The Wrong End of the Telescope Read online

  That was not the case with the old woman back where we left her. She was sitting upright now, with the allegedly uncaring son and his family around her. The consummate curmudgeon took one bite of the sandwich and spat it out. A young blond volunteer tried to berate her for spitting out the food, but the Syrian woman simply turned her back to her. Even from a slight distance, the old woman appeared livelier, pinkishly robust in spite of her long trip and longer age. Time, that capricious banker, hadn’t yet seen fit to collect all interest due. The college girl tried a different tack, asking the old woman why she didn’t like the sandwich, the translation done by one of the old woman’s granddaughters. There was some sort of one-sided conversation during which the old woman remained strategically hostile. The college girl showed her an iPhone—the latest, no doubt taken out of its box on Christmas—asking in a theatrically interrogative tone, the kind used to stimulate viewer curiosity at the end of an episode, “Is it okay if I take a photograph with you, and then I can show you what it looks like right here on the screen?”

  I wasn’t sure if the old woman understood any of the prattle, but she uttered the one English word that made the young girl blanch. “No,” she yelled. Where did passions find room in so diminutive a body?

  “Eye gouging avoided,” I said.

  “Don’t bet on it,” Emma said. “The girl will hit on someone else. Look for the babies, you’ll find idiots taking selfies.”

  I ended up talking shop with Dr. Giacometti from Bari while we waited. He’d been on the island for two weeks, his second stint since October. Sumaiya kept throwing questioning glances my way. I told her in Arabic not to worry, that we were not talking about her. Her youngest daughter, around four or so, napped on her lap while Emma stroked the girl’s hair. Giacometti had decided he wouldn’t come to meet another boat, preferring to work in the camp, but he was bored on break this morning and thought he’d check the beach. He sang Emma’s praises, she who reigned over the island, the best nurse on Lesbos, who could fix every problem. He told me a funny story about meeting his first boat back in October, when he was trying to help a terrified woman disembark and in her flailing she struck his face and his glasses flew off into the water. He wasn’t sure what to do. He couldn’t see without them. Should he keep helping the refugees off the boat or look for his glasses? He joked that the question became existential: he could help the refugees as a man, but if he were to help as a physician, he needed better eyesight. He hunted for his spectacles like a purblind pelican, to no avail of course, even though the water was calm that day. Then the most amazing thing happened. He noticed an amorphous dark shape plunge into the water ahead of him. Then a shivering ten-year-old Syrian boy emerged, his hand rising out of the sea first, holding Giacometti’s glasses.

  “I was stunned,” he said. “I broke into tears. I was the lady who dropped her handkerchief, and he was my knight in shining armor, a child who should have been sitting in a classroom somewhere on such a morning. Look, I’m about to start crying now talking about it.”

  I considered giving him a hug but settled on a pat on the shoulder, which was when his colleague approached. “Let me guess,” the other doctor said in almost accentless English. “He has told you the story of the boy-knight refugee who risked his life by diving off a high tower into shark-infested waters to retrieve Paolo’s eyeglasses.” Giacometti pretended to strangle his colleague. We chatted for a minute or so; they cracked a couple of unfunny jokes that made them laugh. I glanced down. Emma hugged Sumaiya, who wept surreptitiously, noiselessly, hoping her daughters wouldn’t notice. Her husband held his breath, apparently trying not to cry.

  We were duly interrupted by panicked selfie-girl, who asked if anyone had seen her cell phone. She had it a minute ago but couldn’t seem to find it. I knew Emma was going to start laughing. Selfie-girl ran from one contingent to the next investigating; each group of refugees and volunteers occupied a precise location, like elements in the periodic table. One of the Mennonite girls offered to use her own mobile to call the missing phone.

  A converted school bus appeared, a yellow rectangle in the distance. Everyone gathered their belongings, meager as they were, before heading toward the parking lot. Most of the refugees carried their belongings in large black trash bags. As I passed the old woman, I heard hers ringing.

