by Hala Alyan
In the crowd, Atef moves his hand, a small gesture for action.
Mustafa swallows. Without removing his eyes from Atef—faith, strength, that quiet—he speaks.
“Brothers,” he says again. “We must fight.”
Alia
* * *
Kuwait City
December 1967
Steam rises as water rushes from the faucet. Alia drops her nightgown on the bathroom floor. She kneels at the lip of the bathtub, grazes the water with her fingertip, winces. The water is always hot, too hot. Splotches of mold have begun to appear on the yellow curtain—Widad picked it out, saying the color would be cheery—even though they’ve lived in the house, Atef and she, less than four months.
Standing beneath the water, Alia keeps her eyes on the small window directly in front of the shower. Beyond it, several inches of Kuwait City are visible—the parking lot of their compound, the other villas, a swath of sidewalk. The relentlessly blue sky. She shampoos her hair then shuts her eyes and steps backward into the stream, the water plugging her ears.
For a moment she is submerged, without breath. She stands under the water until her lungs ache. Afterward, she soaps her body; the thick Kuwait saboun is coarse, drying her skin out. She rubs it in circles over her torso, remembering as she always does the white, silky jasmine soap she used in Nablus.
The steam trails her as she steps out of the tub. Atop the toilet is a cabinet, towels folded in neat stacks. She chooses a mint-colored one, her favorite, and wraps it tightly around herself.
“Oh God,” she moans. She presses her palms against the sink, trying to quell the nausea.
She leaves behind wet footprints as she walks into the bedroom. The vanity is lined with dozens of bottles and tiny pots, perfumes and creams and makeup, Atef’s lone contribution a bottle of cologne. From a porcelain box, Alia takes out several bobby pins, puts them between her teeth, and faces the mirror. Her hair curls damply over her breasts. She begins the intricate, familiar task of pinning it.
When she finishes, Alia lifts her chin and swivels. Wryly, she catches her own eye. She undoes the towel, forces her gaze over her naked body. The bare shoulders, the dark-tipped breasts. Lower still, to the unavoidable: her rounding belly.
The anxiety that arises is habitual, acidic. Alia shuts her eyes and inhales deeply. Count to ten, she commands herself. She holds her breath before releasing it with a faint oof.
She has tried to tell Atef a dozen times.
The baby was never meant to be a secret. When Alia felt the first ripples of nausea back in October, she thought her body was still recovering from the desert heat. Kuwait remained sweltering well into autumn, and the heat fogged her brain, left her feeling boneless.
Each time, she loses her nerve. The prospect of discussing it embarrasses her—to tell him is to allude to that night in August, when she found him in the bathtub. The only time since his return—not lovemaking so much as something desperate, a frenetic coupling, arching and clutching and biting. For a week after, her lips were swollen; a trail of bruises laddered deliciously on each thigh. Even she understood the sickness of such a crazed night, the nature of Atef’s grief. In those early weeks, none of them could mention Mustafa’s name without Atef weeping.
Now that months have passed—her body doing her the favor of remaining slender, only a slight plumping below her navel—now that he no longer sits limply in front of the television, no longer moves through the rooms of their new house as a sleepwalker might, Alia remains too frightened to say anything that might unnerve him. What she knows about her husband, what she thought she knew about the man, has scattered like dandelion seeds beneath a child’s breath since he returned from the war.
Alia’s trip to Kuwait had been in response to a plea from her mother. Widad hasn’t been well, her mother told her, with her myriad ailments and a recent flare-up of arthritis.
“She’s always asking about you,” Salma told her over the phone. “She asks why you never visit.”
“I didn’t realize the roads to Kuwait were one-way.”
“Don’t be uncharitable, Alia. She’s struggling.”
Finally, reluctantly, Alia agreed to go. Nablus was still flush with the last days of May, the morning cool as Mustafa drove to the airport in Jordan with Atef in the front, Alia sullen in the back seat.
“I hope you didn’t pack any of those skirts. Widad says she doesn’t even show her wrists,” Mustafa remarked.
