The Night Counter (4 page)

SCHEHERAZADE WAS WEARING
even more gold tonight, more than last night, when Fatima had revealed the story of her cousin Samira, who at six years old lost her sight but not her hearing when she looked at an old woman with a missing ear, and more than the night before, when Fatima had told her of the chicken farmer’s wife in Deir Zeitoon.

The jewelry’s glitter strained Fatima’s eyesight with or without either pair of her glasses: ruby and diamond rings on nearly every finger, dangling hoops from her ears, and gold and emerald bangles up to her elbows.

“You have on more jewelry than a Bedouin bride on her wedding day,” Fatima complained.

“
Ibad e sher
, keep the devil away, one marriage was enough for me,” Scheherazade said. “How about you with the two husbands?”

“Tell me how I’m going to die,” Fatima replied. “Will I stay fit until the 1001st night? You can tell me, whatever it is. It’s too late for it to be long and crippling. I just want to know if they will all be healthy days that I can focus on finding Amir a wife and someone to take my house in Lebanon.”

“Just let your children solve it for themselves,” Scheherazade suggested.

“Are you saying that I will not have all healthy days?” Fatima countered.

“Tell me a good story for once, and I just might tell you.” Scheherazade winked.

“Fine,” Fatima said. “I know. … Did I ever tell you about the time me and
awlad aami
, all my cousins, tried to paint the house with pomegranate juice?”

“Yes, yes, pomegranate, my favorite fruit of God.” Scheherazade yawned and stretched. “The stains did not wash away even after a winter of nonstop torrents of rain.”

Fatima had told Scheherazade 993 stories of that house: the time her cousin Najwa got stung by twenty bees from her father’s hives and became sweeter than honey; the day a peddler from Damascus came to the door, fell in love with her aunt, and persuaded her to marry him in exchange for all the perfumes on his cart; the year her uncle drove up the mountain with the village’s first motorcar and everyone looked out from the wheat fields to see where the horse or donkey was hidden; the year her grandmother arranged seven marriages in one hot July, all of which produced firstborn sons. Those events had occurred in Fatima’s first seventeen years of life, which was the last time she had seen Lebanon and that house.

Scheherazade jumped down from the windowsill and cuddled up to Fatima on the bed. “
Ya seit el beit
, oh, lady of the house,” she begged.
“
Wahayat deen el-nebi
, in the name of the prophet’s religion, you’ve had ten children and two husbands. Surely something must have happened in the last sixty-eight years. Chicken pox?”

“I never told you about the week my grandfather’s autumn grapevines trapped five bandit farmers up to no good,” Fatima offered.

Scheherazade sighed and ran a finger across her full lips. “You have told me stories of love in Deir Zeitoon, unrequited, forbidden, fated, but you have not told me your own.”

“I do not have a love story.” Fatima shrugged.

“Yes, you do,” Scheherazade argued. “No one could live so many years as you without a love story to sustain them. Maybe it lasted but a moment or maybe it still lives, but love, memory or living, must nourish our heart to keep it beating.”

Fatima twirled a strand of hair.

“For example, how was the lovemaking with Ibrahim?” Scheherazade asked. “Did it get better or worse with time?”

Fatima slapped Scheherazade hard enough to shake the bells on her belt. “
Ya bint al-sharaa
,” she shouted. “Nothing but a common street girl.”

“How dare you,” Scheherazade said, and slapped Fatima back. “When did mortals become so uptight? In the chambers of my palaces, lovemaking flourished proudly and—”

Fatima turned her back to Scheherazade so that she would stop talking.

“I swear on my own mother’s heart, once you start remembering love, the passion for its stories comes back, if not the love,” Scheherazade vowed. “I will commence with the line from one of my own stories, and then you go on. …
Yallah
, let us begin. …
I shall wed the only man who can tell me a story whose beginning is impossible and whose end is untrue. … Yallah
, proceed.”

Fatima twirled a strand of purple hair again.

