The Wrong End of the Telescope Read online

  I never had one of those. My sister, Aida, did. My mother gave her an evil-eye-thwarting pendant when she was a toddler, and she held on to it like it was a dragon’s treasure. She even wore it as a necklace at her wedding, where it bounced in the valley between the two hillocks all evening. My mother gave Firas one, too, at the same age, but he lost it. By the time Mazen and I came along, she’d had enough of evil eyes. I didn’t think I cared that much, but I surprised myself when I visited a jewelry store in Chicago as soon as I became financially solvent. I had no intention of buying a turquoise, but I left the store with one, an amulet dangling from a delicate bracelet. Of course, I misplaced it in less than a month, probably when I took it off while scrubbing. I never wore jewelry again, not even a wedding ring.

  The two young boys had a gigantic mound of soggy scrambled eggs on their plates, topped with fruit, cheese, and potatoes. The father, a small man with a big stomach, called the waiter over, asked for yogurt in Arabic, and the waiter did not comprehend. He asked his daughter if she knew what the word was in English, and she shook her head, still not looking up from her screen. The manager joined the waiter. Neither could figure out what the family wanted. The father used hand gestures, using an imaginary spoon to scoop out of his cupped hand. The boys giggled. The father asked his daughter what the word for cheese was. That she knew. The best phrase the father could come up with in English was cheese water. The boys laughed louder. I told the manager in English what the family wanted.

  All five looked toward me; even the girl lifted her eyes briefly. The father said thank you in English, and I replied in Arabic. I ended up having to give the short version of “I’m American of Lebanese and Syrian origin.” The girl returned to her cell phone, the boys to their clowning. The father wanted to know which region in Lebanon I was from, a code for what religion I belonged to. He wanted to know, needed to, a Levantine need born long before either of us. Once he heard I was from Beirut, he began to tell me how much he loved my city, that they had lived there for the last four years. The children went to school there. The family had left Syria and settled in Beirut in the beginning of 2012. A garrulous fellow, he spoke at me from across the room. Only his wife paid him much attention. My mind began to drift, though I did want to ask him why he was in Lesbos if they had been living in Beirut, but I figured I would not have to wait long and I was right. He launched into his story.

  When the Syrian troubles began in 2011, they had no idea things would escalate into a war. He spoke like an actor reciting lines from a well-practiced monologue. Peaceful demonstrators demanding—no, asking for—their rights, rather nicely, he thought. But then the world was flooded and he fled with his family to Beirut. He was able to find a job, of course. He was a master jeweler, always in demand. He had done well even though his shop outside Damascus was not in the best area, because, as any sophisticated person (as I undoubtedly was) knew, gold was important even to poor people, or more so—to a pauper, gold was as important as the very air he breathed. I still had not said anything since I mentioned Beirut. The girl had the evil-eye necklace, but no one else in the family wore jewelry of any kind, which was to be expected. Had one of the Turkish smugglers seen any, the price of crossing would have quadrupled, and the family would have been robbed. But in Beirut, he said, he couldn’t open up his own shop. Who would back him? He had to work for an Armenian jeweler who was not a good man, didn’t know much about anything let alone jewelry and had no idea how to make money. Still, the father worked there for three and a half years. It wasn’t as if everyone was rushing to hire Syrians, so he worked diligently for an ungrateful man. Of course, he did not wish to imply that all Lebanese were unappreciative and churlish, just the Armenian ones. About a month ago, he began receiving phone calls from a malevolent man with a shifty voice who threatened to kill him if he didn’t help rip off the store. He was afraid at first, terrified really, but decided to ignore the calls even as their number increased, at least one every hour, then two, then three. He stopped answering his phone. But then the criminal sent a couple of policemen to the store to threaten the father. The police, would I believe that? They beat him up, shame-slapped him with such disdain, punched him in the stomach three times. He was in excruciating pain but didn’t check into a hospital because the policemen had warned him not to tell anybody. He called in sick the next day and the day after that. He thought if he hid in the family’s apartment, the criminals would leave him be. But then another policeman approached his wife while she was buying groceries at the market. He told her they knew where the family lived and where the children went to school and they would murder them all if her husband refused to cooperate. The policeman warned that he would do unspeakable things to their daughter before he killed her, the father said, while pointing toward the girl, who was still engaged with her mobile. What could an honest man do? He couldn’t tell the police that the police were threatening his family. They bought airline tickets to Istanbul, bus tickets to the coast, and boat tickets to Lesbos, except they were cheated on every leg of the journey. The boat was the worst because they were told they were getting business-class seats on a ferry and that they would enjoy a full meal aboard. His wife nodded her head in agreement with the last comment.

