The twenty-eighth of February. The twenty-eighth!
In the hospital gift shop, two balloons: one white and one blue. One day Naseem will have a sky of multicolored, silk-ribboned balloons.
Two for now, and the only, misplaced birthday card in the display of bright, glittering Congratulations, Get Well Soons, Condolences. I pick my card from the panoply of life events and run out.
On the tenth floor, I hurry down the hall, past other rooms, other lives unfolding. Fragments of conversations and the crying of babies drift out of doors. I do not look left or right. Somewhere, a machine beeps. I start and run the remaining distance to 1013, the balloons trailing like frantic kites behind me.
I don’t stop till the incubator. Both hands on the plastic wall, my heart and the balloons catch up. My breathing slows.
“Happy birthday. One whole month, ya zghir…”
I whisper, and for a moment all else stills, even time, even fear. All but the balloons, teasing each other under the vents, dancing. One white and one blue, like clouds. They’d fly away if they could. Tiri ya tiyara, tiri… One day, Naseem will have a party…
The ceiling is covered with white and blue balloons, their silk ribbons trickling down, shimmering afternoon light over people’s heads. Everyone is present.
The guests flutter in and out of the dining room, babbling blessings like a brook in April. Relatives, friends, and neighbors, vying for Naseem’s attention, bickering for their turn to carry him. He is dressed in a navy-blue sailor’s outfit Sama chose to match his eyes, wide open like the child is amazed, or about to laugh.
He does laugh. No one has ever seen a child laugh so much. Hadi is wearing a blue necktie and a gray blazer.
Hadi has just had his third, rich, turmeric-golden square of sfouf and asks Sama if she wants more atayef. She is in a white dress and could not possibly have another bite of anything.
“Save room for the cake!”
Which will be served on fine, white porcelain plates, silver-rimmed. Where are the napkins? Mama rushes to the kitchen. Baba seizes the opportunity to raid the glorious, gloriously unguarded platter of karabeej. Sama catches his eye. She won’t tell. Baba winks.
Mama returns. She has outdone herself. The long oak table is overflowing with glistening, peony-pink, mint-green desserts studded with nuts like gems: pistachios and almonds and pine nuts, sprinkled with coconut flakes. The air is syrupy with the scents of warid and orange blossom, and from the kitchen, the warm, peppery smell of yet another round of freshly brewed coffee.
And in the white afternoon light, the stardust shower of wishes everyone recites:
“Happy birthday, ya habibi! Yin’aad ‘aleik! Allah be with you and protect you, my son…”
Wishes upon God, or gods, or stars, pronounced by adults like children, with the faith of children and trust of birds in the winds blowing them on a certain course, hoping, believing, feathered wings wide open… and the blue and white balloons teasing one another and dancing…
I open my eyes. I shouldn’t have done it, let myself return to that dining room in that apartment I abandoned. That party… the desserts were too sweet; the wishes, too many to fit on a single cake; the cake, balloons, colors too vivid. The warmth of all those people, the brightness of that light, too stark against the reality of this room now.
Room 1013 now seems both too small and too empty, with its incubator and windowless walls lined with black boxes blinking depthless red, green, blue artificial lights. That horrid, hard vinyl couch. And those two lonely balloons…
But I chose this, didn’t I? This vaster world so far away from Damascus. Tiri ya tiyara, far from those people and that life, with its clutter of belongings I did not want to take, allegiances and roots that got in my flight’s way.
I thought I didn’t need them, all that weight, but now I feel vaporous, like I am floating in the air. I press the soles of my feet into the ground, pushing down with all my weight, sealing myself to something concrete. I place my hand on the incubator, palm down, flat, fingers extended, willing all the heat in me to cross the plastic wall and into Naseem’s rectangular little world. This room is hopelessly cold…
“Samati! We were wondering when you would call. Sayde, it’s Sama!”
“Ya to’brini! Is she with Naseem? Tell her to turn the video on!”
