The Turtle of Oman (3 page)

The Most Important Word in the World

A
ref ran upstairs to put his new T-shirt and pencil box into his empty gigantic shiny green suitcase that had been sitting for weeks beside his bed. Its mouth was open. It had three zippered pockets on the outside and four pouches on the inside. The lining of the suitcase was printed with blue crown-shaped emblems, like a scarf or a tablecloth.

A cat would definitely fit inside it. Even two small children would fit inside it. He had picked it out himself at the suitcase store with his parents.

Then he fell onto his bed. “I will always like this bed best!” he yelled. He liked the tall wooden bookshelves in his bedroom, the giant boxes of toys from when he was little pushed into the closet, his room's blue ceiling and the lamp over his bed, so he could reach up and click it on while lying on his pillows. He liked the map of the world taped to the wall. His father had poked a pin with a red head into the state of MICHIGAN.

 

My New Home

1. Michigan has more lakes and ponds than any other state. It has 64,980 inland lakes and ponds. Maybe I will fall into one.

2. Ann Arbor's nickname is Tree Town.

3. Mackinac Island, Michigan, has no cars on it. You have to take a horse and buggy, or walk. This seems like Oman in the old days. Also it is strange since Michigan is famous for car factories.

4. The Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island features the world's longest porch
.

 

Aref's twin cousins, Hani and Shadi, two years younger than he was, would be moving into his bedroom while he was gone. His cousins and aunt and uncle, who'd had a job transfer, were coming from Dubai, where the skyscrapers poked the clouds, to live in Muscat, right after Aref and his mom left. It was perfect timing. Everybody could share. It was disgusting and upsetting, actually.

Hani and Shadi would pull two chairs up to Aref's worktable instead of just one, while Aref was far away, in a room he'd never yet seen. They would sleep in his double bed. They would mess everything up. They would look out the window and hear the call to prayer floating across the valley and that sound would be theirs, not his.

They would listen to the cool hush of the air conditioner through his vent. They would use his drawers. This really upset him. What if they broke the blue porcelain knobs off? He couldn't remember how careful they were.

Aref knew for sure he could not leave his official rock collection, now missing two favorites, given to him for his birthday by his parents years ago, in his drawer. He ran to the kitchen. “Mom, I need tissue. Bubble wrap. Something for packing, hurry.” He needed to wrap the rock collection in a special box, tape it shut and hide it under his bed, or on a high shelf in the hall closet where no one would ever look. Chips and chunks of serpentine and diorite, greenstone, basalt, each with its own shape and its story. . . .

“It feels lonesome without your father here already,” said his mom, handing him a roll of paper towels and some tissues. “Oh well, we'll see him in a week! What are you doing? Are you packing? Would you like to come peel some carrots and help me? I need a helper right now—set the table, pour the water. . . .”

“I will,” said Aref. He was feeling anxious. He dropped the tissues and paper towels onto a chair, picked up the little peeler and a scrubbed carrot from the cutting board, and stared at it.

“Mom, could Hani and Shadi just sleep in the living room?” he asked.

“For three years?”

“Yes.”

“You are so silly! You don't mind sharing.”

“Well, I really do. I just pretended I liked it, for school. We had to.”

Miss Nuha, Aref's teacher, whom everyone loved so much, said the word “sharing” was the most important word in the world. She said if people thought first about sharing, they would always get along and the world could be more balanced—those who had too much could share more with those who didn't have enough. Was this true?

Aref and his classmates made posters to illustrate sharing—painting, drawing or collaging images that popped into their minds. Aref painted green and brown speckled turtles on his poster, sharing a wide, dreamy beach. Turtles shared plankton and water and waves and sand. He had fun painting their shells. Sulima painted a much better picture than his—long lines of friends who looked like people in their real class with their arms around one another. Diram painted bright cars in a parking lot, sharing space.

Aref didn't mind sharing sunflower seeds. He didn't mind sharing a crunchy shrimp or two from his Fisherman's Basket at Zad restaurant or the huge pieces of flat bread at the Turkish House. He didn't mind sharing soccer balls or his mini-car collection, which he kept in a tall metal canister—but his friends had to put them back before they left—or pages from a giant tablet of drawing paper.

It was easy to share when you still had what you needed. When you had enough for yourself. Or when you could get whatever you had shared right back again—like his cars.

“Sweet boy, the kids of Ann Arbor, Michigan, will be sharing their town with you too,” said Aref's mom.

“I hate sharing,” he said.

“No, you don't.” Aref's mom put her hands on his shoulders and stared into his face. “A month from now, all your worries will be gone. You will see how silly this was. You will feel excited every morning, just the way you always do.”

Aref buried his face in her side. He wasn't crying. “I don't think so,” he said.

Memorize

T
hey ate green beans with chunks of lamb and rice for dinner. Aref pushed his water glass to the right-hand corner of his place mat. He liked a square glass, so it lined up properly. No one noticed that he always did this. He liked his fork and spoon lined up exactly straight with the place mat too. He liked finishing one food—all the green beans, for example—before he started eating the rice. He ate the salad last, like a French person, his mom had told him. He drank water between each course. And he liked to eat very slowly.