  Rasheed and two other Palestinian nurses, the same women who picked him up at the airport, saved me by coming into the dining room. The two groups exchanged morning pleasantries before the nursing trio joined me. The father made sure to tell me how pleasant talking to me was. I did not wish to bring up the subject of the family with Rasheed while the gossip object was sitting not too far. I didn’t have to. As soon as Rasheed sat down with his pitiful blue-banded breakfast plate, his back to the Syrian family, he raised one eyebrow, the left, asking in a soft voice: “Which version of the sad story were you lucky enough to get?”

  Every Country Gets the Refugees It Deserves

  Although I’m not as much a gossip lover as you—what was it you wrote, gossip is the fuel that stokes the fire of your soul?—I do love a good story. You had chatted with the same Syrian family the evening before, and as I did, you had to translate their dinner order since they did not want anything on the menu. Across tables, the man regaled you with the family’s story, replete with violence and valor, with ardor and adventure, narrated with no little glee. The master jeweler part of the tale was the same as mine, but yours had the Armenian himself threatening the man because the perfidious owner wanted to rob his own store to collect insurance. No policemen in your story, just three Armenian thugs who beat him up, threatening his wife and daughter. You told me you thought at first he might belong to the Syrian regime’s secret police, sent to spy on the refugees, but then you realized that couldn’t be the case. The Mukhabarat, like all state terror organizations, was evil and stupid but not dumb enough to have one of its agents improving his cover story with each telling. If he and his family were an undercover anything, they would be staying in the camp, mingling with other refugees, not calling attention to themselves by staying in a hotel, as reasonably priced as it was. No, you realized he was lying without having to compare his stories. And you decided that he was running not from stray bullets, not from falling bombs or fighter jets. He was the one who robbed the Armenian jewelry store. Rasheed came to the same conclusion.

  I wish we could have asked him. Did he rob the store himself? How much was the haul? Did he hide it in their suitcases? Was he terrified when they went through customs in Istanbul? Did he sleep with one eye open while waiting to board the dinghy to Lesbos? I should have asked. Not having answers at the ready bothered me. In one of your essays, you wrote that a novelist had to be able to “sit with the not-knowing,” which was not something I was comfortable with.

  You had a conversation with the wife, whom you found more bearable than her husband, though not by much. You were trying to find out whether any of the refugees cared to immigrate to the United States. Not one refugee cared to, not one on the entire island. All of them wan
ted to go to Germany, to Sweden, to Denmark, and that was before the imbecile president of America was elected. You asked her where she hoped she would settle. She said she didn’t much care. It could be Berlin, Paris, Frankfurt, or Copenhagen, but definitely not Athens. She’d already told the United Nations people that she didn’t want to go to there. She’d told them that she didn’t leave Damascus and Beirut to end up in a place like Athens.

