by Hala Alyan
“Hello,” Alia says to them, and they return the greeting.
“Madame,” Priya says in her slow English. “Sir call earlier. I tell him you in shower. He call back later.”
“Mmm.” Alia busies herself with the radio on the counter. “Thank you.” Her mind snarls, as it does whenever it’s confronted with her husband these days. The radio knobs are fat and thick beneath her fingers as she tunes.
“Which dress are you wearing tonight?” Widad asks.
“Oh.” Alia captures the tinkling of a news station’s melody. “The black one,” she says. She twists the volume knob. The news music halts, cut by the gloomy tones of a woman’s singing.
“Oum Kalthoum.” This song is one of the Naksa songs that have cropped up in recent months, sorrowful violins and intonations lamenting the losses of the war. The defeat. Every day on every channel the songs play, haunting the living rooms, the marketplaces, even the schools, all over Kuwait and, Alia knows, other Arab cities. Grieving the death of men, all the land lost, but mostly the defeat itself, the hot, mushrooming shame of it. These tunes are more familiar to Alia than any childhood lullaby now, these songs that seems to skulk everywhere.
Both sisters make a sound at the same instant, a grunt of frustration. Alia turns to Widad, sees her sister’s eyes uncharacteristically mischievous.
“Turn it off. For the love of Allah,” Widad says.
Alia laughs, surprised. She adopts the droning voice of the newscasters and politicians on the television over the past months.
“Brothers, sisters. This is a period of mourning. Wear your black. Tell your children to grieve.” Aping solemnity, Alia sings along with the chorus tunelessly. “Ahhh-uhhh.”
“Alia!” Laughter rocks Widad, shocked but delighted. She shakes her head as Alia splays her fingers, tilting her head as she shouts along to the song. Priya and Bambi giggle. Widad lifts her hands from the mint leaves, covers her face. “Turn it off,” she says, gasping. “Turn it off.”
Satisfied, Alia turns the volume down. She sits across from Widad, picks a bunch of mint. Through lowered lashes, she glances across the table, warmed by the smile on her sister’s face, the unexpected expression of pleasure.
“The meat needs another hour or so.” Widad squints at the clock above her head. The mint is washed and dried, the vegetables cut into trim squares. “That should give us plenty of time to add the vegetables.” She turns to Priya and Bambi. “Is the food prepared for your party?”
“Yes, madame,” Bambi says.
The second party was Widad’s idea, a gathering for the maids and drivers of the guests, held in the shack—dubbed the Little House—near the villa where Priya slept. Priya and Bambi seem excited, all week long talking about what music to play and braiding bits of tinsel for decoration. Watching them, Alia feels ashamed of her unhappiness.
“Do you have everything you need?” she asks them now in English. She relishes speaking it, the language lost to her since school days. Back then, it was her favorite subject, those melodic, liquid vowels. “Do you need more juice or sweets?”
“No, madame,” Bambi says.
“No, madame,” Priya parrots. She is petite, barely a year older than Alia, who finds being so close in age to someone this cheery disconcerting.
“Did you say the Awadahs are coming?” Widad asks her sister.
“Yes, and the Khalils. The university dean.”
“How wonderful,” Widad says dreamily. “They’re good people. I’m so happy Atef’s meeting people at the university. Ghazi said he’s doing really well.”
“Yes.” Alia stops, not wanting to be disloyal.
“It’ll take time,” Widad says. “For both of you.”
An aphid hides between the mint leaves. Alia holds the wriggling body in her fingers, then crushes it into a tissue. When Atef accepted the professorship at the university, she’d been stunned. She’d thought Kuwait was a transition for them, a temporary sojourn.
“And now you’re filling the house with friends,” Widad continues. “Building a new life.” She reaches across the table and squeezes Alia’s hand. Her eyes are earnest. “After Nablus, after—” She pauses. “After Mustafa.”
Alia ducks her head. “Perhaps.” Her duplicity pounds in her ears. She has told Widad nothing of her pregnancy and—worse—nothing of the idea that has taken hold in her mind, growing lush with time, intoxicating.
