The Map of Salt and Stars: A Novel Read online

  It’s the third explosion in three days. Since we moved to Homs, I’ve heard booming like that only a couple of times, and always far off. It’s gotten to be like thunder—scary if you thought about it too much, but not something that would hit your house. I’ve never heard it this close before, not near our neighborhood.

  The vibrations fade. I wait for another clap of fear, but it never comes. I pull my fingers from the soil, my thumbs still twitching.

  “Nour.” It’s Mama’s voice, warm cedar brown, its edges curled up into red. She’s annoyed. “Come in and help me.”

  I kiss the fig’s roots and replace the dirt. “I’ll finish the story,” I tell it. “I promise I will.”

  I roll back onto my heels and brush the dirt off my knees. My back is in sunshine, my shoulder blades stiff with heat. It’s a different kind of hot here, not like in New York where the humidity makes you lie on the floor in front of the fan. Here it’s dry-hot, and the air chaps your lips until they split.

  “Nour!”

  Mama’s voice is so red it’s almost white. I tumble toward the door. I dodge the stretched canvas drying by the jamb, the framed maps Mama doesn’t have room for in the house. I plunge into the cool dark, my sandals slapping the stone.

  Inside, the walls breathe sumac and sigh out the tang of olives. Oil and fat sizzle in a pan, popping up in yellow and black bursts in my ears. The colors of voices and smells tangle in front of me like they’re projected on a screen: the peaks and curves of Huda’s pink-and-purple laugh, the brick-red ping of a kitchen timer, the green bite of baking yeast.

  I kick off my sandals by the front door. In the kitchen, Mama mutters in Arabic and clucks her tongue. I can understand a little but not all of it. New words seem to sprout out of Mama all the time since we moved—turns of phrase, things I’ve never heard that sound like she’s said them all her life.

  “Your sisters. Where are they?” Mama’s got her hands in a bowl of raw meat and spices, kneading it, giving off a prickly cilantro smell. She’s changed her dress slacks for a skirt today, a papery navy thing that swishes against the backs of her knees. She’s not wearing an apron, but she hasn’t got a single oil stain on her white silk blouse. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her with a speck of oil or a smear of flour on her clothes, not in my whole life.

  “How should I know?” I peek up at the counter to see what she’s making—sfiha? I hope it’s sfiha. I love the spiced lamb and pine nuts, the thin disks of dough crisp with oil.

  “Mama.” Huda comes in from the pantry, her rose-patterned headscarf streaked with flour, her arms heavy with jars of spices and bundles of herbs from the garden. She sets them down on the counter. “We’re out of cumin.”

  “Again!” Mama throws up her hands, pink with the juice from the lamb. “And lazy Zahra, eh? She’s helping me with the pies, or what?”

  “Locked in her room, I bet.” No one hears me. Zahra’s been buried in her phone or holed up in the room she shares with Huda since we moved to Homs. Since Baba died, she’s gotten mean, and now we’re trapped with her. The little things that kept us going while Baba was sick are gone now—buying candy from the bodega, playing wall ball on the sides of buildings. Mama makes her maps, Zahra plays on her phone, and all I do is wait out these long, scorching days.

  Zahra and Huda always talked about Syria like it was home. They knew it long before Manhattan, said it felt more real to them than Lexington Avenue or Eighty-Fifth Street. But this is my first time outside Amreeka—which is what they call it here—and all the Arabic I thought I knew doesn’t add up to much. This doesn’t feel like home to me.

  “Find your sister.” Mama’s voice is edged with red again, a warning. “Tonight is special. We want everything ready for Abu Sayeed, don’t we?”

  That melts me, and I slink off to find Zahra. She’s not in her and Huda’s room. The pink walls sweat in the heat. Zahra’s clothes and jewelry are all over her wrinkled comforter and the rug. I pick my way over crumpled jeans and tee shirts and a stray bra. I inspect a bottle of Zahra’s perfume on the dresser. The glass bottle is a fat purple gem of a thing, like a see-through plum. I spray some on the back of my hand. It smells like rotten lilacs. I sneeze on Zahra’s bra.

  I tiptoe back down the hall, through the kitchen, and into the living room. My toes burrow into the red-and-beige Persian rug, upsetting Mama’s careful vacuuming. A stereo blasts something that’s supposed to be music: red guitar trills, the black splotches of snare drums. Zahra is stretched out on the low couch, tapping at her smartphone, her legs over the floral-printed arm. If Mama saw her with her feet on the cushions, she’d scream.

