Lifted by the Great Nothing: A Novel (24 page)

After another drink Max could tell Anika was getting as toasted as him. “My sister is a very strong woman,” she said. “People either loved or hated her. That is a good sign, I believe. Means you have a strong character if at least half of the people hate you. You should never be impressed by someone who everyone loves. They are either weak or liars. Your mother was neither weak nor a liar.” She frowned at the sky. “I was one of the people who hated her. I’m not surprised she hasn’t contacted me since her release.”

“Why did you hate each other?”

“I didn’t say she hated me. She was quite unconcerned with me. I hated her because of how inconsequential she made me feel. My hate had no effect on her. I also envied her for other reasons.”

Max consciously changed to a more delicate tone. “What did you envy?”

She daydreamed awhile. “How sure she was about everything. It seems wonderful to know so clearly what is right and what is wrong. Maybe that knowledge doesn’t give her a happy life, but it gives her a purposeful one at least. This wasn’t exactly the idea you had formed about her, is it?”

“I didn’t have any idea formed.”

“Strange. I’d have assumed a child who grows up without a mother would have all kinds of fantasies about what she was like. None of this surprises you?”

“No, it all does.”

They didn’t speak for a few minutes. She stared off at the mountains. Her face softened. “We were young. I chose the wrong side in the war.”

“Because it was the opposite of hers?”

“No, I was on the side of my parents. Most are on the side of their parents. It was my father’s wish, even though we were Muslim, for the rightists and the West to control the country. He, like most, worried about his own family’s survival above any questions of ethics. He wanted us to stay wealthy. Samira was the odd one out in our family. She hated our money. Something in your mother’s blood makes it impossible for her to just accept the great chance she was given.”

“What chance?”

“The chance of being born rich. Of not needing to surrender her life to fight for what we should all have for free.” She swallowed and rediscovered her tone of indifference. “Basic rights and so on.”

Something bothered him. “Do you think she killed other people? Or just Fuad?”

“She fought with violence, sure. As to the specifics, I don’t know. Unfortunately, the use of violence against the Israeli occupation continues to be inevitable.”

“Why inevitable?” Mostly thanks to Nadine’s influence, his admiration for armed revolutionaries had shifted to peaceful activists over the years. She had convinced him that civil disobedience and diplomacy were always superior options.

“Because Palestinians have absolutely no economic leverage with which to demand their human rights.”

“I don’t know much about this topic in particular, but fighting with violence gets more innocent people killed, right? Including more of your own.”

“Sure, but you can’t expect that all Palestinians will accept dehumanization to avoid more casualties. An occupied population has the right to defend itself. That said, perhaps you don’t know, but most Palestinian resistance to the occupation has been through nonviolent demonstrations. But they are always crushed by the Israeli army, daily, and Israel continues to make more illegal settlements inside the Palestinian territories.”

Maybe this was her way of feeling realigned with Samira. “Who decides if they’re illegal?”

“This is not my defining,
habibi
. An overwhelming majority of the world’s leaders”—she counted off on her fingers—“and the United Nations Security Council, and the General Assembly, the Red Cross, the International Court of Justice, the EU, and every single human rights organization across the board consider the occupation illegal, but not the United States. Your country doesn’t see a problem with Israel controlling the roads, air space, borders, water, electricity, sewage systems, and access to oil in the Palestinian territories. And though Israel does not give these people they control the right to a vote, your country somehow
reasons that they are the great democracy of the region. It would actually all be very funny if it weren’t so sad. There is a moment when you must consider the consensus, no? When ninety-eight percent of scientists around the world tell me that global warming is real, I believe them and consider the deniers a little stupid. But in this situation, the most powerful country in the world, the United States, is the denier. What is this?”

