The Ruins of Us (42 page)

ON THE DAY
of Dan and Faisal’s departure, Abdullah told the driver he would take them himself. They filled the trunk of the Range Rover, and Faisal, Mariam, and Rosalie climbed into the backseat. In silence, they drove across the causeway to Bahrain. Dan followed the shoreline off to the right until he spotted the sandpaper and cinderblock rubble of the clubhouse. On the breeze, he imagined that he smelled the familiar sourness of the hundreds of empty beer bottles stacked on the kitchen counters. He didn’t think that Abdullah would be spending much time there anymore. Faisal also looked to the south along the shoreline, but he craned his neck back so that he was looking at Saudi Arabia. He knew he would not be able to see Wisoum from there, but he looked anyway. The sky was a pale, winter’s blue, the clouds propelled by the powerful wind moving down from Iran. He pulled the folded-up photo of Jadd Abdul Latif from his pocket and stared at it. It was the only family he would take with him to America.

Now they were crossing the causeway into Bahrain, which was still a Gulf country, still a Muslim country, though there were a few churches scattered around; Faisal had heard that the whorehouses outnumbered both the churches and the mosques. Was it going to be that bad in America? Would his uncle attempt to convert him?

Mariam had shifted into the center seat and pressed herself against him, tucking her arm beneath his as if he were escorting her on a stroll somewhere. He thought she might be crying but he didn’t look because he knew that if he did, he would not be able to stop everything from spilling forth out of him—his love for her, for his baba, for the stifling, troubled place he was leaving behind, for the mother whose body he had once inhabited. He squeezed Mariam’s arm tightly and looked straight ahead. Moving fast over the causeway, Faisal felt his home stripped away like the thinnest raiment. He had never imagined it could be taken from him so easily.

At the airport, Abdullah parked and everyone walked in together. Faisal’s hand shook. He had never left the Kingdom alone; he had only traveled alone once, when leaving boarding school. His father took him in an awkward embrace, and Faisal realized that he was now taller than Abdullah. Faisal felt the scratch of his father’s goatee against his cheek. Was there still time to learn from him? Mariam grasped onto them from the side, and the sweet smell of her lavender shampoo raised in him an inchoate sadness. “I’ll come in a few weeks,” she said. “I’ll be there soon.”

“Say hello to my brother for me,” Rosalie said to Faisal. “Say hello to Texas.”

And then Dan and Faisal were through security and waving from the other side until the people around them began to get annoyed and mutter unkind things. Before turning away, Dan paused to look at Abdullah. His iron-gray hair was combed back in an unruly wave, and he’d cocked his head ever so slightly to the right, as if assessing a painting on a museum wall. With deep-set black eyes, the cynosure of his elegant face, Abdullah watched him, too. Dan understood that they might not continue to be friends. Their friendship had survived difference for decades—they’d built their bond simply on essence—but it could not survive what had happened in the last weeks. What came between them now was not religion or language or homeland, or any of the other false barriers that humans erect between themselves in their search for order and identity. Rather, what now diminished their friendship, which had become something so utterly a part of both of them that its removal would leave them keening with a phantasmal ache that would last until their deaths many years later, was the fact that their bond had become entangled in the same woman.

Finally, Faisal and Dan turned away to find their gates.

“Good luck, Faisal,” Dan said.

They didn’t shake hands or touch. They merely turned in opposite directions and walked away from each other. This parting was not done in coldness or anger; it was done out of necessity. They were going different ways.

DAN BOARDED HIS
plane to Marseille and later caught the ferry to Corsica, where he drank sweet pink wine and hoped for rain so that he could stay indoors by the fire listening to Miles Davis. If the sun came out, it would require him to put on his boots and venture down to the water, to smell the gorse and lilac and be in the world. For Rosalie, for what she had survived, he would never forget the blessing of another day. Dan knew that he had missed the point for too long. After tragedy, you must still undress your heart and send it naked into the day, where it would be battered and expanded. Wives left, husbands cheated, floods came and took everything out to sea. But if you were left alive, there should be gratitude for that, always. He knew you could relearn those things. How to put on your boots. How to walk. How to love. By the time he got to Texas, he would be ready to run.

