Lifted by the Great Nothing: A Novel (22 page)

Faraz laughed about how apologetically Max asked the maid for water and a vodka cranberry. Max knew he looked old enough to drink alcohol, especially after a few days of not shaving, but wasn’t used to getting waited on like this. Seeing a black maid felt strange. How weird would this have been in New Jersey? At the Yangs’, for instance.

Faraz excused himself; he had to get back to the office. Anika insisted he stay for tea and come up to the roof deck for a quick swim. She didn’t seem eager to be alone with her nephew. But Faraz really did have to get going. He too gave Max his business card and told him that in absolutely no circumstances should he hesitate to call him for anything at all.

Once he’d gone, Anika turned and stared at Max a moment. Her mouth coiled into a tight ring. “You have come to learn about your mother.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint you. I don’t know much.”

“Is she alive?” He held his breath.

“I’m pretty sure. Though I cannot promise that my mother would have told me if she had passed away.”

“Do you know where she’d be living now?” he asked.

“No. The last time I saw her was many years ago. Nineteen eighty-five. But I believe my mother knows where she is.”

“Your mother wouldn’t have told you that, either?”

“No.” She gave a bitter smile. “My mother would not have told me that either. Shall I call her and tell her you are here?”

“Is she in Beirut too?”

“She lives in Paris.”

“France?”

“Yes.”

Gratefulness and suspicion blossomed in him. He could have jumped off the terrace and soared over the city out of how possible everything felt, but also out of some instinctive need to escape this building and the mounting complexity of what he was after. Part of him wanted to go home and forget about the whole thing. How tempting it can be to quit right before getting what you want most.

He waited over a quarter of an hour before Anika came back. Still sipping on his vodka cranberry, he decided he must be careful here. He didn’t yet know who had lied to his mother about him. Someone had probably told her he died, and Anika’s not being in contact with her inspired distrust in him. After too big a drink, acid torched up his esophagus and back down. The acid came with a picture of Rasheed’s face as he’d last seen it in the kitchen, right after hitting Max. A vengefulness heated his mind, a blistering fantasy to say hateful things to him. It was freeing to blame him so openly in his heart, so head-on, as though this was what he’d wanted to do his whole life. Hate his father.

The beeping and shouting and fumes down in the streets were subdued by the prayer call. An imam cried a long
Allaaaaaaaaahu akbar
through a megaphone from a nearby minaret. Other imams in close-by neighborhoods also sang the prayer. Three or four different voices and styles and volumes could be heard together, each a couple of beats ahead of or behind the others.

Anika told Max that his grandmother wanted to speak to him. Her face had changed. She had no more mascara on her
eyes. That was it, that’s what made her eyes smaller now. She had cried and wiped everything clean.

He went into a room with velvet curtains and vintage weapons mounted on the walls, like some sort of colonial smoking room, and took the phone to talk to one of his living grandparents. The parents of a living mother confirmed while at his living aunt’s. A family of ghosts come back to life.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hakeem.” Her voice was grave but soft. “I cannot believe.”

He laughed uneasily. “I’m good,” he said, as though she’d asked.

“You are liking Beirut?”

“It’s very nice.”

“I miss it, you know. If I were your age in Beirut, I would be having too much fun. Are you having too much fun?”

“Yes.”

“Good. You will call me Téta, and your grandfather Jiddo.” She spoke to someone in the background for a minute before taking back up the phone. “Okay. You will now stay there with Anika until your flight to Paris. I have asked that they book you a nine
P.M.
direct on Air France. You will arrive very early in the morning. You are young and can handle this, no?”

“Yes, so my mother is there?”

“
Inshallah
, Hakeem,
inshallah
.”

“Sorry?”

“Yes. She will come here to meet you. God willing.”

Relief filled his lungs. His mother was alive. “Okay. Wow, unbelievable. So, she’ll actually be there.”

“I am sure.”

“Where will she be flying in from?”

“She will be here tomorrow.”

“Excellent. Yeah. But could you tell me where she lives now?”

“Yes, she is on her way. The way to meet her is to come here. To Paris. Okay?”

“But where is she now?”

She sighed and waited a while before admitting, “Not sure.”

“You don’t know?”

