Lifted by the Great Nothing: A Novel (26 page)

Téta showed him a more recent picture of Samira. After nine years of prison, losing her family, and the unforgiving nature of time, his mother’s eyes brimmed over with disquiet and fatigue. They were big, pink eyes mapped with veins, but they had a keen and begging quality to them, not so different from Téta’s. Strands that had gotten loose from her ponytail created a sort of angelic orb of fuzz around her head, like a little girl. She was surrounded by dozens of children, and wore a poncho-like gray thing that Téta called an abaya. It covered her from the neck down, cloaking the form of her body. Téta said this was her at the refugee camp with the students.

He spotted a letter in Téta’s box and unfolded it without asking permission. The blue Arabic characters that looked like billowing sails had been bombed and blotted with teardrops.

“This letter is to me,” she said, and took it from him.

“I don’t get it,” said Max. “She writes you, but you haven’t seen her in fifteen years?”

“She wrote me only this one time.”

“Does she know about me?”

“Of course. She’s coming here only for you tonight, Hakeem.”

“And that’s why you wanted us to meet here. So you can see her too.”

To deflect his accusation, she gave more information. She said that Samira had come to Téta and Jiddo’s Beirut apartment in the summer of 1996. No one but Jiddo and their maid, Nadifa, were home. Jiddo opened the door and was face-to-face with his daughter for the first time in over ten years. Nadifa stood back at an angle, able to see everything. She would later describe Samira as no longer womanlike. No longer beautiful. As having a crazy person’s blank stare, and a few big scars on her face. It looked as if her nose had been broken and her hair cut with a knife. She’d very recently been released from al-Khiam prison.

Jiddo couldn’t look at her for long. Samira said, “Baba, it’s me.” He told her to go away, that Samira had died years ago. Samira stared on. They stood like this for minutes. Finally Samira said something that Nadifa couldn’t hear. And Jiddo responded with something along the lines of
Everyone is dead now. Please leave.
He closed the door on her and turned around to find Nadifa, telling her that if she said anything about this, he’d throw her to the street without her passport—Jiddo confiscated all of his maids’ papers when he hired them. She listened through the front door to Samira’s heavy breathing.

For three years Nadifa kept this secret, too afraid to say anything. Finally unable to hold it in any longer, she told Téta
what she remembered. Téta didn’t let Jiddo kick her out, promising to leave him if he tried such a thing, and returned Nadifa’s papers to her in case she wanted to leave on her own accord.

Téta started speaking to Jiddo again when he finished losing his mind two years before. Now Jiddo talked about Samira all of the time. He continued to speak English, and Téta took up Samira’s old habit of answering him in Arabic, save for when they had non-Arabic-speaking guests. Their relationship was the best it had ever been now that he was like a baby, and she was like a mother again.

There was something unnatural about this most recent photo of Samira, in that she looked both there and not there, paler than everyone else; she alone focused her eyes into the camera’s lens, mistrustfully, a warning to the viewer to step no closer. The children laughed and daydreamed.

“When Samira was five years old,” Téta said, “I knew she would never be a happy person.”

“What do you mean?”

“It is a curse to be so concerned with unfairness, and even at that age she was cursed. She fasted for Ramadan that year. It’s too young. We are not even religious people. We tried to force her to eat, but she refused. And she got worse with age. She wanted to feel what it was like to live a hard life. She saw beggars and wanted to live on the street like them. We compromised by letting her bring them things like blankets and food and so on. Most people forget the outside world—you must in order to carry on with your life—but she could not. She hated her good fortune. This is her curse. She cannot believe she deserves her good luck. Doesn’t deserve money, education, not even family. The life she chooses is an unhappy one.”

His mother’s rejection of a life of grandeur with a maid and too much food was to Max a sign not of unhappiness, but of strength and uncommon virtue. Téta, Jiddo, and Anika were
the unhappy ones. No one should be as rich as Téta and Jiddo. And now his mother had decided to revisit this castle in the middle of Paris because Téta had lured her here with Max, who she’d been hiding from Samira for years. Punishing his mother in the same sick way Rasheed had.

