A Word For Love Part 9

His images were dust and desert and the full moon. There were no trees in his poems, and no ocean, he rarely saw those things, and he wrote from what he knew: a vast desert, a gray station. Here, white was a rare color and so he wrote and wrote about jasmine, because the only white he'd found to describe Nisrine's heart was the jasmine flower in bloom.

ADEL'S LOVE STORY

ADEL'S PARENTS WERE IN LOVE. He believed in romance. Now, he was in love with a dark-haired maid who had a husband and a child, and whose time was not her own. But he believed in equality, and simply loving. If he loved Nisrine, she would love him, too, and that would be enough for them, she would need no more than his affection. He'd keep loving her and she'd keep loving him, and through their love everything else, like jobs and children and education, would fall into place. He believed in his parents' love, and it gave him courage to believe in his own.

He told his mother about her.

"I'm in love with a foreign girl."

His mother said, "Foreign. Paris?"

"From the East."

"New York. Does she like our big city?"

It was not New York.

"She loves it. She never gets out."

His mother said, "That's your fault, donkey! You take her out. I'll give you money. Is she blond like you?"

"No, dark haired."

"Dark hair, light skin?"

"Face like the full moon."

His mother said, "I like those girls. She loves you?"

"I love her."

"If you love her, then she must love you."

Adel realized that, like his friends at the station, his mother did not understand what he meant by foreign. So he tried again the next evening. His aunt was over with her maid. They sat in the living room and sent Lilene to get tea in the kitchen.

"Kiss for your boy, Lilene," Adel teased. He turned to his mother. "Mama, why's the maid sulking?"

Adel's aunt said, "Do you know what Lilene said to me today? She said, I'm slow, Mama, because I didn't get a shower." She laughed. "She plays me like a child."

"Did you say that, Lilene?"

Lilene didn't answer.

His mother said, "Lilene's been eating wool."

"Are you eating wool, Lilene?"

"And after all my sister feeds her," Adel's mother said. "Adel's in love with a foreign girl."

"A foreign girl? What's she like?"

And he could have told them, but they were worried about Lilene.

THOUGH WE DIDN'T KNOW IT THEN, Baba met Adel twice in those months through his own dealings with the station. Any man who'd been in prison signed a contract when he got out to go to so-and-so station at so-and-so hour twice a month, to report on all he'd seen and done, and this contract lasted the rest of his life.

At the station, it was the young policemen who interviewed ex-prisoners, because it was a brainless job: they asked questions and recorded the answers, they didn't judge or think. Adel had interview duty three to four times a week. He sat at a tin desk in the station's bas.e.m.e.nt. The men came in and took a number from the red number dispenser (the visa lines in the American emba.s.sy used the same number dispensers), and when Adel was ready he called the next number in line as if the men were waiting for a service, to refill their cell phone minutes or buy a blender, but instead they gave information.

When Adel did his interviews, he didn't judge; he simply asked appropriate questions and recorded the answers in a thin notebook with puppy dogs on the front.

Now, I have this notebook. It sits before me.

Ras.h.i.+d Halwani, Adel wrote, height 1.83m, age 25.

Work: Still no news. Suffers from unemployment.

Activities: Neighbors had to leave, grandmother died? Destination unknown. Back Sunday night. Sat.u.r.day was Sheraton Club. Russian women danced with him, he didn't buy them drinks.

Money spent: 10,000 lire. Whose money: Father's.

People seen: Mahmood al-Ikhwan, Kerim Morsi, Simo Mustafa, Firas al-Kurdi.

If Baba came on the right day, Adel interviewed him, too: Ha.s.san al-Bakari, height 2.1m, age 66.

Work: Bookbinder, 25 orders filled last month.

Binding: Book for children learning to pray, Positions of Prayer Made Easy, new edition.

Adel didn't ask Baba about the women of the family. It was not polite, and these interviews were only cursory. He asked about business, who Baba had seen, and where he'd gone. They were interviews to record movement, to find out revolutionaries, to make sure that Baba loved his government. They were not to ask the health of the family maid.

Nevertheless, after Nisrine, Adel began to take a special interest.

By Baba's name, he wrote: (Sir) Ha.s.san al-Bakari. Height 2.1m.

He added little notes to himself, character judgments.

Work: Bookbinder (of the Quran the Karim).

Orders filled: 25 (smart man!).

Adel ran through his list of questions twice, and then looked up at Baba. He didn't want the interview to end.

"Maid?" he asked finally, when all other questions eluded him.

"I don't have a maid. My wife does."

