The coin, p.1
The Coin, page 1
Praise for
The Coin
“Zaher draws a Venn diagram of the glamorously neurotic and the politically oppressed, then sets her protagonist spinning in that maddening little overlap.”
—Vulture
“A very stylish novel that manages to broach class and statelessness with tact and humor, while also touching on beauty, sex, love and the nature of civilization itself, all from a Palestinian debut novelist.”
—Literary Hub
“The Coin is a filthy, elegant book, keen on the fixations that overtake the body and upend a life.”
—RAVEN LEILANI, author of Luster
“I loved this bonkers novel. I was hooked by the voice and mesmerized by the glamorous and sordid hijinks. I have never read such a strange and recognizable representation of post-2016 New York City, its luxury and squalor. Zaher is a writer to watch.”
—ELIF BATUMAN, author of Either/Or and The Idiot
“The Coin is a taut, caustic wonder. Like Jean Rhys, Yasmin Zaher captures the outrageous loneliness of contemporary life, the gradual and total displacement of the human heart. This is a novel of wealth, filth, beauty, and grief told in clarion prose and with unbearable suspense. I was in its clutches from the first page.”
—HILARY LEICHTER, author of Terrace Story and Temporary
“Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin does much more than meet the highest standards of literature: it sets its own standards. The Coin does much more than meet the highest standards of literature: it sets its own standards. It combines intimate bodily observations and repetitive daily routines with delicate power plays, displays of crumbling authority, and interrogations of justice, all against the background of global violence. And should we really be surprised that it was a young Palestinian citizen of Israel who performed this miracle? Those who dismiss Palestinians as the violent Other of the Western civilization will discover that a Palestinian can see the truth of our messy world better than we ourselves. The Coin is not a wonderful beginning that promises masterpieces to come—it already is a masterpiece.”
—slavoj žižek
“The Coin is a brilliant, audacious powerhouse of a novel. A story of obsession and appetite, politics and class, it is deliciously unruly. An exceptional debut by an outrageous new talent.”
—KATIE KITAMURA, author of Intimacies and A Separation
First published in the UK in 2024 by
Footnote Press
www.footnotepress.com
Footnote Press Limited
4th Floor, Victoria House, Bloomsbury Square, London WC1B 4DA
Distributed by Bonnier Books UK, a division of Bonnier Books
Sveavägen 56, Stockholm, Sweden
Copyright © 2024 Yasmin Zaher
The right of Yasmin Zaher to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (hardback): 978-1-804-44137-4
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-804-44138-1
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
About the Author
D
irt was my first hypothesis. It had its way of going where nothing else would go, and I kept seeing it, on surfaces, in corners, underneath furniture and long nails. I always noticed it, which is not unusual, because I noticed many things, beautiful things too. I saw colors, birds moving in trees. I had been gifted with the pleasure of all of these, together with my suffering of all of these, and especially the dirt. Everywhere. And in New York, so much of it. Stubborn and full of the promise of disease.
I had just moved to America, and I was working as a teacher at a middle school. It was never something I wanted to do, I would have preferred a job with glamour and prestige, but it was a job I enjoyed. I’ve always been motivated by pleasure, never by money, because money I had enough of and pleasure one cannot possess. And teachers have power, don’t forget that.
Franklin had blue walls, blue stairs, blue doors. All the boys there grew up in blue bedrooms, I imagined. Anywhere else, that blue would have been sickening, but at a school I found it joyous. It reminded me of my vacation to Havana with Sasha, how the shops there only displayed the basic products. Bread, eggs, soap, toilet paper. Basic blue. Now that I think of it, the Franklin blue was the blue of the Cuban flag.
You’re right that the American flag also features the color blue, but one cannot get to the bottom of it with all those stripes and stars. What an overbearing flag, just the thought of it twists my eyeballs.
At the end of our trip to Cuba, Sasha said to me, very directly, I know that you need to get out of there, I’m going to help you. He got me the job through a colleague who was friends with Aisha, the headmistress. It was a win-win, because I got to leave Palestine, and Sasha got me, and Franklin got a donation from Sasha.
