“Let’s get a chair over for him.”
The goateed man departs, returns moments later with a wheelchair.
“Do you feel you can sit up?”
Movement is jerky, difficult. A muscle burns in my side. I collapse into a sitting position, aware of the faces peering in from the dayroom. The doctor pushes the chair through the crowd, acknowledging voices, shushing questions, speeding past the fuzzy, unheeded TV, fumbling with keys at the door lock, out into the hall. It is cooler here, quieter. The chair’s wheels squish as they roll. My mind goes back again, even as I try to steer elsewhere—the Euphrates crossing would have been earlier, closer to Harput, where the river was smaller and easier to ford. The deportee group was much larger then, perhaps a thousand strong or more. From there we would travel to Gerger, to Behesni, to Kilis and Katma, through boulder and outcrop, foothill and desert. The ziggurat would have been later, closer to Aintab. Nearer the end.
“Let’s get you up on the table.”
We are back in an examining room. I move again, with difficulty, my side stiff and painful, to where the doctor and the other man he calls Roger can hold me under the arms and lift me onto the table. Lights flash in my eyes, hands grasp my wrist, a wooden stick enters my mouth. Blood is drawn, charts consulted.
“How are you feeling?”
I am tired.
“What day is it?”
I struggle to respond. Thursday? Saturday?
“Is it day or night?”
Another hesitation. My voice rumbles deep in my chest. “I think it is night.”
“Where are you?”
“The hospital.” The sights and sounds of Aleppo creep back, the smell of sweat and sulfur, the stream of stick-thin deportees. The doctor bandaging my head.
“What is your name?”
I take a deep breath. How best to protect her?
“Ahmet. Ahmet Khan.”
The doctor jots this down. He looks at the other man, the man with the goatee, and I realize I have given the wrong answer, the wrong language, that I am in the United States, not Syria, that my constant back-and-forth has confused things. Do I know who I am, or where? Where is she?
“Doctor. Can you help me?” My voice is thick and strange. “I did not mean to do this. I cannot . . . keep things straight.”
“It’s okay. You had a seizure. Many people experience confusion afterward.”
“Will this stop?”
He frowns. “I don’t know.”
Other conversations follow, discussions on whether I should be sent to the emergency room, the fact that my chart shows evidence of prior seizures. The voices recede, then return. I am asked how I feel, asked to move my arms and legs. A light shines again in my eyes.
Eventually I am raised, placed back in the chair, and returned to the unit. The others stare as I enter the dayroom, as I attempt to right myself, to flex sore muscles, to lift my battered body from the confines of the chair. The doctor and the HST help position me on the bed, remove my clothes, find the pajamas Violet packed for me. John Paul’s voice drones somewhere, a few of his sentences thrusting like swords. “In a petit mal seizure, don’t they often bite their tongues?” “Of course I’ll keep an eye on him.” The rat-a-tat of his chuckle after. The small, rapid shifts of his head.
14
Araxie laughs
and wrinkles her nose. We sit under a bridge, in the cool shade of a hot afternoon. She looks better, healthier, the lines of worry and illness erased from her forehead.
“I saw a man in the market today—I’ve never seen anyone like him. His hair was cut short, and the back of his head was wrinkled and curved, as if the contours of his brain were exposed there. I wanted to touch him. Then I laughed—why should I touch him? As if I would touch someone’s brain.”
I laugh with her. When she dips her head or moves her shoulders, the rope holding the necklace becomes visible under the edge of her
libas
.
“Do you like Aleppo?” she asks. She tosses her head back, despite her hair being covered.
“I think so. Do you?”
“Yes. I am glad to be out of Turkey.” She averts her gaze, as if remembering leaving. “I like my new job.”
I study the palms of my hands. My mind flits unbidden to the Euphrates, to the incident at the brown waters’ edge.
“Tell me about your job,” I say, squinting. I fold my fingers together.
“I work for Dr. Ghavani. He is of Persian descent, a nice man, decent. He and his wife and daughter live in a house behind the hospital. They allow me to sleep on the floor. I work with the nurses, clean up after the surgeries, help transport patients.”
