The Angel of History (2 page)

The beating of your heart kept me awake one night, for months after you died I saw you everywhere, heard you, your voice, sonorous, throaty, reverberating in my ear. I wasn’t crazy, I knew you were dead, I buried you after all—I mean, I burned you, cremated you. But I kept seeing you, doing dishes in the kitchen with your back to me, I’d call you as you stacked each plate in our plastic dish rack, but you didn’t look back and then you were gone in a flash and I was left with nothing, not even an afterimage. I didn’t mistake you for anybody, I never saw you in a crowd, thinking someone else was you, no, it was never like that. I saw you in the hallway, in our hallway, under the Turkish lamp you brought back from Istanbul when you were there so long ago, remember the trouble they gave you at customs for a twenty-dollar lamp, and when you emerged from the
swinging doors you were furious, I kept telling you to calm down but you wouldn’t, you went on and on because you were angry and you were an American and you could ruffle feathers at airports. While I was alive I loved you while you were alive and I loved you still but I forgot for a while. Forgive me, I couldn’t obsess about you all the time, so you disappeared as if I’d bleached my memory, but you came back, you know, like a fungal infection—remember thrush, the white stains that attacked your innocent tongue, looked like the snowy down on old strawberries, we couldn’t get rid of it, and you hated it and I hated it and you wanted it over. When, to make you feel better, I joked that the furry fungus matched your white lab coat, you turned apoplectic, wanted to strangle me, I still regret that, I thought it was funny at the time.

You’ve been gone for decades, you hid deep in my lakes, why now, why infect my dreams now? What flood is this? Once as I was buying groceries in a store where a young third-worlder mopped the floor, back and forth, back and forth, around a yellow sign that announced Piso Mojado, the mephitic aroma of disinfectant assaulted my senses, and you jumped the levee of my memory. Proust had his mnemonic madeleine, but bleach was all ours, Doc, all ours. The tomatoes didn’t look too good and I just went home. I’d been a coward, I was scared, do notice I said scared and not frightened, you taught me the difference, you said, Children get scared, men might feel afraid, might even feel terror, but men don’t get scared. I’d been so lonely since you died, you left me roofless in a downpour. You gripped the bedrail when you took your final breath and I had to pry open your fingers one by one to free you, it took seventeen
minutes because my hands were shaking so much. Even in death you were stronger than I, and more obstinate, the mortician told me it took forever to burn you, thrice he had to put you in the incinerator, you refused to turn to ash. You sincerely believed that the distance between you and me would one day disappear. You told me I was not my mother and you were not my father, but how could we not be, how could we not be, the stones over her cenotaph still felt so very heavy. You held out your arms and said, Join me, but I couldn’t, and you said, Let me love you, and I couldn’t because you wanted to be so close. You held out the fireman’s net and said, Jump, and I couldn’t, I felt the fall was much too great, I chose to go back into the fire. You said, I like it when you doze on my chest, but I said, The hair on your chest irritates my cheeks and makes it difficult to sleep. I could hardly bear the beauty of you.

You were gone for so long and I moved along and everyone told me I was alive, but that night, in my bed, each time my ear touched the single pillow I heard your heartbeat once more, once more, once more, once more.

My heart is restless until it rests in thee.

I’m the congenital immigrant, Doc, think about it. I left parts of me everywhere. I was born homeless, countryless, raceless, didn’t belong to either my father’s family or my mother’s, no one could claim me, or wanted to. I was a rug-burn baby, a Persian rug burn—my father, all of fourteen at the time, fucked my not-much-older mother right there on
the Mahi from Tabriz while sunbeams played hide-and-seek amid the furniture. Both pairs of knees chafed since they stole each other’s virginity canine-style and my mother could admire the exquisite deep blue rosettes surrounded by gold lancet leaves repeating all around her, her body on all fours right above the carpet’s main medallion, which looked like a fish rising to the surface of a pond at midnight to admire the reflection of the moon. I’ve never seen the carpet, not once did my eyes fall upon that masterwork, or the penthouse apartment in Beirut’s Achrafieh neighborhood, yet my mind’s eye rewove the century-old treasure thread by silk thread since my mother never tired of describing it to me when I was a child. In luxury I came to be, she used to tell me, in remarkable beauty I was conceived, deep blue water, gold, cobalt violet toothed leaves that represented the scales of the fish, repeating patterns, ogees and swoops and arabesque arcs, over and over and over. When his parents—I can’t call them my grandparents, Doc, I just can’t—saw me beginning to form in the belly of their short maid from the deserts of Yemen, they tortured a confession out of my father, they went insane, the wrath of frothy-mouthed Hera boiled in their blood, but they did not bring the shotgun out of the rifle room. They were curious enough to ask how many times the sexual act was consummated—quite a few, it seemed, since my mother’s dark blood was insatiable—but didn’t think of asking where their son’s drone first found its Yemeni target, which was lucky for me because had they discovered that filthy bodily fluid had assuredly soiled their priceless chef d’oeuvre, they would have strung my mother from the balcony and Beirut’s bourgeoisie would have applauded in unison and I wouldn’t have been born.