“How very decent of her,” Alia snarled. The flight was an early one, and they’d all woken before sunrise. Her eyes felt dry, gritty.
“Alia,” Atef said quietly. All week long their house had flickered with arguments about the trip.
Her sister was effectively a stranger, someone Alia had seen four or five times in the past decade, a woman who dressed in dowdy robes and murmured Qur’an verses when alarmed. The prospect of spending a month—a month—with her in Kuwait, a city she envisioned as bare and beige, rankled Alia.
In the airport she pouted. When Atef kissed her, she stuck her tongue in his mouth as punishment. He flinched, looking around, embarrassed at the public display.
“Habibti,” he said, touching her shoulder. The airport was filled with milling people and the sounds of their farewells. Alia shrugged off his hand. She felt banished, sent off like a child, jealous of the two of them spending her favorite month in Nablus without her. She would be missing two weddings and the birth of a close friend’s baby. “Sweetheart, it’s only a few weeks. I love you.”
“You too.” She made her voice indifferent.
Mustafa whistled. “Lighten up.”
“You shut up,” she snapped, turning toward him. She lifted her suitcase and walked toward the gate.
“Ya Alia, that’s the last thing you’re going to say to your kind, handsome brother? Who drove you all the way to the airport? That’s what you’ll leave me with?” Mustafa called out laughingly as Alia stalked off, pretending not to hear.
From the beginning, the trip was a disaster. Alia used that word over and over in conversations with her mother, with Atef, with her friends; she would become ashamed of speaking so lightly.
“It’s been a harsh spring,” Widad had said in the Kuwait airport. But Alia was unprepared for the airlessness that hit her when they stepped outside. She felt ambushed.
Alia registered shock before heat. It was dazzling. She hadn’t known the sun could blaze with such violence, that air could be so blistering that even inhaling seemed an Olympian task. So absolute was the heat that, in mere seconds, she couldn’t recall a time without it.
She was unable to find relief anywhere. During that long month of June, she often dreamed of icy lakes, of walking into an enormous refrigerator the color of lilacs.
She busied herself with the task of cheering up her sister, getting settled into Widad and Ghazi’s large but somber villa in a compound of expat Arab families, mostly professors and engineers and doctors. Ghazi himself is an engineer, working long hours at a firm in the city’s center. Alia had met him twice before, once at her sister’s wedding when she was very young and again five years ago when Ghazi and Widad visited Nablus. She liked him well enough; he was solicitous and careful around her sister. Sometimes he talked too much and there was always a faint odor emanating from him, like cabbage or stale water, but for the most part he struck her as dependable, benevolent.
Her days were usually spent with Widad, often shadowed by the Indian maid, Bambi. Alia took on the role of lively younger sister, encouraging Widad to eat plates of food or go on outings, but such a performance was not in her nature. After a week, her cheeks ached from smiling.
“Let’s go to the market,” she’d say brightly. And: “Let’s visit your friends!”
Those trips seemed endless. Widad had a driver, a sprightly older Indian man named Ajit, and he dutifully chauffeured them to dress shops and other people’s villas. They visited with Widad’s friends, drank tasteless tea in parlors, the women a decade
older than Alia. She was used to gatherings in Nablus, where women laughed and smoked and shared dirty jokes, shocking one another with confidences. But these visits were stuffy, the women speaking of silverware prices and the latest heat wave. Alia would go to the bathroom and roll her eyes at herself in the mirror. In the afternoons, they got sweets from a pastry shop near the compound; Widad loved them, and so Alia would eat as well, queasy from the sugar, the syrup too heavy in the heat. By the time they finally got home, Widad would be cheered, talking a little more and laughing, but Alia would feel drained, so bored she’d nearly kiss Ghazi with relief when she heard his key in the door.
Take her, she wanted to shout. It wasn’t that Widad was unpleasant or spiteful. But she was so droopy. So sluggish and melancholy and resigned to her life, its tasks of folding sheets, overseeing Bambi’s dusting, spending hours preparing dinner as she fretted over spices.
“Should we use cardamom?” she would ask Alia in the overheated kitchen. “Or cloves?” And at the dinner table: “I used yogurt instead of milk—is it too filmy?”
