The Turtle of Oman Read online

  Moussa sang a few songs to them, old Arabic fishing songs, with curly notes and repeated refrains—songs about waiting and watching and being out in the water under the giant sky.

  His face had a sunbaked toughness—Aref liked his face. Moussa threw his white net into the waves on the side of the boat by Sidi. It sank down into the water pulled by its metal weights. Sidi gripped the top edge of it where it hooked onto the boat. “I am in charge of the net,” he said, in a frail-sounding voice.

  “Would you like to hold a fishing pole?” Moussa asked Aref.

  “Walla—for sure, yes!” Aref said, thinking, who wouldn’t?

  Moussa placed the pole squarely in his hands. “If you feel a tug, you do this,” he demonstrated the knob on the spinny reel and showed him how to turn it very quickly, which Aref already knew. The reel made a clean whizzing sound, which he also liked.

  “What do you want to catch?” Moussa asked. “Bluefish? Shad? I attached a lure that they both like. . . .”

  Aref just grinned at him and shrugged. He knew some fish were bigger than he was. “I think any fish would be good,” he said.

  They all rocked back and forth together. The wind circled their heads, spreading out across the tops of all the waves. Aref wished one of his friends from school would pass by on another boat and they could slap hands from boat to boat.

  Right then, Aref felt a tug. He stood, tried to turn the knob, jerked the pole backwards and lost his balance, slipping to his knees. He let go of the pole, but Moussa grabbed it in time. A shiny silver fish flapped into the air, then opened its mouth and dropped back down into the waves.

  “Mabruk! Congratulations!” Sidi said.

  “Lost it!” said Moussa. “He was quick! Here, try again!”

  Aref stood up and shook himself off. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to catch a fish because then the fish would be DEAD. Fish looked better flashing in the sunlight for a moment, then slipping back into the waves.

  The sun got hotter and hotter. The motor was humming softly and the boat was circling and floating in place. “I think it’s a good spot,” Moussa said.

  What did a fish think when it saw a fish hook with a pretty feathery lure on it?

  Yummy, yummy, yummy?

  Boom! Another tug. Aref pulled. He tried to turn the reel with his right hand, but the tug against him was very strong.

  Sidi grabbed Aref’s waist so he could stay balanced. Aref cranked the reel slowly and then—the fish flew up above the water and—splashed down.

  “Keep going,” said Moussa. “Slowly, slowly . . .”

  Aref turned the spool as steadily as he could. As the glistening silvery fish rose again, its head poking out of the water, Moussa added his strength to the reel and said, “Aref, you have a big guy here! This is something!”

  The shining, spectacular fish flopped into the boat, its eye staring straight up at Aref, who wanted to pat it the same way he patted Mish-Mish. Its mouth was opening and closing in a perfect O.

  “Is it dead yet?” asked Aref.

  Moussa said, “No.”

  “Can we let it go?”

  “Why?”

  “I want it to escape. I want it to have a longer life. Please!”

  Moussa looked at Sidi and Sidi shrugged.

  “I would make fish soup,” said Sidi. “One or the other.”

  “We will do what you say, Aref,” said Moussa, raising his eyebrows. “I’m sure the fish will thank you. Myself, I would keep it. But, it is your fish. You want to throw it back yourself?”

  “Yes!” Aref was a little afraid to pick up the huge fish since touching it made it wriggle hard. And it was very heavy when he gripped it. “Tell the turtles hi from me!” he said as he held up the fish one moment, then dropped it cleanly into the water where it slid home, disappearing instantly.

  Aref shivered, imagining its relief. “Sidi!” he called loudly, though Sidi was right next to him. “This is fun!”

  “Do you have another peppermint?” Sidi asked Moussa. “Are we ready to head back to solid ground?”

  Once you have been out on a boat looking back at where you live, everything seems changed. The blue water, the sea stretching, everything altered. Now the sea is a real place that can hold you. You will always know you might be elsewhere instead of on solid earth. You’re not tied to the ground.

