The Night Counter Read Online Free

Detroit forever. If he had known that in old age in America having children was the same as not having them at all, he never would have had so many.
    Ibrahim didn’t expect his children to come back, even to visit. He would accept occasional telephone calls from them that mostly consisted of weather reports, with long silences afterward as the person on the other end tried to think of something that wouldn’t raise Ibrahim’s rage. But he no longer had any rage, just loneliness, an aching for them that overwhelmed him during his nearly nightly bouts with insomnia.
    Maybe it wasn’t America that had ruined his children, but rather their mother. If Fatima had disciplined them more, maybe they would have been afraid to leave. Someone was to blame for their absence. America and his wife seemed like the most logical scapegoats. But for all his complaining about America and Fatima, Ibrahim had not left either one.
    “
Inshallah
,” Fatima had answered when he had asked for her hand in marriage sixty-five years ago. Not yes and not no.
Inshallah
. God willing.He had been in America long enough by then to need more precise responses. But now, even as a man who hadn’t been friendly with God for many years, he knew
inshallah
to be the only true response to anything. Will you marry me? Is the fig tree bearing fruit? Do you think the Tigers are going to win the World Series? Your son is going to do great things, don’t you think?
Inshallah
. While there were sometimes definite no’s, nothing in life was as simple as yes.
    “
Inshallah
, you will smile again without me in your life,” Fatima had said when she had surprised him with the divorce three years ago.
    In the divorce, she had split everything between them fifty-fifty, down to the penny. Each got one of their 1983 Ford Mercurys, although neither one of them had any business driving anymore. She had given him exactly half the money in the bank account and exactly half of their forty-two family photos. She took the garlic press, and so she left him the coffeepot. She kept one of her grandfather’s canes and gave him the other, as her grandfather had intended one for her husband in her dowry in case they both should live to be old. She had left the apple tree but uprooted the fig tree so that it could go with her. She had insisted that he take the house in Detroit. He had told her it was hers, but she had said that she had her house in Lebanon, and so she did not need a house in Detroit as much as he did.
    What he wished she had left him was her hair. He had no doubt her purple hair—she never knew how to dye it, either rinsing the dye off too quickly or leaving it on too long—still flowed to her knees, just as it had when they first married. He missed the purple in his life.
    The bus finally reached the exit to the airport, and the little girl bounced her knees in excitement. Here Ibrahim would wait for KLM Flight 6470 from Amsterdam, as he did every Wednesday and Friday. He’d wait for the passengers to come out of customs. Most of them would be Arabs, coming from Lebanon and Jordan and connecting through Amsterdam. They weren’t his relatives, but as they wept and embraced their waiting entourages, he would hear the sound of his childhood dinners in their hyperbolic greetings. He would smell his mother’s evening gatherings inthe heavy perfume of the overly made up grandmothers and in the sweat of the young men who somehow didn’t believe in deodorant but eagerly indulged in Western things such as Marlboros and druggie music with no meaning. In the travelers’ bulging suitcases, tied together with ropes so that they wouldn’t burst open, Ibrahim would picture the gifts of baklava carefully inserted between the sweaters and coats they would make much use of here.
    Ibrahim didn’t need his earring aid, as he called it, to hear his bones creak as he pulled the cord for the bus to stop. If he was lucky, he would inhale jasmine with the arrivals, it being in bloom