The Night Counter (9 page)

FATIMA SAT ON
a black leather couch trimmed in polished chrome to match the chrome table. Two women sat on either side of her: Neda Namour, with hair hennaed so red that it paled the rosacea on her blanched skin, and Rana, her twenty-three-year-old granddaughter with a pierced nose. Rana looked everywhere but at Fatima and Neda. Fatima was still in her pink robe, but she had placed a sparkling bobby pin in her purple hair to dress herself up a bit.

“I’m sure when you get married, Amir will never be late,” Fatima said, patting Rana’s leg with her sinewy hand, hoping to stop the girl’s focus from shifting all over the place.

“Suheir Lababidi had another stroke yesterday,” Neda announced. “It’s quite possible she won’t make it this time.”

“Within the next eight days?” Fatima inquired. Neda nodded, and Fatima thought that she would have to dry-clean her black skirt one more time, after all. Suheir Lababidi had been the one who had told her which mosque to have Amir contact for her burial, a very helpful woman.

“Can we go now?” Rana grunted, eyes still moving around the room.

The eye shifting was making Fatima dizzy She took off her faraway glasses and put on her nearby glasses.

“What color are your eyes, Rana?” Fatima said, and began twirling her hair.

Rana moved her eyes from the mirrored ceiling to the chrome fruit basket on the chrome dining room table. “Black,” she said, but did not let Fatima see for herself.

“They get brown when she is happy,” Neda explained.

The girl’s very black eyes shifted to the doorknob, which was turning, and Amir sauntered in wearing Baluchi pants and tunic and a beard that ran to his knees. Fatima forced her lips to slide over her dentures into a smile. She hoped it hid her anger.

Her knees snapped unappreciatively when she stood up, followed by Neda and Rana, who needed a slight nudge from her grandmother.

“Amir, this is Rana,” Fatima said. “You remember her grandmother, Madame Neda.”

“Sure, we met when I picked Tayta up from Ghada Bilal’s condolences,” Amir said.

Amir shook hands, everyone politely smiled uncomfortably, and Fatima motioned for Amir to sit between the two guests on the couch. As he did, the ends of his beard rested on both women’s laps. They flinched.

“Take that disguise off,” Fatima demanded.

“We call it wardrobe, not disguise,” Amir corrected her, making no effort to remove it. “I just got back from my second audition for Middle Eastern Cab Driver #2.”

“He is an actor?” Neda grimaced.

“No, no,
aauthu billah
, God forbid, just a hobby,” Fatima said.

With another snap of her knees, Fatima leaned forward, grabbed the beard, and yanked it. Amir pulled away, but Fatima’s grip was tighter than either one of them expected. She yanked harder, and he pulled away harder. This time the beard did not follow him but stayed in Fatima’s hands. The
recoil was worse than the quail-hunting guns Fatima’s uncle had taught her to use as a child, and she stumbled back onto the couch. The beard flew out of her hands and landed on the hummus in the chrome platter on the chrome coffee table.

The four of them stared at the beard in the hummus in silence.

“I don’t think there will be a wedding between these two,” Neda decided. She motioned for Rana to stand up.

Fatima grabbed hold of Neda’s arm. “Wait, wait, ladies,” she pleaded. “I wasn’t going to tell you, but he makes the best glassy mole.”

Neda walked toward the door, and Rana followed her, eyes growing browner.

“Now I get to pierce my tongue tomorrow, Tayta,” Rana said to Neda. “We had a deal, and I did my part by meeting this dude.”

At the doorway, Rana gently took Amir’s arm and leaned in, giving Fatima hope again. “If you really want to get a chick, the Al Qaeda thing just isn’t going to work for you,” she whispered. “Living with your grandma and decorating gay isn’t helping much, either.”

“How dare you use that word,” Fatima shouted. “You don’t deserve to be buried next to him one day as his wife.”

The girl showed her brown eyes and smiled. Fatima found the strength to push her out the door and slam it shut. Then every wrinkle on her face was used to give Amir a full scowl.

“Come on, Tayta.” Amir smiled. “The beard is clean. We can still eat the hummus for dinner. I’m starving.”

Fatima refused to loosen her scowl. “What you have just done could be the death of me,” she swore. She reached into her bra and pulled out an envelope. She threw it at him. It just missed the hummus plate before landing on the edge of the chrome table. “So you better take this now— the instructions for my funeral. I had Mr. Kim the dry cleaner write them up for me so that you wouldn’t get depressed writing them. Pick them up now. And if we don’t speak again, I ask that unlike Selma Haddad’s daughter the other day, you remember to start the condolences on time.”

