Zeitoun (20 page)

She called the Claiborne house again. No answer.

Yuko tried to put it in context. It was miraculous that the phone line at the Claiborne house was working at all. Chances were that it finally gave way and died. He’ll find a way to call, she said. He’s in an underwater city, she said. Cut the man some slack.

Kathy was calmer now, but still she paced the living room.

Yuko took the kids to the mall. She didn’t want to leave Kathy alone, but the pacing was worrying the kids. Yuko was sure Zeitoun would call while they were gone, so why not let the kids enjoy themselves? The mall had a food court, an arcade for Zach. They planned to be back at three.

Kathy called the Claiborne house again. No answer.

Walt called. “You hear anything from Zeitoun?”

Kathy told him she hadn’t.

She called Adnan, Zeitoun’s cousin.

“I’m still ashamed,” she said. Last they had spoken, Kathy had had
to tell him that her sister would not allow Adnan and Abeer to stay with them. It had been painful.

“Don’t worry. We’re fine,” he said.

He was still in Baton Rouge with Abeer and his parents. After spending two nights in their car, they had returned to the mosque, and had been sleeping on the floor there for the past week.

“How is Abdulrahman?” he asked.

“I haven’t heard from him. Have you?”

Adnan had not.

Alone and seeking distraction, Kathy turned on the TV, avoiding the news, finding Oprah Winfrey. Or she thought it was Oprah’s show. But soon she realized it was a news report replaying portions of the previous day’s show, with New Orleans police chief Eddie Compass and Mayor Nagin as Oprah’s guests.

Compass was lamenting the extent of the crime in the Superdome. “We had babies in there. Little babies getting raped,” he said, weeping. From Mayor Nagin: “About three days we were basically rationing, fighting, people were—that’s why the people, in my opinion, they got to this almost animalistic state, because they didn’t have the resources. They were trapped. You get ready to see something that I’m not sure you’re ready to see. We have people standing out there that have been in that frickin’ Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people. That’s the tragedy. People are trying to give us babies that were dying.”

Kathy turned the TV off again, this time for good. She called the house on Claiborne. The phone rang and rang. She paced. She walked outside, into the assaulting Phoenix heat, then went back inside. She called again. The rings began to sound hollow, desolate.

*    *    *

Four o’clock arrived and he hadn’t called.

She called Ahmad in Spain. He hadn’t heard from Zeitoun either. He had been calling the Claiborne house all day, to no avail.

In the late afternoon, the kids returned.

“Did Dad call?” Nademah asked.

“Not yet,” Kathy said, “still waiting.”

She held herself together for a few seconds but then imploded. She excused herself and ran to the guest room. She did not want her girls to see her this way.

Yuko came in and sat on the bed with Kathy. It’s been just one day, she said. Just one day in the life of a man in a city with no services. He would call tomorrow. Kathy pulled herself together, and together they prayed. Yuko was right. It was one day. Of course he would call tomorrow.

Kathy woke up with a better outlook. Maybe her husband didn’t even realize he’d forgotten to call. He was likely saving any number of new people and animals and homes, and in the midst of it all he’d gotten overwhelmed. In any case, Kathy was determined to put on a brave face for the kids. She cooked their breakfast and pretended she was sane and content. She played GameCube with Zachary and killed the morning with diversions.

Periodically she pushed the redial button on Yuko’s phone. The phone at Claiborne rang in an infinite loop.

Noon came and went.

Kathy was losing her grip again.

“I need to go to New Orleans,” she told Yuko.

“No you don’t,” Yuko said. She peppered Kathy with logistical questions. How would she get into the city? Did she plan to buy a boat and dodge the authorities and find her husband on her own? Yuko dismissed the notion.

“We don’t want to have to worry about you, too.”

Ahmad called Kathy. His tone had been neutral the day before, but now he sounded worried. This unnerved Kathy. If Ahmad, made of the same stuff her husband was—and both of them made of the stuff of their father Mahmoud, who could survive two days at sea tethered to a barrel—felt this to be a dire situation, then if anything, Kathy was underreacting.

Ahmad said he would try to contact the TV station that had interviewed Zeitoun. He would contact all the agencies that tracked missing persons in New Orleans. He would contact the Coast Guard. They agreed to call each other as soon they heard something.

In the afternoon, Zeitoun’s family began calling from Syria. First it was Fahzia. A secondary-school teacher in Jableh, she spoke fluent English.

“Have you heard from Abdulrahman?”

Kathy told her she had not for two days.

There was a long silence on the line.

“You have not heard from Abdulrahman?”

Kathy explained that the phones were down, that it was likely that her husband was just trying to reach a working phone. This did not sit well with Fahzia.

“Again, please—you have not heard from Abdulrahman?”

Kathy loved the Zeitouns of Syria, but she did not need this extra burden. She excused herself and hung up.

Kathy did not attempt to sit at dinner. She paced the rooms, the phone an extension of her arm. She thought through the possibilities—who she knew and what they could do to help. She didn’t know a soul still in the city, she realized. It was paralyzing. It seemed impossible that in 2005, in the United States, there was an entire city cut off from all communication, all contact.

Later, thinking the kids were asleep, she passed one of the bedrooms and heard Aisha talking to one of Yuko’s kids.

“Our house is under ten feet of water,” Aisha said.

