Պեռլա Կանտառջյան

Boys with Passports

The embassy boys came in threes.

Nobody knew why. Security, probably. Some standing order about not wandering a hostile country alone. Or, as I preferred to think, because the grocery run wasn't only a grocery run for them either.

You could clock them before you saw their faces. Salomons or Hokas. Patagonia quarter-zips tied around the waist. Vuori shorts in some military-adjacent shade of green. Oakleys on the cap, Garmin on the wrist, YETI bottle in hand. Everything expensive, everything selected to suggest he had never once thought about clothes.

They walked differently too. Shoulders loose, eyes busy. Men who'd been given a security briefing about Beirut and discovered, somewhere around week three, that being mildly endangered suited them.

Foreigners here had gotten rare enough by then that they registered as a kind of local event. Between the crash and the port, and half of every graduating class taking the first flight to Montreal or Dubai, the second they got a visa (if they did), the tourists mostly stopped coming, and so did the sight of a healthy adult man walking around with actual USD and no visible worry lines.

So when three broad-shouldered Americans came through the automatic doors smelling like sunscreen and per diem, it wasn't only the unmarried women who felt it. It was Tante Elias, seventy-four, abandoning her tomatoes to go stand meaningfully near the imported cereal. It was the pharmacist's son, sixteen, recalculating his gym schedule on the spot. It was Sariyya's mother-in-law, who does not believe in eye contact with strange men, getting a very sudden and very thorough look at the ceiling tiles above aisle seven.

Beauty gets scarce in a collapsing country and starts behaving like a currency.

The embassy boys came for protein powder, peanut butter, imported beer.

The women came for them.

Not officially. Officially, the women came because the store carried real Greek yoghurt and tampons that didn't feel like folded cardboard, because the detergent said NO NASTIES in English, because paying four times what something is worth is, in this country, the closest available impression of stability. But no one puts on lash extensions to buy organic bleach.

The market sat uphill from the embassy, bright and cold and aggressively air-conditioned, misting its vegetables every few minutes. We called it the good supermarket. Good meant expensive. Good meant a government salary and a loyalty card might, for one aisle, want the same thing.

I worked register six. My name is Naira, which will matter later and means nothing yet.

My mother is Lebanese Armenian, my father Lebanese Lebanese; she gave me her face, her music, and not one usable sentence of her language, so at the till I was just another girl saying ahla w sahla, and nobody swiping a card would guess the other half of me was a country I've never once stood inside. When you spend eight hours handling what strangers choose to put in their bodies, you start to believe a cart is a confession.

I got good at reading them.

The first girl I watched get chosen came through my lane four days into the job. Five items.

Diet Cherry Coke.

Light halloumi.

Zero-cal monk-fruit syrup.

Intimate wipes.

Blueberries, the imported kind.

She had almond-shaped nails with French tips, rings on all fingers the way hot girls do, none on the marriage finger. Miu Miu sunglasses pushed up into hair blown out for eleven a.m. on a Tuesday, skin gone tan-gold in that specific way that costs money even when it looks like it didn't.

She read my tag. "Bonjour, Naira, shu helo esmik, oh my God!" and then smiled at nothing, not at me, not the phone, at the air itself, and I understood something had happened to her an hour ago that every unmarried woman in that store would kill for.

Her name, I later found out, was Maya.

To Charbel-Joe, who stocked the cheese and had grown up two floors under her in Achrafieh, she was still Mounira, named for an aunt who wore orthopaedic sandals to weddings and had spent thirty-eight years married to an accountant.

Somewhere between that building and this supermarket, Mounira had become a woman who did Pilates in a matching Alo set and strawberry matcha instead of doing sit-ups on a towel while her father watched news of the bombings.

There's a detail I only understood weeks later, from Charbel-Joe, that made the whole thing harder to hate cleanly: Maya's mother had buried people in the mountains in '89, that last starving winter of the war, and had drawn from it the opposite lesson mine did. My family had done this before, fled one country's slaughter for this one, then watched this one turn on us too, Bourj Hammoud shelled thin, the second catastrophe stacked on the first.

