The Hidden Light of Objects (15 page)

Blessed Virgin.

Two girls got out. Twins. I heard about it from the judge, the one with the white beard and blue eyes, remember him? You once said he looked like God. They found them in a cellar two kilometers from the camps. They refuse to speak. I can’t stop thinking about these two girls, eight, maybe nine years old. They could have been your sisters. They are your sisters, Nader. They are my granddaughters. These two girls quaking in a damp cellar with no food or water, centipedes in their tangled hair.

How could we?

I’ve included a list of names. There is nothing you can do with this list. I don’t want your father to see it. It is absolutely imperative, Nader, that your parents do not see this letter or the list. No matter what happens, this is between you and me. When your father chose to leave, he made the right decision. I couldn’t see it then, but I see it now. I will not allow all this to drag him back into it. He is free. You are his freedom.

But this list is something I want you to have. I want you never to forget who’s who and what’s what. Maybe you will never return to Lebanon. Never return. But if you do, I want you to know.

I’m going to look for those girls. I’m a dead man with this list, but I have to see the girls. If there’s anything left for Lebanon, it’s in them.

This will be my final letter. I love you.

Goodbye.

Thomas

VII

Sara once gave me a tiny gold ring with a speck of emerald on it. It may have been for my birthday. It may have been for friendship. It fit, just barely, around my ring finger. Sara had hair like a Brillo pad, at least that’s what Jake and Andrew said, every single day, twice a day, for about two years. We weren’t sure what a Brillo pad was, what exactly it looked like, but we knew it wasn’t good, that it implied something harsh and kinked, something to scour black pans with, a cruel exaggeration of Sara’s hair. They called her Brillo pad and me Mona Lisa, which sounds a lot better but wasn’t. Yellow-eyed Jake and red, flaky Andrew – cherry orange hair, pale pink, freckled skin – you know the type – horrible, diseased-looking, but saved, swelled, and made cocky by his Americanness. Not much we could say to counter that.

When Sara and I were younger, Jake and Andrew ignored us. But by the time we were around eleven or twelve, we were worth poking and prying. For them we were an untapped version of fun. We weren’t mice, Sara and I. We would poke and pry back – mocking yellow eyes and splotchy red skin. But with a single “Oh yeah, Brillo pad?” or a solitary “Watcha lookin’ at, Mona Lisa?” we were screwed in our places. Sara was self-conscious about her thorny hair, and I was unsettled by being likened to Mona Lisa who, I had read, might actually be a man and who, in any case, had a sneaky smile. For a year or two we put up with their unpleasantness.

Girls change suddenly. At fourteen or fifteen they can become minxes without notice. After one long summer, Sara marched onto the bus wearing the kind of lush beauty – red-lipped, olive-skinned – that makes cars honk and boys (and girls) gasp. I boarded after Sara – all high cheekbones and newly angled arms – and Jake and Andrew, slack-jawed, fell over themselves trying to blot out years of teasing and to replace it as quickly as possible with a new, awkward fawning. Sara and I, blotting out what we could of Jake and Andrew – so much smaller than we remembered them – talked, with striking animation, about the weather.

At the end of the year that we morphed into minxes, I exchanged Sara’s ring for a small leather pouch. The ring was the only thing I had on me that I cared about, the only thing I could give to Jonas that last day. Sara was not happy and considered my gesture thoughtless, frivolous. What Sara never really understood was that giving away my emerald ring said more about my love for her – black-haired beauty – than my love for him.

Her Straw Hat

Julie may have been the saddest-looking woman ever to board the hydrofoil, Flying Cat III, from Athens to Sifnos. Yannis couldn’t figure out why Flying Cat? Flying Dolphin, Flying Fish, Flying Octopus all made sense. Flying Cat made no sense. It was the sort of detail Julie would quietly notice and record in the big black ledger Yannis knew had to be tightly wedged inside her head. She would put it in the section called “Inexplicably Annoying Details I’ve Come Across and Have Refrained from Commenting On.” Yannis was convinced that would be one section among many in Julie’s black book. An especially thick section would be titled “Even More Inexplicably Annoying Details I’ve Come Across and Simply Could Not Stop Myself from Commenting On.” Once upon a time, Julie’s complaints had rushed through their lives like a wind stream. Yannis wished it was that way still. Anything was better than this sadness, shaming and acute. Julie’s sour odes used to make him chortle, had signaled to him she was engaged with the world. Not happy, but engaged, anchored in, clamped to land and to him. Now, Julie was adrift. She was floating. Not yet drowning, but she was clearly not flying. No flying cat, his Julie.

