Every time a ball bounced that hadn’t been kicked by Naji, Shafiq felt it. During the dead pauses at dinner when Naji would have come up with some easy joke, Shafiq knew it. Searching the newspaper as though there might be a hint about his ideological brother buried in the headlines of the day, Shafiq understood that this terrible, invisible pressure of absence was real.
And then the cries started next door. As though Shafiq was destined to be in rhythm with Omar, in mirth but also in painful, bruised-purple sorrow.
“It’s Hajji Abdullah,” said Reema, who also had a best friend on the other side of that wall.
Shafiq wanted to run over, but his father stopped him with that commanding authority on the Arab way. “You give them privacy the first night. There will be a right time to pay respects. Not now.”
Shafiq didn’t even try to block out the crying. He heard Salwa’s open wailing, but also Omar’s sobs. In his own head, Shafiq joined the mourning.
The death of the old man.
The loss of the young man.
Everyone else left bereft.
He wanted to punch Omar’s shoulder, just to feel that energetic life they shared. There may never be anything to laugh about again, Shafiq thought, but at least they could be sad together.
As the night wore on, he heard invocations to Allah echo through the wall. Omar’s father was called “Hajji” because he had been to Mecca. That would send him to heaven. Shafiq might not believe in blue china or the jinn, but he needed a little comfort now, and he took it where he could.
The body was being prepared for burial. “What do they do?” Shafiq whispered to his father.
“They lay him so his head points to Mecca,” Roobain said solemnly. “They wrap him in a white sheet.”
Shafiq wished he could write Omar a letter, like the one he had received during the riots, but he didn’t have the book of poetry. Which was okay, because Hajji Abdullah loved it so much, and he was going to need that wisdom on his way to the other world.
The next day, Reema broke out of her cloud of tribal superstition to become his mother again. “I’ll be there every day to help when the Imam comes,” she said.
“Doing what?” he asked.
She just shook her head. Like the answer was anything—everything—but still not enough.
There were scores of men gathered around the funeral procession as it made its way through the streets. The plain wooden casket was all that remained, a box holding a corpse headed down into the ground. Shafiq made his way over to Omar, restraining the urge to run for a hug. Tears streamed from Omar’s eyes and that was a moment Shafiq could never undo—those minutes, right there in the daylight, surrounded by men, wearing a black suit and a stiff shirt, feeling his friend’s face go wet with tears and knowing there was no way to stop them. You could say “passing” or “end” or even “going to heaven” but from here it was all just death, so over, beyond repair, way beyond hope.
“My brother,” Shafiq said quietly. Omar’s frown twisted into a full cry. Shafiq pressed his shoulder forward, so Omar could lean on it, and when he pulled away, the shirt was wet.
Their eyes held one last contact before Omar left to catch up with his brother Anwar at the front of a line of uncles and cousins and other neighbors and friends and people just following their religious compulsion to mourn the dead.
Men of every faith joined their voices to proclaim Allah’s Holiness, Greatness, Compassion and Mercy. The prayers mingled like wildflowers—no pattern, no plan, still beautiful.
The air around them was silent. Shafiq was glad that all activity stopped at each café they passed. Muslims, Christians, Jews—all quietly stood up out of respect for the dead. Just like they had during the procession for the king. In the end, Shafiq thought, everyone is important, the founding monarch and the school janitor.
Waiting outside the Mosque, Shafiq already missed the times he and Omar read poetry to the old man. Behind that sadness was his brother Naji and his sister Marcelle and the wars and riots and bullies and hurts that just nicked at life, leaving behind little scars that never went away until the smooth, happy times were all scored with reminders of pain.
He joined the crowd again after the men came out carrying the plain wooden coffin to the graveyard. There, Shafiq watched from a distance as Hajji Abdullah, wrapped in a stark, white shroud, was laid directly into the ground facing Mecca.
For three days following the funeral, the living room in the Abd El Hamid home was transformed into a reception area where visitors streamed in to pay respects. Shafiq and his family joined in bowing their heads and hearing the prayers of the mullah. Roobain, who had been to the funerals of other Muslim friends and associates, had explained it all: the special sura they recited from the Koran, the way to bow your head, the chance to reach for the hands of the family. “But they may not respond and you shouldn’t expect them to,” he’d said. “Sometimes solidarity is louder in silence.”
Reema proved that. Her head covered with a veil, she got up and went to the kitchen, where she stayed for sixteen hours. And returned the next day for longer. And the next. No salt or blue china. Just making coffee and cooking meat and chopping vegetables and baking bread and cleaning, cleaning and scrubbing and washing the house so that Salwa, all she had to do was cry.
Sometimes solidarity came in silence. And sometimes in shaking rice in a pan to get all the little pebbles out. Shake, shake, a sound like a rattle, the pebbles separate and the rice is clean.
Shafiq thought of Salwa saving his life when his mother’s milk ran dry. She was a widow now, but like Reema, he would never desert her.
“I miss him,” Shafiq said a week later.
Omar looked away and Shafiq worried that it had been a mistake to raise the subject. But soon his friend looked back again. “There’s something I wanted to show you,” he said.
Usually so blustery and carefree, Omar was extra careful opening the copy of A Tear and a Smile. The reverence Hajji Abdullah had taught them to have for the book had only intensified with his death.
“He loved the poetry, rahmette Allah a’lay,” Shafiq said, blessing Hajji Abdullah by invoking God’s mercy.
“It means so much,” Omar said, turning the pages as though this paperback were an original edition instead of the copy sold from Baghdad to Beirut. “Do you want to hear?”
Shafiq hardly had to answer. They were close again, and it was more refreshing than any philosophy, or maybe it was the only philosophy Shafiq could really believe in.
“Chapter Twenty: The City of the Dead,” Omar recited. The verse described a funeral, complete with a wooden casket and a dog “with heartbreaking eyes.”
Shafiq wondered whether Hajji Abdullah could see them. In a way, he hoped so. The old man would be comforted by the words. Maybe more than that, by the boys carrying on the tradition.
“Oh Lord, where is the haven of all the people?” Omar read. “I looked toward the clouds, mingled with the sun’s longest and most beautiful golden rays. And I heard a voice within me saying, ‘Over there!’”
For a few silent seconds they absorbed the verse.
And then Shafiq spoke. “Naji’s not really in Lebanon.” Omar listened. “Communism. He’s underground.”
“You should have told me…”
“Why? I didn’t want you to have more trouble.”
“We already have heaps of trouble. What’s a little more? We should sell it.”
“You could.” Shafiq felt a smile forming.
“Only if you back me up,” Omar prompted.
“Yeah, then we’ll get more trouble.”
“So, we’ll corner the market.”
“Be richer than kings.”