“I’m still waiting,” Scheherazade cooed.

“Could I have a cigarette?” Fatima asked.

“Smoking prematurely ages you.”

Fatima ran her palm across the cratered map of wrinkles on her face. “I’m eighty-four,” she said. “Premature was a long time ago.”

“But look at me—1,128 years old and not even a dent,” Scheherazade bragged.

“You’re immortal,” Fatima said. “That’s different.”

“And you’re eighty-five.”

Fatima rearranged her pout, which seemed to satisfy Scheherazade. “My story, please,” she demanded.

“What if Amir does not marry and does not take the house?” Fatima fretted. “Then who?”

“The answer will not come if you only picture long-dead people in it,” Scheherazade countered. “God knows and sees best what lies hidden in the old accounts of bygone peoples and times, not us. Let us look at the past that is still growing. That is where the answer to the fate of your house lies. Before there were the children, there was the father. So let us begin there.”

Fatima continued to twirl her hair for thirty seconds according to the chrome clock. Then she let go of the strand of hair and readjusted the shoulders on her pink robe. “Help me up. I want to show you something.”

“As long as it comes with a story.”

“Haven’t I spent the last 993 nights telling my stories?” Fatima said.

“I mean one that will make me swoon. A sexy, passionate, juicy one.”

Fatima pretended not to have heard those adjectives, but they were disturbingly embedded in her mind now. She motioned for the cane. Scheherazade picked it up and accidentally smacked it against the bed.

“Hey, watch it,” Fatima admonished. “My grandfather made that. He was the best—”

“Cane maker in all of Lebanon. Yes, yes, you already told me that one. Come on,
ya ikhtiyara
, old woman.”

Scheherazade handed her the cane.

“Be nice to me,” Fatima insisted. “I’m missing the sports update on Channel 11 for this. They’re making their predictions about the NFL
draft this week. I’d like to know who’s going to be playing at the Lions’ new stadium before I get to heaven.”

“You are certainly most confident of your destination beyond this world,” Scheherazade said, and hooked her arm in Fatima’s. The two made their way down the hallway silently, aside from the tapping of the cane, until Fatima stopped in front of a door and motioned for Scheherazade to open it. Scheherazade gasped at what greeted them on the other side. “What kind of guest would want to stay in such accommodations?” she exclaimed.

Fatima sighed. All Amir’s chrome and glass, never mind how distasteful, always glistened. But nothing in this room shined.

Scheherazade stubbed a perfectly polished red toenail on one of several boxes and yelped. “Your Amir is such a triumph in the way that many perpetual bachelors are often neater than any person they could have married,” she remarked. “But this … I once told stories to a sultan’s son who had banished all his servants and yet had a palace more tidy than this.”

“These are my boxes from Detroit. The mess is not Amir’s fault,” Fatima insisted. “I told him not to touch anything in here.”

Scheherazade picked up a large wooden stick. “I said don’t touch!” Fatima shouted in a voice so loud that a surprised Scheherazade dropped the baseball bat. It rolled along until it hit a stack of badly aligned boxes, tipping over the top one, a tattered Oster sixteen-speed blender box. Out of it spilled many small white tubes. Scheherazade bent down and randomly opened a few, finding them filled with cracked and ill purples and pinks.

“Those are my samples from when I used to sell Avon,” Fatima explained. “I’ve kept them for forty-two years in case I needed extra cash. But I haven’t had to go out and sell them again. God be praised,
al-hamdulilah
, Amir and I have enough money.”

Fatima gently eased her knees down to the floor and knelt in front of a wooden chest. She inhaled the cedar.

“This is it.” She smiled. She reached into her pink robe but discovered
she had forgotten to bring both her nearby and her faraway glasses.
Ya Allah
. “Come, come,” she beckoned Scheherazade. “Is the wood still the color of black honey?”

Fatima’s hands gently massaged and stroked the chest, and she laid her head on the cool wood, letting her purple hair nearly cover its length.