Homesickness swells in my throat like their voices in the room. Their faces on a little screen, I point to a little sleeping boy.
“Ya habibi! To’borni! He looks like his mother.”
“Not at all, he looks like Hadi! Look at those cheekbones, and his nose… Sama, bring the phone—”
I turn the video off.
“What happened? Wafi, what did you do?”
“Mashi, Sayde! Samati, we can’t see Naseem anymore.”
“I can’t seem to turn it on again. There must be a problem with the internet connection on your end,” I lie.
Sorry, Baba, sorry, Mama. I couldn’t take it anymore.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, ya zghireh,” Baba says, his voice older than it was a minute ago. His exhale fills the space between us, pressing against both our chests, I in a shiny, hollow room, he in a pale-yellow house, on a street in a city at war, where I hear his wife shuffle back to the kitchen—
“Your mother is making coffee.”
“Did you find any?”
“No, the stores are still out. Yesterday I spent two hours in line, waiting for bread…”
—where, before the power goes, she will boil ground chickory mixed with sawdust, which they will drink on the sofa, pretending it is coffee, talking to me, pretending those flashes of images of their grandson they saw were real.
“Samati, are you still there?”
“I’m here.” Whatever that means.
“How are you both, Baba? How is the wad’?”
“The same. People hungry and desperate. The schools closed again this week. A few days ago, the neighborhood kids broke into the Badrs’ apartment. You remember the Badrs. Their son stuttered…” And had a crush on me.
“They’re in Canada now. The kids broke the lock and were caught jumping on the furniture, playing with broken glass. You can’t really blame them… There aren’t many places where children can play these days.”
Doors wide open, locks broken like hearts. Shimmers of plates and windows, catching rainbows like crystals. Black-and-white photographs, spiderwebs, yellow newspapers. At least the house was alive for a while. At least there was laughter. I see weeds peeking between the tiles; moss in the toilet bowls; orange-streaked, purple flowers on vines riding up the walls. A victimless crime. At least there was sun and air for a—
“Someone came in this morning to install a new lock on the door,” Baba says. Then he pauses. Casually, he adds, “Hadi’s mother called today. We finally heard from him.”
“His passport and wallet were stolen in Amman. He couldn’t tell his mother where he was. He was calling from a public phone, but he gave her a number she could call…”
“What?” I ask stupidly, to buy my flailing thoughts and heartbeat time to land and readjust to this earth whose axis has just shifted.
“He kept asking about you and Naseem. Poor boy. I can’t imagine… Iman said he wouldn’t stop crying on the phone. Miskeen, Hadi.”
“He could have called and asked me.” I sound cross but am not. I am stranded over the Atlantic.
Baba speaks gently: “Would you have answered?”
I hear the cautious thud of the copper rakweh on the marble, and the light double trill of the two white coffee cups. Mama pours. Baba resumes:
“I think he feels… Sama, the boy has no papers. He’s hiding. He knows if he comes back here he’ll be arrested.”
“Where will he go?” I ask, high-pitched.
From very far away, I hear Mama’s voice: “You should call him…”
“No!”
The word has an almost physical quality, like a hot bullet shot from the horror of this past month. Renunciation, of Mama’s words and what they implied, reaching out to that land and house and power-cut life at the other end of this line. But most of all, of you, Hadi. You. I couldn’t breathe when you left. I still cannot. But I already put the notes away, I put your clothes in a box. I cut off every ribbony feeling that still moored me to you. I’m free. I need to teach my lungs once again to trust sky—“I won’t call him. I can’t…”—and return to this world in which I have no place. I don’t sleep in that apartment anymore. The silence echoes.
“I have to go,” I finally say.
Baba and Mama don’t ask where. He asks if I need money; she asks if I ate.
Naseem and me, and the balloons shivering under the flow from the air vents.
The machines beep, and a louder, dull thumping I realize is my own heartbeat.
A light knock at the door startles me.
“May I come in?”
