The Night Counter (16 page)

IN ONE OF
his acting classes, Amir had been trained to do improv to get into a new state of mind. Improv worked better with more than one person, but what the hell. “Hey, you ever heard the one about the world’s worst mother?” Amir said aloud to himself. “Yeah, she …” He struggled for a clever line to throw back at himself, but funny wouldn’t come. He was, as usual, sad to see Soraya go. He had grown up in a silent house. Ibrahim and Fatima had only two kids still living at home when he was born, and they were just as quiet as their parents, especially Lena. He had loved—still loved—the sporadic arrivals of Soraya, if only for the commotion, loud clothes, and loud voice she brought with her.

Amir went back to the computer. He knew the envelope with the money would be in front of Fatima’s photo. Before he could open it, he saw what Soraya had added to his e-mail: “She cut off all her hair.” He looked at it for a while and then deleted it. Why worry them? He was about to hit “send” when he realized Lena had not e-mailed him back about visiting. Fatima looked so much more fragile without her hair. He stopped and rewrote what Soraya had written. Then he added a question mark and an exclamation point: “Tayta cut off all her hair?!”

The phone rang. He hesitated on the e-mail one more time and then hit “send.”

He was not expecting Ibrahim on the other line. “Oh, hi, Jiddo,” Amir said, and waited a few seconds until his grandfather thought of the next logical piece of the conversation.

“How you doin’, Son?” Ibrahim asked.

“Good, Jiddo,” Amir answered. “And yourself?”

“Good, Son,” Ibrahim said after a while. “You get my letter?”

“I’m going to use the money to buy her new faraway glasses.”

“I mean that fat envelope,” Ibrahim clarified.

“Right on.” Amir remembered seeing it peeking out behind Soraya’s cash.

“Did you get someone to read it for her?” Ibrahim said.

“Not yet,” Amir said. As he opened it, he saw it was in Arabic. “Maybe you could give her the gist of it over the phone.”

“Maybe,” Ibrahim said.

But Fatima was pretending to sleep. If he pretended to wake her, she’d whine about Soraya into the middle of the night after she got off the phone with Ibrahim, to whom she would not mention Soraya’s visit, at least not the part about her taking off for Mexico.

“So maybe this isn’t a good time,” Ibrahim got in first on the other end. “Maybe it’s better you find someone else to read it.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Amir agreed. He had his own stuff to worry about, and since Fatima had divorced Ibrahim, he didn’t see why Ibrahim should be dragged into the insanity—from the hair chop to the funeral instructions.

“I’ll make sure I find someone ASAP,” Amir said. “Good?”

Ibrahim was too slow thinking up the next line of conversation. The doorbell rang first.

“You take care, Jiddo,” Amir concluded.

“Okay, Son,” Ibrahim said. “You both, too.”

This time it was the messenger with his audition pages. He opened the envelope and looked at the highlighted part. “Jesus Christ,” he groaned. It wasn’t the Omar Sharif biopic.

The messenger shrugged an apology, and Amir watched him leave in a Honda as badly in need of detailing as his own. He went outside to water the garden.

THE MAN AND
woman in black watched Amir as he watered the fig tree.

“Let’s admit we’re bored and follow up on that Prince William at the Mondrian lead we got,” the woman in black said. “You know how much we could get from the
Sun
for those?”

“And you end up feeling dirty again?” the man in black answered. “No, hon. Hey, what if he’s drugging the grandmother to get her to do something? Like a mission. Our contact said the old lady admitted to being high when he drove her home. And she was yakking about imminent death.”

“Our contact’s a soap star,” the female in black pointed out. “He’s a natural drama queen. And you were so grateful for his tip that you didn’t let me take any pictures of the guy from
One Life to Live
that showed up at his door afterward.”

“Next time we’ll get him,” he said. “But for now, we’ve witnessed enough suspicious activity to call the FBI on this house. Then we can go to the Mondrian and make some bank feeling good about ourselves perhaps saving the country.”

“What have we witnessed?” the woman in black demanded to know.

“There’s the freaky, loud friend/relative of theirs that just left,” the man in black offered.

“We all got those,” the woman in black answered.

“And the religious nutcase husband of the daughter in Detroit,” he continued. “It’s missing all the little clues that caused all the big incidents. Remember how we didn’t listen to the guy that told us Britney Spears was on a bender in Vegas, and then she went and got married there. Thousands of dollars down the drain because we ignored something we thought wasn’t really newsworthy.”

“Okay, okay, let’s just call the tip line and get to the Mondrian.” The woman in black sighed. “Ugh! Maybe I should move back to Cleveland. Get a job at Olan Mills Portrait Studio taking pictures of people’s still innocent babies.”

“I’m not going to let that happen to you,” the man in black promised. “If this pans out, and it will, I got a lead from the assistant of a certain supermodel about a falafel restaurant owner in Orange County.”

