Issue 23

Alexia Nader

A girl from Merjan’s school got a boyfriend, which would have been the beginning of the same life as every woman in the town—girlfriend, wife, mother, lover, corpse—not of interest at all, except the couple got into the habit of playing a dangerous game in open air. Holding each other’s forearms, they balanced on two wooden planks left on the old roof of a building off the main square. The rest of the roof and most of the building’s interior had burned down in the big fire. In the face of the fire’s power, which everyone in the town always clucked about as if it were the cause of all of Port-de-Paix’s misfortune, the couple locked eyes, laughed, flirted, swayed back and forth, her weight on his and his on hers, each testing the other’s will.

The three old men at the end of the square, who commented on everything that happened and everyone who walked by, had nothing to say about that daring feat. But someone went to find the girl’s guardians, as everyone knew the boy was from a crazy family and wouldn’t be of help. The girl arrived at school the next day with bruises on her neck and arms, and her head held high. She managed to return to the line on the roof again and again. Merjan and Georgina often saw the couple on the way back to the apartment from school. Georgina always wanted to know what Merjan knew about the girl.

She was just ordinary, laughed in a cackle, which made everyone laugh at her laugh. Merjan thought for a moment. She was good at math, Merjan said, but she didn’t care about school.

Why does she love him, you think? Georgina asked. Merjan said she had no idea, but she knew. It wasn’t the boy this girl liked, but who she became around the boy. She wanted to leave her ordinary skin on the ground. On the roof, her feet turned out like a duck, her spine held firm and proud as a palm trunk, her eyes stirred his, as those below her yelled: Get down you idiots! Don’t invite more curses on this town. As if this town weren’t already cursed by its townspeople, who could not imagine anything more than how much their neighbor had, what they wanted the next year, when the next storm would arrive, or how their children’s lives would turn out exactly like theirs.

Merjan passed by the old men. Their stares followed her. One of them said, If her uncle saw her walking around, swaying her hips like a mule—

Merjan turned to Georgina and grabbed her hand. Have you ever talked to a boy? Tell me the truth.

No, and if one tries to talk to me I’ll run so fast away, he won’t be able to catch up. Georgina eyed the dusty road.

That’s good, Merjan said, and she and Georgina raced the two blocks home. Racing by, the buildings turned into blurs of white and gray and did not look as sad as nutshells.

You slowed down on purpose, Georgina said, biting her lip.

Merjan told Georgina she had not, but this was a lie. When turning the corner, Merjan had thought that if she disappeared, Georgina would not know how to get home. She did not know why this felt true. Georgina had walked that route every day with her for years.

At fifteen, Merjan graduated from fetching Joseph objects to washing his feet. The first time her father saw her hunched over a bowl of gray, soapy water, he turned away without a word. Once away from Joseph, her mother tried to talk down her father’s anger. It was not so bad to wash a man’s feet. Think of the Bible. Joseph is not Jesus, her father pointed out. Her mother provided her typical pleas for understanding: they still owed him their good life here. Her father must have agreed because they said nothing to Joseph. If he took his home and his shop away, where would they go, where would they be? From where she kneeled at his feet, she would try not to remember what his face had looked like years ago in the photograph that had lured them here from her first home. His face in the photograph lived in the mountains in Lebanon, which she knew only as Eden; it lived before the word Haiti had any meaning at all. Joseph had no more stories of his and her father’s youth left, and she had stopped listening to the old ones. Joseph’s feet were still calloused from his youth, at least that’s what he told her, but they were not ever that dirty. Her hands around his feet, she asked Joseph if there was any possibility of sending her to Port-au-Prince to a lycée. The answer would be no. It was worse than no—Joseph looked at her as if she were a beggar at his door. Why? he asked.

Instead, he let her pick what they listened to on the radio. She dialed past rapid French to the music of jazz bands offering echoes of Port-au-Prince. She knew some tunes from the orchestrion that came to town once every few months from Cap-Haïtien, but rather than the thin, silvery tinkle unspooling from the enormous hand-cranked box, the radio boomed the thick, crowded colors of a city: the musicians alone could fill the entire main square of Port-au-Prince, never mind all the people listening to their brass and drumbeat, the rhythms of the ancestors of the true people of Haiti. City voices sang of people in the countryside, like the people of Port-de-Paix, who had pride and dignity in living from their own garden, eating their own food, and casting away foreigners.

If that’s what the city men in Port-au-Prince thought, they had probably never lived in a country town. Country musicians from country towns complained and made fun of people in their lyrics, just like they did on the street. No one was safe from the venom of the country rhythm, of all those eyes watching each other, waiting for a chance to prove that no one was above everyone else’s vices. Still, she preferred the romantic version of the countryside to its real sounds out the window, and she wished the radio could boom, but it did not, because Auntie was sick and needed to rest.

