Zeitoun

DAVE EGGERS
ZEITOUN

Dave Eggers is the author of six previous books, including
What Is the What
, a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of France’s Prix Medici. That book, about Valentino Achak Deng, a survivor of the civil war in southern Sudan, gave birth to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, run by Mr. Deng and dedicated to building secondary schools in southern Sudan. Eggers is the founder and editor of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing house based in San Francisco that produces books, an eponymous quarterly journal, a monthly magazine
(The Believer)
, and
Wholphin
, a quarterly DVD of short films and documentaries. In 2002, with Nínive Calegari he cofounded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for youth in the Mission District of San Francisco. Local communities have since opened sister 826 centers in Chicago, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Ann Arbor, Seattle, Boston, and Washington, D.C. In 2004, Eggers taught at the University of California–Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and there, with Dr. Lola Vollen, he cofounded Voice of Witness, a series of books using oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. A native of Chicago, Eggers graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in journalism. He now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two children.

www.zeitounfoundation.org
www.voiceofwitness.org
www.valentinoachakdeng.org
www.826national.org
www.mcsweeneys.net

ALSO BY DAVE EGGERS

Memoir

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Fiction

You Shall Know Our Velocity!
How We Are Hungry
How the Water Feels to the Fishes
What Is the What
The Wild Things

Nonfiction

Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers
(with Nínive Calegari and Daniel Moulthrop)

As Editor

The Best American Nonrequired Reading

Surviving Justice: America’s Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated
(with Lola Vollen)

About the Author

Other Books by this Author

Title Page

Dedication

Notes About this Book

Part I

Chapter 1 -
Friday August 26, 2005

Chapter 2 -
Saturday August 27

Chapter 3 -
Sunday August 28

Chapter 4 -
Monday August 29

Chapter 5 -
Tuesday August 30

Part II

Chapter 6 -
Tuesday August 30

Chapter 7 -
Wednesday August 31

Chapter 8 -
Thursday September 1

Chapter 9 -
Friday September 2

Chapter 10 -
Saturday September 3

Chapter 11 -
Sunday September 4

Chapter 12 -
Monday September 5

Chapter 13 -
Tuesday September 6

Part III

Chapter 14 -
Wednesday September 7

Chapter 15 -
Thursday September 8

Chapter 16 -
Friday September 9

Chapter 17 -
Saturday September 10

Chapter 18 -
Sunday September 11

Chapter 19 -
Monday September 12

Chapter 20 -
Tuesday September 13

Chapter 21 -
Wednesday September 14

Chapter 22 -
Saturday September 17

Chapter 23 -
Monday September 19

Part IV

Chapter 24 -
Tuesday September 6

Chapter 25 -
Wednesday September 7

Chapter 26 -
Thursday September 8

Chapter 27 -
Friday September 9

Chapter 28 -
Saturday September 10

Chapter 29 -
Sunday September 11

Chapter 30 -
Monday September 12

Chapter 31 -
Tuesday September 13

Chapter 32 -
Wednesday September 14

Chapter 33 -
Thursday September 15

Chapter 34 -
Friday September 16

Chapter 35 -
Saturday September 17

Chapter 36 -
Sunday September 18

Chapter 37 -
Monday September 19

Chapter 38 -
Monday September 19

Chapter 39 -
Tuesday September 20

Chapter 40 -
Thursday September 22

Chapter 41 -
Friday September 23

Chapter 42 -
Sunday September 25

Chapter 43 -
Monday September 26

Chapter 44 -
Tuesday September 27

Chapter 45 -
Wednesday September 28

Chapter 46 -
Thursday September 29

Part V

Chapter 47 -
Fall 2008

The Zeitoun Foundation

Acknowledgments

Copyright

… in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime …

Cormac McCarthy,
The Road

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail
.

Mark Twain

This is a work of nonfiction, based primarily on the accounts of Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun (pronounced “Zay-toon”). Dates, times, locations, and other facts have been confirmed by independent sources and the historical record. Conversations have been recounted as best as can be remembered by the participants. Some names have been changed.

This book does not attempt to be an all-encompassing book about New Orleans or Hurricane Katrina. It is only an account of one family’s experiences before and after the storm. It was written with the full participation of the Zeitoun family, and reflects their view of the events.

On moonless nights the men and boys of Jableh, a dusty fishing town on the coast of Syria, would gather their lanterns and set out in their quietest boats. Five or six small craft, two or three fishermen in each. A mile out, they would arrange the boats in a circle on the black sea, drop their nets, and, holding their lanterns over the water, they would approximate the moon.

