Kashua Sayed - Second Person Singular

They both thanked Tarik, and the lawyer apologized for the imposition and promised to make it up to him. Then he and his wife went out to their cars. She was going to pick up the kids and he said he was going home to shower.

“I don’t want the kids to see me like this. Did they ask about me?” he questioned her before getting into his car.

“I told them you were at work,” she said.

“Listen, wait, hold on just a second. . shut up, will you,” he heard Samah yell at her kids.

“Okay, I’m shutting up,” the lawyer said, and Samah laughed. “Hold on, I’m moving to the bedroom, I can’t get a word in here.”

“Okay, let’s hear it,” the lawyer said when she got back on the line.

“The name I got is Amir Lahab, that’s him.”

“You sure?” The lawyer wrote the name down on a piece of paper. Amir Lahab; he mumbled the name to himself and then lit a cigarette and tossed the lighter onto the desk. “Who gave you his name? The head of social services?”

“Yeah, I called him and he told me right away. He just burst out laughing as soon as I told him that I was looking for a guy who had worked there and then disappeared. ‘There’s a blast from the past,’ he said, laughing the whole time. Turns out that this Amir worked under him and that he’d been Amir’s supervisor during his internship. He made a good impression, apparently, and was a good kid, a little weird, but he did his job well and he kept to himself. He started working there right after he graduated. Worked for a few months and then one day he left a resignation letter and disappeared.”

“Disappeared? But that was many years ago.”

“Right. Several years ago,” Samah said. “That’s what the guy said. He said he hopes I’m able to find him and that after he left his job they looked for him for a while but he never turned up. He told me to send regards if I found him.”

“And then?”

“And then I asked if, by any chance, he had an old address or something and he said he’d look in his file and he found an address in Jaljulia, an old telephone number, and an ID number.”

“Oh, really? What’s his ID number?” the lawyer asked, practically leaping out of his chair.

“I wrote it down in the kitchen. I’ll text it to you in a second.”

“Great, Samah, thank you so much,” the lawyer said. “And please apologize again to your husband. Tell him I’ve got some cigars here with his name on them.”

So that’s his name, Amir Lahab . The man his wife had been with — and who knew what they had done — on the night that he, the lawyer, had fallen in love with her. He recalled how she had surprised him and his sister when she came home early from the student party. She had probably been out dancing with Amir Lahab, the lawyer thought, remembering her black dress and the expression on her face when she came back to the dorm. Her face had looked sad, and he, the idiot, had loved her all the more for it. Later that night he had been unable to fall asleep. He kept seeing her at the entrance to the room, in that dress, radiant, and all he could think of was how he could make her his. She, too, probably hadn’t been able to sleep that night, but not on account of him. Probably all she could think about was Amir Lahab and the wild night she had had with him, which led to the letter, which was not a letter you write to just any old colleague — of that the lawyer was certain. It was a love letter. He disappeared, she had told him, she wrote him that note and he disappeared. She swore she hadn’t seen him since and that she couldn’t even remember what he looked like.

“If I saw him on the street, I wouldn’t recognize him,” she had said, and the lawyer knew you did not have to recognize someone in order to love them. The lawyer realized that she had settled — for him. What would have happened had this Amir not run off? He remembered the early weeks of their courtship and felt humiliated. She wasn’t thinking about me at all, he thought, she was waiting for someone else. She was stimulated not by my presence, but by his absence.

Amir Lahab, the lawyer typed into the search engine, at first in Hebrew, which read it as Lahav, and he found thousands of links. Designers, lawyers, carpenters — there was a long list. He typed it in along with the words social worker and got nothing relevant. Still, he clicked on several links and was surprised to find that all of the Amir Lahavs were Jews.

Then he typed the name in Arabic and found that most of the results were from different countries. The ones that were from Israel did not seem remotely related to social work.

The lawyer reverted to the tried-and-true method of locating an Arab in Israel — using the family name. He typed Lahab into the Yellow Pages search engine and found that they were a big family in Tira, not in Jaljulia as Samah had said. In Jaljulia there were no Lahabs at all. Both villages are in the Triangle, and Tira was very close to the lawyer’s own hometown. He’s from the Triangle? the lawyer wondered. My adversary is a villager? The man who had read more books than he, the one his wife had preferred, was a lousy villager, just like him? The lawyer tried to calm himself. Say she really did love someone before him? Say she had fallen for one of the boys in high school? Would he be jealous then, too? Wasn’t he just being primitive? What had happened to his progressive ideas? What happened to women’s rights? What about his daughter? Hadn’t he promised himself a million times that she would grow up differently? That he would shield her from societal expectations and norms and that he would raise her as a liberated woman?

The problem was that the lawyer knew he was not willing to be different. If it was common, if his friends and family members were married to women who had all had prior relationships, that would be one thing, then he could deal with it. But he was not willing to be the only joker in the group. And anyway, the lawyer wondered, why had she hid this relationship? If she believed she did nothing wrong, then why had she lied? Was she embarrassed of what she’d done, did she feel it was wrong, so wrong that she had hid the truth from her husband, and if that was the case, then why should he accept it now?

The lawyer found no Amir Lahab in the telephone directory. He chose one of the Lahabs in the phone book from Tira and called from the unidentified number in the office. A child, he couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl, answered the phone.

“Who is this?” the little voice asked. “Who’s speaking?”

The lawyer asked to speak with the child’s father and the little voice giggled and handed the phone to the mother.

“Hello.”

“ Salaam alaikum, ” the lawyer said, and the mother’s voice changed when she realized it was not someone she knew.

“ Alaikum a-salaam. How can I help you?”

“I’m looking for Amir Lahab,” the lawyer said.

“Who? There’s no one here by that name. I think you have the wrong number.”

“I’m a lawyer from Jerusalem, and I thought you might be able to help me find him. Maybe he’s a family member?”

“Hold on,” the woman said, and she yelled, “There’s a lawyer on the line and he says he’s looking for someone named Amir Lahab from our family. You know any Amirs?”

The lawyer could hear her husband walking toward her and taking the phone.

“Hello, who’s speaking?”

“ Salaam alaikum, ” the lawyer said, using the greeting he always used when he wanted to set someone at ease.

“ Alaikum a-salaam. Who’s speaking, please?”

“I’m a lawyer,” the lawyer said, and gave the man a name he had made up on the spot. “I’m handling an inheritance case and I’m looking for someone by the name of Amir Lahab. I thought he might be from your extended family and that perhaps you could help me find him.”