I lean out the window and lay my forehead on Teta’s broad back. If I close my eyes, I can remember being carried in the thick branches of her arms. “I wish I was as strong as you.”
She slips a furred sprig of purple sage behind my ear, then cuts a bit of kazbara for later. She angles her bulk back through the window. Teta is a sturdy ship in the too-small harbor of this apartment. I gather up the remnants of our man’ousheh while Teta sets the fresh cilantro in a cup of water. She sets the cup on top of the fridge to discourage Asmahan from drinking it. As I crumple our oily napkins, my gaze drifts from Teta to your Laila Z, the sun glinting off the wooden frame. It’s a hair crooked, and I rise to straighten it. I’ve been studying the bird since Sabah gave it to you, but I still can’t tell what species of hudhud it is. I thought about asking Sabah once, but I didn’t want to make a fool of myself to your best friend. I was supposed to be the ornithologist’s kid, supposed to absorb everything you knew. I failed, though to your credit, you never gave up on me. You were still teaching me up until the day you died.
A second set of fingers strokes the frame. You never come two days in a row. This is not supposed to happen. I am not supposed to have to miss you so much.
“Teta,” I call out into the kitchen, “you want me to do the dusting before dinner? The frame needs it.” Maybe if I go about my day as though you aren’t here, you’ll leave. Out of the corner of my eye, you seem wounded.
“Ma’alish,” Teta calls back, “leave it.” She fills the teapot with water and lights the stove. She looks up at me and then squints at the dusty frame of your Laila Z, and it’s impossible to tell if she is only pretending to look through you. “It wasn’t so common those days, a woman painter. And to paint with all those details, like a scientist—it was rare, yanay. Beautiful, her birds.”
I roll and unroll the hem of a doily on the end table. “Mom never really accepted her disappearance.”
“No.” Maybe Teta doesn’t see you after all. She is rubbing the leaves from a cutting of sage, preparing to make tea. “By the time we arrived, she was missing nearly twenty years.”
You tap the corner of the frame, and underneath the illustration is a signature in Arabic, one I’ve seen before. I could go to my room and pull out Laila’s notebook, let the words pour out of me, tell Teta about the community house and the watercolor sparrow. But in my mind’s eye I can hear what Teta will say, the way she will turn her face from me, the way she will plead with me not to root around in the past the way I do, the way you did. Teta has lost too much to the hunger of memory. I’ve given up trying to force that lock.
But those birds. The details on the tail feathers, the beak, the scales on the toes. “It’s hard not to imagine what might’ve been. If things were different.”
“Eh.” Teta nods her agreement. She fills her silver tea egg with sage, then stops so long I nearly ask her if she’s all right. “I was in love once,” Teta says, “before your jiddo.” She pauses, even her hands. “There was someone.”
* * *
I wait for Teta to fall asleep in her easy chair for her afternoon nap, then tuck Laila Z’s notebook under my shirt and open Teta’s walk-in closet. A quarter of the space is dedicated to the frames wrapped in brown paper that house prints of Laila’s illustrations, along with two rare aquatints. All your things are here, just as Teta was keeping them for you when you died.
Though Laila Z was never able to secure gallery representation, she did do some illustration work for publishing houses, mostly for birding guides and conservation campaigns. One of her aquatints, like the hudhud in Teta’s sitting room, was a gift from Sabah. The other you saved up for years to buy.
I understood, even as a child, how much you loved Laila Z’s birds. Once, while you were saving up to buy that second aquatint—the yellow-crowned night heron—I offered you my life savings in my ceramic piggy bank, but you refused. When you got tenure, not a year before your death, you bought that print to celebrate. Sabah was the only curator of Arab American art that we knew in those days, so she was the one who helped you find it. Aquatint, a variant of etching, isn’t so widely used anymore; it produces tone rather than color, with lines etched to create detail and depth. Laila Z insisted on hand-coloring her prints with watercolor, creating startling images with hyperrealistic anatomical details. They have a surreal, flattened look to them, with all the detail of pen and ink and the ethereal wash of watercolor. There are still a few galleries that show Laila Z’s work—what little of it is still circulating these days, produced before her disappearance back in ’46—but being a naturalist, observational painter, and a woman besides, she’s generally been relegated to the obscurity of time. Just a few weeks before your death, you had Sabah over to pick her brain about Laila Z’s last painting before her disappearance, trading theories on what was known to exist—and what might have happened to her.
Sabah, along with most of the art world, was beyond certain that everything we’d ever know about Laila Z had already come to light. Her disappearance coincided with the city’s destruction of Little Syria, all records of her vanishing, and so everyone took this dead end to mean death. You were one of the few who refused to let her memory die.
You loved Laila Z long before you started campaigning to save the remaining half of the old tenement on Washington Street, the one that’s been reduced to an empty, weedy lot since your death. But by the end, you became so passionate about saving the building her family lived in that even for me, it was hard to remember which obsession came first. Maybe the painter’s activist spirit inspired you. Maybe that’s what fueled your desire to save the nest of rare birds you found on the old tenement’s roof during the building inspection, the birds that set everything in motion. Either way, you took the nest as a sign, adding it to your long list of reasons to save the building. When you joined forces with the local masjid in trying to buy the old tenement, the fact that the purchase would not only save the home of both painter and birds but also create space for the local Muslim community made you even more determined. It couldn’t all be a coincidence, you said, all these reasons popping up like crocuses. You believed that God was the remover of obstacles; you used to talk about the future as though it were something we could build for ourselves. It was an omen that the birds had chosen that building to roost on, you said. There were only two tenements left on Little Syria’s stretch of Washington Street—history was slipping away. You reminded me of the power Allah gave to Solomon to understand the language of the birds, the way that all things were signs for those who look. But you read those signs wrong.
I shuffle through the frames tucked in their brown wrappers, peeking under the taped corners of the paper. You once looked with love on these paintings; your passion made me want to create beautiful things when I grew up. But I didn’t grow up to be a Laila Z. I wonder, if you were still alive, if I could take you with me on the subway, walk you down to Lower Manhattan and show you the murals I’ve been working on, the hudhud and her crown.
When I open the corner of one of the packages, I find you sitting beside me in the narrow closet in the dark, examining the edges for dents or rips, your legs crossed under you like you always sat with me on the old Persian rug on your bedroom floor. You’ve got your hijab off, your hair mussed as though you’ve slept on it, the white hairs in your part preserved forever from the last time you dyed your hair black with henna and indigo. Two generations before you, our ancestors were nomadic. You used to sit like this and tell me stories about my great-great-grandmother, the one who killed scorpions with her bare heels and slit the throats of the goats on Eid. You and Teta Badra before you and Teta’s mother before her—my great-grandmother Wafaa, daughter of the scorpion-killer—you were the bearers of bravery in our family. You were the one who fought to save the neighborhood I’m now sneaking into to paint each night. But you failed to realize that America has only ever deemed certain heritages worth preserving. If the Lenape were forced from their ancestral home on the island of Mannahatta, the eviction of Little Syria’s impoverished immigrants is no surprise, and it’s hard for me to imagine that things will ever be any different.