A few blocks and ten minutes away, he had four slices of hot pizza, in quick succession, each the size of a quarter of a large pie; each a gorgeous, greasy, cheesy, saucy mess that lived up to every fantasy he had ever had of an American pizza. She had marinara on her chin and a drop on her white dress.
He had hesitated in front of the grimy, shockingly red-and-yellow pizza shop. It was she who had joyfully, in her cocktail dress, dragged him in. Now they sat on counter stools while she sang along to the music.
A dusty nineties album. A bright orange light hung over the smudged counter of enormous, glowing pizzas. On the walls, large vintage posters advertising Naples; a motley display of black-and-white photographs of famous people who had dined there, whom Hadi did not know; banknotes from countries he had never heard of.
He did recognize the songs. The Backstreet Boys had performed the soundtrack of his youth.
“I had such a crush on Nick,” Sama said. “I wanted to be one of the Spice Girls.”
“Which one?” Hadi asked, hardly daring to think Emma, who had adorned his bedroom wall.
“Emma, of course.”
Sama laughed.
“The one who looked the least like the black-haired, scrawny Syrian girl I was!”
He tried to imagine her, black-haired and scrawny, in Syria, walking past him on a Damascene sidewalk, on a Saturday. He couldn’t. Just as he couldn’t, now, believe that these songs, playing here and now in a Cambridge pizza shop, had ever played in Syria. That it was possible for songs to exist, simultaneously, for different people in different places. People leading vastly different lives at the same time, eating pizza, singing the same songs…
The lines were corny, and he realized he’d had them all wrong, laughably wrong, then. Look at him now. Look at where he was.
He was stuffed. The feeling was foreign and welcome. Yes, Syria was far away. In the lull between two songs, heavy with dough and cheese, they slumped onto their seats.
“So, why birds?”
“My dissertation?”
Hadi nodded. He saw her lashes flit and a light flicker on.
“I saw a red knot for the first time when I came to the US. I don’t think they exist in our part of the world. The first autumn, a whole skyful of them on their way to Florida. Some people call them sandpipers. They’re tiny birds, so tiny one could fit in the palm of your hand. But every year they travel from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego in Argentina, then back.”
“Why?”
“Warmer climates, for one thing. Food, but also… it’s a mystery. There are nearer destinations, and this journey of theirs… Nine thousand miles one way, Hadi! They cross two continents, literally from one end of the earth to the other. If you saw how small they are… It’s spectacular.”
“Spectacular,” he echoed, though it sounded more like a question. He still did not understand. She fretted with her napkin.
“It’s just wonderful, how free they are, how far they will go to find home…”
They were quiet, but after a while she added:
“It’s endangered now, the bird.”
“Why?”
“Humans. We’re destroying the shorelines where they stop to rest, hunting the crabs they eat. These birds have been around tens of thousands of years. Now, because of us…”
“It’s a sad story,” he said.
“I hope it isn’t. We can still reverse things.”
She looked out the frosted glass.
“I’d like to follow them one day, go on that journey to Tierra del Fuego… You know, for research.”
The square was deserted, save for a homeless man. A heap of thick, coarse blankets that from here looked purple, mauve, not gray. She changed the subject:
“He’s always there, that man out there. Even when it snows,” she said. “His name is Theo.”
Hadi asked, “How do you know that?”
“I asked him.”
They talked while the songs played. The album looped. In the lulls, they shared an easy quiet. The third time around, he asked about her home in Damascus.
“Well, it’s a yellow house.”
A pale, custardy yellow that covered the building’s facade. The interior was powder blue, “like some apartments in Paris.” He said he had never been. “Me neither,” she laughed, “but I will.”
She described three arched windows that looked onto the balcony on which her parents had their coffee every morning. Her mama boiled it twice, like the Turks do, until a sliver of foam formed on its surface. Meanwhile, her baba shaved and listened to Fairuz on his transistor radio. She told him how they then sat, every day, he on the left, she on the right. Coffee, his cigarette, the rakweh on the floor between them. Its heat had discolored only that tile over the years.
She asked about his home, but he said, “Another night.” He didn’t want to leave hers yet, warmer, sunnier. His home was cold and drafty, dark because the windows were covered with cardboard and newspapers. The shabiha had smashed the glass and blasted the door open his last night in that house.