“Now Samira has started an NGO in the camp for preschoolers before they start at the UNRWA schools,” Téta said. “Do you know UNRWA?”

“It’s a UN thing.”

“Yes.”

“Have you been?” he said.

“No. Never.”

“Does she want to see me? Did she know about me?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Which? She wants to see me, or she knew about me?”

“Yes, of course.” She hastily put the pictures back in the box on top of the letter, as if somebody would burst in any second and catch them snooping around someone else’s things.

It made sense that he avoided pressing Téta for the obvious information: Why didn’t his mother ever find him? What had Téta told her? Had Téta, like Jiddo, kept Max away from his mother?

You don’t ask such important questions of people you don’t trust; people who have been complicit in the greatest lie of your life. He’d find out the truth about all these things tonight, assuming Téta wasn’t lying about his mother’s arrival. A few more hours shouldn’t make a difference. Max had to be patient a short while longer. For now, he needed to get away. He excused himself to go for a walk and said he’d be back for dinner. Téta gave him a key and a map of the city, and studied his face and body as though he might not return, telling herself to never forget what he looked like.

Max sat under a big manila sun and a fleece of clouds. He’d left his grandparents’ street of buildings that looked like giant yellow wedding cakes, then passed the Arc de Triomphe, walked the Champs-Elysées, the Place de la Concorde, through the Jardins to the Louvre and then back to the Tuileries, an area that looked exactly how he’d imagined Paris: an aristocratic landscape of ancient statues, enormous arches, designer shops, cobbled streets, skinny men and women, and fancy shrubbery.

He’d parked himself on the lip of a marble fountain with smoothly sculpted fish-children spitting water into arches. Square-trimmed walls of tree surrounded the park, patrolled by mothers pushing strollers. Gangs of French toddlers, in bright red and yellow and white polos, parted from their parents to experiment with what could and could not float in the fish-children’s fountain.

The toddlers learned that a dead sparrow floated in the pool. So did a clump of dirt, for a short while. A dry, bowed leaf floated if placed delicately enough. A toy boat did, but inelegantly after being dunked under a few times. They waited for it to resurface, making a gulping sound they enjoyed. But they respected it less now that its canvas sails were heavier, less graceful. A goose feather floated until it had its hairs taken under in bunches. Sometimes a rainbow of heavy water shot it under, cracking its spine, and other times it glided behind the cascades untouched. The toddlers watched, loving the lack of pattern; loving the idea of surprise. Some rooted for objects to stay afloat, but most expressed the greatest satisfaction when things sank. So far, no rules were apparent, only happenstance.

Max considered himself more authentic than the tourists around him, with their oversize backpacks and trail shoes, or the older ones with cameras and children and awestruck smiles at every monument or gargoyle. He felt sophisticated in how lightly he traveled and the mere fact that he had not, and explicitly would not, visit the Eiffel Tower.

He wanted to discover the Paris Nadine had talked about, with its Africans and Arabs and open-air markets. He looked at the map and found the names she’d mentioned, all in the northern part of the city: Château Rouge, Château d’Eau, Gare du Nord, and Barbès. He set out to Gare du Nord and then Pigalle by Métro. He surfaced so he could walk Boulevard de Rochechouart into Barbès, a lively place, grittier and more energetic than where his grandparents lived.

He moseyed down the center of the boulevard—with a pedestrian walk wide enough to have its own bike lanes, trees, benches, bathrooms, and loads of strolling people—toward Barbès.

He saw a large German couple wearing massive packs and cargo shorts, looking flustered as they spoke to a blind Indian
man. The German man shouted to the blind man as though he were hard of hearing, “I think I know exactly where is it, but we are going the opposite direction!”

The German woman chimed in, “Ya! We are late to get our things and meet our plane! We are not from here, you know?”

Panicked and flushed, the German man saw Max looking at them and called out, “Excuse! Excuse! Are you speaking English?”

“Yes.”

“Help us, please. Can you show this man to Barbès? We must catch the plane and we have not the time.”

“Yeah,” he said, “actually, that’s where I’m going anyway.”

