by Hala Alyan
“It will be cold,” Ajit calls above the sound of water.
“Oh God, please let it be,” Alia says. She laughs bitterly. There is a desire to start talking, to tell Ajit about her hatred of the summer, the heat, how breathing had been like drinking steam. She wants to talk about the unremitting dampness of her skin, the loamy odor everywhere.
But it would be betrayal, she recognizes, betrayal to speak those words, though she is uncertain whom she would be betraying. To keep herself silent, she walks toward the waves. At the water’s edge, she pauses before stepping forward.
Ice. The water felt like ice—needles of it. Alia gasps and turns to Ajit, who stands watching her. “It’s freezing,” she marvels.
Ajit smiles, nods. He joins her, holding his robe bunched in his fists; the two of them move until the water reaches their calves. The ocean rocks around them, the sand shifting beneath Alia’s feet, a vertiginous sensation. Suddenly, a wave breaks, unexpected, sending them both stumbling backward. Water sprays, drenching Alia’s dress, neck, hair. She can hear Ajit laughing beside her, and she begins to laugh as well. She tips her head back, the moon above them a bonfire in the sky. She remembers, for the first time since standing in the kitchen, her body, the rustling within it; she laughs harder.
Alia turns to Ajit, standing with his soaked robe, droplets of water beading his bald head. She places both hands over her belly, her laughter tapering. She speaks not to Ajit but to the sky, eyes lifted to the moon.
“So this is the beginning.”
Atef
* * *
Kuwait City
May 1977
The soldiers call to one another in Hebrew. There are seven or eight of them, loosely forming a circle around Abu Zahi, who is on his knees, a line of blood trailing from his nostrils.
“Let go of me!” Mustafa tries to move toward Abu Zahi, but Atef tightens his grip. “Are you blind? It’s Abu Zahi,” Mustafa says.
“It’s a trap,” Atef whispers. His voice shakes.
“Have you lost your mind?” Mustafa is furious. “They’re taking him.”
“Mustafa.” Atef swallows, trying to steady his voice. “Mustafa, they’re arresting him at dusk. Minutes before prayer. It doesn’t make any sense. Why would they do it in front of everyone, out in the open?”
Mustafa frowns, gazing in the direction of the soldiers. A look of comprehension dawns upon his face.
“They want to see who steps forward.”
Suddenly Atef is in a dim room, his wrists in handcuffs. Across the table sits a soldier with a scar above his lip.
“You camel-fucker,” the soldier snarls at Atef. “He’s dead.”
“I don’t believe you,” Atef says. He tenses his shoulders, preparing to flinch. But the soldier’s hands remain flat on the table. Something gutters in the soldier’s face—malice, humor—and he leans back, lazily crosses his arms over his torso.
“Believe what you want.” The soldier shrugs.
The room changes. Atef is lying on the floor. There are sounds—men coughing, spitting, the rasp of blankets against concrete. Some of the men are masturbating with loud grunts. Someone weeps.
“You talk or I take this.” Gruff, broken Arabic. His fingernail held between metal pliers. A faceless man tugs.
The snake is coming.
“You want to stay silent? Fine.” Somewhere, someone has spilled ethanol, the smell piercing Atef’s nostrils. Metal is wound around his head and his wrists; he wants to scream but cannot. “Ya Rab,” he mutters, and spears of fire shoot up the length of his arm. “La ilaha illa Allah,” and electricity snakes into his jaw, binding his teeth shut.
“Drink,” a male voice says in Arabic, and Atef sees a metallic shape—a flask etched with calligraphy. Atef reaches for the flask and suddenly he is gripped with the most fear he has ever known, fear that has nothing to do with the soldier or death but with some abstract loss, with the sudden knowledge that he is dreaming, just as the flask begins to fade and he loses his breath and, catching it, wakes.
Atef lies in bed for several minutes, heart thudding. The flask glints in his mind. He places a hand over his chest and breathes deeply, as Dr. Salawiya, his physician, has advised.