He had known they were coming—they already had for Ghaith, and Omar had disappeared—but not when. If he had… that last night smelled of beans and rice; the toppled pot of fasoulia. The floor and walls were splattered bloodred with trickling tomato sauce.
What an idiot he had been. And what for? What for? Mama had gasped and muted her wails with her hands. He had promised her No more, after Far’ Falastin. Khalas, Hadi! He would stay home and mind his own business and help Baba with the harvest. And he had, but then, last week, carrying four crates of apples to the back of Abu Yussef’s store, he had seen the napalm, the petrol, the wicks, the glass bottles…
There had been no time to apologize to her. The first bombs had begun to rain, and they all ran to the shelter. The following morning, all were too raw and hoarse to speak, and that night, the shabiha had come and Mama had lied.
She had lied, and they had slapped her while he crouched under the sink in a kitchen cabinet, arms wrapped around his knees. Those had shaken so hard that once or twice they knocked the pine cupboard doors. He had frozen, but with so much shouting on the other side, no one had heard.
He had heard every word. His mother, a sharmouta! Ahbeh! Khiryeh! His woolen collar stuffed in his mouth, eyes shut, his toe touching a bottle of rubbing alcohol. Sometimes he thinks he should have drunk it.
“What are your parents like?”
They had smashed his baba’s glasses and knocked away his cane, so the old man had stood, frozen, in a fog pierced by his wife’s screams, swearing to Allah—her shrieks reaching the sky—that her son was not there.
The men had beat her and left. And Hadi had crouched. Through it all, Hadi had crouched.
Never again.
He had fallen out of the cupboard, onto the tiles, sprawled, legs jelly. Baba had pulled him up.
Hadi still didn’t know how he did it. Kays Deeb had stood his son up. That same night, Hadi Deeb had walked lead-footed out of that house.
“Tell me about Syria then. What’s it like now? Really? My parents never tell me much, and I’ve been gone so long.”
But he didn’t want to answer that either. He already knew, from the too-limpid, too-wide eyes looking at him, that he shouldn’t.
Sama reminisced:
“There used to be an ice-cream cart on the corner of our street. Abu Fuad Khooja made the creamiest ashta…”
He couldn’t. He couldn’t tell her Damascus, now, was broken and cold, covered with dust and caking pools of blood. He couldn’t let her see the city, naked and battered, with its barren store shelves, barren faces queuing for bread, for water, for gas. Its gassings, gas masks. Checkpoints, on corners where the ice-cream carts used to be. Piles of blue, pink, white trash bags, willfully ignored by all but the most desperately starved, and the cats. The feral cats who clawed them open and left trails of rotting bones.
That was what it was like, Damascus. He couldn’t let her see it. She was waiting for an answer. He looked out instead. The strip of sky he could see was starless, but the blue was deep. Not navy, but slightly jewel-toned. It seemed to move, expand as he had never seen it do in Syria. Yet it was the same sky.
“Do you miss it?” she asked, bringing him back, trying to understand his silence.
He looked at her.
“Do you?”
Neither answered.
They did not notice the music stop. They did not look away from each other until they heard the poor college boy stacking chairs and stools around them. Taking their cue, they layered up. Not enough. At the door, they were momentarily slapped in place by a gust of cold.
She let out a squeak and huddled into him. Apples and vanilla again. They scurried across the square to the station, past her homeless friend, snoring gloriously. Down the escalator. She bought him his first CharlieTicket. It lives today in a drawer, book, pocket somewhere in Boston.
Four days later, Hadi returned to Harvard Square, retracing the journey he and Mr. Jeffries had made by car to the gala fundraiser. He walked, and it was a different journey, or perhaps he was a different person. The directions he had carefully written down felt like a treasure map, rustling solemnly, thrillingly in his gloves.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, was still a land riddled with strangeness, one that turned hostile at dusk, when it was cloaked in a certain, particularly mean shade of blue. That alien color all immigrants know, a thick, shocking blue that outlined and isolated every object, amplifying one’s sense of separateness. It haunted Hadi, and would for years, probably forever. But that had been in the evening, and now it was ten in the morning.
It was past eleven, and the sky was enchantingly sky blue, the jet lag had passed, and he was on his first solo expedition and felt brave and daring.
