He paid for the gas. ‘You need some cigarettes?’ the proprietor joked. ‘Very cheap!’
‘I don’t smoke,’ said Abdul.
Tamara’s driver came into the hut as he was leaving. Abdul returned to his car. For a couple of minutes he had her to himself. She had asked a good question, he thought. She deserved an answer.
He said: ‘My sister died.’
*
He was six years old, almost a man, he thought, and she was still a baby, at four. Beirut was the only world he knew then: heat and dust and traffic, and bomb-damaged buildings spilling rubble into the street. It was not until later that he learned Beirut was not normal, that that was not how life was for most people.
They lived in an apartment over a café. In the bedroom at the back of the building, Abdul was telling Nura about reading and writing. They were sitting on the floor. She wanted to know everything he knew, and he liked instructing her, for it made him feel wise and grown-up.
Their parents were in the living room, which was in the front of the building, overlooking the street. Their grandparents had come for coffee, two uncles and an aunt had shown up, and Abdul’s father, who was the pastry chef for the café, had made halawet el jibn, sweet cheese rolls, for the guests. Abdul had already eaten two and his mother had said: ‘No more, you’ll be sick.’
So he told Nura to go and get some.
She hurried out, always eager to please him.
The bang was the loudest noise Abdul had ever heard. Immediately afterwards the world went completely silent, and there seemed to be something wrong with his ears. He started crying.
He ran into the living room, but it was a place he had never seen. It took him a long time to understand that the entire outside wall had vanished, and the room was open to the air. It was full of dust and the smell of blood. Some of the grown-ups looked as if they were screaming, but they made no noise; in fact, there was no sound at all. Others lay on the floor, not moving.
Nura, too, lay motionless.
Abdul could not understand what was wrong with her. He knelt down, grabbed her limp arm, and shook her, trying to wake her, though it seemed impossible that she was sleeping with her eyes wide open. ‘Nura,’ he said. ‘Nura, wake up.’ He could hear his own voice, albeit faintly; his ears must be getting better.
Suddenly his mother was there, scooping Nura up in her arms. A second later Abdul felt himself lifted by the familiar hands of his father. The parents carried the two children into the bedroom and put them down gently on their beds.
Father said: ‘Abdul, how do you feel? Are you hurt?’
Abdul shook his head.
‘No bruises?’ Father ran a careful eye over him and looked relieved. Then he turned to Mother and they both stared at the still form of Nura.
Mother said: ‘I don’t think she’s breathing.’ She began to sob.
Abdul said: ‘What’s the matter with her?’ His voice came out as a high-pitched squeak. He felt very scared but he did not know what he was frightened of. He said: ‘She doesn’t speak, but her eyes are open!’
His father hugged him. ‘Oh, Abdul, my beloved son,’ he said. ‘I think our little girl is dead.’
*
It was a car bomb, Abdul learned years later. The vehicle had been parked at the kerb immediately under the living-room window. The target was the café, which was patronized by Americans, who loved its sweet pastries. Abdul’s family were merely collateral damage.
Responsibility was never established.
The family managed to move to the United States, which was difficult but not impossible. Father’s cousin had a Lebanese restaurant in Newark, and Father was guaranteed a job there. Abdul went to school on a yellow bus, muffled in scarves against unimaginably cold weather, and found that he could not understand a word anyone said. But Americans were kind to children, and they helped him, and soon he could speak English better than his parents.
Mother told him he might get another baby sister, but the years went by and it never happened.
The past was vivid in his mind as he drove through the dunes. America had not looked so different from Beirut – it had traffic jams and apartment buildings, cafés and cops – but the Sahara really was an alien landscape, with its scorched and thorny bushes dying of thirst in the barren ground.
Three Palms was a small town. It had a mosque and a church, a filling station with a repair shop, and half a dozen stores. All the signs were in Arabic except the one that said ‘église de Saint Pierre’， Church of St Peter. There were no streets in desert villages, but here the houses were built in rows, with blank outside walls that turned the dusty dirt roads into corridors. Despite the narrowness of the streets, cars were parked along the sides. In the centre, next to the gas station, was a café where men sat drinking coffee and smoking in the shade of three unusually tall fan palms; Abdul guessed the trees had given the town its name. The bar was a makeshift lean-to at the front of a house, its palm-leaf canopy unsteadily supported by thin tree trunks roughly trimmed.