The room was empty, as I had expected. I located the video I was looking for without any difficulty. It was on the metal stand beside the monitors, the only tape in the tape carousel: CLIPS, SEASON 14, PROGRAM 7. I fast-forwarded through the first five or ten minutes, waiting for inspiration to strike, and stopped finally at the babies-who-look-like-celebrities montage. Most of the babies resembled the only celebrity any baby ever resembles, Winston Churchill, but a few of them were decked out in costumes that made them look like Elvis or Cher or Marilyn Monroe—a consequence of the wigs and clothing they wore rather than any real similarity, just as anyone will look like Groucho Marx if you put him in a pair of Groucho glasses and a mustache.
It was an easy enough thing for me to replace the baby montage with footage from the Ann Wilson video. I had filled in for our production technicians any number of times, and once you familiarized yourself with the editing equipment, duplicating material from one tape onto another was a snap. I rewound the clip video when I was finished and put it back in the carousel. I took the Ann Wilson video and stuffed it in my pocket. Then I locked the door, rode the elevator downstairs, and spent a while reading the newspaper in my office. There were hundreds of listings for grill cooks and chefs in the classifieds, and a handful for cooking institutes accepting new students in the spring.
The doors to the theater opened an hour or so later. The studio audience streamed into the building in their khakis and collared shirts, sandals and casual dresses, toting tiny plastic purses and shopping bags with the network logo printed on them. The ushers guided them to their assigned rows, and a few minutes before the taping commenced, I slipped through the door and joined them, finding an empty seat in the back of the theater where I could settle in to enjoy the spectacle.
At 3:55 on the dot, the Second Goofy Man took the stage, saying, “Welcome, welcome, welcome, ladies and gentlemen! We're going to show you a good time tonight, so get ready to laugh!”
It would be another twenty minutes before he announced, “It looks like Bill Clinton has got a little competition from somebody—and I do mean ‘little,’ folks.” I couldn't wait for the moment when his expression would pucker as he realized what had appeared on the screen behind him. It would be worth all the trouble in the world, every possible recrimination, just to see it rise.
THE AIR IS FULL OF LITTLE HOLES
The parchments proclaim it, and it is true: neglect is a friend to the weary, fame a friend to the strong. The year my photograph was taken, I was living in a refugee camp at the foot of the mountains. My mother and father had died in the bombing shortly before we fled our village, and for nearly half my life my grandmother had taken care of me. I remember watching as Yusuf, one of the boys in the camp, whipped his belt around like a whirlwind to churn the dust up from the grass. Insects the size and color of sesame seeds went hopping out of his reach in all directions. A clutch of them had just landed on my skirt when a man with a jacket that seemed to whisper against itself as he swung his arms—an American—said to me, “Girl, look here.”
A little hole opened up in the air, and light came pouring through from the other side. For a moment I believed that the man had shot me and I was dying, and I thought of what my grandmother had always told me—that if ever death comes to take you and you believe he has arrived by mistake, you must meet him with defiance in your eyes. I refused to look away.
The man let the box he was holding fall to his chest, where it dangled from a flat black strap. His speech was bold and graceless, the words lumbering out of his mouth like brown bears, but even so, I understood what he meant. “I have moved you into the picture,” he said. He smiled at me and set off across the camp, tilting his head one way and then another as he squinted at our tents and our cooking fires, at the warm stream spilling down from the mountain, at the pitiful ash tree growing by the garbage trench, its thin head enveloped in a shock of yellowing leaves.
Yusuf ran up to me, his belt snaking through the grass. “That man, what did he want from you?”
“Did you see the box he was carrying? I think it was a camera.”
He sat down, took my hand, and began cleaning my nails with his index finger, carefully scraping the dirt away and letting it fall to the ground. My fingertips! If they had given off sparks, I would not have been more surprised.
After a while, Yusuf stopped grooming me and said, “You're getting older now. You don't know how beautiful you've become. I tell you this as someone who cares about you: maybe it would be best if you began to cover yourself like a woman.”
When I fasten my memory upon that day, I cannot say what was more remarkable about it, that my photograph was taken by an American in a whispering jacket or that Yusuf, my Yusuf, found the courage to tell me I was beautiful.
I was fourteen when the war ended, fifteen when I married. My head was anointed with sandalwood oil, my hands and feet painted with henna, and the priest led me to the prayer tent and seated me next to Yusuf, instructing us to gaze at each other in the nuptial mirror so that we might see ourselves as God did, side by side and clothed in the brightest silver.
It was high summer when we left the camp for my parents' village in the foothills of the mountains, traveling down roads made rocky and narrow by a decade of bombs. By the time we arrived I was carrying the first of our daughters. She was born early the next year, just as the honeysuckles were beginning to blossom behind our house. We named her Nawar in their honor. The next few years brought three more flowers to our garden: Zahra, Izdihaar, and Nesayem. The sound of their voices, the sight of their little fists gripping their spoons with such ferocity, these things filled us with joy. Then one morning I woke to find our youngest, Nesayem, lying heavy in her cradle, and with one touch of her cold clay skin, I could tell that she was dead.
