Help me, Sufien said aloud to his long dead father, there in Central Park. It was 1973, another war was coming that fall, and it would spell another resounding defeat for Palestine. Give me some- thing, Sufien said. Some sign.
Bernardo, Abdul Jalil said.
No, Sufien said, both out of disbelief that his father was actually speaking, and because he had not seen his friend in over a year. The baby was no longer a baby. And the last time Sufien had visited Bernardo and Sandy, her belly was swol- len with another. He did not want Bernardo’s pity. He did not want Bernardo’s judgment. That was all their friendship had amounted to since they had come to New York.
Bernardo, Abdul Jalil repeated. Then he said nothing else aloud to Sufien ever again.
*
Bernardo pulled Sufien inside his Madison Avenue apartment, then said, Man, you smell, and forced him to shower, and in that bathroom, Sufien bathed for a full hour, then Bernardo took him to the barbershop and then to Nino’s on Lex for a veal parmigiana and meatballs and linguine alle vongole (Sufien had never been so hungry!), and then slid an envelope of cash across the table, said take it, take it, said it again, and now from Sufien’s new window on 103rd and West End Avenue, he watched the New York night descend in purple atop the buildings and after months of living outside, he could not understand why it was so much louder to live inside of an apartment than in the middle of a city park. Maybe it was because he could hear the evening news coming through the walls.
Sufien was sick of the broadcast already, he did not want to know how much worse the world had grown, and he found himself walking out, onto the dark, rainy length of Amsterdam past Saint John the Divine toward Columbia. Oh, the inspira- tion he had felt there once, climbing the sacred steps of Low Library like he might wander into a palace scented with amber- gris and adorned with women who had faces like the moon. He stared across campus at Butler Library and in the illumination of the accountant lamps, Sufien imagined the students rewrit- ing the stories of men, envisioning new countries, better than the last, or even the end of all countries. He had once believed by moving into Paulette’s, he would be closer to these students, but what had he done in those years? Bernardo was right. All he had done was make sandwiches, pay his rent, drink, get high. Sufien again reckoned with the fact that what he was looking upon would never be his life. On this night, though, he could not simply dispense with the feeling. He had the sensation he was sinking. This was aging, the beginning of it. Now that he had a roof over his head again, the passing of time returned to Sufien. Temporarily reprieved from the dire concerns of sur- vival, regret raced back in. He could not take any of the years back. Staring at Butler, teeming with all those lives yet to be lived, Sufien brushed up against his border, and this border was also a shackle, and on the other side of it, what awaited him? Sufien would not be a physicist, he would not be an engineer, he would not be a doctor. No, he couldn’t even get a job as a janitor on that campus. Sufien would never fulfill Abdul Jalil’s dreams. When he grew tired of this defeated thinking, he wandered back down Amsterdam and stood before Saint John the Divine, listening to the choral students and an organist resurrect Bach, then continued, down past the projects into the upper 90s. He walked south until he found himself past midnight in front of the old Cuban Chinese restaurant at 77th and Broadway. He was hungry, that was all. He had spent almost all of Bernardo’s cash renting the room. There was some left. Five dollars. He was not sick, he was not lost, his mind could return with a rem- edy as simple as food. He could go into that restaurant and order a meal. He could be a man again.
Carne guisada, he said to the pretty waitress. She had such sad Spanish eyes. And a Coca-Cola.
Her hand was on his shoulder, and not because she wanted to love him, but because he was weeping. So it was that simple to feel better, to let the pain and the defeat fall down off his body like it was just a little weather.
When he left the restaurant, it was almost dawn, and he understood that hours had passed in there. Perhaps he had even slept? When he looked up again, the pretty waitress had gone and a grandmother had taken over the shift.
Rather than go home, he kept walking. The sun would rise soon and someone was playing the saxophone on the corner of 70th Street, where a prostitute was slumped over. No, he couldn’t save her. Help me, he cried again. To his father.
His father had no words for this. Why should he come back here? To a scene like this? It was heavy, this world, it would plunder his soul. He had had enough of that. Abdul Jalil had said what he had needed to say to Sufien, already. Khalas.
Daybreak. Sufien watched the morning rush, the men in their grey suits, the secretaries in their smart skirts, and the strollers, the moms and the nannies, and all the beautiful chil- dren. They were all coming and going as they always had. And then it was afternoon, and the city was blurry, bleary. He had arrived at Lincoln Center. Outside Alice Tully Hall, Sufien read a poster announcing “free music,” Wednesdays at one. In Italy, on the weekends, there had always been musicians playing in each and every square, even in the country, but he had never encountered anything free in New York except walking the streets. What day was it? The big clock outside the 66th Street Station read quarter to one.
There were three other people in the audience. Perhaps Sufien had wandered into the land of the dead. One was in a wheelchair, another could not stop coughing, the last couldn’t quit inexplicably shouting shhh. It couldn’t be Wednesday. He was in the wrong place.
And then Sufien heard Rachmaninoff for the first time, the opening chords of his Piano Concerto No. 2. This was obscene, to hear something so gorgeous. It was broad daylight out there. Vietnam was being obliterated. Abdul Jalil was gone. Sufien had no home. Had he ever? Wait, there was now the apartment on West End. And this? What was this? Men were dropping napalm bombs. And a man had made this music?
Have I died, then, Sufien muttered to himself in Arabic.
They all looked at him, those ghosts in the audience. And that one ghost among them shouted shhhh again.
Here was the climax, the glorious revelation. And the angel opened his eyes. The angel had come for Sufien, greeting him. His wings were crystal ships. Sufien was weeping, a Russian had done it, the Russians always did, because they understood the heart of snow, and now Sufien was kneeling down in the house of Allah.
There in the now empty auditorium, Sufien pulled out from his wallet the envelope which held his father’s last letter. Firas had enclosed it in his own missive to Sufien informing him of Abdul Jalil’s death and that the unposted letter was found in their father’s pocket. Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un. Five years had passed and only now could Sufien read it.
Recently I dreamt of you, and the wind felt different. Made of another substance. I saw you in a car, and I was in the car with you, and we were going somewhere and when we arrived, you said that we would finally be free.
I never told you about my time in Istanbul, when I was a young man, before the time of the resistance. I had left my family in Safad to study just like you did. There was nowhere like Istan- bul in Palestine. The water, the languages, the boats, the beauty of the women. How could I ever return home after seeing what I’d seen? My world would feel so small.
What brought me back wasn’t the war, but my father. He had written to me and told me that there were more immigrants, and they were taking more land. As a boy, I took for granted what I had, what he had given to me. By the time that letter arrived, it was already too late.
I understand now that I will never return to Palestine. I will never return to his grave. And worse, that you, my eldest, will likely not return to me in this life.
If you give up hope, son, you lose everything. Remember that. Even now, I have hope that one day you shall return to the land of your fathers even if I will not. Remember, you have the strength of a lion.
