by Hala Alyan
Even now, ambling past stalls, nodding at various vendors, he feels warmth at the familiarity of their cries.
“Sir, good morning, sir, sample the melon?”
“Three for ground coffee! I’m giving it away!”
“Buy perfume for the madame? Jasmine, gardenia, irfil, irfil!”
Atef ignores them all, walks to the corner stall where an older man hunches over a radio, a splinter of khat dangling from his teeth. He is muttering under his breath, surrounded by an arrangement of fresh fruit, baskets of dewy berries and apples.
“Morning of luck, Abu Mohsin,” Atef greets the man.
Abu Mohsin grunts without looking up. “Is it Friday already?”
“It’s my daughter’s birthday. I came for some strawberries.”
“You know where everything is.” Abu Mohsin fiddles with the antenna, curses. “Goddamn American piece of shit. They can take over the world, they can’t build a radio?”
“Might be good for you if it’s broken,” Atef teases. “All those Egyptian soap operas are going to melt your brain.”
Abu Mohsin looks at him blackly. “Bah.” He spits the khat on the ground and rises as though Atef is an unwanted houseguest who must be entertained. “Strawberries, you said?”
As Abu Mohsin rifles through the baskets, he asks, “Which girl is it? The lighter one or the one with the curls?”
Atef smiles, then rearranges his face as Abu Mohsin turns to him with a basket. Now and then the old man slips up and shows his hand, reveals that he pays attention to the tidbits Atef shares during these visits.
“The lighter one. Riham.”
Abu Mohsin hands him the basket. Atef touches the strawberries, picking a plump one. The strawberry is warm from the sun, specks of dirt clinging to the fine hairs. The fruit seems to throb with redness. Atef is pleased by the color, knows Riham will admire it. Riham, who is forever tugging his arm to show him a particularly yellow flower or the sky swirled with pastels at sunset. Sometimes she brings home drawings from school, underwater scenes with violet jellyfish, sketches of girls dancing on a beach. He tapes them up in his office at the university, the pictures placed next to his framed diploma and teaching awards.
“You going to taste it or commune with it?” Abu Mohsin folds another wad of khat between his teeth.
Atef bites into the strawberry—sweetness, ripe, with a hint of tart. It is perfect.
“I’ll take four baskets,” he tells Abu Mohsin.
The older man looks pleased for an instant before his eyes sharpen, shrewd, as though he’s remembering he is the vendor of all this unlikely fruit. “You want some cherries? Arrived this morning. Sweet as a virgin’s thighs.”
Atef laughs uneasily. Such talk makes him uncomfortable. “All right. One basket.” Abu Mohsin’s eyebrows knit together. “Okay, okay. Two.”
“Sugar from Morocco,” Atef calls as he walks into the kitchen, sets the bags on the floor. “Are they awake?”
“The girls are getting ready,” Priya says, hefting the cloth sack of sugar. “Karam is in the sunroom. You want more coffee, sir?”
“Sure,” Atef says. “And, please, those cherries.”
The sunroom is actually a storage room. Three windows cover one side, filling it with sunlight. It is unofficially Karam’s playroom, where he spends hours coaxing figures out of wood.
The boy sits at the desk Atef bought for him. Slats of wood are scattered around a small birdcage. In the sunlight, his curls are nearly golden, his hair lighter than the others’. Karam had been born in February, not even two years after Riham—Alia’s pregnancy a blur, her drawn, sleepless face, the flurry of Atef’s academic projects—and it was as though he sensed the chaos he was being brought into. He was a calm infant, an agreeable toddler. Whenever Atef entered the room, Karam would babble with joy: “Ata, Ata.” Even when he fell or was jostled in play by Riham, he didn’t cry; his eyes went liquid, but he made no sound.
The fascination with wood came two years ago, when Atef took the boy to the market during Eid, stalls lined with toys and Bedouin goods—crafted jewelry, satchels of soap, and wooden figurines carved with perfection into limbs and grave faces. A Bedouin man sat on the ground, paring a piece of wood impossibly fast, tossing the shavings to his side. Karam was awestruck, his mouth pursed in transfixion. He insisted on staying until the man finished. The figurine was a swan with a graceful neck, which the Bedouin gave to Karam, telling him gruffly, “This is for luck.”
