Correspondents, page 34
“The San Antonio River,” Rita called again.
“Oh.” Mary Jo laughed. “Ha. The San Antonio River. Well, that makes sense. Okay, Georgie, anyway, that’s it for now. Remember the salmon I bought for the grill or it’s gonna go bad. Okay. Love you. Bye-bye.”
“I knew he wouldn’t pick up,” Rita said.
Mary Jo shrugged. “Married to his work, that man. Always has been, always will be.”
She put her phone away and turned to stare out at the river. Rita did the same, only to turn back to her mother and find a tear rolling down her cheek.
“Ma!” Rita was slightly shocked, so seldom had she seen her mother cry. “What’s wrong?”
Mary Jo turned to look at her with such a nakedly needy visage that Rita almost grimaced. “I’m just so glad you’re back from that place and in one piece,” her mother said, with a snuffle. She extended a hand. “Promise me you’re gonna stay with us.”
“Ma!” Rita laughed. She leaned over and put a hand over her mother’s. “I’m not goin’ back, Ma. At least until it’s really stable again.”
“After your father and I die.”
“Ma, stop it!” Rita shook her head. “Jeez, we should visit rehab centers together more often. It brings out your soft side.”
Her mother slapped her hand, her eyes flashing with a familiar and, to Rita, reassuring indignation. “Why do you always have to be so fresh? Even when I’m being serious?”
Rita laughed and held her hand atop her mother’s a moment longer.
And then came 2007, and all the talk in policy circles about the wisdom and particulars of the surge, the United States’ last-ditch effort to set Iraq right. And then came Jonah. Only two weeks after the party at which they met they were meeting for lunch, spending weekends at each other’s apartments, hiking or running through Rock Creek Park, hitting events and parties together. He was her entrée to the universe of people who worked for liberal nonprofits and advocacy groups, some of whom she’d gone to college with, people who lived in funky neighborhoods like Adams Morgan or the U Street Corridor. The Democrats had taken back Congress the year before, would likely take the White House in 2008, and the city’s young professional left flank was exultant, allowing itself to dream again about finally recovering clout in D. C.
As for Jonah, he would almost salivate, Rita teased him, when he talked about his dreams for the courts in the coming years—victories he thought they’d likely achieve on immigration, campaign finance, gay rights, reproductive rights. After her years of fraternizing with journalists, who were all basically liberal but trained to evince high levels of cynicism and irony and not to betray overt bias, it was refreshing to be with someone who wore his beliefs on his sleeve, even if she sometimes found his arguments oversimplified and his reasoning stubborn. He was a lawyer, after all.
She was also madly attracted to him. She yearned for his body when she wasn’t with him, for his furry chest, full lips, slender fingers, and eyes that seemed rimmed lightly in natural kohl. She also savored the relief, after Sami, of being with someone who was as busy as she was—often busier, frankly—and who harbored no sulking resentment that she lived first and foremost for public affairs and her career. It was D. C., after all, and people were their jobs, their BlackBerrys a natural extension of their brains and fingers. There was no shame in it.
Here he was now, as they sat at Busboys and Poets, the new preferred watering hole of the Beltway left, asking her to meet his family.
“In Croton-on-Hudson,” she said.
“In Croton-on-Hudson, yes. My niece’s bat mitzvah. Hey, it’s on the river! You can swim away if it’s that traumatizing.”
She cocked her head at him. “So you’re serious about this, then?”
He smiled and shrugged. “I don’t think you have to read into it so deeply. I just thought you’d be amused to meet my big old crazy tribe.”
Now she laughed. “I have one of those myself, you know.”
“I do. And I hope to meet them, too.”
She sipped her wine. “Enemy tribes, you know.”
“I know! That’s where the excitement comes in. Think of the role we can play in the peace process. We’ll be like one of those summer programs where Israeli and Palestinian kids make, like, yarn art together.”
“Oh my God!” she exclaimed. “There actually is a program like that!”
“Yes! I read about it in—” He paused. “Your old employer.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said sourly. “Marna Gelman wrote that story. Last year.”
“Uh-oh!” He sipped. “Poor Marna Gelman. You really have it in for her.”
