The Night Counter (17 page)

“Haven’t you ever wondered how Amir pays for a house like this, decorates it like this, buys the expensive soap on a bit actor’s salary?” Sherri Hazad asked.

“Are you kidding? He doesn’t pay a penny.”

“Oh?” Sherri Hazad said, and moved to the edge of her chair.

Fatima put down her kibbe and motioned for Sherri Hazad to bring her hungry ear closer. This near, Scheherazade’s skin today was not as porcelain as the finest china in the world.

“His mother—Soraya—pays for everything,” Fatima said, and then leaned back and began forming a new kibbe. “In cash.”

“Oh,” Sherri Hazad said.

Fatima pointed toward the envelope by the computer, next to her picture in the wedding dress. “That’s from Soraya,” she said. “I counted it already. It’s always in hundred-dollar bills. Four thousand three hundred dollars cash. She left it and then went to Tiajumama just like that.”

“You mean Tijuana?” Sherri Hazad said. “Mexico?”

Fatima shrugged. “Always off to help others, but at least she makes money while she does. Cash only, and almost all for Amir.”

“What exactly does she do?” Sherri Hazad asked.

“Soraya embraced her heritage as a business opportunity,” Fatima explained. “That’s how Amir describes it.”

“Oh?”

“Some might say shame,
aabe
. But she suffered a lot,” Fatima said. “That bastard husband of hers. May he rot in Saudia forever.”

“Oh?” Sherri Hazad said again. “He is Saudi?”

“No, Beiruti,” Fatima said.

“Oh, really?”

“His mother, Tamara,
yakhrub beitha
, curses on her house, and I started the card club of the Arab Ladies Society together, so he and Soraya knew each other since they were children,” Fatima continued. “Then they both went to Wayne State. He started out as a good Lebanese boy born just two days before Soraya in the same hospital.”

“Sounds perfect.”

“He cheated on her and left with another woman,” Fatima said. “
Haram
. Sacrilege. And it was her best friend, no less. Do you know what that lousy
afreet
, devil, did next? Moved to Saudi Arabia and worked for the Aramco company as an engineer and got very rich. Then he moved
his no-good mother there with him.
Inshallah
, Tamara drove her son and his floozy to hell because she was loose, too.”

“Oh,” Sherri Hazad said. “Well, Amir …”

“You don’t know how many times I would come home from playing
basra
with the other ladies and find her sitting in the living room with Ibrahim watching the news, crying,” Fatima fumed. “Every time a war started back home, she would say she couldn’t bear to play cards, like she was the only one upset. But then I’d find her in my home, saying she couldn’t bear to be alone with the news. I saw how she was looking at Ibrahim. He wouldn’t notice because he was usually so busy telling Nixon or whoever was president on the TV that he was going to kill him.”

“Kill him?” Sherri Hazad said, and dropped another kibbe. “Have you heard anything about any current political leaders? Anyone you’ve heard people saying they’d like to kill? Just out of curiosity.”

“Don’t get me started on that list,” Fatima said. She stood up to get more water for her hands and stepped right into the kibbe Sherri Hazad had dropped. Frustrated, she bent down to clean it up. “Haven’t you learned anything from the servants who rule your palaces for you? Or are they just trained puppets?”

It was hard to tell if Fatima was talking about Middle East political regimes or food. Sherri Hazad formed another meat and wheat ball and began drilling.

“Let’s go back to Amir and Saudi Arabia for now,” she suggested. “So does Amir ever go to see him there?”

“Who?”

“His father.”

“What father?” Fatima said.

“Soraya’s ex-husband,” Sherri Hazad reminded her.

“He’s not Amir’s father.
Ibaad el-sher
. Keep evil away,” said Fatima.

“Oh, sorry,” Sherri Hazad said.

“Do you want to know the big secret of Amir?” Fatima hissed. “This is the big one.”

“God, I hope so,” Sherri Hazad said.

Fatima motioned for her to come closer. “Amir is an immaculate conception,” she said, and leaned back, wishing she had on one of her glasses to witness Scheherazade’s jealousy that she, Fatima Abdul Aziz Abdullah, had a miracle grandchild.

“Oh?” Sherri Hazad said.

“Oh, nothing,” Fatima explained. “Soraya didn’t have Amir until thirteen months after she got divorced and the creep was long gone to Saudi. Immaculate,
ya Allah.
”

“Oh … well. … But what if Soraya was …” Sherri Hazad stuttered.

