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
