It would’ve come as a great shock to his neighbors to know that the man they called Ice Cream Saleh, or Crazy Mahmoud, or simply that strange Muslim who sells ice cream, had once been Doctor Mahmoud Saleh, one of the most respected physicians in the city of Homs. The son of a successful merchant, Saleh had grown up in comfort, free to pursue his studies and then his profession. In school, his excellent marks won him entrance to the medical university in Cairo, where it seemed the entire field was transforming as he watched. An Englishman had discovered that one could avoid postsurgical gangrene simply by dipping the surgical instruments into a solution of carbolic acid. Another Englishman soon established an irrefutable link between cholera and unsanitary drinking water. Saleh’s father, who’d heartily supported his studies, grew angry when he learned that in Cairo his own son was dissecting corpses: did Mahmoud not understand that on the Day of Judgment these desecrated men would be resurrected unwhole, their bodies opened and organs exposed? His son drily replied that if God was so literal in his resurrections, humanity would be brought back in a state of decay so advanced that the marks of dissection would seem minor in comparison. In truth he’d had his qualms as well, but pride kept him from saying so.
After completing his studies, Saleh returned to Homs and established a practice. His patients’ living conditions continually dismayed him. Even the most affluent families had little notion of modern hygiene. Sickrooms were kept closed, the air poor and stifling; he flung open the windows, ignoring the protests. Sometimes he even encountered a patient who’d been burned on the arm or chest, a thoroughly discredited practice meant to draw out ill humors. He would dress the wound and then berate the family, describing to them the dangers of infection and sepsis.
Though sometimes it seemed he waged an impossible battle, Doctor Saleh’s life was not without its joys. His mother’s half-sister approached him regarding her daughter, whom he’d watched mature into a young woman of beauty and gentle character. They were married, and soon they had their own daughter, a darling girl who would stand her little feet on Saleh’s and make him walk her about the courtyard, roaring like a lion. Even when his father died, and was lowered into the grave next to his mother, Saleh took comfort in knowing that the man had been proud of him, despite their differences.
And so it went, the years passing quickly, until one evening, a wealthy landowner came to the door. He told Saleh that the Bedouin family who tended his lands had a sick girl. Instead of a doctor, they’d brought in an old healer woman without a tooth in her head, who was using the most outlandish of folk remedies to try to cure her. The man couldn’t stand to see the child suffer and said that if Saleh agreed to examine her, he would pay the fee himself.
The Bedouin family lived in a hut at the edge of the city, where the carefully tended farmland gave over to scrub and dust. The girl’s mother met Saleh at the door. She was dressed heavily in black, her cheeks and chin tattooed in the style of her people. “It is an ifrit,” she said. “It needs to be cast out.”
Saleh replied that what the girl needed was a proper medical examination. He told her to fetch him a pot of boiled water, and went into the hut.
The girl was in convulsions. The healer woman had scattered handfuls of herbs about the room and now sat cross-legged next to the girl, muttering to herself. Ignoring her, Saleh tried to hold the girl down long enough to peel back one of her eyelids—and succeeded just as the old woman finished her incantation and spat three times upon the ground.
For a moment, he thought he saw something in the girl’s eye leaping toward him—
And then the thing was inside his head, scrabbling to get out—
Unbearable pain seared through his mind. All went dark.
When Saleh came to, there was foam on his lips and a leather strap in his mouth. He gagged and spat it out. “To keep you from biting off your tongue,” he heard the healer say, in a voice that sounded hollow and distant. He opened his eyes—and saw kneeling above him a woman whose face was thin and insubstantial as onionskin, with gaping holes where her eyes should have been. He screamed, turned his head, and vomited.
The landowner fetched one of Saleh’s colleagues. Together they loaded the half-conscious man into a cart and took him back home, where the doctor could conduct a thorough examination. The evidence was inconclusive: perhaps a bleeding in the brain, or a latent condition that had somehow been triggered. There was no way to be certain.
