The Night Counter (19 page)

“That’s so cool.” Dina smiled. “I mean that you’re working on it.”

The Tucker case was a migrant labor lawsuit her dad had taken on pro bono at her request after Jamal had e-mailed her a
New York Times
article about it.

“D, do you think I should keep the Beamer, or should I get a Range Rover?” Jake asked. “Which car says ‘I’m not just a lawyer—I win?’”

“A Honda Civic.” Dina laughed but saw that Jake wasn’t laughing.

“Seriously. If I go with the Rover, I should get it this weekend,” he said.

“Well, Bud has a Lexus,” Dina suggested.

“Boring,” Jake said.

When she saw a 7-Eleven, she told Jake to stop. She went in and bought them each a lottery ticket. At the terminal, she handed Jake his ticket.

“Maybe you’ll get lucky this summer,” Dina said.

“I’ll hold you to that when you get back.” He smiled.

She blew her official boyfriend kisses until she came to the spot where she legally exited the United States.

On her own, Dina let her nerves take over, nerves she hadn’t felt since the cheerleading squad’s state championship finals. Without her squad members, Dina’s senses took on a darker flavor as she flew from Houston to Paris, where she changed planes to Beirut. The passenger demographics got decidedly louder after Paris: more children, more yelling over her head, more shuffling of bags crammed with electronic gifts.

At the airport, Dina saw Jamal’s butt first. When he turned around, so did a tiny person with unremarkable features: Allison from the protest. Jamal’s butt was still nice, but he was darker than before, thinner, his eyes bigger and even greener. Dina wasn’t sure how she was supposed to greet him. He reached his hand out for a shake. Jerk. Then he leaned in and kissed her on both cheeks. A little better.

“Welcome, Dina,” Jamal said. Then he put his arm around Allison. “Allison’s been the summer volunteer coordinator with the UN branch that manages the camp, for four years. She’ll be your roommate at AUB.”

Allison kissed her on both cheeks with lips colder than the iced tea at Harlon’s—and with none of the enthusiasm she’d had for Dina as a protester.

Dina sat in the back as they drove away from the airport in Jamal’s dented 1987 Peugeot. She tired to ignore the stink from the overflowing ashtrays as she wondered when Allison and Jamal had slept together. She was sure they had, and she was sure they did not anymore. In any case, there was no need for Allison to go hostile on her. It wasn’t like she was planning on sleeping with Jamal. Dina remembered her team spirit award from senior year. Surely, Allison could be won over again.

“So, Allison, when did you get here?” Dina asked.

“Two weeks ago,” Allison replied without turning to look at her.

“Allison’s grandparents were missionaries here way before the war,” Jamal added. “Even taught at AUB.”

“Jamal didn’t tell me what your skills were,” Allison said. “You know, so I know how to place you in the volunteer schedule.”

“Just being here is a help,” Jamal answered for Dina.

Allison gave a grim smile, and the three fell into silence, allowing Dina to look out at Beirut, which was alive with cars, people, music, women in miniskirts, others in long dresses and head scarves, peddlers selling roasted corn, posters of pop stars right next to Khomeini flyers, and billboards overhead with women in skimpy lingerie hawking everything from toilet bowl cleaners to perfume. Along the crowded beachfront, along streets filled with boutiques, at nearly every intersection, young boys
carrying lottery tickets ran up to Jamal’s car, pasting their faces against the window. But he would not roll it down.

Jamal looked back in time to catch Dina’s disapproval. “I knew you’d be giving me the business,” he said, laughing. “But if I bought a ticket from every single boy, I’d have no money to buy my own lunch. In Lebanon, either you are born lucky or you aren’t, and not much changes after that.”

He drove into an area of lush palm trees, blooming hibiscus vines, perfect rose gardens, and beautiful limestone brick buildings. As he took Dina’s suitcase out, Jamal told her for the tenth time how great it was to see her.

“I’ll get you in the morning,” he promised, and blew a kiss in the general direction of both women. Dina followed Allison into the women’s dorm of the American University of Beirut.

“That’s your bed,” Allison said. She put on shorts and a T-shirt and crawled into her bed. “Good night.”

