. With a grunt, he fell forward, and then Majid was on top of him, shoving his face into the sand.
“I told you to stop!”
Majid said. They rolled over, pushing each other away and drawing each other close as they moved. But Faisal had the dagger in his hand and then it was only a matter of physics: Majid’s belly, and Faisal’s left arm long and taut like a catapult—a slash, and then Majid’s red blood. The gun fell into the sand. Faisal dropped the dagger and closed his hands around Majid’s neck, feeling the slick blood between them as he pressed closer. Majid was weak and getting weaker. Faisal’s fingers dug easily into his throat, and he watched Majid’s bloodshot and tearing eyes bulge with the pressure.

With his hands bound, Dan could do nothing more than pummel the tumbling bodies.
Oh God, please,
Dan thought. An elbow to the chin sent him reeling backward. They might have just been two boys wrestling, but for the blood that stained their clothes. Dan grabbed the half-buried knife and sat back on his haunches, trying to maneuver it against the tape on his wrists. He dropped it and picked it up again several times before placing the handle between his shaking thighs and moving the tape against the blade. Once freed, he pumped his elbows to rock himself to his feet. Now the boys were on the sand, each struggling to pin the other down. Majid had the size, but Faisal the fury, and so they rolled and grunted, slapped and spat. Again, Dan moved forward to try to split them apart. Faisal was sitting on Majid’s chest and had nearly submerged his head in the rushing tide. Majid made gurgling baby sounds and did not move his arms. Dan grabbed Faisal under the armpits and pulled with all his remaining strength.

“Stop!” he shouted. “Stop, Faisal.” But the boy wouldn’t let go.

Dan yanked down hard on Faisal’s hair, so his head jerked back.

“Let go,” Dan said. “You don’t want this.” He pulled Faisal up and away from Majid, who lay still, the water floating his hair around his head. Dan put his hands under Majid’s body and lifted him up, his back straining beneath the weight of the wet boy, who was no longer a boy but a body. He placed his cheek near Majid’s mouth. He did not feel breath.

But Dan had not predicted the whispery rush in his ears, the cascading words of Majid’s lifetime of prayers, a sound like eucalyptus leaves moving with the wind as they left his mouth, not words, but an unmistakable wave that was beyond language. Dan did not know that Faisal also heard the sound. At first, they heard only the familiar swishings of a young man’s prayers for his family; that they might be secure and safe.
Please, God, make my wife beautiful and good and full of love for You; let me know true love as you have given it to us here on earth;
and
please, Almighty God, I know that the Prophet, peace be upon Him, has said there is no shame in poverty, but please show me how to find dignity within it, at least for my mother.
Then, they heard specific pleas—
Oh please, God, do not let me hit my shin on this chair one more time!
And for a toilet that worked, for enough money to buy meat for all of them, not just the youngest children; that he might be a provider,
a leader for this family, so that we might not be lost
. As they heard the word “provider,” both Dan and Faisal saw a figure cloaked in gold spreading its arms, but they would never know they had both seen this, simultaneously, while at the beach at Wisoum, for they kept it to themselves, attributing the visions and the strange whisperings to their hallucinatory dehydration.

Finally, they heard the rattlings of fear, a young man praying for guidance as he and his older cousin found their way from Yemen to Syria, then across the Syrian border and into Iraq; the prayer of pain when he spilled cooking oil down his arm as he made dinner at the camp near the banks of the Euphrates, the oil leaving a pink, banana-shaped scar from his wrist to just above his elbow; and then, three weeks later, more prayers as he scrambled back across the border of Iraq and into Syria, in flight from those men who would have made him nothing more than a puff of smoke inside a Shi’a mosque, as they had his cousin:
Brother, they are not Muslims; they are with the occupiers now, not with God. They must be stopped. You must stop them. You will do it at the noon prayer, the busiest time.
Together, Dan and Faisal felt his disgrace when he arrived home without the martyrdom money that would have provided for his mother and siblings for the rest of their lives, but as Umm Jalal never knew such money existed, she kissed him and cried out to him. Dan and Faisal felt her kiss as a breeze prickling their skin. Then they felt the weight of Majid’s cowardice as it had felt to him. They knew his shame at being a poor man in a rich man’s country. And at last, they both felt death surge through them, and then the silence of life’s end.