He couldn’t tell if it was a paranoid thought or not, but he had the strong feeling that condemning Israel equaled anti-Semitism. His impulse was to defend their state. He was conscious that this stance was an implicit critique of his mother. Even so, he felt more comfortable arguing for the Jewish people he’d heard had been persecuted for centuries. And maybe disagreeing with his mother was healthy. It didn’t mean a rejection of her. No, he imagined she was the kind of person who would respect his willingness to disagree. He decided she was the synthesis of Nadine and his father. With his father he’d made the mistake of refusing to vocalize his differences of opinion, and though he would have surely felt at ease contradicting Nadine, he never did. He naturally agreed with everything she said, which was also suspicious. Finally, with his mother, he’d struck a balance. Respectfully opposing her, even if only through his aunt, was actually anticipative and exciting. “But don’t Jews have the right to their holy land? I mean, after all they’ve been through? They needed a safe place to exist after the Nazis tried to exterminate them, right?” He wished Nadine and his mother had heard him say that. He sounded good just now—confident.

She looked at him as if he’d randomly taken his shirt off. “Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust. You know that, right? Listen”—she put both her hands flat on the table—“the very idea of half a million traumatized people from Europe getting invited into the Middle East to make an exclusivist state, without the knowledge, let alone the permission, of the native
population is absurd.” She squinted at him. “You don’t see that? And some of the natives who were violently forced out fought back, like the Native Americans in your country. Some of them tried to fight back as they were being forced out, no? Were they horrible terrorists for it?”

He resented this comparison, as if being on the side of the Jewish people was the same as being on the side of colonizers who killed Native Americans. “I’m not saying Israel is perfect or anything. I just think they use military force out of self-defense from terrorists. If terrorist attacks stopped, I’m sure they would let up.”

“Ah yes, the losers will always be called terrorists. The crazy man who doesn’t look anything like a Westerner, who straps a bomb to his chest and cries out ‘Allah Akbar,’ is of course a terrorist, but the handsome, light-skinned cadet dropping a bomb from an expensive plane onto a shantytown is not. He is a soldier following orders. He is well trained and well fed and speaks an impeccable English. But the fact that they kill at least ten Palestinians to every one Israeli doesn’t seem to count when deciding who is terrorizing who.” She was heating up. “And why does your principled antiviolence position only apply to Palestinians? Why should one side be allowed to use force but not the other? Because one side is better friends with America? And tell me, if Israel’s main concern was really their people’s safety, then why do they pay Jews from anywhere in the world, who have never even been to the Middle East, to move into these illegal settlements in the occupied territories, right on top of the Palestinians? This isn’t about safety, Hakeem, this is clear-cut expansionism.”

“No, yeah, okay.” He nodded rapidly. He wanted out of this debate.

“It’s always amazed me how afraid Americans are to criticize Israel’s brutal occupation. I have no problem complaining about the racism in Lebanon and the backwardness and corruption
here, and it doesn’t mean I hate Lebanese. I went to graduate school in London and lived there for twenty years, but I will happily criticize Great Britain’s foreign policy too. So why is it so hard for Americans or Israelis to admit that the way they treat Palestinians is disgusting? Disagreeing with Israel’s repression of Palestinians doesn’t mean that you don’t like Jewish people. There is nothing Jewish about the apartheid enacted there. Don’t be fooled, Hakeem, this is not a religious or racial conflict. It is a human rights issue. Period.” She shook her head at her plate for a while.

As the maid came to clear the table, Max thought about meeting his mother, of their cheeks touching. What else was in her life than fighting for Palestinians? What did she eat for breakfast? Did she read any fiction? Did she spend a lot of time outside, or was she more of a hermit, like Nadine and Max? Did she listen to Pink Floyd? Which album was her favorite? Did she really exist at all?

He said, “I don’t want to go to Paris if she’s not there.”

Anika clucked her tongue. “If my mother says she’s coming, then she will come. Go to their home, Hakeem. It’s the best way.” She stood up. “Now, please, call Rasheed. Call him at once and tell him you are here and doing all right.”

He didn’t. A righteous anger streamed through him at the thought of Rasheed. The tangerine-size ball on his stomach that had maybe been a sorrowful love for his father before now shivered with sickening pity and hatred.

He called Nadine instead.

“You’re in Lebanon?” she shouted.

“Yeah.” He could hear a trace of pride in his voice. “I just sort of flew here. And my mom’s in Paris.”

“What are you doing to us, Max?” she said.

“Us?”

“Your father’s been over here three times. He’s called the school and the police.” It was hard to imagine Nadine and his father interacting at all, let alone collaborating on a manhunt. “Tim spent the last two nights with him because of how bad he’s freaking out. He’s been having a heart attack since you left. He looks horrible.”

