by Hala Alyan
The water now reaches her upper arms, covering her breasts, the sea like a towel. She starts to swim. One arm after the other, she slices the water with her body. After taking a breath, she dives her head in, swims as far as she can until her lungs begin to burn. She lifts her head and sucks air thirstily. Her legs tread water and she notices that she isn’t cold anymore.
The only sounds filling her ears are the waves and her breath. Her back still to the shore, she moves her arms, making circles. A faraway memory jars her—her mother carrying her into the ocean as a child, a glimmer of seawater beneath her tiny hands.
“It’s like bathwater, see?” her mother had said, cradling her. Riham, looking up at her, saw the sun haloing her head. She remembers now what her four-year-old mind had thought: The most beautiful woman in the world.
Just as the memory is filtering through her, Riham understands that the water does, indeed, feel like bathwater, no longer icy, and not just from the effort of swimming—the water itself swirls warm. She turns at last to face the shore.
It is a distant smudge of gold.
This is the thought that comes to her first—that the shore is now a blur—and panic begins to squeeze her. She realizes the voices and laughter and splashing are barely audible from here, that the slapping of waves means she is far, really far away. Even the other swimmers are distant, their heads dots in the waves. She squints toward the shore and sees the yellow of her family’s towels. This calms her and she takes a deep breath.
“O-kay,” she says to herself in the singsong voice she uses with children. “Time to swim.”
She takes another breath and begins to kick, one-two-three, strong thrashing motions, knowing in the back of her mind she must look so stupid, thankful that no one can see her. Her breath comes heavily, moistly, water bubbling against her lips, and she tries to part the water with her arms like two knives, as she’d been taught years ago in this very sea. She holds her breath until her chest explodes, then lifts her head for air.
It is then, as she is gasping for air, that the second realization comes, far worse—she is not getting closer to the shore. No. She is being pulled away from it, trying to slice the water when, in fact, she is lashing against it uselessly. Something invisible in the waves is pulling her quietly but urgently back into its arms. She feels her body being eddied, the water around her warmer now, and she begins to panic in earnest.
With the panic comes motion; Riham begins to kick and claw and fist at the water. She forgets the knives, the graceful diving; her body—her arms and legs—and her mind seem to fuse into one screaming thought: land. She feels the drag of the current and remembers dimly someone once telling her, years ago, in another lifetime, that if you felt the ocean pulling, you should never fight against it, but wait until you were out of the current. But whoever said that had never been here, Riham thinks, had never felt this terrible, magnetic tugging, as though there were nets and she was being swept up into them, swept into the water’s mouth.
Riham hears distant screams. She tries to blink as she looks toward the shore, but the sun is too bright, and she cannot see anything but the sea, the salt in her eyes, the rush and pull of water.
There is a flare of blue, and she is suddenly under the water, her head beneath it. Riham opens her mouth but gargles salt, sputters. Up. She needs up. Her thoughts come in brief, choppy phrases. Up. Lift head. Kick.
Her head surfaces and Riham gulps air, her ears full of her rattled breath. She will break, she knows, she will flop and sink to the bottom of the sea if she doesn’t move. Her arms are so tired, heavy as stone, but she knows she must lift and slice, lift and slice, even as her body shakes.
“Now, now,” she yells to herself, but it comes out hoarse. She forces her legs to kick and hears the screaming once more, falling and rising above the waves.
She sees herself, a flimsy string floating through the water. Then another image—seeing herself from above, looking down at her struggling, airless body. A swath of light and some blackness, a splotch of it. Riham thinks to herself, conversationally, She needs to scrub that out.
Again there is the calling out, thudding against the waves: Riham. Riham. Startled, she recognizes that is her—Riham, Riham—that some essence of her is here, threading through the water, far from sand. She takes shaky gulps of air and tries to remember Riham. That was so long ago—why, she is an old woman now! It is a peculiar thought, but decisive, with the same conviction she would say yes, of course her eyes are brown, or yes, she loves her father—but she is certain, absolutely certain, that she has lived for decades, that she is an old woman dying now, elsewhere, and this is just a memory.
She doesn’t have a chance to dwell on this. Another undulation of the sea and she rocks with it, her shoulders knocking against the crested wave, her arms furious with pain, and she understands suddenly that if she doesn’t call out, if she doesn’t open her mouth and speak and say—anything, anything—then she will die, the old woman and the little girl, she will die and she will be dead, and the water will take her. And with that fear Riham opens her mouth and speaks against the salt water the only name that leaps to her lips.
