Freebie

If you know me (I think at least some of you out there do), you probably know that I'm finishing a book. I try to refrain from using it as an excuse for a lack of substantial posts on TFR, but I'm going to embrace it now and share a small bit of a piece I'm working on. Something which, I imagine, will be sliced and edited and washed over a few dozen times before you see it again.

It all leads me back to the night Hassan and I first met Mohammed. We’re checking into the Faisal at a late hour, just before the curfew. We’re checking in and he’s looking over our passports in the lamplight, turning through the pages after he’s written down our information in the ledger. His teenage fingers pass over all the officious, diminutive colophons (Athina, Praha, Ferihegy, Stansted, Hohenau, NYC, Schiphol, Warszawa), blots of ink like keys on a harmonium he wants to play in order to know their music or perhaps just to make a sound.

He holds slow through the pages, he is not yet outside of his duty, but he’s nearing the penumbra in which he’d called out for loitering. He lingers a little while before he says something for only Hassan to hear—perhaps in consideration of certain stamps I’ve accrued (or perhaps in spite of them)—after which, Hassan unlocks his voicebox and draws out a response laden with the hue of fraternal love.

What Mohammed chooses not to tell me, Hassan decides to convey without my asking as we drop our bags in the dorm room of the hostel. Mohammed says that when his country is finally born—inshallah—he wants to be the agent who looks at the passports of its visitors and stamps them through.