You, Doc, wait, I need someone to hear this, listen to me. My mother was kicked out of the palace, which meant I was unceremoniously exiled while still in utero. Think about that, an early immigrant, I learned to travel light, always just a carry-on, never checked my luggage. Do you know the difference between an expat and an immigrant? You’re an immigrant in a country you look up to, an expat in one you consider beneath you. I don’t know why I tell you all this about me, I need to, I guess, but with this need to tell comes the concomitant desire to forget everything, to bury it once more and forever, to remember my story into some microphone or digital thingamajig and then take the recording to a field in Sonoma or a cemetery in Colma and inter it along with my so-called poems that no one reads and no one should. I would walk to my burial ground, not ride the bus, no matter how long it took, because it would be a ritual of pilgrimage. My memories would blur with my poems, each image would meld with a clod of dirt, each word dissolve into the earth.

I was forced to emigrate while I was still my mother, while I was within someone else’s flesh. You never emigrated, Doc, you were born and raised in this town, but I tell you, when you leave, a section of your heart withers on its vine, you start over again, over and over, you mispronounce your name once and once again, Ya’qub becomes Jacob and then, heaven forbid, Jake, you get on with your life, but each time you bid farewell to a place, voracious flesh-eating fish swim up from your depths, vultures circle your skies, and your city’s dead quiver with fury in their graves and bang on their coffins, but then your homeland feels too paltry, a canoe tied to a branch by your mother’s hair. A caisson of regrets, Doc, a caisson of regrets is all I have left.

For a few years my mother Hagared the desert: from the Imamate to the Aden Protectorate, Abyan, Hadramawt, from one corner of the southern peninsula to the other, I in her arms, or so she told me, from a desiccated village at the border with Oman to an irriguous one across the strait from Djibouti, hoping to be taken in by one part of her family or another. They would feel sorry for her at first, adopt her for a brief period before someone felt horrifically offended by being in the presence of an adulteress and her offspring of sin. North and South Yemen may have waged wars against each other, roosters who cock-a-doodle-dooed at dawn from dunghill to dunghill, but the two cocks united in finding me repulsive. My mother hid behind her veil, I behind her skirt, and we kept on leaving, which might have been traumatic at the time, but it was a good thing because really, can you imagine this faggot growing up in some obscure hovel with no running water, let alone air-conditioning, and where would I have found products for this nappy hair? Every night as we wandered the desert among my mother’s tribes, golden jackals howled about the five million ways she missed my father, jackasses brayed urging her to move to the city, that’s what she used to tell me and I believed her. She told me she many a time considered discarding me. The moon when full and camels with gibbous humps whispered in her ear to offer me, her mark of shame, to the wide womb of the night, a sacrifice to the Arabian leopard. Without me she would have stayed, she had a man to take care of her, a husband, well, many husbands, other women’s husbands, but she kept me and kept me away from the desert’s hunters and carrion scavengers.

On a rainy night as bucketsful of water sluiced the dark and local roses hung their dripping heads in sorrow and brackish runnels muddied the floor of her shack, she wistfully recalled the luxuries of that Beirut apartment, the carpets, the Laliques and Limoges, the white faience chandelier and its Louis XVI sister in crystal luster. The next day she was on the bus out of whichever urine-soaked, dust-plagued village we were in at the time. The first big move for immigrants is usually from the country to the city, and we did the same, except ours wasn’t the first move or the second or the third, and I can’t tell you how old I was, maybe a toddler, maybe two or three.