I was hired halfway through September. It was early enough in the year and as Aisha told me, it was time for change. When she walked me into the classroom and I saw all the copies of Moby-Dick, my first thought was that I was in way over my head, that this was a terrible idea. I had never read any of the books in that closet, never read Twain, never heard of Brontë. But the first weeks went by and I realized that as long as the boys scored high enough on the standardized tests, I could do whatever I wanted with them. And that’s when I began to see myself as really big and important.
No, not as their savior, much more than that. Their general.
The boys were living at an important moment. Very soon they were going to get dirty in the streets of New York. But for the time being they were still clean, and I liked being around them.
I have to be totally honest with you. We’re going to get some-where good. You will see that I’m a moral woman, that all I want is to be clean.
I
wore a very nice perfume then, Lys Méditeranée by Edouard Fléchier, very strong and sexual. I always imagined it smelled like an inseminated flower on a summer night in a coastal city. It smelled like the opposite of incest, like a just-conceived superspecies.
The Lys was useful to me, living in a big city like New York. When I moved there, not yet old, I was a free woman. I thought there was no better feeling in this world than leaving work to walk along a Manhattan avenue, wearing a violent perfume with no one waiting for you at home. I had done the math and come to the right answer, which is always zero, or even less. To love is not worth it. The benefits, whatever they are, are mostly a comfort from the relentless empti
Yes, I was with Sasha, we had been together for years, but he didn’t have any power over me. I never thought of him when he wasn’t there, my heart never skipped a beat. I’m not proud of this, I would have preferred a relationship of passion, but I always need one foot on the ground.
Looking back now, that time in New York feels like a dream. When you’re inside a dream, everything makes sense. But when you wake up, the shapes lose their solidity and the logic is strange. So I have to tell you quickly, before I forget.
In the morning I brushed my teeth with a soft toothbrush and my favorite Cattier toothpaste. Then I washed my face with an oil-based cleanser, followed by a water-based cleanser, followed by toner. All imported from Korea, the world capital of skin like porcelain, purity, and nothingness. Two thousand more years of snail cream and you will see a woman’s brain through her face. Then, after drinking a glass of hot lemon water, a glass of lukewarm water, and a cup of coffee, I emptied my bowels. This happened easily, gloriously, requiring no effort or thought, like flipping through an abridged history of the fall of an empire. All out, insides clean.
After work I got in the shower and repeated the steps of the skin-care regimen under the hot water. I washed my hair with two kinds of shampoo, I scrubbed my feet with a pumice stone, I cleaned my ears and underneath my nails with cotton buds. Slippers from the shower to the bedroom. Ready for the white sheets. I never, ever got into bed without showering.
I was a clean woman then, you could say. In cleanliness, I invested money, time, attention. But it was not enough. The dirt kept piling, pain is an accumulation.
T
he boys at Franklin had gotten the opportunity to attend an excellent school. They didn’t need to pay for it, it was their ticket to social mobility. So they had to dress accordingly, speak accordingly, read accordingly. They were required to wear khakis, a button-down shirt, a jacket, and dress shoes. The uniform wasn’t strict, they could play around with it, it was America after all. The point was that these boys were meant to dress for the class that they were going to ascend to. They always looked dashing, the outfit cast them in a kind of performance. They rarely fought or said crude things, they were polite and charming. Like domesticated animals.
I could tell, early on, which boys had style. Sal, for instance, showed up on my first day of school wearing all mustard and a checkered bowtie. I observed his wardrobe throughout the week, admiring his mother for her dedication, his clothes always pressed. Jay was simple but dignified, although he sometimes neglected to tuck in his shirt after going to the bathroom, unlike Leonard, who was my star student and always tucked in his shirt tightly, his baby belly held firmly above a brown leather belt, I assumed his father’s.
Myself, I had already arrived and I didn’t need to earn anything. I dressed the way I dressed, the way I saw myself. Never like a WASP, you would never see me in pastels or pearls or a pencil skirt. I did carry a Birkin, though, I had inherited it from my mother. It was black, made from baby bull leather, and it was surprisingly utilitarian. It fit the standard A4 page and had two pockets inside, one for my wallet and phone, the other for my MetroCard. And it had feet. Yes, feet. Four studs on its underbelly that kept it upright and clean, even when sitting on a subway seat. This bag was self-sufficient, it took care of itself.
