The Map of Salt and Stars: A Novel Read online

  Zahra catches Huda’s arm, her bracelet swinging.

  “I thought of a game,” Zahra says in English so I can understand. She smiles in a slow, careful way that comes off cruel somehow. “Why doesn’t Nour ask for the cumin?”

  Huda darts her eyes to Zahra. “Don’t.”

  “She can practice her Arabic,” Zahra says. She smiles with her hand over her mouth.

  The man behind the counter waits, scratching the shadow of his incoming beard. I wipe my clammy hands on my shorts. Outside, the tea seller passes by. “Shai,” he calls. “Shai.”

  I think, Tea. I know that word. I squint at a pull in a tapestry at the back of the shop, a loose thread of red wool shivering under the fan. I try to remember how to say I want.

  The man behind the counter asks me a question I don’t understand. His voice is all green swoops, the black dots of consonants between them.

  “Come on,” Huda says, “that’s not—”

  “Ana . . .” My voice breaks the heat, and everyone goes quiet. I’ve only gotten out the word I. I swallow, digging my nails into my palm, using the pain to stop my nerves. “Ana . . .” My brain pricks and boils, sunbursts of red and pink, and even though I can remember the word for cumin—al-kamun—I still can’t remember how to say I want. I must have said it dozens of times, but with everyone staring at me, my mind goes blank.

  The man says, “Shu?” What?

  “Ana—al-kamun.”

  The man is laughing.

  “You’re cumin?” Zahra belly-laughs.

  “Ana ureedu al-kamun.” I say it again, louder. “I know how to say it. I do!”

  “I know you do,” Huda says.

  Zahra haggles with the shopkeeper. I press my cheek into my shoulder to keep my eyes from tearing. The coins clink in Huda’s palm while she counts them. On the way out, she lets out a low whistle. Over my tangle of frizz, she whispers to Zahra, “Mama was right about the price.”

  On the way home, Zahra refuses to shut up. “What kind of Syrian are you? You don’t even speak Arabic.”

  Inside, I hear what she really means: that I don’t know what it means to be Syrian.

  “Stop it,” Huda says.

  “Oh right,” Zahra says, “I forgot. You’re not Syrian. You don’t even remember our house before we moved to the States. You’re American. All you speak is English.”

  “Zahra!” Huda squeezes her nails into Zahra’s arm.

  Zahra howls, wrenching her arm away. “It was just a joke. God.”

  It doesn’t feel like a joke. Zahra crosses her arms, her gold bracelet winking on her wrist. I want to rip it off and throw it in the street for a car to flatten.

  We walk back through the empty streets of Old Homs, the sun red and long, the shopkeepers ratcheting down their metal blinds. I look around for the exposed roots of a date palm or a patch of clean, bare earth.

  We pass the bald ankles of the crooked poplar again. I imagine pressing my fingers into the rough bark, folding my voice into the roots.

  Like Two Hands

  So that was how Rawiya, a poor girl from the village of Benzú in Ceuta on the tip of Africa, came to sail the Mediterranean. She wanted to claim her fortune, to come back and provide for her mother. Her father, who had died when she was a little girl, would have wanted her to. Her brother, Salim, was always gone, sailing the sea with a crew of merchants. His was a hard life, and her mother never knew when his ship would come in, or if it would come at all.

  So Rawiya left home as Rami with her father’s sling and her mother’s misbaha, joining al-Idrisi’s expedition to map the whole Mediterranean—which wasn’t called the Mediterranean then, but the Bahr ar-Rum, the Roman Sea or the Sea of Byzantium, or sometimes the Bahr ash-Shami, the Sea of Syria. To al-Idrisi, that sea was the gateway to much of the inhabited world.

  But Rawiya’s world was her mother’s plot of land in Benzú, the tiny olive grove and the seashore, the markets of Ceuta, the harbor on Punta Almina. Rawiya had never imagined the world to be so big.

  They sailed for more than three weeks before the crew began to murmur that they would soon be nearing Sicily. Heartened by this news, Rawiya stood on the deck of the ship with her cloak around her shoulders. The salt air lifted some of the seasickness that had plagued her for weeks. With a pang, she thought of Bauza belowdecks.