“Please. I could care less anymore.”
He let seconds pass before he spoke again. “So you’ll come this weekend?”
“If I can subject you to my tribe next time. Absolutely. I might even take you to a mahrajan.”
“A what?”
“It’s a big Arabic fair where you stuff your face and then you’ll have to get up and do a line dance.”
He leaned over the table and laced his fingers through hers. “It’s a deal.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HABIBI
(2006)
They were glancing at each other. Nabil was sure of it.
He’d been sitting for the past thirty minutes in the Internet café in Bab Touma, Damascus’s picturesque, stone-walled Christian quarter, which was filled with Westerners and tourists. He loved Bab Touma; he spent most of his days there. All his life, or at least until right before the American invasion, when journalists had flooded Baghdad, he’d seen Westerners—Europeans, Australians, Americans, with their infinite shades of blond or red or brown hair and creamy pink or tan skin—only on TV or in movies or photos. Here he saw them all the time, with their backpacks and sunglasses and Lonely Planet guidebooks, the girls respectfully covered in gauzy pants and long-sleeved blouses, some of the boys looking absolutely moronic and out of place in shorts, their tanned, furry legs, atop Birkenstocks or Nikes, drawing Nabil’s eyes like a magnet, as much as he willed himself to look away.
He’d been smoking and nursing a Nescafé in a tiny plastic cup he’d bought at the counter, writing an e-mail to Rick Garza:
Hello, Rick!
I hope this finds you safe and “hanging in there” in Baghdad. It is odd to think that you are still there and I am not! I cannot believe the high levels of sectarian killing and how the neighborhoods are becoming segregated. The country is at civil war even if America won’t call it that! I cannot believe they build a giant wall around Adhamiya. I used to walk between there and Kadhimiya every day to work and back! I truly do not recognize my country anymore and I do not know if we will ever go back. It is a great sadness.
I am writing to respectfully enquire if you heard anything from Marna Gelman related to my possibility of working for you in Damascus. Most of the work here for Iraqis occurs if they can find work through another Iraqi, such as working as a business partner supplying some sort of goods from Syria to Iraq. I do have a small job that I hesitate to say what it is as it is “under the table,” as are many jobs here for Iraqis. As you know we cannot get work papers. Some Syrians here have told me that I would probably get into trouble if I tried to work as a reporter here. However, I decided that I would “cross that bridge when I come to it”! I miss working! I felt useful at the bureau with my education finally putting itself to use. The days are rather long here. Thankfully my nephew and niece are in school and we are far better off than many Iraqis here. Yet still there is not much for us to do. I continue to read a great deal. Currently I am reading The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. Have you ever read that, Rick? It is quite challenging for me, which I enjoy!
Well, I will not hold you further. Thank you, Rick! Please continue to take extreme precautions and please give my warmest regards to Claude and to Umm Nasim. And I will once more humbly reiterate my great desire to hear from Miss Marna Gelman if at all possible.
Yours very sincerely,
Nabil
He sent the e-mail, wondering whether he would hear back this time. Rick hadn’t replied to his last e-mail, sent two weeks before, but Nabil was aware he had sent it during a particularly brutal week of Sunni-Shi’a killings in Baghdad.
He sat, sighed, finished his cigarette. He had three hours to kill before he had to be at the cell-phone shop, whose owner, Milad, had had the wherewithal to leave Baghdad in late 2003. The shop was in Muhajirin, where Nabil’s family lived. The neighborhood was not quite as picturesque as Bab Touma but was still older and prettier than most Damascus districts—a dense network of small streets and warm yellow buildings that climbed their way up the lower reaches of Mount Qasioun, which towered over the city. Iraqi newcomers with some money, like his own family, lived there, sparing themselves life in the congested Iraqi refugee ghettos of Jaramana and Set Zeinab, farther from the city center.
He sat back in his chair, stretched. He’d probably pay for another hour of Internet and continue his idle research into marketing and communications career opportunities in the Gulf states.
But then he allowed himself to glance over his shoulder to the left.
