Zeitoun: Part 1: Friday August 26 Summary & Analysis

The narration begins with the protagonist Abdulrahman Zeitoun’s recollections of nights spent fishing in his hometown of Jableh, on the coast of Syria. He remembers how the men would hold lanterns over the water to draw sardines to their rods. This only took place on moonless nights, as Abdulrahman’s older brother Ahmad told him, so that the fishermen could control the amount of light with their own lanterns.

Once Abdulrahman was thirteen, and old enough to join them, he would enjoy paddling quietly with them, joking and whispering about women as they watched the fish rise beneath them, band motoring back to the shore before dawn. The fish broker in the market would pay them and sell the fish all over western Syria. Abdulrahman’s father had died a year earlier and his mother was sickly, but he loved this work enough that he’d do it for free.

Thirty-four years later, in 2005, Abdulrahman wakes up in New Orleans, Louisiana, next to his wife Kathy. He lets the memories of Jableh recede. It’s 6 a.m., and he knows the peace and quiet won’t last long before the children awake.

Kathy and Zeitoun (as most people call Abdulrahman, since they have trouble pronouncing his first name) run a painting and contracting company, so every day customers and crews begin to call at 6:30 in the morning. Kathy knows that a tropical storm is supposed to be coming north, so this Friday will be especially busy as clients make preparations. An older woman calls first, asking if the crew can come board up her windows.

Kathy is the office manager, while her husband handles the building and painting: Kathy’s native Louisiana accent puts people at ease. She and Zeitoun have been married for eleven years. Zeitoun had arrived in New Orleans in 1994, and Kathy is from Baton Rouge, so hurricanes—like this one, named Katrina—don’t worry her too much.

Kathy and Zeitoun’s children, Nademah, Aisha, and Safiya, are currently obsessed with the movie Pride and Prejudice, and they spend breakfast reciting the words (Zachary, Kathy’s son from her first marriage, is already at school). Zeitoun thinks they have more in common with Kathy in their playfulness and sense of drama.

Kathy worries about Zeitoun, who today, as usual, eats barely anything for his 12-hour shifts, and yet manages to maintain his weight. They squabble as Kathy tells him not to forget his phone, and she reminds him of the time he forgot newborn Nademah in the yard as he followed his wife into the house. Zeitoun is slightly resentful that Kathy always brings this up, but the event still epitomizes for him the difficulty he finds in balancing his obligations as partner and as protector.

Already at 7:30 a.m., Zeitoun feels behind for work, so he rushes out the door, stopping to kiss Aisha, who is begging him not to go. He isn’t particularly doting, but he never objects to the girls touching and jumping on him: he is both firm and pliant. For Kathy, his long-lashed eyes tend to disguise when he’s upset: though he is 13 years older than she is, those dreamful but discerning eyes had attracted her from the start.

Kathy adjusts her hijab (headscarf)—a nervous habit of hers—as she watches Zeitoun leave. His white van has “Zeitoun A. Painting Contractor” painted on it, along with images of a paint roller and rainbow. Zeitoun had never been aware of other possible meanings of a rainbow, so he had been surprised after initially designing it to immediately get many calls from gay couples. At the same time, some potential clients were no longer interested once they saw the logo. Kathy had wondered if they should change the logo so as not to create misunderstandings, but Zeitoun had already created signs and stationery. Besides, he said, anyone who had a problem with rainbows would probably also have a problem with a Muslim-run company.

Zeitoun drives to work, still thinking of Jableh. His mother is no longer alive, and his brother Mohammed died young, but his other siblings are spread out through Syria, Spain, and Saudi Arabia, all successful in their professions and happily married.

In the kitchen, Kathy gasps as she realizes the kids will be late for school, and she quickly bundles them into the minivan and heads across the Mississippi River to the West Bank. Kathy enjoys being able to have flexible hours and choose clients and jobs, but the disadvantages to running a business are growing, and she and Zeitoun work and worry constantly. They own six properties with eighteen tenants, and feel responsible for all their tenants’ well-being, as well as having to worry about maintaining their homes and paying and collecting from a huge variety of people.

Still, Kathy cherishes her family, and is thankful for being able to provide for her children, knowing that she’ll be able to send them to college. Kathy had grown up with eight siblings, and Zeitoun with twelve—neither of them had much. Kathy marvels at the maturity and intelligence of Nademah, their eldest child, who is ten, and recalls how cleverly (but endearingly) she had attempted to get out of doing chores when she was younger.