Her sadness as she boarded the hydrofoil was so leaden, he feared the ship might sink too deep. He worried everyone in the cabin would feel the weight of his wife’s misery, that it would smother their youthful excitement about the summer, about all that sex waiting for them on the islands. Surely they could sense the saddest woman in the world had just boarded. Surely they would presume, their sunflower heads twisting toward Julie, that it was all her husband’s fault. The man accompanying the saddest woman in the world – lanky and tall, teal blue eyes and sandy hair – must be responsible somehow. Yannis walked around with the guilt over other people’s silent accusations thudding hard against his back exactly the way the waves now thudded against the side of this boat, this incomprehensible flying feline.

Yannis saw to it that the children were settled in. He put Zoé in the aisle seat in front of him, fastened her seat belt and showed her how to tighten it around her five-year-old body. Jules sat in front of his mother, in the seat by the window. From his backpack he took out a book – one of the thick Harry Potters – and his rubber clown’s head, which he began to rub rhythmically against his forehead. He sucked his thumb hard; he had been waiting to do it for hours. That morning, Yannis had informed Jules he would be allowed to suck his thumb once they got on the hydrofoil but not a minute before. So Jules had been counting the minutes from their apartment to Charles de Gaulle, the plane ride to Athens, the taxi ride to the port at Piraeus, to this moment, this heavenly release on the wondrously named Flying Cat III. Sucking his thumb and riding on the back of a flying cat all the way to Sifnos, better than a broom, better even than a hippogriff or thestral. Yannis knew Jules, at eight, was too old to be sucking his thumb, but since he was the son of the saddest woman in the world, Yannis figured the kid deserved a break, deserved to take whatever joy from wherever he could for as long as the world would allow. He wondered whether Jules’s sucking bothered Julie, whether it was noted in her “Have Refrained from Commenting On” section. She would sometimes watch Jules as he sucked, rubbing that grinning clown’s head hard against his own. Her eyes would narrow as she stared at her son. At his sucking? At the impossibly large head snapped off the strange rubber doll she had bought for him before he was born? Did Jules trouble her? Yannis had no idea.

Jules was such a good boy, maybe the best boy ever. He said the kinds of things that made his father remember curiosity. Jules asked Yannis why humans didn’t have wings to fly like bees or why they couldn’t breathe underwater. Jules thought it would be splendid if stars were connected by a pulley system that children could hold on to and then swing from constellation to constellation. Jules was attentive and generous, rarely short with his little sister, never once jealous of the attention she had drawn away from him, at least in the beginning, before it was taken away from them both. He was patient and quiet, could spend hours alone reading or examining things under the microscope Yannis had bought him for his birthday, demanding nothing from anyone. Julie’s silence and her sadness were accepted by Jules without judgment. Yannis sometimes caught his son’s eyes, worried like beads, caressing his mother, loving her with his gaze but asking for nothing, knowing, maybe instinctively, she had nothing in her to give. His son was an angel, and when he smiled, too rarely, his dimples twinkled like stars in a twilight sky.

Zoé had a small pink backpack precisely the size of her back. She was a tidy little girl, pond brown eyes, sandy blonde hair bobbed and fringed. More a doll than a child. Zipped up inside her backpack she had puzzles and books and bright plastic capsules she collected from the center of chocolate eggs. She had a scrap of blanket she dragged everywhere with her, to school, to parks, to the market, to bed, on flying cats. She sucked her thumb, like her brother, and she rubbed her tatty blanket scrap against her nose. Zoé’s voice carried. She could be quiet for hours and then, suddenly, loudly, she would ask a question or demand attention, unaware of the way her voice rippled her family’s stagnant silence. But now, on the hydrofoil, she was as quiet as her mother. She held her scrap against her nose, her thumb in her mouth, her four other fingers out like a small fan. She would sleep for the three hours it would take to get to Sifnos.