I had never forgotten the weariness that overtook me after my parents were killed, nor the savagery of my tears as I walked with my grandmother to the refugee camp, so I was able to meet my grief with a kind of recognition. I was aware that in time my heart would settle, like a pond after a thunderstorm, into a wistful stillness that might almost pass for peace.
Yusuf had no such familiarity with loss. His appetite deserted him. The straight lines of his bones began to show through his skin. It was all he could do to put his shoes on in the morning and head out with the other men to tend the terraces above the village. At night, as we lay in bed, he would cry in almost perfect silence, as if to keep me from hearing him, yet he would press himself against my body so tightly that I could feel his tears flowing down my neck. Did he want me to comfort him? I was too frightened to ask.
I tried my best to nurture him surreptitiously, keeping his hair clipped short, mending the frays in his clothes, and making the boulanee and yogurt sauce he liked so much. Even the girls seemed to sense what was needed, climbing onto his lap when he got home and asking, “Baba, will you make your tiger face? Baba, will you tell us a story?”
But it took the first deep snow of winter and its long days of smoke-scented isolation before the Yusuf we had known finally came back to us. I remember the moment well. We were sitting at the table listening to the ice hiss in the chimney when he said, “Did I tell you about the rock we found in the wheat field last month? Rahi thought it was wedged in deep, but when he tried to pry it out, it came loose and he fell over backward.”
Yusuf smiled into his chin, wearing that old expression of barely restrained amusement, and I knew that he would be all right.
The years that followed were surely the best in my life. There was the drought to contend against, with clusters of minnows spreading themselves flat in the puddles of the stream, and there was the wind that brought down the walnut tree in our front yard and the blight that killed the corn one summer, but through it all Yusuf and I were able to watch our daughters growing decent and strong, our home growing lush with memories, and with every year we had a greater sense of devotion to each other.
It seemed that our world would go on that
way forever.
Then the American returned.
One evening Yusuf came back from a trip to the city and asked me to sit with him on the sofa. He took my hand and said, “There is a Westerner who has been inquiring about you in the market. It appears, my wife, that you have become famous.”
The story as I came to know it was that the American, the one who wore his camera around his neck like a medallion, had arrived in the town where the refugee camp used to stand carrying a copy of the picture he had taken of me so many years before. He had spent several days showing it to the men assembled in the teahouses to drink and play chess. Eventually one of them had recognized me and taken him to see Yusuf 's brother, who had in turn pointed the way to the city nearest our village, where the American had left word that he wished to meet with me.
“But why?”
“I believe he wants to take another photograph,” Yusuf said. “Apparently, the first one appeared on the cover of a popular American magazine. The people there are dying to know what happened to you.” The idea was plainly ridiculous. I had to wait for the smile to fade from Yusuf 's face before he continued. “So the first question to ask is, are you willing to meet with this man?”
A jacket that seemed to speak to itself and a hole blossoming with white light—that was what the American had been reduced to in my memory. I had no particular desire to see him again. But Yusuf was my husband, and I told him it was only proper that he decide.
“The man has traveled so far,” he said. “There is custom to consider, yes, but there is also hospitality. In times like this, the parchments tell us to seek out our greater obligation. Do you agree?”
“If you wish.”
He sighed and drew his brows together. “I will have to consult with the rest of the village.”
That night I waited in the back room with my daughters while the men gathered around our table to discuss the matter. Izdihaar was suffering from a poisonwood rash that had just begun to lose its color, and she kept peeling little bits of her skin loose and flicking them at the other girls to aggravate them. I watched as Nawar and Zahra concocted various retributions against her, bumping her with their hips as they walked across the room or switching her name to Tafh Geldi, “skin rash,” when they spoke to her. They were bored—nothing more—but it was all I could do to keep them from coming to blows. I was unable to overhear more than a few fragments of the men's conversation.
The meeting had been in progress for almost an hour when someone began to shout. “Enough! We should be ashamed that we are even discussing such a thing.” It was Kashar, the youngest of the husbands, his voice leaping higher and higher like a wild goat scrambling up a mountain. “If we start exposing our wives to the eyes of any man with white skin and a wealthy accent, what will we have left? They've already taken the fish out of our streams, the coal out of our hills. Are we going to give them the last of our treasures, as well? We might as well throw our bones into the ground right now!”
A great din of curses and exclamations arose in the other room. The girls stood as quiet as owls for once, staring at one another out of the cool liquid depths of their eyes.
A short time later, after the house had been emptied and Yusuf had extinguished the candle in the majlis, he opened the door to us. “Tomorrow I will fetch the American,” he said.
The next morning I watched from the window as he vanished into the trees, his brown shirt and olive green turban following the dusty thread of path that led from our village into the city.