“The sight of blood does not bother you?”
She pauses. “I’ve grown accustomed to blood.”
“And Hussein?”
“He remains a problem. Dr. Ghavani has asked him to take his leave of me, but he refuses. He brings me candies and gifts, then pouts if I’m not appreciative. I angered him when I was sick, because I refused to see him then. He yelled that he could have me deported, that I must show proper respect. I try to be courteous, but it is always so difficult.”
“Does he,” I hesitate, “attempt to touch you?”
She shakes her head. “Only once. When I was first resident in the hospital and still quite ill, I awoke to find him standing over me, his hand on my belly. I thought at first he was a doctor, but then I recognized him. I screamed, and he pulled away. He told the doctors I was delirious.”
She shakes her head again. Bile forms in my throat, merging with shifting memories, of my thirst at the stream at the ziggurat, the tear of the fabric as I ripped off her clothes. I fidget. My nails cut grooves in my palms.
“If you could be anything you wish,” I ask, seeking to start anew, to turn all things forward, “what would you be?”
She glances into the distance, at the sounds of transport and barter. “I always thought I would be a merchant, like my father, trading goods, traveling to exotic places. Now I am less sure. I am happy helping people, doing what I do now. Perhaps I will become a nurse, or a doctor.” She spreads her hands across her lap. “And you?”
I swallow, the reference to her father unsettling. “I always thought I would be in the military,” I say quickly. “Work my way up the ladder.”
“And now?”
I smile. “And now I am less certain.” I glance at her hands, at the bend and curve of her fingers. “I want to go to America.”
I raise my head to find her staring at me, her eyes narrowed in concentration. “And how will you get there?” she asks.
“By boat,” I say, as if I have worked it all out.
“How? ”
“Either pay or steal my way on board. Or get hired as a ship’s mate.”
She nods, glancing again at the bustle of the suq. “I would like to go to America.”
“Would you go with me?” I ask quickly, impetuously.
She does not respond, at least for a time. Saliva moistens my mouth.
“I think so,” she says finally. She smiles, her fingers on the necklace curled beneath her loose clothing.
My doubt flips to exultation. Suddenly all things are possible. “Do you want to have children?”
“With you?”
Blood rises to my face. “I mean . . . in general.”
She laughs, her face broadening, then thinning, returning now to its prior concentration, her eyes up and alive. “I think I would like to have a family someday. I have lost almost all the family I had. Sometimes I question this, though. The thought of losing someone else, someone I love, is almost too much to bear. I wonder if survival has changed me, perhaps damaged me in ways I can’t see.”
I look down again. “How do you imagine it? America, I mean. What do you think it is like?”
She pauses. “I hear there are streetcars, and subways—trains that run under the ground! It is big, with large cities that make Aleppo look tiny, and vast spaces it takes trains days to cross. I have cousins in New York, the largest city. I would love to see them.
“Do you dream?” she asks.
The question prickles my scalp. “Do I
what
?”
“Dream. Do you?”
I pause. “Yes. I dream of the past, of my home, and the future.” I glance away. “Do you?”
“Yes, every night. Colorful dreams, of my home, my family, the journey here, the death along the way. Some of the dreams are frightening, some joyous, others disheartening. In one a dog chased me down a valley, through a thicket of thorns, into a river and beyond. He kept after me, swimming so close I could feel the heat of his breath through the water, feel the scratch of his paws as he brushed up against me. Then, back on land, he caught up with me, tackled me, sank his teeth into my leg, shook me with such a vengeance that the bones clicked in my face. And then he let go. Why would he give such pursuit only to release me once he had me? I thought about that dream for days after. I could not get it out of my mind.
“I had another dream that haunted me even longer. I was very young, maybe three or four, out for a walk with my mother. We stopped and spoke to a Turkish woman, a squat, older woman with eyes that rolled back in her head. In the dream my mother said something I did not hear or understand, something that made the old woman angry. She cried out, this loud, contemptible wail that carried through my dream, such that I could hear it for days. I saw the woman’s blind eyes and cruel mouth in the sun and the sky, even the stars. I still wonder what my mother said to her—did she insult her? Offend her? But I tell myself it was only a dream.”
