There was food, more than twenty people could or should ever eat. Food as any gathering of expatriates mandated. Arab expatriates, said the gold and lapis knickknacks, the Persian carpets, and etched mirrors that cluttered Al Firdaos Middle Eastern restaurant.
The place was embalmed with rose incense, to mask the garlic perhaps. Loud oriental music competed with loud voices: Arabic in an array of dialects, English in accents betraying varying stages of expatriation. All buoyantly, boisterously celebratory: “Mabrouk!” Toasting Sama’s pregnancy.
Shots of milky arak and glasses brimming with Tyrian wine. Trays of kibbeh and sambousek, tabbouleh, mashawi. Hummus and labneh and soft pockets of bread, still puffed with steam. Overhead, through the speakers, Fairuz sang melancholically.
Sama hated Fairuz and such gatherings. She hated the singer’s drawling voice and never-ending list of longings. Hadi listened to Fairuz as he shaved every morning.
Hadi loved Fairuz, as his father did, and Sama’s father, and, she suspected, most of the people at this table: Hadi’s friends, whom he’d made at the Lebanese sandwich shop where he worked, six days a week, long hours for minimum wage, sometimes on Sundays too, for, as the owner explained, “there are no Sundays for us hardworking immigrants.”
Us. The owner was a portly Syrian businessman who ran a shabby establishment in an as-yet-ungentrified neighborhood in Cambridge. A warmhearted countryman who had kindly offered Hadi a place behind the counter, forty-five minutes and two bus rides away from their apartment.
Sama wanted Hadi to take classes, perhaps get a degree, play the piano again, meet her Harvard friends. Americans. He would, when he was ready, he said. He wasn’t then. He liked the sandwich shop. He felt at home on that street of ethnic, eclectic small businesses that sold nail care, food, car repair, religion… all the same thing, really: a sense of community. A construct, like any, that the lonely create to make themselves feel less lonely.
His clientele flocked in, ravenous, almost all immigrants, almost all blue-collar workers, shelling out their precious dollars for street food that cost five times more than in Damascus. Homesick and hungry, proportionally. The sandwiches were mediocre, but the place was always packed, especially at that hour, blue, near the end of the day when everyone else seems to have somewhere to go, to be. Sundays, especially… At such times, it was nice to step out of the street and into a place that smelled of bread and thyme, even for five dollars, if only for five minutes.
Hadi reached for another man’ousheh. It tasted like shit. But also like Syrian mornings, the zaatar flatbread baked to just golden in Abu Riad’s furn on the way to school: folded, bubbly, and still steaming, into a crescent. The scent of sumac and thyme would trail down the street behind him. If he closed his eyes, he could just feel the warm, puffy dough dissolve on his tongue.
Sama was not eating. There was too much food. They always ordered too much food. And the camaraderie, the music, were too loud. And the makeup on the women. They wore thick kohl and painted their lips so red that every glass but Sama’s was stained with prints like red cherries. She felt consciously pregnant.
It was so situational, time-bound and shallow, this affinity they shared. They teased her about her accent and when she forgot certain words in Arabic. They inquired about Haa’vad. She had avoided such gatherings for years, and only been to that fundraiser for refugees last year out of some sense of duty to…
Hadi turned to kiss her, eyes bright. He whispered in her ear, his breath licorice-sweet with arak: “Are you having a good time?”
She had met him at that fundraiser. She had married him. And this loud and motley crew of Arabs was well-meaning and generous. And in the absence of a baba, mama, or any family in the US, they were offering food and warmth and it felt safe.
“I know you don’t really like hanging out with the expats, but I thought it would be nice to celebrate…” Hadi began, anxious at her silence.
“I’m having a lovely time,” Sama said and smiled broadly and meant it.
Lebanese wine and conversation flowed. Opinions rose and ebbed.
“Have you chosen a name yet? If it’s a boy, Kays, like Hadi’s father?” asked one of the girls, long black hair, long nails, long lashes.