A crisp c. Professor Mendelssohn! His voice is low and warm and glowingly familiar. It silences the beeps.
“You look terrible,” he says, echoing Dr. Farber. My throat constricts and the room, all of a sudden, looks watery. He lifts laden arms.
“I brought coffee, and more Hungarian pastries. My wife is determined to feed you and the world into rightness.”
He sets his wares on the wobbly table by the blue couch and sits, crossing a leg, as serenely as though he were at a sidewalk café in Budapest. Food and drink are not allowed in the NICU.
“Thank you, but…” I smell cappuccino, and something flaky, airy, nearly ethereally light… And it is too happy and welcome a moment for rules.
“Kifli,” he says as he bites one. It looks like a croissant and smells like an old friend, and my stomach rumbles. I sit beside him on the blue couch and reach for my Styrofoam cup. The coffee steams and the moment radiates, magically normal. For a moment we just sit and sip and do not talk. A brief, untethered moment.
In a spartan room, on a spartan couch, we share kifli, two strangers neither home nor not home, in that moment, as luxurious as pedestrian and transient. It ends with the coffees… and my third crescent powdered with sugar. Nothing has changed in the room, in the world, but the skin on my cheeks feels less dry and taut, and my back, surprised, encounters that of the couch, and the blue and red and green blinking lights seem less sharply defined.
Professor Mendelssohn brushes a crumb off his impeccable suit, scrutinizes me, then nods like some geophysical sense of order has been restored. Then he asks:
“How are you?”
I tell him. Everything. It spills out of me like water: events and names and alphanumerics, bits of law, executive orders, countries and headlines. So cruel and cruelly coherent. I lay it out on the couch between us, and it looks so absurd, so spectacularly absurd, that I begin to cry.
I cry like children do at injustice, choking on the words visa and separation. I cry the distance across the ocean, east through Gibraltar, the sea, spread like giant wings to full fathom between here and…
“You don’t know where he is?”
I cry the emptiness of this room, the crushing weightlessness of the uprooted.
This isn’t right! This isn’t the story I was told, promised. The dream, to come to America, work hard, become somebody. Become better and larger than who I was and could be in the life I left. A life beyond the walls in Syria, beyond mere existence.
Freedom, that was the deal!
“It isn’t fair,” I cry.
“We worked so hard to get here! We both gave up so much!”
I realize I am shouting. I am sobbing, again, to this man whose only connection to me is a course taken, almost seven years ago, on comprehensive bird biology. But this is not anger; this is fear, masquerading as fury, spilling out with the tears. Sky-deep terror like gravity turned upside down, sucking the ground from under me.
I clasp my hand over my mouth, mortified at the scene I just made.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and through my fingers, try to slow my breathing.
Professor Mendelssohn does not reply. He hands me his handkerchief. Baba’s handkerchief. And the fear returns with stampeding wings.
It beats about my chest, the urgency to be somewhere where that handkerchief makes sense. Where that handkerchief belongs, and I do. But I cannot see that place. I cannot see the sky. He puts his hand on my shoulder, and I want to believe that touch, that everything will be all right, but I can only cry. His hand stays till I am quiet.
His handkerchief is soggy, and I am mortified, but he takes it and folds it neatly and puts it back in his pocket. Then he just sits there, next to me, on the blue vinyl couch, like he is waiting for a train.
“I know,” he says. He removes his glasses and inspects them, then puts them down, and somehow, without them between us, he seems to see me better.
“You are very young. I was very young too when I came here. When my mother and I left Budapest, the Soviets were slaughtering people in the streets. My father…” He stops. “Well, he wouldn’t have left anyway,” he says, not bitterly.
His eyes are limpid and clear, and do not belong to an elderly professor, but to a young boy on a steamer.
“We took many trains and boarded in Marseille—those were the last of the ocean liner days. The crossing took forever then, but I was so happy. And my mother, she spent the whole journey up on deck, on the lookout for the Statue of Liberty. She didn’t want to miss it.”