SCHEHERAZADE BEAT FATIMA
back to her room and fluffed the old lady’s embroidered pillows for her. Then she perched on the windowsill and waited.

When Fatima entered, she pointed her cane at Scheherazade. “At least the beard wasn’t real,” she vented. “Like the girl’s mustache was.”

“That reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to do for the last 994 nights,” Scheherazade said. She reached into the band of her head scarf and pulled out a pair of tweezers. She lifted up Fatima’s chin and plucked out a dangling thick black hair.

“Even preparing for death is no excuse to let yourself go,” Scheherazade asserted. “Why do you think Ali Baba could not give up his obsession with the thieves’ gold? Because it never lost its shine,
ya oukhti
, my sister. Perhaps you should have let Ibrahim see you could still shine.”

“I left him,
ya mejooni
,” Fatima retorted. She put the covers over her head. “Curses on your house, Scheherazade—is this how you wish me to die? A whole night I spent looking for that key for Amir, and see the thanks I get. And I didn’t even find the key. Bring me water.”

Fatima motioned to Scheherazade to hand her a glass on the table.

Scheherazade sniffed the glass and then quickly pulled away. “It doesn’t have any rosewater.” She grimaced. “At least some orange blossom.”

“It has fluoride,” Fatima said, and chugged it down.

“I’ve got something better.” Scheherazade winked. She reached into her headband again. “Smell.”

She swung a handmade cigarette under Fatima’s nose, but Fatima brushed it away. “I thought you didn’t smoke.”

“Only on special occasions,” Scheherazade said.

“What, my death?” Fatima whispered. “Is Amir’s behavior really what will kill me?”

“I rolled it myself in 1875,” Scheherazade bragged. “In Lebanon.” Fatima looked at the cigarette and forgot about death and Amir. “This was just a few years after the opening of the Suez Canal, so I was able to get the last of Lebanon’s fine silks at the same time.”

Scheherazade lit the cigarette and took a deep first inhale before handing it to Fatima. “But, I’ve never actually …” Fatima protested.

Scheherazade put her finger to Fatima’s mouth. “Shush,” she murmured. “Just breathe it in. Or are you a chicken, cat, and mouse all rolled together?”

Fatima sucked it lightly and coughed for more than twenty seconds on the exhale, according to the chrome clock. “But it tastes worse than anything from Lebanon could,” she finally rasped.

“It will taste better soon,
inshallah
,” Scheherazade vowed.

“One of my uncles used to smoke a smell like this, but never in front of Mama.” Fatima inhaled again, more delicately, and sighed on the exhale. “
Ya Allah
, none of my kids ever saw Mama. I was going to go back and visit her finally, and then I got pregnant with Lena and couldn’t. In my seventh month with Lena, Ibrahim read me a letter from my uncle that said she had died. Of all the girls I had, it never occurred to me to name one for her until Lena came. Mama never knew that I had a daughter with her name. But I have taken good care of our house, and she would like that,
al-hamdulilah.
”

Fatima got up, a little dizzy, and picked out a picture of a limestone and
carmede
house that looked exactly the way she described it every night.

“
Mashallah
, how have you managed to maintain it from here?” Scheherazade asked, trying to sound interested in the house.

“Ibrahim did go back to Lebanon after …” Fatima started. “After …”

“After what?”

Fatima shook her head. Then she took her deepest inhale yet. “Ibrahim went back to Lebanon many years ago and fixed up the house. Then he hired someone from the Mansour family to clean it once a month. A couple of times I asked Ibrahim for the Mansour woman’s number so I could remind her to pick the grapes in fall before the mice got to them; she was just rude, perhaps because she never met me. In any case, she likes Ibrahim more than me, which doesn’t happen very often, so I even asked Ibrahim to keep dealing with her after the divorce.”

“It was that way with my servants and my king,” Scheherazade recalled. “They liked him more because it was not he who told them to scrub the grout between the mosaic tiles.”

The two women passed the cigarette between them. Slowly, very slowly, the wrinkles on Fatima’s face started to flatten out. She giggled and pursed her lips, motioning for Scheherazade to look at her. Then she blew out a perfect smoke ring.

“Why, a djinn defying Solomon doesn’t rise out of the sea with such precision,” Scheherazade marveled.

“Millie used to do that with her Virginia Slims,” Fatima said. She fell silent when she gazed again at the photo of the house, which was still in her hand.

“It’s like the house in Deir Zeitoon was built for your Arabic-speaking Nadia,” Scheherazade suggested. “The dress to Lena, the house to Nadia,
khallas
, finished.”