He was still there. The blond boy. The kind of blond that was picture-book blond, Swiss Alps blond, California surfer blond. Blond, with blue eyes that Nabil found shocking and skin that looked as though it had been brushed in liquid sunlight, with more blond fur on his arms. A T-shirt and jeans and tennis sneakers and a backpack and a book on introductory Levantine Arabic and also a small plastic cup of Nescafé and a cigarette at his side, his e-mails opened on the screen before him.
And then, when Nabil looked back again, the boy looked at him, quickly appraised him from top to bottom, and then, ever so faintly and shyly, smiled.
Nabil darted his head back toward his own screen, horrified and delighted. Had that really just happened? Suddenly, he was trembling. Had anyone seen? Nearly every cubicle in the café at that moment was occupied, a few by other Western backpacker types, a few by young Damascene men who seemed to live here, smoking and drinking coffee and playing online video games all day, filling the café with the irritating bleeps and buzzes of points gained or lost. There was a high chance at least one of them was a member of the Mukhabarat, Assad’s secret police force, who were rumored to haunt Internet cafés, looking for people who might be reading or writing anti-government material. More than once since coming here, thinking back on what Rita had whispered to him just before leaving Baghdad, Nabil had been tempted to type the terms gay or LGBT plus asylum and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees into Google. But he didn’t dare. It was an extremely frustrating feeling to know that either a lifeline or an arrest (or, worse, deportation back to Iraq) might await him just on the other side of an Internet search—a liberty that Nabil had come to take for granted back in the villa of the paper.
Now he could barely focus on the jobs page of the Abu Dhabi multinational he had been perusing.
“Afwan?” he heard someone say in a foreign accent.
He looked up. The blond boy was standing before him, his Arabic-language book in hand, that same shy half smile on his face. Nabil’s stomach sloshed about. The boy’s cheeks were so creamy, pinkish-tan, his lips so petulant, full.
“I speak English,” Nabil managed to say.
But the boy, who was perhaps nineteen or twenty, continued to speak in his first-year Arabic, which charmed Nabil. “Min fadlek, ya akh,” he continued, nodding toward his book. “Sadoony bi arabi?” Help me with Arabic?
Nabil smiled broadly; the request seemed so childlike, so guileless. “Ma fi moushkala,” he said. No problem.
Now the blond boy smiled, apparently familiar with the phrase. “Isme Liam,” he said, offering a hand. “Ana danmarki.” My name’s Liam. I’m Danish.
“Isme Nabil. Ana eiraqi.”
Liam’s eyes widened, seemingly with understanding—although, Nabil surmised, he lacked the Arabic word for refugee. Liam pointed toward the door. “Yalla?”
Nabil paused a moment, then nodded. Why shouldn’t they go? This was the most innocent and elemental thing in the world, agreeing to help a foreigner with the language. It was the essence of hospitality, even if he himself technically wasn’t a local. He closed his web browser, signed out of his stall. At the counter, he moved to pay, but Liam waved him away and handed over one hundred Syrian liras. Nabil silently acceded, feeling a kind of luxury, a letting go, wash over him. The young ponytailed guy behind the counter, intent on a soccer game on the radio, barely seemed to notice them.
They exited onto a narrow, quiet side street whose left end revealed a small portion of the old Roman stone gate of Saint Thomas, the portal to Bab Touma. “Shaqti qarib,” Liam said. My apartment is near.
Nabil nodded okay and followed him around the corner and into the covered stretch of Straight Street that held the souk. Nervously, Nabil glanced at stall keepers tending to canaries in cages, at old ladies with bags of vegetables, but nobody seemed to be staring back at them. Liam walked slightly ahead, dispensing with small talk, which Nabil found slightly odd but intriguing and a bit exciting, as though Liam had no need for words to assert his will. They turned a corner onto another impossibly narrow side street, and then Liam turned a key in a lock in a typical Bab Touma building, where the windows of the second floor jutted out slightly over the windows of the first, as likewise did the windows of the third over the second.
They entered a courtyard, the typical sort of inner chamber of an old Damascus building, with its diamond-patterned tile floor, empty stone fountain in the center, jasmine hanging from some of the balconies. It was unpopulated at the moment, Nabil noted with relief—no neighbors to take note of them.