"My mistake," Adel said.

There were officers above Adel who read his reports, and after Nisrine, they began to notice a change in Adel's writing. Adel had friends at the station, but even his friends, who believed in love, knew it was their duty to watch him, and as he fell more and more in love with Nisrine, they found Adel's back was turned to them more and more often. They went to the officers.

"Adel loves a foreign woman. He won't guard anyone but her."

Because Adel was his father's son, the officers went to his father.

"Adel writes soft reports. He notes character and intelligence."

Adel's father summoned him to the living room.

His father asked, "Why are you a policeman?"

"To serve my country and my religion."

"Why else are you a policeman?"

"To serve my family and my father; I am my father's son. I do not want my father's money, I want my own money. I must hold myself to the highest standard. I must carry myself so all will know I am my father's son."

His father asked, "Do you guard foreign women?"

"If they are in this country, I must guard them."

"And only them?"

"No, everyone."

"Especially them?"

"Especially citizens."

"That's not what I've heard," his father said. "You are the son of a man, now act like one."

Adel was indignant.

"I do," he said, "I do guard everyone! I guard the women and the children."

For a few days after that, Adel guarded ten minutes toward Nisrine, ten minutes with his back to her. But, he loved her. In his love, he soon forgot this caution. He met her again in the garden. He watched Dounia run around them in circles while he made up stories to show he didn't care about social standing.

"In our home," he told Nisrine, "everybody's equal. The maid is equal. The gardener is equal. Even my father's driver, who's Yazidi, is equal. You know what that is?"

"They wors.h.i.+p fire."

"They wors.h.i.+p the devil. But my father doesn't care. Except, we don't let him use the bathroom. You know what Yazidis do to wipe? They take their finger, and they rub it on the wall. You go into a Yazidi house, there're brown streaks all over the wall. But even in the bathroom, my father says, you have a choice: ya water, ya paper. No finger, that's for your own bathroom. Not mine, I'm Sunni. Understood? But the driver goes outside."

She laughed at his equality. "That's like saying a maid sleeps on the floor because she chooses to."

He didn't mind. Love was laughing, and telling.

"I dream of where you sleep, Nisrine. You tell me a story."

So, she began. "My mother is never jealous. To a fault, even. Sometimes, my father wants her to be jealous. He believes if she's jealous, it means she loves."

"You're not jealous of me," he told her.

"I am." She was not. She didn't have time to be jealous, her time was not her own.

"Once, my father put on his nicest suit that he only wears for weddings. He took the motorcycle and left without telling my mother where he was going. My mother fried rice in the kitchen. She read in the living room. We asked her, Mama, Baba left in his nicest suit, don't you want to know where he's going? Maybe he took some money.' My mother controls the money, but my father knows where to find it. My mother didn't say anything. She continued her frying. When it was dark, she got ready for bed.

"Finally, my father comes home three hours later. He's smelling of cologne he put on before he left. He asked my mother, Don't you wonder where I've been?' No, I trust you.'

"And because she trusted, he told her. He'd been over to his brothers', harmless. He beat them at cards, he handed my mother the money he won. You see, men think it is nice to be jealous, but my mother knew love is trusting."

And caring, and telling.

"I trust you, Nisrine. I love you for your soul in pink pajamas."

When she was on the balcony and he was far away, then he would raise one arm, and if she raised hers, it felt like the sky could connect them.

There were things he wanted: a stolen kiss, sweet words (he was the one between them who said sweet words), a peek, close-up, beneath her little white veil.

Nisrine was less sure in their love than he was. Sometimes she would be sweeping and, though she didn't mean to, she would forget him, drawn by the pull of her home. She worked against this; she would rather remember him, he was here before her, someone to make her happy; in the quiet dawn when he called to her, he thought he could hear her heart beating.

Adel understood why she forgot, and he waited patiently for her to remember.

He had always been a man who liked to be in the center of things. He liked the crowds of the city, big streets, and men in groups who took up the whole sidewalk.

But now, after Nisrine, Adel preferred the city from above; that was where real lives were lived, away from the spit and mucous of the gutters. He knew now that, like Nisrine, the real citizens of this city did not know the outside of four walls, except by a door's peephole, and this was a beautiful existence. He'd learned so much, loving her, about how faraway, up-above love worked, he knew he could go on forever if she would let him, he needed only a roof to stand on, a window to look through. She'd told a story about jealousy, but he trusted her, like she trusted him.

Then one day, she wanted to use his cell phone.

"What about Bea's phone?"

"It doesn't call internationally."