“The mind is a mystery. Give it time to catch up.” The doctor always says the same thing, has since Atef first went to him a decade ago. The Six-Day War was over and Atef had been released from prison, stumblingly finding his way to Amman, where he stayed with Khalto Salma for a few days before continuing to Kuwait, the tawny desert looking like a hopeful face from the airplane window. He and Mustafa had been arrested soon after the Israeli invasion of Nablus, the fifth day of the war, and swept up along with dozens of their neighbors, men from the mosque, cousins. The charges were spurious and arbitrary: organizing protests, pamphlet distribution, inciting violence. Planning infiltration was the charge for him and Mustafa. It’s not true, he’d wept to the guards once they were separated. Yes, they went to the mosque, Mustafa made his weekly speeches. They were angry. But they hadn’t done anything. He shook during those unceasing days of prison, having imaginary conversations with Mustafa, who had been taken elsewhere.
“It’s like a shadow life,” Atef once tried to explain to the doctor. “Like there’s another me, and that me is still stuck, like a skipping record.”
“It’ll get better. The dreams will come less frequently.”
It is true. No longer is Atef afraid to fall asleep, as he was for years, jerking awake from the edge of consciousness, convinced his palpitations were a heart attack, his dry mouth the result of a stroke. The dreams have lessened as the years passed, from several a week to once a week, now once every few months.
But though less frequent, the dreams have sharpened in focus. Atef hears his breath over the whir of the air conditioner, thinks of the electric shock buzzing his teeth. His jaw hurts.
He once read about a young woman who often dreamed of drowning, water rising above her, filling her mouth. One night her parents woke to the sound of gurgling, a muffled cry. They fell back to sleep. In the morning the girl was dead, her lips blue. Her lungs had filled up with water, an ocean of fluid from her own organs drowning her.
Such are the ways the body believes what we tell it.
Snatches of the dream—electricity, blankets, smoke from a soldier’s cigarette—spark in his mind, the images already dissolving, tamed in the quiet bedroom. Beneath the damask curtains, swaths of morning sun peek through, the bedroom like an aquarium.
Alia lies sleeping at his side, and Atef watches her for a moment, reassured by the sight of her splayed arms. She always sleeps on her stomach, face burrowed in the pillow, snarls of hair surrounding her head.
She’d cut her hair off while pregnant with Souad. That pregnancy, the third, was the worst, the heat leaving her dazed with nausea. Even in cool bathwater, which Atef would fill with ice cubes, Alia spoke of heat.
“It feels like wool,” she’d tell Atef, moaning, gathering her curls in fistfuls.
Atef was mournful when he saw it shorn, his wife’s shoulders suddenly bare. He loved the weight of her hair, the citrus scent he could bury his face in. But Alia liked it short, said it made her feel airy. Now, she cuts it every few months.
Atef swings his legs over the side of the bed. His body feels stiff, as though he has walked for hours. He squints at the clock on the bedside table. Nearly forty years old, Atef can feel the complaints of his body begin to gather momentum—the twinges, the blurred vision in the mornings, the occasional headaches. He blinks, and the numbers on the clock sharpen: 7:20 a.m. The plan he half formed last night before sleep returns to him: go to the market before Alia and the children wake and buy strawberries for Riham.
Atef walks down the hallway, his feet bare against the tiles. To his left, the bedrooms are lined up, one for each child—Souad’s an eruption of sorbet colors, toys strewn around the four-poster bed; Karam’s in navy and white, his wooden figures arranged neatly on the shelves; and Riham’s pr
istine, a bookshelf lined with spines of novels and encyclopedias.
When anyone asks about his children, Atef recites the names like a talisman, his voice full and grateful over each one. “Souad is five, Karam is seven, Riham is eight.” And now the talisman will be adjusted, for today is Riham’s birthday, her ninth.
Nine, he wrote in his last letter. The age fills me with sadness, for the solidity of the number, its cementing of her foray into adulthood, a lifetime of double digits. But I keep such thoughts to myself. I know Alia wouldn’t approve. She’d just look at me with that frown of hers and shake her head.