They trudged up two flights of stairs just half a meter wider than their own bodies, the walls smelling mysteriously of coffee, spices, and old bricks; then Liam turned a second key in a lock, and they entered a dim room not much bigger than the computer stall Nabil had been sitting in, with just enough space for a very narrow futon on the floor, covered in a mussed sheet, and a small table beside it, stacked with books and magazines. The putty walls were bare save a cluster of taped-up photos of Liam in what appeared to be various sites around Europe, some with fellow blonds whom Nabil assumed to also be Danish, some with darker sorts whom Nabil assumed to be friends he’d met along the way. There was one small window, placed high near the ceiling, which allowed a dim square of light.
They each put down their backpacks. Liam slipped out of his sneakers and sat on the futon, but Nabil just stood frozen in place, looking down on him.
Liam reached out a hand to him, laughing softly. “Anta—” he began, You, then “Ana la baref kalimatan.” I don’t know the word.
“Tell me in English.”
“You are shaking.”
Nabil felt himself blush, mortified, looking at his hand. He was, visibly. Liam sat up slightly and reached for his hand, pulling him down gently, until he gave way and sat beside him on the futon. “It’s okay,” Liam said softly. “Nobody saw us come up. Ma fi moushkala.”
Nabil was reeling, desire and fear churning in his stomach. “Are we going to study?”
Liam laughed softly. “Do you want to help me study?”
“I need a job,” he said helplessly. “I’m not allowed to work officially in Syria.”
Liam seemed to sober, considering this. “I will pay you to help me with my Arabic,” he finally said. His English accent was so odd! Odder than Claude’s French accent. But it mesmerized Nabil. “But first may I do something?”
Nabil felt as if he had a whole lemon in his throat. “What?”
“May I kiss your eyelashes?” Liam raised a hand and lightly grazed one of Nabil’s lashes with his thumb. “I saw them in the Internet café, and I thought, I have never seen such long lashes on a man. Even in the Middle East. They are so beautiful.”
Nabil felt himself crumbling under the feather touch of Liam’s thumb. All his life, people had commented on his lashes, telling him he looked like a girl. His lashes were a curse and, on a more secret level, a source of pride and vanity.
“So, may I kiss them?” Liam asked.
“Yes,” he barely managed to croak.
Liam leaned forward and placed his lips atop Nabil’s right away, expelling a sigh and a wash of warm breath over Nabil’s face, grazed there a moment, then moved to his left eye. Nabil felt his right hand moving toward Liam’s, until their fingers interlaced. Nabil felt a curtain falling, a scrim. He’d wondered since he was eleven, twelve, what this experience felt like, tried to conjure it when he masturbated behind a locked door or in the shower, assumed he might never find out. His heart cannonballed in his chest; his whole body was shaking now.
Liam put both his hands on Nabil’s thighs. “Shhh,” he whispered. “Nobody is here. And the guy next door isn’t home now, but he is a student like me, from Rome. He wouldn’t even care.”
“I have never done this before.”
“That is why you have to enjoy it.” Liam’s lips grazed over his nose, to the bottom of his ear, eventually to his lips.
Nabil gasped. “Oh my God,” he whispered.
“Remember, I am paying you.” Liam regarded him and smiled. “I command you to enjoy it.” He had a mock sternness in his voice that made Nabil laugh, momentarily, relaxing him.
“Yes, master,” he quipped back.
Liam laughed, a little mischievous rumble. “Much better.”
When Liam pressed his lips firmly to Nabil’s, when his tongue breached Nabil’s teeth, and Nabil allowed himself to drop his jaw in acquiescence, a wave of terror shuddered through him. He was now officially among the people of Lot; he was defying the hadiths of Muhammad, and he would surely die for this. Briefly, his jaw froze. Liam said nothing but brought an arm around his neck and pushed in harder with his tongue until it filled Nabil’s mouth, and Nabil’s last wall of defense gave way with a moan he could not withhold, and his arms found their way around Liam’s slim waist.