  My Mother and the Can Opener

  My mother arrived in Beirut a young country girl, barely able to read and write, having never strayed more than a donkey ride from her village. She would remake herself within a short period of time and kept doing so for as long as I could remember. She emerged from one cocoon after another, and each butterfly wanted nothing to do with the caterpillar she’d once been. My father was not well-off, particularly when they were first married, but she spent whatever extra money she had on clothes and, more important, accessories. She could wear the same dress for an entire week and make it look different each day. I inherited none of that talent.

  A number of her dresses were markers of my childhood. Instructing my sister on boiling rice while wearing a red dress with small blue lilacs spattered across it as if she had tumbled into a bushel of flowers, yelling at me for trying on her precious pillbox hat in a white high-neck number, a sophisticated cut that highlighted her slim figure. For the slap, she had on her popover purple dress. A few days after my ninth birthday, I stood before the full mirror after a bath, drying my hair, noticing that the towel around my head made me look less boy. I wrapped it like a turban, held it high atop my head. I was an African village woman going to market, a desert maiden visiting the well. Naked before that mirror, I moved one thigh in front of the other and disappeared my penis in flesh not yet fully plump. Mazen accidentally opened the door. Stunned, he didn’t shut it quickly enough. My mother in purple passed by. She rushed in, smote my African-cum-desert-maiden hairdo without a single word, and slapped me hard. In my late fifties, I could still feel my cheek burning.

  I idolized her as a child—well, early on I did. She exemplified the word “fabulous.” She used to gesture dramatically with her hands while talking. I used to think that I didn’t need to hear her words because her hands explained everything, that those hands of hers were the last practitioners of a lost Babylonian language. Then her gestures matured, became grander, with more flourish, more panache. They no longer illustrated her narrative, were more about style than a need to be understood. I would get lost trying to reinterpret them.

  Francine insisted that women like her should not have children, that we only served as garnish. In her own way, my mother loved her children—loved us with a lofty, magnanimous detachment. She air-kissed us goodnight. If any of us achieved anything of consequence, she’d pat us on the head. My brother Firas at seventeen ran the fastest 400 meter in the school district. He received a pat on the head. I had such high scores on the baccalaureate that a Lebanese organization offered to pay my way through Harvard, a pat on the head.

  Most of the clothes she bought for us were neutral, blacks and whites and grays and browns, whereas she preferred bright colors. Wherever we showed up as a family, our subdued hues made her shine. It wasn’t just us. The walls of our home were a dead white, the furniture beige. Even the carpets were muted. Everything in the apartment had a function: to make her appear striking.

  I have one remaining photograph of her in my chest of secrets, from the late sixties, the colors tinted an aging orange. Draped around her shoulders is a white cardigan with red piping. She is going for Vogue kitchen elegance on a restricted budget. Her hair is high in the style of the era, an elaborate chignon that required gallons of hairspray; my eyes stung looking at the picture. In front of her, on the Formica kitchen table, mustard yellow, lie a number of kitchen utensils, three bowls, and her newest acquisition at the time, the reason the camera was brought out of its case: an electric can opener. Her hands magically appear from beneath the floating cardigan to direct the viewer’s eyes toward her prize. My mother’s
smile is that of a winner.

  Her joy wasn’t everlasting, of course. It was a year at most before the electric can opener earned its place at the back of the pantry next to the sealed jars of pickled turnips.

  When cans infested Beiruti consciousness, it was about moving up in the world, giving up pesky traditions. My mother desperately wanted to be lifted by the calloused hands of modernity. Nothing spoke to her better then. Look, every single asparagus the same size, not like the idiosyncratic stalks of nature. We were all duly, if briefly, impressed. Canned mushrooms were a particular favorite. The end arrived when in high summer my mother made a compote of canned fruits. I remember looking at the dish before me while smelling the freshly picked peaches atop the sideboard. I wasn’t the only one. My father stared wistfully at the overflowing bowl. Mazen held up pieces of the slimy, syrupy fruit one by one. He curled his upper lip and put a slice of mandarin there as a mustache.

