The Things We See in the Light

by Amal Awad

  ‘Actually,’ I begin, ‘it’s funny you should say that. Lara, I know you were saying I should be experiencing more things … My workmates have kind of convinced me it’s not such a bad idea.’ Lara is quietly watchful as I walk towards her, feeling a bit silly. ‘We’re calling it The Experiment.’ Saying it out loud makes it sound stupid. I pull out the napkin with Kat’s hastily scrawled but surprisingly legible list. She’s even decorated it with flowers, hearts and faces projecting a variety of expressions. The haircut is an excited face; the dancing, a happy one. The one beside chocolate-making with Luke is a snooze emoji.

  Lara takes the napkin with a curious expression. She looks to Hakeem then studies the list. ‘Those little fuckers.’

  Hakeem flinches.

  ‘You’re not their Barbie doll to accessorise.’

  ‘Didn’t Sahar just say this was your idea?’ says Hakeem.

  ‘And second, exactly. Fuck that, I put my hand up first.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Lara. It just kind of happened. They were joking about it. Then Khaled left me some messages and—’

  ‘Whoa, whoa! He contacted you?’

  ‘Yes. I think the family is dealing with a lot because of me.’

  ‘Shit. Are you OK?’

  ‘I’m OK. I just don’t want him to have power over me anymore.’

  Lara softens. ‘Well, I certainly don’t think it’ll hurt you to have a life outside of work and the gym.’ She studies the list again. ‘Can I at least add one item? Hakeem, you should do something. Samira will want to add something, too.’

  Hakeem sees my pained look. He gently takes the napkin away from Lara and hands it back to me. ‘Let Sahar decide for herself before you start inviting everyone into her experiment.’

  ‘Lara, I promise we can do something,’ I tell her. ‘The list thing is a bit of a joke.’

  ‘I’m going to think of something. And it’ll be epic.’

  ‘God help you,’ says Hakeem, landing himself another sucker punch.

  ‘You wouldn’t need this if you were born twenty years ago, by the way,’ says Lara with a sigh. ‘It’s our generation that’s messed up. Now you go to the gym and Muslim girls are doing handstands in hijab and competing in the Olympics.’

  Hakeem pulls Lara towards him. It’s an easy movement, instinctive and certain. ‘Why so worked up?’ he says.

  ‘I’m not worked up. I’m passionate,’ she says with an intimate look.

  My heart is full as I leave them, a little crushed by how the vision of them together revives a memory of love.

  I am wired. I can’t fall asleep. Despite the turnaround in the evening, Khaled’s voice rings clear in my mind. He is gaslighting me, but he has ammunition. He knows more than he ever said; I suspect he simply didn’t because to say something would have suggested an investment in our marriage he didn’t have. I am sure he cheated on me during his overseas trips. There were things I found, in a suitcase, or a pocket. The scent on a piece of clothing, feminine and sweet, nothing like the heavy masculine scents he favours.

  I reach over to my phone and unlock the screen. I open Khaled’s messages and start typing.

  Please send me the divorce papers. I’m in Sydney.

  Without thinking, I give him my address.

  Jordan

  The fourth year

  The hot sun beats down on us over the refugee camp at Zaatari. Naeem is giving me my first tour of a place so vast it’s considered a city. He wears a long-sleeved shirt and tailored pants, insisting that, at least some of the time, he likes to dress as he would if he were in his surgery in Dubai out of respect for his patients. There is a lightness to him. He inhabits a space. It feels like something to be beside him and have his attention. With every beat of our conversation, he is leading me into new ways of thinking and existing in the world.

  The religious girls I used to know in Sydney would warn that the brother-in-law is death whenever someone got married. Never be alone with your brother-in-law. He is not your mahram.

  We’re not really alone here, but our interactions feel private somehow. And meaningful.

  It is Naeem who urges me to search for the beauty in my heritage and embrace it.

  ‘No matter what people have told you to be, you are Palestinian,’ he says. Some Arabs in the diaspora cling to their cultural identity. Most of the people I knew held on to their Muslimness. Nothing, not the brutality of public judgement post-September 11, nor the casual death threats lobbed at them as they went about their ordinary day, would sway them.

