Man of the Hour (11 page)

“Okay,” said David, not quite absorbing the actual words.

The detective slapped him on the arm and reached over to open the door for him. “You done good today,” he said. “There’s guys been on the job twenty years wouldn’t do what you did.”

“You think so?” asked David, opening the door.

But the detective had already gone back to writing in his notepad, his jaw working and his green vein throbbing. Looking for a hundred different ways to dissect the moments just gone by.

8

ELIZABETH HAMDY, MANAGING
as sort of elegance in baggy green fatigue pants and a black T-shirt, was sitting on the front steps of her father’s house when Nasser and Youssef pulled up in the Plymouth.

“You’re so late!” she said, standing up with her skates slung over her shoulder. “You were supposed to be here by one-thirty. I thought you were going to take me shopping. I skipped the whole museum trip for you.”

“I’m sorry.” Nasser got out of the car looking tense and distracted. “We went too far and got lost.”

“Lost?”

“I mean, the traffic was very bad.” He looked back at Youssef behind the wheel. “Ocean Parkway is blocked. I think something happened down the road.”

“Yeah, I heard a big bang and saw some smoke from down by the beach. Was there a fire or something?”

“I don’t know. These crazy things. I was in Manhattan with my friend.”

She noticed Youssef was staring at her again, through the windshield, with his tinted glasses and his big bald head. He’d made her uncomfortable the two times they’d met, and now she had the unmistakable feeling he wanted something from her. She waved to him halfheartedly as two black crows landed on a slate roof across the street and gray smoke evaporated on the horizon.

“She is very beautiful, your sister,” Youssef called out to Nasser, as he started the car and drove away.

“He gives me the creeps,” she said, watching him turn left on Stillwell Avenue and disappear.

“He is a good religious man,” Nasser replied stiffly. “Should we go?”

He started walking across the little tree-lined street to where his rented black Lincoln Town Car was parked.

“I wonder what the fire is.” She looked again at the smoke on the horizon. “I hope it’s nowhere near school.”

“Probably it’s the hot dog store. Maybe this is a chastisement for making the bad food.”

He was even more tightly wound than usual today, she noticed, with his hair flat and his shoulders slumped. When he held the passenger-side door open for her, she saw little indentations in his lower lip where he’d been biting it.

“Please to put on your seat belt,” he said as she climbed in. “I am very nervous to be driving with you.”

She smiled to herself as he got in on the driver’s side and started the car. The interior was ragged but comfortable. She liked it sometimes when he was sweet and protective. There was something very Old World about it. She could almost picture him holding their mother’s hand as they crossed King David Street in Bethlehem or helping a Bedouin tribesman lead his flock to the Saturday-morning sheep market.

“You mind if I put on the radio? Maybe they’ll have something about what happened down at the beach.”

She reached for the dial as the car rolled down Avenue Z, passing the brick houses with Madonna statues on the front lawns.

“No!”

“Why, what’s up with you?”

They made the turn onto the Belt Parkway entrance. A long serpentine road lay ahead, with high weeds on either side and angry men hanging meaty tattooed arms out their car windows.

“I am just needing to be quiet for a few minutes, that’s all.” Nasser gripped the wheel tightly. “Hey, why aren’t you wearing your
hijab?
”

“It’s too hot today.”

He looked over and saw her hair hanging free and loose around her shoulders. It looked so soft and rich that he had to restrain himself from trying to touch it. Other men would want to touch it too. He wished she would cover it immediately.

“I don’t like for boys to see you like this. They get the wrong idea.”

“Well, you say it’s the wrong idea.”

From the way he quickly switched lanes and cut off an approaching Lexus on the left, she could tell she’d picked a bad time to tease him. There was hardly a day that went by without his claiming to be disturbed or offended by some aspect of modern American life. But this afternoon it was more than that. He seemed profoundly shaken. She wondered if this Youssef had just said something.