“No, we don’t know. But she will fly here tomorrow.”

Max noticed a pain in his jaw. He’d been grinding his teeth since he hung up the phone. Again, things had only become more mysterious. Really? Fly over and meet your mom? She’ll be here waiting, but we don’t know where she lives? Don’t know where she’s been, or why we haven’t seen her in fifteen years?

The maid brought him a towel and led him to the bathroom. He was to wash and change before their early dinner. Max asked if she could show him where they kept the vodka to top off his drink. She speed-walked away and returned a few minutes later with a martini and a sword of olives. He sipped on it while in the triple-headed shower, big enough for five people.

Refreshed, he meandered the apartment alone while Anika stayed on the phone in that colonial smoke room. He tried to listen in on her conversation by standing by the door, but it was all in Arabic. Ambling up to the roof deck, one of the highest outlooks in Ras Beirut, he discovered the swimming pool. The maid lay on her stomach at the pool’s edge, reaching for a dead pigeon floating a few centimeters out of her reach. A Siamese cat perched on the balcony’s handrail eyed the dead bird. Behind the cat stood Beirut on crutches—half-built gray and brown buildings, construction cranes, cinder-block homes studding the mountains like mushroom stalks, water tanks, holes—all set before a belt of smogged blue sky. The maid noticed him, and
became self-conscious, as if she’d been caught breaking a rule. She said, “Sir?”

He looked around the roof deck: the table and umbrella, the pool, and the pool shed not much bigger than his tree house. In Rasheed’s version, this space had been turned into a brothel. He pictured half-naked men and women pouring bottles of whiskey down their chins, and Kalashnikov rifles resting up against the wooden chaise longues.

Dinner was almost ready, and Anika waited for him at the head of the table on the lower terrace. “If you knew how much you looked like your father.” She said it less aggressively this time, but still, he was taken aback. If I knew, he thought, then what? What if I knew? And why does she assume I don’t know in the first place? But in truth he didn’t know he looked like his father because no one had said so before. There wasn’t much physical resemblance between them other than the size of their noses, though the shapes weren’t similar at all: Rasheed’s like a butter knife, and Max’s like a spoon.

“I was hoping you could tell me some things about my mother,” he said.

She stood up. “Let me introduce you to Beirut before the food arrives.” She led him to the balcony’s railing and pointed out buildings and places in a bored tone, as though someone had told her this task was part of her burden as hostess. He listened attentively, awaiting the relevance of these sites to his mother, and despite himself, to his father too. She pointed out AUB, which looked like an airbrushed photo of an American university that had been cut and pasted into this beaten-down view. The flashy new buildings had this same out-of-place effect, making the older architecture look like beautiful tombstones from another era. The Holiday Inn was the tallest building
around, and hideous. It looked like an enormous abandoned building firemen use for training, all scorched around the windows, and with huge chunks of cement that had long been rocketed out.

He didn’t care about Beirut now. He asked her what his mother was doing in 1985. She acted as if she didn’t hear him and continued describing sites in her jaded way—the Grand Serail, the Mohammad al-Amin mosque, an all-women’s swimming resort. She did an expert job at pretending not to notice him staring at her profile. Max was sure she was running out of steam; that she couldn’t maintain this description of everything her eyes landed on for much longer.

She surprised him when she said, earnestly, that she never stopped missing this city. Apparently she was only back here on business and lived in Qatar most of the year. Max didn’t see what one could miss about Beirut. It was a striking place, sure, but it was also run-down and war-shadowed. Was its value thanks to its continually being on the brink of total destruction? Was that what made it so precious? Was that what made it feel more like real life than Clarence?

With her first semblance of a natural smile, she asked how many drinks he’d had. He told her two, and she found this funny. In this unguarded moment, showing teeth, she was pretty. She ordered herself a drink and kept describing the scenery. As she spoke, Max watched fisherman starting their workday at sunset, swaying on top of the sea. The water twinkled hysterically under a sinking orange sun. His mind wandered over to Nadine and the smell of her lips and sweat and head. He imagined her fear and regret at his having vanished, and how they’d left things. His heart warmed at the thought of her worrying about him.