In the car on the way to school, the radio is announcing that the storm heading into the Gulf of Mexico is a Category 1. Kathy hadn’t paid much attention to Katrina, since people often get worried about hurricanes heading to the city, but the storms often dissipate before even hitting the coasts. Nademah asks if they should worry, but Kathy reassures her.

After dropping off the girls, Kathy turns the radio back on, and hears that there are 110-mile-per-hour winds and storm surges in the Gulf. She calls Zeitoun and asks if he thinks it’s serious. “Really? I don’t know,” he replies. He prefaces many of his sentences with “really”—something that used to irritate her, but now she has to find endearing. They speak on the phone several times a day, their business talk interspersed with witty banter and exasperated needling.

Kathy had grown up in Baton Rouge in a Southern Baptist family, so ending up as a Muslim married to a Syrian American and managing a painting and contracting business still surprises her. She had met Zeitoun when she was a recent divorcée and convert to Islam, and was uninterested in getting remarried. Now, however, she finds Zeitoun a deeply honest, hardworking, and devoted man—though they still have regular, spirited arguments about anything at all. Kathy speaks her mind about everything. Sometimes the kids grow anxious about their “fussing,” but it’s all in good spirit.

Across town, Zeitoun begins his first job of the day in the Garden District, where he greets his employee Emil, a painter from Nicaragua. Inside is Marco from El Salvador. Zeitoun’s employees are from all over the world, and his experience with them is usually positive, though his business has a high turnover rate, as many plan to spend only a few months in America before returning to their families. Some young workers are irresponsible, and Zeitoun tries to convince them to save money so as to live well and raise a family in the future, but the future seems not to be among their highest concerns.

Zeitoun gets a call from his brother Ahmad in Spain, who is worrying about the approaching storm. Ahmad had been a ship captain for 30 years, and had brought Zeitoun as a crewman to Greece, Lebanon, and South Africa. Zeitoun had then headed out on his own, traveling around the world until settling in New Orleans. Ahmad knows a good deal about storms, therefore, and Zeitoun listens, though doesn’t entirely agree, when Ahmad says they should leave town.

Zeitoun’s next job is in the same neighborhood—their company often benefits from word of mouth. It is a beautiful, stately home, and Zeitoun admires its exquisite details, part of what makes him enjoy working in New Orleans so much. He checks in on his Bulgarian carpenter, Georgi, who is installing new molding.

Back in the car, Zeitoun hears more about the storm Katrina. He heads to the Presbytere Museum in Jackson Square, and then Kathy calls from home with a new job, also mentioning the high winds and approaching storm, though Zeitoun dismisses it.

Zeitoun is naturally stubborn, having been raised by a legendary sailor who had survived a number of difficult trials. His father, Mahmoud, had been born on Arwad Island off Syria, and began crewing as a teenager between Syria and Lebanon. In World War II, his ship had been hit by a fleet of German planes, and he was among only a few survivors who hid underwater until the Germans were satisfied that all the crew members were shot or drowned. Another time, Mahmoud was returning from Greece when the ship’s main mast cracked and the sail dropped into the water. While trying to fix it, it had broken entirely and Mahmoud had fallen into the ocean. He floated for two days before he washed ashore fifty miles north of Arwad Island.

Mahmoud couldn’t believe he survived. He quit sailing and moved his family to the mainland, to Jableh. He opened a hardware store, sent his children to the best schools, and taught the boys any trade other than sailing, which he didn’t want them to pursue. Some of his children did grow up to work on the sea, but Zeitoun followed his father’s trajectory in becoming first a sailor and then, to provide for his family, a stable builder.

Zeitoun calls Kathy back. She is online and is tracking the storm, which has already killed three people in southern Florida and knocked out power for 1.3 million households. Zeitoun looks to the sky and sees nothing unusual, but he goes to Home Depot for supplies like plywood and rope anyway. In the parking lot a man, noticing Zeitoun’s van, introduces himself to Zeitoun as an electrician and gives him his card. Zeitoun admires his attitude.

When he began working in New Orleans eleven years earlier, Zeitoun was hired by Charlie Saucier, who had built his own company from scratch. He wanted to leave it to his teenage son, but the son was lazy and ungrateful. Zeitoun didn’t have a car at the time, and instead biked to work. One day he had a flat tire, and had twenty minutes to make it four miles—he couldn’t leave the bike, so he threw the bike over his shoulders and started jogging. Charlie ended up passing him in the car, laughed, and told him to throw the bike in the back. Charlie told Zeitoun that in thirty years, he had never had such a good worker—others made excuses not to show up, and Charlie admired that Zeitoun did the opposite. Two years after that, Zeitoun was working for himself and had twelve employees.

