Green Line 1

I went to school anyway. The hall was dark with the extinguished offices of professors who’d fled. And the students were few. One waits for me, though - Fouad. Wealthy and nearly failing. I unlocked the door and seemed more in a hurry than I actually was. I nodded at the folding wooden chair near the door and set my purse on the desk. You want the grade. I understand. But I cannot help you. I started strong. In the midst of this war, whatever this was, history was more important than ever, I said. Only the players have changed, I said. I can’t with any integrity let you pass without having done the work. I gathered papers and noticed the varnish now peeling in thin, translucent strips from this weak desk, and remembered rubbing my fingers on my sister’s burnt and bubbled back in the dark bedroom in Bhamdoun, one or several summers ago, peeling the wet brown skin from the pink flesh glowing beneath. I know my country’s history. I will graduate this year. His hair was in a glossy mold, a good-looking boy, with a sprinkling of black stubble around his mouth but his cheeks were hairless and flushed.

Well. You just told me you didn’t even finish the essay that is due in – I looked at my watch to make a show, I knew and he knew we had only a few minutes before class, and we both knew he was done for, but time, an indifferent, neutral arbiter, could provide cover – ten minutes. I doubt you’ll be able to pass at this point. He put his hand in the backpack that lay across his lap. Stiff palm leaves outside the window rustled, suits shoving to get on a train. The morning was humid and vicious, with the loud cheers from the walk still echoing in my ears. They’d hit the _______ Building. A loud crashing and then the cheers. Shots shuttered the air close by and, farther off, smothered the silence like cicadas.

I continued to fill the time and shots continued, as well, and my voice matched the cadence of the loud clicking. “Think about your motivation for attending school. Just to graduate, to get a diploma so that you may look big before your friends? Or to learn something that will actually benefit you, that may, in fact, actually and substantially benefit this…” country, but no point saying it as the fact of saying would dissipate the word’s meaning or, worse, deepen the chasm between my meaning and his. The shots became closer, a flutter, and yet I could see he was listening, his eyes on me but picturing himself in his living room, his father, perhaps – I did not know his family – saying the same to him with his fist on the table, with his eyes in a rage, desperate as any father’s before a son assuming control of the world he used to own. I myself shouted, over the shots, to match the passion I imagined his father’s voice having inside his own mind. “You will not walk out of here with an empty diploma, my son.” My son was his mistake. Not mine. Not remotely. His eyes flashed wide, he returned from his father’s ornately carpeted study (I imagined) with its gold embossed books on shelves, with its map on the wall, with the milky smell of lamb’s meat entering from beneath the door and mitigating the lecture, or rendered sour by it. He was here again. In my gray metal office with the cheap wooden desk they’d dragged from the basement when I was hired. We were here and I was watching as he pulled a black metal pistol from his backpack and laid it on his lap and the sun broke through the window now, it must have been 8:50 then, because that was, in those final days of the semester, my cue to head off to the lecture hall and begin class, and the warm yellow sun landed on my desk and his hand and the black gun, beatifying all. I said nothing. I’m graduating this semester. You need to give me a good grade, and that’s it. My tongue leapt on its own, not minding the heavy limping of my chest then, or the sweat that began to run down the side of my face where the strong yellow sun was melting it. I’ll do nothing for your grade. You’ve determined it yourself, little one. I omitted the final diminutive. I could be your mother. He shook his head and smiled and got up from his chair. I remained seated. He drifted to me and for a moment, as he got closer, leaned over my desk on one straight arm, knotted like a tree limb, the other swinging from his chest, I thought he would touch my breast. He stuck the gun in my face and I looked up at him. He pressed the still-cool-from-the-morning nose of the pistol against my forehead, the abyss of the barrel sucking my skin. I nearly laughed, because of the predictability of his stance, because he was serious, this child! And because here he was, taking his education seriously at last, what irony, and foolishness for thinking of the irony, in this moment. I would have laughed, then, at just myself, but for the coolness of the metal and, despite now seeing the sweat-darkened cloth beneath his arm as it was raised before me, and smelling the pungent polish of his hair, the sudden distance I felt he’d retreated to – no longer just a cheap-desk width; he was touching me now but he was so far away he was no longer visible. I could not laugh. I tried to find his eyes and measure with my skin the rim of the barrel and the diameter of the hole that it would make in my skull. I heard a door down the hall close.

Neighbors

We stopped at the Druze potters because she was told they would bargain with her. I walked around wiping a finger through each dust-covered piece, sometimes writing a letter or, when the man with the long white beard, the white head cover and white robe pointed his eyebrows at me, I slowed, and pretended to indicate pieces for my mother to buy, while letting my extended finger, and then hand, linger on each vase long enough to press away the dust and in the opaque powder leave behind a glossy window in the shape of my hand. When she had stacked up two water jugs –a graceful tube encircling the size of my arms clasped before me and up-ended like a rolling bicycle tire, the unpolished clay ring broken by a spout at the tipping point and the stand like a disc of brown bread, the air it encircled much greater than the water it could contain; the other pitcher was traditional, shaped like my mother: tall and straight with a smooth indent in the back mirroring the outward bend of the handle’s elbow; three large brown glazed baking dishes with threaded handles the girth of a horse’s tail; five small bowls, all different sizes, baked, blunt red clay on the outside, glazed into a metallic gloss on the inside, the glaze dripping slightly over the lips of some of the bowls as though they had been filled to the brim with liquid gold and then jostled lightly; and four double-sided dishes that I could already see filled with dried olives and thyme, baba haloed in green olive oil and dusted with orange paprika, candied almonds, dates, turnips pickled pink in vinegar. My mother, without my father, tried to be my father. She walked up to the man, who had watched silently and blankly as she stacked one piece on top of the next, and said, how much for all of it? A large bird swooped low past the doorway and a slow, full shadow unfolded and then retreated in the orange powdered air.

