Lifted by the Great Nothing: A Novel (25 page)

“Yeah, all right.”

“Good boy. Another thing. Stop stacking the plates at the end of the meal. We have people to do that. You and Samira try to help the waitress. You believe it is a considerate and helpful thing to do, but in fact you are degrading the waitress’s duties. You must allow people of all standings to do their work honorably. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good.
Shh
. Here she comes.” Téta walked through the living room and sat with them. Jiddo winked at Max and said, “So, Ali, tell me how is school? Are you going every day like we spoke about?”

Max had no idea how to play this. Before he could think to answer, Jiddo cut in. “Where is Samira?”

“What?”

The pleasantness drained from Jiddo’s face, and he looked at Max as if he’d caught him stealing. His brow lowered and his eyes darkened. “Are you having trouble with your ears today, Ali? I asked you a simple question. Where is my daughter? Look at me. Where is she?” He tried to stand up a couple of times but couldn’t. “You dirty peasant swine.” He wept. “They put her in prison because of you. Are you proud, you pig? Nine years. Are you proud now? They hurt my baby. Ways that never leave the body. Ways that stay on the inside. They don’t ever leave the inside. They won’t leave the inside. They won’t leave.” He shook his head as if he were wicking water off his
hair, softly repeating, “I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you,” through his sobs.

Téta took a lollipop out of her pocket. “Don’t worry, Hakeem. He is only very confused.” She unwrapped it, leaned over, and planted it in Jiddo’s mouth. This distracted him enough to stop his crying. His expression changed into an easy, pleased smile. He gazed at the table like a glassy-eyed kid watching cartoons. Téta said, “Come with me into the kitchen, Hakeem, to help with the tea.”

As they walked to the kitchen, Jiddo talked around the lollipop at Max’s back. “Where is she? Where is she?”

In the kitchen, Téta introduced him to the maid. She was Sudanese and at least six foot three, with a sweet round face and shaved head. She bowed a hello, and Max bowed back. The kitchen was as large as one of Max’s classrooms back in Clarence, with a big island in the middle, brass pots and pans hanging above. The clock on the oven read 6:45, and the amber daylight climbed the walls like a rising water line. They could hear Jiddo barking it now, like a protest chant:
Where! Is! She! Where! Is! She!

“What year are you at school, Hakeem?” Téta asked Max. She seemed to want to pretend, at least for a short while, that there was something casual in this visit.

“I’m going to be a senior in high school.”

Jiddo was going hoarse in the living room, screaming that they had hurt his baby in ways that never leave the body.

Téta said, “Good, good. Good. You look so much older than that.”

They should have had a million things to say to each other, but nothing came. Samira’s absence hung too heavily between them.

“How is your father?” she asked.

“He’s fine.” Jiddo sounded like a mourner out there. No words, only wailing.

“Is he doing all right financially?” He saw she regretted saying it as soon as it came out of her mouth, and ignored the question.

Jiddo’s lamentations simmered down to a drowsy blubbering. Max heard the ticking of a grandfather clock coming from some other room for the first time since he’d arrived.

Waiting like this made for a terrible restlessness. Waiting to address the reason he stood here in this oversize kitchen. Waiting for Jiddo to tire out. Waiting for the kettle to whistle and the long-limbed maid to stop moving around aimlessly, cleaning what was already perfectly clean. Waiting to meet his mother. Sleep hadn’t come to him on the plane to Beirut or the one here; the waiting had kept him up the whole way. An obsessive concern for the future: the very definition of anxiety.

The kettle whistled, and the maid prepared the silver tea tray, everything appearing miniature in her large hands. Téta looked at Max with rose-rimmed eyes of alarm and pain, and maybe wisdom. He couldn’t decide if she saw him as an angel or as a curse that had landed in their house.

He volunteered to bring the tea to Jiddo, and on the way he determined that the nervousness in the air wasn’t only his own. Téta was afraid of Max too. Of course she was. Max represented a memory they’d tried to erase. She had probably never expected this day to come. Had she been the one to tell his mother he didn’t make it? That he’d died? Was that the arrangement? You, Rasheed, tell her son that she is dead, and I’ll tell my daughter her husband and son are no longer of this earth?