  What happened to that family? Where were they? Unlike you, I tried to find out. A couple of months after I returned to Chicago, I asked you if you knew, then I asked my contacts, Emma, the other doctors. Nothing. Of course, I didn’t know their names because I hadn’t asked. I would describe them as: “you know, the jeweler and his wife, two young boys and a teenage girl, stayed at our hotel.” But then Rasheed knew their name. He found out through a friend where they were living a year later. The family had ended up in Florida, Tallahassee of all places, which seemed appropriate for some reason. Of all the refugees you and I talked to, that family was the only one that immigrated to the United States, as if the reputation of Syrian refugees needed more damage in America.

  At least the family settled somewhere. They were lucky, as was Sumaiya’s family. They arrived in Lesbos while Europe was in a quandary as to what to do with them or, more accurately, while European nations were trying to figure how to stop the refugees from entering without appearing monstrous for doing so. The November 2015 Paris attacks increased the influence of the anti-immigrant factions in Europe, but those forces had yet to mature into their full fascistic power. During a brief window, Syrians, particularly families with children, were allowed to trickle into Western European countries. Processing was difficult when we were on the island but would become next to impossible not too long after. Within a month after we left, the European Union began to smother refugees in more and more bureaucracy, the empire’s most effective weapon. We were there a few weeks before Europe all but closed the borders. I understand that these days families wait for months to get a red stamp and then wait for many more months to get a blue stamp, more for yellow or green, if they’re lucky and aren’t sent back because they turned out to be color-blind. You and I were lucky. We were in Moria before it morphed into a callous prison camp, before the riots and arson, before the refugees had to be forcibly returned to Turkey, returned to whatever home the authorities deemed was theirs. With the dumb tenacity of moths the refugees kept coming, and from behind the cold pane of Moria, they longed for the unattainable warmth.

  Lesbos was a somewhat humane mess when we were there. Shortly thereafter it became an inhumane one.

  A Terrorist by Any Other Name Is Still a Terrorist

  Of the Syrian reputation in the United States, I should tell you about a friend’s family. Once known as Lina Abdullah, a nurse at the Chicago hospital where I worked, she took on her husband’s name when she married in 2006. She had considered the custom of assuming the man’s name to be misogynistic, and she certainly had not expected to be doing it herself. Yet there she was now with a new name. When she made her resolution to keep her last name, she hadn’t thought that one day it would elicit such Islamophobic fury from strangers. After the World Trade Center attacks, she had to delist her phone number because she began receiving random hate messages. The things she was called, the virulent attacks on her character by anonymous people, terrified her. It grew worse during the invasion of Iraq. She spent years in therapy, yet the situation improved only after she changed her name. She was finally able to sleep through a night.

  The irony is that Lina is Jewish.

  Her father was Morty Abdullah, né Mortadda Mohammad Abdullah from Aleppo, arrived in the United States with his family when he was seven years old. Muslim by birth, he grew up not terribly religious, though he was instructed in all the rituals and rites of Islam. He was popular at Schaumburg High School, attended some college, and ended up supporting his family by owning three gas stations in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. He hadn’t changed his name legally, but for all intents and purposes, he was Morty, never Mortadda or Mohammad. That would get him in some trouble after he died.

  Morty married Elena Finkelstein, née Elena Midamasek from Damascus, arrived in the United States with her family when she was three. Her name was changed at Ellis Island. When her family landed, an inspector decided that the name Midamasek—Hebrew, meaning “from Damascus”­—was not pronounceable in English, so he baptized the family with the name Finkelstein. When I first heard of the name change, I had some doubts, thinking that a more English-sounding name would have been chosen, but then you came along and told me you had a friend with the exact same name and story. The surname of your friend’s father was changed from Schwarzberg to Finkelstein at Ellis Island. One might come to the conclusion that there was an inspector there who really truly loved the Jewish name of Finkelstein. You’re a Finkelstein, you’re a Finkelstein, and yes, you over there, wouldn’t you like to be a Finkelstein too?

