Zeitoun (35 page)

The man sighed. “I’m sympathetic, but you can’t have it without permission of the district attorney,” he said.

“You mean Eddie Jordan?” Kathy asked. “Where is he?”

“He’s not here,” he said.

“When will he be here?” Kathy asked.

The assistant DA didn’t know.

Kathy and Zeitoun walked into the station lobby, not knowing what their next step was. But then, through the station’s front window, she saw Eddie Jordan. He was standing out front, surrounded by a phalanx of reporters.

Kathy marched out the door to confront Jordan. He was dressed in a three-piece suit.

“Why can’t we have his wallet?” she asked.

“Excuse me?” Jordan said.

Kathy told him a brief version of Zeitoun’s situation, and reiterated her demand that the wallet be returned.

Jordan said that there was nothing he could do about it, and turned around, resuming his conversation.

Now Kathy saw that the Dutch reporter was nearby. She wanted him and the other reporters to hear what was happening. She spoke as loudly as she could.

“You arrested my husband in his own house, and now you won’t give him his wallet back? What’s going on here? What is wrong with this city?”

Jordan shrugged and turned away.

“We’re going back inside,” Kathy said to Zeitoun.

Zeitoun didn’t see the point, but the fire in her eyes did not encourage debate. They went back in and walked directly up to the
assistant DA. Kathy wouldn’t allow that damned prison ID to define her husband, to be the only government-issued identification he owned.

“You have to do something,” she said. She was near tears now, a mess of frustration and rage.

The assistant DA closed his eyes. “Let me see what I can find,” he said. He left the office. In ten minutes, he came back with the wallet and handed it to Zeitoun.

Zeitoun’s driver’s license and permanent-resident card were there, but all his cash, business cards, and credit cards were gone.

“Where are the other things?” Zeitoun asked.

The man didn’t know. “That’s all there was.”

Kathy didn’t care. All she wanted, for now, was proof that her country recognized her husband as a citizen.

“Thank you, sir,” she said. “Thank you.” She wanted to hug him. He was the first person representing any part of the city or state government who had shown any humanity at all. Even this one easily executed task, retrieving the wallet of a man they’d held in a cage a few yards away, seemed, in the context, an act of great courage and empathy.

They left, satisfied that they had gotten the most crucial thing, the driver’s license. Given the nature of the city’s judicial system, it was miraculous that the wallet had been kept at all. Kathy had already canceled the credit cards. The rest they could replace.

That was the last time Kathy felt that focused, that angry. Now she is more diffuse. She gets angry, but not as often, and she can’t focus her rage as she once could. Where she was once ready and willing to fight any battle, she prefers now to retreat, reinforce her defenses, double the locks on the doors. She finds herself fearful, always, that something will happen to her family. She doesn’t like her kids playing in the neighborhood.
She wants them where she can see them, even Nademah, who is thirteen now, and almost as tall as Kathy herself. She watches them sleep. She never did that before. She checks on them frequently during the night. She wakes up and has trouble getting back to sleep.

Nademah, always responsible, always whip-smart, is now sharing in the care of her sisters. Zachary is eighteen, lives with friends in New Orleans, and works at one of Adnan’s Subway restaurants. Safiya and Aisha are the same as always: blithe, full of joy, given to bursts of song. All of the kids make life very easy for little Ahmad, born on November 10, 2006 at East Jefferson Hospital.

Ahmad is, by all accounts, a preternaturally content baby. He never wants for attention, with his sisters taking turns holding him, taking dangerous things out of his mouth, reading to him, dressing him in their old clothes.

Zeitoun was so thankful for a boy. And the name was never an issue. Ahmad was the first and only name.

Zeitoun’s brother Ahmad, still living in Spain, now works as a ship inspector. He’s waiting for his brother to bring the new baby to Málaga. It’s time he saw his nephew, his namesake.

Kathy is working less these days. There’s the baby to care for, and her mind is not sharp enough, not lately, to handle all the paperwork on her own. They have some help now, from Ambata and others, which gives Kathy some room to breathe, to be a mother, to try to make sense of the last three years.

