“Come now,” my mother said to my father. “Do you believe such things?”
“I’ve seen many things I would not have once believed.”
My mother set down her sewing and scolded my father that he was lucky to be alive. Though she raised her voice, I pretended to sleep.
“You have your life and two healthy children. Can’t you be happy with that?”
My father breathed in through his nose. The night lay still, uninterrupted by the usual sounds of evening, the happy noises I’d once heard: the neighbors in their gardens, telling stories, laughing over glasses of ara’ or cups of coffee. There were no such sounds from our neighbors now. Imm Rayan and her husband had left to join their son in Amrika, leaving the house to a cousin in Aleppo. The village had taken on a brooding quiet.
The owl sent its mourning cries into the dark. My father looked up from his account books. He fixed his gaze out the window on the empty house next door and said nothing, and I knew then that there was more than one way to imprison a man.
* * *
Little wing,
Today Khalto Tala snuck me away after my chores were done and took me to see a talkie at the Roxy movie palace off Times Square, on the condition that I not tell my mother. You’d like Khalto Tala, B, I’m sure of it. Sometimes I can hardly tell she’s my mother’s sister, they’re about as different as dandelion and hibiscus.
Khalto Tala left Syria long before my parents got up the courage to follow her. She was always the braver of the two sisters, so when she boarded a steamship bound for Amrika, no one was too surprised, even though it was rare for a woman to travel alone. Before we arrived in New York, I only had vague memories of her. I used to take solace in her letters, though, and in her tales about the land of plenty beyond the dark Atlantic. Khalto Tala sent back trinkets from time to time, baubles she bought for me or my brother with the money she made peddling. Khalto Tala had found someone in Amrika who was teaching her to read and write, and in her letters she built fantastical worlds for us back home.
None of the older women in my family knew how to read, not even my mother, who I used to believe knew everything. My father read the letters to us while my mother cooked or sat with my brother in her lap, and I would listen. That’s how I learned to read English, from reading the bits of it in her letters over and over. When my parents decided to invest in English lessons for Issa (who was, in fact, not well suited for languages), I would eavesdrop while I washed grape leaves for wara’ einab or mixed burghul and lamb with my hands for kibbeh, and after Issa’s lessons were over, I’d whisper what I’d learned to myself as I went about my day. And anyway, what did I have that was more interesting in those days than Khalto Tala’s stories? Khalti wrote of deep pine forests and ice-laden cold, of prairies flat as a palm and of sky melting into heaven, and these were my dreams in those days, the fantasies I escaped to when I was alone.
That’s what I was thinking of when I met you the day after Hawa’s death. At first, I didn’t even see you. I was walking home from school when I looked up and noticed a small gray bird fighting with a hawk. Though the bird put up a bold and desperate fight, the hawk tore the feathers from his wings and dropped him. I broke away from the cluster of schoolchildren and ran to the place where he’d fallen. It was a kite, one of the same birds I’d seen when Hawa crashed. His eyes were closed and his beak was open, his head tilted at an angle so that he looked like a holy man opening his mouth to pray.
You ran up to me as I scooped the kite into my hands, another girl in the same awkward stage of middle adolescence. We locked eyes—do you remember? We looked just alike back then, our hair the same shade of almost-black, our arms and legs the same gangly length, our strong chins all but identical.
You reached out to touch the kite’s feathers and asked me if he was dead. I thought he was; I couldn’t feel him breathing. We studied his feathers and the shape of his wings, the talons on his scaly feet. For a time neither of us wanted to speak. You asked if you could hold him. He seemed to belong with you. I was jealous, though I didn’t say so. You had the look on your face my mother once described to me of new parents—a wondrous silence. Finally you said we should give him a proper funeral, then picked up the feathers on the ground that had been torn out by the hawk. I thought of your hands months later on the ship to Amrika, how the feathers were longer than your fingers.
We buried the kite in my mother’s garden. We stood side by side for our prayers, but the heat of you so close distracted me, and I had to start over twice. I said the Lord’s Prayer over the bird’s body and crossed myself, and you said: “Surely we belong to Allah, and to Him we shall return.” We both said, “Ameen.”
Something about your face made me feel I was looking at myself. I’d been lonely so long. I put my arms around you and kissed you twice on each cheek, the way I’d been taught to greet the women in my family. I felt strange and light, but I pledged my sisterhood, because I had no words then for what that lightness meant.
You didn’t come to me with your gift until weeks later, tapping on my window before school one morning with a bundle wrapped in old linens. Your mother had been ill, as I recall, and you’d stayed home to take care of her. She was pregnant. You were hoping for a sister you could sew tiny dresses for. Back then, neither of us knew what lay ahead.
I unwrapped the linen bundle, curved like the seed of a mango. You’d stitched the feathers of the kite into a magnificent silver-white wing. You held your breath while I lifted it to the sun, and I thrilled at the thought that you cared for my approval. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
I brought the wing with me to school that day, hidden among my things. I took it everywhere with me, carried it in the folds of my skirt and tucked it beside me when I slept at night. With the wing under my pillow, I once dreamed that God visited me in the form of a bird. I don’t know why I think of it now. He was a slender starling, his feathers smoothly oiled, his iridescent plumage speckled with pearls. He perched on the window my father kept closed to the owl. I opened it, and there the King of Kings sat with the moon for a crown, preening his feathers. For the first time in many days, I felt peace.
When I awoke, it was to my father once again poring over his account books and my mother’s whispered prayers. My Lord’s visit had changed the inside of me, but out in the world, it had changed nothing. I lay with my eyes shut and your silver feathers beneath my head. I clutched their softness tight. I’ve showed your wing to no one since then, B, not even when I folded it into my steamer trunk when we left for Amrika. It reminds me that something pure still exists in this world, that something immortal can be lifted even from a harvest of torn feathers, and of all your qualities, little wing, that is the one I have always loved best.
THREE /
ON THE SUBWAY, THE first sign of dawn is a girl in a striped blouse who breaks the quiet of the empty subway car where I sit reading Laila Z’s diary. I’ve been riding the system all night since I missed the stop for Teta’s apartment. I’ve been sitting on this orange plastic bench, people shuffling forward and back around me, until all human presence trickled away to silence. Down here, I can almost pretend I’ve escaped the passage of time.