The taxi driver's name is Mohamed, he is from Egypt. I lounge back relieved and thankful onto the black leather seats of his battered yellow taxi. He wants to know my name. I resist, anticipating the deluge of questions that will unfurl from this garrulous man at the mention of my Arabic name.

Passing vignettes of early morning Manhattan sweep by me. Innumerable Korean corner stores with piles of unsold New York Times newspapers line the dirt-filled pavement alongside screaming headlines of the New York Post "Central Park Rapist: Nabbed!". Dark music stores showcasing vinyl rock' n roll classics are eclipsed by the larger-than-life red-and-white façade of the Virgin mega-store on Broadway. I hold a visceral love for this city. Here I learned to believe in my own voice, to be a writer, a film-maker — to reach for long-held dreams, no longer riveted to the past.

Crossing over into the East Village, I watch listlessly the grey awnings of Eastern European Delis registering the names of flashier restaurants that have mushroomed in this newly fashionable area.

I make a mental note, a journalist's habit.

I think back to the night Marius and I walked home, my hand in his, singing softly to the sound of Chet Baker's "My Funny Valentine." It seems a lifetime away. Trying to hold onto this fickle memory, I search for the smoky jazz joint we discovered that night but a fruit juice bar stands in its place.

Over Manhattan Bridge more pressing scenes tumble in uncontrollably: the mattress on the floor of our loft apartment; Marius's ashen face framed by flaming red hair standing naked as he begs me to stay; tears rolling down my face as I pack my belongings, a sharp pain at the pit of my stomach. Images are flooding in tripping over one another like a set of falling dominoes.

At the wheel, Mohamed awaits an answer. I cannot hold back any longer.

"Loubna," I murmur.

Mohamed's fatherly gaze locks into mine via the back seat mirror. He seems surprised. My pale skin, the tight jeans I wear, and the lack of adornment around my face do not betray my Oriental roots.

"Loubna?" He says. "But that's an Arabic name." He says it more as a fatality than as a question. An Egyptian name he corrects, for everything Arab is Egyptian for this supremely confident nation.

I smile. Beaten

Mohamed accelerates, his mind racing. I sit bobbing up and down in the back seat of the speeding yellow taxi like a malleable marionette. The last couple of weeks have taken a toll on me. First, the difficult break up after seven years. Then, like a bomb falling from a clear sky: the news of my father's death

I recognized the banker's clipped British accent as he answered the phone. Our conversation was brief. I asked him for the whereabouts of my father, annoyed to have to go through him to reach my father. A long silence ensued. Then, the voice distant and formal sounded a chord in my chest. “I'm afraid that your father passed away.” The pain was sharp like I'd imagine a bullet wound.

As I head to JFK airport toward what had been my father's world, I look back once more at the relationships I let slip away: at what moment did I stop caring? I watch out of the car window the city I leave behind, unsure if I will be back. In this immensity of people, places and opportunities, had I not forgotten where I come from? After years of selfish plying, the distance between my father and I had widened to an abyss bridged by a tenuous thread. In a moment of inattention, a beat really, that thread had broken clean like a stick of dry wood.

Mohamed turns around to face me, his plump hairy arm spread across the back of the passenger seat. He demands my attention.

"Do you know the story of Loubna and Qays?"

I shake my head. "This is one of the most romantic in our culture," Mohamed says as if lecturing a filled auditorium. He enters into a long soliloquy into the origins of my name.

The fable of Qays and Loubna is an ancient tale of unrequited love, an oriental Romeo and Juliet that dates back to the seventh Century. It was spread throughout the Arab world by way of the verses of the Ummayad poet and grandson of the Prophet, Qays Ibn Dharid. Qays had fallen in love with a girl named Loubna who his parents disapproved of. When Loubna fails to deliver a heir, the family force him to discard her. To appease his tormented soul, his parents arrange for him to marry again — another woman named Loubna. But the beauty and kindness of the new-found Loubna only fuels Qays' anguish at having lost his true love. Upon seeing her again, they both die mysteriously leaving no clues behind.

I had been afraid of Mohamed's inquisitiveness, prying into my life at a time when I have difficulties making sense of it. But this former history professor in Cairo enchants me with fables from a world I hardly know, which I can only fathom and which, deep inside, I long to discover.

I do not know what it is in the end: Mohamed's warm voice retelling the tale of the discarded Loubna, the relief at knowing I would make my flight, the sparkle in this gentle and erudite man's eyes, or the grief at the realization that the story I'm tailing is my own, and that its ending remains indelible, like that of Qays and Loubna.

As Mohamed drives along the drab rain-drenched streets of Queens, forging and unravelling more tales of a foreign world, I weep silently. I weep for the painful separation, for this exiled Egyptian's love of his culture, for my father's premature death and our unfulfilled bond left exposed like an open wound. I weep for the child I once were, and which I know intuitively in that instant, I no longer am.

 

Loubna Freih is a human rights activist and writer. Freih was recently published in allaboutlove.com and her poetry appeared in an anthology of women's writing in South Africa. She is working on her first nonfiction novel based on her childhood in Baghdad. She lives in the Swiss Alps with her husband and two sons.