40

Sometimes foreigners get hurt in Beirut.

I’ve given the hotel clerk twenty dollars to let me use the computer in the back office and he has left me alone with the warning that my time will be up in an hour. It is in the third set of Simone’s articles that I find the veteran who, as it turns out, wasn’t a veteran at all. He wasn’t a journalist, either, though he wasn’t far off.

He was a photographer who’d been injured in a car bomb blast.

In the photo of the accident, Ryan Russo is on a stretcher, being pushed into an ambulance on the streets of West Beirut. His face is mostly covered by an outstretched arm, but his eyes are wide open and glaring at whoever is behind the camera. The bomb, said the article, had exploded from a parked car that Russo had just walked past.

I skim past the warning of the danger of working in a foreign country until I get to the background information on Russo himself. His family had run a chain of small-town papers in California, and he’d gone to journalism school at Stanford. But photojournalism was his passion. He was working for his family’s paper when he’d heard one of his photography idols had been killed in Beirut. The article said he was hoping to write a book about his mentor’s work and death in Lebanon. He was a young man, yearning for adventure and was armed with a camera. He had fancied himself a man of the world, said his Beirut landlord. A bit of a daredevil who sometimes hired a “fixer” to help him navigate the city both geographically and politically, but had taken to going off on his own. The landlord suggested this was something of a mistake. According to the report, the blast caused severe burns to Russo’s neck, arm, and torso. He’d also fractured a rib and broken his collarbone. After some searching, I find that Russo took photos for the family business for about a decade after returning from Lebanon.

The chain was sold and Ryan Russo dropped off the face of the earth.

“That’s him,” says Dania Nasri, after I knock on her door a second time. We’re sitting in her living room and she is looking at the photo on my phone. It is a head shot taken before Beirut. Russo is looking directly at the camera, unsmiling. But even in this photograph his charisma shines through.

“You’re sure?”

She nods slowly, eyes skimming over the article. “But I don’t understand. It says right here that he’d been to Lebanon himself and was in an attack. He never said that when he came to see me—and I spent the whole afternoon talking to him.” She scrolls back up to the top of the page, looking at the date. “He was in Beirut the same time your mother was there. You don’t think that’s a coincidence, do you?”

And then he saw her picture in the paper, came looking for her, and when she heard about it she abandoned her family and never looked back?

“No,” I tell her. “I don’t.”

Having five granddaughters must have tuned her to the changes in female posture. Or maybe it’s the sudden fear that I’m projecting. She places a hand over mine. “Are you in trouble, Nora?”

“My mother,” I say, watching her carefully. “You said she wasn’t political in Montreal when you met her. Was she political in Lebanon? Could she have been in some kind of trouble?”

She smiles and pats my hand. “No, I don’t think so.”

It hurts when someone you trust lies to your face. Even elegant women who love their granddaughters aren’t exempt. Maybe that’s what makes me hold on to her hand, a little tighter than necessary. I squeeze, not enough to cause pain, but enough for her to know I’m not letting go. Her fingers feel brittle under my grip. She’s wearing a diamond engagement band along with her wedding ring. The diamond cuts into my skin, but I barely feel it. I’m so tired that I’m close to being numb. “Tell me the truth.”

Dania is looking at me, shocked. She tries to move her hand away, but I don’t let her. “You don’t want to know the truth.”

“Isn’t that for me to decide? I need to know.” I’ve come too far now. I sense her weakening, so I loosen my grip.

She pulls her hand from mine and goes to the window. “I heard from a mutual friend who knew your mother’s brother from Lebanon . . . She lived on the outskirts of the Sabra refugee camp with some relatives who took her in after her brother was shot in the head. He had refused to provide ID at a checkpoint. He’d joined a Marxist group that fought for Palestine. They were a low-key bunch, but some were involved in petty acts of disturbance. Kidnappings, robberies. This friend said that Sabrina had hung around them for a while after her brother died, his friends were all she had left of him. It could have been something, or nothing. That’s all I know.” But I can see the wheels still churning in her brain.

There’s something she’s still not saying. I wait quietly for her to continue. To realize that she can’t fool me.

She turns away from the window and looks at me. I wish at this moment I looked like my mother because maybe it would spark something in this woman. Maybe make her tell me what she’s too afraid to say.

I think, at the end of it, it’s my stubbornness that wins out.

She sighs heavily. “Your mother lived alone in Montreal. Her aunt who sponsored her . . . she didn’t live with her. Never really spoke about her. I just couldn’t figure out how Sabrina could afford it all. I always got the sense that she was holding something back. I liked her, loved her at times, even. But I couldn’t trust her. It was like she always kept something hidden. You know what her favorite book was? Catch-22. She saw herself not as a part of a revolutionary people. In all the time I knew her, there was no struggle in her. She saw herself as a person sick of the world who gets in a rowboat and paddles away. She could be . . . she could be cold. Not always, but every now and then I would see a little glimmer of it. When she didn’t want to talk about her new baby, your sister, I felt that coldness again.”

