Ramadan Ramsey Read online

  “I guess . . . I thought you would tell me what to do,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “I am going to have his baby.”

  Adad’s hands rose up and covered his face, as if to shield him from a blast. Though he already knew it, Alicia’s truth felt like a desert gust. As he slid his hands down, they wiped away moisture from the corners of his eyes.

  “Well . . . a baby is a blessing.” Then he sniffed away his feelings, and hardened his heart to the situation, before adding with a brutal finality, “Even one with no father.”

  “Why do you say that?” she asked. Adad’s sniffle cast itself upon Alicia with the contagion of a yawn. Her shoulders trembled as she tried to stop herself from crying. “Mustafa’s not coming back, is he? That’s what you mean.”

  “I don’t know what I mean.”

  “He doesn’t know about the baby. If I write to him and tell him, he will come back.”

  “He will not come back.”

  “How do you know?” She was crying now.

  “I know.” He wanted to do something to console her, but he restrained himself. She might cry for hours—right here in front of pump number 2—if he permitted his storefront to be turned into a haven for heartbroken women.

  “There is nothing I can do for you. You should go home now. May All—May God be with you.”

  Alicia heard mostly Adad’s tone, which was tapping into its lower regions, and that was, as it turned out, soothing enough. The key words, each sobering if inscrutable, registered. Nothing. Home. God. The nouns. Maybe language, not just math, would help her after all. Her tears had mostly evaporated by the time she managed to shake loose her hoodie and cover her head. Then she moved past Adad, not walking homeward, but toward the store.

  He turned around, confused by her defiance. “Where are you going? Where are you going?”

  She stopped to answer him, but she did not look back. “We need eggs.”

  * * *

  SOMEWHERE DOWN THERE, Mustafa thought, looking out his airplane window, amusing himself, somewhere down there is the real Skinny Israel. That sacred place between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The country that had given him a nickname and a girl. It was truly, for him, the Holy Land now.

  Beyond that, Syria. Aleppo. He was almost home.

  Skinny Israel. As effortlessly as jet engines propelled this aircraft through the Judeo-Arabian skies, his heart, aflutter at the memory of his and Alicia’s private joke, was spiriting him across the landscape of their romance.

  He looked down at the empty middle seat next to him and saw his Quran, which he had pulled out an hour ago when the plane had hit a rough patch of turbulence. Touching the beautiful silk cover his mother had made, he wondered, Am I a bad son? He was hardly thinking about his mother’s well-being at all. (Well, he was thinking about Rana—mainly about how upset she would be if she ever found out about Alicia.) Why wasn’t he more concerned about her? Maybe because of what Malik had said yesterday while driving him to the airport in New Orleans. “Cheer up, Mustafa. Don’t worry—at least not about Aunt Rana. She will be fine.”

  “What? Did Uncle Adad hear some good news?”

  “Him and his news. He sees everything. He hears everything. But he only tells the news that is good for him. Don’t you know that? One day maybe he will tell what is good for someone else. But that day is not today.”

  Then, when Malik dropped him near the entrance to the American Airlines check-in area, he had said, “Remember, don’t worry. You will be fine, too.”

  Of course he would be fine—he had Alicia! Would his mother see that on his face? Would she see Alicia in his eyes? The evidence of her imprinted on his lips, swollen as they were by American kisses? His image mirrored back at him in the window, and he watched his phantom finger rub the ridges of his lower lip. He closed his eyes and pretended his finger was hers. (Alicia inserting things into his mouth—bite-sized pieces of food, morsels of herself—remained the essence of their bond.) When he felt the tip of his nail graze his teeth, he thrummed an onanistic moan. Ah, their trysts. Their touches. Their stares that, since the day they’d met, defied translation. The silences made the kisses possible. All those kisses, which they had realized soon enough, were the most articulate means of expression anyway. He was stiltedly bilingual, but that didn’t matter. They were beyond lingual. Their tongues were their tongue.

  But they’d also had moments when the heat of intimacy had ignited language, when pillow talk itself, at least briefly, had surpassed the eloquence of sensuality. Just last week, while massaging his back, she had asked, “Do you miss Syria?”