Now, the strangeness was delicious, intoxicating. He had a borrowed phone, a borrowed coat, twenty dollars, and a map. In spite of it, he got lost. Blessedly, wonderfully, amid the new, exotic trees, smells, faces, shop fronts.
Used books and used clothes and records and graffiti and weed as he walked on Main Street. Chinese takeout, Indian spices. Starbucks, Chipotle. A caricature of a Middle Eastern restaurant, tattoo parlors, the pizza shop with its red and yellow and the same poor kid at the counter. A local movie theater. Coffee shops, coffee shops, coffee shops. Accents and skin and hair colors and eye shapes and… he stopped.
A stooped woman wheeling a black cloth cart of groceries, out of which peeked oranges, a roll of toilet paper, and milk. The strangest sight of all, the most flabbergasting. People lived here. The woman reached a blue door in a brick building, burrowed in her pocket for keys, and the boy inside Hadi thought, There is no suffering here.
He walked even slower now, more astonished. He crossed campus, where these students were not characters in a play. They walked, carrying textbooks and bags, which were heavy, which were not stage props, carrying coffees he could smell, carrying on with conversations. They could have been students on campus at the University of Damascus.
But no. Words and sentence fragments drifted around him. English, but also, the melody; there was no tension. He became acutely aware of tone; no one was shouting. Another sudden, jarring realization: No one was afraid. They were just walking, these students, on a campus in a parallel universe.
In a white square, he saw them queue in front of a Vietnamese food truck. He watched, amazed, as one ordered, in English, a sandwich. He had never tasted Vietnamese food. He witnessed, minutes later, a sandwich materialize, very real and very big, and smelling of beef, a strange sauce, and, strongly, vinegar. The boy took a giant, distracted bite and hurried on. Hadi stood, shell-shocked by the sublime banality of this world, while in another, at this very moment… but he was not in that other. He was here, and dizzy with so much stimulation, and, suddenly, ravenous.
And suddenly, he saw himself stand in that line, heard himself order in English, saw his hand present his twenty-dollar bill and receive his sandwich. He saw himself, in America, taking a bite from a Vietnamese sandwich, a puffy baguette—then he thought of bread lines and just as suddenly, felt nauseated.
Ten minutes late, but she would forgive him. Sama Zayat remembered being new in a new land. She stood outside the library, gulping precious, rare November sun. She had thought it would be easier for them to meet in front of the building where they’d first met, that night he had given his speech at the fundraiser for refugees.
He appeared, panting and raggedly apologetic. “I’m—” He coughed and wheezed, attempting to continue in sign language.
She burst into laughter and said, “There should be a water fountain inside the library. Do you need a drink before we go to the museum?”
While Hadi searched for the restroom, Sama walked around the empty hall where, four days ago, there had been such a crowd. Her footsteps echoed now, and the collections of rare books and manuscripts lining the walls glowed in royal blue, black, forest green, burgundy. Hundreds of thousands of records of human culture and history, overwhelming.
She stopped at a gospel lectionary enclosed in a glass case. At first, she had thought the writing was in Arabic. It was in Syriac, dating back to the eleventh century. According to the plaque, the book had been used to celebrate Mass in an Orthodox church somewhere in today’s southern Turkey or northwestern Syria.
The book was open and petrified at a specific page, marked by a once-red, deeply frayed satin ribbon. The text displayed would have been the last one read by the congregation. The manuscript was highly damaged, disfigured by a gaping hole in its middle. A bullet had run it through, and around the exit wound, bits of parchment flayed out like rose petals. Sama turned to the plaque. Eighteen ninety-five. The Hamidian massacres. Hundreds of thousands killed, a million pillaged, fifty thousand exiled… where?
Hadi, emerging, his voice echoing down the hall:
“I’m so sorry I kept you waiting! This place is enormous!”
She jumped and gave him perhaps too big a smile.
“Ready to see something lovely?”
She practically flew out into the sun, dragging him behind her.
Glassy blue through glass ceiling, three stories high. Into the atrium, sun flowed in white streams. White marble arches. The balconies, normally swarmed with visitors, were quiet. A campus secret, one of the better kept: the art museum on a Wednesday morning.
Klimt, Degas, Van Gogh, Whistler, Monet—she had them, gloriously, all to herself. She held his hand and did not seem to notice how it turned both of them red, pulling him in and out of rooms and up and down stairs. Stopping abruptly at a single drop of white on a pearl earring, a shadow of an indentation on a marble nape, a forest so lush and dense they could have stepped into it, a million colors in an orchard of pear trees.