There are appointments with doctors. Doctors to try to figure out why her hands go numb without warning. Doctors to investigate her digestive problems, memory problems.

Doctors have asked Kathy what she thinks the most traumatic part of the Katrina experience was. She surprised herself and the doctors when she realized that it was after she knew Zeitoun was alive, and had been told he was at Hunt Correctional Center, but wasn’t allowed to see him or even know where a court hearing might be held. It was that moment, being told by the woman on the phone that the hearing’s location was “private information,” that did the most damage.

“I felt cracked open,” she says.

That this woman, a stranger, could know her despair and desperation, and simply deny her. That there could be trials without witnesses, that her government could make people disappear.

“It broke me.”

She finds herself wondering, early in the morning and late at night and sometimes just while sitting with little Ahmad sleeping on her lap:
Did all that really happen? Did it happen in the United States? To us?
It could have been avoided, she thinks. So many little things could have been done. So many people let it happen. So many looked away. And it only takes one person, one small act of stepping from the dark to the light.

She wants to find out who that missionary was, the man who met her husband in prison and took her phone number—the messenger. The man who risked something in the name of mercy.

But did he risk so much? Not really. Usually you needn’t risk so much to right a wrong. It’s not so complicated. It’s the opposite of complicated. To dial a number given to you by a man in a cage, to tell the voice on the other end, “I saw him.” Is that complicated? Is that an act of great heroism in the United States of America?

It should not be so.

*    *    *

Kathy worries that her husband is working too hard now. He works every day, even Sundays. He’s home for meals, and bedtimes, but he works whenever he can. And how he does it while fasting on Mondays and Fridays—he’s become more religious—is beyond her. He seems to eat even less than before, and works harder than ever.

Friends who know what happened to Zeitoun after the storm ask why he hasn’t left, why he hasn’t gone to another city, another country—even back to Syria—anyplace removed from the memories embedded into New Orleans. He does have dark feelings when he passes by the Greyhound station, when he drives past the house on Claiborne where he and two friends and a stranger were carried off. When he drives by the home of Alvin and Beulah Williams, the pastor and his wife, he says a quick prayer for them. Beulah Williams died in 2007. Reverend Alvin Williams died in 2008.

When he passes by the home of Charlie Ray, his neighbor on Claiborne, he waves if Charlie is on his porch, which he often is. One day after the storm, Charlie was visited by the National Guard. They told him that he should leave the city, and that they would help him. They waited for him to pack, and then carried his bags to their boat. They ferried him to an evacuation point, whereupon a helicopter flew him to the airport and he was given a free plane ticket to New York.

His rescue took place the same day Zeitoun was arrested. A few months after the storm, Charlie returned to New Orleans and still lives on Claiborne.

Todd Gambino now lives in Mississippi. He spent over five months
at Hunt Correctional Center. He was released on February 14, 2006. All charges against him were dropped. More than $2,400 had been confiscated from him when he was processed at Camp Greyhound, and when he was released, he attempted repeatedly to recover it. He was unsuccessful. He was not compensated in any way for the five months he spent at the maximum-security prison.

After his release, he went to work on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico but was laid off in the fall of 2008.

Nasser Dayoob spent six months at Hunt. All charges against him were eventually dropped; when he was released, he tried to recover the $10,000 he’d had with him when he was arrested. No authorities had any record of it, and he never recovered the money, his life savings. In 2008 he moved back to Syria.

Ronnie spent eight months at Hunt. Since his release in the spring of 2006, the Zeitouns have not heard from him.

Frank Noland and his wife have moved. Just about everyone in the Zeitouns’ neighborhood has moved. Gone, too, is the woman Zeitoun found in her foyer—the woman whose cries he heard because he paddled quietly. The new occupant of her house doesn’t know where she went, but he has heard the story of Zeitoun’s rescue.

Zeitoun thinks of the simple greatness of the canoe, of the advantages of moving quietly, of listening carefully. When he was released from prison, he and Kathy looked for the canoe where he’d last seen it, at the Claiborne house, but it was gone. The house had been robbed, too. Everything was stolen, because the soldiers and police who arrested Zeitoun had left the house unlocked and unguarded. Thieves walked in unimpeded and made off with all the tenants’ belongings, everything
Todd had gathered there in the front rooms to keep dry.

