The Hidden Light of Objects (14 page)

*  *  *

Adam learned to read the stamps on
Jido
’s letters to Nader as coded missives. He grew convinced the Munich Olympics stamps indeed signaled
Jido
’s acceptance, if not approval, of his son’s move to Kuwait. A moss green stamp of little boys in red shirts playing football gently probed the possibility of more grandchildren. Adam would never have the heart to explain to his father that Nader was destined to be an only child, fulfilling the promise (Adam still refused to see it as a curse) of his name. With Adam’s brazen vow on that unforgettable afternoon still ringing in
Jido
’s ears – a boy and two girls –
Jido
knew his son would have done all he could to make it happen. In
Jido
Thomas’s stamp of the footballers, Adam didn’t read disappointment or reproach but, rather, all the things he would have less of: a father’s hand through his child’s hair; the sweet sweat smell of that child after play; a small voice in the middle of the night asking to be let into his and Nadra’s bed. But he also read in that stamp, and in so many others,
Jido
’s sympathy and, more than anything, his love for Adam and his little family.

Nader, unlike his father, didn’t bother to decipher secrets from his grandfather in the stamps. He didn’t need to look for hidden meanings since his correspondence with
Jido
was unobstructed, frank, often sharply humorous. Nader’s interest in the stamps had to do with something else entirely unconnected to
Jido
. When Nader saw the stamp
Jido
had stuck on one of his letters from 1975 – an image of the jackal and lion from the
Kalila wa Dimna
tales – what unfolded before him was that devilishly wide and unanticipated world of books and their clever enchantments. This was not about the usual catalog of children’s books he was more than familiar with from the library at the American School of Kuwait. This was not
The Hardy Boys
, not
The Famous Five
, not even
The Wizard of Oz
, though that last one might have come closest to the new realization brought on by the
Kalila wa Dimna
stamp. Nader, fascinated by the meticulous illustration of the proud, almost jolly looking lion and the emaciated jackal with the flapping jaws, immediately asked Adam about it.

“They’re a collection of short tales about the lives of animals, some of them noble, some of them trouble. They tell us things about how we should live in the world.”

“Where are they from? They sound Arabic. Who are Kalila and Dimna? Which one is the lion?”

“Kalila and Dimna are both jackals. They show up in most of the stories, that’s why the collection is named after them. It’s hard to say where the stories are from. They’re from a bunch of different places: India, Persia, Iraq, Spain. It’s interesting because the stories changed as they traveled from place to place. That’s how things are, Nader. Everything collects traces. You’re no different, you know. You’re a magnet attracting life filings as you grow.”

“I think I’d like to read
Kalila wa Dimna
.”

Adam happily bought Nader a copy of the stories translated into English, the language his son was most comfortable in. This didn’t bother Adam the way it did Nadra and some of their friends, who all feared their children’s loss of Arabic was going to exile them from Lebanon even more. Adam wasn’t convinced there were degrees of exile. Plus, he believed languages were for everyone. It didn’t matter to him that English rather than Arabic or even French was the one Nader had chosen for himself. Nader had already made it his own in the way he wrote to his
Jido
, mixing it into the Arabic his grandfather preferred, making both languages vibrate and keeping
Jido
on his toes. As it turned out, Nader would become fluent in all three languages anyway, moving through each like a Kashmiri shawl through a rose gold ring.
Kalila wa Dimna
, even in English, gave Nader a sense of the wide open world and the role the imagination could play in shaping it. It made him realize that things were more connected than they were apart, but also that not everyone could see or wanted to see the links. Nader would come to believe that sometimes it was prudent to keep the links invisible, that some connections weren’t meant to be shared.

To Adam, on the other hand, the
Kalila wa Dimna
stamp
Jido
had chosen for that letter sent just at the start of the civil war, a stamp that had commemorated the
Journée de l’Enfance
a few years earlier, had nothing whatsoever to do with literature and its strange worlds. It certainly had nothing to do with children or their designated day. Adam understood immediately that with this stamp his father was making a political statement, warning of upcoming betrayals and chopped up lives, of jackals that would trick lions and of lions that would make unlikely demands on hares. Adam could sense – despite the dreams that still came to him in technicolor, despite the endless promise of his glorious boy – their old world rapidly plugging up behind them like a drain. For the first time in his life, Adam began to register promises in pieces.

*  *  *

But even with Beirut on the verge of a calamitous war, Nadra and Adam had each other. And they had what mattered to them both even more than each other, as they admitted without jealously or resentment: they had Nader. Nader shimmered with an appetite for everything around him, and it was this quality, more than his incredible good looks, that drew even strangers to him. Nader’s atmosphere was, like all atmospheres, mostly illusion. His was the ephemeral atmosphere of Kuwait in the 1980s, still seemingly untainted by clawing, meddling neighbors and the dank fumes of righteousness. That a Christian Lebanese boy could encapsulate this chimerical time in such a volcano of a place said it all. But even then trouble lurked in the shape of black-eyed hawks and bearded beasts, types Nader would have read about years before in his illustrated copy of
Kalila wa Dimna
. He would be long dead before these forces would shroud the country, but his weary parents would be there to witness Kuwait’s atmosphere, like their son’s, vaporize to nothing.