Dan set Majid on the sand, out of reach of the tides. Faisal’s face was a blank, but his shoulders were square, even proud in the dwindling light. Faisal would have to learn the posture of tragedy. To be young was to be arrogant about how much one could bear. Faisal ran back toward Rosalie, placed his fingers at her neck where he thought her pulse should be. It was strong, but her eyes remained closed when he took up the shovel and began to dig.

He did not think of the violence he had committed. He did not see the gun or the dagger. He did not see the crosshatching of tiny veins on his mother’s eyes. There was no immediate world. There was only the memory: his mother, her red hair shining like its own sun, sitting at the edge of the courtyard fountain.
Faisal, come and see.
He was not more than two years old, and still, he hadn’t said a word. Her hands lifting him up. The cool, still surface of the fountain. A water bug’s spindling legs, six pinpricks on the mirror of water. He had known to be quiet, to let the sun grow hot on his back, to hear the sound of his mother breathing, to watch the delicate thing as it did the impossible and walked across the water. Together, they were so quiet and so alive. When it moved away, she drew her white fingers through the water and it made a sound like coins jingling in a pocket. She touched the side of his face with her wet finger and drew him close so that he could smell her clean blouse, feel its smooth silk against his cheek.

With Dan’s help, he pulled her from the earth. He placed his wet hands on her forehead.

“Umma.”

Her eyes opened slowly; she blinked several times, as if she had been sleeping.

“Majid’s dead,” he said.

Faisal took her arm and together, they stood and moved to the water’s edge. There, she shook the sand from her clothing, rinsed her arms and legs clean. He bathed his bloodied hands, wet the back of his neck. He removed the soiled white T-shirt he had been wearing since their arrival five days before. He set the T-shirt on the sand and knelt down, his back to the water. His mouth moved, but no sounds came out. He stood and kneeled, stood and kneeled, his eyes open. Then, he turned and ran out into the small waves until it was too deep to run. Diving forward, he swam, his face bathed in the salty water, his arms churning the surface that had turned pale pink with the dawn. He felt the familiar rhythm of his strokes. When you cannot sleep, swim. When you cannot live, swim. Turning onto his back, he floated there, looking into the sky that held the shrinking day.

BACK ON SHORE,
Faisal supported his mother as they walked toward Dan. In his arms, she seemed insubstantial. She was small in a way he had never noticed when she stood erect in front of him, her chin held at that insistent angle. He had allowed himself to be annoyed by her habits whether or not he understood them, just because they were hers, American. How he had hated her difference, for it meant one thing: his own.

At the near horizon, pearling boats moved like wooden toys. The ruins continued their silent erosion, the wet salt air drying on the porous stone, insinuating itself into the tiny fissures that spelled the structure’s doom. The three of them stood looking at one another in silence. After several minutes, Dan set his hand on Faisal’s shoulder.

“Let’s go home,” he said.

Faisal stepped away, then swayed to one side before toppling over. Behind his eyelids was starred blackness, occasional colors moving across his line of sight as if refracted from a crystal lodged in the center of his skull.

“Here. Take my hand.” Dan leaned over him and saw that his face was an unnatural red. He glanced up and down the shoreline, then inland toward the Dahna. Once, he had felt that all that sand, all that blankness, meant freedom; it had represented a chance for the rewriting of self. Now Dan knew that the desert would kill them if they didn’t leave immediately.

“We’ve got to start walking for the road,” Rosalie said.

“We should put him inside until we can come back for him.” Dan nodded toward Majid’s body.

“Let the gulls have him,” Faisal said.

“Let us give him some dignity in death,” Dan said.

“Only the lucky few have dignity in death,” Faisal said. He paused and tried to swallow, but his throat was too dry. “We’ll leave him.”

“Life doesn’t offer us many moments of grace, Faisal. We have a choice.”

“Yes, and I choose to leave him out there.”

Faisal hung his head and put his thumb and forefinger to his temples, gently massaging them.

“I’m so tired,” Faisal said.

“I know.” Dan paused. “Let’s bring him in.”

They laid Majid a few feet inside the door, careful not to disturb the wound that threatened to open up like a glistening, bloody flower. Faisal took a moment to look into his friend’s face, where the mouth had relaxed into a scowl. Bruises had formed at his neck, and the blood had crusted across his abdomen. In making his plan, Faisal had not considered that violence could be senseless, the instrument of nothing at all.