Anika did tire out. She interrupted his thoughts by asking if Rasheed still went to mosque. He couldn’t tell if she was making
a dry joke. He said no, but then again he knew very little about the man. She gave the strenuous grin that only cynicism can pull across one’s lips, then quickly finished her first drink and ordered the maid to bring them each a fresh one. A good sign. The alcohol loosened her up.

He tried again. “Why haven’t you seen my mom since 1985?”

“For many reasons. We were never close. Also,” she said into her new drink, “our father disowned her.”

“Why?”

She looked surprised. “Because of what she brought on to Rasheed’s family.”

“Which was what?”

“Do you know any of this story, Hakeem?”

He told her he’d only learned his name was Hakeem a few days ago. Then he ran her through the version of his mother’s story he’d lived with for the past five years.

She said, “It’s very close to the truth,” as if it should suffice. She scanned the cityscape from left to right, probably looking for something else to describe.

After she’d lit and nearly finished her cigarette, Max said, “He kept my mother from me.”

She shrugged, seeming to say,
Sure, I can see why you’d be upset about something like that.

“What did she bring on to Rasheed’s family?” he asked.

“Your mother will tell you about all of these things. I know too little, Hakeem. I may mislead you if I tell you my version of things.”

“I want to hear your version.” He was resolved to keep pushing. His insistence would either break Anika open or cause an irretrievable rift that blocked further discussion. But she’d invited him here. Surely she knew he’d have questions. Did she really hope to avoid the topic altogether? Again: “What did she bring on to Rasheed’s family?”

“She brought death to his family. “

Max kept his face still, wanting her to think him impervious, simply collecting facts. He asked, “How did Rasheed and Samira meet?”

“The Boulos family”—she cleared her throat and sighed—“lived always just below us. Samira and Rasheed played together as children. And then, of course, there was Ali, the third friend. Ali was a Palestinian boy from a refugee camp in Beirut called Shatila. The camp is famous because of the Sabra and Shatila massacre.”

“I saw something about it in a documentary once.” He couldn’t have said more on the subject, having just a vague recollection of bodies and those names, Sabra and Shatila. He wanted to keep her going. “So they went to school with Ali?”

She encircled her mouth with her thumbnail, scraping clean any potential smudges of lipstick. She was one of those elegant people who are impossible to imagine naked. “No. Ali was the son of a very poor worker who fixed things in our home. The problem was, Ali grew up to be handsome, and he liked Samira too much. My father wanted Samira to marry Rasheed. Somehow he’d gotten it in his head that Rasheed would calm her down.” She laughed at this. “Ali and Samira got into trouble, sneaking off to protests when they were ten or eleven years old only. Protesting things that had nothing to do with them even, like increases of tuition at the university.” She shook her head and sucked on a new cigarette, caving in her cheeks. “They protested just to protest, because it excited them.”

The maid came and quickly filled the long table with enough dishes for five people: char-grilled eggplant on triangular plates, cumin-powdered chickpeas in emerald and eucalyptus-green bowls, skewers of grilled meats and vegetables, a salad of toasted pita bread, cucumbers, tomatoes, chickweed, and mint in a wooden salad bowl, fried cauliflower, flat cakes of minced
meat and spices, stuffed zucchini, some kind of lentil concoction, cheese balls, falafel, and baba ghanoush. They sat down. He didn’t want to enjoy the food as much as he suspected he would. Worried and stressed people were supposed to lose their appetites. But feeling physically well again, he was ravenous. He asked Anika if the maid ate with them. “No,” she said, “she eats her own food. Food from her country that she likes better.” Anika told him to stop thinking of the maid as a slave. Everyone in Lebanon had at least one maid. Given all the different kinds of people he’d seen on the streets today, Max had trouble believing that. “This one here,” Anika said, “Nadifa, sends a lot of money back to her family in Eritrea. She is paying her children’s way through college. She is lucky to be here.”

“So,” Max said. “Ali and Samira’s friendship.”

She picked up a falafel ball with a pair of silver tongs and dropped it on her plate. “Yes. Let me back up.” She took in a deep breath and exhaled the way people do when they are about to explain something from the beginning. “My father loved how Samira argued when she was a young girl, but later, when she was still just as stubborn and the issues were very sensitive, real tensions came between them.”