  “Summer twenty-eleven,” Zahra drawls through the heat. “I was supposed to graduate next year. Class of 2012. We planned out our road trip to Boston. It should have been the best year ever.” She turns her face to the cushions. “Instead I’m here. It’s a hundred and fifty degrees. We have no air conditioning and Mama’s dumb dinner tonight.”

  She can’t see me boring holes into her back with my eyes. Zahra’s just jealous that Huda got to graduate high school before we left New York and she didn’t. She doesn’t seem to care at all how I feel, that it sucks just as much to lose your friends at twelve as it does at eighteen. I rap her back with my hand. “Your music is dumb, and it’s not a hundred and fifty degrees. Mama wants you in the kitchen.”

  “Like hell.” Zahra covers her eyes with her arm. Her black curls hang over the side of the couch, her stubborn eyes half-lidded. The gold bracelet on her wrist makes her look haughty and grown-up, like a rich lady.

  “You’re supposed to help with the pies.” I tug on her arm. “Come on. It’s too hot to keep pulling you.”

  “See, genius?” Zahra lurches up from the couch, taking lazy barefoot steps to shut the stereo off.

  “We’re out of cumin again.” Huda comes in, wiping her hands on a rag. “Want to come?”

  “Let’s get ice cream.” I wrap myself around Huda’s waist. Zahra leans back on the arm of the couch.

  Huda jerks her thumb toward the kitchen. “There’s a bowl of lamb with your name on it,” she says to Zahra, “if you don’t want to run errands.”

  Zahra rolls her eyes to the ceiling and follows us out.

  Mama calls to us as we pass by. “I want you on your best behavior tonight—all of you.” She tilts her chin down, eyeing Zahra. She pushes cilantro into the lamb, breaking the meat apart. “And here—in my pocket.” She motions to Huda, holding up her oily hands. “A little extra, in case the price is up again.”

  Huda sighs and tugs a few coins from the pocket of Mama’s skirt. “I’m sure it won’t be that much.”

  “Don’t argue.” Mama turns back to the lamb. “All the prices have gone up in the last month. Bread, tahina, the cost of life itself. And listen—watch your steps. No crowds, none of this crazy business. You go to the shop and then directly home.”

  “Mama.” Huda picks at dried flour paste on the countertop. “We won’t have any part in that.”

  “Good.” Mama glances at Huda. “But today is Friday. It will be worse.”

  “We’ll be careful.” Huda leans an elbow against the counter and looks up from under her thick eyebrows, beading with sweat. She shuffles her feet, setting the hem of her gauzy skirt rippling. “Really.”

  For the last two months, Mama’s always told us to avoid crowds. It seems like they pop up everywhere—crowds of boys protesting, people protesting the protests, rumors of fighting between the two. The last few weeks, they’ve gotten so loud and angry you can hear their singing and megaphones all through the neighborhood. Mama’s said for months that being in the wrong place at the wrong time can get you arrested—or worse. But just like in New York, keeping to yourself doesn’t always keep trouble from finding you.

  I close my eyes and try to think about something else. I take in all the spice smells in the kitchen, so deep I feel the colors in my chest. “Gold and yellow,” I say. “Oil dough. I knew it was sfiha.”

/>   “That’s my Nour, in her world of color.” Mama smiles into the lamb, sweat shimmering at her hairline. “Shapes and colors for smells, sounds, and letters. I wish I could see it.”

  Huda tightens her shoelaces. “They say synesthesia is tied to memory. Photographic memory, you know? Where you can go back and see things in your mind’s eye. So your synesthesia is like a superpower, Nour.”

  Zahra snickers. “More like a mental disorder.”

  “Stop your tongue.” Mama scrubs her hands. “And get going, for heaven’s sake. It’s nearly five.” She shakes the water from her fingers before drying them. “If the power goes out again today, we’ll have to eat cold lamb and rice.”

  Zahra heads for the door. “Good memory, huh? Is that why Nour has to tell Baba’s al-Idrisi story a hundred times?”

