Restoration

The summer after law school ended, I flew to New York City to work at a non-governmental organization that promoted human rights internationally. The law school gave me a stipend, and I found housing near Washington Square Park, in a graduate student dorm. I shared the apartment with two other girls. One was from Buckhannon, West Virginia. The other was from New Jersey.

They were both working at large corporate law firms, hoping to be hired back as associates. They left the dorm before I did in the mornings and came home only to dress back up for work events at night. “Car service to MoMA PS1 tonight,” Devlyn said, in her black shift. Robin was going to her first Yankees game, excited about the private suite. We drank wine from mugs. They modelled their dry-cleaned outfits and statement necklaces. The move to dressing the part of a successful middle-aged woman was coming too early for me. I didn’t like pearls or gold. When they’d leave the apartment, I’d have it to myself.

I slept in a single bed in a large, concrete-walled room. There were no carpets or rugs in our unit. Every surface was very clean and hard. I went to an art supply store on Wooster St. I tried to soften the drab walls with layers of tissue paper I stapled together. I tacked up sheets of it in pink and layered it over with grey, attached to charcoal paper, four by five feet. I had an ink pad and a collection of small rubber stamps. Numbers and letters. I pressed out phrases that I had heard at the office during the day. New terms and languages. Robin and Devlyn were skeptical about this at first, and then started coming into my room to stamp out their own days. They brought ink pads in other colours back from their offices. We tried to keep it light, this temporary ritual.

The most appealing part of the bedroom was an almost floor-to-ceiling window facing 6th Ave. I remember sitting by the window and looking out onto the sculptural landscape of water towers on the rooftops, each one at its own height and depth. Unevenly checkered, reliably there. Our building had a rooftop patio. At night, students living in the dorm would congregate outside. I would go to the rooftop to smoke just one cigarette and write in my journal. I could see out over Washington Square Park to the lights and music from the Village’s faded jazz clubs. I understood the fragility of that time on some level, I think. A one-line entry: “Zareb asks why I want to do this work?”

A new criminal court, created with the United Nations’ support, had been established in The Hague. The idea was that the people most responsible for ongoing atrocities—including large-scale murder, directing attacks on peacekeeping missions—would be brought to justice in the Netherlands. We were working on a project involving the genocide in Darfur. My own, assigned advocacy effort involved writing drafts of strongly-worded letters to those countries that had signed on to support the International Criminal Court. These countries were called state parties. I also helped edit reports that urge the Court to issue an arrest warrant for the former Sudanese President, Omar al-Bashir. Al-Bashir was thought to have orchestrated attacks against the civilian population and directed and permitted mass rape.

From my limited viewpoint, it seemed to me that the momentum was really there. My boss was excited and firm: pushing, pushing, pushing. The everyday atmosphere seemed like what I imagined a newsroom was like. He liked to walk fast, looking over our cubicle walls.

“Another day, sunshine! Are you ready?” he would yell. He was affectionate. He poured packets of Splenda into his coffee.

This office was in midtown. Every morning, our purses and bags went into the conveyer and through an X-ray machine in the lobby and we were patted down before getting into the elevator. It was not that long after September 11. The city was still on edge.

My group partnered with another organization which stressed the impact of the horror in Darfur on women and children especially. My only understanding of the conflict came in through reports on the ground from our researchers, from the United Nations and other NGO operations offering aid and helping to calm the region. Everyone referred to “broad strokes”: all that we needed to know was that a majority Arab government in Darfur was eliminating rebel groups representing the Black Sudanese population.

Many young, well-off, white students from Cornell or Yale were working in positions like I was. We would frantically check incoming emails and share responses from our country targets, when they’d come in, infrequently. My boss was very sure that indictments were going to come from the Court’s prosecutor. We hadto just keep the pressure on these countries to take a principled stand. We had urgent conference calls with a political aid working in the European Union who had intelligence about which country might sign on to the Court next, a researcher working in Geneva for the Red Cross, and so on.

Reading the reports tracking the attacks and their consequences was heavy-going. I was used to a certain remote way of talking about war and conflict based on my own community’s experience, but this was different. This was a detailed accounting and clinical itemizing of violence and injury. I must have had a cell phone, because I remember texting my roommates at the end of the day, who I could lean on, sometimes, to debrief. Occasionally we’d do so at a cocktail bar, if they had time. But otherwise, I did a lot of walking through lower Manhattan alone. I would walk home instead of taking the subway to try to walk off the tension and stress.

West Broadway heading south was a throng of pedestrians walking and shopping in all directions. I tried to find short cuts to explore, not yet ready to go back to my temporary home. I swerved further to the east.

Through a chain-linked fence on 6th St. between Avenue B and Avenue C, I got to know a little dog. He was a patchy black and dark brown, with streaks of white around the ears and eyes. He seemed to know my scent or my hand. Almost every time I walked by the community garden there, he was outside, on the other side of the fence. We couldn’t touch properly, but his moist snout would just sneak through the links, and I held my hand out as a near-nothing offering.