  Al-Idrisi joined her, the breeze curling rough fingers through his short beard, his sirwal trousers flapping in the wind. He told her he loved to watch the sea, and the salt spray carved its way through the lines around his eyes, as though he’d done decades of laughing rather than reading. Rawiya wanted to tell him how she had watched the shore as a child, how Salim was somewhere on those waves right now, but she held her tongue. Even now, her mother would be waiting for him—and, she realized with a wave of shame, beginning to worry about her.

  “I spent years of my life in towers and libraries, reading and reciting.” Al-Idrisi’s chest swelled with sea air. “There came a time I didn’t want to waste any more years than I already had.” He told Rawiya to be careful of words: “Stories are powerful,” he said, “but gather too many of the words of others in your heart, and they will drown out your own. Remember that.”

  Still they could see no land anywhere, only the sea around them, the mast groaning and the sails creaking like the wings of a hundred albatrosses.

  “You don’t belong in a library,” Rawiya said. “You seem at home here, like you were in the mountains and the Medina.”

  “I once had family who would have agreed with you.” Al-Idrisi lowered his eyes to the water and set his elbows on the rail. “The sea has a way of showing us ourselves,” he said. “Sometimes I think we came from the water, and it calls us to return. Like one palm reaching for the other.”

  Rawiya turned back to the carved waves. She had thought the open sea would be flat, like a mirror or a coin. But it had colors and shapes, turning green or black under an approaching storm. Sometimes it was red and purple and silver and white gold. It had sharp edges. It had its tempers, its blue spells, its fits of laughter.

  “The sea is a child,” Rawiya said, “curious, hungry, and joyful at the same time.”

  Al-Idrisi said, “The sea takes what shape she will.”

  And Rawiya thought of her father, the way he used to watch the shore while he tended the olive grove, the way he used to say the sea changed her shape in the night. She thought of her father’s short illness, the way he had slipped irretrievably into the dark like slipping off a ladder in the olive trees. She had never gotten to give him a real good-bye.

  Al-Idrisi smiled again, softer this time. “Get some rest,” he said, “so you have your strength when we dock at Palermo. There will be much for both of you to learn.” For al-Idrisi had brought along a second apprentice, a boy named Bakr, who was seasick and resting belowdecks. “You, Rami,” al-Idrisi said, “are the more resilient of my apprentices.” And he laughed.

  Then al-Idrisi was gone. His laugh bounced off the cargo ropes and the mast. It became Rawiya’s father’s laugh, all green ripples like sun-scrubbed olive leaves. Over the railing, Rawiya saw her reflection in the surface of the water, her red turban and her boyish face. She didn’t recognize herself.

  AFTER BABA’S FUNERAL, after the neighbors and my teachers and Baba’s friends from work had all left, Mama put away the casseroles and set the carnations in a glass of water. The stems were too long for the glass, so when Mama turned away, Huda picked it up and set the glass by the window, with the heads of the flowers leaning on the cabinet.

  Mama didn’t notice. It was like she was in a place where nothing could get to her. She moved around the kitchen like the breeze from a fan, flicking on the gas stove and overfilling the teakettle.

  While we sat there not saying anything, Mama dotted away the smudges in her makeup and brewed a pot of strong sage tea, the kind that made my friends nauseous, the kind I loved.

  The tea tasted like Saturday mornings when Mama would walk with us to the b
odega for vegetables and everything smelled like fruit and water. It tasted like fall afternoons when Baba would take me to Central Park and stand down in the empty sprinkler pool to make himself my height while we tossed a ball. It tasted like Baba’s bedtime stories.

  So I asked Mama for the only one of Baba’s stories I was sure she knew. I asked her to tell the story of Rawiya and al-Idrisi.

  Mama leaned across the table and curved her eyebrows up above her nose, thinking of how to start. But even though she’d always listened, Mama had never told stories like Baba did. She said, “Many years ago, a brave girl named Rawiya left Ceuta for Fes to seek her fortune.”

  I said, “But that’s not how Baba starts. What about the fig tree and Bauza?”

  Mama moved her chair closer to mine and smoothed our woven placemats. “Remember,” she said, “even Baba said that no two people tell a story quite the same.”

