by Hala Alyan
Slowly, Alia stops swaying. Her arms drop to her sides. She steps out of the dancing circle, away from the living room. Her chest aches with want; it catches at her throat, dwarfs her.
She misses Mustafa. Like a city after a tsunami, the earth is altered without him, wrecked. They never found out how he had died, just that he had, somewhere in an Israeli prison. And yet she continues eating éclairs and gathering hairs from the shower drain. In the back of her mind, that terrible, treacherous voice, the one that possessed her while she watched the war on the television screen—If one of them has to die, if I could pick—a voice she hates. She clamps the heel of her palm against her rib cage as though to quiet it.
You are surrounded by the living, her mother says. Housing one of them too, Alia thinks. Her hand flutters over her belly and she wills movement. Anything. But it is just a hand atop silk. Last week at the doctor’s office—the kindly man she has been seeing furtively—she listened to the heartbeat through a stethoscope. At four months, the doctor said, the eyelids are fused shut; sound cannot yet be heard. The thing—sightless and cloaked in fluid; does she feel her mother’s grief? Does she drink it like soup?—sleeps, will not turn for weeks.
“God.” She pants. She knows these moments well; the despair is a lake she must move across, water in her lungs. She thinks of Priya and Bambi, the maids and drivers dancing in the Little House, stirring pots of spiced stew. The thought of their happiness steels her, and she finds her shoes before moving quickly toward the yard.
She fumbles for a second with the sliding door, the bottom slots jamming. Through the screen door’s mesh, Alia sees Atef sitting with the other men. Smoke from their cigarettes rises into the night. They talk animatedly but stop as the door opens, greet her.
“Alia!”
“The lady of the fortress!”
“Is Majed still making a fool of himself in there?”
Alia smiles and leans against the door frame. She feels a craving for men, familiar from girlhood, a need to sit with them and listen to their talk. Behind her, the music is loud, brassy.
“He certainly is. And all of you, still cowering out here?”
The men laugh appreciatively.
“She knows us too well.”
“We are unfortunate men, Alia. We can’t dance!”
“Nothing terrifies us like music.”
Alia laughs. “And you?” She turns to her husband, his face relaxed in the candlelight. “Are you also afraid?”
Atef grins at her. “I’m the biggest coward of all.”
His smile fills her with nostalgia. It is like seeing a ghost. Alia extends her arm to him, palm upturned. “Just one.”
“You’re a lucky man,” one of the men says. “My wife wants me out here.”
Atef stands. “I am lucky,” he says softly, walking to Alia, his own hand out until his fingertips close over hers.
“Come dance,” Alia says. “Those shoulders.” She brushes his shoulder lightly. It is a tease, a reminder of their wedding day, when he’d jounced them to music.
Atef chuckles and brushes her forehead with his lips. “I’m a terrible dancer,” he says. He takes a drag from the cigarette, smoke trailing as he speaks. “You go on.” His fingers unlace from hers and he lowers his hand, grazing the dress over her hip, giving her a secretive smile.
“What romance!”
“Oh, the perils of young love,” one man says.
“You were young once?” another man asks him.
Atef glances at the men and turns back to Alia. “You go on, habibti.”
Alia forces her lips upward. When she is back inside, the disappointment capsizes, suddenly, into anger. She strides through the house, pausing at the living-room archway. The women and Majed have made a dirbakeh circle, shoes—magenta, blue, silver—strewn by the couches, the faces flushed.
The kitchen is a mess, gloriously so, the kind of mess that implies something happened. Stacks of dishes, platters of uneaten rice, a large bowl of tabbouleh.
“For the love of God, someone put some Fairuz on,” Alia hears Majed call out, then a bout of female laughter.
She picks up a dirty spoon and plops it into the rice, suddenly ravenous. She eats quickly over the sink, swept with an urge familiar to her these days, as though her body is a cavern to be filled.
“I always loved watching you eat.”
Alia startles and the spoon falls on the counter. Grains of rice scatter. She turns to find Atef in the doorway, smiling sheepishly.
“From that first dinner, in your mother’s garden,” he continues, walking toward her slowly. “She’d served soup and fassoulya. You ate like you were going to battle.”