All those things were replaced, but he misses the canoe. He keeps his eye out for it, hoping he’ll see it at a yard sale or in someone’s sideyard. He’d pay for it again. Maybe he should get a new one, he thinks. Maybe his girls will like it more now. Maybe little Ahmad, like his uncle and father and grandfather and countless Zeitouns before them, will feel the lure of the sea.

Some nights Zeitoun struggles to sleep. Some nights he thinks of the faces, the people who arrested him, who jailed him, who shuttled him between cages like an animal, who transported him like luggage. He thinks of the people who could not see him as a neighbor, as a countryman, as a human.

Eventually he finds his way to sleep, and in the morning he awakens to the sounds of his children—four young ones in the house now, so many voices in this now-bigger house, the smell of fresh paint filling the home with possibility. The kids fear water, yes, and when a pipe burst last year there were screams and nightmares, but slowly they’re growing stronger. For them he has to be strong, and he needs to look forward. He needs to feed them, to hold them close, and he needs to show them that God had a reason for their trials. He tells them that perhaps God, by allowing him to be jailed, saved him from something worse.

“Everything happens for a reason,” he tells them. “You do your duty, you do what’s right, and the rest is in God’s hands.”

He has watched the progress of the rebuilding of the city. The first few years were frustrating, as legislators and planners bickered over money and protocols. New Orleans, his home, needs no speeches, no
squabbling, and no politics. It needs new flooring, and new roofing, new windows and doors and stairs.

For many of his clients, it took time for the insurance money to come through, for the FEMA money to appear, for any number of complications to work themselves out. But now things are moving. The city is rising again. Since Hurricane Katrina, Zeitoun A. Painting Contractor LLC has restored 114 houses to their former states, or improved versions thereof.

Zeitoun bought a new van and drives through the city, through Uptown, the Garden District, the French Quarter, Lakeview, the West Bank, Broadmoor, Metairie, Gentilly, the Lower Ninth, Mirabeau Gardens—and every time he sees a home under construction, no matter who’s doing it, he smiles.
Build
, he thinks.
Build, build, build
.

And so he makes his rounds, checking in on his crews. They’re working on some very good and important projects. Even with a slowing economy, there is much to do.

There’s McDonogh #28, a three-story junior high school on Esplanade. It’s been closed since the storm, but it can come back. Zeitoun is fixing the woodwork with caulk and putty, repainting the interiors with medium grey and sage-green and bone-white. That shouldn’t take too long. It’ll be good to see that school open again.

It would be easy, he knows, with that building and so many others, to simply tear them down and begin again. As a builder, it certainly is easier starting with a piece of flat, cleared land. But so much is lost that way, far too much is lost. And so for three years of rebuilding he has always asked, first, “What can be saved?”

There’s the Leidenheimer Bakery on Simon Bolivar Avenue. The building is a wonderful brick structure, over a hundred years old, and
the bakery is still run by the descendants of George Leidenheimer, an immigrant from Germany. Zeitoun was proud to get the job, as he always is with buildings of significance; he hates to see them torn down. The masonry weathered the storm just fine, but the windows and wood need refinishing or replacing. So he and his crew are doing that, and remodeling the inner office, installing some cabinets, painting the vents.

And there’s the St. Clement of Rome Parish Church on West Esplanade and Richland. The interior woodwork needs priming and refinishing. The exterior sustained some damage, so they’ll pressure-wash it, sand and caulk it, and repaint every wall and window. He intends to oversee that project very carefully. He always does when hired to restore any house of worship. He is sure that God is watching the work he and Kathy and his men are doing, so it must be done with great care and even, he tells his crews, with soul.

More than anything else, Zeitoun is simply happy to be free and in his city. It’s the place of his dreams, the place where he was married, where his children were born, where he was given the trust of his neighbors. So every day he gets in his white van, still with its rainbow logo, and makes his way through the city, watching it rise again.