AS SCHEHERAZADE CAME
down the eucalyptus tree, Amir sprayed both her and the fig tree, but that was not the reason Scheherazade was highly displeased. She knew that Amir had not meant to water her. He was still far too young to see her immortality.

His mother was a different matter. She—Scheherazade, daughter of the Great Wazir and wife of King Shahrayar, reciter of love stories, religious legends, and the poetry of the magnificent Abu Nawas—was not a charlatan playing out people’s fates with devil’s cards and fiberglass balls. It was bad enough that the boy Zade had named his café after her, but now a cheap fortune-teller? Did no Abdullah respect her memory? She
climbed through the window to enumerate her grievances to Fatima, but the old lady was curled up in a way that begged for sleep as a distraction from life’s agonies.

“Go back home where you are loved and come back to America tomorrow,” Fatima mumbled in her sleep. Scheherazade did miss her homeland. That was true. But loved? She and her 1001 nights were better remembered in Hollywood. In the Middle East, her stories were no longer the fabric of women’s gatherings, as they had been when they used to sew, read each other’s fortunes in coffee cups, and tell her stories of caliphs, beggars, and wild fools.

She took Fatima’s hearing aid and put it in the underwear drawer with her other precious things. Then she saw her faraway glasses. She picked them up. Without them, Fatima would be annoyed in the morning, much the way Soraya had left her annoyed. She was pleased with this action, only momentarily jolted from it when she saw the strands of purple hair shimmering in the drawer. So lovely; she sighed. She put the glasses atop them and closed the drawer.

She checked her appearance in her silver gilded compact, as she always did before retiring, and found a place to sleep in the eucalyptus tree. She threw a silk veil over her hair to keep it from being messed up during the night. Fatima had sacrificed her beauty in cutting off her crown. But beauty was nothing next to a child’s life. Scheherazade had outlived her own by centuries. She had outlived everyone she had ever loved. All that was left was her name.

THE NEXT AFTERNOON
, Fatima sat in an uncomfortable high-backed chrome chair in Amir’s chrome kitchen, her nearby glasses almost falling off her nose as she formed a paste of ground sirloin and bulgur wheat into fist-size balls. It was the thirtieth kibbe Fatima had made this morning. She took each meat and wheat ball and drilled into it with her index finger, turning the ball around until she formed a perfect hollow oval. She then filled each oval with spiced ground beef and dipped her fingertips in ice water before sealing the oval.

The television played highlights from the previous night’s baseball games. The Detroit Tigers were a big strikeout this season. How could they get swept by the Twins, a team playing under a plastic bag on spongy cement? She was glad she would not be there for the Tigers’ next game.

The TV was on exceptionally loud because Fatima hadn’t known to look for her faraway glasses this morning in her underwear drawer, and without them she couldn’t find her hearing aid. Her only sense in full working order today was smell, and the stale aroma of Scheherazade’s cigarette filled the house. She pushed her bifocals back up her nose; it was hard to keep them on her head without the volume of her hair.

Fatima’s purple spikes had evolved into a psychedelic Afro after a night of tossing and turning over the house in Lebanon, Amir’s marriage, and, almost as important, the precise method of her impending death, which Soraya’s untimely visit had prevented her from asking Scheherazade about. Soraya’s questioning laugh was still grating in her head, a troubled reminder of yet another child to whom she could not leave the home in
Deir Zeitoon. Home was a concept Amir’s mother had been running from since he was born.

Fatima covered the completed kibbes with a white towel so that they would not dry out. Before the engagement dinner tomorrow with Tiffany from the Iranian Jew’s store, she would deep-fry the balls in corn oil, just as Marwan had taught her to do when she first came to America, a place where olive oil was a hard-to-find luxury, even when he started making more than thirty dollars a week. Her troubles without olive oil in the early days of her marriages would be a story she could tell Scheherazade tonight, a story about her life with her husbands. That would more than entitle her to an answer to her own question.

The doorbell rang when Fatima was on her thirty-third kibbe. She went to move her hair from over her ears, as she always did when she doubted her hearing. But her hair was not there. The doorbell rang again before she could find her cane.

She could not make out the time on the chrome clock, but early or late, the doorbell hardly ever rang for good reasons. No one in America just stopped by to say hello except for Millie “popping over for a cup of joe.” But Millie was gone. Perhaps it was the prospective bride Tiffany. It wasn’t tomorrow yet, but Tiffany was American. Americans with their fear of tardiness. Fatima washed her hands and took off her bifocals, putting them next to Amir’s computer, before using her cane to feel her way to the door.

