Back there, in Palestine, that house, the building at 17 Haret Ein el-Asadi, was positioned directly across from the mosque which had never fallen, not by any whim of weather, the one that had been kept by Abdul Jalil’s family for six hundred years. And painfully, now in Damascus, drunk and staring down the moon, the keys to the house still in his pocket, Abdul Jalil recalled the story of the butterfly. Back, back, back, in the age of Shahrazad and Shahryar, before time began its persistent march, one of Abdul Jalil’s ancestors, in death, had disintegrated before the very eyes of his aggrieved family, and transformed right then and there into a butterfly. His wife, his brothers, his sons, tried to capture it, him, desperate as they were to keep his form here among the living. Nevertheless, he fled them. And this was the origin of the mosque. It was built upon his empty grave, that ancestor’s, the butterfly’s grave.

  Others in Safad all harbored the idea that Abdul Jalil’s family was touched. There was always some nephew or niece among them reported to be sighted with butterflies escaping from the palm of their hands. Their neighbors never belittled them too much because there was also that other ancestor, who was said to have saved the city from the ravings of a mad lion by taming it and making it his pet. This was the story that gave them their name. El-Asadi. The people of the lion.

  What had Abdul Jalil done to their name? He had given himself over to war, first against the British, and then the Zionists. In the early ’40s, his own father had even shared a prophecy with Abdul Jalil: That he, Abdul Jalil, would lose everything, would live in a foreign place, under an unforgiving sun, and that he would meet his end there. No matter what you do, his father shook his head, ya rab. Back then, Abdul Jalil mistrusted the old man’s superstitions. He had felt so exuberant. He was liberating Palestine. There was nothing quite like the mania of a revolution holding up the thin body of a man. Then there was the defeat and more defeat. A man can lose a war once, but losing twice, again, is a verdict, or an edict. A decree. Abdul Jalil would never win. He was not just on the losing side: He was a loser.

  His father had been right; Abdul Jalil was going toward the unforgiving sun. The only work was in Kuwait. Some Gulf Arabs had found oil and needed a man who knew engineering to help them build a new caliphate. Yes, to build something. If it couldn’t be seen, then it wasn’t there. The way he couldn’t smell Palestine anymore. That musk, the bitter woody brush, the distant sea. Jasmine. For so long, it had remained on their skin, in the hair of his wife. In little things, an old book. When Abdul Jalil hunted for it now, it was gone.

  No one was watching, so he poured out more of the arak. Abdul Jalil didn’t like to think of the boy, but after a certain point in the night, perhaps three glasses in, he saw him anyway, with his beautiful head of curly blond hair and green eyes. Years before the war, Abdul Jalil had found that boy on his land. There he was digging at the edges of Abdul Jalil’s property, and his father’s property, and his father’s father’s property, and no one had ever had to declare it, everyone just knew it—it was their land, their mountain where their goats grazed, their spring—and he, the young settler, was standing there, right there, so casually, taking measurements, and when Abdul Jalil asked what he was doing, the young man said, But where is the deed? Where is the paperwork?

  Back then, look what Abdul Jalil had, an entire mountain! He had so much to give. He could see the lake where the prophet Isa walked on the shimmering water every morning after the mist. How rich he was. He didn’t believe the paranoid rumors about the Jews. They had always lived peaceably together.

  He said to that boy, This is all mine, so you can have this little plot right here.

  Abdul Jalil was generous. They all would be, every seed that came after him, they would just give and give until they became sick from giving.

  Ahlan wa sahlan, he said: As his father, and his father’s father, had said to all the strangers who had come through that land, looking for God.

  Ahlan wa sahlan, Abdul Jalil said to the boy he would later shoot in the belly. Ahlan wa sahlan.

  9

  Walk Me Home

  What Sufien always remembered about Kuwait was the voice of the Gulf, that rolling tongue, languorous and all-knowing, like the voice of the divine.