  I picked a thread from the weave of my placemat. I didn’t want a new version of the story, I wanted Baba’s. “I miss the way he told it.”

  Mama said, “None of us have his voice.” She took my hands and stopped my picking. My fingers left a gap in the braided threads, shorn borders.

  That night, after I had put on my pajamas and pattered into the kitchen to check on the carnations, I found the first rings of salt on the handle of the teakettle. They made outlines of oceans I had never known before, countries I had never seen.

  ON THE WAY home from the spice shop, Zahra begs us to stop at a jewelry store. Down the street, policemen stand grumpy in the heat under a portrait of the president. Shouts echo from somewhere deeper in the neighborhood. Aside from the policemen and Huda and me, the block is empty. I turn away, dangling the jar of cumin in my hand.

  “Can’t she hurry up?” I kick at pebbles. “Abu Sayeed will be at the house any minute.”

  “Don’t worry,” Huda says. “Abu Sayeed lives a street down from the spice shop. If he were on his way, we’d run into him.”

  I huff and frown. “But what does Zahra need more stuff for, anyway? She’s already got that gold bracelet with the stupid patterns.”

  “You mean the filigree?” Huda shrugs and tightens her shoelaces. “People like different things. Zahra likes to look . . . a certain way.”

  “But she acts ugly.” My shadow on the sidewalk has legs as long as giraffes’ necks. They look ridiculous attached to my sandals.

  Huda glances into the jewelry shop, then takes my hand. “How about some ice cream?”

  We plod across warm stone and concrete toward a tiny ice cream parlor a block away. “Zahra has a lot to figure out,” Huda says, “but she’s not a bad girl.”

  “What’s there to figure out?” I finger the jar of cumin, watching the windows over the dress shops and the cafés. Women lean out and shake their rugs and curtains, releasing dust. “She’s mean now. She’s the worst sister ever.”

  “Don’t say that.” Huda and I split bread-and-butter around a crack in the sidewalk. Huda raises her arm and lets her wrist curve down to my hand like a dancer’s. The breeze fans her skirt behind her like the steel-blue wake of a ship. “Some people take time to find out who they are,” she says. “They get pushed around by all these little things, the stuff the world says is important. It’s like being blown around in the wind.”

  I finger the lid of the cumin jar. The powder inside shifts from its own crests and peaks. “That doesn’t make it okay to be a jerk.”

  “No. It doesn’t.”

  A man on a bike passes us. His shadow runs along the wall, flitting over door columns in stripes of black and white. The banner over the ice cream parlor ripples in the heat, and I can just about read the letters. The glass paneling is open to let the heat out. A table and two plastic chairs sit outside, empty.

  Inside, towels and framed pictures decorate the walls, and fans tickle our faces with warm air. Every now and then the power gives a little, and the lights dim to brown. The fans stall.

  Huda is fasting for Ramadan, so she just orders a cone for me. A man scoops out a chunk of ice cream and shapes it with his hands, rolling it in pistachios and sticking it in a cone wrapped with wax paper. Behind him, a man in a paper hat and tee shirt pounds ice cream with a wooden mallet. He looks up at me when I thank him, noticing my accent.

  Outside, the heat attacks my ice cream. I catch the drips with my tongue, holding the cumin in one hand and the cone in the other.

  I take a bite out of my ice cream, shivering at the cold. I ask Huda, “How come you’re not like that—caught in the wind?”

  “I decided there were more important things to me than what the world wants,” she says.

  “Is that why you put on the scarf after Baba got sick?” Steam escapes my mouth.

  Huda hands me a napkin. I run the paper over the creases in my knuckles, sticky with sugar.

  “God got me through,” she says. “Call him what you want. God in English. Allah in Arabic. The universe. There is a goodness in the world that got me through, that taught me it’s important to know who you are. You can get lost.” Huda leans over and kisses the top of my head. “You have to listen to your own voice.”

  A big boom interrupts us, just like the one I heard in the garden. Shards of ceramic tile crumble down from the building’s upper floors. I want to think of it like thunder—loud and harmless—but it’s too close for that. I flinch and clench my teeth, putting purple dents in Huda’s arm with my fingernails.

  “What is that?” I pry my sticky fingers out of Huda’s skin. “Where is it coming from?”

  Huda frowns. “That sounded closer than this morning.”