From all of it my side learned to hold still and hoard, that the ground always opens eventually so you'd better be dug in when it does. Maya's mother lived the same war and decided the opposite: leave. Get the degree, get the second passport, raise a daughter fluent enough in reinvention to become someone else at a cheese case in under an hour. One built a bunker. The other built a launch pad.

One of the embassy boys, the tallest one, saw Maya first. Up on her toes for the top shelf, linen riding up the backs of her thighs, spine bare and warm-looking under the fluorescents, the gold cross swinging loose and catching light every time she shifted her weight.

Her hair moved with her, straight and lush and catching the same light as the cross, the specific shine that only happens after a keratin treatment and a bottle of Kérastase– blow-dried into submission twice a week at a salon that has known her by name since she was six.

She was dissecting the halloumi options for caloric compositions.

Wifey material, yeah bro? One of the men floated to the other two. His friends gave the collegiate nod and peeled off toward the sparkling water, leaving him the field. And they wanted her too, all three of them, watching from a safe distance over the fizzy water– that was half the point of doing it in a pack. A girl is worth more the second your friends want her too.

He came up slow, close enough that his shadow fell across her hands before she heard him, the way you approach something you don't want to spook. "A confusing choice, isn't it? Need a hand there?" he said. Not because halloumi is confusing. Because a beginning needs an object to point at.

She let a beat pass– turn too fast and it reads as hunger– then turned the rest of the way slow, on purpose, and gave him the whole face at once, chin tipped just enough to make him do the rest of the work with his eyes. Charbel-Joe swore he watched the boy's jaw loosen, watched something in his shoulders drop, that small surrender men make without noticing they've made it. We don't know what was said between them, only that she let him stand closer than the aisle required and didn't step back. We know the word that closed it, the one she let through the polish on purpose as she turned her bare back to him and walked, slow enough to be followed.

Yalla.

Follow me. The ‘Yalla’ dropped in there carefully to signal I'm foreign enough to be a fantasy, native enough to promise access. He'd say it back wrong to the other two by the sparkling water, too hard on the first syllable, and she'd correct him later and let the correcting feel like pink cotton.

American boys come here already primed for this. We are, to them, one more entry on a list they didn't know they were keeping– the Latina baddie, the Eastern European baddie, the Lebanese baddie– different accents on the same fantasy, a woman who looks like she'd fight for you in the street and then go quietly domestic the second you got her home, beautiful and a little dangerous and secretly dying to cook for someone. Her Arabic did most of the work before either of them said a real sentence to the other. A woman going soft in one language and sharp in another, switching between the two mid-thought, reads to a man like that as depth. Sexy.

A man like that doesn't fall for the beautiful woman. He falls for the one who makes him feel let in– who can take the frightening country outside the blast walls and hand it to him translated, exotic.

Before they knew each other's surnames they'd both already furnished the kitchen. His version was somewhere in Ohio, or New Jersey, or Wisconsin: white cabinets, a refrigerator with a screen in the door, an ice dispenser that spits crushed or cubed, a dishwasher you genuinely cannot hear, a mailbox with both their names stenciled on. A garage that opens itself. A dog with a vet. A long weekend in Tulum for her friend's bachelorette. A week in Cuba, kid-free, the twins Ryan and Ava, obviously, home with the nanny. Cuba because someone at his work did it and said it was unreal, the cigars, the old cars, the little casita by the water.

And Maya on his arm at the lake house over July Fourth, doing the thing Lebanese women do without being taught–nails done even to buy cheese, walking into a room like it owes her something–next to Brittany from high school, who is kind, and who stopped bothering because down there nobody's grading. He wants the before-and-after. He wants to come home from a hardship posting with that.

His mother will see it too. His mother has spent thirty years choosing the girl at that sink, someone local, someone whose country isn't a chyron on the evening news, someone whose mother knows what a casserole is– and she will meet Maya at arrivals with a hug that lasts exactly long enough, and a smile you could keep meat in.

Still. Maya would go.

