by Hala Alyan
He surveys the kitchen glumly, as if a roasted chicken or shish kebab might magically appear. He thinks, with dim hope, of his sister. Perhaps she picked something up from the market.
His casual lifestyle is underpinned by Alia and Atef, residing several streets over, their lives spilling into one another’s. They all check in daily, usually gathering at Salma’s house—Mustafa still refers to it as beit immi. Both houses are always unlocked, and they slip easily between them. Mustafa loves the permeability of their days, the way he and the two people he loves most revolve around each other like planets.
As though he has conjured her, Mustafa hears footsteps on the pathway of the house, Alia’s trademark heels.
He moves to the sink and starts to scrape the dish, the pasta already congealed.
“Mustafa?”
“In here,” he calls out. The cigarette turns the drain water brown.
Alia appears in the doorway, her nose wrinkled. “What’s on fire?”
“Dinner.”
“I’m starving,” she says, setting her purse on the table. She wears a long, peasant-style skirt, and as she walks, the hem trails along the floor, rustling up dust.
“Is Atef here?”
“No, we’re meeting at the mosque later.”
“I think it’s going to rain.” Alia lifts the pot lid, frowning. “Another boys-only meeting?”
Mustafa makes a noncommittal sound, busying himself rinsing ash from the sink. His sister is clever, Mustafa knows, clever enough to understand there are secrets, things involving the mosque and men gathering to talk at night. And he knows she resents it, the exclusions, being left in the dark, kept away from a part of her brother’s and husband’s lives. Especially after the prison.
“I’m sure all you’ll be doing tonight is snacking on grapes and discussing the weather,” Alia snaps. “No talk at all of Nasser or Eshkol.”
Perhaps it is jealousy, Mustafa thinks. Alia has always been sturdy, never afraid of mud or worms, not covering her eyes like other girls during lamb slaughtering for Eid. And while she has been given free rein in Nablus, her life different than other wives’—an easygoing husband, days filled with shopping and tea dates and reading—she is still, first and foremost, a woman. No amount of sturdiness will allow her to become one of the mosque shabab.
“No discussions in the mosque,” Alia continues, taking a bite of the pasta and grimacing. “This is disgusting.” She sets the fork down. “No arguments about politics and philosophy.”
All Mustafa’s life, Alia has been the one closest to him. Atef might be his best friend, the shabab his brethren, but he always confided in Alia. They told each other everything, admitting to shoplifting and youthful romances and darker things, such as Mustafa’s hatred of his father.
But this he cannot tell her, the kinship he feels in the mosque; this churning of something ancestral and looming—but what? Revolution? War?—he cannot speak of.
“Those guys,” he says now, casually, “they don’t know their Camus from their Sartre.” He meets her eyes. Alia breaks the tension first, turning toward the bowl of pears. When she speaks, her voice is tight.
“You want your secrets, Mustafa? You and Atef? Keep them.” She moves her hand as though swatting a mosquito. “Anyway, it’s all smoke and gossip with you men.” Her tone is supercilious. She takes out two pears and begins to peel them.
He is ashamed by the wave of relief.
They throw the pasta out, eat the pears hollowed and dolloped with jam. They talk of the weather, Atef’s new job at the university. They swap stories about their mother’s recent phone calls, her perpetual worry for their futures. Before she leaves, Alia kisses Mustafa’s cheek.
“Enjoy the gossip,” she teases. The argument’s temporarily forgotten.
Alone, Mustafa rinses the dishes beneath running water. “We have two choices,” he says. “Abandon our cause or pledge to it.” He likes how the words roll off his tongue, tries raising his voice. “Or pledge to it!”
As if cued, the muezzin begins outside the windows. The echoing tones remind him of the mosque and Atef, whom he is meeting—Mustafa glances at his watch, the face covered in soapsuds—in an hour.
Despite his nerves, he thrills at the thought of the gathering. He leaves the meetings feeling moored, centered, as though someone has finally found the matchstick of his faith and touched fire to it.