He smiles, shaking his head.
“She had this dream of America, of me getting an education. Days before we were even close to land, she had me up there with her, describing New York, pointing… I wasn’t sure what we were trying to see, but I was so excited I actually believed I could see the statue’s torch.”
He chuckles.
“I was just a boy. The way you see things when you are young… When the statue did appear, eventually, I was disappointed. It was so small! But the city… New York was…”
He searches for the word.
“Big,” he finally says.
“It was like magic. New, and shiny, so big, like nothing I had ever seen. For the longest time I actually thought that America meant ‘big.’ In Hungary, everything was old and cramped and didn’t work. Budapest was a shot-up mess in those days: bullet holes in everything, rubble everywhere. Here…”
A little boy wanders about the big city’s streets. Professor Mendelssohn and I watch him. He could be Naseem. I know that feeling of big. I have walked those streets. A dusky sadness coats me, cold and damp. My voice quavers:
“They don’t want us here…”
He takes a sip of his coffee and pats his lips with a napkin.
“They weren’t too keen on us then either. I heard the word ‘commie’ a lot, and ‘kike.’ I had to learn what they meant, but I caught on fast. I had to learn English fast too. My mother never really did, and she was never really able to make friends either. It pained her; she was so alive. She loved people. She was called some quite ugly names too.”
He sets his glasses back on the ridge of his nose.
“Sometimes I think it was a good thing she never grasped the language. It would have beaten her to death. The immigrant experience—”
The monitors beep. He looks at his watch, then at me.
“But things changed. That is what I wanted to say. Things change. My mother survived because she was doing it for me, and I became a professor.”
Through the round, gold rims I glimpse the boy, his mother, their suitcase, and the ocean liner carrying hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people and stories, similar and distinct. Name, sex, date of birth, father, mother. Place…
I am not certain how long we sit there: I, torn in half; he, American, whatever that means or looks like. From our couch, I watch them disembark and go, the myriad identities and paths that could have been mine, if I had been someone different, at a different time, in a different America. One that was not, did not have a reason to be afraid of people like us. I wish there were a window in this room.
Professor Mendelssohn looks at the incubator.
“This is a very young country. I have hope for it. I think it is greater than people think.”
I wish there were a little more air in this young and vast and beautiful country. I wish… but everyone does, and everyone wants America. Everyone wants to be free.
Professor Mendelssohn puts his empty cup on the table.
“But you are very young too. And the world is very big.”
It sways unsteadily.
He continues: “Why don’t you?”
I look at him without understanding.
“Why don’t I what?”
“Go back.”
“To Syria?!”
There are two kifli left. He reaches for one, takes a bite, and pushes the other in my direction.
“To your husband. I don’t know where, exactly, or how, but your son’s condition is improving, and if all goes well, he’ll soon—”
“My son is American!”
“Yes, but the travel ban…”
“The travel ban isn’t fair!”
I explode again, once again the child in shocked, breathless pain at the rough, crashing contact with an unjust reality, and the cold indifference of the world looking on.
“I know,” Mendelssohn says again, but his quiet tone only fans my rage.
“How can you suggest I leave? You, of all people, how dare you? You know! You came here just like me! Except you got the life you wanted!”
He shakes his head.
“No one has the life they want. People make choices.”
“You became a citizen! You got your education, your career!”
“That’s right, and I also did not become or get many other things. I never saw my father again. I did not attend his funeral. My mother lived in another language and died in a country far from her family and friends…”
“Yes, but—”
“I’m not complaining,” he said, “and I know my mother had no regrets either. She said it was just”—he searches for the words—“the cost of living. Hmm, it sounds different in Hungarian.”
He swallows the last bite, looks at a fine gold watch, and stands up.
“I must return to campus. Good luck with everything, Ms. Zayat.”
He walks away, lightly for such a stout man. He pauses briefly to look up at the balloons by the incubator.