ON HIS SIX-HOUR
layover in Amsterdam, Faisal bought a Toblerone, wandered though the terminal counting the number of Arab faces that he saw (thirty-eight, including one man who was possibly Greek or Spanish), and changed from his thobe into a pair of suit pants and a white button-down shirt. He listened to all of the languages around him and heard Persian and Turkish and Urdu and Arabic. He wondered what it would be like to be in a place where he might not hear Arabic every day. While he waited to board, he watched an English-language news program. A Moroccan named Youssef Belhadj had just been arrested in Belgium in connection with the Madrid bombings and was awaiting extradition to Spain. He looked like a professor—his face had that learned quality to it. Faisal wondered what could move a man like that to kill. It was something other than God. Faisal had held Majid’s twitching neck in his hands, he had seen his death tremors. They were things Faisal could not bear to see again.

Outside the glass walls of the airport, the sun of late morning had ignited the water-slick runways; the tails of departing planes bandied the light back in bright, surprised O’s. The whole world seemed alight, and Faisal recalled a quote that Imam Sa’ad at his masjid liked to repeat:
Muslims, in their dealings with others, should appear like the sun that shines and melts away darkness.

Now, sitting in the Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, he was concerned with one thing, and that was the frozen blue in his heart; the pain and regret that might never leave him, not as long as he lived, maybe not even in heaven. Would heaven be his? He felt a darkness in him—a shadow that had not been there before.

After twenty-eight hours in transit, Faisal landed at the George H. W. Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, Texas. As the plane flew low over the city, he was stunned by the orange lights that seemed to stretch on and on in every direction. He was nervous, as if he would be asked to do something for which he had failed to prepare. The plane taxied to the gate, and Faisal felt calmer. It was darker along the runway, the city panorama gone from view. Fat men in vests waved their orange sticks.

Inside the terminal, he slowed his step. There was no reason to rush. In fact, he wanted to prolong his time in the airport as much as he could. Again, he tried to count the Arab faces that he saw, but he found only one—a woman who looked Egyptian, wearing a pink headscarf. Several times, he thought he had seen another one, but when he moved closer, he heard them speaking Spanish. Maybe he would call Abdullah after he went through customs. He knew that his uncle was waiting for him beyond the divide, maybe his aunt, too, but the thought of seeing them made him very tired. He would be a guest in their house, in their country. How would he fill up his days? How would he move from the kitchen to his bedroom? Would he be watched? Where would he pray? It was not his house. This was not his country. Even the sign at the customs line reminded him:
ALL OTHER COUNTRIES
. As Faisal moved toward the front of the line, he could see a man with a face like his mother’s waving at him from behind the glass panel. The man was tall and blond, his face ruddy. The man had German cheekbones. His mother’s. His own. Here was this man to meet him, this man who shared his blood. Faisal caught his breath. Surrounded by all the people, the brown and the beige and the yellow and the pink, the spotted and the smooth, the stooped and the heroically tall, Faisal was entirely alone. He should go back; he wanted so badly to go back. He could barely bring himself to edge along the blue carpet toward the Exit sign and the expanding and consuming fluorescence of the strange, whirring world that lay beyond it. The people who belonged went streaming by; they treated the transitional place with ease. They spoke English more quickly than his mother had. He tried to picture Rosalie making her way down the tiny airplane staircase and onto the tarmac in Al Dawoun that first time, her pale face already burning in the September sun. Imagine. To live out your life in a country not your own. Imagine it.