“Now I have you,” Liam chuckled, satisfied.
“Oh.” Mary Jo laughed. “Ha. The San Antonio River. Well, that makes sense. Okay, Georgie, anyway, that’s it for now. Remember the salmon I bought for the grill or it’s gonna go bad. Okay. Love you. Bye-bye.”
“I knew he wouldn’t pick up,” Rita said.
Mary Jo shrugged. “Married to his work, that man. Always has been, always will be.”
She put her phone away and turned to stare out at the river. Rita did the same, only to turn back to her mother and find a tear rolling down her cheek.
“Ma!” Rita was slightly shocked, so seldom had she seen her mother cry. “What’s wrong?”
Mary Jo turned to look at her with such a nakedly needy visage that Rita almost grimaced. “I’m just so glad you’re back from that place and in one piece,” her mother said, with a snuffle. She extended a hand. “Promise me you’re gonna stay with us.”
“Ma!” Rita laughed. She leaned over and put a hand over her mother’s. “I’m not goin’ back, Ma. At least until it’s really stable again.”
“After your father and I die.”
“Ma, stop it!” Rita shook her head. “Jeez, we should visit rehab centers together more often. It brings out your soft side.”
Her mother slapped her hand, her eyes flashing with a familiar and, to Rita, reassuring indignation. “Why do you always have to be so fresh? Even when I’m being serious?”
Rita laughed and held her hand atop her mother’s a moment longer.
And then came 2007, and all the talk in policy circles about the wisdom and particulars of the surge, the United States’ last-ditch effort to set Iraq right. And then came Jonah. Only two weeks after the party at which they met they were meeting for lunch, spending weekends at each other’s apartments, hiking or running through Rock Creek Park, hitting events and parties together. He was her entrée to the universe of people who worked for liberal nonprofits and advocacy groups, some of whom she’d gone to college with, people who lived in funky neighborhoods like Adams Morgan or the U Street Corridor. The Democrats had taken back Congress the year before, would likely take the White House in 2008, and the city’s young professional left flank was exultant, allowing itself to dream again about finally recovering clout in D. C.
As for Jonah, he would almost salivate, Rita teased him, when he talked about his dreams for the courts in the coming years—victories he thought they’d likely achieve on immigration, campaign finance, gay rights, reproductive rights. After her years of fraternizing with journalists, who were all basically liberal but trained to evince high levels of cynicism and irony and not to betray overt bias, it was refreshing to be with someone who wore his beliefs on his sleeve, even if she sometimes found his arguments oversimplified and his reasoning stubborn. He was a lawyer, after all.
She was also madly attracted to him. She yearned for his body when she wasn’t with him, for his furry chest, full lips, slender fingers, and eyes that seemed rimmed lightly in natural kohl. She also savored the relief, after Sami, of being with someone who was as busy as she was—often busier, frankly—and who harbored no sulking resentment that she lived first and foremost for public affairs and her career. It was D. C., after all, and people were their jobs, their BlackBerrys a natural extension of their brains and fingers. There was no shame in it.
Here he was now, as they sat at Busboys and Poets, the new preferred watering hole of the Beltway left, asking her to meet his family.
“In Croton-on-Hudson,” she said.
“In Croton-on-Hudson, yes. My niece’s bat mitzvah. Hey, it’s on the river! You can swim away if it’s that traumatizing.”
She cocked her head at him. “So you’re serious about this, then?”
He smiled and shrugged. “I don’t think you have to read into it so deeply. I just thought you’d be amused to meet my big old crazy tribe.”
Now she laughed. “I have one of those myself, you know.”
“I do. And I hope to meet them, too.”
She sipped her wine. “Enemy tribes, you know.”
“I know! That’s where the excitement comes in. Think of the role we can play in the peace process. We’ll be like one of those summer programs where Israeli and Palestinian kids make, like, yarn art together.”
“Oh my God!” she exclaimed. “There actually is a program like that!”
“Yes! I read about it in—” He paused. “Your old employer.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said sourly. “Marna Gelman wrote that story. Last year.”
“Uh-oh!” He sipped. “Poor Marna Gelman. You really have it in for her.”