Right at the door between Room 1013 and the hallway, the strip of tiles is a deep navy. On either side, in and out, sky blue. I peer out; the floor is quiet. Behind me, only the monitors.
Sugar still dusts my fingertips. My tongue still tastes the kifli. I try not to swallow, to prolong the light sweetness of the encounter a little longer. It made this lonely room less sterile.
It does not take much to alter the texture of a place, just a few words. A few years. The taste of kifli dissolves. Distance dissolves as easily; a blue vinyl couch, two strangers, coffee.
This is a beautiful country, an easy country to be different in. A painful country to be different in. Maybe all countries are. Or maybe it is freedom that is so painful, so unbearably light and painful. Maybe people build walls because—
A siren shrieks. My thoughts stop, paralyzed, my body too, suddenly invertebrate. Only my eyes dart around, over the doors of other rooms, other babies’ and their parents’. One light, bulbous and red, flashes above…
“Code blue!”
A voice behind me pierces through even the screaming alarm. Footsteps race past me, rubber screeching, scrubs cadaver blue under the neon, fleetingly purple as they cross the threshold under the crimson-red light, into Room 1010, three doors away from Naseem’s room. Someone else’s room, I tell my heart. It does not hear.
It hurls my body forward. I am at the door. The incubator is blasted open, the lid thrown to the floor. The baby’s face is blue. No child should ever be that color. Chest, not moving. Mouth dark, like black currant. A twitch, almost imperceptible, of a little finger and almost translucent gray. A shrill sound—the mother—that could shatter a glacier.
“Ma’am! You can’t be here!”
No, I cannot, and will never unsee this. CPR on an opalescent chest smaller than the size of my fist, turning mauve where the fingers pound, pound, pound, my God they pound that little chest.
The blanket that had swaddled the baby lies by the lid, on the floor. The same blanket, white and blue. Thick fingers rub, pound, rub. Repeat. Pound and rub with so much force I am sure they are breaking the baby’s ribs.
The child is minuscule, naked arms and legs like dragonfly wings. A hand cups the back of a tiny neck so that it doesn’t snap. A mask is placed over the face, covering it entirely. The mask is a dirty white.
A hand holds a pump and forces air in rapid, consistent, forceful bursts. Too strong, too harsh, too brutally inconsistent with the child’s faint gasps, in and out. The pumping pauses and I hold my breath. Nothing. Repeat. Repeat!
I don’t know how long this sequence is repeated, how long it should be, or how such a metric can humanly be set. Please little one, breathe. Please little heart, come on, ya zghir…
“How long?”
“Fifty-eight seconds.”
Fifty-eight seconds. Only fifty-eight seconds. Fifty-eight enormous seconds. I do not know how time can still be measured, how time itself can still be, when every other law of nature is being violated.
“No response to stimulation.”
The pumping resumes with renewed, desperate vigor. I watch the baby’s chest sucked in and out artificially, while I do nothing, while I can see the little fingertips go rigid.
“Ma’am, you cannot be here!”
A hand grabs my elbow. Steel grips my arms and a faceless body fights my lurching and flailing, shouting something I don’t hear, my senses far beyond comprehension. I am pushed away from the room that is not mine. The mother’s screams follow me, racking me, forever. The mother’s screams will never leave me. The last thing I see is the screen on which a green line stretches, like a tightrope.
One enormous moment. Then a beep.
I hear it. The whole world does. The whole world stops, and every star in every galaxy, for that faint sound. A peep. Another follows. Then another, and the next, and the next, from inside Room 1011, someone else’s.
Arms catch me as my legs dissolve. We fall to a heap of hoarse, gasping, euphoric sobs on the linoleum. Arms remain locked around me though I am no longer fighting. Just shaking. The red light over the door is no longer flashing.
The ground is a midsummer sky of blue and white. Like Naseem’s balloons. Naseem’s little white chest, the drum of my son’s little heart. It wasn’t someone else’s baby, else’s life, else’s fate. All the walls in the world, real and invisible, crumbled in one enormous moment.