  “When I first came here, yes. All the time.”

  “What did you miss?”

  “My mother. Playing soccer with my friends. Aunt Zahirah’s cooking. Aleppo at night. The lights. The Citadel. So beautiful it can make you feel like you live in the best place in the world!”

  “Hmph . . . that’s the same way we feel around here.”

  “I know. And now I am agree with you. I say is true. You and me, we live in the best place in the world. For us.”

  “Really?” she asked.

  “Yes.” He looked over his shoulder to see why she had stopped tracing her fingers down his spine.

  She frowned and shook her head.

  “Not New Orleans,” he said. “That’s not where we live. You don’t live here, and I don’t live in Aleppo. We live together . . . in Skinny Israel!”

  He had rolled over while she was still straddling him. His slender hips nuzzled perfectly between her thighs, she had leaned forward, and he watched her crucifix dangle hypnotically, from one breast to the other. She sank into him, sealing the necklace between their chests, cupping her hands behind his head. Her lips and tongue moved against his ear as she whispered, “The love of my life . . . the love of my life.” Then, marveling at his own prowess, he stroked her giggle into gasps of ecstasy.

  Mustafa sighed now, opening his eyes and staring out at streaks of clouds against a pale blue sky. He pressed his lower back deeper into the seat cushions and stretched his legs, making room in his jeans for the bodily consequences of his nostalgia.

  Since being with Alicia, he had a newfound, athletic grace. In her presence, it manifested as friskiness combined with a purposeful daring. (He thought of it, with pride, as masculinity, though in reality it owed to his heightened self-assurance, a genderless confidence of being.) But his enhanced physicality was even more pronounced when he was not with her. Jamil had stopped wanting to shadowbox and wrestle with him in the backyard of the little house Uncle Adad rented on the edge of St. Bernard Parish, close to New Orleans. One day, after Mustafa had penned him to the ground in record time, Jamil had grunted a surrender and, rising, dusting off his jeans, still crouching, asked, “What is she doing to you?”

  “Alicia? Nothing. I am still the same.”

  “No. Everything is different. The way you talk—so much more English, my brother. And the way you act—now you fight like Muhammad Ali!”

  That had sounded absurd to Mustafa, if funny and flattering. That is, until less than a week later, when a shabbily dressed man, possibly homeless, had come into the store and started waving a knife at Uncle Adad. Though he was husky (a borderline heavyweight), without hesitating, Mustafa had sneaked up behind him and punched him in the back of his head with such force the man collapsed without knowing what or who hit him. For Mustafa, who had never struck anyone into unconsciousness, the shock of watching the man fall was matched only by the thrill of knowing he had made it happen. He had never had such urgent cause to defend himself or his family. But wrong was wrong and right was right. An intense satisfaction at his first taste of triumph surged through him. Part of him wanted to be challenged again, immediately, if only so he could crush the enemy once more (as he was clearly capable of doing), and feel this, the joy of winning. The blade of the man’s knife, when it had pinged against the tile floor, was a bell tolling the news of his victory
.

  The only thing he knew about Muhammad Ali was the general fame of his name. But Jamil’s comment and his own accidental knockout blow had piqued his curiosity, in the same way the constant need to restock Wrigley’s gum had. So, at the first opportunity, there he was again, sitting at Adad’s computer exploring the World Wide Web, discovering that, yes, Ali was a great boxer—and, as indeed his name indicated, a Muslim. But he had not always practiced Islam, and he had not always been “Muhammed Ali.” One photograph—they were countless in number but this one was the earliest picture of him—was dated 1954, when he was twelve years old. Only twelve. But apparently already well-known enough to be photographed shirtless, wearing only trunks and laced-up leather boxing shoes, posed like a real fighter. According to the caption, he was “Cassius Clay” and was about to box on a television program called Tomorrow’s Champions in his hometown, Louisville, Kentucky. His eyes expressed hope, but his face was a mask of uncertainty; the kid was, after all, skinny as a rail. Mustafa searched the black-and-white image of this scrawny preteen for traces of the legend to be, but all he could see was a boy. No—something even less developed than that, so vastly different was this child from the man in later photographs of the cultural titan—the Olympic champion, the Hajj pilgrim at Mecca, the Heavyweight Champion of the World. Looking at the twelve-year-old Cassius Clay, he felt as if he were looking at the embryo of Muhammad Ali, a giant in gestation.