So much can happen in seventeen years. The American had lost all but a thin sickle of his hair. He had replaced his jacket with a heavy leather coat that creaked at the shoulders and elbows. His stomach had grown tighter, and he had taken to wearing a small pair of glasses. His speech, however, had not improved at all. “Do you know who I am in the past?”
I was reminded of the way my grandmother began to talk after the wasting disease entered her brain, in the days before she finally took to her bed and yielded up her spirit. “Yes, I remember you.”
“Good, good.” He sipped at the sweet milk tea I had poured for him, set his cup down, and showed his teeth in a nervous grin, examining our home like an awed merchant entering a palace—the ceramic vase and the scarred oak table, the sofa where I sat next to Yusuf, the fine muslin curtains we had been given on our wedding day. “You cannot pretend the trouble I had to find you. I talked to I would not try to count the numbers of men. You were so much a child when I locked your picture, I'm surprised you can true remember.”
“It's not the sort of day I would forget. It was the only time I ever had my picture taken.” An image came to me of Yusuf dragging his belt behind him, then sitting beside me and patiently cleaning my fingernails. “And there were other things, as well.”
“Would you like to see the picture?” the American asked.
I nodded. He opened the case he was carrying and handed me a magazine with a yellow border around the cover. The first thing I noticed about the picture was my head scarf. It had been scorched by a cooking fire and was riddled with holes, some of them embarrassingly large, like breaches in a bomb-damaged wall. I was about to explain what had happened when Yusuf, looking over my shoulder at the magazine, caught his breath. “Oh, how beautiful,” he whispered.
I inspected the picture more carefully. The parchments teach us that we see the world only from the back, which is why everything appears so imperfect to our eyes. There is no leaf on a tree that is not a leaf seen from behind, no star in the sky that is not a star seen from behind, no man and no woman who are not souls seen from behind. But occasionally, by the grace of God, the world turns its face to us, uncovering its perfection, and though the glimpse we are given never lasts longer than an instant, we remember it for the rest of our lives. It seemed to me that the American had managed to capture my image at the exact moment my face—my true face—was revealing itself to him. I could hardly believe it had once been me.
“In my home, humans look at this picture and they never forget.” His eyes were moist with emotion. “We get so many letters, even today, from those who want to childbear you. To childbear you? No, to adopt you. To adopt you or even to marry you. Your picture is like a badge to us. It shows the bravery of your people. I would like to know what has changed of you since then.”
“What has changed of me?” I thought the question over and began to talk. I told him about my wedding day and our journey across the mountains, about our garden of flowers and that poor pale blossom, Nesayem, who had been plucked so early from the soil, about the seasons that had passed so reliably in the village, about the honeysuckle vines that luxuriated along the fence behind our house, about the years when the sound of a plane would cause a dagger to pass through my heart and the day when the terror suddenly lifted and I realized I was free.
He used a silver pen to write in his notepad as I spoke. When I finished, he asked if he could take another picture of me. I looked to Yusuf, who nodded his permission.
The American requested that I avert my body and pose with my eyes gazing into the lens of his camera, just as I had when I was a child. Then he asked me to hold a framed copy of the magazine in my hands. Finally he suggested that I stand with Yusuf and our daughters so that he might capture a portrait of our entire family. I called the girls to join us from the other room. Nawar and Zahra were unusually subdued, but I had to hoist Izdihaar into my arms to keep her from running away.
The image is as clear to me now as it was then: the American's flashbulb punching little holes inside our house, and behind him, through the break in the curtains, a cluster of men looking on like witnesses gaping at an accident.
It was not long before our neighbors discovered a way to demonstrate their displeasure. The very day Yusuf escorted the American back to the city, he returned to find a note tucked into our doorjamb with a quotation from the parchments: “Say to the believing woman that she should lower her gaze and guard her modesty.” And the following morning,
while he was out weeding the terraces, someone slipped a second note into his satchel that read, “The best garment is the garment of righteousness.”
As the next few weeks passed, we uncovered note after note, in a variety of hands, all of them attempting to hold our family up to its shame. Almost every day, another slip of paper would appear like a pennant on our door. We found them battened inside the frame of the window, pinned beneath stones on the front porch, wedged between the slats of the fence. Even the children grew used to discovering them. One morning, Izdihaar came in from playing in the yard with a blank page that someone had torn out of a book and placed directly in her palm. Written on it was one word: “Repent.”
“Who gave this to you?” I asked, but she was young enough that the men of the village were all just strangers and uncles to her, an indistinguishable mass of giants, and she could not describe him except to say, “He was tall, and he had a beard.”
Yusuf told me not to worry about these incidents. “It is only Kashar and his friends. Soon they will find some new scandal to occupy their attention, and all this trouble will disappear.” Every time one of us chanced upon another note, he would say, “Nothing more than clouds in the sky,” and make a vanishing motion with his fingers, as if the wind were whisking the clouds away. When I closed my eyes, though, I saw something very different: a blanket of thunderheads stretching from horizon to horizon.