One afternoon Alia watched, exasperated, as Widad spent nearly two hours organizing the pantry. She couldn’t comprehend it, this appetite for housework. Her sister was like a mirror of some alternative fate, rolling her husband’s socks, scolding Bambi for oversalting the meat, wandering the rooms of her mausoleum-like villa.
Some evenings Alia spoke with Atef on the telephone. “I hate it here,” she’d whisper like a hostage. “Everything smells like boiled meat. And the heat. Atef, it’s like a furnace.”
“Not much longer,” he would say. “I miss you. We’ll see you so soon.” Gone was her anger at Mustafa, at the two of them for their alliance. She missed her bedroom, the sloping hills of Nablus, the sound of the men laughing over her burned meals. She couldn’t wait for home.
Alia’s return to Nablus was planned for the first Tuesday in June. The final week, she was so excited, she willingly put up with Widad’s chatter about cumin and starching cotton, even helped her cook maqlouba, dropping the slices of eggplant into sizzling pans. She packed her suitcase four days early, stacking gifts for her friends and brother and Atef between layers of clothing.
“You’ll come back? Maybe for Eid?” Widad asked over dinner two nights before Alia’s flight. She had made shish taouk, and the chicken was delicious.
“Why not? Maybe for another month,” Alia agreed and was surprised to find that she meant it. Now that she was about to leave, everything—her sister, Ghazi, their cavernous villa—was cast in a kinder light. She had two helpings of dinner and fell asleep happy.
The next morning Alia decided to visit her favorite dressmaker. She’d gone to Umm Omar’s store several times during the trip, Ajit driving her to the strip on Salamiyah Road littered with tailors, shoemakers, textile vendors from Bangladesh, Paris, even the Far East.
Umm Omar’s shop was on the corner, a nondescript storefront belying the décor inside. Her husband, a soldier, had been blown up in Algeria years earlier, and touches of Africa adorned the store—bundles of rosemary and sage tied with satin ribbons, the skulls of tiny, unlucky creatures on display, Moroccan carpets nailed to the walls. Bright ottomans were scattered throughout, the dressing area shielded by browning palm leaves. Algerian music crooned from the tape recorder near the cash register. Every week Umm Omar lined the racks with new dresses, pushing the others farther back. Unlikely taffeta peeped from beneath emerald silk; all the clothes smelled of Bedouin incense. It was, to Alia, the most wonderful, exotic place she’d ever been. In the monochrome of Kuwait, the store was a dash of vivacity.
Umm Omar herself was wizened, her hair covered in a headscarf though the shop received only women. Her Arabic was harsh, gruffness sanding the words.
“You’re too tall for that,” she’d bark whenever Alia’s fingers lingered over a particularly dainty frock. “You have long bones, ostrich bones; you must wear something that suits them.” Umm Omar always chose unfussy dresses with simple necklines, much to the disappointment of Alia, whose eyes snagged on the sequined pieces, the dresses with green and pink tassels.
That morning Alia made for a magenta dress, the fabric mouthwateringly shiny. Umm Omar clicked her tongue and pushed Alia out of the way, selected instead a long gray gown. The silk was unadorned, the only decoration a bow at the center of the neckline. Defiantly, Alia also took the magenta dress to the changing area. The magenta stuck to her hips, the color unflattering against her skin. The gray made her look like a starlet.
“You have a fine collarbone,” Umm Omar said when Alia emerged from the dressing room. It was the same remark she made every time. The older woman turned on the small television propped behind the cash register. Every few moments the screen would flatline into static, prompting Umm Omar to swear and swat it until the antennas quivered.
Alia admired herself in the mirror. It was ancient, the yellowed glass making her skin appear unearthly. The dress flared near the ankles, and, after a glance in Umm Omar’s direction, Alia did a twirl. She felt bold, like a foreigner in a film. She smiled at her reflection.
In that instant, Umm Omar let out a low, hissing sound.
“Those bastards. Those sons of dogs, they’ve done it.” In her distress, Umm Omar knocked her stool over as she jumped to her feet. She waved her arms around.
