Ramadan Ramsey Read online

  So that morning—this morning—when Alicia declined to press her black hoodie into the service of concealing her secret, Mama Joon had looked up at her younger daughter without judgment. Alicia was standing out there in the living room staring, in profile, at the television, at the Today show, pouting at an innocuous remark one of the hosts had just made, as if they intended her some personal offense. (Her hormones must have already been setting her nerves on edge.) Yes, Mama Joon had looked up at Alicia and seen not, as some might have, the silhouette of a whore, but the shadow of hope.

  3

  The Disappearance of Mustafa Totah

  Where Mama Joon saw hope, Uncle Adad saw mischief. He saw sin. He saw the self-fulfilling prophecy of his own making: bad business. And he assumed others—not disinterested bystanders, but Alicia’s kin—would see the same. Or worse, rightfully so to his way of thinking, dishonor.

  The sun was not yet up, and Adad sat alone at the desk in his office sipping his second cup of tea, brooding over and justifying his decision to send Mustafa back to Syria. It was too late to change his mind now. The boy was already gone. Malik had taken him to the airport yesterday. Adad, treachery in his heart, had not had the will to go along and perform a theatrical goodbye based on a lie. Flight 622 on American Airlines to JFK, then to Istanbul, then home to Aleppo. Safe! Mustafa’s mother had conspired with Adad, claiming she was ill; she needed him to come home quickly to take care of her. What nonsense, of course. Rana, Adad’s hellion of a sister-in-law, had been a sickly child, but she was now, even in her early fifties, though an avowedly sedentary woman—a seamstress by trade, who read books in her spare time, making her both a professional and a vocational sitter—as healthy as an aerobics instructor, and as demanding and controlling as one as well.

  It was late February, and three months had passed since he had become addicted to the vicarious satisfaction of watching from his high stool the seemingly harmless romance between his nephew and the local girl. But his pleasure had turned to panic the day he had noticed the barely perceptible but unmistakable protrusive addition to Alicia’s profile. Adad had acquired a fine tailor’s eye for detecting the work of thieves; the contours of a customer’s body often exposed his or her criminality. A bulbous extra few inches to the butt was not an attractive pulchritudinous bubble, but actually a bag of Nabisco Chips Ahoy or Cheetos squeezed down back. What strained credulity as a newly aroused masculine endowment of stupendous proportions was but, after all, a 22-ounce bottle of Heineken immodestly concealed in some thirsty young man’s underpants. And while a girl’s swelling tummy could be the measure of her lack of respect for a shopkeeper’s property, it could also be a measure of her lack of respect for herself. Or, less harshly put—for Adad was not truly a prudish man—a measure of her resplendence. That was what he had seen on Alicia’s face when his eyes had finished their quick scan of her new pooch as she had walked toward him last week, swinging a loaf of Wonder Bread by its tail. No, she was not just resplendent with life in general; she was resplendent with new life. He knew that look on her face. That look—and that loaf. Wonders, both! He had smiled at his quiet deduction and at the relief that he would not have to endure another confrontation. No back-and-forth of accusation and denial, before the final, wordless admission of guilt, with a magician’s quickness: the unapologetic slap of contraband, a pack of bologna or sliced ham, onto the counter.

  Then he had tensed, as it occurred to him—oh, no, Mustafa!—that what he thought didn’t matter at all. The girl’s family would have the last word. Words like thief and guilty came to mind. Mustafa, they’d judge, was the one who had taken something that did not belong to him. Something far more precious than the makings of a mediocre sandwich. Taken something priceless from the girl, which he could not return and for which he would have to pay: her reputation, her good name. Their name.