From then on, it was as though Saleh had stepped away from the world. An unreality permeated all his senses. His eye could no longer measure distances: he would reach for something and it would be nowhere near his grasp. His hands shook, and he couldn’t properly hold his instruments. Occasionally a fit would overtake him, and he would fall down and froth at the mouth. Worst of all, he could no longer look at a human face, be it man’s or woman’s, stranger or beloved, without succumbing to nauseated terror.
Weeks and months passed. He tried to return to medicine, listening to complaints and making simple diagnoses. But he couldn’t disguise his malady, and his remaining patients disappeared. The family adapted a more frugal lifestyle, but within months, their savings were gone. Their clothes grew shabbier and the house fell into disrepair. Saleh spent his days alone in a shaded room, trying to consult medical texts he could barely read, searching for an explanation.
His wife became ill. She tried to hide it at first but then turned feverish. Saleh sat by helplessly as his former colleagues offered their aid. Still she worsened. One night, burning and delirious, she mistook Saleh for her long-dead father and begged him for ice cream. What could he do? There was a churn sitting in a cupboard, purchased during more extravagant days. He rolled it into the kitchen and washed the dirt and dust away. His daughter’s chickens had laid that morning. Sugar they still had, as well as salt and ice, and milk from a neighbor’s goat. Laboriously he set out the supplies, moving slowly lest he fumble and spill. He smashed the ice with a hammer, then beat together the eggs and sugar and goat’s milk. He added the ice and rock salt, and packed the mixture around the inside of the churn. He wondered, when had he learned this? Certainly he’d watched his wife make ice cream, as a treat for their daughter and her friends, but he’d never paid any particular attention. Now it was as though he’d done it all his life. He fixed the lid on the churn and turned the crank around and around. It felt good to work. The mixture began to stiffen. A clean sweat broke on his forehead and in his armpits. He stopped when it felt right to do so.
He returned to the bedroom with a small dish of ice cream and found that his wife had descended into chills. He set the dish aside and held her shaking hand. She did not return to consciousness, and died as dawn was breaking. Saleh hadn’t recognized the beginnings of the death throes, and thus hadn’t been quick enough to wake their daughter to say good-bye.
The next afternoon, Saleh sat alone in the kitchen as his wife’s sisters prepared her body. Someone came in and knelt next to him. It was his daughter. She wrapped her arms around him. He closed his eyes so that he could remember how he used to see her, her dark hair and bright eyes, the sweet freckles on her cheek. Then she noticed the churn.
“Father,” she said, “who made the ice cream?”
“I did,” he said. “For your mother.”
She did not remark on the strangeness of this, only dipped two fingers inside the churn, then brought them to her mouth. Her red-rimmed eyes blinked in surprise.
“It’s very good,” she said.
After that, there was little question as to his path. He needed to support himself and his daughter. The house was sold, and his wife’s brother’s family took them in; but they were not wealthy people, and Saleh had no wish to strain their charity. And so, with a white cloth wrapped around his head to keep away the sun, Doctor Mahmoud became Ice Cream Saleh. Soon he was a common sight in the streets of Homs, lugging the churn on a small wheeled cart garlanded with a string of bells, calling out Ice cream! Ice cream! Doors would open and children would
come running, clutching coins; and he would keep his head averted so as not to see the light filtering through their bodies, and the bottomless holes in their eyes.
Soon Saleh was one of the most successful ice cream sellers in the neighborhood. Partly this was due to the ice cream itself. All agreed that what made his ice cream superior to others was its smooth texture. Other sellers would use too much ice, and the cream would freeze too quickly, becoming gritty and harsh. Or they might not churn it enough, and the children would be left with a disappointing, half-melted soup. Saleh’s, though, was perfect every time. But his success also developed from his tragic story—there goes Ice Cream Saleh, did you know he was once a famous physician—and for the children it was an exercise in suspense. Would Ice Cream Saleh fall down in the street today, and foam at the mouth? They were always disappointed when he did not, though the ice cream was a consolation. When a fit did overtake him, he’d try to warn the children: “Don’t be frightened,” he would say, the words slurring in his ears. And then his vision would go dark, and he would enter another world, one of hallucinations, whispered words, and strange sensations. He could never remember these visions when he woke, his face in the dust, the children invariably having fled.