I backtrack. I don’t want to think about how my mother could look at Lorelei and feel anything other than love. If I do I’ll have to confront the fact that, to make up for it, I spent my childhood looking at my sister with nothing but love. Even when it hurt so much I could barely speak to her. “She never said how she supported herself?”

“I asked a few times, but she would just change the subject. She was an expert at avoiding conversations she didn’t want to have.”

A short silence follows. Then something in her breaks. “I always thought there was a man involved, to be honest. We would talk about boyfriends, of course, but she was very cynical. She said there’d been someone, back in Beirut, but she’d seen another side to him. She said he’d just been using her. Something about the way she said it frightened me, I suppose. She was not a forgiving person.”

Dania Nasri turns away from me. She looks like she’s aged ten years since we began this conversation. I guess that’s the effect I have on people.

“Thanks for your time,” I say, getting up so that I can put some distance between us. I pause for a moment at the entrance to the room. “How can you remember all of this?”

She hesitates. Looks through me. “My family, when they left Jaffa in Palestine it was supposed to be for a few days. Maybe a month. We had orange groves there, the best oranges in the whole world came from our land. There was an olive grove, too. We had family in Lebanon whom we visited many times in the past, so it was just like another family holiday. And then . . . and then we weren’t allowed back. Other people lived in our house. As the years went past, my mother and father used to talk about the house, until they couldn’t remember it properly anymore. Then they would argue about what had been on the shelves and the color of this rug or that curtain. Eventually my mother threw the house keys away because what was the point of keeping them anymore? That part of our history was lost to us, and we will never get it back.”

She goes to a bookshelf filled with large albums. Her fingers skip over them and land on one. She opens it up and shows me a certain page. It is the article that I first showed her, the one with the photo of my mother at the wedding. “Everything about us goes into one of these,” she explains. “My granddaughters, they think I’m silly for doing this, but it’s our history, you know?”

“They’ll always know what color the curtains are.”

“No, they can forget the curtains, but nobody will throw away any more keys to who we are. The keys are more important. They can look in here if they want to find one. I don’t want my family to lose another memory.” She pauses here and something like regret crosses her face. It’s the first time I’ve seen her lose her composure. “Like, for example, one of a close friend who has left her family shortly after a conversation with you. I’ve replayed that phone call in my mind over and over for years and thought about what I said to that man who came to our house. I know I had something to do with her leaving, you understand? I just didn’t know what. At the time I was pregnant and preoccupied, but I never forgot and I’ve thought about it often. I even wrote it down, but destroyed the note afterward. It was so silly of me, giving out her information! When I came to America, I wanted a new life, too. I didn’t want to live in fear and suspicion. You have no idea what that does to a person after a while.”

Her voice turns soft. Without intending to, I find that I’ve leaned in to hear her. She smiles the saddest smile I think I’ve ever seen.

“That time in college with your mother was the freest I’ve ever been. We would spend nights studying and giggling like we were schoolgirls. When she had something crazy to say, something outrageous, she would grab whatever was handy and hold it up to her ear. ‘Who’s listening?’—and then she’d laugh with her whole body, from deep inside her belly. In those moments, I loved her. She was my best friend back then. When she left your father, she left me, too.”

We don’t shake hands at the door because we’ve come too far for that. She moves in for a hug, but I step back to avoid any attempt at an embrace. I haven’t forgotten what happened to the last person I put my arms around. I have no desire to see anyone else lying broken in a hospital room.

“I didn’t know your father died when you were a child. I’m so sorry for you and your sister. For whatever role I played in your mother leaving you.” Dania Nasri reaches into her pocket and hands me something that she has been hiding there. It is an old, rusty house key from the previous century, warmed from her palm.

“I thought you said your mother threw her keys away.”

She shakes her head. “This is your mother’s key. We got drunk one night in her room off absinthe and cheap wine, and she showed it to me. Then she laughed and threw it out the window. I saw it on the ground when I left, so I picked it up. I meant to keep it for her if she was ever ready to have it back. She never brought it up again. I’ve been waiting for some kind of sign of what I should do with it but now you’re here and you know everything I know about your mother. So it’s only right you should have this, too.”

She looks at me expectantly, waiting for something. Understanding. Forgiveness, maybe. She may even settle for acknowledgment, but she’ll have to do without it because I leave without another word to her, feeling like I’m being watched. Well, that’s nothing new. Watched. Hunted. Just like my cold, distant mother, who I guess I really am like.

My mother’s old friend was wrong. I do know what it’s like to live with fear and suspicion hanging over my head. That it’s an inherited trait makes a kind of sense. My mother was a migrant, a refugee—one of the many. A sad song that would be played on repeat for years to come. A broken record that left a trail of despair that would see the migration from country to country, shore to shore. And the trail would keep moving, along with the bodies. As changeable as the political arguments for and against intervention, keeping in mind the protection of various economic interests in the region.

As fluid as the world’s capacity to give a fuck.