Not that kind of faith, though Mustafa has a flighty belief in Allah, an avowal that he recognizes in more honest moments as tactical. If there is ever a sweeping of believers into one room and the rest into the other, he doesn’t want to be on the wrong side of the door. But he loves the mosque for its dusty smell, for the carpet prickling his feet, for the predictable hum of the muezzin more than anything celestial.
No, when Imam Bakri addresses the men, his arms moving like an orchestra conductor’s, when he talks about Allah’s greatness and the coming war and the righteousness of land, Mustafa’s spine tingles at only one word: Palestine.
Atef likes to talk of the overlap of Allah and land, how each is holy in its own way, that, in fact, when one says he loves his country, it is only because he loves his God.
But Mustafa has no patience for such talk, for self-analysis. He prefers the arguments at gatherings, the bickering between himself and Alia. He loves getting angry, that intoxicating rush of blood; his temper is well known—he rips up maps, walks out of dinner parties. He likes the impact of these acts, how people eye him alertly.
“Mustafa, break any teacups lately?” the neighborhood girls like to tease him, referring to one he’d shattered, at age twelve or thirteen, after a particularly fantastic argument with Alia. She’d begun to cry and he, recognizing the cheating inherent in the move—that female trick—had lobbed a teacup across the garden, where it smashed against a tree trunk. The fact that the incident took place in front of dozens of neighbors lent it a legendary air. It was told and retold so many times that some who joke about it are younger than Alia, had not been present or even born when it happened. Mustafa himself barely remembers it.
In his bedroom, Mustafa takes his undershirt off and sniffs it. Smoke and sweat. He chucks it onto the bed, opens his closet door.
“Brothers,” he says aloud. “We must recognize the battle ahead.” He moves in front of the mirror next to the armoire, repeats the line. He frowns. “We must recognize it will not be fought for us.” His dark eyes stare back at him.
He knows he is handsome, although he does what he believes to be a stoic job of hiding this awareness, trying to appear tousled, attractive as an afterthought—the uncombed curls, rumpled shirts. My honey boy, his mother would say when he was a child, and the aunts would coo. Those eyes. That hair. And once, overheard while playing, a murmur from a neighbor: A pity, when the boy gets the beauty instead of the girls. Even as a boy, he understood there was something of an imbalance—Alia’s gangly body and Widad’s plumpness, both sisters’ crooked noses and high foreheads. That he had gotten something not rightfully his.
Six o’clock. Two ties have been discarded; he has settled on a gray shirt and slacks. Outside, the air is cool and pleasant. He is overwhelmed by a sudden desire to walk in the opposite direction, follow the twilight to Aya and her warm bed.
But it is Friday, the one night her family gathers in the hut after mosque, the night she takes her siblings into her mother’s room and leads them in prayer. Although he has never seen this, he can picture it—Aya’s calm voice, her face in the lamplight, the siblings reciting Qur’an under their breath. She can be hard sometimes, even during lovemaking. But he likes to think of her in moments of softness.
His mother worries, he knows, about some predilection keeping him from marrying. Some part of her would be glad—or at least relieved—to hear her son has known the bodies of a dozen women, that he is a man in that sense.
The girls themselves are far-flung, assorted: Amman girls who studied in British universities, a couple of Europeans working with th
e refugee camps, even the pretty girls that fill the pool hall with their oud perfume and smoke on Saturdays. Whispering incredible, filthy things into his ears, things that leave him both shuttered and pining. You got twenty? You know what I’d let you do? He always felt removed with the girls, as though his body were a detached animal, clawing while he looked on.
Aya is different. She lives near the Nabulsi outskirts, where refugee camps litter the land. Her hut is old; damp clothing hangs from wires around the windows. The people in nearby huts work with their hands, the men in farming and carpentry, the women seamstresses and bakers. None of them are Nabulsi. They have come over the past two decades from villages, the ones soldiers set fire to or sowed with salt. They came from cities like Haifa and Nazareth. Their villages are lost, the names already eroded, replaced with new, Hebrew ones.
