He went back through the turnstile. The clerk made a show of counting bills as he approached the booth.
“I bought a ticket for twenty dollars, sir,” Omar Yussef said, “but you gave me a card worth only eighteen.”
The clerk spoke, but Omar Yussef heard nothing. He repeated his complaint, and the clerk lifted his head to his microphone. “Sold you a twenty-dollar card, sir.” His voice drawled through the speaker as though it were cut roughly from metal.
Omar Yussef decided to be generous. “Then there has been a computer error, because the machine says I only have sixteen dollars remaining.”
“Sold you a twenty-dollar card, like I said.”
“You took my twenty and kept two dollars for your pocket.” Omar Yussef had the familiar feeling of his heartbeat quickening, drowning all sense of moderation and leaving him full of anger. “This is a damned outrage.”
“Watch your mouth, buddy,” the clerk said.
“You cheated me, sir.”
“I’ll make you a deal. I’ll give you another ticket for nothing.”
Omar Yussef took a long breath. “Very well.”
“One-way, non-stop back to Baghdad, Osama.” The clerk sniggered, as he licked his thumb to count a pile of twenties.
Omar Yussef brought his fist down beside the change tray. The quarters jumped on the clerk’s desk. “You may keep my two dollars,” Omar Yussef said. “I don’t wish to sell my dignity as cheaply as you do.”
The clerk sneered.
Omar Yussef swiped his card in the turnstile again and followed the signs for the Manhattan platform.
Chapter 6
The windows of the N train were scratched and daubed in an ugly paste graffiti, the translucent letters dripping like a sugar glaze on a cake. The floor was black and speckled to disguise the dirt, but pink smears of vomit and red chewing gum and the explosions of dropped soda cups stained it.
As Omar Yussef rattled toward Manhattan, fewer than half the slippery, unwelcoming seats in the car were taken. Encased in voluminous coats, the passengers hunched their shoulders, crossed their arms, and coughed into their collars, though it was warm in the train. Omar Yussef let his eyes drift across the smiling faces in the advertisements just below the ceiling of the car. The ads pushed training courses for para-legals and court reporters, the services of doctors who would give you better skin or allow you to commute on the train without hemorrhoid pain. He imagined the ads might have been there to torment the riders with the Siberian gloom of their journey, allowing them to glimpse the mediocre extent of the improvements they might pursue. Enclosed in plastic, strip lights flickered over the ads and across the immobile faces of the passengers. Their glow gave the train the somnambulant aura of a midnight bus station.
He felt a rush of loneliness. He missed his wife and wondered if he ought to have insisted on waiting for his son at the police station after all, despite Sergeant Abayat’s dissuasion. On the wall beside him, the N train snaked its yellow trail across a subway map. To distract himself from his worries, he lifted a finger to the map and tried to trace his path to his destination, but he lost track of the route in the mess of different lines converging on lower Manhattan. He realized that he’d forgotten Abayat’s instructions and was unsure if he needed to change trains again to make it back to his hotel. The variegated twirls on the map made no more sense to him than the wires in a diagram of an electrical appliance. He glanced nervously around the train. To ask directions might, he feared, invite a mugging.
A fur-lined hood bracketed the face of the girl on the bench opposite Omar Yussef. She was slight, even in her quilted brown coat, but her cheeks had an Andean broadness. Omar Yussef heard a jangling pop tune, and the girl pulled a mobile phone from her pocket. When she flipped it open, to his surprise she answered the call in Arabic. She squirmed in her seat with enjoyment as she whispered into the phone, smiling to reveal a row of teeth imprisoned behind heavy orthodontic apparatus.
“I’m on the train,” she said, giggling. “I might be cut off in the tunnel, so I’ll call you back.”
Despite the relentless thundering of the train and the quietness of the girl’s hurried voice, Omar Yussef detected the soft consonants of the educated Palestinian. When she returned the phone to her pocket, he smiled at her. “Where in Palestine are you from, my daughter?” he asked.
She opened her eyes in surprise. Is it, perhaps, so odd for a stranger to talk to another on this train? Omar Yussef wondered. Or did she simply not take me for an Arab, just as I mistook her for a South American?
“Jerusalem, O Hajji,” the girl said.
I look so old, youngsters assume I must by now have fulfilled the obligation to go on the pilgrimage to Mecca, he thought. “I’m not a Hajji, my daughter, though may it be the will of Allah to grant you the honor of such a journey to the holy places in Arabia.”
“If Allah wills it, ustaz.”
Allah might will it, Omar Yussef thought, but I’d no more go on the Hajj than I would enter a mosque to pray in Brooklyn. He recalled the page on Ala’s refrigerator with the prayer times for the Alamut Mosque. He wondered which of the boys worshiped there. He didn’t remember any of them being religious. Maybe it was only the name-with its connection to their old Assassins gang-that had led them to display it.
“Which neighborhood of Jerusalem?” he said.
“Sheikh Jarrah.”
It had been many years since Omar Yussef had visited that quarter north of the Old City where the leading Arab families had their mansions, dilapidated now that their owners no longer were the power in the town. “How long have you lived in New York?”
“I was born here, O Hajji.” She corrected herself: “Sorry, I mean ustaz. My parents came when my mother was carrying me. And you, ustaz?”
“I’m-visiting my son in Bay Ridge,” Omar Yussef stammered. “I’m from Bethlehem, from Dehaisha Camp.”
“May you feel as if you were in your own home and with your family in New York.”
“You don’t look typically Palestinian.” Omar Yussef stroked his own cheekbones to demonstrate what was different about her appearance.
“My great-grandfather came to Palestine from Libya, ustaz,” the girl said with a grin. “My mother says I inherited the cheekbones of a North African tribeswoman.”
“May Allah bless you.” Omar Yussef paused as the train rocked across the points and the lights flickered. “How is life here?”
“It’s all I’ve known, ustaz,” the girl said. “My dear parents love Jerusalem, but I’ve only visited once. The city seemed full of frustration.”
“This subway car is very far from Jerusalem.”
“It’s also far from the fears people experience there, ustaz.”
Omar Yussef thought of the desperation in his son’s eyes when the police took him away, of the headless body and the strange reference to the Veiled Man. Did Palestinians have to take trouble with them wherever they went? Couldn’t they be more like Americans, engaged in their financial struggles, but unburdened by politics? “Far away, my daughter? It seems to me that fear tracks our people faster than they can flee it.”
“May it be displeasing to Allah, ustaz.” The girl rose as the train came into the Pacific Street station. “This is my stop. May Allah grant you grace, ustaz.”