They thanked Max a few times and left. The blind man looked about thirty. He turned to face Max, clouds of gray sitting in the middle of his white eyes. One of his cheeks was flattened and aslant, and he had scrapes and bruises on his chin and forehead, like he’d taken a bad fall recently. There were also anthills of razor burn on his jaw and neck, giving his face a granular quality.

“You ready?” Max said to him. “It’s not far at all, I don’t think.”

“It is a fine day,” the man said, hooking arms with Max and starting them off walking.

“It’s really nice.”

“Who are these people around us?” he asked.

Max looked around the pedestrian walk. “Who are these people?”

“Yes, the people walking around us now.”

“Oh, lots of different people just strolling. I’m Max, by the way.”

“And my name is Hanuman. What do the people look like, Max?”

“Which people?”

“Any of them.”

“Let’s see. Well, I guess there’s a bit of everything.”

“Men and women, I suppose?”

“There are both men and women, yes.”

“Young women?”

“Some,” Max said, noticing that the city had gotten very loud.

“How about over there?” He pointed at what happened to be a charming young woman sitting on a bench.

“Wow. Yeah, actually, there is one right there.”

“Does she have big tits?”

Uncomfortable, Max mumbled, “Pretty big.”

“Could you repeat?”

“I said, ‘Yeah, pretty big.’”

He glanced back at the woman, and she gave him a disgusted look, as if she knew what they were talking about.

“What’s she wearing? Something kind of—”

“Just a shirt and a skirt and boots, okay?”

“The skirt is quite short?”

Max said, “Normal, average length. Do you mind if I ask how you hurt yourself? Your face?”

“No. I do not mind if you ask. What was the color of her hair?”

“Brown. Straight. Pretty.”

“Pretty, huh? Soft skin?”

“I don’t remember. We’ve passed her now. So, how did you hurt yourself?”

“I was beaten up by
racailles
on the Métro.”

“Racailles?”

“Yes, this is the pejorative word that means ‘scum.’ They are most often the children of immigrant families from Africa or the Middle East that live in the peripheral ghettos of the city called the banlieue. They have baby faces and military haircuts.
They are poor and uneducated, and they are profiled and bullied by police. They are treated neither as French nor as members of their parents’ home countries. They are the result of social exclusion. Monsters. When my eyes face them, even though I cannot see, they ask if I want to take their fucking photograph.”

Max took a minute to absorb this thorough description. “And so they attacked you?”

“Correct. They were going behind people on the Métro, slapping the backs of their heads and laughing like some drunken wolves. I could feel them behind the young woman next to me, who smelled of flour and jasmine. One of them came around to face her, and with a voice like an electric blender asked the girl if she thought he was a handsome man. The girl did not answer, and I felt the heat of her fear expanding. Then he yelled at her, saying, ‘Oh, you don’t like Arabs, huh? Your daddy will not let you be with a dirty Arab?’ Etcetera, etcetera. He stopped yelling, and everything became very still. The boy cleared his throat and spit in her face. His friends howled with terrible laughter. She spat heavily, and the boy who spat on her said, ‘It is okay, baby, do not cry, honey, I’m sorry,’ in this very cruel and horny-like voice. ‘I’ll take care of you, come with me, baby, come with me, and I’ll take good care of you.’ All of the other passengers sat inside themselves like helpless prisoners, watching this girl be tormented. I was pumped with outrage. I stood up and said, ‘Stop.’”

Max waited. “So then what happened?”

“Then I heard the loudest sound. Like someone taking a big bite out of a very crisp apple, only one hundred times louder than that even. This sound was the breaking of my cheekbone. They kicked me while I was on the ground, curled like a snail. At the next stop they exited the car, very happy about their victory.”

“Jesus. What happened next? Where did the girl go?”

“Oh, I do not know. She cried for some time and then got off at the following stop. Only when the
racailles
were far away, and I still lay on the ground of the car, did the other passengers come to life. They fought over who got to take me to the hospital.”

Max told him how brave it was to stand up to those guys, and Hanuman said it wasn’t courage but an impulse. He explained he didn’t think about what could come next. Didn’t think about how those boys would love the chance to break his face. He reacted in the moment. Had he thought about these things, he would have stayed seated.

“You regret standing up to them?”