The Night Counter (5 page)

“That was what Mama always told me when I felt cursed having to work with her instead of going to school like the other girls,” Fatima said. “Mama promised me she’d teach me to read one day, but that time never came.”

Scheherazade fondled the white trim of the dress.

“Try it on for me,” Fatima requested. “For you are still beautiful.”

“If that is your command,” Scheherazade said with a nonchalance that did not match the care with which she slipped the gown over her head.

Fatima clasped her hands in delight. “You look like an angel worthy of heaven seven times over,” she gushed. Scheherazade cupped her hands around breasts that had remained very full for eleven centuries and pushed them up. Fatima forced Scheherazade’s hands down.

“You have no idea how many times Mama had Bedia—that was the village’s seamstress—come over to adjust the hem,” Fatima said. “Bedia’s eyesight was going, the old goat.”

Using long-buried memory, Fatima moved her hand over to a spot with a reddish-pink stain. “Is it still there?”

“Is it from your wedding night?” Scheherazade cringed.

“I was eating a fig, and Bedia pinned me instead of the dress, and I dropped the fig.” Fatima giggled. “I can still hear Mama barking at Bedia with her scratchy voice as she grabbed the fig and juggled it as if it were a grenade.”

“It must have been an explosive wedding.” Scheherazade batted her eyes.

Fatima stopped giggling. “It was the last time I ever saw Mama—and our house,” she said. “When I left with Marwan, Mama gave me a key. She told me that if Marwan ever did anything bad to me, I should come home. Even if for some reason she was not there, I would still have the key to go inside. Then she kissed me twelve times. The morning after the wedding ceremony, Marwan’s family came to inspect the bedsheets; they saw blood and were satisfied I had been a virgin, and so we went to Beirut that afternoon and sailed to America the next day.” She stopped, too worn out by memory to continue.

“It was a good story,
ya qalbi
,” Scheherazade said. “And we’ve got you on a boat away from Deir Zeitoon.”

“It wasn’t just a story,” Fatima said, mustering the powers of all the djinni to close the lid. “I thought you might think this dress would be nicer to die in than this robe. But it’s too heavy to wait for death in. It’d kill me first. I’m not going to die from an overweight dress. Right? Come on,
yallah
, I’ve told you a story of a husband; now you tell me how I will die.”

“Is there no more passion to this story, more details of the wedding night?” Scheherazade asked by way of an answer.

“No,” Fatima said, and crossed her arms.

“So now you will leave this dress and its stories to Amir’s bride?”

Fatima uncrossed her arms. “No, I cannot give it to a grandchild when I still have a daughter that is not married,” she lamented, not realizing she was opening the storybook on her children

“An unmarried daughter? You are eighty-five,” Scheherazade said. “How could you have a daughter not yet married?”

“I had Lena late in life.” Fatima sighed, thoughts of her death easily made subservient to her daughter’s marital failings. “She is choosing marriage late in life.”

“Choosing?” Scheherazade said.

“This is what she tells me,” Fatima said, and began twirling her purple hair. “But my children do not often tell me the truth about anything but the weather. And when the weather is very bad, they do not even tell me that.”

“Only one unmarried daughter,” Scheherazade said. “That is not so bad. You must give her the dress.”

Fatima shook her head. “She will turn forty in ninety-seven days,” she said.

“Every woman has her time,” Scheherazade offered. “Marriage later is better than sooner. How many years can you really spend with one man? I’m going on 1,108 years with the same one. Even with all the help of astrologists, magicians, and alchemists, it has not been easy to keep it alive in my stories. And look at you. Your marriage lasted only sixty-five years.”

“True, but I did not have a matchmaker,” Fatima said. “How good my family used to be at marriage. It was not for nothing that my grandmother,
Allah yerhamha
, was the greatest matchmaker in all of Lebanon.”

“How bad could your marriage have been if you made ten babies?” Scheherazade said, seductively running her hands up her body and licking her lips.

Fatima covered her ears with her hair to shut out Scheherazade. She wanted only to spend time with her boxes.

