How to Greet Your Brother

I came to appreciate Mytilene Airport a bit more on my second visit. It was so small that I saw the plane land a few minutes before I reached the airport and knew that it was Mazen’s from Athens. I worried I’d be late, but parking my rented Opel was easy and literally a walk of twenty seconds to the terminal.

More rain was coming. The bits of insanely blue sky seemed to be shrinking like an encircled army already defeated, turning paler and more vulnerable, the sun less convincing. On the pavement outside the squat airport building, a man in some kind of uniform sprinkled seeds, pigeons forming a wreath around him. Into a plastic bag his hand would dip, returning with more seeds to be flung. The circle of pigeons expanded and contracted like a pumping heart.

Mazen had his back to me as he contemplated the eternal mystery of the luggage carousel. I did my inflatable air man wave, but he was picking up his bag and didn’t notice me. The bored, seated guard wouldn’t let me through, asking me to wait behind the yellow line next to him. Mazen, rolling his bag, passed me, looked left and right. I came up from behind and hugged him, my hands snaking under his elbows and around his torso. My ever-trusting brother didn’t even flinch. Why would he be surprised? Didn’t everybody receive unexpected hugs at airports? When we were kids I liked to jump on him, particularly when he had his back turned to me. I’d end up holding on to his neck, my legs around his waist. We were both too old to repeat that these days. We were the same height, though, the same weight. We spooned perfectly together.

“Good morning, madam,” he said in the softest of voices. He held my arms but did not turn around yet. “May I interest you in our newest fund, which I believe has the right risk-to-reward ratio that someone like you would appreciate!”

We both chuckled. The childish joke was in reference to an earlier conversation when he asked me what he would do in Lesbos, how he could help the refugees. He’d said that the only thing he was remotely good at was selling stocks, if that. He was a stockbroker at Merrill Lynch in Beirut. He didn’t think he could meet the boats with the latest investment portfolios. Pardon me, ma’am, would you like me to explain how a family savings plan works?

A memory came back to me. He was eight, I seven. In our bedroom, on the floor, we sat side by side, touching at the hips, as if we were two trees, bough grazing bough, our roots, our legs, intertwined. This image—this memory had not crossed my mind in decades. Mazen held a housefly in his loosely closed fist. He repeated the gesture that our father performed each time it was his turn at backgammon. Mazen shook his hand roughly as if it contained a pair of dice, made me blow on it for good luck, and with great panache threw the dazed insect onto the floor. We watched the flummoxed fly try to regain its bearings. Below us, the insect dragged itself and its confusion in small circles, unable to lift itself into the air for a while. We did this every time we caught a fly.

Mazen, my Mazen.

He and I had a blood pact, literally. I was eight, he nine. He had heard that if two people shook bleeding hands, they would become blood brothers. We would do it. We didn’t consider that we were already siblings. We thought the ritual would make us as close as two people could get. We would stand side by side even if attacked by sword-wielding monsters or fire-breathing dragons. With a pin from a thistle flower, we pricked our forefingers and shook hands, sealing our contract.

When the familial umbilical cord was scorched, I was so furious with my mother and with my father who always took her side that I felt I could live with that break. I may even have convinced myself that having nothing more to do with them would be a welcome relief. But Mazen cutting me off? That—that I could not abide. I directed my disproportionate rage at him first. I decided I would not speak to him ever again, even if he came begging forgiveness. If he crossed a desert on his knees to atone for his sin, I would not relent. No, I was certain that I’d never forgive his betrayal. I encased my heart in iron and chugged along, a clean break.

But then breaks are never ever clean, no such thing.

In 1987, a few years after the rupture, I received an envelope from Beirut, from Mazen, containing nothing but a black-and-white photograph. Standing before the cadre of mailboxes in the dark lobby of my building, I tore open the envelope and tried to figure out why Mazen would send me a picture of himself and his bride. No note, not one word, just a cliché of a wedding portrait: the couple coming out of the church, a young Mazen, plump and fleshy, beginning to follow in his father’s footsteps, dark suit and tie, a beaming smile on his face, grains of rice stuck to his meticulously gelled hair. Clearly besotted, he was gazing at his bride, while she, coiffed hair streaked with highlights and gardenias, looked seductively at the camera, her leer proclaiming: I’ll give him the wedding night, and then all bets are off.

Had we been speaking, I would have warned poor Mazen. They were divorced after ten hellish years. She left him for some sleazy millionaire with whom she’d been having an affair.

At the time I didn’t understand what he was trying to do. If he wanted to make contact, why send me a picture? Why not a letter, a phone call? Did he think this inanity would make me forgive his duplicity? We had a pact. He was my closest friend, my only friend. Cosigners of a covenant, we shared a bed till I was ten, pressed together against the same sheets of cotton. When I had a nightmare, I would sidle closer and hug him fiercely. He poured comfort into my ears. The nightmare was not real, he would tell me. And then he abandoned me. Did he think my fortified heart would be easily pierced?

I hesitated, not sure what to do. I wished to hurt him. Damn him. I decided I would treat him the same way. I sent my reply, a photograph of Francine and me and my budding breasts. She and I were young and in love then, and the picture reflected it. We were atop each other in Cambridge Common, haloed by glorious sunlight and a furious cloud of gnats.

Mazen sneaked back into my life, slipped into the water with a silent paddle. We sent photographs back and forth for years, but no words were exchanged; our relationship was reduced to a visual correspondence. It was only later, when he came to visit for the first time, that I learned he’d sworn an oath to my mother: he would chop off his tongue if he uttered a word to me; he’d saw off a finger if he wrote a single letter to the family freak. At the time, though, I wanted him to say something, anything. I wanted him to send me more than a photograph, but I refused to ask. Instead, he’d send me a picture of himself on a Beirut beach, and I’d return one of myself walking the Lakefront Trail. I received a snapshot of his son and returned a photograph of my cats. I refused to break. I was the strong one.

When I began my first job, the hospital’s newsletter published a grainy photo of the chief of surgery and me in pristine white lab coats, the obligatory stethoscopes around our necks. How Mazen found that newsletter I do not know. I received a picture of him hugging his daughter as she sat on his lap, his left hand holding the newsletter, my new name stationed where his heart was supposed to be.

He broke first. In 1997, I received a four-by-six portrait of his son with a slightly bleeding nose, taken hastily, badly lit, likely by a bathroom bulb. On the ten-year-old face, a thread of blood trickled from nose to upper lip, curved an ogee around the corner of the mouth and down the chin. The boy was in no pain; he looked inquisitively at the camera, probably wondering why his father had had the urge to bring it out.

I held my breath for a beat or two or three when I saw the image. On the back of the photograph Mazen had written, “I keep seeing you.”

Iron is iron until it is rust.

When I was ten, a bullyboy at school pushed me into a wall. My nose bled. Mazen, eleven at the time, took me to the lavatory and helped me clean my face. We missed two classes, hiding and holding each other in the bathroom. The boy’s face in the photograph was a replica of the one I saw in the mirror that day. Mazen’s son looked more like me than like his father.

My response didn’t include a picture. Like him, I began with only one sentence, the incipit of all further conversation. In the middle of a white sheet I wrote, “I have never stopped missing you.”