Amman. To her mother, her aunts, to the cousins and childhood friends who moved there from Nablus after the war. The idea had struck her like rainfall, simple and clear: They should move to Amman.
Instead of staying in Kuwait’s wasteland, the endless afternoons of television and heat, let them go to Amman, the coffee shops and vendors hawking fruit, neighborhoods filled with old friends. Yes, everyone was distraught, mourning the houses and cities they’d left behind, the men beneath the soil. Shouldn’t they mourn together? Palestine has vanished for them—this knowledge crept up on Alia slowly, a new death every morning: Mustafa gone, Nablus gone—but they can find the ashes in Amman, collect them to build another life.
The pregnancy is further motive. Amman has knotted like a vine in Alia’s mind, her conviction that, if they go, something can be saved. She and Atef could shed the snakeskin of this year, begin to laugh again, lament and heal with their friends in Amman. They could start their family there, live in a house near her mother; everything could be all right. She knows in her bones that if she could show Atef all this, could show him the image in her mind—their salvaged life—he would see it and understand. He would go.
Alia watched the war on the television in Widad and Ghazi’s living room. Unlike Umm Omar’s, their television was new, the screen slick and orb-like. Four knobs adorned the right side, the largest for sound. Ghazi set the volume, twisting it up high, and when the image quivered with static, he was the one who rose heavily from his armchair to fix it. Watching Ghazi swivel the antenna wands, it would occur to Alia that those fat hands had traversed her sister’s naked body.
Widad busied herself during the news reports. She clanked her knitting needles against each other, rose abruptly for cups of tea. Irritation scraped Alia as her sister asked repeatedly whether anyone wanted dinner or fruit. Even when Widad finally sat, her back never touched the sofa cushions, her feet remained arched over the floor, as though she might spring up at any second. Alia sat still as a stone. Whatever biscuits or oranges Widad brought languished untouched beside her. Tension clamped her jaw, congealed her muscles. Every few hours she willed her fingers over the telephone, dialing the numbers of Atef, of Mustafa, listening to awful, endless ringing.
Only Ghazi spoke. He seemed excited by the war; there was an edge to his thrill, almost a satisfaction. Alia gathered from his commentary that he’d predicted such an outcome, that these sentiments were well worn.
“I’ve said it and said it, this was a long time coming. Nasser and his men walking around with their chests puffed out, thinking they’re peacocks. Scattered men. What kind of leader promises victory with scattered men? An Arab republic. Ha! Look at this—some American money and here’s Israel’s shiny new toys. What do we have? Flags, songs, dreams. They’re going to obliterate us.” His enormous body trembled with the force of his words.
Fury rose in Alia’s throat each time Ghazi spoke. Swallowing was a measured task. Alia had grown up with angry men—Mustafa, his schoolmates, her uncles, all crowding for protests swathed with Palestinian flags, shouting at gatherings late into the night.
And now war had come, snatches of it harvested in Widad and Ghazi’s living room. But it was wrong, horribly wrong. The news-casters spoke of an Arab victory, but no crest of Arab military was approaching, no waving of the green, red, black, and white flags. Alia’s packed suitcase remained in Widad’s guest bedroom, upright, like an eager child. She would not be returning home. On the third day, tanks rolled into the Old City. Although none of them could have known it, Mustafa and Atef were arrested soon after, when the Israelis entered Na
blus, during a sweep of young men affiliated with the mosque. As the fourth day came and went, the Sinai Peninsula fell to the wrong men. The tanks razing through Gaza, Jerusalem, the Golan Heights—even Nablus, even Nablus—and the jets screeching over the Mediterranean, they had not Arabic lettering on their sides but chalky six-tipped stars. The Israelis were winning. And for Alia, who had believed the Arabs would conquer, whose only concern was keeping the men she loved on the sidelines, the sweeping victory was inconceivable.
“It’s gone. Palestine is gone. The fools. They saved nothing,” Ghazi said on the sixth day as the sun rose to reveal bodies tossed in ditches. Alia listened dully now. When she dialed, the telephone lines still rang. By sunset that day, Alia no longer startled at the televised images of dropped bombs, the debris clouds swelling out into frothy edges, like something edible.