At noon Zeitoun heads to the Islamic Center downtown for the second of his five daily prayers, which the Qur’an asks Muslims to complete each day. Zeitoun worships at home but also wherever he happens to be during the day. On Fridays he stops at the mosque for a ritual gathering of Muslim men in the community called the jumu’ah. He begins with a ritual cleansing called wuduu, and then begins his prayers, asking God to guide him.

Afterwards, Zeitoun calls Kathy, who says the storm looks like it’s turning into a Category 3. Zeitoun still thinks it will die overland or in the Gulf. Kathy’s friend Rob Stanislaw calls her, saying she’d be crazy not to leave. Rob’s husband, Walt, is stubborn like Zeitoun—both couples have been close for years—but even Walt wants to leave. Kathy is about to log off when she sees a news item about a family of five who had been sailing in the Gulf and is now missing at sea.

Kathy gets deeply affected by stories like these, and she calls Zeitoun to tell him that their friends are leaving. Zeitoun usually trusts Walt, but after hesitating, he tries to change the subject. Kathy breathlessly tells him about the family of five, but Zeitoun tells her that they’re not out at sea. He had spent a decade on ships—in 1988 he had finally come to the U.S. on an oil tanker, and began working in Baton Rouge for a contractor.

Zeitoun had met a Lebanese American named Ahmaad in Baton Rouge, who became a close friend. One day Zeitoun asked Ahmaad if he knew any single women who might be appropriate for him. Ahmaad had married a woman named Yuko, an American whose family was Japanese and who had converted to Islam. Yuko had a friend whom Ahmaad had already introduced to a friend of his, but he told Zeitoun he’d let him know if this didn’t work out. Months later it hadn’t, so Ahmaad told Zeitoun about Kathy, an American who had converted to Islam, but who had a two-year-old son from a previous marriage. Zeitoun didn’t find that a problem, and admired the fact that Kathy would convert to Islam.

Ahmaad gave Zeitoun the address of the furniture store where Kathy worked, and Zeitoun pulled into its parking lot one day to wait and watch for her. He saw a young woman wearing jeans and hijab, striking and young, walk right towards his car smiling. He was electrified, but then grew nervous as she came closer to his car—he ducked under the dashboard, but it turned out that her car was simply parked next to his.

Zeitoun told Ahmaad that he needed to meet Kathy. They agreed to meet at Ahmaad and Yuko’s house. Kathy immediately found Zeitoun attractive, though too conservative and too old for her. She also didn’t feel ready to marry again two years after a disastrous first marriage. She told Yuko she didn’t think it was a good fit, but over the next two years she saw Zeitoun occasionally, and he asked about her once in awhile. Meanwhile, as Zachary grew up, Kathy began to feel guilty that he didn’t have a father, and her feelings against marrying again began to fade.

Back in New Orleans, Kathy calls Zeitoun in the early afternoon about a problem with a client. She begins to fret about him driving across the city with a coming storm, and they start to bicker about it. Finally Kathy gets the better of him and Zeitoun laughs, saying he’ll call her later. Zeitoun heads over to the house, where a client has decided that she’s unhappy with the tangerine color she had chosen for a bathroom.

Zeitoun’s work is never dull, what with people’s changing tastes and the subjective nature of the tasks. Once, a Southern woman in her sixties had seemed fine when on the phone with Kathy, but then had complained about non-white people working on the house. Kathy had laughed and told her it wasn’t possible, and the woman, though she continued to call to complain, finally resigned herself to watching the men. Other times, people would ask Kathy where Zeitoun was from, and with the response of Syria, would cancel their orders.

Usually Zeitoun laughs these events off, but once in awhile they bother him deeply. He loves the opportunities of America, but sometimes gets frustrated with Americans like a disappointed parent. He objects that whenever a Muslim—or an African-American—commits a crime, his or her faith (or race) is mentioned, whereas no one mentions the person’s religion if it’s a white Christian. Zeitoun often quotes a Qur’an passage emphasizing equality of men. Kathy admires his spirit, but doesn’t like him getting so worked up in front of the kids at dinner.