The swan still rests on the shelf above Karam’s bed, along with a myriad of objects and figures the boy has since created, in varying stages of skill. A duckling, an elephant with a drooping trunk. The creations are rudimentary but solid.
Atef feels a pang at times watching the neighborhood boys play soccer on the compound lawn, elbowing one another in dirty shirts. His own memories of childhood involve camaraderie—a scraped knee, the elation of making a goal, playing games of tag.
Alia defends their son’s quietness, his solitary play. When she speaks, Atef watches her face cloud over, knows she is remembering the boys in Nablus.
“He doesn’t steal; he doesn’t fight. He’s never in trouble like the other boys.”
Of the children, Karam is her favorite. It is unspoken, but Atef can hear it in her voice, the way she spends hours admiring his handiwork. In less forgiving moments, Atef mentally supplies the reason: The boy demands less than the girls. He is unobtrusive, his moods easier to manage than Souad’s tantrums and Riham’s anxiety to please.
“So you went for the birdcage.”
The boy looks up, a smile unfolding across his face. Grinning cartoon wolves dot his pajamas, which, Atef notices, are too small, inches of skinny ankle exposed. “And this. It’s still drying.”
Karam lifts something near the birdcage. Atef leans in. A wooden bird, the size of his son’s hand, with a tapered beak.
“Kiki,” Atef breathes out. “It’s beautiful.”
“Blue’s her favorite.” Karam’s face is radiant. “I know because she always picks blue notebooks for school.”
“It is,” Atef agrees. “She’s going to love it.” He feels a tenderness toward his son, happy in his sunlit closet. Karam’s a gentle heart, Alia likes to tell people.
“But I still need to paint the cage.” Worry ripples his voice. “She can’t see before Khalto Widad’s party tonight.”
Atef suppresses a smile. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I’ll distract her until breakfast.”
In the living room, Priya has placed a silver tray on the table, along with a bowl of cherries and the hearts coffee mug. Atef sips his coffee. Years ago, Alia decided the living room was too beige and changed nearly all the furniture. Now, the room pops with yellow and green and blue. Each of the pink couches is strewn with overstuffed pillows the shade of banana peels. Even the walls are painted an unearthly pearl. To him, the effect is garish; he’d found the beige soothing. The colors make the room glisten, as though everything—the varnished wood, the walls—has not quite dried.
The cherries are fat, beaded with water from Priya’s washing. Atef decides to wait for Riham and turns on the television. The news is on, and Atef resolutely changes the channel. Not on Riham’s birthday, he tells himself—he is careful with the news; an image of flags burning or a row of corpses can set him trembling for hours. He switches to a soccer game.
As the jerseyed men jog onto the lawn and begin kicking the ball back and forth, Atef hears the familiar padding of feet—light, careful. Each child has his or her own stride, a concerto as distinctive to Atef as their voices. He hears the steps get louder, pause, Riham’s voice calling out, “Good morning, Priya,” and Priya’s muffled reply.
Finally, she appears in the doorway, her hair wet and already curling. Atef’s heart fills—she wears a dress he bought her, the lilac silk tied in a bow around her waist.
“All this sugar!” Atef cries, leaping to his feet dramatically. The shameful truth is that Alia isn’t alone in having a fa
vorite—he loves Riham beyond reason, a love tinged with gratitude, for when she was first placed in his arms, tiny and wriggling and red-faced, he felt himself return, tugged back to his life by the sound of her mewling. The arrival of Riham restored something, sweeping aside the ruin of what had come before.
“You look like a queen! A thousand happy returns.” Riham ducks her head, embarrassed, but a smile sneaks across her face. Atef bows to her, extending his hand. “My lady, may I request a twirl?”
“Baba!” She giggles, the taffeta rustling.
“My lady, I must insist.” Atef mock frowns. “Such beauty cannot be allowed to pass without twirling.” Riham shakes her head, still giggling. Finally, she takes his hand, and he twirls her once, twice.