“Fatima Abdullah?” said a woman in a severe blue suit. Even through blurred vision, Fatima had never seen anyone in Los Angeles dress so seriously, not even at Rabia Hoss’s memorial service last month in Beverly Hills, and she was from one of the best families in Lebanon. In fact, Rabia’s granddaughters had looked like they were going dancing in their black dresses afterward, shame on them.

If Fatima had had on her faraway glasses, she would have known that the reason the blurry woman’s head kept bobbing up and down was that she was trying not to stare at Fatima’s purple orb.

“I’m Sherri Hazad,” the woman said, and showed her FBI badge.

It didn’t occur to Fatima that the badge was something to read. “I know I look terrible, but you can put that thing away,” she said, assuming the badge was Scheherazade’s gilded silver compact. “I’ve seen enough.”

“As long as you saw it, ma’am,” Sherri Hazad said, and put the badge away. “Can I talk with you for a few minutes?”

Scheherazade had the same black hair as usual, but perhaps immortality allowed her to transform into many human styles. “Why are you here so early—and why are you dressed that way?” Fatima asked.

“Regulations, ma’am,” Sherri Hazad said.

“Why didn’t you just come in through the window?”

“Regulations, ma’am,” Sherri Hazad repeated.

Fatima shrugged and offered her arm. “
Yallah
, let’s go. I have to get back to work.” The agent hesitated and then turned right. “You act like you’ve never been here before,” Fatima chided. She pointed straight ahead, and Sherri Hazad, with Fatima’s nudging, guided her into the kitchen and to her chair in front of the bowl of raw meat and bulgur wheat. Fatima motioned to Sherri Hazad to take a seat opposite her.

“Why are you speaking English today?” Fatima demanded.

“I’ve been trained in Arabic, if you prefer,” Sherri Hazad said in Arabic that lacked several expected letters and sounds, Arabic loud enough to drown out the Tigers on TV “My grandfather was Lebanese.”

“Everyone knows that maybe he was Persian or from Damascus or Baghdad or Samarqand. There’s not a drop of Lebanese in you.” But she decided to allow this imitation of Americans. After all, Scheherazade had endured Soraya’s imitation of her. “Amuse yourself, but we also have to be serious. Remember, we only have four days to settle the house in Lebanon.”

“The house in Lebanon?” Sherri Hazad shouted over the TV “Four days?”

“Do you mean I’m going to be incapacitated before then?” Fatima asked.

“What did you say?” Sherri Hazad said. She lowered the volume on the television.

In the absence of the TV noise, Scheherazade sounded even odder.
“Wash your hands so you can help me,” Fatima said. She picked up the thirty-third ball again and began drilling.

“What’s that smell?” Sherri Hazad said as she dried her hands and sniffed the air.

“Either it’s that special cigarette smoke or Amir’s soap,” Fatima said. “He paid ten dollars for soap. Neither of my husbands could afford olive oil when they came here.”

“So only recently he’s acquired the ability to pay ten dollars for, um, soap?” Sherri Hazad asked.

“Do we look like the Rockefellers?” Fatima sighed. “But lately he does care more about money. Always talking about the handsome neighbor boy and how he’d do anything to have everything he has.”

Fatima handed Sherri Hazad a ball of kibbe. But Sherri Hazad, as would have been clear to anyone who hadn’t just misplaced her nearby glasses, was no kibbe maker.

“Huh, I’ve eaten kibbe a couple of times,” Sherri Hazad said. “There is a great Lebanese restaurant in Glendale.”

“It’s Armenian,” Fatima corrected. “But so many of them came to live with us after the Turkish massacres that they’re practically Arabs now. Two of them—sisters, one of whom never found her children—rented a room from Mama for a while in the house in Deir Zeitoon. Then the sisters moved to Beirut, where their brother had opened a watch repair shop. And then—”

“Before we move on to more relevant matters,” Sherri Hazad interrupted, “I must tell you, ma’am, that you do not have to speak to me.”

“Fine, you do not want to hear a story of Deir Zeitoon. That is okay. I’ve thought about it, and talking about my children—and Ibrahim—is the best thing I can do for their sake,” Fatima conceded. “I know Deir Zeitoon is a safe house for everyone but Nadia, but still I think Amir would be the best one to go there.”

“A safe house, ma’am?” Sherri Hazad inquired.

“Don’t keep rolling the kibbe like that,” Fatima admonished. “You’re going to get the meat tough.”

“I’m not much of a cook, ma’am,” Sherri Hazad admitted.

“Stop ma’aming me,
ya sitti
, I know you’re having fun being American today, but Americans are not as uptight as you’re making them seem.”

Sherri Hazad took the ball of kibbe she had handed her. Fatima picked up another ball and deftly tunneled into it.

“Even without my glasses, I got kibbe fingers,” Fatima said as Sherri Hazad tried to keep up with her graceful speed with the meat and wheat. “Long fingers. Mama always said that kibbe fingers are an asset that will get you a good husband.”