“Soraya what?” Fatima said, lifting up her hand to stop any smirch to her daughter’s character by anyone but herself. “All my girls married the first man they kissed.
Khallas
, that’s all. After Soraya found out that the other woman was having a baby with her no-good man, she cried and cried, for a child is the one thing everyone should get out of a marriage, no matter how it ends. It was as if God heard her tears and gave her Amir.”

“Okay, okay, then,” Sherri Hazad said, struggling for words. “So, moving on, um, to the best of your knowledge this daughter is now supporting Amir from money made in a Mexican border town.”

“She’s been everywhere helping, as she calls avoiding her own family,” Fatima said. “Circuses and festivals all over the world. And she makes people think she has mystical powers like you.”

“Don’t believe all the wild stories you hear about my job,” Sherri Hazad advised.

“No need to be modest,” Fatima said. “Could you start making the hummus?”

“Umm …” Sherri Hazad said.

“
Ya bint el-hara
, weren’t you trained to do anything?” Fatima exclaimed. “Look for the can with the picture of chickpeas on it. Just open it and put it in the food processor.”

“I can do that.” Sherri Hazad sounded relieved.

“So help me, if Amir lets any of his disguises get in the hummus today,” Fatima vented.

“Disguises?” Sherri Hazad asked.

Fatima began dividing the kibbe into smaller batches. She kept out ten to fry for tomorrow. The rest she started bagging to freeze for her condolences.

“I told you what you wanted to hear,” she said. “Now you tell me how it’s going to happen.”

“What’s going to happen?” Sherri Hazad asked.

“There’s only four days left, so just tell me. Is it going to be big?” Fatima said. “An explosion of drama and emotion?”

“Let me look into that a little more on my end,” Sherri Hazad said. She put her notebook in her purse. “Do you mind if I come back later?”

“How much later?” Fatima scolded. “I want to know now. You are not being fair.”

“That’s a complaint I often get,” Sherri Hazad said. “I will come back, I promise. And you’ll call me if you know more.”

“Ha,” Fatima said, wondering what was written on the silly card she had just handed her. “Before you go, at least look at the clock for me.”

“It’s about four-fifteen, madam,” Sherri Hazad said.

“Strange. Randa hasn’t called today,” Fatima thought aloud. “I wonder if she’s heard anything from Gaza.”

Sherri Hazad sat back down. “Gaza?”

“If you’re going to stay, add the tahini to the hummus,” Fatima instructed.

Sherri Hazad looked for the jar that said tahini and began pouring its contents into the food processor. “You were saying about Gaza?” she shouted over the food processor’s whir.

“Her daughter Dina should be in Gaza now,” Fatima informed her. “Her mother was not so clear on her whereabouts yesterday. She went to Beirut, even southern Lebanon, too, can you imagine? But she has not had a chance to go to Deir Zeitoon yet. Soon,
inshallah.
”

“
Inshallah
,” Sherri Hazad mumbled, still pouring tahini.

“What are you doing?”

“Putting in the tahini,” Sherri Hazad responded.

“You should have stopped doing that by now,” Fatima said. “Just let the food processor run for three and a half minutes.”

Sherri Hazad was good at obeying orders and left the food processor to whir on its own. “Why was Dina in Beirut?”

“I don’t know exactly,” Fatima said. “She started law school in Los Angeles 188 days after I came here, but she was too busy to come visit, and then all of a sudden she decided to go to Lebanon. That’s what Randa says from Texas, but Randa’s life is a web of lies. It’s hard to keep up with the truth with her. Maybe you can go figure it out.”

Sherri Hazad looked at her: no hearing aid, no eyeglasses except reading glasses she couldn’t use to read. “This is not how I wanted our meeting to turn out,” she said under the din of the food processor.

“What?” Fatima asked.

Sherri Hazad turned off the food processor and saw Fatima’s nearby glasses next to the cash envelope. She picked them up and tightened the ends with her hands. “You should put your glasses on. It’s safer in these troubled times.”

“Was there a time when things were not troubled?” Fatima countered, and put them on her face. “Hey, I think they fit.”

When she looked up, Sherri Hazad was gone.

Fatima shrugged. She moved to the food processor. The hummus was very gray. “Who puts half a jar of tahini in?” she said to the food processor.

She went to the chrome fridge to get some lemons to counter the tahini. Why was she having so much trouble outsmarting a woman who didn’t even know how to make hummus into revealing what could be so terrible about her death that she kept avoiding telling her?

WHAT FATIMA HADN’T
seen without her glasses was the real Scheherazade, who had awoken to the surprise of daytime chatter in Amir’s home. When Scheherazade had found the serious female in the kitchen, she had looked on from the stairwell. She wanted to see Fatima’s reaction when she finally figured out this woman was not her. That did not happen.