It’s easy to make jokes about girls hunting passports because jokes are cheaper than admitting what the hunt was for.

Nobody dreams erotically about immigration offices. They dream about not counting the days between explosions, not refreshing embassy advisories, not wondering which country would take them if this one finally finished collapsing.

By the end of the shift the market had married Maya and the hunk off completely. The butcher swore he'd seen them holding hands and giggling, though he's deaf in one ear and has sworn to worse. The produce guy put them in a big white car with diplomatic plates. The girl on register four said she'd added Maya on Instagram and been left on request, which the room agreed was the most damning proof of all, a girl who has won does not accept new witnesses.

Then came the kiss, allegedly, by the Maybelline, he'd picked up the nude tint that always sells out, told her to try it, kissed her right there between the primers. The break room erupted, but not entirely with joy. If it were true, it changed things.

American boys don't marry a Lebanese woman for kissing him in the makeup aisle on day one. That's not what we're for. American boys marry us thinking we're the last housewives left on earth, the last women anywhere still willing to cook and clean and stay, and you don't sell a man that fantasy by handing him the ending before he's even asked for the beginning. A girl with any self-respect makes him wait until the passport starts to feel like his own idea.

"Naira." Sariyya, head cashier, turned the room toward me, not looking up from her tea. "You saw her closest. Nude, or messy?"

I thought of Maya’s twirl, her tan, her mother's name pulsing on the lit screen. "Nude," I said.

"But overlined?"

"A little."

The room went quiet. A peck wouldn't move liner. A real kiss would, and the whole cosmetics aisle would've known it, the eyeballs alone. Nobody said what we were actually doing the math on. How much wanting a woman may show before the wanting starts costing her something. What it subtracts. How a candle left burning eventually comes for the whole table.

I turned my wedding band inward, the way I do when I don't want to look at it.

His name is Wassim. Not Hagop. Not Hovsep. Not Levon.

My grandmother kept a short list her whole life, three names, in order of preference, for the man I was supposed to marry. A Hagop, if God was generous. A Hovsep, if He was only being fair. A Levon at the absolute worst, because even a Levon still crossed himself the Armenian way, three fingers instead of four.

I married a Wassim.

This is, depending on which tantig you ask, either a tragedy or a small treason. My grandmother took it personally. Nayirig, she said, using the full version of my name the way she does only when she is genuinely wounded, we survive one genocide and you finish the job yourself. She has never once said this in front of Wassim. She says it to me in the kitchen, in Armenian, so I’ll only get the tone and not the accusation, which is its own kind of mercy, and its own kind of insult.

This is what the diaspora is actually afraid of, underneath the folk dancing and the genocide-recognition marches and the Sunday school flashcards.

Us. Girls like me, four generations out, marrying the first kind man who's nice to our mothers, watching the language die not in a massacre but in a maternity ward, one healthy, well-loved, half-Armenian baby at a time.

My mother did it first, if we're being honest, and got the same speech thirty years earlier. She married a Lebanese man too– a good one, my father– and by the time I was born the house ran on Arabic by default. I didn't lose the language. It was already most of the way out the door before I could talk.

Here's the part nobody in my family says out loud. If Wassim had shown up with an American or French passport instead of a Lebanese one, my grandmother would have made her peace with it inside a year. She'd have told her friends about her granddaughter's husband from Michigan or Marseille and let the word Lebanese just quietly stop coming up. It was never really about him being from here instead of from Armenia. Half of Lebanon is intermarried by now and nobody's grandmother is staging a hunger strike over it. It was all about the passport.

An American son-in-law is an exit disguised as a wedding. A Lebanese one is just more of the same country, no way further out than the one you already had. She'd have forgiven Wassim almost anything if he'd come with that blue instead of this blue.

Here's my good reason. Wassim sat through his first full Badarak– two hours, incense, nobody translating a word– and never once checked his phone. He learned three sentences of Armenian for my grandmother's eightieth, badly, off a voice note his Armenian colleague sent him for pronunciation. When my father was in Hôtel-Dieu with his heart, Wassim was in the hallway before either of my brothers found parking. I didn't marry him off a checklist. I married him because he kept showing up in the ways that were actually hard.