“Nadia was terrified when Elias was kidnapped,” Fatima said. “My only child to ever go to Lebanon could not go back.”

“I saw her yesterday,” Scheherazade casually threw in. “She will be fine anywhere when you are gone.”

Fatima felt a creeping wooziness taking over her head. “What do you mean you saw her?”

Scheherazade did not want Fatima sensing that she had visited Nadia to give her peace of mind, knowing that she would be too proud to accept such a gift. “You weren’t paying any attention to me,” she said instead.
“Watching you dig through those boxes was even more boring than listening to another story of Deir Zeitoon.”

“Why didn’t you take me with you?” Fatima demanded. “She’s my daughter, not yours.”

“You were busy with your boxes,” Scheherazade reminded her. “Besides, mortals can’t travel on my carpet. That is not how my story was written.”

“Are you sure she’s fine?” Fatima said, and clasped Scheherazade’s hand. “The kidnappers never told Elias who they were, and they always spoke to him in classical Arabic so he could not tell where they were from. They could still be out there.”

“It was the 1980s,” Scheherazade said with a dismissive wave. “Professors were always being kidnapped. Whoever they were, they’ve surely moved on to new games. No one stays in the same one in Lebanon for that long.”

She put the cigarette to Fatima’s lips, but Fatima pulled it out to speak. “One day Millie saw Nadia on the six o’clock news at an anti-Vietnam rally,” she began. “She came running over from next door, curlers in her hair—she hardly ever remembered to take them off—saying Nadia was a commie. President Nixon and Millie didn’t like communists. Millie loved Nadia, so I know she didn’t mean to be afraid of her after that, but she was.”

Fatima inhaled again, almost burning her fingers. “Ibrahim wasn’t happy, either,” she continued. “He was so silent when she said she was going to study Arabic instead of accounting things. He told me to ask her what kind of job she could get with Arabic at the university if, God forbid, she did not marry well and had to work. Nadia went to Ibrahim and told him that perhaps, just perhaps, money was a noose around mankind. Then Ibrahim told her that life was a noose, not a vacation like her life in Detroit, and she had to do real work. He could only speak from his knowledge of life, which he did not share with the children. But I know in Lebanon, Ibrahim was responsible for his mother and his sisters from the age of eleven, when yellow fever took his father. He would tend the sheep herd, fetch the water from the hills, trade his mother’s chicken eggs for
cheese and bread—and go to school. He even arranged the marriage of his oldest sister to another sheepherder when she was eighteen so she would not die an old maid.”

“Alas, what’s done by the next generation cannot be forced undone,” Scheherazade remarked.

“So unfortunate,” Fatima agreed. “But it was fate, too. The day Nadia graduated from high school was the second day of the Six-Day War, and many of the Arab parents in the audience were crying. Grief, sorrow, humiliation, anger, worry, fear—none are the right word alone to describe the parents. Nadia became interested in back home then. She could have become a hippie like Hikmat Kanaan’s daughter did, but
al hamdulilah
, instead she joined the Peace Corps and went to Algeria. She thought she could use her Arabic there.”

“But that was just after the revolution of one million martyrs against the French,” Scheherazade recalled. “Algerians barely had their Arabic back yet.”

“So she found out.” Fatima nodded. “She was trying to help farmers with her school Arabic, and they didn’t understand anything. Then,
subhan Allah
, Elias arrived with the Red Crescent and helped translate her Arabic into French … then he saw how good she was at helping him put together the North Africa budget for the Red Crescent.”

“So he married her,” Scheherazade concluded. “At least Nadia would be able to read the deed to the house, unlike your others.”

Fatima shook her head and motioned for the cigarette. She inhaled one last time, and hope rose inside her as quickly as the smoke she exhaled rose to the ceiling. “You know, I still have something I can leave her as dear as the house,” she realized. “When I am gone, at least one of my children will still be able to read Mama’s letters. I will leave Nadia Mama’s letters. That is safe and good for both Nadia and Mama.”

Fatima got up, still holding the cigarette, and went to her dresser. She pulled out the letters, which were wrapped carefully in embroidered silk ribbons from Damascus. The letters peeked out of fading blue envelopes, covered to the very edges in carefully drawn Arabic letters scrunched
together in lines with no breathing room, as if the writer had not wanted to waste any space. Fatima untied the ribbons, so lost in the words that Ibrahim used to read her that she didn’t hear the footsteps.

“Your grandson is coming up the stairs,” Scheherazade hissed. She grabbed the cigarette out of Fatima’s hand.

“Hey,” Fatima protested, and tried to reach for the cigarette. But Scheherazade flew out the window.