Man of the Hour Page 9

  God, God, God. What a terrible sound the hadduta made when it went off the second time. He couldn’t get the noise out of his head. He was trying to talk to his sister, but all he could hear was that hollow boom. A sound you could feel all the way down in the bottom of your stomach. You knew such a sound would shake things loose and set them rolling wildly. The idea frightened him. What if a police car pulled up alongside him right now?

  “All right, so you don’t want to play the radio and you don’t like my hair,” said Elizabeth. “What else do you want to talk about?”

  “I don’t know,” said her brother, as the road turned into Shore Parkway and swept past Dyker Beach. “Are you still thinking to go to college?”

  “Now that’s something I don’t want to talk about. Not with you.”

  “Okay.”

  He shuddered a little behind the wheel and honked at an oil truck going by too close on the right. The yellow fragrance tree hanging from his rearview mirror swayed in the breeze.

  “What about Mother?” she said.

  “You want to ask me about Mother?” He took a deep breath and reached inside his shirt, fingering the key again.

  “Yes, what was she like?”

  Nasser let go of the key and put both hands on the wheel as his eyes followed the curving road ahead.

  “She had soft hands, beautiful hands,” he said. “But she was not soft. She was strong in her heart.”

  “And what was the name of the town she was from?”

  “Dir Ghusun. It means the Monastery of Branches. It was an old Christian town, founded by the Romans. I have told you this three hundred times before.”

  “I know. But I like hearing it.”

  There was music in his voice when he described this place he’d never actually seen. Their mother’s village on the coast of the Mediterranean. Where the soil was rich and black and the lemon trees and olive trees grew tall, and the sea carried the fine smell of the trees across the village. Every year at harvest time, children ran through the streets following the blind storyteller to a neighbor’s house, where he’d tell stories of great Arab heroes and warriors like Saladin on his white horse battling Richard the Lion-Hearted during the Crusades, or the Prophet himself, who led three hundred brothers to victory over a thousand Meccans at the Battle of Badr. Even after the Israelis bombed the village in 1948 and forced her family to flee, arresting anyone who tried to come back, she’d carried the memory of this place, her connection to the land, in her heart. And, in turn, she’d passed that love of the land on to Nasser, even giving him the rusty key to the family’s old house, so he could open the door on the day of return.

  “So did she like me?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Of course she liked you.” Nasser forced himself to smile. “She loved you. You were her little baby girl. How could she not love you? I look at you and I see her sometimes.”

  He stepped on the gas again and maneuvered around a blue Honda onto the Gowanus Expressway. His head was full of hot tears but he didn’t dare let them out.

  Mother. She would have understood what he did today. She knew what it was to be drastic.

  She was always at the front of marches in Bethlehem, lying down in front of the tanks at Rachel’s Tomb. Screaming and rending her clothes at the funerals of martyrs. A little Arab lady in a white scarf with a voice that carried like the wind. She taught him that there was a special place of honor in heaven for the ones who fight, not for the ones who stay at home.

  Not like Father. Getting his face slapped by Israeli border guards and trying to smile through the tears.

  Nasser couldn’t have been more than five years old when it happened but the memory tore at him in new ways all the time. It didn’t even look like a slap. It looked more as if the young soldier was lightly patting his father on the cheek. They’d been making a special trip to Jerusalem—his mother, his father, and he—when their cab was stopped by the Israeli border patrol and the soldier on duty asked to see Father’s identification card. Perhaps Father was slow to get out, so the soldier just reached out and put his hand to the old man’s face, and that was that. Father bowed and got back in the cab.

  It was only when Nasser looked up and saw his father trying to smile with tears running down his cheeks that he realized anything was wrong.

  His mother just sat there, lips pursed and chin raised, refusing to look at her husband. Amina. She was pregnant, Nasser remembered, and Father had shamed her this day. So she stared into her son’s eyes, not needing to say it out loud: Don’t be like him. I would rather die than see you be like him.

  Up until then, he’d thought they were a family like any other. Yes, he knew they had to move around a lot before he was born, leaving Jordan and eventually ending up in the Deheisha refugee camp outside Bethlehem, because Israeli forces had claimed the house Father grew up in and there was nowhere else to go. But all other families they knew had a story like that. After the slap, though, everything grated, everything hurt. Seeing the water carrying sewage down the middle of the dusty narrow street, so that flies followed you everywhere and the terrible smell infiltrated your clothes. Living eight to a room in a concrete-block house with a corrugated tin roof, where his mother would stack up mattresses during the day so they could have a living room and then spread them out at night for everyone to have a place to sleep. Wearing old UN food sacks for underwear, with Not for Sale stamped on the ass. Knowing his parents’ first child, Maryam, had died of malnutrition before her first birthday. Watching his father stand on a street corner near the Damascus Gate every morning, with twenty or thirty other Arab men, jockeying for position, waiting for some sweaty, hairy-necked Jewish contractor to drive by in a Mercedes and say you, you, and you can come work for forty shekels a day, building houses on the land we stole from you.

  “So what was it like when Mother came here?” said Elizabeth. “I can’t really picture it. This little Arab lady in a head scarf riding the subway with us.”