  “Shut up, Zahra.” Without waiting for an answer, I slip my sandals back on and open the front door. I swipe the curtain of fig branches out of my face. Dappled shadows shift on Mama’s maps. Past our little alley, blue marbles of conversation roll in to us. A car swishes by, its tires making a gray hiss. A breeze rustles white on chestnut leaves.

  I walk in the shadow of the building next door, shuffling my feet while I wait for Huda and Zahra to tie their shoes. I want to press my face back into the salty garden dirt, but I poke the corners of Mama’s canvases with my toe instead. “Why does she leave all these out here?”

  Huda comes out. She glances at the painted maps, stacked to dry like dominoes against the wall. “There are too many to keep them in the house,” she says. “They dry faster outside.”

  “The maps don’t sell like they did when we first moved,” Zahra says, wiping sweat off the side of her face. “Have you noticed?”

  “Nothing is selling,” Huda says. She takes my hand. “Yalla. Let’s get moving.”

  “What do you mean, nothing’s selling?” I ask. Huda’s rose-print hijab blocks the sun. “We buy pistachios and ice cream all the time.”

  Huda laughs. I’ve always liked her laugh. It’s not like Zahra’s, all nose and squeak. Huda’s got a nice laugh, pink purple and flicked up at the end. She says, “Ice cream always sells.”

  The sidewalk stones steam like bread out of the oven, and they scorch the bottoms of my feet through my plastic sandals. I hop from foot to foot, trying not to let Zahra see.

  We turn out onto the main street. A few cars and blue buses circle the square, twisting across the lanes. It’s Ramadan, and people seem to drive slower, walk slower. After iftar tonight, gray-haired men with full bellies will stroll the streets of the Old City with their hands clasped behind their backs, and the tables outside the cafés will be full of people drinking coffee with cardamom and passing the hoses of narghiles. But for now, the sidewalks are almost empty, even in our mostly Christian neighborhood. Mama always says Christians and Muslims have been living side by side in this city for centuries, that they’ll go on borrowing each others’ flour and sewing needles for years to come.

  Zahra’s gold bracelet bounces, throwing ovals of light. She eyes Huda’s scarf. “Are you hot?”

  Huda side-eyes Zahra. “It doesn’t bother me,” she says, which is what she’s been saying ever since she started wearing her scarf last year, when Baba first got sick. “Aren’t you?”

  “Maybe I’ll wear one when I’m older.” I reach up and skim my fingers along the cotton hem. “This one’s my favorite, because of the roses.”

  Huda laughs. “You’re too young to worry about that.”

  “You don’t even have your period yet,” Zahra says.

  “Bleeding isn’t what makes you grown-up,” I say.

  Zahra inspects her fingernails. “Clearly you don’t know what it means to be grown-up.”

  We turn at a brick building. Heat shimmers off the pavement and Zahra’s black hair. Down the street, a man sells tea from a silver jug on his back, but he doesn’t have any customers. He eases himself down on the steps of an apartment building, swiping sweat from under his hat.

  Huda says, “I wear the scarf to remember I belong to God.”

  I think about our bookshelf in the city, the Qur’an and the Bible next to each other, Mama and Baba swapping notes. Mama used to take us to Mass some Sundays and, on special Fridays, Baba used to take us to jum’ah.

  I ask, “But how did you decide?”

  “You’ll understand one day.”

  I cross my arms. “When I’m older, right?”

  “Not necessarily.” Huda takes my hand again, teasing my arms apart. “Just when it’s time.”

  I frown and wonder what that means. I ask, “How old is Abu Sayeed?”

  “Why?”

  “Isn’t tonight his birthday dinner?”

  Zahra laughs. “Do you ever pay attention, stupid?”

  “It’s not her fault,” Huda says. “I never told her.” She holds her hand against her thigh, her fingers stiff. There’s something she doesn’t want to say. “Today is the anniversary of when Abu Sayeed lost his son. Mama didn’t want him to be alone.”

  “He had a son?” Somehow I never imagined Abu Sayeed had a family.

  “And we’re distracting him with food.” Zahra kicks a stone and scoffs. She seems almost mad. “We’re worried about cumin.”

  “Abu Sayeed is like us, then.” I look down at my plastic sandals, still warm from the sidewalk stones. “He’s missing the most important ingredient.”

  Huda slows. “I never thought of it that way.”

  The sun simmers the silver roofs of cars.

  “We should play the spinning game with him,” I say.

