by Eman Quotah
“Who’s ‘they’? Dad?”
“Everyone. Why am I telling this to you? You don’t know.”
She doesn’t want to hear what her mother is saying, her side of the story. There should have been a better way, and why should she have to grapple with the choices her mother made?
One of the men stands near her, hand hovering, not wanting to tap her but wanting her attention. He speaks in Arabic, and she shakes her head. The other man tidies a display of Smarties and Chiclets.
“Miss. Your son?”
The door jingles shut.
“Fuck.”
She leaves the phone handset dangling and rushes outside. The street is as hushed as a sepia-tone photo. It smells of spit and sand and metal. Fadi is nowhere to be seen.
“He walks off a lot,” she says to the closed door of the shop, trying to calm herself down. The door is pasted with ads for ice cream, candy, phone cards. To the empty street, she shouts: “Fadi! Come here! I’m not here to have my father kill me for losing you.”
She walks around the block five times, sticking her head into the corner store as she passes. “Yes, Miss?” the men say. Two more and she gives up. Her father is going to crucify her.
But in the apartment, everyone is asleep, except Mary and Fadi, who watch cartoons. Hannah finds herself silently repeating thankgodthankgodthankgod, though she’s not religious.
Her voice comes back. “Fadi, why’d you leave me?”
“You took him for a walk?” Mary says. “I think he needs more walks, a playground. He loves his big sister.”
Fadi gets up and hugs Hannah.
Hannah is done with her mother for a while, but the hug is enough.
By Thanksgiving, though, she needs more. She needs Malik’s voice. It’s been nearly two months since she said goodbye to him at the airport. So much has happened. She hasn’t seen Zee since the consulate, but her low-grade guilt flares when she thinks about Malik. It will make her feel better, she thinks, to wish him a happy holiday. At naptime, she makes sure Fadi is with Mary—he’s fallen asleep in front of the TV while Mary irons—before slipping out on her own to the corner shop.
She doesn’t expect a dozen sanitary workers in blue jumpsuits to be waiting their turns for the phones. When she queues up behind them, the man ahead of her turns his head, and she accidentally makes eye contact. He looks at his feet.
Another man makes kissy sounds at her. His behavior doesn’t faze her, but the shopkeeper notices and makes a fuss. He gestures toward the door, and Hannah realizes he is telling her to leave.
“Phone tomorrow?” he says.
“No, I want to phone today.”
“Tomorrow,” he says.
She doesn’t want to cause a scene, so she leaves.
On Friday, at naptime, the shop is empty. The shopkeeper, alone that day, pours tea into a small glass and offers it to her.
“Maybe later,” she says, but he won’t let her refuse. She sets the glass on the shelf nearest the phone, next to cylindrical packages of cookies.
She gets through to Malik on her first try. The sound of his voice makes her yearn for him. She pulls her abayah tight around her.
“It’s so good to hear you,” he says.
“You too.”
“I’ve been worried about you.”
“I told you I might not be able to call.”
“I know.”
“I’ve got a twenty-page letter. Everything I need to tell you is in there.”
“Why don’t you send it?”
“I will. I’ll give it to my dad.”
“I love you.”
She knows it’s terrible to leave him hanging, but she can’t think of what to say. The shopkeeper has gone outside. She sees him smoking through the glass doors.
“I was thinking.” She flicks her nail at the little metal door on the coin return. “I was thinking you should see other people while I’m gone.” Later—in a year, in two years—she’ll recognize herself as the villain in this story. She’ll recognize that the nonchalance with which she was willing to let him go was atypical for her, a person afraid of losing everyone. Except her mother, who she sees as the original bad guy, the villain in every other story.
Hannah’s breaking her own heart.
The silence between them is filled with phone-line feedback. The distance that separates them is too much to bear.
“That wasn’t the deal,” he says. His words are puffed up with a sudden hatred that she knows she deserves. She ducks, as though he could throw something at her from where he is.
“I know, but—being here. It’s more than I expected. The letter explains everything.”