  “She didn’t.” Nasser kept his eyes on the road. “She never crossed the water.”

  “What do you mean, she didn’t cross the water?” Elizabeth cricked her neck, trying to get Nasser to look at her. “I thought she brought us to the States after Father had been working here a year, making money so he could get us out of the refugee camp. Didn’t we all live together on Starr Street?”

  “She came here but she never left there. Do you understand?” He blinked. “In her heart, she was still there, in the camp.”

  He flashed on the image of her in Deheisha, right after Elizabeth was born: A shrinking lady with two small children carrying rotting vegetables past barbed-wire fences, moving slower than the dirty water in the gutter. Her spirit wilting in the sun. A part of her was already dead. Things he could never put into words.

  “Never mind,” he said. “You’re too young to remember.”

  “Explain it to me.” Elizabeth touched his arm.

  They were passing under the elevated tracks, near the Bush Terminal warehouses, a rough and dark industrial place where men did things that made no sense to their wives.

  “She never accepted that she was here,” said Nasser. “No place was home except for the Monastery of Branches. You see? She said she would go back there one day or die waiting for the Jews to leave Palestine. Okay? This is how it was.”

  America had done this to her, she’d say. America has broken our hearts. America has taken your father from us. America makes it possible for the Jews to treat us this way. There would be a Great Chastisement for those who’d been so cruel.

  “Sometimes, she’d take us on this boat that goes around Manhattan Island,” said Nasser. “This Circle Line. She’d stand by the railing and look out at the water, like she was thinking to be somewhere else. And I would never let go of her hand because I was so afraid she would jump over the side and leave us.”

  “Is that what happened?” Elizabeth turned on him. “Is that how she died?”

  “No.” Nasser pushed himself
back against his seat, as if bracing for impact. “She just got sick and took too many pills. It was an accident.”

  “You mean she committed suicide?”

  He took the question like a blow to the head, “Don’t say this. It’s against the Holy Book.”

  For a few seconds, he refused to speak or look at her. The road hummed under his wheels and he felt the pressure of tears building up behind his eyes again.

  No, she wasn’t a suicide. She was a martyr. That was the only way he could think of her death. He remembered seeing her lying on the bed, with hands folded over her chest. “This is not my mother!” he’d yelled at Father. “What have you done with my mother?” He had become a warrior to honor her memory. When he’d joined the intifada back home, every stone he’d thrown at the soldiers was for her, every rock was a piece of his broken heart. Today was for her too. She would have understood.

  “Then what did happen?” said Elizabeth. “I have a right to know. She was my mother too.”

  “I tell you this was an accident—nobody says nothing against her.” Nasser abruptly cut her off. “We don’t talk bad about her.” He took a deep breath and sniffed.

  “I know, but sometimes I’ll hear you and Father speaking in Arabic and I feel like you’re keeping something from me.”

  “Maybe it’s better that way.” He blinked again and the tears began to recede, just a little trickle coming out on the side facing away from her.

  “Why, what makes you say that?”

  The Gowanus bent its elbow in Red Hook and splintered off into the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, cutting through Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill. Gray-rimmed clouds drifted in from the east.

  “I think let’s be quiet awhile.” Nasser wiped away the stray tear and lifted his chin. “I don’t want to talk no more. Let’s just be together, like a family.”

  9

  AS THE ELEVATOR DOORS shut, David closed his eyes and got that same visceral jolt of the bus exploding. But when he opened them again, he was back on the elevator, being carried up to see Renee and Arthur on the eighteenth floor. For a few seconds, he wasn’t sure which was real and which was hallucination—the polished oak walls or Seniqua screaming, metal twisting, and the floor buckling under him. He had to see his family immediately. It was a physical craving. He needed the tactile sensation of being near them, touching them, to make him real again and assure him that he had indeed survived.

  The elevator doors popped open and he stepped off quickly, coughing as if his lungs were still full of poison.

  “Jesus, what happened to you?” Renee was waiting for him in the corridor, wearing gray sweats and propping open the apartment door with her foot.

  “I was in a fire.” He followed her into the apartment, realizing mat he might still be a little raw and smelly in spite of the shower he’d just taken at home.

  “For real?” The door closed behind her.

  “Yeah, for real. Didn’t you see it on television? Our bus blew up outside school.”

  “Shit.” She came over to hug him. “Are you all right?”

  “I guess so.”

  She reached up to put her arms around his neck and he closed his eyes, waiting to feel the bus explode once more. But instead there was only the sensation of stillness and her cool forehead resting against his chin. His metabolism was finally starting to slow down. He felt skin and hair and heard Joni Mitchell singing on the kitchen tape player. He opened his eyes and saw sunlight streaming between the buildings and Margot Fonteyn dancing above the couch.

  “Hey, is that Daddy?” Arthur called from the other room.

  They moved apart from each other a little, embarrassed by the Polaroid flash of intimacy.

  “You better go talk to him.” Renee touched his chest. “Show him you’re okay before he hears anything and gets worried.”

  “Yeah, of course.” He took her fingers and kissed them, “I’ll be right back.”