  Salim, acting like a gentle guardian, suggested it would be OK to modify my hijab for safety reasons. Instead, I lengthened my headscarves and ignored the stares in the supermarket, and the intimidation at the traffic lights. I sought solace on the prayer mat. Occasionally, an invasive thought would sneak in, one that plucked at the emptiness I could feel following my prayers. How was it that I would recite so urgently my supplications but nothing would echo back to me?

  The first time I worked at the refugee camp on the outskirts of Amman, Naeem and Magda stay in Jordan for only a month. It is seven months before they return.

  Naeem pays us a visit the day he arrives back following travels to Syria and Palestine. The connection that had so startled me remains intact. He greets me with a look confirming that he too shares these confused feelings. I never knew so much could be said without words, but within minutes, my heart is unblocked, my stomach no longer tight, and the pain of separation has dissipated.

  Khaled is tolerant of my work at the camp, but he lightly blames Naeem for taking me away from him. ‘She prefers spending time with Syrians to being with her husband,’ he tells his brother as we eat lunch.

  ‘You travel a lot,’ I say.

  Khaled acknowledges my words with a shrug. ‘What kind of husband would I be if I didn’t prefer you to be safe at home?’

  ‘What century are we living in?’ Naeem says. There’s an edge to his tone and it’s noticeable.

  The next day, Naeem surprises me by joining the agency team on the minibus. It is a thrill to be near him, and he angles his tall body into a seat too small for him in order to sit beside me, prompting a German volunteer opposite us to make a joke about it. He’s so close I can smell the musky scent of his oud fragrance. His body occasionally bumps into mine. Every pothole, or sudden swerve by the driver, brings us together.

  For months, I thought I had imagined Naeem into being, some kind of convenient rescuer. But whenever we’re together, he proves to me our connection is real by finding a way to expand his knowledge of me and my world. He asks questions about my life in Sydney, and who I’ve left behind. He shares his thoughts on politics and the Arab world. He is an activist at heart.

  It is strange but I never feel guilty. Perhaps it’s because, technically, all that exists is emotional attachment and a hidden desire. It is also easy to hide behind Khaled’s acceptance. Easier because it’s not approval he displays, but indifference.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t mind me going to the camps?’ I ask him a few times.

  ‘I hate it when you ask me that, Sahar. I’m not your master.’

  ‘OK. I’ll go, then.’

  ‘Inti horra.’

  I get to know Naeem primarily on the bus trips into the refugee camps. At the camps, we are both hard at work. Occasionally we are brought together, but it’s rare because he doesn’t need me to translate.

  One day, Naeem tells me he has arranged for me to upskill by learning first aid.

  ‘Now you can save a life,’ he tells me with a smile.

  We work with the residents of the camp, from children to the elderly. We always speak in Arabic, but occasionally the younger ones will try to challenge themselves and share a sprinkling of English words they know. The older people I interact with pick apart my accent and joke about me being a daughter of Palestine as my language skills become stronger.

  As I help them find creative outlets, some offer a skill in return. One woman, Farah, a quiet,
thoughtful school teacher, helps me with my Arabic writing.

  I make friends and expand my world each day that I’m at the camp. I come to understand how inflated my self-importance was in my youth, where I spent every moment worrying about how ordinary, simple acts could offend God. At the camp, I see how many small stories exist and interact. But rather than deflate me, they inspire me to be useful and give me purpose. I am not there for Naeem, but because of him.

  One morning on the bus ride in, as usual, we fall easily into conversation. Naeem only speaks to me in Arabic. He asks me about my thoughts on life in a way Khaled doesn’t, in a way I never even query myself. When he sees how I pepper my language with religious platitudes, he gently steers me towards neutrality.

  His voice. His lively eyes. Naeem is handsome by anyone’s standards – a beautiful face; masculine but not aggressive; tall but not perfectly built. I lose myself imagining how it would feel to be enfolded in his arms.