“You waited two months. Don’t send the letter,” Malik says. “You said everything you need to say.”
Outside, the afternoon sun stings her eyes.
Hannah’s father works constantly, especially after the UN makes its ultimatum at the end of November: Saddam has until January 15 to withdraw.
“It’s good timing,” Hannah tells her father. “Since I’m leaving on the twentieth. Hopefully he’ll surrender soon.”
“He won’t surrender,” Muneer says. “What if they close the airports on the fifteenth? You should leave sooner.”
She’s surprised he would suggest she cut her visit short. And she doesn’t want to, though often she’s bored. She wants to be like normal people and stick to a plan.
In early December, Summer drags Hannah to a holiday bazaar at one of the international schools and tries to convince her to buy pot holders decorated with an embroidered Saudi husband and wife—his head covered in tiny red-and-white check, hers in black. Their faces are made out of pantyhose pulled tight over cotton batting, and their sewn-on mouths curve into little red smiles.
“No way,” Hannah says, and worries she’s offended the nice British expat housewife who crafted the thing.
“We should plan a New Year’s party at the beach,” Summer says. “I’ll invite that Zee guy.”
“I don’t think I should see him anymore.”
“I met some cool Kuwaiti guys I could call.”
Americans and Brits stream by. Hannah and Summer are among a few Saudis at the bazaar—and Summer looks like an expat. It is a strange friendship between them. When they go to stores at the mall, the shopkeepers speak to Summer in English and to Hannah in Arabic.
Hannah likes that here, at a foreigners’ event, in a foreigners’ school, they are almost on another planet. She likes that people here speak to them both in English; and they can walk around with their scarves around their necks, their abayahs wide open over their jeans and T-shirts; and the courtyard smells like hamburgers, which two middle-aged, blond men grill at another booth.
Something comes over her—she doesn’t know what she’s thinking—and while Summer is buying two hamburgers and the craft-booth lady is selling a tea cozy to a tall Scandinavian-looking woman with a blond pixie cut, Hannah sticks her hand into the pot holder and hides it under her abayah. It isn’t like a cassette. It won’t fit in her pocket. When Summer hands her a paper plate of food, she doesn’t know what to do with the pot holder. With her back to the craft table, she presents it to Summer.
“You bought it!”
“Changed my mind. Can I put it in your bag?”
“We should go to the gold souk. You’ll find better souvenirs there.”
Hannah loves the souk. The whitewashed, wooden-windowed buildings lean against each other. What would it be like to live in one of them? What was life like for her grandparents’ grandparents? She and Summer eschew the many gold shops, instead visiting a tiny silver shop. Hannah checks out charm bracelets with little high-heeled shoes and miniature houses and roller skates, silver rings that look like growling jaguars, and amulets with God’s name on them. The far wall displays the pieces Summer likes best: a pair of hammered-silver earrings with etchings of crescent moons that appear shakily hand-drawn, another pair that looks to both of them like silver ear-chandeliers. Strings
of thick, knuckle-size beads of coral and turquoise; amber beads that look like sugar dates.
“It’s so hard to find this traditional stuff,” Summer says. “Everyone wants gaudy jewelry. Diamond bracelets from Italy.”
When Hannah says she can’t afford to buy anything, Summer haggles with the shopkeeper in Arabic over the price per gram of silver. Unlike most of the men in the souk, he wears a black T-shirt and blue jeans, not traditional clothing, and he responds in American English. “I can’t go any less—I’ll lose money.”
Summer keeps haggling though, till Hannah tires of listening. She steps outside and sits at a fountain listening to the water tinkling. As two men walk by, she thinks she hears one of them say, “Habibti”—my love, darling, sweetie. She flips them the bird. They keep smiling.
Summer has left the shop, and she cusses the guys out. “I told them to respect themselves.” She hands Hannah a small black plastic bag. Inside is a velvet box containing the chandelier earrings.
“I can’t accept that,” Hannah says. “You keep them.”
“No, no, you have to have something to take back with you. Something better than a pot holder.”