  The new house, his father’s, recently built by the government, stood alone. Sufien was accustomed to stone walls, stone ceilings, the musty smell of old buildings. This place was echoey, almost alien in its bigness. The most unfamiliar part was its modern electricity. Sufien had been raised by candlelight. Walking outside and looking up, he saw the constellations spread out like cities in every direction. Sufien had never seen a night like this. It was so dry, and he was so thirsty. This was the loneliest part of the desert: the clarity of the sky. There was no blanket. No hills, no trees. The land was just exposed to the beyond. Sometimes Sufien could hear the din of some distant party carried across the dunes, which made him think, maybe that better place is just there. What he learned in time, though, was that the desert carried sounds for miles. By the time that happier gathering reached his ear, it was just a ghost.

  What he missed again, what he missed forever, was the camp—that camp at the end of the world back in Syria. And now all there was in the night after all of his little brothers and sisters were asleep—there were seven of them now—and after even his parents had fallen asleep, was Sufien, alone, trying to shut his eyes despite the moan of the wind in the sand. He had stayed up with the night from a very young age, and always would. Night was the texture of his soul.

  * * *

  *

  There were other problems for Sufien in Kuwait. The schoolmaster belittled his Palestinian dialect, and made him sit apart from the other students. This sense of deprivation only made Sufien more willful. So he conquered algebra. Sufien understood even then that math was the only language which had completely evaded human evil even if it might be used to forward it. Once it was clear he had excelled beyond any other pupil, studying calculus by the equivalent of the eighth grade, he looked for other pathways to excellence. None of the other Kuwaiti pupils could speak English fluently, for instance, nor had anyone else memorized as many verses of the Quran. None except Nefisa.

  Nefisa was from Haifa, a girl of the sea, not the Gulf but Sufien’s sea, the Mediterranean, the sea which had informed the blood of his ancestors. She had his people’s eyes, the eyes of a lion, hazel, that whirl of blue, and silky dark hair, and when she was deep in thought over an equation or reciting a script of ancient poetry, she cupped her hands across her brow and squinted like she was trying to see something far into the distance. It was the first time Sufien recognized beauty. He was only thirteen, but he felt the pain of it, the inability to hold on to it, the way it could simultaneously exist and not be grasped.

  A thing, a real thing, was something a person could touch, point to, like a soccer ball, or his mother’s hand, or a dinar. Whereas Nefisa smelled of rain, which he had scarcely felt or seen in the years since they came to Kuwait. When she passed Sufien in the hall or on the way to the car which always waited for her after school, a 1953 baby blue Volvo station wagon, her father’s, the same model Sufien’s own father had but in turquoise, he smelled off of her a yearning petrichor, that perfume of the desert.

  There had to be some way to keep her, or rather keep what he felt when he beheld her. Keep it still. Keep it forever. Keep beauty. Thinking of Nefisa, the curl of her words when she recited the Quran in his own accent, or seeing the way her breasts had risen under her shirt, the fabric of her hair, like velvet, he felt like something was slipping from his grasp. Like he needed more time, more pages, more words. The poet’s curse had stricken him.

  The present, that enviable superpower of childhood, had abandoned him, and now he understood time and space. If she left him, if Nefisa escaped his gaze, as she did every day, if she removed herself beyond the steel doors of that station wagon, and disappeared from view, then everything would. He understood missing. Yes, this was first love. There is no difference between it and an encounter with death but a degree of charm.

  Sufien, Nefisa said one day. Oh, can you hear it, the voice of a pubescent girl? Shaky and sweet. She said, Walk me home.

  But what did Sufien know of love and how much it could hurt? To be face-to-face with desire? Almost no one of us can handle it even once we’ve known it and known it again. He looked at her and knew she could see him. Too much of him. He felt naked. So he ran ahead of her toward his father’s house.

  * * *

  *

  From that day onward, Sufien avoided Nefisa. It was simpler not to behold her, the gentleness of her cheekbones, the sad curvature of her mouth. She was like a tiny adult already, mourning the heaviness of the life she would later live. Her parents would be killed in the war to come once they returned to Palestine. And she would be a refugee once more, in Gaza. She would never marry, and never bear children. And on her final evening, she would walk into the sea. So they would find her like that, thrown out, half buried in the sand, after some great final exhale.