Atef hears Priya’s humming before he enters the kitchen, the toneless noise she makes while working, like a children’s lullaby. She stands with her back to him, the ironing board in front of the windows. He watches her lift and press the iron to a pink swath of fabric, one of the girls’ dresses. Steam comes out in tiny puffs.
“Good morning,” he says.
Priya glances over her shoulder and smiles. “Good morning.”
She still looks girlish, the years plumping out her cheeks and arms. Atef likes to think of Priya as a pillar, the center of the house, all of them crowding around her, coming for bandages and tea and laundry. Every two years she returns to India for a month, packing suitcases full of clothes and treats to bring to her husband and two children, children Atef imagines as miniature versions of Priya. The weeks she is away, the villa feels empty, all of them restless, aimlessly moving through the rooms. Someday, Atef knows, she will return for good. The prospect is a bleak one.
Now, Priya turns the dress over, smoothing the fabric on the ironing board. She speaks above the hiss. “There is coffee; would you like a cup?”
“I’ll get it.” Atef chooses a maroon mug with hearts on it. A birthday present from the children last year. “I was thinking of going to the market. Picking up some strawberries.”
A small, approving nod. “For Riham.”
Atef smiles as he pours himself coffee from the ibrik. “Yes, and some figs if they have them.”
“Good. I can make a fruitcake.”
“For the party at Widad’s? Riham will love it.” Atef likes these exchanges, the moments he shares with Priya while the family sleeps.
Priya lifts the dress, shakes it firmly. She makes an appreciative sound. “If you buy some cane sugar, I can make pudding.”
“I’ll buy ten kilograms of sugar,” he declares theatrically and Priya laughs her low laugh, shaking her head.
He takes his coffee into the study they furnished last year, the wooden desk and tightly packed bookshelf. At the doorway, he waits for a second, looking down the hallway, before shutting the door behind him and moving to the books. He finds the brown spine and pulls it out, his heart quickening familiarly at the touch of the smooth cover, the book opening in the middle like a mouth, revealing the sheaf of papers. They are held together by a rubber band, a blue Bic pen tucked under it.
He turns the last page over—April 29, 1977—the ink spidery through the paper, and sits at the table. He glances at the door before beginning to write.
I wake up and it feels like my lungs are dropped in ice and I have to count, one two three four, listen to myself taking in air. Sometimes I wonder if this is really the waking world: coffee in a red mug, three children sleeping in three rooms, the television blaring in the background.
Years ago, when the pills and diet changes and vitamins didn’t work, Dr. Salawiya recommended letters.
“They say it can help. It’s a way to organize your thoughts, explain what you’ve been through. Write them to your wife, your family back in Palestine.”
But when Atef sat down, it was Mustafa’s name that tumbled out, his eyes that he saw. At first he wrote just about the dreams, the whittled faces of the soldiers, but then he began to talk to him about other things, daily things, always starting the letters with his friend’s name, writing about Riham winning the spelling contest, how Souad upended a glass of milk during a tantrum. He told him, delicately, about Alia, how neither of them ever spoke of Palestine.
I’m crazy, a part of him realized. If anyone finds this, they’re going to think I’m crazy.
But it was the only thing that helped. Pretending that Mustafa was still somewhere in the world, still in Nablus or, better yet, in Peru or Thailand, living one of his dozen lives, pretending that a rickshaw was delivering Atef’s letters to a doorstep somewhere, his friend laughing and sucking his teeth as he read them. Sometimes—in his more reckless moments—he even bargained with himself: They never gave us a body, it’s not impossible, lots of men left Palestine during those months, what if, what if.
Atef pauses before finishing the letter. They always make me say your name. I was afraid I called it out in my sleep, that Alia might’ve heard. But when I woke, she hadn’t moved. Even though it feels unnecessary, he still signs his name, in a complicated flourish at the bottom of the page.
He has chosen a particular book for this job: A Lifecycle of Plants. He tucks the letters in, then replaces it in the far left corner of his bookshelf. The spine is drab and brown. He knows no one will ever touch it.