  Adad was remembering now how at first it had been Mustafa’s honor he had feared for, then mourned, before tossing stodginess aside, just letting the courtship play out before him like the coming of spring. As if he couldn’t stop it—when of course he could have—preferring instead to whiff the sweet scent of impetuous, youthful romance, like so much flora. Aye-yi-yi, what an idiot he’d been! The boy was his nephew, not a field of wild narcissus. What did he, Adad, care for nature, anyway? He was a man of the town, of the city, of concrete and commerce. There was nothing pastoral that appealed to him at all. He cared not one iota for the country. The outdoors, in general, made him anxious; he was an indoors man, which was why he excelled at his work in the shop. He preferred the smell of incense to honeysuckle, a breeze blowing in through a window while you napped on a cushy cot to a gust that swept up sand and inverted your umbrella. And while the idea of an ocean was awesome and seductive, it had nothing on the reality of a warm bath. The worst you could say about him was that he liked a good river. But then rivers always led to towns, anyway. To cities. Great ones. Cities like Aleppo. Cities like this one—New Orleans. The Mississippi River was just over there, straight ahead. If he wanted to, he could skip all the way down Governor Nicholls Street, through the French Quarter, yes, all the way to the Mississippi. The way he used to do, as a boy, skip to and through Saadallah al-Jabiri Square in Aleppo Park on his way to the river at home. He longed to see all the great rivers he’d read about: the Thames, the Volga, the Mekong, the Seine. Oh, to experience the grand cities the rivers had borne. When he was twenty-five years old, he and Zahirah, newlyweds, had visited Cairo and taken a boat ride on the Nile. The moon had been high that night, not full, but in the shape of a crescent, almost as bright as Zahirah’s smile. Or his own. He had never forgotten the lights of the Cairo skyline twinkling, as radiant as the stars, while the boat swept along and the water gushed outward, slicing away like banana peels, like that part of time, of any instant, that didn’t matter. Not the meat of the moment. Them. Embracing, he and Zahirah had swelled with desire, not just for each other, but for whatever life held. And life itself had never felt so transporting, so capable of delivering them somewhere special or something special unto them.

  Gripped by the memory, he reached into the lap drawer of his desk and found the letter Zahirah had sent after he had first arrived in America. He opened the envelope, which also held the photograph a stranger had taken of them as they had stood transfixed under the night sky in Cairo, all those years ago. Adad stared at the picture of himself and his bride for a moment and smiled. Ah, Zahirah, my love. Then he reread the letter for the umpteenth time:

  Adad, my husband, even though you are the longest distance away from me I can imagine, I feel like you are right here beside me—just like in this picture! Remember this night? Of course you do. May this photograph remind you of me too, your Zahirah. No matter how far apart we are—let it be a symbol of how close we will always be!

  Your far, far, faraway wife who awaits your return!

  Love,

  Zahirah

  And, one more thing, Adad. Do not lose this photograph, the way you lose things. It is the only picture left from our special time in Cairo when we knew we would be together forever. That is not the moonlight sparkling in my eyes. That is you!

  Yes, Zahirah, like Mustafa’s girl, had been resplendent, Adad thought, sliding the letter and photograph into the envelope, and tucking the memento from his youth back into the drawer. He remembered how, after the stranger had handed them their camera and walked away, he had held Zahirah close and they had kissed and cried—and then . . . gone on to build their whole life together on that moment, on the flow of things, on submitting to the romance of movement and time, on the Nile.

  So, of course, he liked rivers. Loved them. That was the worst you could say about him when it came to being susceptible to the sentimental charms of nature. But no—he wouldn’t be caught dead by a stream! A babbling brook? He shuddered. There was something vaguely untrustworthy about a ripple. A sinister quality to its tone, its presentation, as if it were hiding something. Or merely teasing you, baiting
you to trust its “natural” gentility—right before the jaws of a shark or, here, in these remnants of a swamp, an alligator lurched up to chomp off your arm. No. Damn a ripple! He had enough subterfuge in his life, what with the myriad of ways inventory could be hidden and removed from one’s possession without recompense. Give him a river. Give him the lap of a wave, courtesy of a tugboat, barge, or cruise liner coming into port. Or the whoosh of the figurative wave of humanity that rushed in and out of his store every day, frank about its inclination to challenge his propriety, or that swooshed by in buses and cars and SUVs up and down North Rampart Street outside his shop window, or, in his memory, along the busier streets of his beloved Aleppo.