Julie pulled a book out of her purse with a gesture that mirrored her son’s. She was glad Yannis was handling the children, smiling at them, doing what a good parent should do, everything she could not do herself. She pulled her knees close to her chest and ignored everything around her. She tried as hard as she could to ignore Yannis sitting beside her, taking apricots out of a plastic bag, the excruciating way he bit into the fruit and allowed the juice to drip over his lower lip onto his chin, not wiping until a second before it would have been too late. It was maddening, but not enough to say anything about, not enough to break her cocoon of silence. She didn’t have the energy for that, for speech, for chitchat, for tenderness. It was simply too much. She wanted only the comforting parameters of the dumb novel in her hands. No more than that. She hadn’t spoken a word since the morning. Yannis had done everything. He had packed for the kids, for himself, for her. He had made the children laugh as he dressed them. He had checked all the faucets, switched off all the lights, pulled out all the plugs from the sockets. He had called a taxi and taken out their suitcases. He had locked the front door and pressed the button for the elevator. He had checked them in at the airport. He had bought the tickets for this ridiculously named hydrofoil to Sifnos, Flying Cat III. Not I, not II, but III.

Julie could not bring herself to speak. Not a single word. Not even when she had seen him pack that tattered straw hat of hers, the floppy one with the thin red ribbon around its brim.

*  *  *

Julie had been wearing the same hat on the blazing afternoon she boldly – bolder than ever before – placed a Mythos at the tips of Yannis’s long fingers. That was twelve years ago. She was twenty-seven years old then and had decided to go to a place she was certain no other Kuwaiti would be and, if she was especially lucky, no other Arab either. None of the people she had asked had ever heard of Sifnos. They had heard of Santorini, Crete, Rhodes, Mykonos. But not Sifnos, not her secret Sifnos. She wanted out of the trap of Kuwait, the burden of its rights and wrongs. That place – the broken Middle East – often felt foreign to her, an uncomfortable elsewhere. She wanted to have done with everything she felt to be irrevoc­ably beyond her: the desert, the black poison oozing beneath, the white scorching sky, the ominous eyes of judgment and, most of all, her parents. At least for a while. She was sick of the mystery behind her mother’s sadness, her father’s indifference. She was fed up with the guilt her parents made her feel with every loaded sigh, every slow blink of their drained lids.

She was named Ghalia, expensive, because she had come after many miscarriages, stillbirths, early baby deaths. The price paid for her existence may have been her mother Salwa’s emotional balance, her sense of justice and goodness in the world. By the time Ghalia was conscious of them, her parents were utterly detached. To be in the presence of her mother felt like being at the foot of a great Icelandic glacier. She couldn’t ask anything of her; her enormous silence took over every room of their tight house but one. Only Ghalia’s room, with its door firmly shut and locked, her radio, a calming box of noise, always on, provided some reprieve. Ghalia’s father, short and exhausted, offered nothing much to counter his wife’s neglect of their daughter. Rashid was ordinary. He worked at a bank, like many Kuwaitis. Not a swank bank job but a dull one with no chance of advancement. Rashid didn’t care. He wasn’t ambitious. He wasn’t much interested in anything. There was no hidden key to his indifference, no lurking childhood damage or psychological potholes. Rashid drifted and rolled, wanting nothing more sensational than for his days to squeeze through.

In his whole life, Rashid had done only three incongruous things, the first when he was seventeen. After graduating from secondary school, he had decided to move to Paris to learn French. He had stayed for two years and returned fluent in a language that had nothing to do with him. He had studied business administration at university, got his brainless bank job, married Salwa without ever having met her, and tried everything he could to get at least one of her many pregnancies to stick, convinced the babies died, one by one, because he didn’t love his wife. He had never visited France again and never told anyone at the bank he could speak French.

Rashid’s second incongruous act had been to enroll Ghalia in the French School of Kuwait. He had vowed to speak to her only in French, a language Salwa could not understand. This hadn’t done much to lure Salwa back to the land of the living. At the French School, Ghalia, one of the few Kuwaitis there, was christened Julia and nicknamed Julie. Ghalia insisted on being called Julie all the time. Since her mother rarely spoke to her and her parents had little to do with their extended families – Ghalia’s vague army of aunts and uncles, her two sets of grandparents – she could easily forget she was once Ghalia, the expensive one. She slipped into Julie, into a life of milky coffee in the mornings and small, pastel-colored
petits fours glacés
in the afternoons. A charmed French life in her head: Astérix and Tintin,
cahiers
and
stylos
, lavender billowing in the summer rain, homemade yoghurt in small, glass jars. Julie, with long brown hair, eyes as dark as destiny, and a winsome overbite. Julie, not tall, not thin, but hour-glass voluptuous as a teenager and after. Julie in Kuwait with her head in French clouds.