The same memory assaulted her while she watched the news reports:
When Alia was five or six, Mustafa found a chick in the schoolyard during a rainstorm. The creature was slick with rain, shivering. He fashioned a home from Salma’s old hatbox, patiently shredding paper to line it while the chick warmed in his shoe near the radiator. Alia sat by her brother’s side, both of them silent as he worked. Every few minutes she bent over the shoe, peering at the quivering bird. Her fingers itched to touch the matted feathers, but she restrained herself. It felt like an honor, sitting by her brave, handsome brother while wind battered the windows with rain.
The hatbox seemed to Alia resplendent, snug, with snowlike carpet and bits of lettuce Mustafa stole from the kitchen. Mustafa lifted the chick from his shoe, knelt beside Alia.
“Do you want to hold him?”
Alia nodded. Her throat caught, making it tricky to speak. She curved her hands, and Mustafa lowered the bird into them.
“Careful,” he breathed.
The bird shivered violently, his heart palpitating beneath Alia’s fingers. Tiny bead eyes, translucent beak. The claws dug pleasantly into Alia’s palm. Pale yellow stood out in tufts, the downy feathers frizzing as they dried. Alia held her breath, forced herself still. It seemed that if she moved she would break him.
“You can pet him,” Mustafa assured her. Alia looked up at her brother, her heart pounding. He nodded.
“It’s okay, birdie,” she said and stroked carefully, the skull solid beneath her forefinger. Mustafa smiled at her, his teeth straight and white and beautiful. Alia felt big, bigger than ever before, the chick’s heartbeat calming in her palm.
The bird, Mustafa, bombs, Atef, Nablus.
That almost-week jumbled everything as Alia sat before the television, images searing her hour after hour. Her mind raced. She was parched, but whatever she drank tasted sour. When Widad called them to dinner, Alia had to force her teeth over the meat, the spinach. When they returned to the living room, the images on the television seemed stolen from another time. The men’s faces, brown, dirty, the features so alike, they could’ve been photocopied.
She kept her body still. It had never occurred to her before how similar they looked, the two men. To each other, and to the men in uniforms. Once they were broken down into parts, she could see how those parts could be ignored or hated—grimy faces, dark eyes, beards.
On the fifth day of the war, President Nasser’s face was drawn and somber as he told Alia and the rest of the world it was over. The Arabs had lost. Reels of Israeli soldiers pointing their rifles at truckfuls of captured Arab soldiers played over and over. The prisoners held their hands up, looking childlike and absurd without their weapons, just sweaty men, the same men who had played war as children in neighborhoods just like Alia’s. Then, as now, the captured didn’t speak, kept their heads bowed; the victors ran around waving their guns, imaginary or real, heavenward, spraying celebratory bullets to the sky.
Widad peeled potatoes during Nasser’s resignation speech and the reels of captures. After the images of grinning Israelis looped around for the fourth time, Ghazi rose and clicked off the television.
“Well,” he said to the blackened screen, grimly. “Well.”
Nobody said Mustafa’s name, or Atef’s. It was clear there were more capture sites, dozens, maybe hundreds more. And the dead bodies, the piles of corpses feasted on by flies, stacked in the desert—the camera had whizzed by them, Alia’s eyes neither fast nor willing enough to scan for faces.
She sat in the yard for hours that evening. The June night was muggy and hot, but she didn’t move. Above her head the sky was clear, stars like salt tumbled onto a tablecloth. She tried to count them but finally gave up.
Atef had warned that no one would want to come to a party. Everyone with Arab blood is mourning. But the guests arrive with flowers and trays of sweets. Many of the women wear iridescent dresses, the men well-tailored suits. They kiss Alia’s cheek and ask when Atef will arrive.
“Soon, soon,” she says laughingly and prays it is true. She ushers them into the house, the living room with an archway leading into the dining room. Other guests are gathered inside, sitting on couches or standing around the table, plates balanced in their hands. Chicken and lamb are arranged on platters of jasmine rice, little burners beneath to keep them warm. Ghazi laughs in the corner with one of his engineer friends. Alia feels a brief envy toward her sister for her noisy, unaltered husband.