  Like her pillbox hat and my brothers’ psychedelic prints, the novelty ran its course, and we returned to picking fruits off trees. Some years later a forgotten can spontaneously exploded, detritus of botulism and string beans covering everything in the pantry.

  The Little Rascals Go to Camp

  Sumaiya and her family rode the bus while Emma, Rodrigo, and I followed in the car. Luckily, we’d decided not to take my Opel that morning. Emma’s rental Honda was much more comfortable. In the back seat, I suddenly felt exhausted and sluggish. Drowsiness overwhelmed me. Talking to me through the rearview mirror, Emma suggested that I close my eyes for a bit. It would be at least half an hour before we reached Moria. I fell asleep before she finished her sentence.

  I dreamt of my mother, of my father, of sitting before them as an adult, all of us underwater in the Mediterranean, something like that, everything fleeting and hollow. I heard strange knocking noises, as if I were in an aquarium with some child knocking on the glass, my head echoing back. And indeed it was a child who woke me—or rather five of them—four boys and a little girl, all in clothes that had seen better days if they’d ever had a good one. The kids stepped back from the car as soon as I turned, all of them giggling. I’d slept for hours, my head leaning against the rear window.

  I had a text from Emma explaining that she thought it would be best to let me sleep, that I should come to the camp when I woke up and call her. I stretched my arms, used the car’s roof as support, which made the children laugh louder. I got out of the car, asking them in Arabic if there was something wrong or if they found me generally amusing. The eldest boy, no more than eleven, clad in a multidarned sweater, explained that I was snoring loudly. He could hear my snoring through the car window, he said, but not his friend and lieutenant, pointing to a younger boy, because his ears were filthy. His ears had so much dirt, the eldest boy said, that you could grow wheat in them and make bread. The other boy, whose ears did not seem any dirtier than the rest, was not amused.

  It had rained sloppily while I slept, and all the cars parked along the road were still dripping. Shreds of frayed clouds congealed into a dark, menacing mass, covering the light with thickets of moisture. The shadows around me grew fainter.

  The children asked me where I was from, then introduced themselves. The leader, his lieutenant, and another boy were from the Aleppo area. The fourth boy was all the way from Pakistan and didn’t speak Arabic, but he was fun nonetheless, and the blond girl clad in strident colors was from Iraq and didn’t say much because she was shy, but she had to be in the club because the leader’s mother would beat him up if he didn’t allow girls. And what did their club do? Well, it was formed only that morning, so their objectives were not entirely clear yet, but the main reason for the club’s existence was mischief making, as in his mother told him to take his friends and make trouble for other people not her, if he knew what was best for him, and of course he knew. Could they take me into the camp to meet my friend? Of course they could, and not only that, they would explain things to me since I was obviously new, but it was going to cost me. No, not money but a whole chocolate bar, or two since there were five of them, and of course they knew I didn’t have chocolate on me. I didn’t even have a purse, but I could buy candy at one of the cantinas over there, the boys said. The big one facing the gate had the best chocolate; the owners had given them two bars that morning for picking up all the paper cups and putting them in a garbage bag. Had I ever had coffee out of a paper cup? And it was hours ago since they had chocolate and they were five and it was only two bars, and they could tell me all kinds of things about Moria, the camp to my right, not the city in The Lord of the Rings, but they could even explain the movie to me if I wanted, so I should buy them chocolate bars, of course I should.