IN AL DAWOUN,
the sun rose and set in a flawless sky, the rain saving itself for a more blessed time. Spring arrived, then summer. Faisal was gone, Mariam had started at St. Stephens in mid-spring; when she arrived in Austin, she’d written to Rosalie right away:
Umma, the highways here are lined with flowers, purples and reds and yellows. The man who picked me up at the airport said that I came at the best time, wildflower time, and that soon, the flowers would be gone and the grass on the shoulders would brown and die. It reminded me of our time in France, with the sunflowers and all the lavender, when the whole earth was color. I want you to visit me at exactly this time next year. I will try to take a picture so you can see it, or remember it, if it was this way when you and Baba lived here.

In the past months, since the children’s departures, Rosalie and Abdullah had lived easily together. Together, they talked of the children, missing them, wondering who they would become. The love was there. Remember the Qabbani, he said. He began reciting the old poet, trying to take them to a simpler time.

When I love you, the Arab cities leap up and demonstrate

against the ages of repression

and the ages

of revenge against the laws of the tribe.

And I, when I love you,

march against ugliness,

against the kings of salt,

against the institutionalization of the desert.

She interrupted him: And how does that poem end? You never recited the ending.

He looked perplexed, as if he had never considered that the poem had an ending, so consumed was he by the passion of the beginning.

So she recited for him.

And I shall continue to love you until the world flood arrives;

I shall continue to love you until the world flood arrives.

IN THEIR TIME
together, Abdullah was tender and eager, and only occasionally did he disappear from the house. She did not ask if he went to Isra’s or to B-Corp; she did not want to disrupt the harmonious passage of days. She sensed his regret, and, as she was not a cruel person, she did not try to intensify it. On any day, she could have said: Our son kidnapped me because of your outburst. On any day, he could have said: You were going to leave our family, our country, with my best friend. So she did not say anything, only accepted his touch, his words, because she understood that his affections were turning more and more back toward her, and this was almost enough. Almost.

THAT EVENING, THEY
lay together on their bed for the first time. They touched each other tentatively. At dusk, they stood at the window, watching the desert flood with copper light. They remarked the eroding landscapes of their aging bodies. This is how two bodies orbit each other after decades together, when the gravitational pull of love is properly in place. They had been out of orbit for too long, Abdullah recognizes. His love has been too diffuse, not enough to center them.

Abdullah thinks with exhaustion of watching two women grow old—of differentiating their habits, their particularities—and he is angry at Isra for the first time in their short love. Angry that she will not stay fine and firm; that she will one day need him to love her despite her infirmity, her dementia, her stooped and brittle body. After all, it was her fineness that made him think his heart capacious enough for two women. That it should fail her, fail them, one day, was too much for him to bear. And beneath his anger and exhaustion is doubt: Two women have given everything to be with me. Am I worth two lives? He tries to bury this thought back in the shadows, but it will not be buried. It is lodged where, now, he will always consider it.

ROSALIE SEES WHAT
is left of her love. It is as if a switch has been flipped. She can touch without being consumed. She can remember without sadness. She is not bitter, and she is not afraid.

AT THE HOSPITAL
after the baby is born, Abdullah greets his sister Nadia, who has come up to offer her assistance.

“Mashallah, my brother,” Nadia says. She watches Abdullah clutching awkwardly at the baby. In her brother’s world, helpless things have no place. It is why, she thinks, he married the American, the Palestinian; women tough enough to stand with a foot in two worlds, as he did.

FROM HER BEDROOM,
Rosalie listens for the front door. She stands at the dresser and surveys the room; she imagines the bed pushed all the way into the corner, as it was off Rio Grande. She sees their young bodies stretched across the mattress. They are not yet engaged. She wants to return to that moment and steer herself differently. Not away from him, but not so fully into him.

She hears the click of the bolt easing out of its place, the swoosh of the door’s rubber liners against the tile. With both hands, she smoothes the map she has placed on the dresser top. She found it in a desk drawer, the socialist’s map from the bar all those years ago. He cannot know how well he paid her that night, when he gifted her with the entire world. She runs her fingers over the boot of Saudi Arabia, feels the crinkle of the paper. She remembers the ache of homelessness she felt when they flew out of the desert, she, Maxine, and Wayne. Sometimes, the cure for nostalgia is return. She knows she will leave.