Merjan held onto the tunes from Port-au-Prince while she rubbed Joseph’s arches and soaped between his toes. They stayed in her head until she was safe in her room, where she practiced moves copied from the farmers who danced in the square. Her music was Georgina’s giggles and a thread of her own voice, thinner than even the orchestrion’s sound—dak-ta-dak-ta-dak-ta. She rounded her sway, and imagined a certain boy pressed against her.

The boy she imagined, Ibrahim, was from Port-au-Prince. Ibrahim’s Port-au-Prince was full of Lebanon. She knew it wasn’t true. Everything from the radio, everything she learned in school told her that only Haitians lived in Port-au-Prince. But Ibrahim’s parents had come from Lebanon like her family had, and sometimes Ibrahim spoke of a club of Lebanese men in Port-au-Prince, which meant there were enough men for a club.

Merjan and Georgina were not invited to eat with the boy, who wasn’t family and couldn’t be trusted around girls. Ibrahim stayed on Joseph’s side of the apartment, and ate with Joseph, her father, her brothers, and her mother, while from the other side of their bedroom door, she and Georgina listened to his terrible Arabic, which burst into Creole at times when he couldn’t contain his excitement over Port-au-Prince’s twists and turns. For months, she contented herself with dancing with a faceless boy, his voice wrapped around her, but when she looked up, there was only her bedroom, their old toys, Georgina.

On one visit, as if Ibrahim were speaking to her through the door, he told her family about a grand exhibition in Port-au-Prince where Haitian artists would display their work next to artists from all over the entire world. Estimé was building a new city, within Port-au-Prince, brand new buildings, and anyone who was anyone in the world, not Haiti, the entire world, would be there, he said. People talked about how much money Estimé was spending, how he had demolished a slum to build a clean space for tourists. They said he couldn’t afford to spend so much on this frivolous thing when Haiti’s farmers were suffering, but in Ibrahim’s opinion, the money was well spent. He knew it mattered what the rest of the world thought of Haiti. Tourists were the best customers at the shop where Ibrahim worked.

Her father vaguely responded to Ibrahim’s comments. He knew nothing about Haitian politics. He was not a man who wanted to stick his nose in the commotion that this boy brought along with him; he wanted to listen to other people’s problems, taste the after-dinner sweetness of the fact that they were not his own.

Ibrahim’s boss was enamored of the paintings of Haitian artists from a place called the Centre d’Art. His boss, who knew about these things, declared that the artists’ work would turn to gold after the exhibition.

What did artists do? Where did they live? If they lived anywhere, it was Port-au-Prince. The only painter she knew of in Port-de-Paix was the man who decorated doors with bursts of flowers in exchange for bottles of clairin. Merjan looked down at her sketches, which suddenly seemed small, simple, silly. What would they look like if she were an artist, the way Ibrahim had pronounced the word, with such reverence?

She wouldn’t try to speak to Ibrahim, just try to catch a glimpse of his face. A look would be enough and would not get her into too much trouble if she was found out. One evening, she crept into the sitting room and willed herself to look in the direction of the kitchen table where her family was eating with the boy. His mouth was open mid-sentence; his eyes tried to catch her father’s, Joseph’s, her father’s again; he saw nothing beyond the table. She remembered she had seen something of Port-au-Prince as a girl. She began to sketch the source of Ibrahim’s voice, starting from a straight line for the part in his hair, a line like the road he’d taken from Port-au-Prince to their town. What would it feel like to kiss the mouth that contained his mysterious, hybrid city? His thick eyebrows, his nose in profile, as strong as his name Ibrahim sounded.

At fifteen, Merjan finally did not have to go to school anymore, only she began to miss it right away. At least at school she could sketch during lessons. In Joseph’s shop, where she now spent endlessly long days, she was under her father’s bored, bird-like eye. Her father’s idea of conversation was to gossip about who owned what empty tract of land and was doing nothing with it. Joseph told his wife he was still working at the shop, but he really left Port-de-Paix every morning to visit his mistress who lived in the countryside. No one told Auntie, but Merjan’s mother prayed for Joseph’s soul.

Once a day, if it was a busy day, someone came in searching for fabric for the house or a dress. Merjan’s least favorite part about Auntie’s old job was selling dress fabric. Her observations of variations in the color of the hair, eyes, or skin tone of the women who came in had to be transformed into some form of flattery. Once, Merjan told one woman that a canary yellow silk would complement her dark skin. The woman called her a devil and left in a huff without buying anything. For a week, she feared the woman would complain to Joseph and she would be fired. After that, she chose her words more carefully, speaking to the customers in French, knowing her father was listening, furious at his own muteness. Gently, she would tell her father which cloth the customers wanted to see. She bent her mind carefully around small phrases of speech until she could release them from her tongue as stripped of malice as possible. She would ask where the ship was coming from this month, how much rain was falling, how good the orchestrion sounded the last time. She was always surprised when what came out of her mouth was reciprocated at all—mostly in distracted, condescending but ultimately harmless tones. As long as she did not mention anyone’s skin, she was not a threat to anyone’s position.