The fish, sardines, would begin gathering soon after, a slow mass of silver rising from below. The fish were attracted to plankton, and the plankton were attracted to the light. They would begin to circle, a chain linked loosely, and over the next hour their numbers would grow. The black gaps between silver links would close until the fishermen could see, below, a solid mass of silver spinning.

Abdulrahman Zeitoun was only thirteen when he began fishing for sardines this way, a method called
lampara
, borrowed from the Italians. He had waited years to join the men and teenagers on the night boats,
and he’d spent those years asking questions. Why only on moonless nights? Because, his brother Ahmad said, on moon-filled nights the plankton would be visible everywhere, spread out all over the sea, and the sardines could see and eat the glowing organisms with ease. But without a moon the men could make their own, and could bring the sardines to the surface in stunning concentrations. You have to see it, Ahmad told his little brother. You’ve never seen anything like this.

And when Abdulrahman first witnessed the sardines circling in the black he could not believe the sight, the beauty of the undulating silver orb below the white and gold lantern light. He said nothing, and the other fishermen were careful to be quiet, too, paddling without motors, lest they scare away the catch. They would whisper over the sea, telling jokes and talking about women and girls as they watched the fish rise and spin beneath them. A few hours later, once the sardines were ready, tens of thousands of them glistening in the refracted light, the fishermen would cinch the net and haul them in.

They would motor back to the shore and bring the sardines to the fish broker in the market before dawn. He would pay the men and boys, and would then sell the fish all over western Syria—Lattakia, Baniyas, Damascus. The fishermen would split the money, with Abdulrahman and Ahmad bringing their share home. Their father had passed away the year before and their mother was of fragile health and mind, so all funds they earned fishing went toward the welfare of the house they shared with ten siblings.

Abdulrahman and Ahmad didn’t care much about the money, though. They would have done it for free.

Thirty-four years later and thousands of miles west, Abdulrahman Zeitoun was in bed on a Friday morning, slowly leaving the moonless
Jableh night, a tattered memory of it caught in a morning dream. He was in his home in New Orleans and beside him he could hear his wife Kathy breathing, her exhalations not unlike the shushing of water against the hull of a wooden boat. Otherwise the house was silent. He knew it was near six o’clock, and the peace would not last. The morning light usually woke the kids once it reached their second-story windows. One of the four would open his or her eyes, and from there the movements were brisk, the house quickly growing loud. With one child awake, it was impossible to keep the other three in bed.

Kathy woke to a thump upstairs, coming from one of the kids’ rooms. She listened closely, praying silently for rest. Each morning there was a delicate period, between six and six-thirty, when there was a chance, however remote, that they could steal another ten or fifteen minutes of sleep. But now there was another thump, and the dog barked, and another thump followed. What was happening in this house? Kathy looked to her husband. He was staring at the ceiling. The day had roared to life.

The phone began ringing, today as always, before their feet hit the floor. Kathy and Zeitoun—most people called him by his last name because they couldn’t pronounce his first—ran a company, Zeitoun A. Painting Contractor LLC, and every day their crews, their clients, everyone with a phone and their number, seemed to think that once the clock struck six-thirty, it was appropriate to call. And they called. Usually there were so many calls at the stroke of six-thirty that the overlap would send half of them straight to voicemail.

Kathy took the first one, from a client across town, while Zeitoun shuffled into the shower. Fridays were always busy, but this one promised madness, given the rough weather on the way. There had been
rumblings all week about a tropical storm crossing the Florida Keys, a chance it might head north. Though this kind of possibility presented itself every August and didn’t raise eyebrows for most, Kathy and Zeitoun’s more cautious clients and friends often made preparations. Throughout the morning the callers would want to know if Zeitoun could board up their windows and doors, if he would be clearing his equipment off their property before the winds came. Workers would want to know if they’d be expected to come in that day or the next.

“Zeitoun Painting Contractors,” Kathy said, trying to sound alert. It was an elderly client, a woman living alone in a Garden District mansion, asking if Zeitoun’s crew could come over and board up her windows.

“Sure, of course,” Kathy said, letting her feet drop heavily to the floor. She was up. Kathy was the business’s secretary, bookkeeper, credit department, public-relations manager—she did everything in the office, while her husband handled the building and painting. The two of them balanced each other well: Zeitoun’s English had its limits, so when bills had to be negotiated, hearing Kathy’s Louisiana drawl put clients at ease.