Sherri Hazad’s finger bore right through the other end of the kibbe ball. “Oops,” the agent said, and held it up close enough for Fatima to see right through the tunnel to the blue suit. Fatima took the kibbe from her and molded it back together.

“But I do know how to roll grape leaves,” Sherri Hazad offered.

“Ah, so can anyone who has got a drop of blood from Iran to Greece,” Fatima said, and handed Sherri Hazad another kibbe ball. “My daughters make them every time someone comes to dinner because they don’t know nothing else. But they married well without kibbe fingers. To tell you the truth, I don’t think kibbe fingers are why either of my husbands married me. Ibrahim wasn’t much of an eater, especially after … Well … Marwan would eat anything and say it was
zaki
, delicious, one of the few words he said in Arabic. Marwan was so easy to please. He’d had a childhood of peddling with his father. For weeks they would live off of baked beans, which, by the way, come out of a can and you don’t bake them. He told me that sometimes his father’s mustache would turn white with snow and ice but they would keep going. He was peddling in Massotwoshits when his father died of the TB.”

“Yes, madam, my great-grandfather was a peddler, too,” Sherri Hazad chimed in. “Not in Massachusetts. In upstate New York. He told my grandfather how he would go with his cart around his neck from door to door selling soap, sponges, and even toilet brushes.”

Fatima glared at the blur of Sherri Hazad’s face. “I told you this story about Marwan and his father before, didn’t I?” Fatima asked, suspicious.
“So is this how you get your stories? Taking other people’s history and turning it into your tall tales?”

“It’s my job to get to the truth, madam, not make up lies,” Sherri Hazad said, and took her kibbe drilling much slower this time. “But I got a lot of stories my grandfather told me. I adored him. I used to love playing with his mustache.”

“Millie used to say that Marwan’s and Ibrahim’s mustaches made them mysterious,” Fatima recalled. “She said they were dream ships with their accents and dark eyelashes. To me, they were husbands, not mysteries.”

Sherri Hazad proudly held up her first successful kibbe. “Look, madam,” she said, beaming.

But Fatima was lost in thought on her thirty-fifth kibbe. “I didn’t like making love with Marwan because he smelled unfamiliar as long as I knew him, kind of like what we were smoking yesterday does,” she said. Sherri Hazad dropped her kibbe.

Fatima reached for her hand. “
Ya Allah
, I can’t imagine having such discussions with anyone but you, although Millie used to have them with me, but I never said anything back.”

Sherri Hazad’s hand pulled away. She picked up her kibbe and went to the sink to wash her hands. “Don’t use the expensive soap,” Fatima warned. “It’s only for special occasions.” It was more than time, Fatima decided, to tell Scheherazade all the things she could possibly ever wish to know about her husbands in exchange for the information she wanted about her death. Scheherazade would have no excuses then.
Inshallah
, things would work out with Tiffany tonight, and she would be able to leave Amir and his new bride the house. Then she could relax in her remaining days, maybe even visit one of her children. But she wanted to know how her death would be, because if she was to be incapacitated at some point, she wanted to be home with Amir by then, where she would feel comfortable dying. For that, it would be worth revealing her deepest secrets.

“With Ibrahim it felt different. When he touched my skin, even by accident, it prickled up.” Fatima blushed. “For sixty years, which Millie would have said was impossible. But it’s true. But I never would have told him that, especially since he married me just to be nice.”

Sherri Hazad scrubbed her hands harder. “I should be honest and say that what I really want to talk about is Amir Abdullah. Really. And that’s all.”

“But I deserve to be informed,” Fatima said. “How will I die?”

“Excuse me?”

“What more do you want me to tell you?” Fatima asked.

“Any information about Amir Abdullah,” Sherri Hazad said. “Only.”

“Ah, easy stories. Despite everything he does, he is still one of my favorite topics. Did you know Amir has kibbe fingers, too?” Fatima bragged. “He makes perfect kibbe. Should I let you in on a secret?”

“That’s why I’m here,” Sherri Hazad said. She took out her notebook.

“A dash of cardamom in the filling.” Fatima winked. “That’s the secret to my kibbe. I’ve never revealed that to anyone except Amir. He was the only child who asked for the secret. Now you,
ya oukhti
, have it for immortality.”

“Okay,” Sherri Hazad said. “Thank you for that information. Now …”

“He could have been a chef in one of your courts,” Fatima bragged.

“Oh, I don’t doubt it,” Sherri Hazad agreed. “Courthouse food is not that good. How long has he been pursuing acting?”

“That’s just a game, I told you,” said Fatima. She hoped she had clarified this acting hobby once and for all. She did not want tales told by Scheherazade one day centuries from now that would call her grandson a member of such a low-class profession.