Hannah has the stolen tape and the stuff Aunt Randah gave her. But she doesn’t want to argue in public.
“What if I stayed here?” She is thinking of Aunt Randah, her father, her brothers, her grandmothers.
“You should keep the earrings.”
On their way to the parking garage, where Nasser waits for them, they buy chickpeas with vinegar and pickled turnips from a street vendor. The call to prayer sounds and shops’ metal grates start to bang closed, one by one.
“Afternoon prayer.” Summer sucks on a chickpea and taps her plastic spoon against her cheek as they head to the car. “If you think you’re going to have an arranged marriage and hire a driver and teach art at a private school or something—I mean, I guess you could stay. Sounds like a nice tidy life. No bands, though. No movie theaters. No road trips.”
“You’re telling me not to stay.”
“But can you find pickles like these in America?”
On New Year’s Eve, the war is two weeks off. Hannah stays home and draws for the first time in weeks. She puts on her abayah and headscarf, borrows her father’s Polaroid, and takes an instant photo of herself in the entryway mirror. With a charcoal pencil, she copies the photo. She gives herself dark circles under the eyes. A toothless smile, like in the photograph. By midnight, her father and Lamees have been in bed for several hours. Hannah uses the phone in the front room to call Malik.
“Happy new year,” she whispers.
“It’s four in the afternoon. And I thought we broke up.”
“I changed my mind. Please tell me you didn’t listen to me and see other people.”
“I’m worried about you,” he says. “I’m worried about this war.”
“My dad says it’ll be over fast.”
When she falls asleep, Malik is in her dreams.
The war starts on a Thursday at 2:00 a.m. Hannah finds out from her father at breakfast. He’s been working nearly nonstop since the deadline passed on Tuesday.
The cheese and olives Mary prepared smell too strong to eat. Hannah keeps thinking how a lot of the US soldiers who came to fight are her age. Zee has probably been transported to the Eastern Province, maybe Kuwait.
“When the airport reopens, you’re going home,” her father says before heading back to the newspaper offices. He dips his bread into small bowls of honey and cream. “I want you to be safe.”
She’s ready to go, she realizes. She’s not the same person she was when she arrived. She’ll leave her family behind, but take them with her, like a pot holder or a pair of earrings.
CNN has replaced Saudi television. Hannah, Lamees, and Mary watch most of the day. At Dhuhr and ‘Asur prayer times, the broadcast shifts to readings of the Qur’an, and Lamees leaves the room to say her prayers while Hannah and Mary watch the boys.
On TV, they show US soldiers writing “love letters” on bombs. At home, Malik is writing Hannah a breakup letter as though she hadn’t already broken up with him, but of course she doesn’t know that yet.
The boys go stir-crazy until Lamees turns the TV off and tells Mary to take them to the roof to run around.
When Hannah’s father comes home, near Maghrib time, he’s already taken his shimagh and iqal off and hung them in the crook of his elbow. He heads straight to the bathroom to wash up.
Hannah doesn’t know how to wash for prayer, and she doesn’t know how to pray. She puts on one of Lamees’s long prayer scarves, a sharshaf, as big as a bedsheet. Lamees lays out prayer rugs, one vertical in front and a second horizontally, behind the first. Hannah stands beside her stepmother as her father leads them in prayer.
“Allahu akbar,” he starts, and she raises her hands and lowers them to her chest, like Lamees.
Hannah doesn’t understand the words her father recites out loud, and she struggles to mimic Lamees’s and her father’s movements. But she can pray with them. She needs to pray.
GONE
With Operation Desert Storm launched and the country officially-officially at war, they settle into a new routine. Fouad’s school closes, and so the three boys are home. It’s like being home because of a blizzard—except it’s because of a war, and no one knows exactly when it will end, though Summer has heard that it won’t last long. Flights start up again, but flights are limited; it’s not clear when Hannah will be able to leave. She feels guilty at the idea of leaving her dad and his family behind to deal with the war without her, but she also wishes for certainty, for the Arabica coffee shop on Coventry Road, for a life drawing session, a French avant-garde movie at the Cleveland Cinematheque, a blizzard.