  Aref had once floated with his dad on a friend’s sailboat and they came home that night feeling lighter and airy inside. Would flying feel this way too? Looking down on earth from high in the sky—would everything change even more, once you landed? Would standing on a shore in Michigan, or drifting out in a boat on any great lake let you feel connected to all the floating people of the world?

  “Let’s check the net for sardines,” said Moussa, “before we head back in. We didn’t quite get to their favorite spot, but just in case. . . .”

  Hand over hand, he and Sidi pulled the heavy net into the boat. A large clump of seaweed was snagged in it, and a few tiny sardines.

  Moussa shook his head. “Not very successful!”

  “But look what I see,” said Sidi, pointing. “A prize! A relic from the deep!”

  It was an odd lumpy gray stone that looked a little like a person sitting down, hunched over.

  “It’s for you!” Sidi said, handing it to Aref. “No fish, but a sitting stone! I think it looks like me in the boat.”

  Aref laughed. “It does look like you. Does it get a face?”

  “No, this one will remain pure, unblemished by human touch. But ask what it knows, listen closely, and guard the answer.” Sidi handed it to Aref like a prize. Aref slipped the sitting stone into his pocket. A relic from the underworld. Frozen in time.

  Boat Trip

  Boat Trip

  1. I caught two fish.

  2. Sidi is not like Sinbad the Sailor. Sidi had to take a Tums.

  Stretched-Out Day

  That afternoon, Aref and Sidi made popcorn and watched a movie on TV about penguins. Then they decided to take naps. Sidi thought of it, but Aref agreed without saying anything. “The sea makes people sleepy,” Sidi said, yawning. “This will be good for us. We can play games longer this evening. We can stay up late and have a stretched-out day.”

  Lying on the couch, his head on a red pillow, Aref kept thinking that no matter what you say, there is something more inside that you can’t say. You talk around it in a circle, like stirring water with a stick, when ripples swirl out from the center. You say something that isn’t quite right and that’s worse. Then you want to say, sorry! But no one knows what you mean.

  He wished he could tell Sidi, you are the king of my heart forever, I don’t care who else I meet, I don’t care about traveling and new friends and different flavored yogurts, I only care about how nice you are and how much I cannot stand the thought of being far from you, ever, ever, ever.

  But he could never say this.

  Aref took the sitting stone out of his pocket because it was lumpy and placed it on the table next to him. It really sat up. Aref’s body felt as if it was still bobbing in the boat. Then he fell asleep.

  When they rose again after an hour, they both felt energized. “I dreamed of the boat!” Sidi said.

  “So did I!”

  “I was still on it.”

  “So was I.”

  “Let’s get moving.”

  Sidi swept the floor and Aref washed the dishes. Then Sidi gave Aref all the 5 and 10 and 25 baisa coins from the kitchen table drawer. He dropped them into a green velvet pouch and said, “Show your new friends in the United States what our coins look like. Maybe you can trade some. I could give you a few interesting postage stamps too. Would you like that?”

  “Yes,” said Aref, knowing that Sidi’s gifts would be hard to trade or give away.

  That night, they climbed up to the roof to watch the moon rise over the sea. It was orange and full, like a big fat juicy melon. So quickly, the steaming air of the day cooled off and the world became softer. A bre
eze rose up around them. Someone far away was calling out, repeating echoing words they couldn’t understand.

  A bird flew over, so large and so fast Aref wondered if it might be a falcon. Sidi thought it was a vulture headed toward a dead rat down by the dock.

  A plane took off from the airport and flew low over the city, at an angle. “Where do you think that one is going?” Aref asked.

  “Maybe Teheran. Or Karachi. It’s not the biggest one and the biggest one that goes to Kuwait also goes to London or Germany.”

  How did Sidi know so many things?

  “When you go to the airport in a few days,” said Sidi, “I’ll come straight home after dropping you and your mother, and climb to this roof and look up. And you look down, too. Promise me?”

  His voice sounded thick now.

  Aref, like swirling water, couldn’t say anything.