They finally stopped, and she stopped for breath, in front of Sintenis’s Daphne. Sama had saved her for last. The sculpture stood in the center of a glass room on the ground floor. Young; naked; sprouting bronze leaves from the tips of fingers thin as filaments, reaching skyward; swirling strands of hair, upswept by an invisible gale; luminous in her metamorphosis. Behind the glass walls that framed her, trees ablaze with autumn.
“Why is she turning into a tree?” Hadi asked.
Sama said, “Daphne is a nymph, and she is trying to escape the god Apollo. He has fallen desperately in love with her and vowed to make her his. Her only way out is to beg her father, the river god, to turn her into a tree.”
“So she’s dying?”
“Her human form is. She becomes something else.”
He frowned at the adolescent figure lurching up, desperate, her body fragile and taut.
“That’s morbid.”
“I don’t think so.”
“What? Sama, she dies!”
Sama shook her head.
“She’s free. I think she’s beautiful.”
Beyond the glass, a brown bird alighted on a bare branch.
“That bird looks like a douri,” he said, looking, not at Sama. She took a step toward him and they both looked out the glass. Sama flushed.
“Douri… How embarrassing, I never learned the names in Arabic. Is that the one that sings?”
“No, that’s hassoun, with a red dot over its beak. Douri is the little one everyone hunts. So stupid. It’s inedible. The bird is so small, it’s just feather and bones, almost no meat.”
“That’s horrible! There should be a law—”
“There is,” he said. “Since the war started, they’ve been shooting hassoun too… At least that one they can eat.”
They had hot chocolate in the atrium. Hadi hesitated, but Sama had already ordered two, which appeared, thick and mounted with two obscenely large dollops of cream, in wide and deep porcelain bowls. On each saucer, there was a cookie. She wanted to clap, and did, and it was his turn to laugh. He also applauded.
They sat at a flimsy table under the glass ceiling, two Syrians far away from Syria, having bitter chocolate and cream, in an empty museum they could pretend was theirs. They could see the sky through the roof. In that enormous moment, they could, perhaps, see the world, not as it was, but as it could be. Different. Wonderfully pigmented with possibility, like the paintings, the spectra of light and color surrounding them. Upper lip mustached, tongue coated with cocoa, she asked which was his favorite.
“The pear trees, definitely. They remind me of my father’s orchard.”
He paused, and through the chink, she glimpsed that home of his she didn’t know, and waited. He wiped foam off his lip and put it back there with another sip.
“I think I’d like to bring my parents here, someday. I don’t think they’ve ever been to an art museum.”
He looked down and lightly prodded the cookie, which was wrapped. He almost opened it, then seemed to change his mind and put it carefully in his coat pocket. Then he lifted his cup, but it was empty. He put it back down, traced the rim, then laid his hand on the table.
If she had known him better, she would have reached for it. If she had known him better, she would have told him he could be happy here. He could be anything, have anything he wanted. Could he see it? His life in this vast country? He wouldn’t have to be afraid.
“I think your parents will like Boston. There are parks and libraries, and all the museums, and for your father, the nature…” And she was rambling like a tour guide, dancing around the word war, desperate for him to look up, return from wherever he had gone. She realized it and stopped, and silence fell between them. He did look up, then.
He looked around and saw, with searing double vision, the atrium, light streaming down in curtains, this world, their old one, and sky piercing blue over the glass.
“Look at where we are,” he said.
“I’m going to bring my parents here,” he said now.
They rose and began buttoning their coats. She wrapped a long red scarf made of thick looped wool around her neck.
“What about your parents?”
She tied and untied the scarf and tied it again. When, after the third time, she looked up, she wore an expression he didn’t understand. It looked like sadness, but deeper, laced almost with anger.
“They won’t come. Baba won’t… He has thoughts about land and duty…” She struggled, letting the thought fall, grasping for it like a drifting thread. “Some people.”
She undid her scarf and let it hang angrily.
“We weren’t born with roots, el a’ama! We’re not trees!”
That was all. The wind fell as it had risen. She took his hand again and led them out of the glass doors, and heat seeped between them where their gloves touched.