  Meanwhile Sufien regretted what he had not said to Nefisa for so long that it burrowed deeply inside of him. He had loved her; he had loved her purely. But he was just thirteen then. He had not yet had the courage to feel something so big.

  They say Allah works in mysterious ways, but everyone forgets to say how beautiful are His mysteries.

  Sufien might have expected his mother or his father to be the ones to greet him on his way to the land of the dead all those decades later. It would be Nefisa. When they were finally rejoined, he was no longer thirteen, but a shriveled old man, a hundred pounds of failed flesh clinging to his skeleton, his body undone by cancer, drool falling down his face. Whereas there she was, more beautiful than he had ever seen her, a grown woman, and also the child he had known, the way people can be all things at once in a dream. She was like the archetypal fool, sitting there at the pool, or was it the spring on Jebel Kan’aan, or was it the Sea of Galilee?, dipping her toes into the everlasting water, splashing about, a being even younger than a toddler, and likewise timelessly old.

  Nefisa, Nefisa, Nefisa, he would whisper. Is it you?

  She would say, Come, walk me home.

  10

  To the West

  Ever since he heard the music of those parties floating across the soughing dunes, he had yearned to be invited to the palace. He had seen it, had driven past it, for so many years, had heard of its famous iftars, the scandalous weddings. In his memory, its façade glittered gold. It was that sort of mythical landmark of childhood and adolescence, the sort of place the young person feels that just by entering it, the circumstances of their life might become drastically different. The stuff of fairy tale. No Palestinian Sufien knew had ever been to the palace, and now one Friday afternoon, there he was being dropped off at it by Khalil’s driver.

  Khalil was the boy who lived there, the boy whose father had been among the first to get rich in Kuwait from oil. And it was rumored that he had amassed more jewels than even the last sultan.

  Inside the courtyard of the palace, draped around the blue tiled fountain were two trees hauled from Eden itself, and those blue tiles were made of lapis lazuli, and everywhere Sufien looked, there were maids, male and female staff, all darker-skinned, hired from Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia, wearing white robes with gold trimmings.

  And then there was the palace itself, a miniature Taj Mahal rising out of the Kuwaiti desert. Sufien had heard rumors that Khalil’s family even took their qahwah with gold flecks in it.

  Khalil had no interest in giving Sufien the tour of his house. Let’s watch a film, he said.

  It was the late fifties, and up until then, Sufien had only ever heard of Hollywood movies on the radio. No, he had never seen anything on the silver screen.

  Sufien could hardly keep up with Khalil, as they passed swiftly by a massive dining area, and libraries, and smoking quarters until there was a room, rising up stories, and covered in gorgeous silk carpets and pillows, from which through the tinted windows Sufien became bewitched by the dunes anew. Out there was not just sand, it was a paradise of female bodies tucked into themselves, a sleeping harem made of soil. Then on the wall opposite, something even more magical happened. Like a carnival trick, there appeared the faces of Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor.

  Khalil was telling the servants to bring them dates, pistachios, coffee, cigarettes. Whenever they finished one thing, they were brought another. And the two of them lounged there on the carpets like kings in a storybook. It was enough for Sufien. It should have been enough. Staring at Elizabeth Taylor’s milky face draped across the handsome torso of Paul Newman. Why had he decided that this spectacle, the grand living room where he sat watching a movie which had transported America itself across the oceans, was not enough? No, Sufien wanted to see it all. He wanted the entire palace now. So he excused himself to the toilet room.

