The Road to Fez

When the family is tucked safely in their bedrooms, on this night that is different from all other nights, I climb the narrow spiral of stairs to my grandfather's roof terrace. I need help--from above. The moment I open the red and blue stained-glass door, I enter a world that obeys laws of another universe, where time doesn't pass: it remembers, and moves back, forward, and sideways--all at the same time. Six-year-old Brit waits for me there, and I know Papa Naphtali is playing his oud, smoking and thinking. As far as I know, he never sleeps.
Sure enough, he's seated cross-legged on his little tasseled carpet. He plucks strings on the oud, immediately transporting me to the Sahara, a hot sirocco blowing sand over us. He acknowledges my presence with a few mournful chords, then returns to his music. Hypnotic and haunting, his music has no recognizable beginning or end: variations on a theme, examined from every possible angle, until I want to scream, and instead find myself tapping my foot, swaying my head back and forth-waiting for the note to pierce the inner heart.


The globe whirled, and he laughed. "Pick a place," he said. "Any place. Pick a name. A religion. A nationality. You can be anyone. Born anywhere."
Breathless, I watched the spinning globe. Reached out with my finger. To stop the globe. To stop the world. So I could be born. The whirling globe slowed.

-Ruth Knafo Setton