Kathy held her breath at the door.

“And we can’t find my dad.”

In the bathroom, Kathy covered her face in a towel and bawled. Her body convulsed, but she tried not to make a sound.

Kathy had no choice but to lie. She had never told a bald-faced lie to her children before, but now it seemed necessary. Otherwise they would all lose their composure. She planned to enroll them in school on Monday, and to have the strength to be thrown into such a situation they had to believe that their father was healthy and in contact. So at breakfast, when Aisha asked if she had heard from Dad, Kathy did not hesitate.

“Yup, heard from him last night,” she said.

“On what phone?” Nademah asked. They hadn’t heard a ring.

“Yuko’s phone,” Kathy said. “I got it on the first ring.”

“So he’s at the house?” Nademah asked.

Kathy nodded. And as smart and skeptical as her kids were, they believed her. Especially Nademah and Zachary. Whether or not they
sensed the lie, they
wanted
to believe it. Safiya and Aisha were harder to read, but for the time being her kids’ fears had been assuaged and now Kathy only had to worry about her own.

Just after breakfast, the phone did ring. Kathy leapt to it.

It was Aisha, another sister of Zeitoun’s. She was the director of an elementary school in Jableh, and also spoke English.

“Where is Abdulrahman?” she asked.

“He’s in New Orleans,” Kathy answered calmly.

Aisha explained that no one had heard from him in days. He had been in touch a few times after the storm, and then nothing. She was calling on behalf of all the siblings, and she was worried.

“He’s fine,” Kathy said.

“How do you know?” Aisha asked.

Kathy had no answer.

Kathy got online. Immediately she was swamped with horrific news from the city. Officials were reporting the death toll in and around New Orleans at 118. But Mayor Nagin estimated that the final number might climb as high as ten thousand. She checked her email. Her husband had never sent an email in his life, but she couldn’t rule it out. She found an email from Zeitoun’s brother Ahmad. He had cc’ed her on an email to another aid agency.

When it was noon in New Orleans Kathy called the Claiborne house. She let the phone ring, willing it to stop, to be interrupted by her husband’s voice. She called all day, but the ringing had no end.

Walt and Rob called. Kathy told them she had not heard from Zeitoun, and asked if Walt knew anyone who could help. Walt knew everyone, it seemed, and always had a solution. He said he would call a friend, a U.S. marshal, who he knew was near the city. Maybe he could get inside and get to the house on Claiborne.

As Kathy put the kids to bed that night, she forced herself to present a face of confidence. They asked if their house was underwater, and
Kathy admitted that yes, there was some damage, but that lucky them, their father was a contractor, and that any damage could be quickly fixed.

“And guess what?” she told them. “Now you’ll all get new bedroom sets!”

Walt called. He had spoken to his friend, the U.S. marshal. The marshal had driven toward the house on Dart Street, but he couldn’t get close. The water was still too high.

Walt said he would call a friend he knew who had a helicopter. He hadn’t thought it through beyond that—where the helicopter would go or how they would scout for Zeitoun—but he said he would make more calls and call Kathy back soon.

Just as she had the day before, when it was noon in New Orleans she called the Claiborne house. Again the ringing had no end.

Zeitoun’s family called.

“Kathy, where’s Abdulrahman?” they said. It was Lucy, one of his nieces. All of Zeitoun’s nieces and nephews were fluent in English, and were translating for the rest of the family.

“I don’t know,” Kathy said.

Another cousin got on the phone.

“You need to go find him!” she insisted.

Throughout the morning Zeitoun’s sisters and brothers called from Lattakia, from Saudi Arabia. Had Kathy heard from him yet? Why wasn’t she in New Orleans looking for him? Hadn’t she been watching the TV?

She told them she hadn’t, that she couldn’t bear it.

They filled her in. There had been looting, rapes, murders. It was chaos, anarchy. They repeated Mayor Nagin’s assertion that the city had devolved into an “animalistic state.” And in this way she got the media’s funhouse picture of the state of the city via her husband’s relatives halfway around the world. God knows, she thought, what kind of spin the media was putting on things out there.

Twenty-five thousand body bags have been brought to the area, they noted. How can you live in that country? they asked. You need to move back here. Syria is so much safer, they said.

Kathy couldn’t deal with the questions and the pressure. She was overcome, helpless, trembling. She got off the phone as politely as she could.

She went to the bathroom and for the first time in days looked at her face. There were blue rings around her eyes. She removed her hijab and took in a quick breath. Her hair. She had had no more than ten grey hairs before all of this. Now there was a stripe of white hair rising from her forehead, as wide as her hand.

Yuko forbade Kathy to answer the phone when anyone called from Syria. Yuko fielded all the calls, telling them that Kathy was doing everything she could, everything humanly possible.

Yuko and her husband Ahmaad took Kathy and the kids to Veterans Memorial Coliseum, where the Red Cross had set up a shelter and triage unit for New Orleanians. Various missing-persons agencies were collecting information and trying to connect those separated from their families. Kathy brought a photo of Zeitoun and every piece of information she could find.

At the gym, it was a grim scene. There were dozens of people from New Orleans there, looking like they had fled that very day. Injuries were being treated, families sleeping on cots, piles of clothing everywhere. Kathy’s girls clung to her.