ALAS, FATIMA HAD
not been enticed to speak of her nuptials. However, talk of this daughter with no groom was the farthest the old lady had traveled away from Deir Zeitoon in a story. Perhaps a little more provocation was required.

“It is possible that if you had been a more vigilant mother, your daughter would not be a spinster,” Scheherazade goaded. “She would instead be a wife.”

“My daughter is too beautiful to be a spinster,” Fatima snapped back, and her eyes squinted in anger. “And you cannot blame me. I was more vigilant with my children than any quarterback guarding his ball.”

Scheherazade was not familiar with the duties of a quarterback, but her shrug implied that the old lady’s words hadn’t altered her beliefs in any way.

“For your information, my family may soon reclaim its success with marriage,” Fatima added. “Through my grandson Zade. He is my fifth daughter Nadia’s son. He runs a matchmaking service for Arabs.”

“
Smallah, smallah
, your daughter sounds like she has raised a son more amazing than the logicians, geographers, and philosophers of the Abbasids,” marveled Scheherazade, who knew that nothing endeared her to people more than excessively complimenting their children.

“He has his own coffee shop in Washington where young people can meet each other even without these computer things,” Fatima boasted. “Did you know Nadia can speak Arabic?”

“Don’t all your children speak Arabic?” Scheherazade asked.

Fatima bowed her head. “No, only Nadia.” She sighed. “Ibrahim and I would speak to them all in Arabic, but they would answer us in English. Then one day Nadia told us she had gotten a scholarship. Oh, our joy. We thought for sure it would be in accounting. She was always helping me write the bills. But it was a scholarship to study Arabic.
Subhan Allah
, God is mysterious, she went to a university to learn the only thing her parents could have taught her at home. Here she was happy to learn Arabic from strangers when Ibrahim is an excellent reader and writer of Arabic, and as you can hear, I speak very eloquently.”

Scheherazade could not tell Fatima that her Arabic was fossilized, as her own use of the language was even more dated.

“Nadia and her husband, Elias, are both professors,
mashallah
,” Fatima continued. “They used to teach Arab things to mostly Arab kids who also could have just listened to their parents. But since September 11, there are many people who want to learn Middle East things, and her classes are very full. Now, help me back to the room for my glasses.”

She stood up, and they walked down the hallway arm in arm.

“Elias is a Christian name,” Scheherazade said, prying.

Fatima picked up a strand of hair and began twirling it. “So you wish to reprimand me on how I let my daughter marry a Christian, just like the women in the Arab Ladies Society did in Detroit. Both the Christian and Muslim ladies accused me of being a lenient mother.”

“Did those ladies dance at the wedding?” Scheherazade asked her.

“Oh, how everyone danced,” Fatima recalled, and let go of the strand of hair.

Scheherazade shrugged. “If people could still dance at the wedding, how bad could it be?”

“It was the last wedding where people danced for my children,” Fatima said.

Scheherazade was sure Fatima no longer was talking about religion or even Nadia, but before she could pursue this, the old lady put on her nearby glasses and picked up a picture from the vanity of a young man and woman smiling at the camera, arms around each other.

“This is Zade and his Giselle,” Fatima said. “
Aladdin and Jasmine, Inc. We guarantee it won’t take 1001 nights of bad dates to find love—or your money back” was
written across the bottom of the photo. She put the photo back on the vanity. “The writing is their engagement vows, I believe. Probably some new fashion for romance. … Oh, how I would like to make sure my children are all okay before I go,” Fatima said. “
Ya Allah
, I wonder if Mama had so much to do before dying. Of course, she had given me the key to the house in Deir Zeitoon long before she died. It is in one of the boxes in the attic. I must find it for Amir.”

She motioned for her cane and fell silent when they reentered the guest room. She used her faraway glasses to get to a certain section and then put on her nearby glasses to inspect the boxes more closely, twirling her hair all the while.

“Why do you not give the house to this Arabic-speaking daughter?” Scheherazade wondered.

“No, someone might kill her there,” Fatima said.

“Kill her?” Scheherazade perched herself on the windowsill, ready for more, but Fatima was lost in her boxes. The rustle of the eucalyptus tree turned her attention outside. Two people in black clothing were descending from the large petrol caravan.

