A Tender Struggle by Krista Bremer

Author:Krista Bremer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Workman Publishing
Published: 2014-03-26T16:11:14+00:00

14 Bartering

The open-air market in Tripoli’s Old City was a labyrinth of narrow, crowded alleys where shoppers jostled past row after row of displays: tall stacks of neatly folded cloth, a pile of shoes, a display case spilling with gold. Vendors and customers faced off in noisy negotiations, leaning over counters and slapping tabletops and jabbing the air for emphasis. A woman’s slender hands appeared from a tent of cloth, and she ran them over a gold bracelet’s engraving as if she were reading Braille. A fabric vendor unfurled a length of white lace with a snap of his wrist, holding it aloft only a few inches over a black puddle. As a tour guide waddled down the alley, a tight cluster of European tourists followed like skittish ducklings.

I had often tried to imagine the country where Ismail had been born and raised, the land where the Arabic trapped in his throat in our small southern town would flow as freely as it had for the first half of his life. I wanted to know him in a country where no one inquired about his strange accent within the first few minutes of meeting him or stumbled over the pronunciation of his name. Even as our intimacy deepened back home in North Carolina, his foreign status clung persistently to him, permeating every aspect of our relationship, like the spicy aroma of his clothes after he cooked a meal. Each time he rolled an r across the roof of his mouth or touched his forehead to the carpet to pray or carried on passionate phone conversations with his relatives in Libya, I was reminded how foreign he was to me. In his native land, where I could see him not as an immigrant but as a son and a brother, I imagined I would finally locate the missing pieces of the puzzle.

Watching him now, maneuvering through this bustling market in a T-shirt, jeans, baseball cap, and sandals, our daughter balanced on his shoulders and pressing her hands to his cheeks, I was startled by how strange he seemed here. Never had I seen him look as American as he did surrounded by Libyans. Men his age seemed a generation older in their flowing white tunics and sandals. Huddled close on overturned milk crates and plastic chairs, absorbed in animated conversations, their hands swinging dangerously close to the cups of tea beside them, they raised their eyebrows and turned as Ismail walked briskly past, curiosity mixed with scorn on their faces. I suddenly understood the loneliness Ismail wore like a second skin, the heavy judgment that landed on him wherever he went, his nostalgia for a home that could not be found on any map.

As we flowed along with a current of shoppers down a winding alley, we almost collided with a dwarf standing squarely in the middle of the path. Like a buoy in a stormy sea, his head bobbed in and out of view among hips and shopping bags, his thick bowed legs anchored as people elbowed past.

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