The owner came to talk to me one day. He was lanky, slow-moving. I could see that much through the vines and the thickened greenery.

“You think Dibi is sweet? He likes you,” he said, through the fence. “He’s basically blind.”His voice was mild but sonorous.

The dog in profile now, turning towards his owner, only one eye continued to stare at me through the fence.

I was curious about the activity in this community garden.This was before Facebook, so I couldn’t look up anything about it online. I hadn’t seen these kinds of projects in cities I lived in. You couldn’t really get into any of them. They felt like private treasures of very few residents. In my imagination, these gardens were places where filmmakers sat together and traced plot diagrams, figured out which locations, and whose scripts. The gate to this garden was shut, typically. But looking through the fence I could see an outdoor kitchen under a makeshift roof: rudimentary shelves and personalized mugs and some colourful plates stacked one on top of the other. I heard water rushing out into a basin but couldn’t spot it.

The dog’s owner told me that he was working in the garden on a restoration project on the south side of his building. His job, as a co-op member and resident of the building, was to scrape all of the old green paint off the wall, and then sand the wood siding so that professional painters could come in to do the last part of the job. The building was seven stories tall and quite wide, housing at least fifty apartments. This was a long-term project for one person. He wanted to complete it by the end of this summer. He was spending up to eight hours a day outside.

The next time I saw Dibi, his owner told me he had a bout of vomiting. Lasting for a few days, and he didn’t know why. Probably something he was eating, of course. I wondered out loud if there were poisonous plants the dog might be getting into without him noticing, while his back was turned.

“I think the berries over here may be poisonous,” he said, lightly concerned.

“I might be able to ID them,” I said.

“You want to come in? I’m not supposed to let people who don’t live here.”

We both smiled then, at the absurdity of that.

He gestured towards the gate that was half a block to the left of me, tucked in.

The blackboard at the gate said: Enter at your Own Risk Children Must be Supervised Welcome all Salsa Lovers and Community Gardens Forever. Still-bright chalk. Like it had never rained here.

The gate opened inwards, not outwards. When I stepped inside, I became attuned to the different sounds: instead of the scraping of brakes and the din of competing car stereos, I heard cicadas. I heard bees humming at different frequencies. I wouldn’t go so far as to say there was a complete hush. It was still loud. But the raucousness from the streets and sidewalks was gone.

He came closer to me and looked back at me. We both stopped to leave that respectful distance between us, and I was grateful I didn’t have to be the first to back up. He had a pale face but very dark hair with some waves of grey, and deep-set eyes that were a bit nervous.

“I’m Zareb,” he said. “Very nice to meet you.”

He was so gallant at that moment that I tripped up. “Ilse,” I said.

“Well,” he paused, “the berries are over here.” He walked ahead of me on the path that was half flag-

stone, half patchy mud.

I took in the growbeds sewn over with cages and the tented arbours filled with knotty grape vines. Fairy lights were strung in crisscross patterns through the structures. Roses, honeysuckle, and wisteria were climbing up and through arms of the trellis. Clouds of dark pink hydrangeas clustered here and there. I breathed deeply .

I knelt down where he showed me. Yes, the plant was clearly deadly nightshade.

“Never saw these in Lebanon,” he said slowly. “So I pull them out?” He had his work gloves on already. In a few fierce gestures, he got the plant and all of its roots out of the ground. He placed these in a green bin.

We sat down on a curved bench covered in embroidered cushions under an old pine tree.

“I really like your dog, Dibi,” I said. “I hope he’s ok.”

He told me that Dibi was thrown out of a car while his family left an area that was being bombed in 1995 and had lost most of his sight when he was left outside during one of the spells of bombing and shelling.

Now the dog was in his old age and probably didn’t need to be consuming anything that would weaken him at all. Dibi had a collar with a tag with Zareb’s names and phone number on it. Zareb toyed with the tag while we talked.

He asked me where I worked and where I was from. I told him. I was used to answering those exact questions with a certain amount of pride.

Zareb just twisted his mouth and raised his eyebrows. His skepticism was immediate and wordless. I felt very young, and spoiled and thoughtless. This was probably the very beginning of the worst kind of self-consciousness which haunted me around that time. We talked more about his neighbourhood and the co-op dynamics and I watched his eyes move around, a luminous green with bursts of gold around the pupils.

I waited a day and went back again to Garden 6BC the day after. This time I went right up to the gate, which was open a bit, for once. Dibi wobbled up to me. I grasped him by the snout and looked in his floppy ears for signs of distress. We walked together, his leg dragging behind him at an awkward angle, to find Zareb by a ladder, wearing goggles and scraping the wall by a window on the third floor. He heard us and slowly climbed down.

“How is he doing today?” I asked.

“Much, much better. Thank you,” Zareb said, lifting the goggles off his face and shaking them out. The sunlight had softened by now. Both he and his dog looked tired out.

“I have another hour or two left to complete this,” Zareb gestured with a long arm to the portion of the wall. He told me about what he was doing in terms of the parts of the wall that had been painted with lead paint, how he needed to protect himself against the particles. He was using a heating gun to soften the paint and would then be able to rub it down with a shrouded grinder.