“How about instead of calling the FBI tip line, we contact the bureau in Washington directly,” the man in black whispered. “When we’ve got enough, that is.”

“And who is waiting for our call in Washington?” the woman in black whispered back. “Washington, my ass.”

Hmm, Washington, indeed, Scheherazade thought.
Bejouz
. Maybe. She had never seen the capital of this nation that was born more than seven hundred years after her own birth. Fatima had told her a story finally that was not about Deir Zeitoon, but it was not complete.

She would go see for herself this astounding matchmaker and Arabic-speaking daughter whom people wanted to kill. After all this time with Fatima, she was curious to see what kind of people the old lady would leave behind in this world. And she would find out if this child was in
fact in danger, for as much as she provoked the old woman, it bothered her to see her so burdened by worry and fear.

Scheherazade pulled out a gilded silver compact and looked at herself Even though no mortal but Fatima could see her, it was important to her to live up to her timeless beauty, especially as she was visiting Fatima’s family for the first time. She adjusted her kohl and then she slid off the perch and flew out the window past the fig tree.

She traveled on her flying carpet, which was much in need of a good beating by Omar the Carpet Cleaner to rid it of the dust it had accumulated in the 993 days since she had followed an American soldier home to see what the world looked liked from this side of it. The boy had returned from Iraq to Los Angeles for his father’s funeral, and it was at the cemetery that she had been drawn to the prayers mumbled in Arabic at a nearby grave site. Fatima, too, had just arrived in Los Angeles and stood watching the Arabic mourners, an impatient Amir carrying her suitcase and trying to lead her back to his car. But it wasn’t Amir’s frustration that held her attention. It was Fatima’s hair. Purple had been the color of Scheherazade’s sister Dunyazad’s hair, which Scheherazade used to braid every night as they planned their future. Dunyazad had been part of the past for centuries, and she had never lived to Fatima’s age. Still, Scheherazade had understood that this old lady was the mortal with whom she was fated to spend the next 1001 nights. The trill of Dunyazad’s laughter had danced in her head as she followed Fatima’s purple hair home.

As she had on that first day in America, Scheherazade flew, albeit in the opposing direction, across the Rocky Mountains and over lakes and rivers and plains and another greener, smoother mountain range until she arrived at a river from which parkways of the most verdant trees she had ever seen were laced through geometrically pleasing gardens and monuments, many of which reminded Scheherazade of old Athens and Rome when she and her husband had summered away from Baghdad. Everything here was much newer, whiter, and brighter than Athens or Rome, even brighter than she imagined Athens had been in its glory, long before scholars in Baghdad would commit its history to paper.

Scheherazade had left the great white monuments and statues of long-gone men in the distance by the time she came upon a place alive with shops and cafés. She began to look for Zade’s coffee house among them, but it was Zade she spotted first. She recognized Fatima’s bumpy nose on him and the rest of him, from his khakis to his dimple, from the framed photo on Fatima’s vanity.

He was on the escalator at Georgetown Park. Scheherazade had never seen so many things for sale, not even in the souks of Damascus. But this place was so much cooler and more spacious than those souks. America had a great deal of room. It was easy to avoid bumping into people, especially as most of the people seemed to move around alone rather than in clumps the way they did back home.

She readjusted her hair and veil with her hands in a wall mirror. So many of the women didn’t even wear kohl on their eyes, just as Fatima didn’t. Femininity was a lost art in America, Scheherazade thought. Yet she had never seen a land with so many places to look at oneself. She posed for all the mall mirrors until Zade reached the exit.

Zade walked the length of two streets before he stopped in front of a place with beautiful mosaic calligraphy welcoming everyone. The place was called Scheherazade’s Diwan Café. Under the words was a drawing of a half-naked belly dancer. Who is that supposed to be? Surely not me, she thought. A
LADDIN AND
J
ASMINE
, I
NC.
M
AGICAL
D
ATING FOR
A
LL
was written underneath. She was not happy to see her stories—and herself—so cheapened by commerce, even if it was in the name of love.