After my class, Rami waited for me outside the squat, wanting to talk about his graphic novel. So far, it was only images. “I don’t know which language to use to tell the story,” he said. “The one that’s hardest, or easiest?” I’m not sure if he meant skill or pain. I told him he should write in the language in which he felt most at home. “Your book could always be translated,” I said, and his face opened up then, as though I’d told him some giant secret. This must be part of the pleasure of having children, of watching the world reveal itself to them in simple and magnificent ways. For a kid like Rami, whose situational possibilities were currently limited, in limbo, the opening of the artistic and intellectual was no small thing. For any of us, really.
Rami’s fourteenth birthday was in a week. I reminded him I knew, and his brow furrowed. He looked at his feet before looking up at me, a wan smile.
“We’ll have to all do something special,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. Then he did something out of character. He flung himself at me, not his usual, boyish one-armed hug, but wrapping his arms around me. I hugged him back.
Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned it, this marker of time. It’s nearly impossible for the mind to reshape what was supposed to be a temporary situation into a permanent one. I worry now that my mentioning this somehow changed the course of events, or that my talk of multiple homes put ideas in his head, or that something I had said, somehow, caused what happened next.
•
A few days later, Dimitra called, nearly hysterical. “Mira, Mira, Mira mou,” she said, in tears, and I knew that Rami was gone.
“He got tired of waiting,” Dimitra said. And then she repeated it, more to herself. Perhaps there was some truth to this, that Rami, knowing he would eventually leave, simply wanted to get it over with. But I think that Rami, caught between his life here and a new life in Germany with his brother and aunt, could not bear an official goodbye. Still, I couldn’t believe he was gone.
I went to Dimitra and Fady. They were angry at Leila, who had known, but she herself was so upset, inconsolable, sobbing like a toddler, they couldn’t be too angry. And Fady. Fady was bereft. “I knew it would happen, I knew it wasn’t forever,” he kept saying. But even more, they—we—were worried. Who had he gone with, and how? Where was he? Was he safe? It was maddening. Dimitra sent me messages in the middle of the night, worried.
Three days later, the same day Rami called Dimitra to tell her he’d safely made it—how, exactly, we still do not know—the novelist phoned to tell me two German hikers had found Nefeli’s jeans and T-shirt and the scarf she’d been wearing in her hair, all folded neatly atop a stone, near the edge of a cliff, a short hike from her small cottage. On a large rock she had stenciled a blue scorpion. It had not rained for weeks, the wind had been still, and one of those scorpion-women had been scorched into the ground. Nearby the ground smoldered, but the hikers put it out before it became a fire.
But she herself had vanished. As if she had alighted into air: from body to vapor, from earth to sky.
I asked the novelist what the church would do if it were a suicide. “Easy,” he said. “It’s not a suicide.” “And the body?” I asked. “Don’t worry,” he said.
I dreamt of scorpions again, skittering across the floor, scurrying over my torso, my back. I woke sweating, my heart racing, and went outside to look at the moon, cold as marble. But I was relieved to be alone. I glanced at my phone. A new message from Rami: a photo of the sketchbook I’d given him before he’d ever shown me his drawings. Then another: a silly little stuffed panda I’d also given him: first perched on a skateboard, then sitting in a café chair, then another looking out a windowsill at the rain. Watch the mail, it said.
A few days later in the building lobby I found a large box addressed to me, from Germany. A manuscript, a bound photocopy of Rami’s book. The rest was in Arabic and a little bit of English. It remained untitled. There was a Post-it on the front that said, Dear M, Thank you and I hope Fady will read it to you!! Maybe you can help me with a title!
My heart was pounding. I’d seen sections of it, drawings, a series of frames: kids eating ice cream, kicking a ball around, sitting in desks at school. What I found so impressive was the way he read and rendered faces, the subtle way the slant of an eyebrow could show surprise or fear or anger or laughter, the way a flick of a smile could be full of subtext. But I had not seen him finish a story, give something a beginning, middle, and end.
The story was about a group of friends, a boy named Rami at their center, whose homes were, day by day, disappearing. First went their school. They arrived one day to the gymnasium and it was gone. But Rami never resorts to realism: the school was not destroyed by bombs or shells or even natural disaster. Each day more disappeared until he pictured only an empty landscape, as if the structure had never existed at all. No trace of books or pens or chalkboards, no computers or broken windows. Just cleanly excised from the landscape; only bitter orange and loquat trees