Mustafa first came to the neighborhood after an imam asked for help distributing resistance posters. The imam told him of a printing shop near the foothills.
The store reeked of paper pulp and ink. Aya worked in the shop, unrolling the reams of paper, capping bottles of ink. She was polite to Mustafa and Atef whenever they entered, always inclining her head when Mustafa caught her eye. She rarely spoke, but something about her infected him—he thought of her incessantly, her half smile, her fingernails darkened from ink.
Their courtship was a simple one, Mustafa returning to the store alone several times, asking her to print various photographs and flyers. Once, he brought a creased photograph of his father’s—a view of the sea, a print from their old house in Jaffa—and asked her to copy it for him.
“The sea will be blurry,” she’d said, frowning. She leaned over the counter, her fingertips flat against the photograph.
“You have the most beautiful hands,” he replied, touching her wrist.
He’d known girls like Aya, poor girls who lived by different standards than his female friends and relatives. These girls had their faith, but their lives were hard and bitter and full of death. The ones that weren’t married by their early twenties had a recklessness about them, giving their bodies with abandon. They hadn’t been raised on European summers and dinner parties; they had removed shrapnel from their brothers’ legs, had washed their sisters after rape. There was no chamber for love in their bodies, and they appreciated Mustafa’s banter.
But it is another world with Aya, the only time he has lost his footing, as if suddenly darkness has fallen and he has only his fingers, his breath, to guide him.
Aya is dependable. He always sees her near dusk, as the call for prayer is beginning around them. Rather than making their trysts feel illicit, this seems to sanction them. She invariably smiles upon spotting him and then turns, leading him to the hut where she lives with six younger siblings and a bedridden mother. He has only heard the mother coughing, never met her. At the hut, he waits outside the back door, Aya entering first and making sure the children are playing before gesturing for him to follow—Quiet, quiet, she mouths—up the stairs to her room. No one ever comes up there, and he understands that this is all Aya has in the world: those walls, those floor tiles.
Even the room is loyal; always the same narrow bed, the armoire, the cracked mirror. Always the same clean lemony scent, the soap with which she washes everything, even her hair. The same Russian dolls on the tabletop, the same empty vase. Their lovemaking is precise, anticipated—Mustafa first sitting on the edge of the bed and, as though signaled, Aya beginning to remove her clothes.
She never does it coyly. She takes off each piece of clothing carefully, pausing to fold the dress and roll up the stockings, even tuck one brassiere cup into the other. And she never looks at him, standing instead in profile, so that he sees her nakedness in halves—one bare leg, one breast, one shoulder. She has the body of an Egyptian film star, none of that tiny-waisted, long-legged nonsense the wealthier girls obsess over. Aya’s is voluptuous flesh, heavy-breasted, a roll of fat above her hips. Only when she is finished does Mustafa rise and kiss her neck, then her shoulder, finally her mouth. He removes his own clothes haphazardly and afterward must squint in the dark for his underwear, shirt, socks.
He wonders sometimes what happens after he goes, leaving behind his hairs and scent on her sheets. Whenever he thinks of this, he can dredge up only a single image, like a photograph: Aya getting ready for bed, smoothing down the length of the mattress where his body had been, as though some warmth remains. The image is cheerless, and he puts it away instantly.
Several weeks ago, they finally spoke of it. Aya waited until they’d finished making love. He’d noticed her furrowing her brow during it, a distraction about her. For long minutes afterward, they fell into the pattern of their bodies—Mustafa stretching and lighting a cigarette, Aya settling back against the pillow with her eyes shut.
He thought she’d fallen asleep and started when she spoke, her voice low.
“Someone has asked to marry me.”
The pinch in his stomach surprised him. The smoke in his mouth turned sour. He exhaled quickly, wanting to rid himself of the taste.
“Everyone says I should accept.”
Another woman might’ve said such a line coquettishly, with the undertones of a challenge, but Aya spoke simply. Somewhere in the house there was a crash and then laughter. The children had broken something.
“Who is he?” Mustafa asked.