He spent years wandering the streets in this way, footsore and hoarse, his hair gone to silver. What money he could spare was put aside for his daughter’s future, as they could no longer count on a generous bride-price. How surprised they were, then, when a local shopkeeper approached Saleh with an offer that was more than he’d dared hope for. Saleh’s daughter, the man said, had impressed him as a rare example of filial piety, and such a woman was all he desired as a wife and mother of his children. No one seemed to think much of him—he was known mostly for his unsolicited opinions on the failings of his neighbors—but he made a good living and didn’t seem cruel.
“If God gave me one wish,” Saleh said to his daughter, “I would tell Him to set the princes of the world before you and say, ‘Choose, whichever one you like, for none is too wealthy or too noble.’ ” He kept his eyes closed as he spoke; it had now been eight years since he had looked at his own daughter.
She kissed his forehead and said, “Then I thank God you cannot have your wish, for I hear that princes make the worst of husbands.”
The marriage contract was signed that summer. Less than a year later she was dead: a hemorrhage during childbirth, and the baby strangled in the canal. The woman attending the birth had not been able to save either of them.
Her aunts prepared her body for burial, just as they’d prepared her mother, washing and perfuming her and wrapping her in the five white sheets. At the funeral, Saleh stood in the open grave and received his daughter into his arms. Pregnancy had enlarged and softened her body. Her head rested on his shoulder, and he gazed down at the covered landscape of her face, at the ridge of her nose, the hollows of her eyes. He laid her on her right side, facing the Qaba. The shroud’s perfume blended oddly with the clean, sharp smell of damp clay. He knew the others were waiting for him, but he made no move to climb out. It was cool and quiet there. He reached out and drew his fingers across the jagged wall, feeling with his distant senses the ridges left by the gravedigger’s spade, the clay slick and gritty between his fingers. He sat down beside his daughter’s body, and would have stretched out next to her except that he was then hauled out of the grave by his armpits, his son-in-law and the imam having decided to cut short the spectacle before it grew any worse.
That summer he had fewer customers, though the weather was as hot as ever. He could hear parents murmuring to their children as they passed, no, dearest, not from Mister Saleh. He understood: he was no longer merely tragic, but cursed.
He could not pinpoint how the idea first came to him, to take the last of his money and go to America, but when it did he embraced it quickly. His wife’s family thought he’d finally fallen into insanity. How would he survive in America on his own, when he barely could make his way through Homs? His son-in-law told him that there were no mosques in America, and he would not be able to pray properly. Saleh replied only that he had no need of prayer, as he and God had parted company.
None of them understood his purpose. America was not meant to be a new beginning. Saleh had no wish to survive. He would take his ice cream churn across the sea, and there he would die, from sickness or starvation or perhaps even sheer accident. He would end his life away from the pity and the charity and the stares, in the company of strangers who only knew what he was, not what he had once been.
And so he left, in a steamship out of Beirut. He spent the wretched voyage breathing the miasma of close air in the steerage deck, listening to the coughing of the passengers and wondering what he would contract. Typhoid? Cholera? But he emerged unscathed, only to suffer the humiliating interview and examination at Ellis Island. He’d given two young brothers his last bit of money to say he was their uncle, and they kept their word, promising the immigration clerk that they would support Saleh and keep him from indigence. He passed the medical exam only because the doctor could point to nothing physically wrong with him. The brothers took him to Little Syria, and before the disoriented Saleh could protest they had found him a place to live. It cost only a few pennies a week: a tiny room in a damp cellar that smelled of rotting vegetables. The only light came from a small grate, high on the wall. The young men took him around the neighborhood and showed him where he could buy milk and ice, salt and sugar. Then they purchased sacks full of peddling notions, wished him good luck, and left town for a place called Grand Rapids. That evening Saleh found in his pockets two dollars in change that had not been there before. After weeks of seasickness and exhaustion, he didn’t even have the strength to be angry.