  Back downstairs, Sidi lit the old kerosene lamp he kept on his table. They played cards. Sidi could snap and shuffle cards much faster than Aref’s parents could. They worked on the giant turtle puzzle that they obviously weren’t going to be able to finish now—and only accomplished one corner of water. “What is the use of a puzzle anyway?” Aref asked.

  “Patience,” said Sidi. “The use of a puzzle is patience.”

  “I hate patience.”

  “No, you don’t. It’s the best talent we have.”

  Aref poured the dominoes out of their wooden box and he and Sidi dove into a game, playing twelve or fourteen times in a row, clicking the dominoes on the low marble-topped coffee table. And they tied. They always tied, winning the same number of games each before quitting. The kerosene light from the lamp danced on the walls. Sidi leaned back on the couch. “How often does it happen?” he asked. “Two champions in the same family!”

  Sidi told Aref a few stories about when he was a boy, when none of the roads were paved and no tourists came and people still had donkeys and horses nuzzling around their houses and yards. Bread sellers and tea sellers would ride on the small dirt roads, calling out special bread and tea songs. “Hoobz for the people! Shai turned on high!” There were many camels in a caravan then, loaded with pots and pans and cloth and seeds and drums and threads and fruits and dates and tools. People were dependent on them.

  “You definitely would have liked cooking outdoors all the time on those big flaming fire pits with huge pots suspended over them,” Sidi said.

  “Where did those fire pits go?”

  “I don’t know. We could look for them someday. Maybe the earth swallowed them. We had one right outside in the backyard where the mint is now—you know how the mint is growing in a circle? I think it’s growing in the ashes of the old fire pit.”

  Sidi closed his eyes and tipped his head to one side. “When I was young, I rode a galloping brown horse all the way to the turtle beach, which is very far, as you know, to see the turtles at night, slipping out of the sea . . . I even slept there.”

  “I want to do that,” Aref said. “You know I do! Why have we never done that?” It sounded even better than just camping with other kids on the school field trip.

  “We’ll do it when you get back,” Sidi promised. “I mean, we won’t ride horses there, sorry, but we’ll see if we can get a permit to camp there. We’ll also drive south to Sana’a, Yemen, to see the fabulous ancient brown and white buildings with zigzags and polka dots, the most amazing buildings in the world, and we’ll drive to Saudi Arabia to see towers and palaces and maybe we’ll even go to Dubai to purchase little gold bricks from the mall machines, since you’ll be bringing your big sack of American coins back here and need to invest them, and maybe we’ll even sail to India, across that rough water, if we get very very brave. I don’t know if I could take it, though. Too much boating might finish me off.”

  Aref laughed. “I’m sorry you felt sick, Sidi!”

  “It’s fine now. I took a Tums. I have recovered.”

  “We can just fly to India.”

  “By then you’ll be an expert on flying. I have one more small surprise,” Sidi said. “Are you tired again? I hope so. Because tonight . . . would you like to sleep on the roof?”

  Open Air

  Two bedrolls of blankets and quilts were waiting on the wooden shelf inside Sidi’s clothes cupboard.

  “Excellent!” said Aref.

  “Can you blow out the lamp, please?” asked Sidi.

  They lugged the bedrolls, along with a bed pillow for Sidi and a red velvety couch pillow for Aref, up the skinny stairs to the flat roof. Sidi unrolled a plastic tarp, then Aref smoothed out the quilts.

  A rooster crowed from somewhere. Aref leaned over the edge of the roof to see if he could spot him. But the rooster was invisible in the dark.

  “Is he confused?” asked Aref.

  “He always does that,” said Sidi. “He needs a new clock.”

  They looked out across the old portion of the city. “In my eyes I have a map of these lights,” Sidi said.

  “You do?”

  “You can have one too. Just soak it all up and close your eyes, then look again till it is written in your brain.”

  They were quiet. A fire engine streaked across the map, down toward the shore, wailing loudly. “I don’t want a fire engine in my brain,” Aref said.

  “Erase it. Let it pass, then look again.”

  They stood a few more moments in silence.

