The Ruins of Us (41 page)

“A baby,” Nimmah said between bites of a biscuit.

“Your family is growing,” Nadia said. “Think of it as your family growing.”

“After all that has happened,” Dina said. “A baby means so much. It means life goes on.”

The sisters were surprised at her calm.

“You’re not angry?” Nadia said.

“I am,” Rosalie said. “But anger is useless to me now.”

DAYS PASSED, FEBRUARY
became March. Rosalie remained in the living room. One morning, Faisal came to see her. He looked thin in his thobe, his eyes grown too big for his face. As she looked at her son, Rosalie felt the same tenderness she had always felt for her boy. Though for a period, she would love him but without fondness. She was permitted that. She saw traces of her face in him—the light eyes, the high cheekbones. She opened her arms to him and he moved close to her. He let himself be held—it was the only way he knew to be forgiven.

“Sweet Faisal,” she said. She kissed his temple.

When she stepped back from him, he would not look her in the face, and she knew: They had to send him away. The prince had called Abdullah to check in. He wanted to make sure his instructions were taken seriously. Rosalie was glad Faisal would have to go. How else does one learn compassion than through suffering? To have your mother’s love no matter what, your family’s love no matter what, to be always among your own people, like surrounded by like, to be always in the majority and loved. These things weren’t good for a man’s spirit, not if the man wanted to learn humility, or how to give love, or tolerance. After Wisoum, perhaps he would be ready to learn.

She steered his chin in her direction. He blinked, hesitant, then met her gaze.

“You’re going to leave this house,” she said. “You’re going to leave this country.”

She understood that she must empty their lives, hers and Abdullah’s, in order to see what was left between them. She knew Abdullah would agree to it because she sensed a change in him—a willingness to listen, a desperation to please her.

“We’ll find a school nearby for Mariam. She needs it too—the leaving. We’ll send her before summer. I know the perfect place. You can visit from time to time. You’ll take good care of her, won’t you, Zool? You’ll need to take good care of her.”

A breeze came in from the courtyard, where he’d left the sliding-glass door open to the cool morning. He felt it, her quiet withdrawal. The air blew right through his thobe.

WHEN DAN FIRST
arrived back at Prairie Vista after Wisoum, he had picked up the phone and called Carolyn because she was the only person in the world he could imagine talking to at that moment. He’d told her what had happened and she had cried for them. She had asked him, did he remember when they were all young and indomitable, borne up by their belief that life held for them a singular destiny? They had believed that, the four of them: Rosalie, Abdullah, Dan, Carolyn. They were young, and they believed in their unimpeachable greatness. On the phone, he’d asked Carolyn: What if I had died? Would you have cried? And she’d said my God, Dan, what kind of a question is that? And there was a comfort in that. He told her that he would arrive in Austin in six weeks’ time and she said she would drive out from Santa Fe and be there to pick him up at the airport. He knew they would not be together in the real sense, that there had been too many hard things said in the intervening years, but goddamn if it didn’t mean something to have someone there to pick you up at the airport.

FAISAL AND ABDULLAH
got into the car and drove to Majid’s grave. Banyan and fig trees shaded the site, where the dirt still possessed the darkness of being recently turned. The wind had picked up, bringing with it a host of billowing gray clouds. It was mid-February and had not rained in more than three months, an anomaly in wintertime. The newsmen had promised a cold front—rain, perhaps a shama’al first. But for now, the heat weighed heavily on the men’s shoulders, the clouds casting shadows whose edges bled like wet ink around the graveyard.

“Baba,” Faisal said quietly, his voice barely audible above the rising wind. He did not look up from the grave.

“Na’am.”

“I’m so sorry. For causing this.”

“You were defending your mother. Before God, you are free. You must live like it. You must stop apologizing. We are both responsible for what happened.”

“Na’am, Baba.”

“Sheikh Ibrahim is still in prison somewhere. There’s no record of his arrest.”

“He’s a good man,” Faisal said. “He gets carried away sometimes, but he’s a good, faithful man. I’ll start a petition for him.”

“No. They might withhold your passport. Let me. I will see what I can do.” Abdullah paused. “You’re not the first young man to let his anger get the better of him.”