And so once again he became Ice Cream Saleh. The streets of New York were more crowded and treacherous than Homs, but his route was smaller and simpler, a narrow loop: Washington Street south to Cedar, then Greenwich north to Park, and back to Washington Street again. The children learned just as quickly as their Homs cousins to put the coin in his outstretched hand, and never to look into his eyes.
One sweltering afternoon, he was scooping ice cream into his small tin bowls when he felt a soft hand touch his elbow. Startled, he turned and glimpsed a woman’s cheekbone. Quickly he looked away. “Sir?” a voice said. “I have water for you, if you’d like. It’s so hot today.”
For a moment he considered refusing. But it was indeed incredibly hot, a humid oppression like none he’d ever known. His throat felt thick, and his head ached. He realized he didn’t have the strength to refuse. “Thank you,” he said finally, and held out one hand toward the direction of her voice.
She must have appeared puzzled, for he heard a child’s voice say, “You’ll have to give him the glass, he never looks at anyone.”
“Oh, I see,” the woman said. Carefully she placed the glass of water in his hand. The water was cool and clean, and he drank it down. “Thank you,” he said again, holding the glass out to her.
“You’re welcome. May I ask, what is your name?”
“Mahmoud Saleh. From Homs.”
“Mahmoud, I’m Maryam Faddoul. We’re standing in front of my coffeehouse. I live upstairs with my husband. If you’re in need of anything—more water, or a place to sit out of the sun—please, come in.”
“Thank you, madam,” he said to her.
“Please call me Maryam,” she said, and there was a friendly smile in her voice. “Everyone does.”
After that day, Maryam would often come out and speak with him and the children, whenever his slow trudge took him past her shop. The children all seemed to like Maryam: she took them seriously, remembered their names and the details of their lives. When Maryam was at his side he was inundated with customers, not just children but their mothers as well, and even merchants and factory workers returning home at the end of a shift. His route was a fraction of what it had been in Homs, but he sold just as much ice cream, if not more. In a way it was exasperating: he hadn?
??t come to America to succeed, but it seemed that America would not let him fail.
Now, with his churn in tow, he considered Maryam’s news of the Bedouin apprentice as he passed Arbeely’s shop. He’d never gone in, only felt the wave of heat from the open door. For a moment he considered it. Then, irritated at memories, he resolved to give no more thought to Maryam’s news but only watched the dark shapes of his feet as they moved inexorably toward his cellar home.
In the Syrian Desert, the three days of rain came to an end. The waters soaked into the earth, and soon green shoots were carpeting the lowlands, spreading up the sides of the hills. For the Bedouin tribes, these brief days were of great significance: a chance to turn their animals out to pasture and let them eat their fill, before the days grew hotter and the new growth died away.
And so it happened that one morning a Bedouin girl named Fadwa al-Hadid drove her small flock of goats out to the valley near her family’s encampment. Singing softly to herself and switching the straying goats with a thin branch, she crested a small ridge—and there, glinting in the valley, was an enormous palace made entirely of glass.
She goggled at it for a moment before deciding that it was, indeed, truly there. Bursting with excitement, she gathered her goats, ran them back to the encampment, and rushed into her father’s tent shouting about a shining palace that had suddenly appeared in the valley.
“It must have been a mirage,” said her father, Jalal ibn Karim al-Hadid, who was known to his clan as Abu Yusuf. Her mother, Fatim, simply snorted and shook her head, and went back to nursing her youngest. But the girl, who was fifteen, stubborn, and headstrong, dragged her father from the tent, pleading with him to go look at the palace with her.
“Daughter, you simply can’t have seen what you thought you saw,” said Abu Yusuf.