But as with Anika, why had Téta invited him at all? Did she have a change of heart and realize the wrongness in all the lies spun over the years? He walked toward Jiddo, angry but emboldened by this idea of forcing confessions from everyone.
Yes, emboldened by the idea that he wouldn’t stop until he found his mother and all the light they would bring each other.

Jiddo sat folded over himself, hanging his head all the way down to his lap. Max thought he’d dozed off at first, but he was holding a wristwatch in his hands, staring intently at it, his nose almost touching its gold face. The lollipop had fallen to the Persian rug.

Max sat a few minutes, observing Jiddo’s steadfast obsession with his watch’s second hand. Téta should be here to take her share of the awkwardness. He marched back through the swinging door and into the kitchen, where the enlivening smells of pressed pomegranate, coffee, and the olive oil and
labne
being spread down a long plate coursed up his nose.

Max asked, “Will I meet her soon, Téta?”

She washed her bent and knotted hands in the air. “She should have arrived hours ago. This means she had some delays in coming.”

His instinct was to conceal his edginess. “But coming from where?”

“Amman, Jordan,” she whispered as though it could get her into trouble.

“Jordan?” He didn’t know exactly where to situate Jordan, but he was pretty sure it was closer to Lebanon than to France.

So what the hell was he doing here? Did no one understand that he was looking for his mother? He’d come all this way for his mother. Not for tea and pistachios with grandparents. Not to learn about his Lebanese origins. Not to debate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Not to hear stories about Samira Jabbir, or see pictures of her, but for her to be sitting and breathing and talking right there in front of him. Why hadn’t Téta told him where his mother lived before? Why didn’t they give him her fucking phone number when he was with Anika? What was
going on? So far, of all the people, only Kelly had been straight with him.

If Téta knew or could have found out where Max lived all these years, since they were depositing money in Rasheed’s account, and she had his mother’s phone number, of course she could have connected mother and son. Ask her why she never did, he told himself. What are you afraid of? Ask her. Ask her that one question, you coward.

Téta washed her hands more rapidly. “She works at a refugee camp there.”

“Could I call her, please?” he said.

Her head shook a little faster, and her eyes glazed thickly, as if they sat in egg whites. She’d looked on the verge of tears since his arrival, but had yet to shed one. She didn’t answer for a long time. “Yes. You are right. I will call her in the study room. Wait here.”

She exited.

She’d already left by the time he’d formulated what he should have said:
No, I’ll call while
you
wait here.

He stayed in the kitchen, doing slow laps around the island, avoiding Jiddo.

He didn’t want these grandparents. Not until he found the woman that connected them to him. He wanted his mother to teach him how to read and appreciate Téta and Jiddo.

He dragged his feet to one of the large windows, pressed his forehead against the glass, and stared down into the street. He heard Téta’s voice rising from behind a closed door somewhere. The apartment was easily six times the size of his home, but elevated, like a giant tree house: a fort, a prison, a casket in the air.

There was a white delivery van in the street with an extraordinary amount of pigeon shit concentrated dead in the center of its roof like a giant spinach omelet, green and white and
yellow. The cars parked in front of and behind it were spotless. He wondered what it was about this van that attracted pigeons to take aim at it so incessantly. To remove all those layers of shit would require a metal scraping tool, a strong spatula of some kind, and boiling water and soap too. A minor surgery of sorts. He understood why the owner of the van didn’t clean the roof. He might avoid such a job himself, considering so few people look closely at roofs anyway.

This is crazy, he thought. What am I waiting here for? He lifted his head and nearly ran toward the sound of Téta’s voice until he came to the study. He entered as she hung up.

Without turning toward Max, she said, “Hakeem, your mother is not well.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean to say she is not like before. She is not stable as she once was. Like Jiddo.”

“Like Jiddo?”

“No, not like Jiddo, really.” She faced him.

“Téta, why didn’t you tell me she was in Jordan while I was in Beirut?”

She looked at the ground like a culpable kid. “It is better to have everyone meet here, I think. It is better like this. Here, with us all together. This way we can all meet.” She put her hand on Max’s shoulder. “Okay. There was a simple complication. No problem. She will come, you will see. I promise. She will come tonight, I am sure. We will see her tonight.”