Scheherazade pulled out the hearing aid and faraway glasses and put them on the vanity for Fatima. No matter how blind she was, how dare Fatima confuse her with a bumbling woman who wore pants—with no embroidery. She wouldn’t go see Randa as Fatima probably was taking for granted. But Scheherazade was also hungry, and the aroma in Fatima’s kitchen propelled her instead toward Gaza—and the chance to get some good
labneh
and tamarind juice.

It did not take Scheherazade long among the crowds, bullet holes, and collapsed buildings of Gaza to see that she was not likely to find Dina, for nearly no one who had the choice to be somewhere else was there. She continued to fly across the Mediterranean, across lands that smelled of the sweets and spices of Fatima’s kitchen. Off the sea, Beirut gleamed with tall buildings and newly engineered cobblestone streets, so many of its pasts gone and rebuilt over, although several craters of war remained. Beirut, the Paris of the Middle East, the Geneva of the Arab world. That was what people had been calling Beirut for nearly sixty years, as if it had to be compared to a great European city to prove its worth. As the afternoon call to
prayer began over the sound of honking, Scheherazade spotted Dina. This was a city of women who spared no expense or effort to achieve beauty, but the shiny waves of one girl’s flowing locks stood out. The girl did not have the bumpy nose, but she had the vibrantly lush hair Fatima had had that first day she’d met her, although Dina’s was perfectly blond.

DINA HAD NOT
made it to Gaza because it wasn’t the kind of place to go to when one already had a broken heart. Well, actually two broken hearts. At least in Beirut there were places to escape misery.

Dina’s perfect thighs stuck to the vinyl of the taxi’s backseat, and she was stuck somewhere between Texas and Gaza and somewhere between pissed off and depressed as hell.

The taxi driver rolled his 1984 Mercedes 190E through another red light along the Corniche, which was crowded with Friday afternoon walkers trying to catch a Mediterranean breeze on a very humid summer afternoon. The driver lit a cigarette, using the cab’s N
O
S
MOKING
sign as a flint. When she had arrived here, the law student in Dina would have said something, but now she absently waved the smoke aside and closed her eyes. Today both of her boyfriends had broken up with her—via e-mail. Cowards. Losers. Assholes.

Dina had come to Beirut for love and to make up for (a) being so lucky in life, as one of her boyfriends called it in his e-mail, and (b) being oblivious to reality, as the other one had said in his e-mail. But she wasn’t feeling lucky or oblivious right now. Nor was she feeling way sweet, way generous, way cool, or way hot—all words written next to smiley faces to describe her in her high school yearbook, right next to a picture of her in the air cheering the Kinross Falcons, one of the most well-funded football teams in one of the most expensive schools in Houston.

A tiny fist clutching a lottery ticket shoved its way through the taxi
window. “Auntie, is this your lucky day?” shouted a little Lebanese boy wearing a tattered “New York Jiants” T-shirt. He had patches on his skin that were a mixture of dirt and vitiligo. He fanned the ticket in front of her face. She basked in the fanning for only a moment.

“Get lost, kid,” the cab driver said to the boy. His cigarette smoke formed a carbon monoxide blanket in front of Dina’s eyes when he turned to her. “Sorry for the intrusion, miss.”

The boy, unfazed, stuck his head back in and gave her an exaggerated frown. She forced herself to turn away.

“I guess it’s not your lucky day, Auntie.” The boy shrugged, waving the tickets one more time. Dina looked back until the boy had been folded into the strolling masses.

“
Occasion, occasion
, get your lottery tickets here,” was the last thing she heard him say.

“You know, before the lottery tickets, before the war, they used to sell Chiclets,” the cab driver said as he rolled up the windows of the Mercedes to fend off another boy approaching with more tickets. “This is better. No dentists needed, and there is hope in lottery tickets. What good is there in American chewing gum? No offense, miss.”

No one in Beirut saw Dina’s Arab features, and she didn’t point out the fact that she was not only American but Texan, too.

IT WAS BECAUSE
of Jamal Masri’s fine butt that Dina had spent the last month in Beirut. Jamal had sat next to her on the first day of her business law class at UCLA the last winter quarter. He had soft black curls that framed eyes as big and green as those of Fluffy, her mother’s cat. He had handed her a flyer with a brown girl in rags sitting on a pile of rubble. It was for an antiwar protest. “I thought you might be interested in joining us,” he said with an accent that was there in that barely-there-sexy-foreign-accent way.