“Cherries!”
“And strawberries for a certain someone’s day.” They sit on the couch and begin to eat. “So,” Atef says, spitting a pit out. “We have Auntie Widad’s at five. Before that, the day is yours. Anything you want.”
He watches her chew. She is the plainest of the children, with a high forehead and slightly bulbous nose. But her eyes are extraordinary, flecked with honey and green, a fringe of thick eyelashes. Bit of a waste, those eyes on that face, Atef once overheard Alia say wistfully to Widad, and he’d wanted to shake her.
“Anything? Mama said so too?”
Atef remembers the argument last night after the children had gone to sleep, one of those spats that blaze in their marriage like grease fires. You spoil them, Atef. He’d countered, You barely notice them. Her hurt, furious face floats back to him now.
“Yes, habibti,” he tells Riham. “Anything you’d like.”
Riham chews her lower lip, stained red. “Even if it’s far?”
He knows in a flash what she is thinking of: the dunes. Last month, he went with some of the men at the university far beyond the reaches of the city, where the sand stretched uninterrupted for miles and miles, gilded with sun. Some local Kuwaitis joined them in the evening, building a fire and roasting chunks of camel meat. Atef had told Riham about the starry sky, the way the locals plucked scorpions from sand and flung them into the fire, causing sparks. The girl listened attentively, the way she always did to him, her eyes spellbound. Afterward, she’d pored through her encyclopedias, looking up scorpions and Bedouin.
“Even if it’s on the moon.”
Riham looks at him solemnly. “We would die. There’s no oxygen.” Atef eats another cherry, hiding his smile with splayed fingers.
“That’s true. So no moon.”
“Could we go to the dunes?” she asks, looking down at her hands. “Is it too far?”
“That’s it?” Atef feigns relief. “I thought you were going to say Istanbul, Hong Kong. Paris!” Riham giggles. Atef tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “Of course we can.”
“And we don’t have to worry about scorpions, because I read that they hate lavender, so we’ll take that spray Priya uses for laundry.” Her face lights up. “I’ll tell Karam! He’ll be excited.” She is nearly out of the living room when Atef remembers the birdcage.
“Riham!” She turns. At a loss, he blurts, “Can you do my shoulder?”
Atef sits at the edge of the couch, his left arm held out like a scarecrow’s. Riham balances on the cushions behind him and holds on firmly to his elbow. Like a seesaw, she pulls and pushes.
“Akh, you’re getting too strong,” Atef says. For years, his children have done this, yanking at his limbs, pulling and hefting like tiny construction workers. Sometimes Atef imagines how he must appear to them, enormous and long-limbed, with his backaches and creaking joints. Especially his shoulder, an old dislocation never properly healed, from where a soldier yanked him to his feet. The children never ask him why or how. They accept it, like air or bread, their father with his ailments.
Riham puts forth a burst of strength and, surprisingly, his shoulder pops, air resettling in his joints.
Riham’s eyes widen. “Baba, did you hear that?”
He rotates his shoulder gingerly. “It doesn’t hurt,” he marvels. “You should become a mass—”
A cry interrupts him.
“No!” The voice is small but strong. From the other side of the house, a door slams. Then flat-footed, decisive strides: Souad’s. Of all the children, her footsteps are the loudest.
“Your sister’s up,” Atef says to Riham and they both wait, listening. Atef can make out angry tones—Souad defiant and Alia’s voice rising in return.
“Nooo!” Atef braces himself. Souad rampages into the living room, running in that absurd, leggy way of hers, her hair riotous, sticking nearly straight up. She is wearing underwear, a yellow sock on one foot, and nothing else.
Still hollering, she runs straight for Atef, in the manner of someone seeking her protector. “Baba!” she howls, her fingers outstretched. When she reaches the couch, she wraps her arms around his neck like a vise. Atef lifts her, smothering a smile at her tear-stained face.
“You banshee, what’s all this?”
“No dress!” Souad yells. She buries her head in his neck as Alia appears in the doorway. Alia’s lips are set in a tight line, a frothy dress hanging from her fist. She shakes it in Souad’s direction. A pale ribbon jounces maliciously.