  ‘Forget religion and read Mahmoud Darwish,’ he says. Recently, he has decided to properly introduce me to Arab writers, most prominently the Palestinian poet Darwish and his displaced angst. ‘You are like him, always lost and wandering, expecting the world to be fair,’ he says with a smile.

  ‘Are you sure you’re not talking about yourself?’ I say, and he laughs.

  Naeem reaches into his bag and retrieves two books, which he then hands to me. ‘I warn you: he will break your heart,’ he says, his expression more serious.

  I look down at the books in my lap. He wanted me to read Darwish’s poetry in Arabic, but knowing that my reading comprehension is not as strong as my spoken Arabic, he has gifted me Now, As You Awaken and Exile’s Poet in English.

  In that moment, I wonder if past lives are real; if he and I knew each other in another time, and if we suffered together in some way that links us in this life.

  At home, after a long day, I fall in love again, with a poet who never found peace, his words weeping tragedy.

  The exile tells himself: ‘If I were a bird I would burn my wings.’

  I find myself in Darwish. Tethered to an idea of place, but never at home. I discover that displacement can be expressed in many ways.

  The next day, Naeem wants to know what I think. He cares. He values my mind and my perspective. And I tell him: how when reading poetry, I discover that immersion in lyrical pain can speak to you, list out the feelings you automatically stem. I had read the obligatory texts in school: Robert Burns, Henry Lawson, Banjo Patterson and his bush ballads, a war with nature. They were texts I studied but never connected to in any meaningful way.

  ‘Of course you didn’t,’ Naeem says. ‘Australia is a land built on blood. We Palestinians understand what it means to have your land stolen from you.’

  Other poets steal my thoughts. Kahlil Gibran; no stranger but never appreciated until I read him under a hot sun at the Citadel in Amman, where I pretended to be a tourist.

  And what is it but fragments of your own self you would discard that you may become free?

  He shifts my understanding, shows me how my religion is missing a crucial component of genuine faith. Religion as a duty, rather than a feeling.

  I cannot teach you how to pray in words.

  I am used to working with my hands, but I learn to broaden my mind and sink into my heart. I returned to the mystics I first met with my Islamic teacher Hajjeh Noura. She would diligently work through a Saturday lesson in a high school classroom without air conditioning, still fully robed, even in the absence of men. She wasn’t like the rest, who were pious in a quiet manner. She wore sneakers and played basketball with us after class. She made jokes about sex. She was nothing like the strict Muslims I knew, women so strict, they did aerobics to silence because music is haram. And she was secretly, I am sure, a Sufi, unable to share her longing for the Divine outside of the traditional scripture she was contracted to teach us.

  I realise now that she felt no need to.

  It terrifies me to discover how much I can feel for someone, what a look triggers within me. That time is not a requirement, only connection. Occasionally, I wonder if I am imagining this to be something it is not.

  One morning, Naeem compliments me on my Arabic skills. ‘Ya Sahar. Do you know there are fifty words for love in Arabic? Shall I teach them to you?’

  My breath catches in my throat. Is it a confession? I swallow my nerves, and his expression softens from playful to serious. My doubts are erased. I am not imagining it.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ I tell him, and we lock eyes, neither of us willing to sever the cord between us.

  In my marriage with Khaled, I always feel separate to myself, like I’m watching myself from a distance, seeing not feeling. In the bedroom, this only intensifies.

  I don’t think I will ever sleep with Naeem. We haven’t even kissed. But our connection transcends the physical. It isn’t pleasure he gives me, it is communion.

  If anyone around us notices our connection, we are oblivious to it. Only Magda disrupts the union. Increasingly wary of my presence, she is no longer cheerful when she sees me.

  ‘Do you think I’m stupid because I wear make-up and can’t cook mansaf?’ Magda tells me, and I have no response.

  One stormy afternoon, as fierce wind and rain batter the tents at the refugee camp, a fellow aid worker gossips that Magda has broken off her engagement to Naeem. I listen for signs that the rumours involve me, but there’s nothing to suggest this. I return to my admin tasks, rain pounding the metal roof as I try to clear my thoughts.