“Why?”

“Bitar is a pretty well-known Palestinian family,” he said, pointing to the name on her notebook and pronouncing it as only her grandparents did. “So are you of the Nablus Bitars? We’re probably related, if that’s the case. I’m a Masri. Jamal Masri.”

No one had ever identified Dina before by family name or village. It made her uncomfortable. Just being Texan—heck, just being Houstonian—was enough identity, never mind American and Arab. Nor had it ever occurred to her that Arabs could be so hot. She pictured Yasir Arafat, Saddam Hussein, or her grandfather Ibrahim when she heard the words
Arab man
, which she rarely did except when she was watching the latest terror alert on FOX News. Jamal, however, was unmistakably hot. She forced herself to think of Jake.

“I have to study on Saturday.” She handed him back the flyer, failing for the first time to give a guy a perky smile. “Sorry about that.”

“They’re interviewing me on KPFK tomorrow morning,” Jamal said to her on the way out of class. “Check it out.”

Dina asked Jake later that night what KPFK was. “Oh, Pacifica Radio.” Jake laughed. “A bunch of crazy, liberal, Arab-loving, Spanish-speaking Jewish homosexuals.” Jake was actually quite open-minded compared with most of the people she’d grown up with, and so she knew that he had laughed without meaning any harm to anyone crazy, liberal, Arab, Spanish-speaking, Jewish, or homosexual. The next day, Jake caught up with her on campus and handed her his iPod. “I downloaded this for you.” He smiled. She stuck in the earphones.

“Look, nobody better than the people in Middle East understands what it is to have your land attacked, as we were here on September 11,” she heard Jamal’s impassioned voice resonate. “But let’s look at how President Bush responded. He took an eye for an eye and then went for every other body part—on people who had nothing to do with it.”

Jake was making the cuckoo sign. Dina turned away from him and pushed the earphones farther into her ear. Jake pulled out the right earphone.

“That’s enough of the kooks, D,” he said. “Give me back my iPod.”

She waved Jake aside. The rest of the day Dina was preoccupied with Jamal’s voice … and butt.

After watching the Lakers game on TV with Jake that night, Dina closed her business law book and ran her finger along her bookshelf several times until she found
A History of the Arab People
, a colorful paperback her Tayta Fatima had sent her on her twentieth birthday. Dina had dutifully replied with a thank-you note and placed the book on the shelf as she had done with all the other books her grandmother had given her. Tayta Fatima chose books for their color scheme, and Dina found that they added life to her apartment’s decor. She sat down and began reading.

Two days later, Dina was looking at Jamal’s flyer again when her mother called from her veranda in Houston.

“How’s Jake?” Randy asked before Dina could tell her about how she herself was doing.

“He’s sleeping off an all-nighter,” Dina answered, letting her mom believe she was talking about studying when in fact he was at home puking from Los Angeles tacos and too much tequila at his frat house the night before. “But it works out fine because I can study by myself today without any distraction.”

“See, his passing out couldn’t have happened at a better time,” Randy said. “It’s a sign. Soraya says we just have to see the signs. She saw a baby giraffe at the zoo thirty years ago, and that’s how she knew she was pregnant with Amir.”

Randy’s signs were all about Jake. Jake, so blond, so blue-eyed, so tall, so white-toothed, the son of a corporate executive whom Bud, Dina’s dad and lawyer to Houston’s star crooks, had kept out of jail so far. Jake was a fantasy son-in-law for Randy, who also claimed that it was a sign that both Dina and Jake had been accepted to UCLA law school and that both had immediately felt that the Mexican food there was nowhere near as good as Texas’s.

After saying goodbye to Randy, Dina went on eBay to forget her conversation with her mother. She bid on a vintage Pucci dress with her dad’s credit card. Then she went to the library.

However, Randy was right. Signs were exactly what Dina witnessed as she looked outside the window of the law library “No Blood for Oil,” “Not in My Name,” and “How’d Our Oil Get under Their Sand?” she read as an antiwar protest marched by, giving her a perfect view of Jamal Masri’s butt. Holding up one end of a banner saying “Say Can You See My Democracy,” Jamal was the march’s leader.

Dina guzzled half of her bottle of water to purify her skin, as her mother had taught her. Then she ran a brush through her hair, thinking her dark roots were getting too obvious. After the quarter ended, she’d go see Carlo, maybe let him give her bangs, too. She slapped on some lipstick and checked her teeth for color stains in her window reflection. She closed her books and left the library.