Zeitoun especially can’t stand anyone raising his or her voice to Kathy. One young woman had once asked Zeitoun for a quick turnaround, three days, for a painting job. Impressed with the job midway through, the woman had asked him to paint an office and bedroom too. But on the third day, Kathy called Zeitoun in tears, since the woman had called her yelling and cursing about the house not being ready for guests coming in. They had finished the initial job they said they’d do, but the client wanted the entire house done in five days—an impossible task. Kathy tried to reason with her, but the client continued to harangue her. Furious, Zeitoun drove to the client’s home and told the crew they were to leave immediately. He told the husband that no one spoke that way to his wife.

Back at the room with the tangerine bathroom, Zeitoun calls Kathy back to run through prices, and notes the massive, antique tub in the bathroom. Kathy says it’s big but beautiful and he jokes that it’s like her. Kathy had been weight-obsessed when they’d met, binging and dieting dangerously. Zeitoun had insisted that she get beyond this, and now she jokes that she’s gone too far. She is grateful for the abaya, a shoulder-to-floor Islamic dress that she wears.

At Kathy’s home, Melvin, a Guatemalan painter, knocks on the door to be paid before the weekend. They always pay swiftly (Zeitoun quotes the Prophet Muhammad, “Pay the laborer his wages before his sweat dries”), but Zeitoun prefers to pay on Sunday so that his employees don’t disappear over the weekend. But Kathy is soft, however, and pays him just this once.

On television, everything is about the impending storm. Kathy hears more about the family of five, the father a construction supervisor, who had gone missing. She calls Zeitoun and begs him to leave. He says she can go, but he’s staying. Zeitoun always has trouble leaving the business and relaxing. After threatening for years, Kathy finally packed up the kids and left for Florida one morning for a vacation without him. Zeitoun met them at home as they were piling into the car—Nademah had called to him to join, but he had been too stunned to move.

After that, Zeitoun understood that Kathy was serious. She continued to make plans, and once in awhile he would join, but only at the last minute. By 2002, though, Kathy wanted a real vacation. She slowly planned a ruse, saying that they would leave for their usual Florida trip the weekend after Christmas, which was always slow, so she knew Zeitoun would come along. As Zeitoun slept in the car, exhausted, Kathy simply kept driving all the way to Miami—17 hours. That way, there was no way for Zeitoun to sneak back to work. Now, Kathy smiles to herself as she remembers how well that plan worked.

Kathy decides to head to the grocery store to stock up on basic supplies. She adjusts her hijab, bracing herself for the minor incidents of prejudice that she has faced increasingly after 9/11. In 2004, at a local high school, a tenth grader of Iraqi descent had been repeatedly harassed by a teacher, who said the student would “bomb us” if she returned to Iraq, and who had pulled back the girl’s hijab and said he hoped God would punish her. Though the student had filed a lawsuit, the school board decided simply to suspend the teacher for a few weeks and then return him to the classroom.

Since then, minor harassment of Muslims in the area has gone up. Teenage boys, for instance, would sneak up behind a woman, grab her hijab and run. This almost happened to Kathy when shopping one day with a friend, Asma, who was Muslim but didn’t wear the hijab. Asma alerted Kathy in time, but the kid’s group of friends cursed at Kathy as they fled. Kathy cursed right back at them, leaving them speechless.

After 9/11, Kathy had seen very few Muslim women in public, and though that they were probably hiding. In late September she finally saw another woman in a hijab in a Walgreens, and ran up to her to greet her. The woman, a doctor studying at Tulane, greeted her just as warmly.

Today, at the grocery store, there are no such confrontations. Kathy soon leaves to pick up her daughters. The girls ask if they’re planning to leave to go to one of their cousins’ houses. All over the five o’clock news is footage of waves, uprooted trees, and flooded towns. Governor Blanco declares a state of emergency for Louisiana. Kathy feels rattled, and realizes it’s too late to make dinner. She calls Zeitoun to ask him to pick up take-out.

At dinner, Zeitoun tells his daughters, who are picking at their food, to finish everything on their plates. He is still stunned by how disposable everything is in America, and how it feels like everything can be easily replaced. He tries to instill the value of work in his children, but worries that the waste and excess of the culture will rub off on them.

After dinner, Kathy and the girls watch Pride and Prejudice yet again as Zeitoun does chores. Kathy is growing more anxious, but after the movie she turns on the news to learn that the family of five has been found, and had survived the storm. Kathy puts Zachary to bed and then the girls, who take turns telling parts of a goodnight story. Zeitoun watches from the doorway, finding the scene beautiful.