“What? What?” Alia rushed over, careful not to snag the dress on the counter. Explosions of light filled the screen, the camera shaking as it followed the arc of a swooping plane. The plane released something from its belly, something that ignited in the air. “What?” Alia stared dumbly at the images.
Umm Omar practically leaped, spittle flying as she spoke. “The Israelis! They’ve done it. They’ve done it. Tiptoeing like cowards, sneaking around at dawn. They’ve snuck up on our boys. They’re in Sinai.”
“Not Palestine.” The relief shook Alia’s voice.
“Not yet! But we’re prepared, you can bet on that! Palestine, Jordan, Iraq. We’ve been waiting for this. They don’t know what they’ve done, those motherless bastards. They don’t know what they’ve started!” Umm Omar’s eyes sparkled. She turned to Alia kindly. “Go on, dear. Let me wrap that up for you. Gray’s a good color on you.”
Alia meant to protest, the silk suddenly unpleasant against her skin. Instead she walked to the changing room, numbly removed the dress. Her stomach was slick with sweat. She hungered for her bedroom in Nablus, the breeze lifting curtains.
Umm Omar insisted on giving Alia the dress. She called it an early victory gift. Alia watched in a daze as Umm Omar wrapped the silk in brown paper. The older woman circled a ribbon around the package, looped it with a flourish.
When Alia stepped onto the pavement, she didn’t recognize the dark sedan, Ajit’s familiar figure behind the wheel. For several moments, she was stunned by heat, brightness, bewilderment. The sun blazed above her head. It was still early.
Alia walks naked to the closet. Her hair is heavy atop her head as she flips through dresses and skirts on cedar hangers in the armoire. They are nearly all new, bought in the past few months.
The party had been Alia’s idea. It would be good for them all to celebrate the new year.
“We’ll invite the Shafics and Mourads and Qiblawis,” she told Atef, referring to the families she’d met in the weeks before Atef’s arrival. “They were kind to me, during those days.”
“Whatever you like,” Atef said, and it was this very response, monotonous and listless, that spurred on her planning.
The true reason had nothing to do repaying the kindness of these dull people, most of whom worked with Ghazi, the wives friends with Widad. She couldn’t bear the thought of spending the new year as they did most of their nights, in front of the television as politicians roared their dissatisfaction. Or, worse, of trudging through feigned festivities at Widad’s house, the four of them forcing conversation and exclaiming over Widad’s pineapple cake, as they’d recently done for Alia’s birthday. After the birthday song w
as sung, the slices doled out, Alia fled to the bathroom, where she stuffed a towel against her mouth to muffle sobs. Their straggly, moping foursome; this awful country; pretending to be happy over saccharine cake—it was something to mourn over.
No, better to have people, lots and lots of people filling the rooms of their house, crowding the yard. Better to have voices and laughter, colorful dresses and flashy jewelry, a clatter to conceal the emptiness.
Alia enters the kitchen to find Widad seated at the table, shaggy bunches of mint in front of her.
A bowl brims with water at her side. She lifts a sprig of mint, plucks the leaves, and drops them into the bowl. Leaves skim the water, darkening to an emerald once submerged.
“Good morning,” Alia says. Widad has removed her veil, and sunlight from the kitchen windows falls around her, bringing out the amber in her hair.
“I came early. I hope you don’t mind. There’s so much to do.”
“No, it’s fine,” says Alia, joining her at the table. In the past few months, their companionship has softened, settled into familiarity.
“Want a cup?” Widad nods toward the stove, the new ibrik on a burner. The smell of coffee is thick in the air. Alia scorched the old one the first week here; even after the ibrik had been scrubbed and soaked in salt, the bottom remained charred.
The smell turns Alia’s stomach, and she averts her eyes. “Maybe later.”
In the kitchen alcove, Bambi sits with Priya, the maid Widad arranged for Alia months ago. The two women speak their trilling language with each other, a mountain of potatoes, carrots, parsley, and beans on the table between them. Their heads are ducked over it as they chop the vegetables.