Dina, thrown off by jet lag, barely could sleep that night and was relieved when her bed was covered in hot sunlight. She went to the communal bathroom and felt like she had entered the makeup room for the Miss Texas pageant. The young women looked more like her than her cheerleading squad, only more perfect. She got a little confidence back when she blow-dried her hair because she saw that Carlo had done a particularly good job with the highlights. Allison came in just after Dina had loaded up her mascara wand.

“Jamal’s waiting,” Allison said. “Let’s go.”

“I got to finish my face,” Dina answered.

Allison stood waiting, wearing no mascara, no lipstick.

Jamal was in the Peugeot, eating the biggest loaf of pita bread Dina had ever seen. He tore it and handed her half. Then he shifted the stick and drove. Dina lost her appetite ten minutes later. The beachfront cafés and hotels gave way to roadside shacks, Fiats puttering down the road with families the size of militias stuffed in them, and mechanic shops working on thirty-year-old Renaults. The sights, smells, and sounds of poverty
increased with each meter they went south until they stood before a mass of trash piles, mud puddles, and honking, all enveloped in the stench of summer sewage.

“This is the entrance to Shatila,” Jamal told her. “It’s one of sixteen refugee camps in Lebanon, but unlike the other camps, less than half the residents are Palestinian. The rest are Syria’s and Lebanon’s poorest.”

Stepping outside of the car into rancid air bogged down with humidity, the three entered a crowded, dusty maze of tiny alleys, vegetable markets spilling over with people and tomatoes, haphazard rows of tin shacks, and faded clothing hanging on rooftop lines. Women in head scarves sat on the floor sorting through lentils. Other women carried jugs of water on their heads. Diesel minitrucks transported wilted produce, kicking out pungent fumes as they swept by. Pepsi and Fanta posters hung on the doorways that led to makeshift one-room homes with only pillows for furniture.

In back of the market, Dina saw a vacant lot with garbage piles higher than any cheerleading pyramid she had ever seen. “Why don’t they clean up that garbage and at least build some decent housing?” she asked. “I’ll get my dad to pay for it.”

“God,” Allison said through clamped teeth.

“Dina, under all that garbage is the mass grave of many of the women and children who were victims of the 1982 massacres here,” Jamal explained. “There are anywhere between a thousand and two thousand people buried there.”

Dina was glad she didn’t have more in her stomach than the pita. She had read in the books Fatima had given her about those massacres during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, an invasion that had left eighteen thousand people dead, in addition to tens of thousands who had died in the civil war raging at the time.

Most of the older boys waved lottery tickets in their faces as they walked through the camp. “Luck, miss, luck day, miss,” they sang, surrounding Dina.

Dina smiled and handed a boy with two flies perched on his head a
thousand-lira bill, ignoring Allison and Jamal’s attempts to stop her. The boy, wearing a school uniform he had outgrown two grades ago, gave her ten tickets.

“No, just one,” she told him, handing back the others. “You try your luck with the others.”

“Crazy lady pretty,” the boy told Jamal.

“Yes, she is,” said Jamal, not seeing Allison’s face cloud over. “Get to class, kids.
Yallah, yallah, ya’awlad.
” The kids giggled when he switched to Arabic.

Dina handed Jamal and Allison each a lottery ticket. Allison gave hers back.

“If you are going to insist on giving money, then it should be the right amount of money,” Allison said. “They don’t want charity. Right, Jamal?”

At the whitewashed building with the UN flag waving overhead, there were several other aid workers, some Lebanese, many European.

“Everyone, I’d like you to meet Dina,” Jamal said. He began introducing her around. “Most of these guys are staying in the dorms, so you’ll get to know each other pretty well.”

“Where are you from?” a French worker asked.

“She’s from Texas,” Allison replied for her.

“I’ll show Dina around today, and we’ll see where she fits in best,” Jamal offered as a few Europeans mumbled “Texas,” disturbed.

He took Dina’s hand as they walked back out to the squalor. She melted without the sun’s help and would have mistaken this for paradise for as long as he held her hand if it had not been for an old man hacking an endless cough from the rubble of a former building. Dina saw that there were people living in the rubble, mattresses laid out, and food piled up. From where she stood, the people in the building looked like toy tenants in an old dollhouse kicked over and stomped on by an angry big brother.