  We hurry back to the jewelry store. I finish my ice cream, licking the sugar off my nails. It tastes wooden, like the fear has gone to my taste buds.

  Huda leans into the jewelry store and calls for Zahra. I put my palms to the concrete, feeling the last of the vibrations. I think I can feel the foundations of the city still trembling. I wonder how long the buildings can take it. I think back to a rumor I heard Zahra whispering to Huda last week, that the shells came down where the power went out. They didn’t know I heard. But I’ve heard lots of rumors—crowds turning on each other, friends taking sides and picking up guns, people accusing each other of making trouble. But Mama and my sisters and I don’t want to make trouble. I just want Mama’s maps to sell, and I want Zahra to stop teasing me, and I want to hear Baba’s stories again. I think about the price of cumin. I hope the stove and the lights are still running at home. I remember the fans wavering in the ice cream shop.

  Zahra tumbles out with Huda, her jeans and her tee shirt sticky with the heat. We turn onto Quwatli Street by the old clock tower and pass the red-and-yellow Kasr ar-Raghdan hotel. Everything is louder here, even the shouting that seems to come from everywhere at once. The ice cream slides around in my stomach.

  A cab circles the rotary, blaring Umm Kulthum on the radio, and drowns out the shouting. Umm Kulthum is my favorite, and she always will be. Mama and Baba used to dance to her in our apartment in the city. After Baba got sick, the CD sat in the stereo, crusting over with dust. I used to put the music on, hoping they would dance again. But they didn’t.

  We skirt the square, heading home under latticed apartment windows and closing shops. This has to be where all the shouting is coming from: a crowd of boys Huda’s age gathered around the old clock tower, their voices chalk and chocolate. The crowd bursts with plum shouts like the notes of oboes, the instrument I love most.

  I imagine what Mama would say if she were here. The crowds make me want to run, but the three of us stand on the corner, watching. Some of the boys are just old enough that their beards are starting to come in, lopsided and stubbly. Others wear striped polo shirts or button-downs, their jeans whiskered at the thighs and the knees. I look closer and notice a few women moving among them. Arabic fills the air like a flock of startled birds. I wonder who’s on what side. I wonder if there are sides at all.

  “This is the most intense I’ve seen
it,” Huda says.

  Zahra shuffles her sneakers like she’s getting ready to bolt. She says, “The most in the last two months, definitely.”

  The shouting pounds and bleats like angry music. I ask, “What are they saying?” No one hears me. Fear presses into me like a thumb. I realize I’m sweating when I smell my deodorant, yellow green like chicken soup. How weird, to smell like deodorant. Isn’t that the opposite of its job?

  Then Huda puts her hand on my back and guides us away from the noise. We dive down another street. The shouts shrink to black dots, megaphone static. You can still hear them all over the Old City, a thrumming that won’t go away, no matter how loud you talk over it.

  The alley that leads to our house is crowded with orange light when we come home. We turn in between the buildings, and the sounds finally start to fade. A new map dries outside, leaning on the garden gate. Mama must have gotten impatient with waiting for us to come back and worked on her maps to pass the time. She’s always doing something, never still. I look for the shimmer of oil paint, but it’s flat. I inspect the gold compass rose, the swoops of Mama’s hand-painted Arabic script. The letters make different colors than the English letters do, even the ones I can’t sound out. I can read some of them: the blue curve of the waw, the burnt-orange haa, the sulfur-yellow ayn.

  Huda opens the gate. In the garden, more framed maps are scattered under the fig tree, drying in the shade. Mama must have moved them to make room for the new ones. The stones steam while the afternoon fades, mixing the scent of chemicals and earth. The low sun turns the yellow walls of our house to brass, falling in slats across the wooden shutters and Mama’s hanging window boxes of herbs.

  Inside, Mama plunks her brushes in a mug of water, harder than she normally does. Most days I don’t think anything of it: Mama is always busy with her maps now, painting the world for professors and people in stiff jackets who come to the house to buy them. But today isn’t like other days, because the power’s gone out and Mama’s set candles in the windows and on the dining table. Every couple of moments I catch myself willing the lights to come on again, hoping they’ve only flickered out like the lights at the ice cream shop. They don’t.