  Hungry for more flesh-on-flesh contact, he went down the hall to the boy’s bedroom.

  “Hey, tiger. What’s happening?”

  “Odysseus is killing all the suitors.”

  Arthur was sprawled on the bedroom carpet, arranging toy soldiers around a plastic castle. The floor was covered with the detritus of a child’s life: comic books, Disney action figures, Lego blocks, Playmobil fortresses, Transformers, and cap guns. An archeologist could come in and discover generations of pop culture buried in layers. David knelt and put his hand on his son’s back.

  “Why is he doing that?”

  “He wants to take back his family,” said Arthur, furrowing his brow in concentration.

  David saw how enormous his hand looked on the boy’s narrow back. From palm to fingertips, he could easily span Arthur’s waist. This was good. This was real. This was life. He leaned down and nuzzled the boy’s hair.

  “Look, buddy, something kind of serious happened at school today. I’ll tell you more about it later. But right now all you need to know is I’m all right.”

  “Okay,” Arthur said casually, turning onto his side. “Dad, tell me about the Valkyries again.”

  For a second, David was disoriented. Was this relevant? “The Valkyries from the book we were reading the other night?” He blinked, trying to get on the boy’s wavelength.

  “Yeah. I really, really want to know.”

  David steepled his fingers and felt himself getting dizzy for a moment. He considered telling Arthur more about the explosion, but now the timing didn’t seem right.

  “Um, I guess you’re talking about how the Valkyries look down from Valhalla and choose which warriors are going to die that day,” he said slowly. “And then they swoop down and tap them on the shoulders.”

  “Yeah, yeah! Keep going.”

  David closed his eyes and breathed in, still trying to get himself oriented. You’re okay. You’re not going to die. You’re with your son. The hard part is over. The fire is out.

  “And so then,” he said, opening his eyes, “the warrior who’s been tapped knows this is the day he will die, and he rushes around killing as many of the enemy as he can until he falls. Because this is his last day.”

  “And what else?”

  Breathe in, breathe out. You weren’t the one who died today. “And then he’s carried up to Valhalla, where he lives with all the Valkyries and great warriors in history, eating and fighting and fighting and eating until the end of time.”

  “Cool!” Arthur threw his arms around David’s neck. “Thank you, Daddy.”

  “My privilege.”

  His exhilaration tempered by the knowledge of Sam’s death, he kissed his son on the top of his head. Why me? he wondered briefly. Why am I the one who gets to live?

  He looked down at the back of Arthur’s red hair standing on end like a cock’s comb and decided the answer was probably somewhere in there.

  From the next room, David could hear Renee turning the television up, the traditional signal that it was time for him to leave. This was going to be a short visit after all.

  “All right, buddy.” He stood up. “So I’m going to see you Friday after school.”

  “Dad.” Arthur rolled onto his side. “Mommy cut herself.”

  “What?”

  Arthur turned back onto his stomach, playing with his soldiers again, blissfully unaware of the chill he’d put in his father’s belly.

  “What did you just say, buddy?”

  “Nothing.” Arthur made machine-gun sounds and banged his sneakers together, losing himself in his little world again. “I’m just playing.”

  Afraid to ask any more, David squeezed the boy’s foot and started to walk out through the living room. Anton, the boyfriend, was sitting next to Renee on the couch. Wearing David’s old red bathrobe with the belt double-knotted in the front.

  Unbelievably, he was a couple of inches taller than David, so the sleeves were too short and the hem rose up above his knees. His hair was long and silky and much more poetic than his face, which had a mildly sl
uggish and complacent look. He wore a thin gold chain around his neck and an expensive-looking turquoise Navajo bracelet.

  “David, you know Anton,” Renee said cautiously.

  So here was the final aftershock. Yes, he’d met Anton before, but never this casually. The coziness of the scene made him a little sick to his stomach. Another man in his house, wearing his bathrobe, sitting next to his wife, on his couch. How’s that for cutting you down to size, big guy?

  “How you doing?” David offered his hand.

  “Yeah, what’s up, man?” Anton gave him a kind of limp hep-cat hand slap and the bracelet slid down his arm.

  David sucked at his teeth and sneaked a glance at Renee. What did she see in this guy? Was she impressed because he was a musician? Or was this evidence of some worrisome deterioration in judgment on her part? She used to have better taste.

  As the six o’clock news began on television, David looked her over, trying to find the cut Arthur mentioned. But no bandage was apparent.

  On the screen, a chiseled-looking young anchorman was introducing a segment about the bus exploding. And then there it was again, the nightmare starting, this time with a little graphic at the bottom of the screen that said: New York 1 News Exclusive. No longer just a vision in his head.

  The camera turned just after the first explosion, so the bus was already tilting forward with its hood on fire and the kids running away, screaming. And then here was David Fitzgerald again, lumbering around to the back of the bus, opening the door, and getting a leg up from Ray-Za. Then David watched himself climb onboard and go charging into the smoke. The camera didn’t record the fear in his head; it just caught glimpses of him through the smoke, making his way toward Seniqua, halfway out the window and bawling piteously.