God, God, God.
What a terrible sound the
hadduta
made when it went off the second time. He couldn’t get the noise out of his head. He was trying to talk to his sister, but all he could hear was that hollow boom. A sound you could feel all the way down in the bottom of your stomach. You knew such a sound would shake things loose and set them rolling wildly. The idea frightened him. What if a police car pulled up alongside him right now?

“All right, so you don’t want to play the radio and you don’t like my hair,” said Elizabeth. “What else do you want to talk about?”

“I don’t know,” said her brother, as the road turned into Shore Parkway and swept past Dyker Beach. “Are you still thinking to go to college?”

“Now that’s something
I
don’t want to talk about. Not with you.”

“Okay.”

He shuddered a little behind the wheel and honked at an oil truck going by too close on the right. The yellow fragrance tree hanging from his rearview mirror swayed in the breeze.

“What about Mother?” she said.

“You want to ask me about Mother?” He took a deep breath and reached inside his shirt, fingering the key again.

“Yes, what was she like?”

Nasser let go of the key and put both hands on the wheel as his eyes followed the curving road ahead.

“She had soft hands, beautiful hands,” he said. “But she was not soft. She was strong in her heart.”

“And what was the name of the town she was from?”

“Dir Ghusun. It means the Monastery of Branches. It was an old Christian town, founded by the Romans. I have told you this three hundred times before.”

“I know. But I like hearing it.”

There was music in his voice when he described this place he’d never actually seen. Their mother’s village on the coast of the Mediterranean. Where the soil was rich and black and the lemon trees and olive trees grew tall, and the sea carried the fine smell of the trees across the village. Every year at harvest time, children ran through the streets following the blind storyteller to a neighbor’s house, where he’d tell stories of great Arab heroes and warriors like Saladin on his white horse battling Richard the Lion-Hearted during the Crusades, or the Prophet himself, who led three hundred brothers to victory over a thousand Meccans at the Battle of Badr. Even after the Israelis bombed the village in 1948 and forced her family to flee, arresting anyone who tried to come back, she’d carried the memory of this place, her connection to the land, in her heart. And, in turn, she’d passed that love of the land on to Nasser, even giving him the rusty key to the family’s old house, so he could open the door on the day of return.

“So did she like me?” Elizabeth asked.

“Of course she liked you.” Nasser forced himself to smile. “She loved you. You were her little baby girl. How could she not love you? I look at you and I see her sometimes.”

He stepped on the gas again and maneuvered around a blue Honda onto the Gowanus Expressway. His head was full of hot tears but he didn’t dare let them out.

Mother. She would have understood what he did today. She knew what it was to be drastic.

She was always at the front of marches in Bethlehem, lying down in front of the tanks at Rachel’s Tomb. Screaming and rending her clothes at the funerals of martyrs. A little Arab lady in a white scarf with a voice that carried like the wind. She taught him that there was a special place of honor in heaven for the ones who fight, not for the ones who stay at home.

Not like Father. Getting his face slapped by Israeli border guards and trying to smile through the tears.

Nasser couldn’t have been more than five years old when it happened but the memory tore at him in new ways all the time. It didn’t even look like a slap. It looked more as if the young soldier was lightly patting his father on the cheek. They’d been making a special trip to Jerusalem—his mother, his father, and he—when their cab was stopped by the Israeli border patrol and the soldier on duty asked to see Father’s identification card. Perhaps Father was slow to get out, so the soldier just reached out and put his hand to the old man’s face, and that was that. Father bowed and got back in the cab.

It was only when Nasser looked up and saw his father trying to smile with tears running down his cheeks that he realized anything was wrong.

His mother just sat there, lips pursed and chin raised, refusing to look at her husband. Amina. She was pregnant, Nasser remembered, and Father had shamed her this day. So she stared into her son’s eyes, not needing to say it out loud:
Don’t be like him.
I would rather die than see you be like him.

