She would leave on Sunday night; the flight to Boston, through Paris, was cheapest then. Thus, the circumstances of lives altered; decisions made, part chance, part volition. Sama Zayat would leave Damascus on the first of August.
She would leave Syria and arrive in America the same day, very nearly at the same time, after a fourteen-hour, one-stop trip. It would be Sunday night there too, as though, as she flew, life would hold its breath and the world would pause its revolution. She would have time to find her luggage, her bearings. She would have weeks before orientation. She could, perhaps, have left on another Sunday, but there was no point in lingering. The decision had been made, long ago, a year ago on a Tuesday.
On a Tuesday one year ago, Mama blasted the window open over the kitchen sink, uncharacteristically; she was a mild woman and it was a mild evening. Like the bharat in the bamyeh, the trace of nuttiness in the lightly goldened rice with vermicelli. The breeze, dusty but temperate, blew from the west, clearing the kitchen of the last of the day’s heat, and onion, rosemary, and garlic.
She began scrubbing the pots. Sama cleared the table and stood to her mother’s right, ready with the towel. Baba remained on the stiff-backed Turkish pine chair, smoking his Gauloises. And something happened that altered the course of Sama’s life.
Mama dropped a plate. It broke. The plate she broke was pink. It had been lilac, once, with crassly painted flowers in thick cyan. The colors had, for the most part, fortunately, faded, by the time Mama had inherited the set, missing a bowl and chipped. Sama hated it. She preferred the pure-white porcelain plates, silver rimmed, that the Zayats saved in the dining room for guests and special occasions. They saved the dining room for that as well.
Sama started and turned to her mother, just in time to glimpse something flicker across her face. Then her mother said:
“Ya allah! Look what I did!”
But Sama had already seen: Mama hated the plates too. She had never said so. Mama never said what she loved or hated, liked or did not like to eat. She had made bamyeh and rice that night, and warek ‘einab stuffed with ground meat, tomatoes, parsley, no cilantro because Baba could not abide it. Mama owned gorgeous porcelain plates and never used them. She had bought them on a trip to Paris the summer before her wedding.
She contemplated the scatter of pink-and-blue debris across the beige ceramic tiles, a fraction of a second too long, then rushed for the broom and dustpan. She did not let Sama help. Two brushstrokes. The floor was beige again. She then returned to the pot and browned onion grime with zeal. She was going to scrub it raw.
“Kahweh, Wafi?”
“I’d love some.”
“Sama, will you put the rakweh to boil?”
Mama had said she liked espressos, once, at a café near Bab Sharqi Street, whose owner brought back bags of Café Richard coffee every time he went to France. The two of them had babbled on and on in French, and he had excitedly offered Mama a bag of beans to take home. Next time, inshallah, she had said. She and Sama still had errands to run, but they would return. They had not. Mama had been seventeen when she married, Sama’s age now. Eighteen when she had her.
Mama handed Sama the pot. It was slippery, like the unease Sama suddenly felt. It was too warm in the kitchen. Stifling, even. Damascene heat poured in through the window, dry, but she was sweating. The feeling trickled into her lungs, swelled, and was pressing out, leaving no room for air. There was no air in that kitchen.
“Baba, Mama, I got a scholarship.”
Mama already knew. Mama had proofread the essays and sat by Sama’s desk in the evenings, comparing programs, and late at night, on Sama’s bed, whispering excitedly like she too was applying to Harvard. Mama knew, by now, more about admission rates and standardized tests, more vocabulary words than most Americans. She stopped scrubbing, nonetheless, but kept facing the sink.
Baba asked, “What scholarship?”
“To study in America, Baba. Harvard.”
She drew a breath. Baba looked at her over his second cigarette. He let the ashes melt off the tip, then set the butt on the thick clay rim of the ashtray.
“You want to go to America?”
The floor felt porous under her feet. She looked down and caught a glimpse of one stray piece of broken pink, more a weak orange now from years of tomato and cumin. She could have done it better, at least differently, but too late; she had leaped. And it had to be said. It had to be said then. Now, fly or crash. Looking up, she continued:
“I want to study anthropology. I want to learn—”
“You want to study what?”
In Sama’s head, pink plates shattered to magnificent bits.
There were shouts and there were tears. Accusations of folly, ingratitude, betrayal of her ousoul. Of him, whose own roots were a square of a corner shop near Souk Medhat Pasha, rented on borrowed money, selling potato chips and Alhamra cigarettes, and tepid bottles of Barada beer. Wafi Zayat, who spoke no English, then or now, who had built an empire—five Zayat stores, this apartment, two cars, the summer house in Mesyaf, with a vineyard and rose garden—for his wife and daughter, for her children, his grandchildren! He had built it all! He had provided, sheltered, loved…
But the louder Baba fought, the louder, higher, she pulled against those roots; they were dead weights, and she couldn’t see the sky through his trees. They were blocking her escape. She would be seventeen next year. She needed freedom.
“Freedom from what?!”
His daughter, an immigrant! Nameless in a foreign country! She preferred the word émigrée. It sang. It felt airy, vowelly. She would be so: light and cosmopolitan, a world-touring saunterer, untethered by land or home, having shrugged both off, taking off, taking flight.
“Majnouneh?! What do you think America is? The crime, the drugs—”
She mutinied: “How on earth would you know that, Baba? You’ve never been!”
She could have stopped. She should have stopped. Mama was crying.
“How would you know anything about America? You’ve never even been on a plane! You’ve never been anywhere!”
Her voice lashed the air.
“Sama,” her mother said.
“And you trapped Mama with you! Every year, you promise you’ll take her to Paris!”
“Sama!”
“Sayde, it’s all right.”
It was the tone of his voice—low and hollow, quivering like he was just learning to speak—that knocked the air from her lungs. She crashed back into the kitchen, no, fell back, touching ground with the soft sound of a dead leaf. She saw what she had done.
Baba sat still, erect, swaying imperceptibly, as though his daughter’s blows were still reverberating in him. He looked ahead, through her, past her, at Mama at the window, out the window onto the street. Blackened mountains. On one of those, a summer house and garden. She looked at him, carving every line, every curve and indentation of her father’s face on her heart, wishing he would speak, silently begging him to. Realizing he wouldn’t; she had punched the air from him too.
“Baba, I—”
“It’s all right, Samati.”
Samati. My Sama.
He was still looking at his wife.
“Sayde, I…” but he ran out of courage and Mama was still turned away, looking intently at the patterned tiles over the sink, or perhaps out the window. Silence, wafer thin, like jasmine petals. Lilac-veined, translucent. Only then did Sama smell the jasmine on the ledge. It had been wafting in all evening.
“I’m sorry, Sayde.”
“Shh…”
Mama’s voice blew the past away. Much else was said between them, but Sama could not hear it. Then Baba rose, and Mama put the rakweh on a low flame, on the gas stove.
No trumpets sounded. They had their coffee on the balcony, in three white thimble-size porcelain cups, hand-painted with sparse green and red strokes, on a tray Mama carried.