Though Rania’s wide eyes moistened, they made no appeal to Omar Yussef. He could read her only as clearly as he might have made out a goldfish at the bottom of a fountain, distorted and out of proportion.
“I had an opportunity,” she said. “I seized it. Then it was destroyed. It’s gone forever. Knowing that it was real does no good, because the joy was in having it. Thinking of it or dreaming about it only makes its absence harder to bear.”
“Are you talking about Nizar?”
She slammed her hand down on the desk. “I’m talking about me.” Something sensuous and strong reached out from her gaze. It seemed to Omar Yussef that it touched his cheek and stopped his breath.
“‘We created the houris and made them virgins, living companions for those on the right side,’” he murmured. He grunted, only then realizing that he had spoken the words of the Koran aloud as he watched Rania’s face.
“That’s what Nizar used to call me-his houri,” she said. “But they’re supposed to be ‘perfect companions,’ so I’m no houri, and Little Palestine is no Paradise.”
“You must allow yourself to mourn without being too hard on yourself.”
“I disappointed my father, and Ala too. I even disappointed Nizar. I’m a faithless woman, ustaz.”
“Faith in human qualities is like faith in Allah-”
“I don’t mean faithless in that way.”
“Faithless in love? Disappointment is a part of love. You will overcome-”
“I disappointed them.” She shook her head, and she hammered her palm onto the desk again. “But I didn’t disappoint myself. I went to Manhattan, and there I did things that are forbidden. I did them for myself. I didn’t want to wait until Paradise to be happy. I loved the things I did that were supposed to be barred to me, and I loved the man I did them with, though he also was forbidden to me. That’s what infuriates me. I live here among people who’d condemn me for the only things in my life that’ve been worthwhile.”
Omar Yussef shuddered. He saw in Rania’s dark eyes confusion, copulation, prohibited things he had renounced, and things not even known to him because they were so blameworthy. It was as if he found in one of her eyes the restrained life of a conservative Arab girl and in the other the world that pawed at her as she passed along the streets of Brooklyn-the advertisements displaying half-naked bodies, the crude language, and the disrespect. He wondered which eye had the better vision.
He watched her sob, her fingers knitted together before her eyes, her face lowered to the papers on the desk. He recognized the guilt in her then, visible on her pale flesh like a bruise. He knew he had to push her now, before the tears washed away the signs.
“What’s the Masjid al-Alamut?” he said.
She shrugged without looking up.
“The Alamut Mosque?” he repeated. “You’ve never heard of it? Your father didn’t pray there?”
Rania blew her nose on a tissue. “He didn’t pray, ustaz.” She dabbed at her eyes. No makeup had run, and Omar Yussef realized that the shining ebony of her long lashes was natural.
“What was Nizar like as a boy, ustaz?” Her voice was suddenly clear and free from bitterness, like a child’s.
“I thought you said joy was a present happiness, not a future Paradise or a memory of a good time.”
She smiled through her tears, and Omar Yussef felt the touch of her gaze against his cheek again.
“Nizar was a bit of an operator, I remember,” he said, “but never malicious. He was one of those devilish types who surprises you by how caring he can be.”
“Was he religious, as a boy?”
“Not so much.” Omar Yussef was unsure if her curiosity was a diversion or a true desire to track the intimate traces of a lost love. “Did your father kill Nizar to protect your good name?”
“You think my father worried so much about my reputation? Just because he lost his temper about me being with a man, when you were at our cafe?” She shook her head. “He was all talk.”
“It’s true that drug dealers aren’t usually so concerned with the family image.”
Rania flinched, and her tears stopped. “My father wasn’t a bad man.” The girl blew her nose into another tissue. As she tossed it into the wastepaper basket, the end of her nose was briefly red. Omar Yussef watched its pallor return. If someone were to attack her with a knife as they had assaulted her father, this spot on her nose confirmed that she would bleed, perhaps until her veins emptied. He thought she had cried out all her capacity for pain, and with it had gone the healing that scabs over a wound.
“He was in jail in Lebanon, wasn’t he?” he said.
She ran her tongue over her lips, pale pink like a fingernail.
“Could his killer have been someone from his past?”
“He was forced into the drug business during the civil war,” she said.
“Forced?”
“By Islamic Jihad people. They came to the Bekaa to train with the Iranians, the Revolutionary Guards, and they recruited local people like Dad to do their dirty work. He had no choice. They didn’t ask him nicely, if you see what I mean. When the government wanted to jail some drug producers, Islamic Jihad sacrificed my father, because they knew he wasn’t one of them.”
“What do you mean?”
“He didn’t believe in Islamic revolution. He didn’t love the Iranian mullahs or want Hizballah to take over Lebanon, and he didn’t care at all about the Palestinian cause. He just loved me and my mother.”
“Then he was freed in the government amnesty.”
“Amnesty.” Rania laughed scornfully. “We left Lebanon right away, so that he could forget how he’d been forced to live. We came to the U.S.”
“But someone back home would’ve known he lied on his U.S. immigration forms about his drug conviction,” Omar Yussef said. “If he’d told the truth, the Americans would’ve never allowed him to become a citizen. They wouldn’t even have given him a visa as a tourist. Isn’t that right?”
Rania fingered a plastic paperweight in the shape of the Dome of the Rock. The dome was painted in a garish egg-yolk yellow. “Someone from Islamic Jihad found him here. I don’t know who it was. My father called him ‘the little bastard.’ Excuse my language, ustaz.”
“That’s all right. I’m not a fan of the Jihad. This man forced your father to sell drugs here in Brooklyn?”
Rania’s chin dropped to her chest.
“Can you forgive him?” Omar Yussef asked.
She was briefly confused. “For selling drugs?” she said.
“This is the day that you’ll bury your father. Make your peace with what he did.”
“I can forgive him for the drugs, ustaz. That was the fault of the son of a whore from Islamic Jihad. But I can’t forgive him for letting Nizar work with him.”
“Is that why Nizar died? Because of his connection to the drugs?”
Rania shook her head, and tears brought a higher sheen to her black lashes. She waved Omar Yussef out of the room. He shut the door behind him.
Chapter 19
As Omar Yussef went out through the waiting room, the woman chewing her gum looked him up and down with disdain. Calm yourself, dear lady, he thought. This was one queue I’d rather not have jumped. He stepped outside, fumbling with the zipper of his parka. A boy of about seven years nipped through the glass door as it closed behind him and pulled at the coat.
Omar Yussef came slowly down onto his haunches to face the boy. He smiled. “What is it, clever boy?”
The boy gave a cry and lifted a knife. Reflexively Omar Yussef threw himself against the wall, sliding onto his backside. The boy giggled and waved the knife. It was an elaborate Omani dagger with a curved eight-inch blade.
In his shock, it took Omar Yussef a few seconds even to be angry with the crowing child. “Where’s your mother?” he said.