The man began to count each item one by one, listing the individual price for each and adding it to the next. When he came to the total, it was exact. There was no rounding off or cutting down, like there usually was at the spice market. There was no adding a piece here or a trinket there, as there usually was at the grocer’s.

My mother said, and for everything? If I take everything? The man repeated the same price. My mother looked at him with shame and fury. You must be able to offer me a better price if I am to take all of this, for all of this, I would pay …and here was the moment I had been waiting for, my mother’s forward volley, my mother’s flag in the sand…she gave him a number less than half of what he was offering. He nodded and started replacing the pieces to their silhouettes in the dust on the shelves.

Native Vegetation

Your mother was always particular. Sure, apart from her never having seen a walnut tree before moving here, never declining a martini. Even so. Know what she said to me when she first arrived? Raining like the end of the world, charcoal sky. Her hat box over her head as she got out of the taxi. Your father, typical gentleman, waving to her from the covered balcony three stories up. She saw the wet eucalyptus – an old import – by the prime minister’s palace, saw honeysuckle climbing the plaster walls and your father in shades of black and leather slippers, a cigar in his hand and a slight smile beneath a black mustache, in a nearly identical pose as the colossal portrait of the primer minister himself, painted on the granular cement security wall, thirty feet high, surrounding the palace. She said, “Well, at least there’s eucalyptus,” and shouted to your father to open the front gate.

The Next Morning

Book seller’s dog darted in circles, nose in the air, shifting its head left and right. It caught a scent near the fencepost but was snapped back into place. Rope taught, legs pedaled in the dust. It whimpered at the fencepost. A woman covered in red soot passed the loud mutt again and again, her son’s name echoing in the city’s shell.

Jupiter

“Arrows,” Le Prof says, “and large spheres or eggs. The Romans weren’t very subtle.” We were in the middle of the killing floor, the great temple at Baalbek rising out of the ground, chipped columns closing in around us like teeth. The sun bounced against the bleached sand and back again and back again until Le Prof finally let us explore alone. The yellow entablature was knocked from its post and lay blunt against a tomb. The rounded stone beads were encased in tapered cuffs. And those feathers. What are you drawing? His breath was mace and old milk and Amira looked blankly at us, then whispered to Liz. I stood beneath the carved colonnade, the sheaves of wheat, the busts with eroded gestures. “Nothing.” I smiled, hiding behind a fallen hank of my hair like those goddesses behind sheaves of wheat, and stepped further beneath the arch, its pattern repeating endlessly in the stone. You’re allowed to draw. He put a dead arm around my shoulders. You know you’re the best-looking here. Tears came to my eyes – what else could I have done? – and I looked down. A black spider skated over Le Prof’s toe and his sandal twitched violently in the sand.

The Road Home

Air ascended from the sand and asphalt in scarves. He was coming. She knew it before she saw his car. A brown Mercedes Benz that used to be a taxi. There was still the black metal rectangle above the air vents, for years, a small frame emptied of its license that she would stick her hand through and feel as though she was entering a new dimension. Getting bigger on the long straight highway. The wind pulled up her skirt, the hot air vibrated through the hair on her arms. She looked back at the house. Mother was probably braiding the onions and listening to her Otis Redding album and alternately swaying and crying over the sink, her hands never stopping. “Sweetie, get in.” He groaned as he leaned over the seat, and his voice was low, as though hushing the engine and me and Otis Redding. Hi Dad.

Dervish

And then, right when she’d left home, she stopped.

A dark leaf spun

close to the ground near the door, nearly

buried by undergrowth. It was

Tethered by an unseen thread, a

Trap clasping its dried stem. A

plane rendered round in its speed, this black leaf

turning with more grace

than it ever did glued on the green limb. Now

dead, low and intent, flung

into this by an unseen breath.

I Crouched Between the Grape Vines, Anticipating the Release of Urine onto the Rocks

Two meters over, in the same wrought shadow: a brown rabbit. It licked its paws, the plush at its head and in the folds of its neck and in its rounded back bristling like a field of wheat before the first rain, its white skull sawing back and forth - splashing in and out of the sunlight falling through the serrated leaves - with the motion of its tongue.

Dad Brought His Other Wife

She ate all the marzipan, her pink nails clicking, while my sister and I played tennis.

Window in the Water Jug

There was the studio and there was the windowless bodega where orange dusk light eddied in air thick with powder, before revealing a red clay water jug, a glazed dish, a sparrow walking the table between them. Continued.