No one who came into the shop noticed that she had replaced Auntie behind the counter. When Auntie died a year after Merjan began working in the shop, the priest requested that the burial be very discreet. The town should not be reminded that a Syrienne was being buried in the same place as their loved ones. The priest whispered the final prayers to two families, Merjan’s and Joseph’s. The beloved’s family looks to God on the mound of her dust, waiting for vindication, he said. Job said it was his own eyes, not another’s, that waited and waited to see God, as his being consumed itself with longing. The families responded as one: Amen. When they returned home from the graveyard, Merjan’s mother atoned for the priest’s callousness, praying loudly in the apartment and keeping Joseph fed. A month later, Merjan’s mother remarked to her father that Joseph needed another wife. Perhaps he would send word to Port-au-Prince, or perhaps that wasn’t necessary at all.

During those days, a rara for Port-au-Prince’s carnival used to parade through the radio to a low drumbeat, and a bouquet of horns:

Where are the people?

I don’t see the people.

Where are the people slandering others?

I don’t see the people insulting others.

Nice to your face, nasty behind your back!

She often hummed this song as she waited for Ibrahim to return home after his bezique game out in the countryside. Ibrahim split his winnings at bezique three ways. He took one third, and gave two-thirds to his sponsors, her father and Joseph, to split as they saw fit. When Ibrahim lost, Joseph and her father would speak with one voice. They would say that Ibrahim was eating their heads, treating their money carelessly; he was without a face, or a civilized tongue. But when Ibrahim won, long pauses—habibi, cousin—divided her father’s and Joseph’s careful words to each other, and after dividing the money, they avoided each other’s eyes for days.

Merjan’s father did not know how to play bezique but he thought it involved moves called tricks. One player puts down one card on the table, then another player puts down a card containing more or less power. If you can produce a higher card, you win the hand. How you produce the higher card all the time was the trick. Who knows what kind of dirty magic that boy has picked up among the nègs? That’s probably why he’s so good at it, her father said one day in the shop. Her father had probably lost money. She asked him if he ever wanted to learn the game.

No, you can’t trust a man who’s good at cards.

She burned the drawings she had made of Ibrahim, without knowing whether she did so to protect them from her father, Joseph, or herself.

Years after she first heard his voice, he saw her. On the next beat he moved his gaze to her father. Her father was fiddling with cloth scraps behind the shop counter, tired of her company, and hungry for gossip in his mother tongue. Ibrahim said it had been a good sales day. He had sold lots of presents—he winked, at her father, perhaps—shoes, scarves, paper roses—and he had sold a few records to the gros blan in the countryside who played them for him on his record player. On his way home, Ibrahim had seen these two crazy people balanced on a piece of wood on a burned down roof. True love birds, he declared with a flick of a hand, which went straight to her chest.

Her father said, Everyone knows about those two. Their heads are going to break open like cocos.

But a miss by an inch is a miss by a mile, that’s the risk, no? He darted the question at her, perhaps, a question like another brief glance, or nothing at all.

The glance could not stoke the courage she needed to defy her father, her mother, and Joseph. But then, on one of Joseph’s trips to Port-au-Prince, her father told her to stop washing Joseph’s feet. What am I supposed to do when he tells me to do it? Her father slammed his hand on the wooden counter.

Tell him no, he said, as if it were that simple. It was not that simple, but still there was the crack between her father and Joseph, as filled with light and sound as the crack in the door.

What can one do? her mother asked. Merjan had asked whether her father would marry her to Joseph. For once, Merjan took her mother’s question for a true question, not a prayer.

The next time Ibrahim came, the orchestrion did too, and in the square Ibrahim shamelessly danced merengues with women in from the countryside while her father and Joseph looked on and she and Georgina watched from their apartment window. Georgina would not sit still. Merjan told her there was something she could do that would really test the swiftness she was always bragging about. Would she dare to go down to the courtyard, make her way to Ibrahim, and give him this note? Georgina wanted to know what was in the note.

This is boring, she said, after she read it. Why don’t you tell him you love him?

Because it’s not true yet.

In the waistband of Georgina’s skirt, the note traveled through the shadows on the poorly lit side of the square. She saw Ibrahim’s head turn at a sound. When the song was over, he disappeared into a slant of darkness and re-emerged looking in her direction. Georgina said her heart was running hard when she spoke her first words to a boy: Take this.