“Is your story for tonight in there?”

“My grandfather built this from the cedars back home. … He was the best carpenter—”

“In all of Lebanon,” Scheherazade concluded.

“I was not going to talk about him,” Fatima said. “So don’t complain.” Her weak eyes focused on a world left behind long ago as she opened the chest, swatting Scheherazade’s hand away when she tried to help her with its weight.

“I closed it myself, and I’ll open myself,” she declared, and slowly, carefully raised the lid until it stood upright and enveloped her in the powerful aroma of cedar and time.

Lying on top was a white damask gown with just a hint of yellowing on the lace. Fatima tried to pull it out, but she was overwhelmed by its weight and the smells of her mother’s house—the cardamom her aunt stirred into the Turkish coffee as she boiled it not once but twice, the garlic and lemon juice that permanently stained her mother’s fingertips, the sweetness of the hibiscus and gardenia petals from the veranda—all still sewn into the fabric, along with the cold, muddy aroma of fresh figs.

Scheherazade took the gown from her just before its many layers of lace toppled her. She examined its embroidery and then let the train glide behind her as she twirled with it and then held it up to Fatima’s body. In the sixty-eight years since Fatima last had worn the dress, she had become too short for it.

“I got married the first time in the early summer,” she reminisced. “The year the Palestinians started to rise up against the British, and in Deir Zeitoon, everyone was already talking about getting the French to leave Lebanon.”

“That was 1936,
habibti
. Or 1355 in the year of the
hijira.
”

“We didn’t have calendars in my house.” Fatima shrugged.

“You left Lebanon just in time. Another great war was around the corner, and you would have never gotten out then,” Scheherazade said. “Did you like him, this first husband?”

“Marwan? Sure, why not? He was very nice.” Fatima nodded. “He was working at the Ford River Rouge plant and came back home to Deir Zeitoon to attend his mother’s funeral. She had refused to go to America with her husband, so he took Marwan with him and she kept the older boy with her. Marwan’s older brother and my father had been best friends before my father died, so I went to pay my respects. That was my first funeral. Two days later, Marwan came to the house and asked Mama and my uncle for my hand. Mama was so excited.”

“With a dress like this, you must have been, too,” Scheherazade marveled as she spun around with it.

“I told Mama that Marwan was the same age as her, so why didn’t she marry him? She slapped me three times. She told me that Marwan made six dollars a day working for Mr. Ford. Mama was sure that in America I would have a better life. Both she and Marwan were born when Lebanon was starving because Britain and France had blockaded our harbors to defeat the Turks.”

Fatima touched her wedding dress, letting go when she noticed that even Scheherazade was weighed down with its stories. “Marwan and his father left Deir Zeitoon right before the blockade, when he was just a child, only eight,” she continued. “So he barely spoke Arabic anymore. His Arabic was so hard to understand some days, and I had no English.”

“Love has no words,” Scheherazade gushed.

“Your King Shahrayar fell in love with you because of your words,” Fatima reminded her. “But I did like Marwan because I was getting older and I didn’t have a father and I wasn’t so good-looking. And my grandmother, the greatest matchmaker of all, died two years before, just when I turned fifteen and hit the prime marriage age. Mama had begun to
worry that I would have to work like an animal like she had, with no man or sons to help me plow the fields.”

“She only worried because she loved you more than the moon,” Scheherazade said.

“Mama had no one else to love,” Fatima replied. “I was born eight months after my father died; the Turks killed him for refusing to be conscripted in their army. Mama always said not to feel bad about him deciding to become a martyr because the Turks would have put him on the front line, as they did most of the Arabs, and he would have probably been killed anyway. Then, a month before I was born, the influenza took her two other children. I explained all of that to Marwan when the officer at Ellis Island asked when I was born. Marwan wrote down 1919.”

“You were blessed you came after that influenza,” Scheherazade remarked. “It killed three times as many people as the Great War going on then across our lands and beyond.”