  Mustafa had kept clicking, wondering if, as with Mr. Wrigley, he might find something to explain Ali’s rise to such prominence. He began to suspect he might, when he noted that in addition to being celebrated for the things he’d done, Muhammad Ali was also renowned for the things he’d said. He linked to quotes about religion, boxing, love. Oddly, the most praise was reserved for something boastful and pithy the champ, in a poetic mood, had once said about a pair of alliterative insects. But then, having surfed his way to some obscure website called Warrior Wisdom that appeared to be based in Saudi Arabia, Mustafa had sat up—for here it was! Written in Arabic, these more profound words might also have been inspired by Ali’s meditation on the same floating and buzzing inhabitants of the garden: The man who has no imagination has no wings. So, Mustafa had concluded, the boy had seen his future, and he had taken flight.

  The plane glided ahead reassuringly. Staring out at its wings, Mustafa thought, Men can actually fly, soar! He felt this miraculous means of transport stimulating his own ambition, aiding his reverie. From Ali to Alicia, as close for him now as their names in a dictionary. From Israel to Skinny Israel, geographical neighbors on the map of his enigmatic self.

  If Skinny Israel wasn’t as real as the country below, then how could the mere thought of it do this to him? How could it make him, after only a day away, already ache to return there? No. Their Skinny Israel, his and Alicia’s, was real. An island maybe. Except they weren’t that remote. They weren’t Cuba. They weren’t Madagascar. Their families touched parts of them—the Totahs on one side, the Ramseys on the other. Skinny Israel was a peninsula, perhaps. A tiny nation of two. It had only a brief history and one supreme rule of law—it was a colony founded on passion. Like all great romances, it was a democracy, of course. In this case, one whose constituents voted with desire. Unless he and Alicia were together, it wouldn’t exist. So was it real? Were they? Right now, with her in America and him in this vessel bolting farther away by the second, it was starting to feel like just a fantasy, a utopia of their own imagining.

  The PA speakers crackled. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re beginning our descent into Aleppo . . . ,” the pilot began. When Mustafa heard “descent,” he squirmed. As long as he was aloft, everything was still somehow now. As long as everything was now, America was not the past. Alicia was not the past, and not what being away from her would turn her into, a memory. But no—no need to panic (the back of his neck was prickling with warmth and dampness)—this separation was only temporary. He would be going back soon. Back to the homeland of their love. A real place—not make-believe. Strange. To be without your lover was to be in exile. He laughed to himself, at himself, as overwrought with emotion as a character in one of those cartoon books Malik was always reading. No wonder they called them comics! Okay, okay. Be strong, Mustafa. As long as you are without her, you’ll just have to be a solitary man—a comic book hero—staggering about the earth trying to get back home. Your superpowers are in jeopardy, dwindling by the hour. (Knife-wielding maniacs, the planet could be yours!) You will lose access to the Force forever, without the girl, without the kisses. Until you get back, you will know the struggle of all who have been cast out of their native land. You will be Mustafa the Wanderer. Mustafa of Palestine. Mustafa the Jew! You are daunted by the challenge: to take back and defend your rightful place in the world. You didn’t ask for all this responsibility—but there’s no turning back now. You know you will have to fight, fight, fight for you and yours. You might be, you must be, the Muhammad Ali of Love!

  * * *

  AFTER RETRIEVING HIS two suitcases from the baggage claim area in the Aleppo airport, Mustafa turned and saw, instead of Hasim, Aunt Zahirah standing near an exit, calling to him. Her face was welcoming but tremulous, which he took to mean she had missed him and was overwhelmed that he was home at last. He lumbered over to her and put his bags down. “I know,” he said, hugging her. “I am happy to see you, too.”