“I didn’t know you two were such good friends.”

“Don’t be an ass,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?”

“Because I acted like a psycho last time I saw you. And because you’d have talked me out of it.”

“Yeah, I would have come up with some way to do it intelligently. Prepare a little. Did you even try to call her first?”

“I couldn’t find her from there. I needed to do this, Nadine. I needed to do something for once. Anyway, it’s more or less worked out thus far. I’m going to meet her in Paris tomorrow.”

“So she lives in Paris?”

“I don’t think she actually lives there. No one seems to know,” he said, starting to whisper now, “or they’re not telling me.”

“That’s weird. Why wouldn’t they tell you?”

“Not sure yet. We’re all meeting at my grandparents’.”

“Well, at least give me their phone number.”

“No, I don’t know it. Nadine, please don’t worry about my dad anymore. You shouldn’t be paying attention to him. And do not tell him where I’m going, okay? I can try to call you from there, but promise you won’t tell him.”

“Don’t ask me to keep a secret like that. He’s hurting badly. I mean, he looks sick.”

“I don’t give a shit.”

“Yes, you do. Saying you don’t give a shit invariably means you do give a shit. Come home. Your dad’s in really rough shape.”

“You’re joking, right? I’m a day away from meeting my mother.”

“Are you nervous?”

“I don’t know what I am.”

He arrived in Paris at six thirty in the morning. His grandparents’ apartment was the whole top floor of a Haussmannian building next to the Arc de Triomphe. Even with the tall ceilings and large windows, the inside had the same great but somehow airless feel as their Beirut apartment.

His grandmother, Téta, opened the door. Not saying a word, she studied his breaths as though each one revealed a profound truth about universal life. Based on their brief phone conversation, he would have guessed her to be high-energy and assertive. But it’s easy to be that way over the phone. She looked frail in her blueberry-and-cream polka-dotted summer dress. Her skin, wrinkly and soft, would probably rip under a light scratch. Wrapping her arms around him, she smelled tart, like face creams that have gone sour. Over her shoulder he could see Jiddo. Max followed Téta through the living room. Her steps were light and surprisingly even and self-possessed. Like Anika,
she had controlled and deliberate gestures, except for the constant side-to-side motion of her head that seemed to be saying,
I don’t know, I don’t know, oh God, I really don’t know.

Jiddo’s appearance was familiar. Max must have caught a younger version of him in one of those photographs in the Beirut apartment. He didn’t rise from the sofa placed in the center of this grand, wood-floored apartment. His legs stayed crossed as he caressed a
masbaha
, a string of prayer beads, with his thumb.

Jiddo scrunched up his eyes as Max approached. The couch and table, with little else around it, were a good thirty feet away from the door. The liver spots on his peanut-brown skin looked strangely handsome, medallions of experience. His lips were slim and the color of ground beef, and above them hung a thick gray mustache. He had broad shoulders and spoke loudly. “Ah, yes, Ali! Come here, my boy! Please, sit, sit.”

Shit, Max thought, now I have a third name?

Téta said to Jiddo, “This is not Ali, Ziad, this is Hakeem, Samira’s son.” She spoke kindly but with that directness and authority effective schoolteachers use. “He has come to meet us for the first time.”

Jiddo gave no sign of registering what she’d said. Max sat on an antique wicker chair across from him. The black marble coffee table—littered with silver antiques, a dozen more
masbaha
s, and two curved daggers in ruby-studded sheaths—separated them. Jiddo wore a corduroy vest and a green-and-red Christmas sweater underneath, though it must have been eighty degrees. Téta went to the kitchen to tell the maid to prepare some tea, leaving Max and Jiddo alone.

“You see,” he said, “Ali, I have been meaning to inform you of some things. When you order food in a proper restaurant, you should not look at the menu, you should look at the waiter directly in the eye.” He interlaced his fingers. “Because you
know what it is you want.” He moved his head forward and backward knowingly. “I ask you to try this when the waitress comes back. Also, always dry your hands well enough to shake with another person immediately after you come out of the bathroom. You never know when you will run into an important acquaintance, and a wet handshake puts a very disagreeable pall over a conversation.”