A Word For Love Part 12

If Adel was Qais, then that made Nisrine Leila. I had once dreamed of being Leila. I looked over at her now: her straight back, the long curve of her neck. Nisrine made a beautiful Leila. She didn't seem to notice. Her beauty was a part of her like any; like her smile or her thoughts, not the only one. I loved this about her, too, and I wanted to think like her, I didn't want it to matter. Her hand on my arm, making me wave, I thought, I could stay right here forever.

But, at the same time, I wondered, if he was Qais and she was Leila, then who was I?

Wave, Bea, he'll wave back, and he did.

Because she had told him to.

While I waited for my ID, I went through the roles in my head. Leila's father: was suspicious of their love. Leila's new husband: was her punishment. I couldn't think of a role for me.

I tried again at the National Library. This time I went, determined to flirt my way to the astonis.h.i.+ng text, like Nisrine.

At the library, there was a man and a woman behind the desk. I went up to the man. He was wearing the long beard and white robes of a religious scholar. I didn't care. I arched my back.

"Can I have a text?" I flirted.

The man looked up. He glanced at me once, then, with his eyes on the floor, he went to his female colleague. She came over. "Can I help you with something?"

"I wanted a text."

She told me I could wait in the cage for it.

I said, "That man was helping me, he was going to get it." She looked over at her colleague, who sat in the corner, his eyes trained studiously on a blue computer screen.

"That man is religious and a faithful husband. Here, we don't flirt with faithful men."

At my next Arabic lesson, Imad had a new workout machine and his idea was for Maria and me to run on the machine while we were reciting Arabic. To make it more natural, he said. To make it so we didn't think before we spoke. The verb for using a machine in Arabic is laub, which means to play, so after that, in our lessons Maria and I said things like: I want to play on this machine now, and the sweat was coming off of us; I want to play on this machine, are you done playing on the weights, Maria? I wanted to play on the bike. The sweat was coming off of me.

Imad said, "Say something in Arabic, Bea. The first thing that comes into your head. Say it with voweling."

But all I could think was, I wish some policeman would write poems for me.

On the phone with my mother, I complained: Nisrine couldn't stop talking about a policeman, as if we didn't have enough to worry about with Madame's suspicions, and Baba's revolution, and my studies.

I asked again and again, What about her husband? Until Nisrine turned around: "Stop, Bea."

But then one morning, I felt a hand on my shoulder as I was sleeping.

"Bea, I don't know what to do, I love Adel, but I love my child in Indonesia."

I tiptoed through the silent house, Nisrine giddy as sunlight before me. We pa.s.sed the living room, and did not wake Baba, who was asleep calmly. We pa.s.sed through the kitchen; Nisrine took my hand and pulled me out, onto the balcony.

"We had trouble in Indonesia, just like here. Before my child was born, we had storms, and on the other side of our country, a tsunami. I was very pregnant with my child. The winds came and beat our little house; outside, you could hear motorcycles banging. My husband had hung wind chimes all around our house. We had taken in the flowerpots and bicycle, but no one had thought to take the wind chimes in; they blew around, and they chimed so loudly we couldn't sleep. All night through the storm they clanged, but no one wanted to go out in the rain to take them down.

"In the middle of the night, we woke with a start. There was a crash. A tree had fallen over half our house. My husband opened the door of our bedroom, and rain and torn-up leaves came in. But, where were we to go? We closed the door again, and got under our bed, so if another tree fell, the frame might protect us, and listened to the wind. It howled outside our door; the rest of the night we stayed like that, and my child felt my worry. He was awake in my belly the whole night, his little legs moving.

"In the morning, there was water and a wasteland. From our house where the tree fell, we could see all the way to the ocean.

"I walked out with my child in my belly. My husband went to see about staying with his family, and to get food. When he came back, I was still walking. The landscape was so different, I didn't recognize him in it. He tried to kiss me, and I lowered my head as if I'd just met him, so he kissed the top of my head. He said, There is so much ocean here, even your head tastes salty.' After that, we went to live with my husband's family. I took care of his mother and aunts, the old women, and they all touched my belly, they said, This child survived a storm, he is already lucky.' Let him be good, I prayed, and he was, from the moment he was born, he was. But my husband couldn't find work, he didn't rebuild our house, he wasted our money."

In the morning light, a lone wagon moved along the sidewalk, behind the garden, out of sight.

"I love Adel, Bea, but I miss my husband. He gave me a child."

Nisrine was a maid with a growing heart. She had left a family that she loved, and now she worked to build a new home, to replace the one that had been broken; to send her family money, to start a new life. And yet, to be happy in her work, she had to find other loves; this was her dilemma-how to love here, and love there; to work for one love, she needed the excitement of the other.

We leaned out over the railing, arms crossed, feeling the air on our faces, feeling policemen in the air.

Then, from the edge of the rooftop, we saw a hand waving.

"It's him!" Nisrine cried.

The hand stayed there for a moment, waiting. Then, slowly, as Nisrine uncrossed both arms to wave back, Adel appeared. His hair was golden. There were bra.s.s medals on his chest.

She used my cell phone to call him.

"You talk to him, Bea."

"I don't know what to say."