“Why the hell would they do that?” said another, whose hair was cropped short, blue black reflecting large gold hoops that hung from delicate ears.
“People here will just mispronounce it and the kids at school will tease him! Sama, pick an American name. Something really American. Brian.”
“Brian?! What will people say when they go to Syria?”
The man sitting across from Hadi grumbled, “Syria? Who’s going to Syria? Fucking shelled-out country…”
“Watch your mouth, Salim!”
They couldn’t have looked more similar, the two dark-haired, dark-bearded men; they even both came from Al Ghouta. But Salim had left with his mother and father after the chemical attack in August 2013. Someone said he maybe had a baby sister who died, but all he ever said was that “they fucking ruined the summer.” He spoke with no accent.
Ahmad, across from him, manned the shawarma wheel at the sandwich shop where Hadi worked. He and his wife always smelled faintly of garlic and onions, and they had won the green-card lottery years ago. Sama always wondered why they had entered it.
Ahmad pounded the table. “Our fathers, our brothers, are fighting for that shelled-out country of yours, Salim! You’re eating that shelled-out country’s food!”
“Exactly, Ahmad! I’m eating it here! I’m eating falafel in America, where I’m safe, and so are you, by the way.”
“You think you’re safe here? Have you seen the news? Did you see who the Americans just elected?”
“It’s a free country!”
“Not for us, my friend! It’s not our country!”
They didn’t come from the same Syria, the exile and the patriot-from-a-distance.
“Oh, come on, Ahmad! Don’t be a hypocrite! You’ve been in America how long now?”
“That’s not the point! Unlike you, I haven’t forgotten my ousoul!”
“Ah, your ousoul!”
Salim laughed.
“Tell me, Ahmad, what is your ousoul? Your mother’s food? Your father’s olive trees?”
“Our heritage! Our land!”
“Oh, yil’aan abouk, go back to it then!”
Both men had risen, with their voices, from their seats. Both realized it and sat down. Ahmad’s wife passed him a piece of cheese wrapped in fried phyllo dough. He bit into it. Chewy: It had gone cold. He finished it and took another. Salim downed the rest of his cloudy white arak and reached for the carafe. He poured himself another generous, licoricey shot.
“Go back to Syria then, Ahmad,” he said, coldly, again.
“Tell me how you like it, whatever it is that’s still there…”
“Our people,” Hadi interjected. “Our people are still there.” He said it quietly, his hand clutching Sama’s under the table, her ring cool and soothing under his skin. He hadn’t given her a proper wedding: the party, the dress, the hired zaffeh hoisting her on their shoulders over family and friends. These people, this dinner, so rapidly turning sour, this was the best he could manage.
He looked down. He hadn’t even been able to give her his mother’s ring. His mother’s white, bare fingers, the wrist bone on her bare hand. He hadn’t been able to give his mother and father reunification visas. Yet.
“What people, Hadi? You’re not one of them anymore.”
Salim responded quietly too.
“You’ll always be the man who left, even if you do return.”
A rare and sad, foreign silence followed. Coffee arrived, just then, on a silver platter, with plates of sesame barazek and knafeh doused in thick syrup. People looked down at their plates. Some did not touch them; some wiped them clean. People fill voids differently. Salim drank two scalding shots of coal-black Turkish coffee, then said, hoarse, his throat burnt:
“Look, we all left. Let’s stop kidding ourselves.” He wore a Red Sox jersey. “You live here now, Hadi.”
“And I’ll always be a foreigner here.”
Salim shrugged. “With clean water to drink, a roof over your head, and one day, maybe, a nice backyard with a swing set for that kid…”
He smiled at Sama, but she was looking at Hadi, who seemed like a child trying hard to find a word. Finally, he said, “My kid won’t know Syria.”
Salim was gentle, but merciless: “Or the difference between an M-21 and a 120-millimeter mortar.”