  “Oh, Mustafa . . .” Her voice had always sounded to him like an instrument tuned to express glad tidings. She could say a simple “hello” or “good morning” on an average day and make you think she’d said “Eid Mubarak!” as if your presence marked the end of her having to abstain from you any longer, as if you were a cause for celebration. So her whispering his name this way—unnecessarily comforting, far from cheerful—alarmed him. Had Malik contrived his optimism to hide the truth?

  As they separated, he asked, “What’s wrong? Where is Hasim? Why are you alone? What is happening? Mama . . . is she . . . ?”

  Zahirah was looking up at him, tight-faced and teary-eyed, and Mustafa thought: My mother is dead. That’s what happens when you spend your entire Ramadan sinning, cavorting with Christians, letting America have its way with you. That’s what happens while you are casually cruising on a plane—barely thinking about your sick mother at all—relishing your transgressions, fidgeting indecently in your seat at the memory of it all, converting to Judaism in jest. Your mother dies. He’d sacrificed her for potato chips and gum, for phony superpowers, for the affections of a convincing stand-in for a lesser member of Destiny’s Child. (But, no, only Alicia could make losing Rana bearable. He couldn’t let the fear of his mother dying indict their love. Loving Alicia had been his greatest act of bravery. He wouldn’t deny her and commit his greatest act of cowardice. Rana herself had raised him better than that. So just like that—saved by his finest rationalization—he recommitted to life’s irony, which he and Alicia had discovered together, the oath of their love: your sin could be your salvation.)

  Zahirah’s hand gripped his wrist, confirming, he felt, that she thought he needed consolation. He would mourn his mother with a double dose of grief. She could have her sorrow, plus the sorrow his father’s eternal absence had denied him. Absence was not death, just its own brand of nothingness. Being fatherless was all he’d ever known; it had been impossible to grieve oblivion, though he had tried. This despite Uncle Adad, who had always shielded Mustafa beneath the umbrella of his paternity, offering him manly teachings and security from the physical dangers of the world. But once, when he was five years old, Mustafa had gone wandering on the outskirts of their neighborhood and gotten lost. He kept trying to trace his steps, but every turn, down one narrow cobblestone street and up another, led him to increasingly less familiar environs. Then, dusk nearing, a scruffy vagrant had darted out of an alley and chased him for a couple of blocks. He’d somehow escaped and eventually made it home safely but, traumatized, he didn’t leave the house alone for weeks. Late at night during that unforgettab
le phase, he would tiptoe into his mother’s room, because he couldn’t sleep for weeks either. Not to crawl into bed with her for a sense of security, which he desperately wanted to do. Rana would have told him no—had told him the first time he tried—and sent him back to the room he shared with his cousins. “Be strong, Mustafa!” Instead of cuddling, he would settle for picking up the framed picture of his father that she kept on her dressing table near the window. His eyes would dart from the Uncle Adad look-alike to his mother’s slumbering bundle reflected in her vanity mirror. But the most intriguing vision was the one beyond the black lace curtains of Rana’s own design. He would stare at the rooftops and the maze of streets and, in spite of the panic he relived when he remembered being chased—or maybe because of it—something in him, in defiance of his own fears, longed to be back out in the streets of Aleppo, getting lost. Those unfamiliar streets. Those alleys. Alone, but alive with anxiety. Breathless with vulnerability. Running for his life. His anguish—usually barely felt whenever he sat holding his father’s photograph—suddenly animated. Of course, he had the rest of his family: his mother, Uncle Adad, Aunt Zahirah. But not—not now, never—his father. Being lost had felt strangely natural to him, in accord with who he was. It felt like being. For even if he searched every corner of Aleppo—was this why he’d gone wandering in the first place?—even if he could travel the world, this man in his hands was nowhere to be found.

  “Aunt Zahirah,” he said now. Was his mother really dead? Did his aunt’s speechlessness augur this reality? Something definitively dark—the end of something—was in her eyes.

  “Please tell me the truth, Aunt Zahirah. You always tell the truth!”

  He could tell she wanted to say it. She wanted to soften the blow of this thing that was going to break his heart. Her sympathy-drenched eyes widened, angling upward, to his right shoulder, as if the source of his agony, like a chip, rested there. Her lips parted. But the response to his plea did not come from her; rather, for more than one reason, it seemed to issue from a ghost.