  I seek confirmation with Naeem, but he seems regretful, not sad.

  ‘You have to do what’s right for you,’ I say, because I understand the separation. I wish I could do the same with Khaled. I wish I had done it before my marriage. I am deeply in love with Naeem, and he pays me the attention a lover should; he would have destroyed Magda with his indifference the way Khaled almost did to me.

  ‘I have to do what’s right by her,’ he says, ‘and that means letting her go with her dignity.’

  His tepid response leaves me feeling flat, but what else can I expect?

  The end of the engagement prompts a response in Khaled. He eyes me with suspicion when I come home that evening. From his place on the balcony, which overlooks a sea of villas that glow a soft orange and yellow in the evening light, he asks me if I saw Naeem. He is smoking a cigarette, and resting beside him on the balcony is a cup of tea, still hot.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘He told you about Magda, then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I expect Khaled to criticise her, loyal to Naeem as he is, but he looks disgusted. ‘My brother is an idiot. He lost a diamond.’

  I can feel my cheeks burning and I am seized by a feeling of panic. I search for the subtext in his words, the meaning of his disgusted look and if it relates to me. Khaled stares ahead, smoking, lost in his own thoughts.

  ‘I don’t want you going there so much,’ he tells me.

  ‘They need me.’

  ‘I need you!’ He turns abruptly towards me, his face etched in a minor version of fury, or perhaps it’s hurt. ‘I want to try again,’ he says, indicating to my body.

  ‘I’ve lost three.’

  ‘Zainab told me about a doctor who helps women like you.’

  The next morning, Naeem does not join me on the bus. In the afternoon, he finds me at the agency’s HQ, answering emails at a computer in the far corner of the demountable. There are only a few of us inside, regulars who know Naeem and don’t blink at his presence. It’s a farewell.

  ‘Yallah, I’ll see you again soon,’ he says, attempting a warm smile.

  I can barely look at him. I stem the flow of tears threatening to erupt. The change in him shatters me. This mock farewell. A budget goodbye.

  ‘Assalamu alaykum,’ I say, returning his smile. I don’t wait for Naeem’s response. I turn back to my computer and continue to type.

  Chapter 13

  How do you know who you are, deep
down, if you don’t challenge the structures others have constructed for you?

  On a quiet Friday afternoon in January, a week after we devised the list, Inez and Kat appear at my bench while I’m mixing a bowl of pistachios and honey. They tell me The Experiment has begun. The first item to be ticked off is my haircut, and Inez books me in for ‘something special’ after work. Before I can enquire further, they wander off and my phone rings. It’s Samira and my first instinct is to panic. She rarely calls.

  I answer. ‘Is everything OK?’

  ‘I get to take your photo,’ she says. I can hear traffic and there’s an echo so I know she’s on speakerphone in her car. Samira beeps the horn. ‘Idiot! Pick a lane!’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The Experiment thing. I’m taking your photo.’

  ‘I’ve had my photo taken before,’ I say.

  ‘But you haven’t been seen.’

  She hangs up mid-curse at another driver. I stare down at the bowl of pistachios suspended in honey and centre myself. Bloody Lara.

  An hour later, Salim calls me. I half expect him to declare that he too is taking one of the items on the list.

  ‘Will you come over for lunch? We would all love to see you.’

  The idea makes me nervous, but I can’t say no. ‘Um, of course. Let me check my calendar.’

  We agree to an upcoming Sunday and I wonder what I should bake for them, because it will never do to show up empty-handed.

  After work, Kat leads me to a nearby hair salon. ‘Nez!’ she calls out, familiar and loud, as she sweeps through the shop. Her grip on me tightens as she leads the way towards the back, where Inez waits, calm and poised as usual, her painted lips and nails standing out in the dim light of the room. She’s out of her chef’s whites and is dazzling, sporting a rockabilly look few can pull off. Vintage. She’s in a sixties-style swing dress with cap sleeves; bright red cherries on black. Her shoes are red and shiny and make me think of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Ruby slippers for courage to help her find her way home.