Abdullah thought back to that day in June, the heat like an act of violence against his thinly sheathed body, the crackle of burning cars and pop of firecrackers and the stickiness of the road’s melting blacktop on the bottom of his sandals and then the sudden cold of the air against his exposed blood and bone. A flash of fire warmed his eyelids. A long-ago fire, kindling his bones, prickling his skin. Anger was in the air the day he’d lost his hand. It had been mixed with the acrid smell of burning rubber, of noisome summer heat.

“Let me tell you how I really lost my hand.”

“I know, Baba. It was Italy . . .”

“It wasn’t. It was far from Italy. It was just down the road from here. It was so close to home that your grandfather would never let me speak of it. I was an angry boy that day. It was the Six-Day War, and on the compound, a riot had broken out at the American consulate. Everyone was angry that day. The loss of those lands . . . it was devastating. Americans were the easy target, with all the money they gave Israel.

“I was an accidental participant in the protests. I was angry for other reasons, reasons that had nothing to do with Nasser or Hussein or Eshkol. It was easy to let myself get carried away by the day’s events.”

Even though, at Abdul Latif’s urging, Abdullah had spent decades pushing his memories far from his consciousness, he found that the details of his last day with two hands came back to him with vivid ferocity. Carefully, slowly, he recounted those details to his son. He had not spoken them aloud to anyone but his father, not even to Rosalie.

Abdul Latif had sent him to the State Oil compound to deliver a package to officials regarding a new contract between B-Corp and State Oil—he hadn’t had time to go himself, so he sent Abdullah, who was working for the company in the afternoons after school. Abdul Latif had warned Abdullah not to get mixed up in anything—that people were agitated about the war and doing foolish things that would only harm their own country. With the windows rolled down, the wind blasting his face, carrying late summer’s sweet, dying smell. Abdullah made it to the State Oil office twenty minutes late, and a man named Larry met him at the door, looking with vexation at his watch.

“Son, we’ve been waiting for you. Need to get this project rolling.”

“Yes, well . . .”

“How are you people going to manage a country if you can’t even make a delivery on time? Just think on that, son.”

You people.
Who people? he’d wondered, though the man’s tone told him to be angry. The soft, sensitive cavity that had settled in his molar caused him to open his mouth and grimace, which the man interpreted as a smirk.

“Just give me the package,” Larry said, grabbing the manila envelope from Abdullah’s hands and turning back into the office.

As the door closed, Abdullah felt a brief, welcome rush of air-conditioning. He stood and stared, not knowing how to react. After a minute, his ears hot with the June sun, Abdullah walked slowly back to his car. Khara. He couldn’t believe he’d let himself be treated like that by a man whose jowls dripped down his jaw like candle wax. After only a few minutes in the sun, the car was a furnace. He raced back toward the security gates, determined to put as much distance as he could between himself and Larry. The Americans behaved like they owned the country. All because they knew how to stick a pump down in the earth and button up a dress shirt. He thought about going to the next majlis to complain to King Faisal.

As Abdullah drove back down the compound’s main road, he saw a flash of light off to the right. When he looked over, a car was being upended, turned on its back, its windows violently reflecting the sun’s glare. There was a crowd of people in front of the consulate. Abdullah slowed to a stop and rolled down his window. They were chanting loudly: “
Israel-lovers get out! Go home Amreekees!
” Several people were spray-painting the building’s exterior, sloppy Arabic script condemning the people inside. Abdullah felt a sudden surge of energy, felt his heart beating fast in time with the chants.
Go Home Thump Thump Get Out Thump Thump.
He stumbled slightly getting out of the car before breaking into a run, galloping sure and fast toward the consulate, toward the smell of burnt rubber and the sound of crunching glass.

As he neared the throng, he saw a young boy light a firecracker and throw it at a consulate window. That Larry bastard, yebnen kelp. The Americans and Israelis, thinking they ran the world. He reached into a pile of firecrackers. They were big, more like miniature rockets. He closed his hand around one and grabbed the boy’s lighter. Sparking the fuse, he squeezed the firecracker tightly, as if his anger would somehow propel it farther. He reached back to blast it toward a window, but before he could send it sailing he heard a popping noise. As he swung his arm forward, he looked toward the building to watch his hurled bomb. Instead, he saw a splatter of bright red ribbon across a man’s white thobe and felt a searing pain up his arm. It was the last conscious thought he would have that day. He spent the night under anesthesia as a surgeon at the al-Salama Hospital wrapped and shaped the grafted smirk of skin that permanently replaced his hand. After the surgery, he’d called his father from the hospital, and he could hear the fear in the old man’s voice as he tried to understand the day’s events.