Throughout the house, Bambi and Priya have placed vases of roses and gardenias, giving the rooms a heady perfume. Shallow bowls of nuts and cherries cover the tables. Even the yard behind the dining room, normally desolate and untouched, has been swept. Through the large windows, Alia sees a constellation of chairs, candles dancing between them.
The house fills. Widad puts on a record, and some women begin to sway in the living room. It looks like a home, Alia thinks. She asks people if they want pomegranate juice, laughs at their stories. Yes, some of the men have gathered outside, where Alia knows they are discussing the war. But otherwise it feels as though she has stumbled into someone else’s living room, where everyone is having a perfectly pleasant time.
At half past nine the doorbell rings, and Alia smiles at the group of guests she is speaking with.
“At last.”
She pauses at the mirror in the foyer, finds her wild-haired reflection satisfying. Arranging her face in a half smile, she opens the door. Samer, Atef’s coworker at the university, and Samer’s American wife, Maryanne, beam at her from the doorstep. In the corner is a blur in the dark. Alia squints.
“Hello,” she says in English.
“Look what we’ve brought you.” Samer grins, holding out a vase with one hand and pulling at the blurred figure with the other.
“Oh, how beautiful, thank you,” she says, taking the vase. Flowers spill from the edge, tangled in delicate nets of baby’s breath. And: “You!” she says gratefully as the figure steps into the light.
“Your husband’s quite the dedicated professor,” Samer says. “We found him in his car still thumbing through books!” There is a pause while Atef glances at Alia, his eyes inscrutable.
“My little bibliophile,” she says dully.
“You look beautiful, as always,” Samer says, and Alia forces a smile.
“What a dress,” Maryanne joins in, then tries for Arabic: “Like the moon!”
“Please.” Atef holds an arm out, and the couple walk inside. He steps in himself and kisses Alia on her forehead.
“I’m sorry,” he begins. “The thought of coming in . . . all these people—”
Alia shakes her head, lifts a hand to his cheek. The gesture feels illicit; they rarely touch these days. “I know.”
At the archway, they stand watching the guests laugh and talk.
“They’re having fun. Can you believe it, the lamb’s almost finished.”
“I see Majed’s here,” he says, nodding toward the young, hairy man laughing and snapping his fingers at the dancing women. He is from the university, Jordanian, a bachelor.
Alia smiles. “I don’t think there’s a girl over thirtee
n he hasn’t flirted with.” Atef lets out a roar of laughter, like his old self.
“It’s a wonderful party.” He pulls her to him, and she instinctively places a hand on her belly. Soon.
“Wonderful,” he repeats.
“Atef!” one of the men calls out.
“The host has finally arrived!”
“Come, Professor, the meat has gone cold.”
Atef looks down at her questioningly, and she laughs.
“Go,” she says, warmed by his pleasure, and watches him walk to the men.
Alia and Widad are dancing together. Their feet are bare, and the blue Persian rugs are soft beneath them. The other women dance around them, the air rippling with dozens of perfumes. The lights are dimmed, candles in silver candelabras casting shadows across the walls. The maids have cleared the dishes and trays, setting fruit and little cakes atop the dining-room table.
“That’s plenty,” Alia told them afterward. “Go enjoy your party.”
The music is lusty and fast. Alia is dizzy with it. She twirls once, twice, then lifts her arms for Widad to do the same. Above the archway, the clock reads nearly eleven. In an hour, it will be a new year. The thought brings an unexpected lump in her throat, the sobering thought of Mustafa. She will become older than him. She will watch the world tumble into yet another year. Without him.
“Ya habibi.” Widad sings along, her face close to Alia’s, close enough for Alia to see the lashes coated in mascara, the reddening from her eyebrow threading this morning. She looks younger, girlish, with her flushed cheeks and bare feet. Impulsively, Alia leans in and kisses her cheek.
Widad smiles, startled. “Habibi inta,” she sings even louder. Around her, the women laugh and clap.
You have your sister, Alia, her mother says on the telephone when they speak. And your husband. You cannot forget them in your grief.
“Aywa, Widad!” Majed weaves his way between the women, snapping his fingers and wiggling his bushy eyebrows. Widad blushes but continues singing and moving her arms back and forth.