Night Soul and Other Stories

The little brother Ali was little enough but you didn’t know what he would come up with, and they laughed when he told what his teacher had said, that we are all nomads.

His little sister laid the table, the mother from the kitchen calling Ali, the bread was waiting and the bowl of meat, and the very big brother Abbod tapped in a phone number, while Ali’s father and uncle, aware of Abbod because he’s only just unexpectedly blown in from Canada, to say nothing of sleeping on the couch, were plotting a new business venture, eased by aromas of lamb and onion, herbs and crusty, paper-thin lavash just out of the oven—so no one asked at first why the fourth-grade teacher at a Brooklyn public school had said what she did about nomad to Ali.

What is your job? I ask myself, on the move.

In the small shopping plaza above the B & Q train stop, they posted a news photo of a patrolman killed in line of duty. This not far from Ali’s family’s apartment, which in turn is a walk from his morning bus stop on the way to school with a walk at the other end.

Nomad
?
Nomad
?—just like that? What does she know? the uncle said at dinner.

In geography Ali had the answers and then some. Original was the only word for it. And when the teacher said a river takes us where we want to go and he put up his hand, the class became quiet. “Sometimes they take the
river
and they move the
river
,” Ali said. Class quietly laughs at the nerd terrorist, yet waiting for teacher. But Ali proves his point. “Once they moved a river to try and win a war, I think.” In the yard later someone would trip him up and he would fall and skin his cheek on the hard, black rubber surface by the jungle gym, but fall lightly.

The family wanted to know a little more about it, this “nomad” point because…because Ali’s an original boy, in need even of monitoring, of serious questioning—for what could happen? Unafraid, called “terrorist” and “
A
rab” by the boys in the school yard, what was he? A nine-year-old, a terrible asker of questions, small for his age.

Where is Mexico, where is Canada? asked the teacher, wondering at her own map hanging over the blackboard, where is California, the Arctic, the ice fields and polar bears, Brazil? Atlantic Ocean, Mediterranean Sea! What is the mouth of a river? Tigris River where they used to fish—no more. Where is Turkey? OK, where is Syria? See what country they have borders with. Borders? See the lines—one line is mostly river. “
Some
times—” she begins, but one question can interrupt another, the teacher was so quick with a question she interrupted herself, a happy person (and to have this Muslim
child
in her class who picks up her turns of speech), she and her map routes, a river is a moving road, she said, and was off.
Caves
, said Ali, the bell rang, he raised his hand too late.

Nomad can wait, we know. Because he moves in season. He and his people. Everyone busy. Nomad knows his job. Children quite safe. He may return next fall to where he was, even when things fall apart.

One day the boy would have to make a living, he would have a job to do, said the father. A dreamer, Ali’s head was in the clouds, you didn’t know what he was thinking—and then he told you. Imam passing through had said that the boy had mouths all over his body.

All
over
? she asked Ali (his teacher, one lunchtime, one-on-one, for she said he was better at math than even she…). Well, this imam was from Mosul, visited New York, got followed but not before he had trained his camera on the evil billboards and the great bridges, Ali told her. Did she know an entire bridge had been moved part by part from England to Arizona? His uncle had told him.

His uncle knew. His uncle got mad, not at him, stood up for him. (“Ali can crunch the numbers.”)

Who all were these nomads? We know roughly where they are. In olden times the Scythians would surprise the enemy, make some trouble and retreat. Let’s make a map of nomads, the teacher said. What is a map? she said. Anything that came into her mind, she would say it. The bald kid at the back who’d been sick but wasn’t anymore showed his notebook to the kid next to him.

Abbod wore a hunting jacket he’d picked up in Canada. He was bent on obtaining a New York driver’s license hopefully. What matter if it’s stamped third class not valid for U.S. government purposes? He’d always known, from birth, how to drive—what’s the problem? He had driven a white taxi from Beirut to Dimashq and when his uncle’s cousin had shown up to collect the fare at the post office by the train station, it was how things worked, which always came first. Didn’t he get paid? Ali asked. Post office next to a theater where you are too young to go, Abbod jigged his eyebrows.