Atef drinks the rest of his coffee too hot, and as he steps outside the house, his tongue feels raw. He moves it over his front teeth, winces, does it again. The car, a silver sedan, is new, a gift he bought for himself after his promotion at the university last year. What pride that letter had brought, seeing his title embossed in golden ink—Honorable Professor—with precise handwriting. A far cry from his childhood in Nablus, from the rice his weary mother ladled, the clamor of his six brothers in their house. His brothers are far-flung now—Amman, Istanbul, the youngest two lost in the bowels of Israeli prisons.
In certain moments, Atef feels the small miracle of his luck perched on his shoulder like a parakeet—something alive, trilling a new song. He feels it even now, fluttering in his chest as he pulls out of his driveway. If left unaddressed, the whirring becomes torrential, threatening to spill over into tears as it often did those years after the war. And so, as he steers the car down the road, passing the rows of white villas and palm trees, Atef quietly recites: It is spring. He has a lovely home. He has three healthy children and a wife. It is his elder daughter’s birthday today, and he is going to buy strawberries for her.
This remembering, this gentle recitation, calms him, gives him something to focus on. These are facts, the obelisks of his life, and, gleaned, they glow for him—sturdy, true, his.
Over the years, the compound has grown, as have others in the neighborhood. While theirs remains mostly Arabs, other Palestinians, and Syrians, the nearby compounds—admittedly nicer, with pools and frantically watered lawns—are luring in more Westerners. Atef sees them in the grocery store and the shops, their golden hair hypnotic.
Atef complains, as the rest of their friends do, of the influx of Americans and British, of the ways the “international”—primarily Western—schools have become mixed, teaching English and French just as vigorously as Arabic. Of the increase of English shows on the television. And yet, when it came time to enroll the children in school, Atef fought with Alia to put them in one of those international schools.
“So they can share lunch with ajanib?” Alia had asked. She felt distaste toward the foreigners, found them greedy. “And learn their ABCs? What for?”
Atef thought for a while before replying. “There are sides,” he finally said, because he could think of no better way to put it. “And I want them to be on the right one.”
Sometimes he imagines a series of time-lapse photographs, like the ones of a tree undergoing changes in foliage or a seascape during sunrise. Only this is of Kuwait City. Although it has happened bit by bit, Atef can picture it after years of driving the same streets. Over and over and over, the whole city bursting into life.
In Atef’s imaginary photographs, the transformation is astonishing. In the beginning, a stark desert, the landscape sparsely decorated with industrial buildings and compounds. An
d then, whoosh, years pass and things begin to crop up—restaurants, Indian, Pakistani, Lebanese, with bright signs; the newer mosques; the billboards cautiously advertising toothpaste and banks; and, slowly, the cranes and concrete pillars, dunes of sand turned into construction sites.
Whoosh. The photograph trembles and changes once again. More years pass. The cranes and pillars are gone, and buildings appear in their place, a telecommunications center. The outskirts of the desert, reddened with sand, are becoming compounds with swimming pools, their villas blooming like flowers. More restaurants are opening downtown, so that driving past them at night gives the impression of tangled light, neon comets. Whoosh. More years. It’s the late seventies, and even Kuwait is feeling it. The billboards are bolder now, showing toothy women advertising veils, travel-agency images of the Eiffel Tower. Driving through the city no longer feels as contradictory as it used to—certain areas sand and air, others fully urban; it feels like a city now, with a distant melancholia about it, like all cities.
Atef pulls in to the entrance of the Mubarakiya souk and parks. Over the years, most of his friends—and Alia as well—have come to view the marketplace as outdated, a holdover from the old days. Sprawling and loud, its mazelike stalls and shops fill the air with saffron and cinnamon. Men’s voices hawk goods with an energy so ample it seems to fill one’s mouth.
Atef loves it.
When he first arrived in Kuwait, he would weave between the stalls like a sleepwalker. Here was a place where nobody wanted anything from him except coins. He began offering to pick up spices and bread and rice, spent hours walking the kiosks, stealing touches of camel-skin rugs, accepting samples of olives and goat cheese, overwhelmed and comforted by the cacophony of vendors. It was the only place he felt relief those first months, and he came to view it as a sort of haven, a makeshift mosque.