“Please. I could care less anymore.”
He let seconds pass before he spoke again. “So you’ll come this weekend?”
“If I can subject you to my tribe next time. Absolutely. I might even take you to a mahrajan.”
“A what?”
“It’s a big Arabic fair where you stuff your face and then you’ll have to get up and do a line dance.”
He leaned over the table and laced his fingers through hers. “It’s a deal.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HABIBI
(2006)
They were glancing at each other. Nabil was sure of it.
He’d been sitting for the past thirty minutes in the Internet café in Bab Touma, Damascus’s picturesque, stone-walled Christian quarter, which was filled with Westerners and tourists. He loved Bab Touma; he spent most of his days there. All his life, or at least until right before the American invasion, when journalists had flooded Baghdad, he’d seen Westerners—Europeans, Australians, Americans, with their infinite shades of blond or red or brown hair and creamy pink or tan skin—only on TV or in movies or photos. Here he saw them all the time, with their backpacks and sunglasses and Lonely Planet guidebooks, the girls respectfully covered in gauzy pants and long-sleeved blouses, some of the boys looking absolutely moronic and out of place in shorts, their tanned, furry legs, atop Birkenstocks or Nikes, drawing Nabil’s eyes like a magnet, as much as he willed himself to look away.
He’d been smoking and nursing a Nescafé in a tiny plastic cup he’d bought at the counter, writing an e-mail to Rick Garza:
Hello, Rick!
I hope this finds you safe and “hanging in there” in Baghdad. It is odd to think that you are still there and I am not! I cannot believe the high levels of sectarian killing and how the neighborhoods are becoming segregated. The country is at civil war even if America won’t call it that! I cannot believe they build a giant wall around Adhamiya. I used to walk between there and Kadhimiya every day to work and back! I truly do not recognize my country anymore and I do not know if we will ever go back. It is a great sadness.
I am writing to respectfully enquire if you heard anything from Marna Gelman related to my possibility of working for you in Damascus. Most of the work here for Iraqis occurs if they can find work through another Iraqi, such as working as a business partner supplying some sort of goods from Syria to Iraq. I do have a small job that I hesitate to say what it is as it is “under the table,” as are many jobs here for Iraqis. As you know we cannot get work papers. Some Syrians here have told me that I would probably get into trouble if I tried to work as a reporter here. However, I decided that I would “cross that bridge when I come to it”! I miss working! I felt useful at the bureau with my education finally putting itself to use. The days are rather long here. Thankfully my nephew and niece are in school and we are far better off than many Iraqis here. Yet still there is not much for us to do. I continue to read a great deal. Currently I am reading The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. Have you ever read that, Rick? It is quite challenging for me, which I enjoy!
Well, I will not hold you further. Thank you, Rick! Please continue to take extreme precautions and please give my warmest regards to Claude and to Umm Nasim. And I will once more humbly reiterate my great desire to hear from Miss Marna Gelman if at all possible.
Yours very sincerely,
Nabil
He sent the e-mail, wondering whether he would hear back this time. Rick hadn’t replied to his last e-mail, sent two weeks before, but Nabil was aware he had sent it during a particularly brutal week of Sunni-Shi’a killings in Baghdad.
He sat, sighed, finished his cigarette. He had three hours to kill before he had to be at the cell-phone shop, whose owner, Milad, had had the wherewithal to leave Baghdad in late 2003. The shop was in Muhajirin, where Nabil’s family lived. The neighborhood was not quite as picturesque as Bab Touma but was still older and prettier than most Damascus districts—a dense network of small streets and warm yellow buildings that climbed their way up the lower reaches of Mount Qasioun, which towered over the city. Iraqi newcomers with some money, like his own family, lived there, sparing themselves life in the congested Iraqi refugee ghettos of Jaramana and Set Zeinab, farther from the city center.
He sat back in his chair, stretched. He’d probably pay for another hour of Internet and continue his idle research into marketing and communications career opportunities in the Gulf states.
But then he allowed himself to glance over his shoulder to the left.