“What complication?”

“A traveling complication. But she is on her way now.”

“Really?”

“
Inshallah
, Hakeem.
Inshallah
.”

“Right. What time is she coming then?”

“Tonight. This evening.”

“I would like to talk to her myself on the phone.”

“Hakeem, she has made bad decisions.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes.”

“Well I’ll learn all about them when I meet her. For now I’d just like to speak to her on the phone and make sure she exists.”

“Exists?” She took a big, brave breath. “Okay. Yes. Fine.” She picked up the phone and held it awhile, staring at him, like she was calling his bluff. When he didn’t react, she dialed a long number and handed him the receiver. There was that waterfalling sound between rings that comes with international calls, and it felt like once the ringing stopped, his judgment would be decided. It rang and rang. He understood his mother had been talking to Téta a moment ago, and now she wasn’t answering. Every ring was a spasming fish trapped behind his breastbone. A nervousness that caused a physical ache. Air bubbles in his heart. It rang nine times before the machine picked up. A woman spoke briefly in a watery Arabic, and then,
beep
.

He said, “Hello? Hi, this is—” and then blanked. He hung up a few seconds later, not sure who would get the message, or what he could possibly say even if he did know his mother would hear it.

“She is on her way,” Téta said.

When they sat around that low coffee table in the living room, Jiddo addressed him again as though for the first time. “Ah, Ali! I am glad to see you. I want you to invite your father for dinner. I find it is not correct that we never see each other except when I need his services. You will tell him we insist that he come this evening.”

Max looked at Téta. She said to Jiddo, “Of course, Ziad, we will have a nice dinner tonight. Now let us enjoy this breakfast.”

“Very well.” He turned to Téta. “Miss? Do I have dinner plans for this evening?”

“No, we do not.”

“Well, tell Ali to stay with us and invite his father and the other children. Doesn’t that suit you, Ali?”

The maid brought everything: the
sobeir
cactus fruit,
labne
, hummus,
halawi, man’oushe
, fresh pomegranate juice, white tea, and coffee. After she’d laid everything out, Jiddo asked where Samira was today. Max took his first bite of cactus fruit, trying to relax under his grandfather’s murderous gaze.

Max didn’t answer, so Jiddo pointed the question to Téta. “Still at school?”

“Hakeem,” Téta said, “why don’t we go look at some family photos after we finish eating? I have decided to tell you a few things you don’t yet know.”

“Okay.”

In her bedroom, Téta opened a green marble box, saying these were the things she’d managed to save. Inside were a few pictures of Samira, Ali, Rasheed, and Anika as children. Ali jumped out at Max first. He looked like him, same nose and eyes and bone structure. Max was more built than him, but otherwise they were twins. It was unsettling to resemble a dead man this much, the same dead man Jiddo kept mistaking him for. There was a delay between that thought and his recalling what Anika had said about how much he looked like his father. He understood who she meant now. Of course. Ali, the man his mother had loved and avenged. That’s who they were saying was Max’s father.

He lost the ability to swallow. His midsection turned into a cloud; his torso floated a few inches above his waist. He had no
urge to address or confirm the surreality of this new understanding. It was too big. Along with Rasheed’s sexuality, his mind’s defense was to shelve it for another time.

Rasheed was the only one smiling in the photos, laughing even, with one arm around Ali and the other around Samira, and Anika standing a few feet apart from them with her arms crossed. They were on a seafront. Téta said they were at one of Rasheed’s aunt’s homes in Byblos. Rasheed’s carefreeness in the pictures annoyed Max to no end.

Samira wore faded jeans and a dusty white T-shirt, her big maple-brown curls cut short and parted in the middle. Her features were both wide and angular, strong and intelligent. She had the broad jaw of Indian chiefs on old television shows, and large, impenetrable eyes. In another picture, years older than the first, she had the physique of a swimmer, full shoulders and bad posture, holding Max in her arms. The people in the background were out of focus, but you could make out the outline of someone reclining in a burnt-orange dentist chair behind her. And behind the chair, lining the walls, were a bunch of even blurrier people, sitting or squatting.