  “I have it now,” said Aref. A moon was at the top of his map and a breeze rattled the corner.

  Sidi had a hard time squatting down on the ground to stretch out on his covers. “I haven’t done this in a long time,” he said, huffing. “Ouch! It would be better if we had two little mattresses. Sorry! I should have thought of that.”

  “I don’t need a mattress,” said Aref.

  “You are a young pup!”

  Aref kicked off his shoes and peeled off his socks. Sometimes it was fun to sleep in your clothes. “I am not a pup. Sidi, did you hear about the oldest gorilla in the world having a birthday this month? He is fifty-two and he has twelve children.”

  “Where did you hear this?”

  “From Lena at school—she likes gorillas as much as I like turtles.”

  “Where does that gorilla live?”

  “She didn’t tell me.”

  “Let’s be glad he’s not having his birthday party on this roof.”

  They laughed. Then they laughed more.

  Thick blackness salted with stars made a wide ceiling above them, even here, in the city. “Sidi, the sky is so huge,” said Aref.

  Sidi said, “I’m falling into it. Are you?”

  They talked softly, whispering together, as if they didn’t want to break a spell. They felt like birds wrapped in their own wings or suspended in the moving waves, comfortably gliding, or secret stones buried in hot sand for hundreds of years. They felt like part of the sky and everything under it. They were very tiny and they were also specks of dust floating in moonbeams and they could time-travel and be in more than one place at the same moment, and Sidi said in some ways he would always be a little boy too even though he didn’t look like it anymore, and Aref said, “Sidi, I am also older than you.” And all of this made sense to them.

  Aref dreamed he was flying without an airplane. Sidi dreamed about the rooster speaking through a translator.

  They woke up at the same time and told their dreams.

  In the middle of the night, Sidi had said, “Aref, I’m going to miss you terribly, you do know that?”

  Aref felt warmed to hear this and sad, at the same time. He knew Sidi always tried to keep everything positive, so this was a rare comment from his happy tongue.

  Contagious

  Back at home, Mr. Al-Jundi from down the street showed up with his wife and seven children to say a dramatic good-bye to Aref and his mother. At least five of the children were coughing and sneezing. After they left, Aref’s mom opened the windows to air out the rooms. She had tried to keep her scarf in front of her face while they
were all standing there. “They seemed very contagious! We don’t want to get colds before we go,” she said.

  Aref didn’t like colds either, but he liked the word contagious. And he added it to his favorite word list. Maybe everything was contagious. His mom had always told him whining was contagious—he was old enough now to feel it might be true. Still, he did it sometimes. You couldn’t help it. Complaining was contagious and also a little delicious.

  Different Kinds of Contagious

  1. If one person likes a song and keeps singing it, it gets stuck in your head.

  2. If one person wears rainbow-colored shoelaces, everyone wants them.

  3. If one kid at lunchtime says the spinach in the school cafeteria tastes rotten, everyone might think so.

  Maybe if your friends saw the stones you had collected, or your grandfather had given to you, they thought about collecting them too. Maybe it was all up to you. To everybody, every single day. What you did, what you said . . . could change what happened. Or how everyone felt.

  “We will win this game.” Aref knew that’s what some soccer players said before every game. Even if they were smaller and younger, even if they knew both teams couldn’t win, the players said it, to pump up their own bravery. “We will win. We will be brave. We will pass this test. We will stand on the stage and sing a solo without croaking like a toad.”

  Aref was turning around inside his own mind. That’s what it felt like. He was standing inside the doorway of his still-jumbled bedroom, staring at it. What a nice room. See you again someday. Be nice to my cousins. Maybe he could make a little space for bravery inside his fear, maybe just a little. Maybe it would grow. Maybe sleeping on a roof had done something to him.

  In his notebook he wrote,

  Breaking News

  1. The Al-Jundi family was sneezing a lot, now our house might be polluted.

  2. Sleeping on the roof is really the best thing. If you have a flat roof, you should try it. But if you don’t have a flat roof you will ROLLLLLLLLL off.