She was still looking at the sad dollhouse when Jamal was swarmed by a pack of kids in blue school uniforms who themselves were encircled
by a swarm of flies searching their Fanta-encrusted lips. Like the Pied Piper, Jamal led the jubilant kids to a one-floor concrete building covered with student drawings—kids throwing rocks at tanks; a woman in a head scarf shedding tears made of the red, green, and white; and Ariel Sharon in a gorilla suit holding a baby gorilla dressed in a U.S. flag.

The students sat at their desks, crammed together to fit sixty students in a space the size of Dina’s bedroom in Houston. She sat down to watch Jamal charm the kids into learning basic English with flash cards of things they did not own in Arabic or English: house, car, computer, air-conditioning. He won the kids over as easily as he had the reporters back in LA.

“
Filistine
is Palestine,” Jamal enunciated, teaching them how to say the name of their lost country in English, using a map of pre-1948 Palestine, old and out of date like everything in the dilapidated classroom aside from the students.

“Ballstein,” the kids repeated.

“Palestine,” Jamal said very slowly.

“Ballstein,” the kids said in unison.

“What do you think, Dina?” Jamal threw up his hands in frustration.

“Sounds German.” Dina smiled.

“Oh, fine, you try and teach them,” he challenged her.

“I didn’t even know there was an Arabic word for Palestine.”

He gave her a questioning squint. “Okay, kids, Palestine one more time,” he continued.

“Ballstein,” they shouted.

“You tell, miss,” said the boy with the most flies around him.

Jamal motioned with a big sweep for her to take center stage. She found sixty faces looking at her as though she knew something about Palestine, at least in English.

“Try it again,” she encouraged.

“Ballstein,” they said.

“
P
, you guys,
P
” Dina said, popping her lips. The kids started popping their lips in unison. She developed a popping beat to Palestine. They
echoed her. “
p … pppp… ppp … pp … pppp
,” they said to different stomps Dina made up.

“Pa … le … stine. One, two, three, four, five … Pal … es … tine,” Dina popped.

“One, two, three, four, five, Pa … le … stine,” the kids replied, joining Dina in clapping.

“
Bes
, stop,” Jamal called out, laughing, just as she got a good cheer going. He had worked up a sweat cheering along with the kids. “No more playtime.”

Dina sat down and watched Jamal be a real teacher. She could not understand what Jamal said to the kids in Arabic or recognize the letters in old newspapers he was helping them read. When the kids did raise their hands to speak, she could only make out the words
Iraq, Iran, Gaza
, and
Washington
, places that rolled off their tongues as easily as Paris Hilton or Xbox did at Kinross Prep.

Feeling useless, Dina absentmindedly cut up a leftover newspaper, making a pom-pom the way she used to when she was the same age as these children.

A little girl left her desk and came up to her.

“What this?” the girl asked.

“Just something my friends and I used to make before we became real cheerleaders,” Dina said. The girl shrugged, and so Dina showed her a basic pom-pom salute. The girl giggled, and the others gathered around Dina.

“Our pom-poms were a little more fun because our newspaper had color photos,” Dina explained. “You know colors?” They continued to stare at her. She turned to Jamal, but he pretended to be confused, too. Dina looked around for help and found only the pictures the kids had drawn. “Yellow, red, blue, black, and white.” Dina pointed to those colors on a drawing of a man facing a machine gun, a rainbow overhead in the distance. The kids repeated after her.

“You’ll teach them English,” Jamal said after the kids could repeat the whole rainbow. “And arts and crafts. And gymnastics. There are volunteers
coming from France next month who speak pretty good Arabic, and they can help with the academics.”

I’ll teach the useless classes, Dina thought, me Miss Phi Beta Kappa. But for the next month, Dina cheered the kids through cartwheels, toe touches, and jumps done to English vocabulary. “It’s all in the prep, lift, execution, and landing,” she’d tell them. “Practice, practice, practice.”

Escaping the camp in the evening gave her two things: fresh air and a chance to walk with Jamal around campus or to Bliss Street for dinner. Even on the days Allison didn’t come with them, he did little more than kiss her.

“I respect your boundaries,” he said more than once. “All men should.” Jamal’s sensitivity heated her up the way she imagined hot flashes would one day, but in a good way. It was merciful that her virginity intimidated him because when the heat finished passing through her body, she would remember Jake, her hidden boundary.