  And yet last December, winter and her bleakness must have turned him wistful for spring, the season that made even a metropolis vulnerable to the trappings of the bucolic, of things that blossom: flowers, prosperity, love. That was all he could think—winter had weakened him. Some sentimental wish for the season to come, combined with the fasting of Ramadan and the distance from his Zahirah, had softened his heart.

  Oh, how he had almost fallen off his stool that day when he looked over the top of his cash register and saw Mustafa outside opening his mouth and letting that temptress have her way with him. A potato chip! Why was he so surprised? Eve had used an apple. What next, beef jerky? No, he had no illusions about the chastity of that Alicia. She had bought condoms from him in the past and at least one pregnancy test kit. Oh, she was no Virgin Mary, that girl. But then, he thought, who was in this age? Or in any age, for that matter. “The Virgin Mary.” The very phrase was a puzzle to him. What about her celibate husband? “The Virgin Joseph” was just as astonishing a reality. Joseph, he knew, had been accorded some sort of backhanded sainthood, but why wasn’t this man of admirable restraint a more prominent part of Christian doctrine? There was a double standard at play. A reverse chauvinism. “The Virgin Joseph,” if enshrined as a heroic figure, might have proven an important role model for young men. He could have been instructive, saved lives, or at least spared favorite nephews their ruin. But then, if “The Virgin Mary” hadn’t stopped Alicia from purchasing and presumably using Trojans and Lifestyles (upon further reflection, if only she’d employed them more—how else to put it?—religiously), then how could Adad expect “The Virgin Joseph” to save Mustafa?

  It was only his panic for his nephew’s security that was firing his fantasies of a more virtuous world being a safer one—the same panic that had forced him to act, in effect, to deport the poor boy. He had feared not for the well-being of Mustafa’s soul, but for his physical well-being, for Adad was quite aware that Alicia had numerous thuggish cousins or nephews. They frequented his store, though they also disappeared for many months at a time, away in jail or prison for various crimes, some involving drugs and guns. Anyone who read the newspaper or watched the evening news knew about them, and Adad had witnessed their petty thievery for years. The one called Crip limped like a veteran of the war that was his rough-and-tumble life. Crip, who bought Marlboro Lights but stole roll after roll of five-flavor Life Savers. Adad, having once glimpsed a pistol poking out of Crip’s side like a dagger, had thought it unwise to interrupt his misdeeds. His stealing seemed to Adad a vaguely legitimate tax for doing business on this gritty little corner, a tax that in the end he accounted for by charging the pilfering patron an extra fifty cents for every pack of cigarettes. (Adad’s various dealings with taxes had led to his most playful, if corny, manipulation of English, vacillating from outrage to acceptance, resulting in vapid, aphoristic pith and bumper-sticker-ready sloganism: “Every tax has a cost.” “No tax is free.” “Tax now, pay later.” “To tax is to ax.”) The first time he had quoted Crip the cigarette upcharge, the two had exchanged knowing looks, and the thief had flashed an extra-wide, gold-toothed smile of respect at the merchant. This, they tacitly agreed, was how, from then on, they would do business. Still, mutual adherence to codes of manhood aside, or maybe because of Crip’s clear-eyed agreement to such rules of common-law retribution, Adad assumed that, in defense of Alicia’s honor, he might one day seek vengeance upon his nephew. Bad business would always be accounted for, one way or another. Hot blood bred bad blood. His own brother, Mustafa’s father, had learned that brutal lesson and paid the highest price. In the end, The ledger of lust is almost always in the red. All right, that one was too long and too preachy for a bumper sticker, he had to admit, but he admired it nonetheless.