  Morty and Elena Abdullah had three children who, though raised rather irreligiously, identified as Jewish. They grew up in Skokie, Illinois, after all. They had a typical suburban upbringing. Lina once claimed that the only difference she saw between her friends’ parents and hers was that Morty and Elena spoke Arabic when they didn’t wish their kids to understand what they were saying and that her mother’s cooking was way better. She did not realize that her parents had different religious backgrounds until she turned fourteen or so, since neither Morty nor Elena believed much.

  Somewhere around 1999, Morty realized that Elena was having problems. It was only little things at first. Elena, who was an exquisite cook, began to serve meals that were mediocre at best. He grew terrified when one night she came out of the kitchen with a cauliflower stew that was missing cauliflowers. He called on his kids, who lived in the area. The family would take Elena to the right doctors, and even though the diagnosis would not be confirmed until later, the neurologist thought that Elena had early-onset Alzheimer’s.

  Morty was Elena’s caregiver for a year or two, but her decline was swift. He was unable to keep up. After she had a frightening fall in the bathtub (no broken bones), her children convinced their father that she should be moved to a facility where she could receive twenty-four-hour care. He hesitated, tried to persuade his children that he could care for her if one of them would move in with him to help, but none were willing or able. Unfortunately, the day they decided to move Elena to the memory care facility was September 17, 2001.

  Years later, when a local television station reported on the events surrounding Morty’s death, the correspondent stated that Mortadda Mohammad Abdullah’s wife left him after the World Trade Center attacks. I don’t have to tell you that the story was picked up by Fox News, albeit briefly before being dropped, and of course there was no apology for the erroneous reporting.

  In 2010, Morty had an incapacitating ischemic stroke that sent him to an assisted living facility in Skokie. He lasted until his eighty-second birthday the following year. Toward the end, he was only able to get around on his motorized wheelchair. And that was why his death turned traumatic for many.

  Morty’s fatal heart attack occurred in the corridor heading toward the dining room, right after the call for dinner. A teenage girl, Melissa or Marissa, visiting her grandmother with her parents, happened to take a video, the one that went viral. When interviewed on television, she said that she was bored, hadn’t wanted to visit her grandma, but her parents forced her because it was Tuesday night prime rib at the facility. The residents, with painfully slow gaits and varied syncopation, ambled to dinner.

  Morty, too, was on his way, looking forward to his prime rib, but he died quickly, probably painlessly, and his wheelchair took off. Into the corridor it whirred.

  The video showed the carnage from behind the wheelchair, which looked like it was being driven by a ghost, since Morty’s slumped head could not be seen from the back. The most memorable moment was of
a frail, elderly woman in a flowery smock, lifting her walker, the tennis balls on its legs rising like two yellow suns to face the oncoming wheelchair in an attempt to halt the inevitable. In total, dearly departed Morty ploughed through six other residents, all of whom survived. The injuries were severe, many broken bones including hips, but no one died.

  Once Morty’s name was released as Mortadda Mohammad Abdullah, two wire services reported the incident as a terror attack—a suicide terror attack. Most were certain of the dead man’s malicious intent. All American lips seemed to carry a curse for Mortadda Mohammad Abdullah. As with everything, the brouhaha barely lasted one news cycle before everyone moved on to more ridiculous commotions.

  Lina told me that she received a phone call from an FBI agent the day after Melissa/Marissa’s video surfaced. The agent apologized, explaining that she was simply doing what she was told, that they had to investigate because of all the calls the office was receiving. So the stories about the FBI investigating the wheelchair terror attack were both true and not exactly.

  And by the way, Lina Abdullah is now Lina Finkelstein. Yes, she married a Finkelstein. Definitely no relation. Her husband’s family was already Finkelstein and remained so after being processed at Ellis Island.

  How to Greet Your Brother

  I came to appreciate Mytilene Airport a bit more on my second visit. It was so small that I saw the plane land a few minutes before I reached the airport and knew that it was Mazen’s from Athens. I worried I’d be late, but parking my rented Opel was easy and literally a walk of twenty seconds to the terminal.