“Atef, you tell that barbarian daughter of yours to put on this dress or she’s spending the day in her room.”
For a moment Alia glares, then catches sight of Riham. Her face softens; she tosses the dress toward Atef—slightly too hard, he notices, and remembers again the previous night’s argument—and holds her arms out.
“Darling, happy birthday.”
Riham hugs her mother, smiling as Alia brushes the shoulders of the dress. As they speak, Atef turns to Souad.
“Turtle,” he whispers. “Why won’t you wear the dress? See how pretty Riham looks.” This grabs Souad’s attention and she examines Riham. She shakes her head.
“Too itchy,” she declares. She has a bizarrely older voice, nearly sensual, a lounge singer’s voice, hoarse, as though she has spent all of her five years drinking whiskey and lighting cigarettes.
In Souad’s features, the dead flicker. His father in the almond-shaped eyes, the color of wet bark—a father Atef barely remembers, knows through old photographs his mother kept in Nablus, the man looking directly into the camera. And in the mouth, the quirk of lips when she smiles, is Mustafa.
She is the child they hadn’t intended to have, surprising them and toppling the neat symmetry of their family—Karam and Alia, Riham and Atef—so that even in babyhood she arrived in mutiny, with reincarnated features. Atef furrows his brow as though pondering this. “Where does it itch?”
“Here,” she says, pointing at her neck. She grimaces. “I want the mermaid.” A polyester nightgown adorned with mermaids, Souad’s favorite garment.
“But Turtle,” he says, “it’s Riham’s birthday. Don’t you want to make it special for her?”
Souad’s brows lift together. “The mermaid is special,” she says flatly.
“It’s okay,” Alia sings out. “Souad can stay in her bedroom while we all go o-uut.”
Desperate, Atef reverts to a timeworn practice—bribery.
“I’ll give you two dinars if you wear the dress,” he whispers to Souad. She considers, a shrewd expression on her face. She nods. Atef cheers. “She’ll wear it!”
Riham applauds and Alia snaps up the dress from Atef’s lap. “Finally,” Alia says, holding it toward Souad. “Hands up.”
“Baba does it!” Souad cries out. Atef sees the brief wounded look in Alia’s eyes, but she moves her head.
“Mama, can you braid my hair?” Riham asks, always astute.
“Fine,” Alia says, “let’s go to the bathroom.”
After they leave, Souad scrambles down and lifts her arms in a V, like a gymnast. “I’m going to buy a camel with my dinars,” she informs him.
Atef cannot quell the blossom of pride in his chest, though he knows it is wrong, wrong to feel so p
leased with being the chosen one among his children.
Alia is not like most mothers. She is rash, impulsive, sometimes settling into daylong pouts when things don’t go her way. Compared to Widad and the other wives they know, Alia is childlike, sleeping late in the mornings, sprawling with Karam in the sunroom to paint his wooden creations. She is carelessly affectionate, brushing her lips against Atef’s beard at random moments, swooping down to kiss the children on their foreheads. But there is an absent-minded quality to her love, as though she is only just remembering this is her home, her husband, and her three children. Other times, she moves through their house with impatience. Atef had thought at first it was a temporary reaction to leaving Nablus, or to her first pregnancy, that she was overwhelmed with it all. But the preoccupation never quite abated.
The children, Atef believes, sense it. Even as babies, they seemed to understand—intuitively—the restlessness of their mother.
Several weeks after Riham was born, Atef arrived from work to the baby’s wails reverberating through the house. He panicked, thinking that Alia had fallen and couldn’t get to the child, but when he entered their bedroom he found Alia standing over Riham’s bassinet, watching the bawling infant.
At his entrance, Alia turned around. “I don’t know what she wants,” she’d said, her hands balled up at her side, genuinely at a loss.
Priya has sliced some strawberries for breakfast, the table spread with pita bread and labneh and jam, a bowl of cut tomatoes with cucumber in the center.
“Look at this!”
“Omar at school wants me to make him a dinosaur.”
“Just make sure you have your father cut the wood.”
“I know, Mama. Omar wants it to be green and yellow.”