CHAPTER 1
April 7, 1979
At last there is silence.
The plane’s cabin holds a strata of cigarette smoke from the hours in flight, and a stewardess walks the aisle, shutting off lights in the rows of sleeping passengers and nodding at those still awake, as if seeing in them a diligence that’s to be commended. The woman’s scarf, the Pan Am colors of blue and white and candy-apple red, has loosened around her neck, and when she reaches Olivia, she smiles in recognition of someone like herself: a woman, white. On this flight from Paris to Beirut—Olivia’s second flight since leaving Los Angeles—she is a rarity.
The handful of children have fallen asleep. Businessmen chew silently on dates, newsprint on their hands as they turn pages. The woman in the aisle across from Olivia wears a black headscarf and reaches with thick fingers into a bag of nuts, watching the night, as beside her a little girl sleeps with one patent-leather Mary Jane loose on her foot and the other on the floor.
Hours ago, when they boarded, Olivia waited for a moment when the child was looking and quickly made a face. There was a shriek of happiness and heads turned, and though the girl continued to stare at Olivia, expectant and waiting for more, Olivia felt the burning gaze of a man the next row over, a man who appeared to have left his better days and humor behind. Once again Olivia waited, this time until the man turned forward. Then she did it again. There was the shriek. The glare. A repeat of just moments ago, but now Olivia basked in not having let the girl down as well as in her own small rebellion. How good it felt, this slight dissent. From behind her hand, the mother smiled as if something had been said in her defense. But with another beat, the woman’s face drew to confusion as she studied the empty seat beside Olivia, as if upon it should sit the reason a white woman would travel alone to the Middle East. Until Delan appeared. Delan who is Olivia’s boyfriend and roommate and is taking her to his hometown in Kurdistan of Iraq. Cigarettes for my cousin, he’d said as he shook the duty-free bag. With this, the woman had seemed appeased, as if he were an explanation she understood.
“Are you not comfortable?” The stewardess. Hunched over to talk to Olivia, who’s in the window seat. Delan, in the middle, is asleep, as is the man on the aisle. “I can get you another pillow.”
Olivia shakes her head. “My mind. Doesn’t shut off. But thank you.”
The woman glances up and down the aisle before turning her voice to a whisper. “Fancy a disco biscuit?” A pause at Olivia’s silence. “Quaalude. They shut it all off.”
“Oh, I know. But then I’d just worry about being shut off.”
“Doesn’t work like that, but suit yourself. He looks like a good-enough pillow. Got a nice deal there.”
The stewardess’s lips shine, glossed and pink and perfect. But when she smiles, there’s a smudge of color on her tooth. Olivia taps her own tooth to indicate the streak, and the stewardess nods a thank-you. People who keep quiet in such situations, who let others walk around with wedged-in poppy seeds or toothpaste on their chins, those people are a different breed. The ones who either value their own comfort above all or who feel themselves rise when others fall. Olivia is neither, to a fault. Once, she saw a woman stare into her own eyes in a movie theater’s bathroom mirror, as if imparting a pep talk, and then walk out with toilet paper stuck to her heel. Olivia sprang to action, but too late. The woman was already in the lobby, joined by her date, and all Olivia could do was slyly step on the toilet paper from behind. A silent save, it would’ve been. Had the woman not stopped short. Had Olivia not collided into her back. Had popcorn not burst into the air and the date’s eyes gone wide. The woman unleashed a very vocal tirade, and Olivia missed her movie upon realizing the same couple also planned on seeing Halloween. Instead, she’d dragged Delan into Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, where she suspected much of his laughter had nothing to do with the film.
Delan. Black eyelashes against pale cheeks. Dark hair that’s chin-length and wild and long enough to curl. A mustache and beard that’s trimmed short yet full. He has passed for Italian, Spanish, even black Irish. Kurds are not Arab or Persian, he’s told her, we are our own ethnicity. The largest ethnicity without a country. My brother has green eyes. I have a blonde cousin. Even redheads are in our family, he added with a nod, as if inducting her into his tribe. Always the last to leave a party, he is a man who refuses to follow recipes and insists on buying roses from the fake gypsy women in restaurants. At thirty-four years old, there are a few early streaks of gray in his hair that lend a refinement to his innate, almost feral quality and a scar by his eye that’s shaped like an old-fashioned quill. Delan is like the land he was born in, one of his costars from a play once said. Untamed and loud.
The land where he was born. Olivia’s flying into the unknown. A landscape he’s compared both to the mountains in Mork & Mindy and the hills of Little House on the Prairie, everything an almost illogical, startling contrast to her image of the Middle East, where camels are silhouettes on sand dunes and hot air wavers in mirages. His stories have made her long for nights under a darkened cap of stars, to bite into figs still warm on trees,