She smiles. I say nothing.
“Do you believe in God?” she asks, her thumbs placed together.
“Yes. Of course.” I finger my beard. God. Allah. “God is life.”
She stares at her palms. “Life. I’ve seen so much suffering and death. Despite my prayers, the prayers that the missionaries taught us, the prayers that the will of God would be done. And yet he who is so all-powerful—will not his will be done whether I pray for it or not?” She shakes her head, strands of hair falling loose down her face. “God, my God . . .” She extends her arms, as if taking in Anatolia. “How could it happen?”
I shake my head. How to explain the unexplainable, the things meant to be mystery? Birds fly. People eat. Allah gives all, demands all. Has he not given us this, each other? We must look forward, not back.
“In America,” I start again, “all things are possible.”
She nods, pitting her chin. “In America.”
Again, silence roams. My thoughts split and carom. How best to assure her? I picture her thinking, jumbled in fear and spent logic. How can she trust this man who has killed—killed her father? The man who tried to rape her. Differing options unfold, paths to outcomes, an array of doors with dim passageways beyond. Practicalities. Youth and its blindness. Race and division and circumstance—these surmountable, all! My gaze strays to the necklace. I should speak, I should offer support for rebirth, transformation, but instead I am frozen, my tongue stilled and thick. What is my direction? My offer? She has made no accusation, assigned no blame to anyone except God—her God. This is her right. Should I not agree? I could blame the heavens, blame fate or luck or inheritance, but it is all to no gain. My shame is boundless, my guilt so heavy it outweighs even truth.
The silence lingers. Her eyes glisten, the light eye appraising, the dark eye reproving. I imagine competing armies warring in great, speechless battle. I will her to speak again, to release me! But she is silent. The shadows grow thicker, the day stumbling on. Bits of the world intrude and withdraw. I stand at one point, try to force the words from me—we can go forward, an ocean’s distance behind us! But nothing comes then, no words. No vessel by which to make good our escape.
The cries of the muezzin bring the sunset prayers. I stir, less from mental instruction than from some deeper impulse. I raise my hands to my ears, fold them right over left on my breast, bow, and place my hands on my knees, stand, dip my forehead low to the ground. I think, This will please her, ease things. Allah has offered us peace. I am joyous. But then a panic seeps in, a cold rain on my heart. Is this not the divider? Allah. The Christian God. The war, the deportations—they are birthed by this cleaving. And then us. Muslims do not marry others unless they convert—I know this. She knows it. We have spoken of togetherness, not marriage, and yet this wedge strikes, guilt-hardened. Her brother, staying behind and renouncing his faith. She would not do this. I want to cry out. Could I not have foreseen it? The words of the sura drone through me, the buzz of bees trapped in a hive—
Guide us in the straight path / The path on whom thou hast poured forth thy grace . . .
—but I am conscious only of her, waiting, the light eye questioning, the dark eye confirming. What was it the imam told me as a child?—we pray to keep life in perspective, to remind ourselves that we are poor worldly creatures, to submit our will to Allah’s. Submit. Have we all not submitted? I could . . . She . . . I arise to find her standing.
“I must go,” she says, her tone final, and sad.
Again I am mute. Her voice lingers, soft after the prayers. I am reminded of the night we first met, of the encounter under the eucalyptus trees, the way I brought her out into the moonlight to examine her eyes, my first thought that her one eye had been blinded. I remember her traveling on Gece, barely hanging on, her face shrunken, her hair matted, her eyes hooded and closed. I recall her smile when I handed her the necklace, the smell of her skin near my face, the gleam of her right eye, her left. But still I say nothing, as if my tongue has been cut.
She hesitates, as if she, too, has much to say but no means to say it. A dog barks in the distance. A door or windows bang shut. She steps toward me, her hand on my arm, but then pulls away, pivoting, looking back once and then gone, vanished through gloom into shadow. I stay for some time, faint, then nauseated, then exhausted, then inflamed. I walk to the
klimbim
later, my anguish buried inside.