Up until then, he’d thought they were a family like any other. Yes, he knew they had to move around a lot before he was born, leaving Jordan and eventually ending up in the Deheisha refugee camp outside Bethlehem, because Israeli forces had claimed the house Father grew up in and there was nowhere else to go. But all other families they knew had a story like that. After the slap, though, everything grated, everything hurt. Seeing the water carrying sewage down the middle of the dusty narrow street, so that flies followed you everywhere and the terrible smell infiltrated your clothes. Living eight to a room in a concrete-block house with a corrugated tin roof, where his mother would stack up mattresses during the day so they could have a living room and then spread them out at night for everyone to have a place to sleep. Wearing old UN food sacks for underwear, with Not for Sale stamped on the ass. Knowing his parents’ first child, Maryam, had died of malnutrition before her first birthday. Watching his father stand on a street corner near the Damascus Gate every morning, with twenty or thirty other Arab men, jockeying for position, waiting for some sweaty, hairy-necked Jewish contractor to drive by in a Mercedes and say
you, you, and you
can come work for forty shekels a day, building houses on the land we stole from you.

“So what was it like when Mother came here?” said Elizabeth. “I can’t really picture it. This little Arab lady in a head scarf riding the subway with us.”

“She didn’t.” Nasser kept his eyes on the road. “She never crossed the water.”

“What do you mean, she didn’t cross the water?” Elizabeth cricked her neck, trying to get Nasser to look at her. “I thought she brought us to the States after Father had been working here a year, making money so he could get us out of the refugee camp. Didn’t we all live together on Starr Street?”

“She came here but she never left there. Do you understand?” He blinked. “In her heart, she was still there, in the camp.”

He flashed on the image of her in Deheisha, right after Elizabeth was born: A shrinking lady with two small children carrying rotting vegetables past barbed-wire fences, moving slower than the dirty water in the gutter. Her spirit wilting in the sun. A part of her was already dead. Things he could never put into words.

“Never mind,” he said. “You’re too young to remember.”

“Explain it to me.” Elizabeth touched his arm.

They were passing under the elevated tracks, near the Bush Terminal warehouses, a rough and dark industrial place where men did things that made no sense to their wives.

“She never accepted that she was here,” said Nasser. “No place was home except for the Monastery of Branches. You see? She said she would go back there one day or die waiting for the Jews to leave Palestine. Okay? This is how it was.”

America had done this to her, she’d say.
America has broken our hearts. America has taken your father from us. America makes it possible for the Jews to treat us this way.
There would be a
Great Chastisement
for those who’d been so cruel.

“Sometimes, she’d take us on this boat that goes around Manhattan Island,” said Nasser. “This Circle Line. She’d stand by the railing and look out at the water, like she was thinking to be somewhere else. And I would never let go of her hand because I was so afraid she would jump over the side and leave us.”

“Is that what happened?” Elizabeth turned on him. “Is that how she died?”

“No.” Nasser pushed himself back against his seat, as if bracing for impact. “She just got sick and took too many pills. It was an accident.”

“You mean she committed suicide?”

He took the question like a blow to the head, “Don’t say this. It’s against the Holy Book.”

For a few seconds, he refused to speak or look at her. The road hummed under his wheels and he felt the pressure of tears building up behind his eyes again.

No, she wasn’t a suicide. She was a martyr. That was the only way he could think of her death. He remembered seeing her lying on the bed, with hands folded over her chest. “This is not my mother!” he’d yelled at Father. “What have you done with my mother?” He had become a warrior to honor her memory. When he’d joined the
intifada
back home, every stone he’d thrown at the soldiers was for her, every rock was a piece of his broken heart. Today was for her too. She would have understood.

“Then what
did
happen?” said Elizabeth. “I have a right to know. She was my mother too.”

“I tell you this was an accident—nobody says nothing against her.” Nasser abruptly cut her off. “We don’t talk bad about her.” He took a deep breath and sniffed.

“I know, but sometimes I’ll hear you and Father speaking in Arabic and I feel like you’re keeping something from me.”

“Maybe it’s better that way.” He blinked again and the tears began to recede, just a little trickle coming out on the side facing away from her.

“Why, what makes you say that?”

The Gowanus bent its elbow in Red Hook and splintered off into the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, cutting through Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill. Gray-rimmed clouds drifted in from the east.