Alia smiles, remembering. “I’d been with Nour all day, in the shops.” Atef had worn a white shirt that evening, lending him a swarthy air. When she’d finished her mango juice, he’d poured her some more, rising to reach her glass. Being near him woke something reckless in her.
He comes to her now, kisses her once, twice, full on the lips. “I’m a fool,” he says. “You still want to dance?”
Love rustles her. And gratitude, for this miracle of a man. The one who returned to her. She feels ashamed of that earlier voice. She kisses him back hard and turns to face the sink. Atef wraps his arms around her and pulls her against him. The counters and walls are beige. The window above the sink frames a view of the driveway, the sky, a film of dust clouding the glass.
“Darling.”
Her eyes prickle, the window swimming.
“You look beautiful tonight.”
They fall silent, listening to the music and laughter in the other room. We’re like castaways from a shipwreck, Alia thinks. One of the glasses in the sink has red lipstick on the rim.
“It’s like a circus in there.” Atef’s lips move against her hair. “Even Widad! Did you see that?”
Alia smiles and turns to him. “She looks so happy.”
“I couldn’t believe my eyes. Went back outside and told Ghazi he had to see his wife. It’s amazing what a little music will do to a person.”
“I miss him.”
Alia hears her voice as if from a distance. The words hang like tiny detonators in the air.
Beneath her head, she feels Atef’s chest rise and fall. There is a long silence. He holds her more tightly, his arms hurting her rib cage. Alia thinks absently of the baby, cramped between their two bodies.
“Atef,” she begins tentatively. “In Amman—”
“We’ll be happy here.” Atef’s voice breaks. He sounds desperate. “The people are kind; my work is good. We’re near your sister and it’s safe, no one will bother us here. It’s a little bare, I know, and the heat can be hard, but after a few years we’ll be settled. We can start a new life. In Amman, it’s the same people, the old neighbors, the people we grew up with. How can we return to that? How can we look at them without remembering”—he lets out a sound, laughter or a sob, into her hair—“what we lost.”
Alia turns to face him. His expression is frenzied. As she looks into his imploring eyes, a truth alights: All is lost. There will be no Amman. He believes Kuwait will save him, she realizes. Us.
“Go in the summers,” he pleads. “You could go every summer.”
The finality of it steals her breath. Since Atef’s return, she has lived what feels like centuries, reimagining their lives, one fantasy after another of untying the war from themselves, shaking it out like sand from hair. It hadn’t occurred to her before this moment that there might be something waiting for her in Kuwait, years with their summers and mornings and birthdays stretched out in front of her. Watching her husband’s face, Alia feels something deep and instinctive within tell her this will be their life.
“Yes,” she manages. “In the summers.”
She excuses herself to the bathroom and leans against the sink. The porcelain is smooth and cool, and she places both hands flat upon it. She sees Atef’s frantic eyes.
From the other room, the women’s voices beg
in to call out the new year. Alia flees the house.
Outside, she moves quickly down the pathway of the compound, past the cars out front, the palm trees skeining above her, toward the small hut. Foreign, lilting music is playing inside, punctuated by laughter. Alia knocks on the door, lightly at first, then pounding, until, at last, she hears the sound of a lock unclicking and the door swings open.
It is Priya, her moon-shaped face peering at her. Behind her Alia sees a swath of colorful candles, dark women and men dancing. There is a table covered with plates of rice, the leftover meat and chicken and fish from the villa.
“Madame?” Priya says, a furrow of concern on her forehead. She looks different, and it takes Alia a moment to understand why—the maid’s uniform is gone. Instead, Priya wears a sari, peacock blue, her hair in waves over her shoulders. Shame drops over Alia, for interrupting the party, for standing here like a madwoman.
“Ajit,” she blurts. “I need Ajit.”
“Madame?” Priya asks again. “Is something wrong? We will come now if you need us to clean—”
“Ajit,” Alia repeats and begins to cry. “Please, bring me Ajit.” Priya looks alarmed. She turns and calls out something in her language.
Within seconds, Ajit appears in the doorway. He wears a silver-threaded robe; a white hat caps his bald, brown head. He is carrying a teacup.