Abbod knew how to take orders. It was how you learned to give them. Ali, age nine, thought if he didn’t ask for a camera he wouldn’t get one. But who could he ask?

What is my job? Ask no one but yourself, things falling apart some days like a song high above the street or in the distance.

Photos on the living room wall—a dark man, his eyes bugged at some awful thing about to happen. Next to it a picture of a gold-and-silver-threaded pharaonic tapestry with a band around it showing ducks flying and their wings like crowns, very pretty Islamic thing. And a tinted photo of, you’d guess, a rug and leaves growing all the way around it, and Ali would look at the leaves. Of what tree? A fruit tree, maybe existing someplace. Look, too, at their California calendar peeling the months up and back, with a hang glider or backpacking trail above each month of days, or high, bellying waves of surf, or a quake-proofed bridge.

Nomads, said Ali’s father, the way he said things. The big brother had left the table to make a phone call and Ali recounted only that teacher had a picture of a tent in the desert and had asked what a nomad was, and Ali had told about their sheepherder cousin. “Maybe a cousin, maybe not a cousin. A singer, we heard he was a singer,” said the father who had an attitude because big brother on the phone again or because Ali storytelling.

Forsythia, the surprise along Newkirk, its early yellow bearing in its very light a suspicion of green in a front yard next to Ali’s building. Late winter, early spring, seasons in question, a matter for the authorities.

And now big brother couldn’t drive legally without at least the third-class license Albany had promised if Governor would only stop changing his mind every other week on the three-tiered plan, what’s the matter with him? (Didn’t you get paid in Dimashq? said Ali remembering from two nights ago.) Cops see it, maybe they stop you maybe they don’t. Third category license was for driving, not I.D. except if you’re stopped with it you’re an immigrant in limbo, you could be on the BQE or Coney Island Avenue. Abbod had just arrived in New York Limbo? asked Ali. It means trouble, said Abbod. Did he fly from Canada in an airplane? How else you gonna fly? (Did Abbod answer Ali’s question?) Ali hopes he will stay. “What the dickens is the BQE?” “What’s the BQ
E
?” laughs big brother. “The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, man—what did you say, Ali, what the what?”

Father and uncle were looking into a storefront at the lower, better end of Foster Avenue across from the NYPD security camera mounted above the street and nice older brick and wood houses, and seeking a private source of financial backing which would save their violating Sharia by applying to a bank in Greenpoint where they had once lived and had a dog.

Canada nothing like Syria, Abbod told Ali. Mom told him to go to bed, Abbod can tell you all about it tomorrow, Sharah is waiting for you to read her a story. Abbod slept on the living room couch, gone early in the morning before Ali was up. Ali must have understood something. Was it the job that brother Abbod was looking for? Why did Ali feel he had found it? Abbod wouldn’t take the messenger job because he didn’t have a bike. That’s right, you don’t take a job you don’t want.

The bedtime story was his job, though only a boy, helping care for a female child in the family. Ali was interrupted three nights running—Mom, Dad, and, strangely, the third night big brother Abbod, angry after a phone call—and each time Ali got back into the story though he skipped a step or two of the tale but added some bits. Same fisherman pulled up in his net: first, a parcel holding a princess’s body all cut up into pieces that seemed more than pieces; second, a great talking stone which asked to be dragged onto dry land, a fallow field, and then heavily lifted to discover beneath it amazingly a hole that hadn’t been there and a narrow door; third, a jar and a genie plus interactive adventures to enlist the genie’s help or escape him and—and little sister Sharah, eyelids trembling with sleep, thought the genie was going to kill the fisherman, had he done so?

Nomads. A considerable tent dipping in the wind with a great flat oblong top. The teacher pointing, Anyone know what a nomad is? Ali spoke without putting up his hand, he had a cousin who was a nomad. He used to keep sheep, you know, but was herding also larger beasts now until he could come to America. Oh? said the teacher. The class laughed with relief, as if they didn’t believe in that cousin living out there on the borderland of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, but they did, for this cousin Zam-ma’jid often on the move who didn’t speak a word of English to his goats and even camels that might lie down exhausted—and why would he anyway?—he didn’t like America and that was final. So why come here? He had a horse to ride, too—the class became quiet at this—but it might be taken from him. Teacher more than sort of liked Ali and she looked at him and said, We’re all nomads.