RANDY WOULD HAVE
killed Soraya if she knew what signs Dina was reading. Beyond snide comments on the spending habits of the rich Arabs shopping at the Galleria, whom no one could really differentiate from the rich Mexicans, the Middle East had kind of faded out of daily conversation in Houston since the 1973 Arab oil embargo. But with September 11, Arabs were back, worse than ever. Dina, who hadn’t been alive in 1973, didn’t remember Abscam and Munich. Randy had worked hard to make such history irrelevant to all three of her daughters.

She and Bud had moved away from Detroit, away from Om Kalthoum on staticky speakers, talk of tangled global conspiracies, and the odor of frying falafel.

With Bud, Randy had built a life doing all the right things for maximum public viewing: the Junior League, the Humane Society, elite gym membership at the Houstonian. Hell, if she didn’t think she’d get caught, she would have tried to join the Daughters of the American Revolution.

She was very glad that Bud was almost pale, not dark like Laila’s and Nadia’s husbands; didn’t have an accent; and had a last name that could pass as anything, even Jewish. Just to make sure they weren’t mistaken for Arab or Jewish in Texas, Randy got a nose job to get rid of the bump she’d
inherited from Fatima. Then she had given all her girls solid American names: Loretta, June, and Dina. She had named her youngest daughter after Dina Merrill, the pretty heiress to the Post cereal and E.F. Hutton fortunes. She didn’t discover until years later that Dina was a far more common name in the Middle East than in the States.

She had even changed her own name—and Bud’s—when they arrived in Houston. “Oh, Bud and I just thank y’all for inviting us to your barbecue,” she had said with her nasal Midwestern accent to her new Texas friends. That barbecue was where Bashar had learned he had become Bud. His eyes had poked up out of the cowboy hat she’d purchased for him for the occasion. It was one of the few times Bud had questioned his wife, now Randy even to him.

“When’s the last time you heard someone say what kind of name is that—oh, Palestinian—oh, yeah, that’s what I need, a Palestinian lawyer?” she had whispered to him as he bit into his chiliburger. “A lawyer descended from people who lost their land and haven’t been able to win their legal right to return. Oh, yeah, that’s the kind of lawyer everyone wants. If anyone asks where you’re from, just say our house is in the River Oaks area.”

And if anyone asked where his grandparents had sailed from, he asked if they wanted to partake of his membership at the Houston Yacht Club. That usually sealed the deal. Bud’s only ambition was to succeed enough to honor his parents adequately for all the hours they had spent doing research at a small university’s chemistry lab so that he could go to a bigger university. He knew that was why they both had died of lung cancer so young. Anything else on Randy’s agenda, he accepted. He preferred domestic peace to arguing. He did enough arguing at work.

DINA STOOD ON
the steps of Royce Hall, forced her eyes away from Jamal’s butt, and telephoned Jake like a good girlfriend.

“Hey, babe, I’m going to protest this war,” she said. “Come join me, sweetie.”

“I got to go blow chunks again,” Jake howled. “Montezuma’s revenge is back.”

Dina put away her cell phone and saw Jamal’s eyes locked on her. He waved her over.

“So you came, after all,” Jamal said. “There’ll probably be camera crews by the time we get to the Federal Building.”

“Oh,” she said. He hadn’t said she looked pretty today, which was usually how guys said hello to her.

A graduate student in a head scarf handed Dina a sign that read “No Blood for Oil.”

“Thanks for coming,” the girl said, sounding anything but sincere as she looked at Dina’s platforms from the Nordstrom Half-Yearly Sale.

“I like the color of your scarf,” Dina replied. “It really brings out your eyes.”

Jamal laughed. “Come on,” he said, chuckling. “Move your ass.”

Move yours, she thought, her face turning redder than her Clinique blush.

“I knew deep down you had to care,” Jamal said. “After all, how could you not? God, in our families, if we weren’t talking about the Middle East at dinner, we probably weren’t talking.”

Dina pictured Randy and Bud and her sisters gathered around a roast with succotash and twice-whipped potatoes, their faces lit by an elaborate deer antler chandelier, the five of them distant dots on a long table made of Texas Hill Country oak.

Then Dina remembered something. “They flinch and bite their tongues,” she said.

“Hey, let’s save that for later.” Jamal winked. “Whatever it means.”

“I mean my parents have started flinching and biting their tongues when they watch the news and it’s about the Middle East, especially when others are around,” Dina said. “Like at the gym.”

He nodded. “My mom bites her nails when Bush comes on TV in a restaurant or something … but at home, look out. We got to hold our plates down.”