He returned months later with an art catalogue in French and articles about the exhibition in Port-au-Prince. Though he and Merjan could not speak, they had a conversation through the scraps of paper. He showed her a reproduction of a painting by a man named Gourgue who had won the highest prize at the exhibition. The black-and-white photograph did not show how Gourgue had dispersed Haiti’s sun over the tops of the potted flowers he painted. Only later in her life, having seen the painting in person, did she see how the light pushed out pinks and yellows from the flowers’ unseen interiors. The light fanned out some petals coquettishly, opened up a pink like the inside of her lips, emboldened yellows of star-shaped flowers, echoing night in day, as if the brazen color could turn the sky inside out. A girl in hiding, no colors in her hand, the light only suggested by a lack of black ink, she saw the struggle of a still life, the speck of decay tied to the sun’s ever-presence, and she copied it over and over again in her notebook, and painted her gratitude to Ibrahim with paper and lime juice—a wordless, nearly traceless love letter. She left it where he would find it. If he knew what to do with the drawing—put it under flame where he could see lines form—he would find a way to take her with him to Port-au-Prince.

Months later, when he returned, Ibrahim knew where to find her, right off the square, hidden from silver stares, but in the music’s orbit. The music of the country band had a softer pulse than the music on the radio: a light trot in her chest, guitar strumming across her arms like a December breeze. Her spine straightened when he put a hand on her back. Relax, he told her. His pushes and pulls buried themselves in her body. They moved away from each other and slid closer, away and closer, their bodies slippery with humidity and sweat, as they connected and drew away again. His breath did not have to travel far from the curve of her neck to her ear, and he said: You are my little artist. The word spread in her heart like a stain in cloth.

He would talk to her father, take her with him out of here.

Do you agree? The hidden street opened to the square, to yellow light, to music, but also to Joseph and her father.

Yes.

She kept on her white cotton wedding dress the entire ride from Port-au-Paix to their honeymoon in the mountains of Kenscoff. On the back of the truck’s open bed, Ibrahim stroked her hand and told her about his trick card. It did not come from any dirty magic, but from a dream. His house had burned down, his family had disappeared, he was standing alone among the ashes when an old woman told him to follow her. She took him to a graveyard, where he saw not words, but these numbers written on his own tombstone. He woke up and right away played the lottery with the numbers. When he won, he knew exactly what to do with the money.

Ibrahim was a man who did not just wish for what he wanted, he bent the world to his wish. Like the good salesman he was, he figured out in no time what her father wanted, why he had been talking about this particular plot of land right off the river for years. Ibrahim talked to the farmer who owned the land. At once, Ibrahim was a good man, and would take care of her, and her father was not worried about her leaving with him to Port-au-Prince. Ibrahim bribed the priest for his silence during a night wedding while Joseph was away in Port-au-Prince. He was not afraid of Joseph at all. Joseph is reasonable, Ibrahim had said. He’ll understand you are not his daughter, you are your father’s daughter.

After all those years in Joseph’s house, she still did not know if Ibrahim was right, if Joseph would be reasonable. If he were reasonable, her mother wouldn’t have given her the St. Christopher coin that had once protected her from the vastness of the sea. The saints would protect her. From whom, or what? If he were reasonable, then during the ceremony, Georgina would not have yelled at her not to leave her behind. Merjan spoke too harshly when she told Georgina she had to learn when to be quiet. Georgina put her palms over her eyes, but she would not be able to block out her new world.

The yellows peeking into the early morning sky revealed Ibrahim once again, and she asked if she could sketch him. He said he needed another shave, and suddenly his stubble became tender. The road rushing by, she focused her pencil on the indentation right under Ibrahim’s chin where his neck met his shoulders, and desire overwhelmed her. For whom, or what? Joseph’s wrinkled skin made the point more difficult to find. For months after Merjan’s father had said he did not want his daughter to wash Joseph’s feet, she had continued the routine, unable to say the words she needed to say, but one day Joseph told her to get the bowl of water, and she had not said no. She’d told him to ask her father for permission. Joseph took his hand and lifted her chin. For a moment, he might have tried to kiss her. But instead he said the last words he would ever say to her: Go get my cousin.

She had closed her eyes. The bodies and screams for God’s mercy had rushed by the shop window. At the source of the noise, a mass of people emerged from inside the old building. Men were carrying a plank of wood under the girl’s body. She was breathing, screaming from a hollowed heart and contracted legs. The congregation swelled as bystanders followed the girl down the street, in the direction of her family’s home. She stared up at the roof of the building, now completely open to the sky; the lines holding the couple together had broken. What had caused the wood to crack? Where was the boy mourning his beloved?