"You talk to him. He knows I very love you, Bea. I very very love you, you know."

I said, "h.e.l.lo?"

"h.e.l.lo, Bea! Does your father have a car? My father has that one, in green."

There was a red car driving below us.

Nisrine took the phone.

"Hi, habibi, you love me?"

I could hear him on the other end. "It is beautiful when a woman questions."

She kissed my cell phone at the mouthpiece. "Bye-bye, go on now, bye-bye, this is Bea's phone. Say good-bye to her, you love me, bye-bye."

"Your face glows like a star. I'm an open book. Ask me anything."

"Bye-bye, this is Bea's phone, you love me-"

"-bye, Bea!"

"Bye-bye!"

She hung up.

I took the phone.

On the roof he raised one arm to the sky.

Inside, we heard Madame waking. We ran to the kitchen. From the window, we could see him waving.

Arabic is a phonetic language; in this way it's economical. Each word only gets the letters it most needs. My name had two sounds, the b and the e, and so in Arabic I got two letters, not three, and in colloquial speech my name wasn't a name, but a preposition: "Bea" can mean on or around or in.

Nisrine was also a foreigner, but her name was more common than mine, and it had three sounds, so she still got at least three letters like the Arabs did, whether she wrote her name in Arabic, English, or Indonesian. In Arabic, you could write Nisrine's name two ways, because there were two letters that made the sound "sri." With a soft s, these letters were also the root for commerce and purchase. With a deep s, Nisrine's letters formed the root for virtue, and to overcome.

Some days, I felt like my name, a lowly connector. I felt our names were the difference between Nisrine and me: She was a noun and a verb in Arabic. Her name acted and moved and had money, while mine just got stuck in between.

But there is a lightness to love, even when it's not your own. There is camaraderie in waving. She took my hand. Adel stood on one side, we stood on the other, waving and waving.

Nisrine had once told me about a word that meant maid, and heroine, and moveable house. It was not from her language, it was from her mother's, who came from a different island. But in Nisrine's town, the concept was the same.

"When I was young, when a family wanted to move, the town all got together, picked up the house from its old spot, and set it down in its new one. That was what we called moving. We took our houses with us."

Nisrine's last house had been moveable. It had been built by her brothers, and migrated to her husband's family after she was married. A moveable house was like a maid's, or a heroine's, heart. It had to be flexible, but strong; to make a place for itself anywhere, no matter the surroundings; for those who counted on it, to always be a home.

"Did you like living in it?"

"Of course, Bea. It was my house." The one she had lost when a tree fell, before the birth of her child.

She smiled. "Moveable houses are beautiful, but they are hard, and old-fas.h.i.+oned. A storm comes, you have to get twenty people to sit in it, so it doesn't fall over. There wasn't gla.s.s in our windows, only wood shutters; at night, the bugs blew in. When I go home, I'm going to build a cement house, with cement foundations. That way, my child will know permanence."

Permanence: cement that doesn't give when a village lifts it.

I had grown up in a cement-foundation house that didn't move; I'd lived in that same house, on those same cement foundations my whole life, and the truth was, I found myself trying to get away from them. I had come here to feel different, because at home, I hadn't felt enough.

Still, I was glad to know Nisrine's house's story. It gave familiar words, new definitions.

A moveable house was one that went with you, that a community came together and lifted.

Community-that which doesn't just force you to stay, but helps you to move forward.

Home-what you take when you go.

I looked at Nisrine, thankful to her for giving me these new meanings to think about.

Foreigners in this city, Nisrine and I each had our dreams; she her house, I my text. I was glad to know about Nisrine's dreams; I was glad not to dream alone.

Out on the rooftop, Adel was still waving. Nisrine sighed, smiled, waved back.

"He's from Allah, Bea. He knew I was all alone here, I had no one." Though, she had me beside her, my arm in her arm, waving. "My G.o.d, Allah, sent him down to me."

THAT EVENING, I read over the story of Qais and Leila, searching for good characters.

Nisrine saw me. "What are you doing, Bea?"

It was a silly thing. "Nothing, studying."

But, she watched my finger, how it stopped over certain people-Leila's mother, her sisters.

Nisrine asked, "Have you heard of the shepherd?"

I had heard of the shepherd. He met Qais after he was exiled to the desert, and helped him find water.

"He did more than that," Nisrine said. "He cared for Qais and became his friend. Some say he's the one who kept Qais's poems, and later made them famous."

"Really?"

"Yes, you should look into it."

A keeper of poems. It wasn't like being Leila. Still.

"Maybe I will."

UNREST.

IN THE NIGHT, there were gunshots. In Madame's apartment, we all jumped. Baba rushed to the window to look, but he couldn't see anything. He ran out and opened the door, which led to a hall without windows. The neighbors were also at their doors. We all stood at our doors in the apartment hallway, talking about the gunshots, and whether this meant there were antigovernment protests. There were rumors of a takeover.

Madame herded us all onto the sofa in the living room and boiled water for tea. On the radio there wasn't talk of the gunshots. There was a special on the life and times of a famous poet.

Baba said, "I'm going to look around."

"Outside?" Madame asked. "Stay with us, Ha.s.san. It's dark outside. You can't even see."