“You’ll go to Italy for a week or two, stay at the Naples apartment,” Abdul Latif said. “By the time you come back, the government will be done making examples of people.”

ABDULLAH LOOKED AT
his son, waiting for a reaction. The sun had retreated behind a bank of buildings and the air was chilly.

“We’re all victims of our own anger sometimes,” Abdullah said. “It is so powerful, it must be respected. Sometimes, it should be squashed.”

“It was awful, Baba. She wasn’t supposed to be there in that parking lot.”

“She forgives you. Your mother will always forgive you. She loves you too much. Before it happened, she asked me how she could get you to love her again.”

“When she looks at me, she has this expression on her face. Like she doesn’t quite know me. And she’s sending me away.”

“You’re going away because you have to. Because of choices you made. Now we have to let the government play their games.”

Faisal’s face contracted, and he turned so his father would not see him cry. How could he have ever felt love to be dispensable? Now, without it, or without it in the easy form he had always known, he felt as if he were walking with only one shoe. It was something he only noticed once it was changed.

“Please. Will you leave me here? I’ll walk home.”

Abdullah nodded, walked back to the car, the soles of his shoes scraping the concrete path. Leaves, wax Pepsi cups, and bits of newspaper rustled around his feet. The thin metal peel-off tabs from soda cans pinged metallically as they blew through the gutters. He wanted his son to remain with him. So much time that should have been theirs had already been lost to business, to foolishness. Perhaps it was too late for them, and he had already made up his mind to do whatever Rosalie asked of him. It was not yet evening, but for Abdullah, the day was over.

Over Majid’s grave, Faisal prayed:
Allah, do forgive him and have mercy on him and make him secure and overlook his shortcomings, and bestow upon him an honored place in Paradise, and make his place of entry spacious, and wash him clean with water and snow and ice, and cleanse him of all wrong as Thou dost clean a piece of white cloth of dirt, and bestow upon him a home better than his home and family better than his family, and admit him into Paradise, and shield him from the torment of the grave and the torment of the Fire.

THE LIGHT OF
day won’t look so good on a dead man’s face.
This phrase held up Abdullah’s dreams. Dark dreams in which he had no children but a thousand wives, or pieces of them—torsos, hair, fingers grasping at the edge of his thobe.

He called Abdul Aziz.

“What of Ibrahim?” he asked.

“What Ibrahim? Who Ibrahim?” Aziz said.

“I know you have him. The man’s a scholar, not a warrior. Release him. Mercy is a virtue in kings.”

“But I am not a king, ya Sheikh.”

“Mercy is a virtue in men.”

“We’ll see.”

Abdullah placed the phone back in the receiver. The Kingdom was the Kingdom was the Kingdom. These were the ways of the state. The poets knew it.
Against
was a tired word in the Arab canon. The skyscrapers stretched toward the heavens. The kings put their hands in their bulging pockets. They counted three barrels per subject. They pardoned when it suited them. They tore up petitions and closed the door on their people. He had taken part in it for too long, a silent and willing partner. He had sacrificed everything to stand alongside kings.

ROSALIE PLACED DOZENS
of calls to arrange the terms of Faisal’s stay: to the Saudi consulate in Houston, to the American consulate in Harran, to her brother, Randy. She did not say anything about Wisoum. And so Randy arranged for Faisal to be admitted to the local community college, where he worked as an accounting professor. Another call to Aziz, and Faisal’s visa arrived within the week.

The king was dying and the country was abuzz with talk of the Crown Prince, who was thought to be honorable and forward-thinking, who knew the value of tradition and the necessity of modernity. Abdullah could practically feel the country holding its breath, awaiting the rise of this new sovereign. It was what Saudis knew how to do best: wait. Abdullah did not tell Faisal that his heart ached to think of him leaving—at the moment God had returned his son to him. Would Faisal be as lonely as Abdullah had been, decades before, when he had first arrived in Austin just before his nineteenth birthday? In the days before Dan and Rosalie?