  Sufien had never seen the act of love, and he was afraid when he came upon it. How had he gotten so lost? He couldn’t find his way back to the movie room, and now he was trying to make himself invisible in the corridor outside of the great bedroom, because there they were—Um Khalil, her body soft as a wave, beneath another body moving over her like a shadow. What Sufien saw happening between them looked like a war, it was desperate and quick and violent. Sufien hated it. This was nothing like the film, it wasn’t pretty. Still, everything else in him had risen, and he couldn’t stop watching, even once he had returned to Khalil in the movie room who remained obliviously entranced by Elizabeth Taylor. Her eyes, Khalil kept saying, are they violet? Only upon leaving the palace did Sufien remember that the man’s body could not have belonged to Khalil’s father, because Khalil’s father was away on business.

  Nights followed this night, and he couldn’t shake the image of Um Khalil, of her trespass, and he discovered that the strength of his hand, and the breast of a pillow, the curvature of sheets, could serve as a conduit back to it. He had found his manhood for the first time, found it inside the soundtrack of those moans at the palace, and somewhere inside that masculine infrastructure, which he had so recently discovered, lay his prostate, the source of his future cancer. Yes, there also was the apartment of his death.

  * * *

  *

  Not a year passed from that night to the morning that Sufien found the baby washed up on the beach. He had gone out in the dawn, promising his father he would catch an angelfish for their dinner. Sufien had come to know the Gulf over the years, and heard fishermen say that when the water turned the color of blood with the sunrise, in it there were sure to be good fish, but so many days had passed with this effort, and Sufien had nothing to show thus far for these outings.

  That morning, he could already hear his father’s voice saying upon his return, Mafi anfoos? Again?

  What Sufien was thinking about as he trod out across the still chilly dunes was faith. If Allah had never given him a fish, it was because Sufien hated the morning, he would always be a night person, and the dawn was when the fish were pure, having dreamt, having been kept safe from human want. And then, Sufien considered the possibility that there was no Allah, and that faith had nothing to do with Sufien’s catching a fish or not. He was simply unlucky. What was here was what he could see and touch and hold in his hands, and morning after morning, there was nothing to hold. If Allah existed, and if He was looking after him, then He would be aiding Sufien in his hunt. Allah would be gathering the fish toward his net.

  And yet Sufien went on toward the sea another morning, because we all go on, because we never give up. The sun was rising and now the desert was warming beneath it for all the desert ever has is the sun. Sufien felt joy from the light, believing the answer to his crisis lay in it. Of course Allah exists, or how else had the day returned? Then, just yards away washed up on the shore, its skin still glistening in the low tide, was an angelfish.

  Sufien squinted in his approach, because surely it was a fish lying there in the sand and not a baby, so tiny, drowned and lifeless. Sufien began to feel so light. He could not fall into the waves, he did not know how to swim, but he wanted to, he wanted to fall.

  * * *

  *

  It wasn’t long afterward that the palace wife, Um Khalil, was also found dead. What they said was that she was sick with an incurable disease, even if everyone knew she had stopped eating, and then had taken her life after what she had done to the baby.

  Abdul Jalil removed a cigarette from his pack at the funeral. One for himself, and another for Sufien. You should smoke beside death, his father said. It’s a signal. A signal to the ones who have come to greet them. To the ones who will meet you one day.

  Sufien noted his father had already drunk his arak, and worried whether the others would smell it on his breath.

  In my dream last night, Abdul Jalil went on, you were in a place unlike I have ever seen. Fee medina, a city with big buildings that reach the sky.

  What Abdul Jalil didn’t say was that he had had a dream of Sufien’s last days. This, the curse of his people, to see the end. The way his own father had. What good was it? What good had it done Abdul Jalil to know he would die outside of Palestine? That he would never return? That one day he would be stuck at a Kuwaiti traffic stop a decade or so hence, clutching his chest. Here it was overhead for all of his remaining days, that unforgiving sun. Abdul Jalil wished his father had been wrong.

  And now Abdul Jalil wished he was wrong too. How awful a pain it was to be a father; to love a child hurt like an ulcer.

  All he said to Sufien was, I have this feeling from the dream, you will leave Kuwait. And maybe that’s good for you. See the world, get a proper education. You’ll leave us, and go to the West.