“It doesn’t matter.” She kept her eyes shut. In the dimness, he could make out the faint wings of her eyebrows lifting. “A neighborhood boy. The son of one of my father’s old friends. He wants a wife, children. He’d take care of my sisters and brothers. My mother.”
“I can give you money.”
“And what would you be giving me money for?” Her voice turned steely. It is their oldest fight, Mustafa trying to leave money—tucked beneath the pillow, inside the Russian dolls—Aya always refusing. Mustafa considered revisiting the arguments, the money left to him by his father, the sheer surfeit of it.
Instead he asked, “Will you marry him?” In the darkness, he couldn’t make out the details of her features—the dimple in her chin, each curl. But he knew them intimately. Better than anyone else’s face, it startled him to realize.
There was the sound of exhaling.
“No,” she said distinctly. Mustafa’s relief steadied him. He watched her push her hair back, a rasp against the pillow that he found arousing.
“Why not?”
She sat up, pulling her knees to her chest. Her expression was inscrutable. She spoke the way one might to a dimwitted child.
“Because I would never be able to love him.”
The unsaid crowded them in the small room. It was the first time either of them had spoken that word aloud. It seemed to signal something for Aya. The rest—the implication that she couldn’t love him because that love, finite, was already elsewhere—she kept silent, gathered with them in the dark.
But why not? The question sometimes jars Mustafa awake. It has even been asked directly by Atef, the only person who knows about Aya.
“She’s good,” Atef said to him once. “Others, they’ll see that. They’ll look past the rest.”
The rest being the hut, the coughing mother, the litter of siblings, Aya’s own pliant body bucking under his. His mother’s horrified expression at her son marrying beneath him; Alia’s perplexity at his choice. The aunts and neighbors would talk for years. Even the men at the mosque, most of them educated and well off, would be taken aback; for all their talk of solidarity with the poor, they are repelled by them.
“They won’t,” Mustafa replied, his tone signaling an end to the conversation.
Mustafa walks toward the mosque, the air sobering. He is late for Atef, and his body vibrates with that familiar urge from earlier, to turn and walk in the opposite direction of the mosque, to plead illness or even cowardice.
In these moments, he remembers his mother. Her face in the courtroom years ago. His promise at her feet: Never, never. He knows she would never bel
ieve that he and Atef did stop for a long time, avoiding the politics and the mosque and spending their evenings together, alone, in the garden at night. They spoke about the future, Palestine, their own fears. But they stayed away from the other talk.
It had been an exercise in futility. Like asking two men living near the sea never to touch the water. The mosque, its thrum of male conversation, the way those walls seemed to palpitate with life and ferocity—what other home was there for two fatherless men?
“We’re sitting here like boys,” Atef once said in a rare outburst. He gestured at the night sky, the garden around them. “While outside, things are happening. The world is happening.”
Mustafa understood. Every day he woke feeling like he might surge, like he wore his skin too tightly. Every newspaper was splashed with faces of the martyred.
When they returned to the gatherings, the men greeted them like long-lost warriors. Their spell in prison, brief though it was, lent them an air of authenticity. Just like that, they had it back: the sermons, the dust motes swirling during noon prayer, the laughter and fury of the men at evening gatherings. And, of course, Imam Bakri.
The man is younger than the other imams, in his early forties. While the other imams are aloof, retiring to the offices after prayers, spending their time with one another, Imam Bakri will gather in the courtyard with the congregation, chatting with the men. Now and then, he even swipes a cigarette from them.
“Imam Bakri, Allah is watching,” the men tease him and he grins back.
“Allah knows how sweet tobacco is.” He is a stocky man with dancing eyes, and he has a gift—one that Mustafa recognizes in himself, though it’s a tenth of the imam’s—of making the person he is speaking to feel bathed in light.
Rumors coursed through the mosque. The imam was imprisoned for a long time, some said, and was in Nablus to flee some darkly heroic charges. He was a Marxist, others countered, a fighter cloaked in imam’s robes. Some—though they were quickly shushed—even hinted that he was an Israeli spy or informant.