He asked me how my work went that day and what I accomplished.

Then Zareb changed the subject to the other events in the garden. A live music night coming up on Friday, would I like to come to that?

“Sure,” I said. “Why not.”

I told the girls in our dorm room. They said I needed to be careful, because we didn’t really know each other, but I should go and join him if I had a good feeling.

I went back to work and found the investigative report our organization had written about Lebanon and the conflict with Israel. Hard copies of reports were stacked in alphabetical order by country. I went to Ls and pulled down a few from the mid to late 1990s. I was trained to understand that the right way to write a report was to find potential victims and witnesses for testimony, reaching out to all actors involved with the violation, and then, finally, identifying advocacy targets and making recommendations. The reports from this time referred to Operation Grapes of Wrath.

I tried to read the title pages to see how many researchers worked on the report; the logistics of investigations and fact-finding, and then the transformation to the group analyzing and writing the reports was something that I was interested in at that time. The name Zareb jumped out at me. Even the family names were similar if not the same. Was it the same Zareb from Garden 6BC who was identified as a “consultant” to the organization? Someone who provided information about which witnesses and survivors to contact?

About twenty subsequent reports were lined up after this one, leaning into each other.

I walked back to the garden as invited the following day. It was dinnertime and the sunlight was turning the edges of all the leaves golden. Other residents were setting up a bar area on foldable tables and plugging in the amplifiers, checking the sound levels. Someone rolled in a large silver keg. Kids were running and weaving around the growbeds. It was a relief to see so much festive activity.

Zareb found me. He was wearing a cleaner blue shirt. No goggles or mask. We chatted about the progress I could see he was making on the wall. I was feeling giddy and comfortable. So I told him about something that had happened to my roommate at work. Then I also told him I knew he had contributed to one of the reports my organization put out. I think I said I found it cool.

He sat down on a bench and looked away from me.

“You think you saw my name? Names are more complicated in Arabic, you know, Ilse.” He put his hands on his knees. “What brings you to this work, that you’re doing with the NGO?”

I stumbled. I explained my family’s background and the fact that they left Lithuania when Stalin moved in.

“You’ve spent your whole life here,” Zareb said.

“Yes, I have.”

“You haven’t witnessed any kind of conflict, or war.”

“No.” It was an obvious answer.

“Not poverty, or even a situation of disease, or any kind of intense distress.” He was asking these questions in his mild way. But there was an insistence now.

Then we stopped talking about these serious things and just sat together watching the musicians. Dibi sat between us with his head on my sneakers for a while until Zareb let him inside.

We had another cup of beer from the makeshift bar. It got darker all around us. The band’s break was over. They started a second set.

Zareb started talking more softly. He slipped a trance, looking over the heads of his neighbours, over

the chain-linked fence where the garden edged out.

“Hard to believe Dibi made it out with me. These were indiscriminate and unlawful attacks, everyone said that. Everybody knew that. No accountability has been offered to our family. They tried to get families to separate. Evacuate the kids first, the old people, the people who were sick. But families like mine didn’t want to separate. We would never separate.”

He stopped.

“You should know, Ilse, what it feels like to be in a home or a car when the attacks come. You can’t hide. You can’t run. You just sit and pray that this blazing weapon of death won’t hit you. Everybody screaming, everybody bloody. The total and final silence is the shock.

”Since he was gazing off and not looking at me anymore, I had been watching his feet tap to the music that was playing. His tapping was speeding up and offbeat. Then I saw that Zareb’s right leg was shaking from thigh down. I saw his stomach and chest quaking under his clothes.

“My sisters and brothers are all gone.”

I put my hand over his. His skin was rough to my touch, warm. I thought this contact would somehow stop the shaking, but it seemed to worsen, so I took my hand away.

I took a break from Dibi and Zareb after that night.

My older brother visited me over the weekend, and I showed him the walk from NoHo to Little Italy: the small and crowded pizzerias spilling people out on to the sidewalk, the Korean bowl place that attracted long line-ups. The basketball court where the men more indifferent to spiffed-up nighttime food sweated it out instead. That weekend the abundance of it all was overwhelming.

By July, a few powerful countries had moved to support the indictments in Sudan, but nothing had actually happened yet, on the ground. The conflict continued. I visited with Dibi and Zareb almost every day.

At the end of August, I packed up my dorm room and the few things I had bought for the kitchen. The ink-stamped paper on my wall was photographed with a Nikon and then put into the recycling bin. Devlyn, the girl from Virginia, took her plastic dishes home, with a promise to reuse them. We hugged as a trio, three points of a triangle set down, but rotated by some degrees, after the experiences we absorbed.

I walked back to Garden 6BC to say goodbye. Dibi couldn’t console me. I hugged him as best I could. Zareb had almost finished the work on the wall. He was very polite. We wished each other well.

The year after that summer I applied for veterinary school and got in. Neither of the two warrants of arrest against the former president of Sudan have been enforced and he is still not in the Court’s custody.

 

Photo by Morgane Le Breton from Unsplash