  Cars and vans were parked bumper-to-bumper on both sides of the narrow road. The Iraqi girl took my hand in hers. I thought she was following the universal edict of hand-holding when crossing the street, but then one of the boys grabbed my other hand. They were escorting me across, guides safariing me through this frightening savannah, making sure I wouldn’t be attacked by a feral car. We passed a couple of wobbly snack trucks parked along the road; the boys called them cantinas. Apparently there were gypsies the day before, selling new and used clothing out of the back of a truck but nothing nice. We had to maneuver around the numerous cantina patrons, primarily Syrians as far as I could tell but at least two African men and one South Asian, almost all smoking and drinking coffee. Quite a number of them were charging their cell phones. The cantina sold everything anyone in the world could ever want, the boys explained. Did I need a phone, a sim card, coffee, sugar, a sandwich, a foul-tasting banana ice cream, a much-too-expensive soccer ball, a Messi T-shirt, anything my heart desired. And chocolate bars, I said.

  I bought them five. I had to. The Greek owner, a woman in her forties, suggested that I shouldn’t have because they’d had too much sugar. She’d given them each a bar that morning, free of charge, after which they began to persuade her customers to buy them more. She’d lost count of how many bars they’d devoured. The little tricksters preened. I expected to find canary feathers stuck to the chocolate smears around their lips. When I asked the Iraqi girl how many chocolate bars she’d had, she put up four fingers.

  Immediately within the gate to the refugee camp across the road was a large police van, its motor idling, its color a blue so gloomy as to be almost black. I couldn’t look at anything else for a minute. It was a beacon of dark in the light, a big blob of bad color. The kids, still savoring the chocolate, stood on either side of me looking at the same van. They were so big, one of the boys said, pointing at three policemen in full riot gear smoking beside the van, helmets off to make it easier for cigarettes to couple with lips. They had not laid their polycarbonate riot shields down. Big boys with machine guns, batons, vests, neck protectors, knee pads—yes, body armor made your ass look fat. They didn’t speak English, another boy said, or Arabic. They didn’t talk except to each other. The cinder block wall next to the gate shouted defiantly: no borders no nations in red graffiti.

  I told the children that I could go in by myself; they did not have to be my guides. But they insisted. I needed them, they said. And we had made a deal. Once more they held my hands and led me across the road. The camp was contained by high concrete walls and chain-link fencing, all capped with concertina razor wire, giving it the air of a high-security prison gone awry because there were hundreds of pup tents in the olive grove outside. There wasn’t enough space inside, the boy leader said. There were more refugees outside the camp than inside. The Pakistani boy slept with his family in a tent in another olive grove on the far side of the camp. The boy leader told the Pakistani boy that we were talking about him, before turning back to me and complaining that they couldn’t understand each other and that created a strain in their relationship. One of the Syrian boys told me that his family had to sleep in the open air the first night because they couldn’t afford to buy a tent, which was bad because of the cold and lot
s of ants, but they were moved into the camp barracks the second night, and they were going to Athens on a boat tomorrow, so everything was all right. They explained that all of them would be leaving within a week or two except for the Pakistani boy, and they weren’t sure how he could survive without them.

  Slight rain welcomed us as soon as we entered the gate, slight enough that the children hardly seemed to notice it. The three policemen didn’t seem to notice either the rain or us; Cerberus they weren’t. These were policemen, the boys said. This was a van, this building was for camp administrators, and they had their own bathrooms. These families were going to the bus that would take them to the ferry that would take them to Athens and then by train to Europe proper. The ship to Athens was huge and was completely safe.

  You, the Immigrant

  You once wrote that you felt embarrassed when critics and reviewers classified your work as immigrant literature. You joked that the worst immigration trauma you had endured was when your flight from Heathrow was delayed.

  Pants on fire! Are all fiction writers liars, or are you just being Lebanese?

  Like all of us, you had to adjust.

  The Beirut of 1977 could not have prepared you for the Los Angeles you arrived in. You landed in the City of Angels with your father while the civil war raged back in Lebanon. He was there to help you find a place to live and set you up at UCLA. He wanted to ensure that you’d be able to make do on your own for a while. He only had one week before he was supposed to return. No one was sure what would happen to the family as the Lebanese war dragged on.