He looks at Alia for a moment without speaking and seems to understand. He turns to Priya, speaks in low tones, and hands her the teacup. Priya nods and glances once more at Alia. The door shuts behind Ajit, his eyes not leaving Alia’s face. She is no longer crying, feels oddly soothed.
“Please,” he says, bowing his head. Alia follows him down the pathway. They pass the parked cars, Alia averting her eyes from the villa. For the first time, she notices the noise the palm leaves make as they rustle against one another, like the sound of lace against lace. In the moonlight, Ajit’s robe seems to glow.
When they reach the sedan, Ajit pulls the keys from a hidden pocket in his robe—are they always with him?—and holds the back-seat door open for Alia. As she climbs in, her heart is pounding, her throat dry. Like a fugitive, she thinks.
They sit in silence for a while, Ajit in the front, the engine murmuring. Finally, Ajit clears his throat.
“Where would you like to go, madame?”
The question dangles in front of Alia and her mind blanks, then races off. Lemon-colored bedrooms, an armoire full of summer dresses. A hidden pathway behind a schoolhouse, the sound of boys yelling, her own feet bare over cool, moist earth. Garden—before its ravaging—at sunset, mint tea. Running wet cloths over tiles, the marble sparkling like gems.
“The water.” Her voice is astonishingly clear. “Take me to the water, please.”
“Yes, madame.”
Ajit drives through the compound. The identical villas blur by, the boulevard swallowed into darkness as they turn onto the main road. Streetlamps are interspersed at wide intervals, and for whole minutes at a time, all Alia can see are the shadowy edges of palm trees, telephone poles, the occasional villa.
Impulsively, she rolls down the window. The wind is cool, rushing against her face, swirling her curls against her cheeks, her lips.
On the seventh night after Atef’s return, Alia had woken to find the bed next to her empty. She walked through the dark, silent rooms of Widad’s house looking for him, finally seeing a strip of light beneath the guest-bathroom door.
She’d hesitated outside it. It occurred to her that he might wish her away. Since his return, Atef sat for hours without speaking.
“Tell me,” she would say to him. “Tell me.” She wasn’t sure what exactly she wanted but longed to hear it.
Instead, Atef was silent. He rarely ate, his cheeks hollowing. He slept until afternoon and seemed to move as though underwater. When he spoke of Mustafa, his voice was flat, detached.
“I don’t know when they killed him. Or where. They just told me he was dead.”
This is what Alia thought as she stood in front of the bathroom door: Mustafa, dead. Every incarnation of him, young and old, had to be folded away. What she had, then, what remained, was on the other side of that door. Atef was hers; he was alive. The sound of rushing water was audible. Alia opened the door.
Blood was everywhere.
This was the first thought Alia registered: a marveling at the blood, crimson around Atef in the bathtub, streaming down his chest. She blinked, her eyes adapting to the light. The blood wasn’t from a single wound, she saw. No. It had gathered in the bathwater where Atef sat naked. Dozens of cuts ornamented his back, his shoulders, his chest.
Glass was her next thought. But Atef turned to her, his eyes not crazed but soft, staring up at her with a childlike helplessness. Looking down, Atef lifted his arm from the pinkish water and found a healing wound on his chest—Alia saw that between the streaks of blood were long, scraggly scabs—dug with his nail, and let out a sigh as he tore the scab, ripping it carefully from his skin.
Instantly, red flowered. He dropped the scab into the bathwater, where it floated on the surface. He’d been doing this often, she understood in that moment, the gesture practiced. The strips on his torso were raw and pink. It occurred to her that she hadn’t seen her husband’s body, his nudity, since his return; she hadn’t known this new skin.
Alia made a sound—stifled, aghast. A wave of nausea. She felt a powerful urge to turn away. Return to the bed or leave, the fantasy coming to her unbidden, the desire to walk out into the blank, desert night, walk until her feet blistered, walk until she reached the dunes.
Shame composed her. It sobered the sound in her throat, moved her legs toward her husband, the door shutting behind her.