Two boys jeered at the Muslim kid. Get Shorty. An airplane passed low overhead. Was it coming out of JFK? Was it bound for Atlanta, Washington D.C.? Ali might well know. His uncle would. And then a second plane.

Big brother Abbod with the camo fatigues you envied was supposed by the family to have come here by way of Istanbul, Warsaw, and then Quebec, where he had arrived with two Polish jazz players he knew from Lodz who had scholarships to McGill, and it was true. But Abbod had soon left Quebec to come here.

What is my job? To see what a child is seeing. However long it takes? Time pounds the pavements and dissolves into a field of chances.

Teacher had two Band-Aids for Ali, he liked them. She heard the boys talking. What was this store on Coney Island Avenue near Foster Ave. the boys went to? she asked Ali. In Flatbush, she said. He shrugged, but she felt he had not known the location of the store.

The Catholic girls’ school near the projects the far side of Flatbush, of Newkirk—Sharah might go there next year. They had asked many questions and had been almost too friendly. It was better than a school where she would be singled out. And homeschooling was not possible, though when they came home every afternoon they studied Qur’an. (Ali’s teacher asked him what difference between Qur’an and other faiths—too much to ask.) Some echo here for me.

Air Canada to JFK? Apparently not. Over the border, then drive? Don’t ask. Abbod knows the city. Ali wants to know what his brother knows.

One day Ali was late getting home.

All but strangers to each other, the tall and the short, a child peering through the store window at video games, behind him like single file a man. We stand before the wares of the West, does he see me in the plate glass?—sees much that is not immediately visible very likely. What is my job? Above his olive-skinned neck a Low Dark Fade they call it at the barber’s school where I go for a $4.99 cut and an experience, the boy small for his age I’d guess, but in the Ocean Avenue game store’s plate glass unmistakable, somehow found—viewing a domain he must often have visited—seeing what is in front of him like a prince, subtle, mighty, and, hearing Green Day from the record store next door, he need not turn yet.

What is one’s job?

That I should have found myself here, to relearn a stretch of neighborhood once my father’s family’s never quite mine you know, but my memory’s, my city’s—and pavements and intersections guessed that morning from words of my wife implicitly like love locating it like a clue a couple of city miles at least from the brownstones of our Rutland Road, those long, turn-of-the-former-century’s blocks of evolving borderland though no stranger to great Flatbush Avenue, the Prospect Park lake/horses/grackles like iridescent crows owning the territory/lilacs on the way—to find myself here might prove worthwhile—a nomad thought more mine than hers, to a virtually unemployed male at 7:00
A.M
.

Ali would do anything for Abbod. Ali was up against it in the playground when teacher came out and he was telling his enemies he had a big brother who had come to the U.S. to do a job and Abbod would chill them in a New York minute. “
Half
-brother,” Ali’s uncle said.

Green Day Ali hears like a message, a life, a promise—because he would like to learn to play bass like…

(Never misses school, never home sick, “like a chip off your old block” he will say two, three days later when I recited a Russian poet—in English—“But I love my unfortunate land / Because I’ve not seen any other.”)

And would like to be invited to play video games after school with…two kids, for it is them he now turns to see. Not yet the man standing behind him, in the corner of his eye in the store window reflection, but his classmates, one pale, strong, bald, the other a “carrot-top,” Ali will later call him (his given name Terry), who come sauntering forth jointly holding a single, targeted purchase. Engrossed in the picture on the small packaged game and maybe the fine print, they look up and see Ali and turn away laughing over their collective shoulder at the nerd whose cousin nomad was coming to America, he’d claimed. Knowing nothing of this as yet, the gentleman behind him—as if the Band-Aid on the cheek proves it—assumes Ali is a regular here.