83
" I ran into him at the library one other time, with my mother, as he was coming out and we were walking past on our way to the post office. He tipped his hat to her, and she nodded, and though I wanted to tell my mother who he was, my stomach went cold, and all I managed was a meek hello. For the rest of the afternoon I felt like crying without knowing why. It wasn’t until later that I realized that I couldn’t picture Dr. Young walking into Mr. Awad’s store—how could I, when Mr. Awad warns us to always check for the back of a cloche hat or a curl of yellow hair before we step out to dress a mannequin, so that the American women won’t see our dirty hands? The white Americans might be ajanib, but my parents say we’re white, too, or we must be something close to it if we are both Christians, and I think they really believe that if we keep our noses in our work, a day will come when we’ll earn more than their disdain. In the meantime, my mother whispers about the widow Haddad and scrubs my face with turmeric, and my father warns me against dating like the American girls, saying, Do you know how hard we worked to get you here? Neither of them know what Mrs. Theodore taught me about my color in the back of that Rolls-Royce. In that moment with my mother and Dr. Young, little wing, when I felt the cold drip of fear in my stomach, I realized that an infinite number of moments had instilled in me a reflex as potent and inescapable as a sneeze. It was like seeing the shape of something large coming toward you in the dark. "
― Zeyn Joukhadar , The Thirty Names of Night
85
" Five years ago, when your absence stitched her mouth shut for weeks, I hid your collection of feathers, hid the preserved shells of robin’s eggs, hid the specimens of bone. Each egg was its own shade of blue; I slipped them into a shoebox under my bed. When you were alive, the warmth of each shell held the thrill of possibility. I first learned to mix paint by matching the smooth turquoise of a heron’s egg: first aqua, then celadon, then cooling the warmth of cadmium yellow with phthalo blue. When you died, Teta quoted Attar: The self has passed away in the beloved. Tonight, the sparrows’ feathers are brushstrokes on the dark. This evening is its own witness, the birds’ throats stars on the canvas of the night. They clap into cars and crash through skylights, thunk into steel trash cans with the lids off, slice through the branches of boxed-in gingkoes. Gravity snaps shut their wings. The evening’s fog smears the city to blinding. Migrating birds, you used to say, the city’s light can kill. "
― Zeyn Joukhadar , The Thirty Names of Night
87
" As I spoke, something shifted in me. The feeling rose that this woman, if she were to deem the pigeon unworthy, would also be judging me, and Khalto Tala, and the widow Haddad. It was an absurd thing, there there it was. A second sense came on its heels, something I had never felt before and which frightened me: the sense that I could not convince this American woman, whose judgements dictated my livelihood, of the value of things and people I cared a great deal about. "
― Zeyn Joukhadar , The Thirty Names of Night
95
" Tell me something beautiful,” you said.
I opened my mouth and out came the only thing that I had ever known to be as beautiful as it was true: that I had once met a woman who knew how to fly.
You clasped my chilled hand in yours and lowered your gaze to our fingers. I hoped I’d said the right thing. My mother always used to say that people in mourning prefer not to talk about the earth.
“What a wonderful thing,” you said, “for just one instant, to be so close to God.”
The breeze tugged your hair across your lips. When my father had been injured in the revolt, I’d dreamed a flock of starlings had passed over our village, and their tears turned to pomegranate seeds. The seeds fell to the ground, but the earth was weary, and the seeds wouldn’t take. The starlings circled, coaxing the earth toward fruitfulness. As they passed, the birds sang a psalm my mother had quoted to me many times, a line from the Song of Songs. I thought of it then, standing on the corniche so close to you that I could feel you breathing.
You are altogether beautiful, my darling. There is no flaw in you. "
― Zeyn Joukhadar