In August 1984, a month before Nader’s seventeenth birthday, a month before his death, he was on a plane heading to New York via London. He was going to visit Columbia College, his school of choice for after graduation the following year, a graduation that would never come. Adam was piloting the flight. About midway through, he emerged from the cockpit to stretch out his legs, to survey the people whose fragile lives were, for a brief time, in his hands. As he walked through the plane, he caught a glimpse of Nader in a seat close to the back. He would never in his whole life forget the scene before him. His son was at the center of a group of young people. Everyone’s attention was on him. He seemed to be describing something, his long, fine hands making odd shapes in the air, of cars or planes or, perhaps, lions and jackals. There was a young girl with exquisite features sitting on his armrest, and every once in a while, his son would ruffle her bobbed hair affectionately, the sister he never had. Periodically the group burst into laughter together, a single organism unified in the promise of youth. In one month’s time, at the end of September,
Jido
Thomas would have been missing for two years. Seeing his radiant son on that plane, Adam knew in his bones, in a way he hadn’t allowed himself to know until that moment, he would never see his father again. His glamorous son on that flight – surrounded by all those young people, a glass of something in his hand, making them all roar (when things could be that funny), heading toward something in front of him (how was Adam to know it was death?) – made it possible for Adam to let his own father go.

*  *  *

The phone call relaying
Jido
Thomas’s disappearance stunned Adam. For weeks after he moved around like an anaesthetized ghost. Nadra feared for her husband’s well-being, but she feared for Nader’s more. She remembered with a crash Adam’s long-forgotten oath on their son’s head to be done with politics and religion. She was certain one or the other was the cause behind
Jido
’s vanishing. She worried Adam would be sucked into a mess he knew nothing about and that demonic forces she still believed in, still a village girl at heart, would descend to extract the price. Suddenly, here was Lebanon at their doorstep, and they were not equipped with the necessary dexterity to maneuver through its deadly tit for tats. Slowly, slowly, Nadra and Adam began to feel their luck changing.

Nader, on the other hand, had been expecting it. Not precisely his
Jido
’s disappearance, but something. The arrival of
Jido
’s final letter preceded his vanishing by three days. The date marked in blue ink over the magnificent stamp revealed that it had been posted a week before that. Nader debated whether or not to show it to his parents. A lesson he had learned early on slipped into his head: some connections were private. He could not betray his
Jido
, the grandfather he rarely saw but whom he loved and who, he knew, loved him with the grandness and gentle wisdom of elephants.

The letter made
Jido
’s disappearance easier for Nader to accept than it was for his parents. He knew, even after two years, their world was not the same, and he regretted his invisible role in their prolonged grief. That morning of the call, Nader decided to hide the letter under the center of his mattress where he knew his mother’s nimble fingers couldn’t reach it accidentally while changing the sheets. He didn’t believe his mother, or his father for that matter, would ever purposely snoop. Nader was certain
Jido
’s last letter wouldn’t fall into their hands, an eventuality
Jido
had warned vehemently against. In his final, desperate moment, Thomas chose to confess to Nader, a fifteen-year-old boy, and not to anyone else because he was aware of the double helix in his grandson, a spiral blend of lightness and gravity that ensured he would protect the last actions of a broken old man.

*  *  *

Fourteen years after her son’s death, Nadra found
Jido
’s last letter to Nader hidden under his mattress. It had been placed right in the middle where her fingers, still tucking in clean sheets every week for the last fourteen years as they had for all the years of his life, never reached. If they had, they would no doubt have found, in the luck-filled early years, a few
Playboy
magazines, notes scribbled on scraps of paper once spiral bound from girls desperately in love with her chestnut-haired beauty, a joint or two, and, every once in a while, a stamp that promised Nader something about the future he wanted to remember. Nader had thought of his mother’s fingers the morning he selected where to hide
Jido
’s final words to him; and Nadra, panting a little with the exertion of pulling her son’s old mattress off the bed frame all alone, ignoring her husband’s earlier plea to wait till he got home so he could help, knew it. Nadra collapsed into her boy’s dusty, dump-destined mattress, now taking up half the floor. The thought of Nader contemplating her fingers was a thing that could rip apart the tight stitching holding her together. She simply could not allow herself to unravel on this day before their return back to Lebanon, forty years after making Kuwait their home. She would not do it to Adam. She focused instead on the letter in her wilted hands.

Adam had never shared with Nadra his belief that
Jido
Thomas spoke to him through the stamps on his letters to Nader, but looking at the stamp on
Jido
’s last letter Nadra came to the same conclusion.
Jido
had been trying to tell them something. This stamp, fragile and sad, stood for goodbye. It was smaller and less flashy than most contemporary Lebanese stamps. It looked like it could have been from the colonial period. Not Lebanon’s, but India’s or maybe Kenya’s. The stamp was monochromatic, an unearthly teal. It looked a little like those stamps of Queen Elizabeth that seemed to come in endless colors – though Nadra wasn’t sure quite how she knew that. Where the Queen’s face should have been, an elephant’s appeared. It was in profile, nothing but one large ear, a lowered trunk, and one steady eye. It was the eye that got Nadra. It looked exactly like
Jido
’s. It was as though
Jido
had somehow managed to etch his own eye into this most incongruous, unlikeliest of stamps. The elephant looked like it was about to speak.
Jido
seemed plaintive, diminished. And in the mournful, glossy eye of her father-in-law, Nadra saw the reflection of her son.

19 September 1982

My dearest Nader,

It is impossible you have already heard what has happened.

Every year begins with hope in this village. We give thanks to the Blessed Virgin despite ruination, despite injustice. But after this, hope is finished. I cannot begin again after this.

The blackest stain. You will hear of it. Sabra and Shatila. They were trapped like vermin, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, surrounded and slaughtered. Even if it had been only one. The blackest stain.