As Ajit drives, Alia keeps the window open, watching the city go by. Something about the landscape, transformed in the dark, is haunting; she has never seen it so late at night. Kuwait is usually a metallic blur of sunshine to her, the ugly buildings and concrete exposed in the light. Midday, the city is absurdly male—the local men draped in robes, street vendors, taxi drivers, construction workers—all men, all turning to Alia with alert, hungry eyes.
But now, in the first hour of the new year, the city is ghostlike, almost tender. As they drive past the banks and the university, the buildings seem welcoming. Alia is comforted by the lights of the mosque, the surreal quality of the streets. Emptied, the city is feminine.
Ajit drives past the city center, past the roads where the royals live. The globes of palace turrets rise into the night sky, lit from within, grotesquely beautiful. Inside, Alia imagines, servants are clearing massive tables, silver bowls of rice and camel meat and fruit, the princes and princesses lounging in airy, gilded rooms.
When Alia first arrived, Widad told her stories about the Bedouin, how a mere thirty, forty years ago, none of this had existed, none of the villa compounds or courtyards or even the pearl-hued mosques. Men, women, children—all had traveled from dune to dune, enveloped in linen cloth as armor against the sun, walked the scalding sand for days. Some royals had servants who carried their dwellings on aching backs until they arrived at an oasis—lustrous fabrics swelling into tents beneath the trees. The miraculous trees. When they prayed, Widad said, they did so by the slant of the sun, no muezzin audible for miles. If there was no spare water, they did their ablutions with sand, rubbing their wrists and feet with handfuls of the clear, rough grains.
As the car moves to the city outskirts, Alia thinks of the palaces. For the younger generation, nothing is lost. But the elders—Alia feels a pang of sorrow for the older generation, the men and women who still remember the desert before all the construction. It reminds her of the aunts and uncles in Nablus who spoke of a Palestine before the big war, before soldiers and exodus. Easier, she thinks, to remember nothing, to enter a world already changed, than have it transform before your eyes. In the palaces, the grandparents must sit in their extravagant rooms, remembering sand.
Nostalgia is an affliction. Someone sai
d that once in front of Alia, and the words reach her now, years later. Like a fever or a cancer, the longing for what had vanished wasting a person away. Not just the unbearable losses, but the small things as well. Alia thinks of her bedroom in Nablus. The seashells she filled with bobby pins. The tangerine dress she’d bought right before her trip to Kuwait and never worn. Photographs, necklaces, the glasses and silver ibrik her mother had given her.
You cannot forget them in your grief.
The lot in front of the beach is empty and dark, eerily lit by two streetlamps. The smell of the sea gusts into the open window. Ajit pulls in across from a boarded-up shack with a sign shaped like an ice cream cone. A metal chain is woven across the service window. Rows of rocks rise like hills at the edge of the parking lot, blocking the view of the water.
Ajit turns the key and the engine hushes. The sound of the sea moves around them and Alia feels shy for a moment, alone with this kind man. It occurs to her that Atef and the others must have noticed her absence by now. She imagines Atef’s stricken face, then pushes it out of her mind. For moments there is no sound aside from the thundering sea. Finally, Ajit speaks.
“Would you like to go down?”
Alia is grateful for his asking. “Yes.”
“I will come.”
“You don’t have to,” Alia says, but Ajit is already opening his door. She is glad. Beyond the light of the streetlamps, the parking lot dissolves into darkness. Alia shivers in the cold air.
They walk wordlessly to the rocks, Ajit behind her. Alia’s heels click as she steps. At the rocks, she moves carefully, her shoes snagging in the crevices as they climb down. She nearly trips, and Ajit’s arm shoots out; his fingers wrap around her wrist.
“Perhaps it would be easier without the heels?” Ajit says. When she looks up at him, his eyes are mirthful. The mood of their trip seems to lighten, an audacious air about it. They are having an adventure, Alia thinks.
“Ajit, you are correct,” Alia says merrily and slips the shoes off, dangles them from her fingers. Her feet are clammy, and once she makes her way down the rocks, the sand is surprisingly velvety. She tosses her shoes near a clump of dried seaweed. For a moment, the two of them are still, facing the sea, which is suddenly everywhere, a living, snarling, barreling thing. Waves foam against the lip of the shore.