He was still there. The blond boy. The kind of blond that was picture-book blond, Swiss Alps blond, California surfer blond. Blond, with blue eyes that Nabil found shocking and skin that looked as though it had been brushed in liquid sunlight, with more blond fur on his arms. A T-shirt and jeans and tennis sneakers and a backpack and a book on introductory Levantine Arabic and also a small plastic cup of Nescafé and a cigarette at his side, his e-mails opened on the screen before him.
And then, when Nabil looked back again, the boy looked at him, quickly appraised him from top to bottom, and then, ever so faintly and shyly, smiled.
Nabil darted his head back toward his own screen, horrified and delighted. Had that really just happened? Suddenly, he was trembling. Had anyone seen? Nearly every cubicle in the café at that moment was occupied, a few by other Western backpacker types, a few by young Damascene men who seemed to live here, smoking and drinking coffee and playing online video games all day, filling the café with the irritating bleeps and buzzes of points gained or lost. There was a high chance at least one of them was a member of the Mukhabarat, Assad’s secret police force, who were rumored to haunt Internet cafés, looking for people who might be reading or writing anti-government material. More than once since coming here, thinking back on what Rita had whispered to him just before leaving Baghdad, Nabil had been tempted to type the terms gay or LGBT plus asylum and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees into Google. But he didn’t dare. It was an extremely frustrating feeling to know that either a lifeline or an arrest (or, worse, deportation back to Iraq) might await him just on the other side of an Internet search—a liberty that Nabil had come to take for granted back in the villa of the paper.
Now he could barely focus on the jobs page of the Abu Dhabi multinational he had been perusing.
“Afwan?” he heard someone say in a foreign accent.
He looked up. The blond boy was standing before him, his Arabic-language book in hand, that same shy half smile on his face. Nabil’s stomach sloshed about. The boy’s cheeks were so creamy, pinkish-tan, his lips so petulant, full.
“I speak English,” Nabil managed to say.
But the boy, who was perhaps nineteen or twenty, continued to speak in his first-year Arabic, which charmed Nabil. “Min fadlek, ya akh,” he continued, nodding toward his book. “Sadoony bi arabi?” Help me with Arabic?
Nabil smiled broadly; the request seemed so childlike, so guileless. “Ma fi moushkala,” he said. No problem.
Now the blond boy smiled, apparently familiar with the phrase. “Isme Liam,” he said, offering a hand. “Ana danmarki.” My name’s Liam. I’m Danish.
“Isme Nabil. Ana eiraqi.”
Liam’s eyes widened, seemingly with understanding—although, Nabil surmised, he lacked the Arabic word for refugee. Liam pointed toward the door. “Yalla?”
Nabil paused a moment, then nodded. Why shouldn’t they go? This was the most innocent and elemental thing in the world, agreeing to help a foreigner with the language. It was the essence of hospitality, even if he himself technically wasn’t a local. He closed his web browser, signed out of his stall. At the counter, he moved to pay, but Liam waved him away and handed over one hundred Syrian liras. Nabil silently acceded, feeling a kind of luxury, a letting go, wash over him. The young ponytailed guy behind the counter, intent on a soccer game on the radio, barely seemed to notice them.
They exited onto a narrow, quiet side street whose left end revealed a small portion of the old Roman stone gate of Saint Thomas, the portal to Bab Touma. “Shaqti qarib,” Liam said. My apartment is near.
Nabil nodded okay and followed him around the corner and into the covered stretch of Straight Street that held the souk. Nervously, Nabil glanced at stall keepers tending to canaries in cages, at old ladies with bags of vegetables, but nobody seemed to be staring back at them. Liam walked slightly ahead, dispensing with small talk, which Nabil found slightly odd but intriguing and a bit exciting, as though Liam had no need for words to assert his will. They turned a corner onto another impossibly narrow side street, and then Liam turned a key in a lock in a typical Bab Touma building, where the windows of the second floor jutted out slightly over the windows of the first, as likewise did the windows of the third over the second.
They entered a courtyard, the typical sort of inner chamber of an old Damascus building, with its diamond-patterned tile floor, empty stone fountain in the center, jasmine hanging from some of the balconies. It was unpopulated at the moment, Nabil noted with relief—no neighbors to take note of them.