We live one floor below his mother, in a rental I told everyone I chose for the light. Some mornings I hear her move a chair directly above our bed.

Unlike the embassy boys, Wassim's passport is navy blue and good for a handful of destinations. No consulate opens faster for a man named Wassim. I'm the one holding the second door in this marriage, the dark red one.

Charbel-Joe has a theory about why Lebanese men fall for Armenian women. We're Christian enough to bring home to a mother who lights candles for the right saints, he says, and foreign enough to feel like a vacation. We swear at each other in a language he'll never crack, which men mistake for mystery.

Sariyya's theory is the one about the ass. God gave us Armenian girls the enormous eyes, she says, and then, worried the proud nose wouldn't close the deal, insured us further down. I used to be offended. Now I love her more for it.

None of it is why I said yes to Wassim.

So when Maya came to my register glowing like something had finally opened just for her, what I felt wasn't romance. It was a clean, private hatred. I hated her bare back. I hated her imported blueberries. I hated that some part of her still believed the world contained surprises addressed specifically to her.

People think girls like Maya want foreign men for the money. Sometimes. For the passport. Sometimes. But the deepest thing was safety. The obscene luxury of knowing that if the airport closed, if the banks swallowed everything again, if another building came down because somebody somewhere made a decision, there would be another country obliged to let you in.

We loved Lebanon. That was never the problem. The problem was loving a country that could not promise to keep you.

I never got permission to strive for that safety. Wassim has known me since I was Nayirig with a retainer.

My mother did leave me one thing no war could take and no bank could freeze: a second passport, dark red, to a country I've never seen. An exit I could legally use tomorrow morning, sitting in a drawer three feet from my marriage certificate. I already own a door out. Wassim doesn't. I've just never learned who I'd be on the other side of it.

That day I stayed ninety minutes past the end of my shift, telling myself it was the air conditioning. Really I wanted to hear it one more time, the part where the American followed her, whether she knew and let him think otherwise.

A girl like Maya does not have a car like mine. A girl like Maya has a boy, or a father, or a father’s driver, or a white Mercedes washed every Sunday by a man paid in cash and called by his first name. She has spent her life sending I’m outside from inside air-conditioning and come get me without specifying who should come. Someone always does. At the end of a day like this she folds one long tanned leg into the cold dark of a black Tahoe with a four-digit plate, her five-item paper bag placed carefully beside her, and the door shuts with the soft heavy thunk of money. Girls like Maya do not drive. They are collected.

After every shift now I fold myself into a 1999 Nissan Sunny the beige of an old tooth. The pleather burns the backs of my thighs through my jeans. The AC died three summers ago and I keep finding better graves for the hundred and fifty dollars. A plastic Virgin sunned to a ghost watches me from the dash. I turn the key twice, the way you have to, and she catches.

I put on Harout.

Immediately I become more Armenian than I've been all day. I don't understand the lyrics but my grandmother told me once he's singing about a city in Western Armenia that isn't there anymore.

Outside, a billboard is selling a downtown tower in the South of Lebanon that will never be built. A building near the highway is wearing its blast damage under a fresh ad for a Hollywood smile.

Outside, a billboard promises EU citizenship. ROMANIAN PASSPORT STARTING €30,000, it says, over a sleek animation of an EU passport opening like a hotel door.

This city, like my other city, is very good at laying beautiful things over holes.

I love it the way you love something that is dying in front of you and won't let you help. That love is not the same as wanting to stay in it.

Both things are true, which is the whole problem.

The turn for home comes up on the right.

I drive past it.

I drive to the airport instead.

I do this sometimes. I take the departures ramp, past the men waving cars along, past the families crying the good cry, and I go slow in the lane where you drop someone you love, and for ninety seconds I let it be me being dropped. Then the ramp curves, the way it's designed to, back down toward the roundabout, back to the city, back to the rest of my life.

I never saw Maya again. This did not stop me from seeing her everywhere.