When Hannah gets tired of watching censored CNN in her father’s apartment, she goes to Randah’s or Summer’s to watch more CNN and drink tea. They have drivers who can pick her up. The streets are empty, as they have been the last few weeks. People are staying home. Most nights, her father’s not home till well after midnight. She and Lamees and the boys eat dinner without him: scrambled eggs with tomato, olives, feta cheese, and pita left over from lunch. No ful mudammas or muttabbaq, though, because these are street foods and they have no man to go out to buy them. No fresh bread from the bakery, either. Hannah tries to convince Lamees that she and Mary could walk to the commercial strip mall down the road and pick up food for their meals, but Lamees says, “No, no, no.” Hannah wakes up to the sound of her father returning home in the middle of the night, and she turns over and goes back to sleep. In the morning, he’s gone before breakfast, and he doesn’t come home midday for lunch, as he did before the war.
Two weeks after the start of the war, he doesn’t come home.
Hannah, Lamees, and Mary go to bed at midnight, as usual. Hannah expects to be woken by the lock clicking slowly as he lets himself in, by his footsteps down the hallway, by the faucet running as he washes for prayer in the bathroom. Instead, she sleeps soundly enough to have dreams. There is no click, no thump, no drip of water. She sleeps until morning. She wakes up expecting another day like the string of fourteen days before it.
But today, Mary is frantic.
“Your father, ma’am. He’s not here.”
“He leaves so early.”
“No, ma’am. He was not here last night.”
“Where’s Lamees?”
“She’s gone to talk to your grandfather Fareed.”
Mary says Lamees knew something was wrong when Muneer was not home for dawn prayer. Lamees called the paper. She called Muneer’s brothers. But for some reason, she did not wake Hannah up.
“What can I do?” Hannah says. “I’m sure he’s OK.”
She worries about car crashes—the driving in Jidda is horrendous, worse than California driving—she worries about heart attacks. Her chest constricts. How unfair it would be to lose her father right after she found him.
Mary tells Hannah she can watch the three boys
alone. Within half an hour, Summer and Nasser arrive to pick Hannah up, and they rush to her grandfather Fareed’s, an old-fashioned white-washed villa in the Al Hamra district with wooden windows.
“Old money, Saudi style,” Summer says.
Summer waits outside in the car. Inside, Lamees sits with Hannah’s grandmother and grandfather in a room with low cushions around its perimeter, like many other salons in the city. They have cups of tea in front of them and the room smells like rose water. In a crisis, there is tea.
Lamees has not removed her abayah or tarhah but she has uncovered her face, something Hannah never expected her to do with a man present.
Hannah’s grandmother Faizah says something in Arabic, something meant to be soothing.
Grandfather Fareed says, “I called people I know. They told me your father is in Riyadh. It’s the columns he’s been writing. They don’t want anyone raising problems in the middle of the liberation.”
“What the fuck,” Hannah says. She claps her hand over her mouth to keep the obscenities inside.
“I’ll jump on a flight,” he says. “I’ll call Bandar, too. You shouldn’t talk about it to anyone.”
“He’s in jail? In prison? That’s what you’re saying?”
“Your father’s a good man. They’ll let him go soon, inshallah. He did something risky.”
Hannah’s grandmother Faizah touches her arm, tries to lead her toward the salon.
Her grandfather tells her to stay for tea, for dinner. He has to go back to the paper. The idea of sipping tea when her father is God knows where makes her so angry she’s shaking, the way her leg shook once when she drove through a red light and missed an accident by a hair. She can’t stop the tremors. Through the fog of her anxiety, she is able to digest that her grandparents are consumed with worry, too. Her grandmother fiddles obsessively with beautiful blue prayer beads; her thumb keeps moving the bead along the string. Hannah’s grandfather twists his iqal back and forth. Their faces, too, are twisted with concern.
“Say a prayer,” her grandfather says. It is what people here say when they want someone to calm down.