“How much she loved us, how much she loved you.”
“Be more specific.” I shook my head. “Please.”
“I don’t know, she was rambling in three languages. It wasn’t clear or uplifting or anything. She recited poetry that made little sense. She mixed lines and made some up, I think. She was smiling the whole time. She said she loved you, I swear.”
My body slumped. “I want to go back in.”
“She thought the male nurse was our father. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She looked at the nurse and offered him the Saadi line ‘I’d rather be shackled to you in hell than stroll in the Garden with another.’ Well, our father tried to get her to repeat it to him.”
A graceless laugh escaped her lips.
Shams’s sorrow was so deep that his wail of lament lasted one incessant week. He did not sleep or eat, and none could console him or interrupt the howl. His cry of sadness forced every creature that heard it to shed tears. The imps tried in vain to comfort him, pleading with him to help them search for his twin, but he could not hear them. They wept and begged, but Shams wailed on and on.
“Go,” Isaac told his brothers, his cherubic cheeks waxy wet. “Ishmael and I will watch over him. The rest of you must find our sister and nephew. Ask every human, every jinni, every beast and insect. North, south, east, and west, search every crevice of the world. Find them.”
The emir’s wife knocked on her son’s door, knocked again and again. The wailing broke her heart, and she wanted to mother him. She opened the door, gingerly and shyly, and entered. In the middle of the room, her prophet hugged himself, formed an orb upon a chair, his face buried in his thighs. The howl poured from his body. Isaac and Ishmael — brother demons, not parrots — each on one knee, each redder than blood, stroked Shams’s head and kissed it.
She waited, crying, hoping Shams would acknowledge her. She took a deep breath to calm her soul. She cleared her throat, but the sound she made could not compete with that emanating from her prophet. “Shams,” she called. “My son.”
Isaac and Ishmael glared at her, but Shams — Shams looked at her with loathing, his eyes redder than the two demons. He raised his arm, his palm facing her. “Blood be upon you.”
Out of nothing, out of the immediate air, blood soaked her. First her hands dripped; strings of blood fell from her fingers to the floor. She thought she was wounded, but it was not so. Her hair felt sticky. She looked at the floor, where a large puddle of blood had formed. Ecru turned to red, and her robe became soaked and clung to her body. Her legs felt viscous and clammy, and her vagina felt full. She desperately wanted to lift her robe and examine her privates but was unable to do anything other than scream and run for help.
By the time my mother’s funeral ended, my father looked as if he had been through wash, rinse, and spin-dry cycles in one of those tiny washing machines that fit under the kitchen counter. Still, he had to find the energy to be with all who came to offer him obsequies. He was so tired by the end of the day that he fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. In the morning, we had to prepare for visitors. The day following the funeral, our house was full of people, hundreds, until bedtime — the post-death rituals meant to exhaust one out of grief. The second day, repeat.
I walked into his room the third day after the funeral. My sister was fixing his tie, getting him ready for another day of condolences. My father looked up and saw me, and his face clouded once more, a confusion of ire and despondency. “Happy you could join us,” he said, as if I had been somewhere else for the previous three days.
“I’m sorry.” I waited, then decided to put everything on the table. “I’m going to leave this morning. I have to get back to work.”
“But you just got here,” my sister said.
“You’re not leaving,” my father fumed.
“I have to.” I clasped my hands behind my back. “I really have to.”
“Why did you even bother to come?” my father snapped.
“Look. I’m very sorry, but I have to leave. I’m needed at work. You don’t need me for the condolences.”
“We need you,” my father said. “Your place is here.”
“I was here. But I also have commitments.”
“If you leave, I’ll never speak to you again. I’ll disown you.”
“No, you won’t,” Lina interrupted. “You’ll not do that. You don’t mean that.”
“If you leave now,” my father said, “you are not my son.”
“I am your son,” I said.
“No son of mine abandons his father.”
Nineteen
One day, a bizarrely dressed man walked into the diwan. He spoke a language that the court’s translator did not understand. Surprising everyone, Baybars replied to the stranger in his language and treated him with the utmost respect and hospitality. The sultan read the letter the messenger had brought and began to weep. Othman rushed to his friend’s side. “What is it, my lord? Tell me and I will realign the sun and the moon to ease your sorrow.”
Baybars handed the letter to Othman, who could not read it. “I can barely read Arabic, my king. Why would anyone send you a letter in this strange language?”
“To test if I am the one,” Baybars said, “and this is not strange. It is my native tongue.”
One of the Uzbeks took the letter. “Shall I translate? This is one of the many languages of the vast province of Khorasan, which means where the sun rises, where bakhshis play the oud and sing the great glory of God. The letter is from Shah Jamak of Samarkand, addressed, he hopes, to his lost son: ‘In the name of God, the compassionate and the merciful. To our son, the prince of believers, sultan of Egypt and Syria, whose name is Mahmoud ben Jamak and whose mother is the Lady Heather. Know, my son, that, from the moment God decreed that you leave us, your mother and I have been unable to enjoy food or slumber. Your mother grieves, and I comfort her and tell her God cannot allow her suffering to go on forever. A few days before this writing, your mother found a coin embossed with your image on the obverse, and she fainted, knowing that her son lived and had become the sultan of Islam. I write to inquire whether this is true. Tell me, I beg you. Are you my son?’ ”
Baybars wept, and his friends joined him. “Deliver a letter to my parents. Inform them that I will be arriving soon.” He stood up, holding the royal scepter close to his heart. “Tell my father who I am.”
It took me a few minutes to realize what my sister was up to. She wanted me to understand, but I was missing the clues she was throwing out. Breadcrumbs are harder to see along phone lines. She was entertaining herself at my expense and my father’s. We had our trivial talk — I was doing fine, she was as well — before the vicarious seduction began.
“Come home for Christmas,” she said. “We miss you.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” It had been eleven months since I had been to Beirut, since my mother’s death.
“Don’t be silly. Of course it’s a good idea. It’s always a good idea.”
She went on to tell me about all the crazy family goings-on: how Uncle Halim had flipped completely, the stories he was telling, the scandals he was unleashing; how Aunt Samia hadn’t talked to her youngest son for a month because she told him she didn’t want a birthday present, and he believed her. “You don’t know what you’re missing,” she added.
“Well,” I said, “you always keep me informed.”
“It’s not the same as being here. Come home.”
“I can’t. I’m too depressed.” I sighed, and, as usual, the instant I uttered those words, gloom filled me.