  “Spinning game?” Zahra smirks. “Speaking of made-up.”

  Huda checks the street signs before we turn away from the tangle of cars. It’s cooler on this street, and the iron gates of the houses are curled into the shapes of birds and the tufts of flower petals. Ladies in crisp dresses water window boxes or fan themselves on the upper balconies. We pass an apartment walk lined with tiny gray-and-white filler stones, and I snatch up a pebble.

  Huda catches hold of my hand again and squeezes it. “The spinning game. How do you play?”

  I grin and hop in front of her, walking backward and swinging my hands. “You close your eyes and spin around. Then the magic takes you through different levels, and you count to ten while you spin, one spin for each level you pass through. And when you open your eyes, things look the same, but the magic makes them different.”

  “Levels?” Huda tilts her head toward voices in the distance, the black-orange bark of a car backfiring.

  “Levels of existence,” I say, throwing open my arms. “There are different layers of realness. Like, underneath this one there’s another one, and another one below that. And all kinds of things are going on all the time that we don’t even know about, things that won’t happen for a million years or things that already happened a long, long time ago.” I forget to watch my feet, and I bump into the curb.

  “Nour’s lost it again,” Zahra says.

  “So these other realities,” Huda says, “are running alongside ours at the same time, like different streams from the same river? Then there’s a level where Magellan is still sailing around the world.”

  “And one where Nour is normal,” Zahra says.

  “Maybe there’s a level where we all have wings,” Huda says.

  “And a level where you can hear Baba’s voice,” I say.

  The words grab me like my feet have grown roots to the other side of the planet, and I stop in front of the iron gate of an apartment building. Panic weights my ankles, the thought that I’ll never hear Baba’s stories or his voice ever again. Why should a missing story leave a hole so big when it’s just a string of words?

  The sun drip-drops along the leaves of a crooked poplar tree. The next block is lined with closed halal markets and shawarma shops, the owners heading home early to break their fasts. No one says anything, not even Zahra. Nobody mentions how Mama and Baba used to live here in the Old City when Huda and
Zahra were just babies. Nobody brags that they know all the shops and restaurants, how even Zahra speaks better Arabic than me.

  But I feel all those things, the not-homeness of this city, the way nobody hangs blankets from their balconies in New York, the way Central Park had maples instead of date palms, how there are no pizza shops or pretzel carts on the streets here. How Arabic sounds funny in my mouth. How I can’t walk to school with my friends anymore or buy gum from Mr. Harcourt at the newspaper stand. How sometimes this city shakes and crumbles in the distance now, how it makes me bite my lip so hard I swallow blood. How home is gone. How, without Baba, I feel like home is gone forever.

  Huda’s sneakers cast red afternoon shadows. The high-faced buildings yawn up in yellow and white stone. Somewhere, someone pours a cup of water out a window, and the droplets run white and silver into the gutter.

  Huda squats on the pavement in front of me, gathering the folds of her skirt between her knees. “Don’t cry,” she says. She dries my face with a cotton rose at the corner of her hijab.

  “I’m not crying, Huppy.” I stab my forearm across my face, missing my nose. Huda gathers me in, and I curve into her like a wooden bowl. She’s warm, the heat of her red gold like McIntosh apples. I press my face into the soft folds of fabric where her scarf meets the neck of her shirt.

  Zahra’s laugh is all gravel. “What are you, three? Nobody calls her Huppy anymore.”

  I scowl at Zahra. “Shut up.”

  Huda says, “She can call me whatever she wants to.”

  We walk in silence the rest of the block to the spice shop, and Zahra dodges my eyes. I should have known better: nobody’s said much about Baba since the funeral. Baba is the ghost we don’t talk about. Sometimes I wonder if Mama and Huda and Zahra want to pretend his sickness never happened, that the cancer never rotted out his liver and his heart. I guess it’s like the spinning game: sometimes you’d rather be on any magic level but your own. But I don’t want to forget him. I don’t want it to be like he was never here at all.

  Inside the spice shop, the shelves are crammed with sacks and tins and jars, open bowls of red and yellow powder with tiny handwritten Arabic labels. A man smiles at us from behind the counter, spreading his hands. I stand on my tiptoes and push my fingers toward baskets filled with whole cloves and uncrushed cardamom pods like tiny wooden beads.