They trudged up two flights of stairs just half a meter wider than their own bodies, the walls smelling mysteriously of coffee, spices, and old bricks; then Liam turned a second key in a lock, and they entered a dim room not much bigger than the computer stall Nabil had been sitting in, with just enough space for a very narrow futon on the floor, covered in a mussed sheet, and a small table beside it, stacked with books and magazines. The putty walls were bare save a cluster of taped-up photos of Liam in what appeared to be various sites around Europe, some with fellow blonds whom Nabil assumed to also be Danish, some with darker sorts whom Nabil assumed to be friends he’d met along the way. There was one small window, placed high near the ceiling, which allowed a dim square of light.
They each put down their backpacks. Liam slipped out of his sneakers and sat on the futon, but Nabil just stood frozen in place, looking down on him.
Liam reached out a hand to him, laughing softly. “Anta—” he began, You, then “Ana la baref kalimatan.” I don’t know the word.
“Tell me in English.”
“You are shaking.”
Nabil felt himself blush, mortified, looking at his hand. He was, visibly. Liam sat up slightly and reached for his hand, pulling him down gently, until he gave way and sat beside him on the futon. “It’s okay,” Liam said softly. “Nobody saw us come up. Ma fi moushkala.”
Nabil was reeling, desire and fear churning in his stomach. “Are we going to study?”
Liam laughed softly. “Do you want to help me study?”
“I need a job,” he said helplessly. “I’m not allowed to work officially in Syria.”
Liam seemed to sober, considering this. “I will pay you to help me with my Arabic,” he finally said. His English accent was so odd! Odder than Claude’s French accent. But it mesmerized Nabil. “But first may I do something?”
Nabil felt as if he had a whole lemon in his throat. “What?”
“May I kiss your eyelashes?” Liam raised a hand and lightly grazed one of Nabil’s lashes with his thumb. “I saw them in the Internet café, and I thought, I have never seen such long lashes on a man. Even in the Middle East. They are so beautiful.”
Nabil felt himself crumbling under the feather touch of Liam’s thumb. All his life, people had commented on his lashes, telling him he looked like a girl. His lashes were a curse and, on a more secret level, a source of pride and vanity.
“So, may I kiss them?” Liam asked.
“Yes,” he barely managed to croak.
Liam leaned forward and placed his lips atop Nabil’s right away, expelling a sigh and a wash of warm breath over Nabil’s face, grazed there a moment, then moved to his left eye. Nabil felt his right hand moving toward Liam’s, until their fingers interlaced. Nabil felt a curtain falling, a scrim. He’d wondered since he was eleven, twelve, what this experience felt like, tried to conjure it when he masturbated behind a locked door or in the shower, assumed he might never find out. His heart cannonballed in his chest; his whole body was shaking now.
Liam put both his hands on Nabil’s thighs. “Shhh,” he whispered. “Nobody is here. And the guy next door isn’t home now, but he is a student like me, from Rome. He wouldn’t even care.”
“I have never done this before.”
“That is why you have to enjoy it.” Liam’s lips grazed over his nose, to the bottom of his ear, eventually to his lips.
Nabil gasped. “Oh my God,” he whispered.
“Remember, I am paying you.” Liam regarded him and smiled. “I command you to enjoy it.” He had a mock sternness in his voice that made Nabil laugh, momentarily, relaxing him.
“Yes, master,” he quipped back.
Liam laughed, a little mischievous rumble. “Much better.”
When Liam pressed his lips firmly to Nabil’s, when his tongue breached Nabil’s teeth, and Nabil allowed himself to drop his jaw in acquiescence, a wave of terror shuddered through him. He was now officially among the people of Lot; he was defying the hadiths of Muhammad, and he would surely die for this. Briefly, his jaw froze. Liam said nothing but brought an arm around his neck and pushed in harder with his tongue until it filled Nabil’s mouth, and Nabil’s last wall of defense gave way with a moan he could not withhold, and his arms found their way around Liam’s slim waist.
“Now I have you,” Liam chuckled, satisfied.
