Even I believed, by the end, that what you imagined was really possible—that this abandoned tenement, the older of the two left on the block and the place where Laila Z and hundreds of other Syrian immigrants had once lived, could really become a place of prayer, a place of history, with a protected home for the birds who miraculously built a nest on the roof. But futures so beautiful are rare for people like us. You lost your battle and, in the process, I lost you to someone else’s anger. There was a confidence in everything you did that I never learned to emulate, a belief in everything you loved, as though victory was secured, as though it wasn’t a fool’s errand to believe in justice. You weren’t afraid when the death threats came, and you don’t look afraid now. For a ghost, you are strong-shouldered, the glow of middle age still gleaming on your brown hands. With no one else in this closet but us, I could be the one who died in the fire, not you. I am left with these paper-wrapped frames and the reminder you always gave me with a raised eyebrow: Don’t believe them when they tell you who is dead and who is living.
I stack Laila Z’s paintings back against the wall and rise to dust fuzwahs off my knees. I bang the top of my head against a low shelf. The shock of pain stuns me, and the shelf’s contents tumble to the floor: a stack of your leather-bound sketchbooks.
The first begins with dozens of pages of notes, followed by hand-drawn maps of Lower Manhattan. A block of Washington Street is indicated by a darkened rectangle, then inset in a larger view on the next page. The inset block reveals the second tenement next to the one still standing at 109 Washington Street. You’ve outlined the front of the building, drawn a red arrow to the westernmost window on the top floor. A sketch of a nest, the silhouette of two birds.
The sketchbook explodes into drawings—graphite, ink, charcoal, colored pencil, watercolor. The birds in this nest are birds I’ve never seen, bearing an unrecognizable name. Geronticus simurghus—third documented sighting, your notes read. The pages of notes spill over into another four notebooks, hypothetical migration routes that might have taken them to New York, the number of eggs in the nest, the coloration of the wings in the dawn light. And, throughout, references to the other two known records of this bird so rare it was once thought to be a fable: the century-old field notes of an ornithologist named Dr. Benjamin Young and an aquatint by Laila Z, hinted at only in a letter to a private collector you found buried in the archives of the New York Historical Society.
Though I never heard even Sabah mention the existence of an aquatint like this, I’ve seen sketches of a similar bird before. I dart out of the closet and into my bedroom, returning with Laila’s notebook. I flick through the pages. The entries are written in English but from the rightmost page to left, as in Arabic. I stop at an entry accompanied by a sketch of a cream-colored bird with hints of iridescence in its breast feathers, little more than a streak across the page.
I still remember the TV interview you did, the one that preceded the first wave of threats. I knew it was going to be a problem while you were filming it. At the time, I was convinced that it wasn’t the fact of the hypothetical masjid that set people off. It was the conviction in your voice when you talked about the birds. The newscaster must have done her homework; she brought out every look-alike species she could think of. You held fast. In the years since, I’ve been afraid of the knot of shame that was tied in my belly then: the shame of earnest belief. Don’t let them see the thing you love, I wanted to shout at you, but it was too late. I wanted to cover your mouth. I’d already learned from my father and my bullies that believing in something, for people like you and me, was a punishable crime.
And yet, here: your evidence waiting for someone to take up where you left off, your secret inkling that you, Dr. Young, and Laila Z all saw the same miraculous event that quickened your belief in the rare, in the impossible. You tried to tell me while you were alive, but I wasn’t ready to believe you. One of your sketchbooks has fallen open at your feet, revealing a watercolor inset of this rare bird’s pale breast. Your cross-legged ghost is no longer looking at me. Both our eyes drift to your sketch, a mirror half a century after Laila’s. You sit unmoving, your palms curved around the sketchbook. I lift it from the mist of your touch and cradle it as though it might shatter in my hands.
* * *
Sabah doesn’t pick up her office phone, so I walk down to her father’s shop on Atlantic to find her. The sidewalks are packed with girls in gauzy midi skirts and crop tops, boys in tropical print T-shirts and bright sneakers with unscuffed soles, men in plump middle age talking loudly on their phones. The restaurants, shisha bars, and coffee shops are packed with people whose apartments don’t have air-conditioning. The painted electrical boxes thrum with effort.
Sami has expanded his project: the light poles at one intersection are encircled with thick silk cord dyed emerald or wine or adobe pink, each cord tied into an intricate knot—an endless knot, or a bowknot, or a sheepshank, or a lark’s head. His efforts are working; I remember there was a police shooting not six months ago in this very spot that most people in this neighborhood, given the relentless pace of violence in this country, would have already stopped talking about. The knots are talismans against forgetting, and they work. I have not forgotten Sami.
The bell tinkles on the door of Sabah’s father’s shop when I push it open. I step inside into cool darkness. A path winds from the door to the back of the shop, past the ouds hanging in the window, the tawleh boards inset with mother-of-pearl, the brass coffeepots and trays assembled along the wall. The countertop is crowded with open boxes of roasted chickpeas and silver necklaces bearing Ayat al-Kursi, the floor with open canvas sacks of rice and bulgur wheat and fava beans that shoulder up against shelves of teas, halawa, and half a dozen kinds of pickled olives.
“As-salaamu alaykum,” I call out into the dark, and something metallic dings to the floor as one of the cats startles up from her afternoon nap.
“Wa alaykum as-salaam,” a deep cello of a voice calls back, and Sabah emerges from the kitchen behind the shop carrying a portable fan. Sabah is tall and broad-shouldered, a hewn marble slab of a person, but she maneuvers her square frame about the shop with surprising lightness. “Sit down. I’m brewing coffee.”
I follow Sabah back into the kitchen behind the shop floor, and taxi horns fade away. It’s rare to find the shop empty on a weekday afternoon. Sabah’s father has been in business so long, since he came to the States from Aleppo, that the whole neighborhood knows their family, so there’s always a steady stream of people who stop in to say hello and chat in Arabic. The delivery guys often stay for tea or coffee, arguing over politics with Sabah’s father, and when Sabah is in, the old Lebanese ladies stop by to pick up fresh bread and give Sabah the latest neighborhood gossip, mostly regarding who’s getting married and whose son just got into business school. Sabah always takes the news with a solemn nod and a grunt, and somehow this always placates the women, as though any response at all from Sabah is a precious thing. For as long as I can remember, Sabah’s cousins have affectionately referred to her as a hassan sabi, a tomboy. Even the delivery guys, when they speak to her in Arabic, tell her “tfaddal” instead of the feminine “tfaddali” when they hold a door open for her. It might be a running joke, but she never corrects them.