The Radiant City by Lauren B. Davis Page A

from Chez Elias, stands in the doorway of the café. He is dressed like any American teenager: baggy black track pants slung low on his hips, oversized jean jacket hanging almost to his knees. Trainers. He fills up the doorway. Matthew considers that if it were not for the ear-to-ear grin he would be a pretty intimidating kid, the kind old French ladies move away from in the metro, clutching their pocketbooks. That lower lip is strange. When Matthew first met Joseph he thought someone had given him a swollen lip, but it is clearly some sort of birth defect, as though someone has pulled down that side of flesh, turning it slightly inside out.
     
    “Hello! My uncle says hello,” he calls.
     
    “Hello. It’s Joseph, right?”
     
    “Yes. Joseph. You busy?”
     
    “Nope.”
     
    “Then you come. Have coffee.”
     
    Another café, another coffee . Matthew shrugs. “Sure,” he says.
     
    Ramzi greets him warmly and pulls out a chair at a table where the old man already sits.
     
    “Sit with us. Joseph, you get the coffee.”
     
    Saida is behind the counter. She looks tired, with hollows under her eyes. Smiling at Matthew, she adjusts the scarf around her neck, and Matthew senses that this hiding of her scars is an automatic gesture. He has noticed that when she is not using her right hand, which is also badly scarred, she keeps it behind her back. When Saida smiles, the brightness of her teeth makes her skin look darker and the smudges under her eyes more pronounced. She says something to Joseph and the boy comes back with a tray of tiny cups, a pot of Turkish coffee, a plate of dates, oranges and baklava.
     
    Joseph sits and pours the coffee. Matthew looks at these three generations of men and can’t help but wonder what it would be like to sit like this, with men of his own blood, of his own stories. To be known in that way. Where you come from. Who your people are. I know my people, he thinks, and I am not proud.
     
    They ask him how he is and he says he is fine. They talk about the weather and about the sans-papiers and the recent strike by public employees, which brought the country to a near-halt for one day, closing schools and grounding flights. Saida does not enter the conversation, but watches them and serves the occasional customer, wrapping preserved lemons in jars, packages of haloumi cheese, olives and pita. Matthew sips the coffee, rich and smoky, alive on his tongue after the sweetness of the date, the sparkle of the orange.
     
    Joseph asks him questions about being a reporter, and at first he answers in monosyllables, not wanting to bring the dark memories into this place. Then he looks at the boy, who runs his hand self-consciously over his shaved head, his heavy eyebrows raised in eagerness, a smile of encouragement on that bruised-looking mouth—and Matthew sees himself as he never was, but would like to think he might have been: hopeful for the world, for tales of adventure, for someone to open a hand and show him a treasure from a far-off place. He sees how Joseph tries to be tough, dressing like that, with the swagger and the pout, but how he is, after all, just a boy champing at the bit and restless in this, the world of his family. Matthew finds he does not want to disappoint him and so he tells a tale or two—harmless stories of exotic places—the Khyber Pass, Bejing, New Guinea, Borneo. He tells of eating slugs with the Australian Aborigines, and snake meat in China. He tells of entering the bowl of a Hawaiian volcano with a film crew from National Geographic and of travelling with storm-chasers across the dust bowl of America on the trail of tornadoes big as mountains, moving at the speed of freight trains.
     
    Matthew discovers he likes telling tales to Joseph, and when he looks at his watch he is surprised to find three hours have passed.
     
    “I have to go,” he says.
     
    “Stay for dinner,” Elias says, his leathery face a mass of wrinkles when he smiles. “We make lemon