You ask what I remember of my mother’s country? I remember nights falling so fast you felt as if you were bungee jumping. Stars above, impervious stars and more stars, awe-inspiring, infinite and indifferent, histrionically spectacular, I felt I was a child of the universe. What else? Morning skies that held no secrets, harsh suns you could almost touch, plunging down and exploding, gushing blood and gold in the evening. Browns and beiges and creams, pinks so divine they would convert an atheist, I remember untrammeled nature in its many guises, dales and plains and hills and many a rill that watered hanging gardens, you could wring the sweetness of jasmine out of the soft air. Qat, chewing qat, drinking it, and then more qat, and death, yes, death and funerals, I was so young, but I remember the funerals, so many, and at one for a teenage boy, men took turns carrying the coffin all the way to the grave, and everyone recited the Sura of Yasin over it as always, villagers wailed about a future that would not occur, a marriage that would not happen, grandchildren that wouldn’t arrive, and
I turned to my mother’s covered face and asked her when her grandchildren would arrive.

I don’t have to mention how my mother supported herself without a family, we can both surmise what she resorted to. Yes, Doc, she resorted to that, I’m the lowest of the low, I’m an Arab, I’m the son of a whore.

“Is it true?” Satan asked.

“Which part?” replied Death. “That Jacob’s mother was a whore? I’m surprised you ask. I thought she was the reason you became involved in this saga. She was the harlot of all harlots. She was the whore of Babylon, a prostitute with a good heart.”

Jacob’s cat jumped out of the closet, landed on the hardwood floor with a sizable thump, big boy. His favorite napping place was on the T-shirts on a shelf behind hanging jackets. He glanced at Death for a moment, found him unworthy, ever so dramatically sauntered over to Satan’s hand draped over the armrest, and arched his back. Satan scratched beneath the lush black hair with long fingernails. The cat rolled onto his back, paws in the air, and spread himself for belly ministrations. His loud purring included a strange nasal hiccup.

“He calls this boy Behemoth,” Satan said, smiling.

“Of course he does,” Death said, “and that’s why the cat likes you so.” His tapered fingers reached toward his newly grown mustache, curled and black and blatantly waxed. With his hand raised, the sleeve dropped once more. Death chuckled, noticing that Satan seemed enraptured with the tattoo. “What were we talking about? Wait, I remember. We were talking about the boy’s mother, but you weren’t asking about her, were you?”

“No,” Satan said, shaking his head, still smiling. “I loved her. She was so good, so adept, she could make Denis blush, and you’d think nothing could embarrass that preening pervert of a saint. I meant the funerals, so many of them, his memories. Wasn’t he too young to remember all that?”

“Probably,” Death said. “I don’t know. There were many funerals, but I can’t tell what he remembers. Yemen is one of my favorite places, it’s an octopus with each of its tentacles dipped in a different century.”

“In one of his poems,” Satan said, “he compared Yemen to a poor African nation without Bono or Nicholas Kristof.”

“Funny guy, our Jacob,” Death said. “One of the reasons he has survived for so long is that his mother took him out of that ill-starred country.”

“In Yemen,” Satan said, “you could get killed for having a dust mote in your eye and blinking at an inopportune moment. I frequently played with sandstorms just for the hell of it.”

“That nation has refreshed and rejuvenated me for centuries,” Death said.

He produced a tan leather pouch out of his sleeve. With thumb and forefinger he extracted a pinch of tobacco and
began to roll a cigarette. “Yet, that Egyptian hellion Badeea happened to come to Yemen and she took the whore and her son back to Cairo. Things have a habit of working out, as the cliché goes, especially if you had a hand in those things. Badeea was your doing, right?”

From his other sleeve Death produced a match, flicked it lit with his manicured fingernail. The smell of Tartarean sulfur floated in the air between them.

“Are you going to interview the others?” Death asked. “Denis and Pantaleon? Maybe Eustace? You must do Catherine too. She probably knew him best, screwed him up the most—well, after you.”

He took a long drag, the tip of his flimsy cigarette growing and glowing, almost afire, yellow flame, red ember, gray ash.

“Jacob doesn’t like anyone smoking in his apartment,” Satan said.

“Fuck him,” Death said.