I had carried this bag for years and no one had noticed it, but in New York, it was turning heads. Women of all ages looked at me, even little girls and some gay guys looked at me, especially when I was uptown, turning the corner of Madison into a ray of sunlight. As you can imagine, this was quite a revelation. You see, I came from a place where a bag could never have power, where only violence spoke. And suddenly I had something that others wanted to possess, I was a woman who others wanted to embody.
Well, it was just a bag, let’s not exaggerate. But sometimes the smallest detail is a portal into another world.
I
t’s strange where we start stories. I might as well have started from my birth if I was going to be proper and methodical. But the dirt is not a metaphor, I really saw it. In my ear canals, inside my nose, around my ankles. Do I disgust you? I don’t look dirty, do I?
One day, I began to notice that my body was dirtier than usual. It was a pleasant day, in late September, and I went for a long walk after Franklin, wandering down some streets that were neither numbered nor lettered. I wasn’t afraid of being lost, there was always a cab around the corner, and when I felt that I’d had enough, the sun was setting, I raised my hand in the air and a taxi took me home. I entered my apartment and decided to take a shower. I did this naturally and with no intentions, I was only doing what felt good.
Before I got in the water, I remembered that I had a Turkish hammam loofah in my suitcase. I brought it out, stepped into the shower, slipped my hand inside the loofah, and began scrubbing. The bathroom was small, the bathtub short.
First, my right hand scrubbed my left arm. It burned. The water was hot, my heart began to race and it gave me the energy to continue. As I said, it was a pleasant day and perhaps in my boredom I had found a way to make it exciting. I closed my eyes and rubbed as hard and fast as I could, until my muscle began to stiffen, which wasn’t long, I’d be exaggerating if I said it took more than thirty seconds. As you can see, I’m a small woman, I wait for others to open doors for me.
When I opened my eyes, I saw the miniature gray snakes. They fell to my feet, three or four of them.
I looked at them and immediately I knew. I mean, I had seen them before, but not like this. A heart-faced woman had once scrubbed me in a Turkish hammam and I saw them there too, wiggling in the splash on marble. But the snakes of New York were scary and ghoulish, like my own voice in the mouth of a total stranger.
I took the dirt to heart. I knew that the snakes were not just a material fact but that they were a sign of something very bad, something terrifying that was happening to my body.
The loofah was a harmless-looking thing that in reality was wicked and rough. I continued, scrubbing my entire body, peeling off the dead skin. I told myself that this was a death that I could manage, if only I worked hard enough, if I stayed clean and organized. But I had no stamina, and when I switched, left to right, I did not see any snakes. My left side is not as strong. And you will see, as I proceed, that this is a condition of asymmetry. The left is cleaner, but it is weak. The right is strong and covered in filth.
The snakes lay there in the bathtub. I bent over, picked them up, and threw them all in the small garbage can in the bathroom. I didn’t like the sight of them, just lying there, so I dug my hand inside the garbage and stirred it, flipping them as one flips a tender risotto.
I got out of the shower and tiptoed back to my bedroom. It must have been dark out, yes, I remember it was. I wouldn’t have done it otherwise. I didn’t have a problem with my neighbors seeing me naked from the bedroom window, but the kitchen window faces Fulton Street, and I didn’t walk naked by that window at night. It’s a good area, a great location. But how do I say it? Working class, going to and from work, always tired, and I didn’t want to be seen by them.
I’m just going to say it. I didn’t want poor people to see my body. Their desperation scared me.
That evening, I went to dinner at Sasha’s. He also lived in the neighborhood. Do you know the tall clock tower, the one that looks like a dick? Sasha was in real estate and a few years back he had even bought the small building across from Kushner’s 666, which, by my advice, he later leased to Salvatore Ferragamo. But Sasha was very humble about it. When people asked him he said he was in real estate, and you wouldn’t know, he could have been just another Eastern European broker.
I wore a dress by McQueen, my arms and legs were like polished bronze, but underneath my dress everything else was dirty, beginning to rot.
I couldn’t sleep at Sasha’s. All night I thought about my dirty body and the place I could not clean. It was behind me, between my shoulder blades, the only part of my body I could not touch, nor fully see, the part of my body which must have been the dirtiest, because I couldn’t get to it with the Turkish hammam loofah.