His dad's chair was just sitting there empty with the echo of his dad in it. By now his dad was—where? High above the clouds. Dozing on a little airplane pillow with his earplugs in his ears. Aref closed his eyes to imagine this.

What did people eat on airplanes?

 

Jumbo jet menu

1. Dad says they eat sandwiches.

2. Mom says they eat peanuts.

3. Sometimes airplane waiters serve hummus in sealed cups, with a sack of chips. This is hard to picture. But I hope they give it to me.

4. Maybe the passengers gobble gigantic mounds of cotton candy since they are above the clouds.

 

After dinner, Aref quietly turned the handle of the front door and stepped outside by himself to memorize what his house looked like under the moon. He needed its shape and shadows. He wanted to press all its details into his brain so nothing would disappear.

It would have been nice to walk around the whole neighborhood, staring at every single other house, tucking all their windows and doors and roofs into his memory too. But he was afraid of foxes. At night foxes wandered through the city, poking their noses into gardens and trashcans for scraps. They had large ears and looked regal and a little scary, sneaking around. Aref had seen them from the roof. But he didn't want to meet one up close.

Still, he wished he had been born a fox.

 

Fox Facts

1. Foxes have fur between their toes so their feet won't get burned on hot ground.

2. The British School has an Arabian Foxes Hockey Club which Diram is going to join.

3. Foxes are not afraid of the dark. They just wander wherever they want to go when they feel like it. No one puts a leash on them.

 

Even better than a fox, Aref wished he were the endangered Arabian leopard in the Musandam peninsula. Almost no one ever saw it. So they couldn't tell it what to do. He would not wish to be a crab (caught and eaten) or a spiny crayfish (too spiny) or a bonito.

Aref thought about climbing the stairs to their flat roof, where his parents draped the bed quilts on clotheslines for airing and his father often sat with friends in a circle, especially in winter, eating sunflower seeds and drinking tea. In the daylight, you could see the ocean off in the distance. You could see Jabrin Castle. You could wave at the one-hundred-year-old lady Ummi Salwa in her pink satin robe taking a nap in her long chair on the next roof.

When they came back from the United States, Ummi Salwa would be a hundred and three.

Better or Worse

A
ref said to his mom the next morning at breakfast, “I dreamed about a word, it was all lit with spotlights.”

The word he had dreamed of was “halcyon.” In his mind, it looked like a tipped balloon with the air coming out a pinhole on one side. Sulima was throwing it at him and he opened his hands, but dropped it.

Halcyon meant a period of time that was happy and peaceful. You never heard anyone say it, though. That is what my life in Oman has been so far, he thought. And now it will be all shaken up.

“That's nice,
habibti
,” said his mom. She didn't ask him what word it was. She probably thought he dreamed about a simple word like “lucky” or “
mabruk
”—“congratulations” in Arabic. She had no idea how many words he knew.

Aref looked out the window at a streak of orange clouds with a bend in it. The clouds reminded him of an arm with a muscle. At breakfast, he nibbled a cucumber, dipped a carrot into the hummus plate. He stared at his scrambled eggs, taking a few small bites. His mother had mixed some white cheese into the eggs. He didn't think he would ever like eggs. But his mom kept serving them. When he was younger, he ate so slowly, his mom said every day was an “endless breakfast” and she made him get up much earlier than his friends did, just to have time to eat before leaving for school.

“How's your place mat memorization coming?” his mom called, trying to distract him from the plate sitting on it.

“Very bad.”

A few weeks ago, Aref's dad had bought him a place mat with a map of the United States on it. Aref was trying to learn the names of the fifty states. He kept mixing up Wisconsin and Minnesota. Mississippi was a river AND a state. It was complicated. He hadn't really stared very hard at the western section of the country yet. It was on the left side of the place mat and he was starting at the right. He liked New York and New Jersey.

“Mom, why is there no Old York or Old Jersey?” Aref asked.

“They are in England,” his mom said.

“I wish we were moving to England instead,” said Aref.

“Why?”

“It's closer to Oman.” But it wasn't really close at all. It only looked a lot closer on a map or a globe.

“Why do you have to go back to school?” he asked one more time.

His mother was looking through a thick stack of papers on the table. She still had to grade them. His father graded papers on the computer, like a modern man, but his mother preferred seeing her students' reports and compositions on real paper.

“Well, I do think we've talked about this one hundred times—please try to remember what we said. It's temporary. We'll have an adventure and when we come home, all our lives will be better.”

“My life will be worse,” said Aref. “Diram will be a Hockey Fox without me. I don't want to speak English all the time. I don't want to meet new people. I will miss my friends and be too far from Sidi. Mom, can Sidi come over today?”

“Guess what, I already called him,” she said. “I told him we need his personal assistance, so he is coming over later this afternoon. Isn't that good?”

“Yes. It's great.”

Aref went to his room and wrote in his notebook.

 

Questions

1. Why can't Sidi come with us?

2. Is my handwriting in both English and Arabic getting better?