  Adad sighed, allowing this last conclusion to help validate his having undone Mustafa and Alicia’s affair. He sipped the dregs of his tea, which had gone as tepid as the rationalization of his zealotry. Discomfort had sneaked up on him with the bitterness of the final caffeine-laden slurp. A gurgle, he gathered now with a harsh truth snapping up at him, possessed an alarming relationship to a ripple. Yes, he had feared for Mustafa’s safety. That was fundamental to what he had done. But there was something else slithering below the surface of the truth; his actions had not been so pure. The relationship between Alicia and his nephew was an open secret in the neighborhood, or at least within the store. Of course, they had hidden the more provocative aspects of their friendship, their kisses and their et cetera, et cetera. But people knew they were a couple. Malik knew. Jamil knew. Adad knew. Surely, someone in her family knew—and did not object. No, there was something else, something Adad was being forced to admit to himself now, two cups of oversteeped tea into his morning quiet time. No need to be coy, with Allah watching, awaiting your admission of guilt. He had let his mind dance around it with the little fugue of river worship and city mongering and love along the Nile. This: his own unbearable loneliness. That’s what had played no small part in his willful separation of Mustafa and Alicia. If Mustafa went away, Adad, thousands of miles from Zahirah, would not have to witness—and be devastated by—on a daily basis, no less, Mustafa and Alicia’s romance. Such tenderness, sordid as it was, was enviable nonetheless. All the pretend “goodbyes” that weren’t “goodbyes” but actually “good nights” or “good evenings” or “see you this afternoons” or “see you tonight when nobody’s watching and the moon, in crescent form or in any configuration, casts its shadow on your bedroom wall while our kisses blossom in the season of our love, which is always somehow, even in December, spring!” That was “goodbye”? Hah! That was not “goodbye.” “Goodbye” was arid. “Goodbye” was June. “Goodbye” was the Aleppo International Airport kiss that lingered on your lips only till the middle of July, when the New Orleans heat starched the last blush of it away and left you reaching across the counter for ChapStick, balm of the dehydrated and the as-of-late unkissed. Cherry-flavored soothed Adad best, its feminine fruitiness a waxy approximation of his wife’s moist sweetness.

  At first, watching Mustafa and Alicia had excited him, reminded him of himself and Zahirah, and he had indulged, wickedly perhaps, in the way his blood rushed when he saw the lovers courting outside the store, plotting their next not-so-secret tryst. (Mustafa’s primping had grown constant, and he was tiptoeing out of the house almost every night—or offering to close up, and not coming home until who knew when.) Exactly when Adad’s envy had displaced his admiration, he couldn’t say. He was barely admitting it now, and as soon as the caffeine overdose began to dissipate, so would the severity of his self-critique. He was beginning to come down already. The sinking back into the basic, less authentic him had begun; he was dimming into simply the doting uncle, the protective surrogate father, not the bitter lonely husband who, because in part he couldn’t bear to witness love pantomimed on his doorstep every day—Mustafa and Alicia: The Ballet—and because he had the power to stop it, had done just that, under the guise of goodness. Well, goodbye to all that. Goodbye to goodbyes that weren’t goodbyes! This was the trouble with vicariousness. It feigned admiration, but deep down it was just selfishness. Amorality, however minor. What else could it be, taking pleasure in someone else’s pleasure? Taking something that did not belong to you! (The weight of his guilt wa
s already decreasing, its eradication made possible by the misdemeanor of overreaching empathy.) Adad, too, had been a thief—and he had put a stop to his own larceny. There. He had done the right thing, really. For himself, for Mustafa, for everyone involved. The boy was safe in Syria. The girl would be fine. Adad would do what he could for her, if she needed anything, if she asked anything of him—anything except that he bring Mustafa back to her. And the child? Well, time, Father Time, as it were, would adopt him or her, parent the kid with tough love just as he did everyone else.

  The awful reality of Adad’s jealousy, which had racked his nerves a moment ago, for a moment, was only faint now. Only its luster remained, refracting back to the more satisfactory rationalization for deporting Mustafa, whose journey would end in irony—home would be exile. Adad again took refuge in the color of loss. You could blame it all on bad business, he reasoned. Yes, in the end, The ledger of lust is almost always in the red. Actually, if you printed it small enough on a bumper sticker, you could make it fit.

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