Allah.
Him, oh, Him, oh, that warm rush at the mosque, that hope that quickened her heart when her grandmother fitted the veil around her head and they sat on the carpet, surrounded by the perfume of incense, the roof above her like a green sky. She thinks of it and is overcome with a hot, liquid love.
Someone is shouting, the sound reaching over the waves, but Riham is shaky with exhaustion, fatigue that petrifies her limbs. The arms rock her again but suddenly they are different arms, arms that are not water but, impossibly, human, and there is something warm, breath against her neck, someone saying, Hold on, hold on, and Riham rests her head—on the wave? on the arm?—and the water stretches and glitters and blackens.
There is a dark room where Riham is lying down and she can smell cake. Around her, she understands, is a magnificent party, and that is where all the noise is coming from, dozens of voices chattering. They sound scared, but Riham knows it’s a trick; they are just pretending to be frightened because they haven’t invited her. She wants to cry because now there will be no cake. All of a sudden, stinging sears her nostrils, and she is coughing, salt, salt, it seems like it will never end, the water in her throat. A light shivers and claps, stretching into a creature with many arms, an octopus, she sees, an octopus moving his body in a flashy dance and saying something. Qur’an, she thinks, recognizing the frantic verses, but the octopus is doing it wrong, garbling the words.
Riham opens her mouth to scold the octopus but before she can, salt shoots through her once more and she is coughing, arms are pulling her up, someone is slapping her on her back and she is retching, suddenly yanked out of the water, akimbo on the gritty shore, and she is vomiting, stream after stream, clumping the sand with globs of white. Cheese, Riham thinks, recalling the warm bread and cheese, her breakfast this morning.
She lifts her head unsteadily. Blinking in the sunlight, she looks around at the people gathered. Her mother kneels in front of her, sobbing. It occurs to Riham that she hasn’t seen her mother cry in years. Khalto Mimi is hugging her mother. Souad stands beside them, her face white and afraid, her eyes trickling tears. The towels have been wrenched around, and food is scattered everywhere, and for a second Riham thinks her mother will be furious, all that sand in the food, but then she remembers that her mother is crying, and crying for her.
“Riham.” Her mother chokes out her name like a talisman, a prayer, and suddenly Riham is enveloped in her mother’s arms, smelling the musk of her skin. She peeks around at the people surrounding her, the other picnicking families and the boys, too, Bassam standing to the side with the group of them. He suddenly looks very young, afraid. The voices merge.
“She’s alive, she’s alive.”
“Uncle, I’ve never seen anyone swim so fast, you saved her.”
“When I saw her on your shoulders, limp lik
e that, my God, I thought—”
“Shh, we all did, but she’s fine.”
“She’s a tough little girl, she was carried so far out, but she kept kicking.”
“She’s breathing, right?”
Riham contemplates this last question, recognizes that she has never had to wonder about such a thing before, never had to consider her breath—what a remarkable thing to think about, her breathing, that thing she does without thinking—but now she becomes aware of how her lungs feel, tight and ragged in her chest, of how it hurts to inhale, like there are tiny spikes in her throat. She turns away from her mother and vomits promptly on the sand.
“Move,” her grandmother’s voice commands above the rest. “Everyone, give her space. She needs air.” A hand appears near the sand, holding one of the bottles of water. Riham looks up at her grandmother’s face, ashen beneath her veil but strong. She nods at Riham. “Drink this, slowly.” Riham brings it to her lips and her stomach cramps, but she sips.
A drop of seawater trickles into her eye, stinging. She blinks and is aware of her body, the flab beneath her bathing suit, her bareness while throngs of people watch her, while Bassam watches her. Watch her vomit too, they all saw it, she thinks, mortified at the lumps of white on the sand. Ancient, familiar shame begins to throb but she hears her grandmother breathing and realizes that this, the strings of vomit, this is what saved her, it is what kept her alive, what returned her to breath.
Suddenly she doesn’t care at all who sees her, who watches as she lifts her head and looks not at the picnickers or boys or swimmers but her family, at her mother still weeping. They are all, Souad and Alia and Salma, looking at her as though she is a ghost and it dawns on Riham that she did something, that she has accomplished something just by living, just by kicking and kicking in the water.
“Riham.” Her mother’s voice catches. “Riham, this is the man who saved you.” Her mother points to a young man from one of the nearby picnicking families. His trousers and shirt are wet, plastered to his body. Riham sees for the first time that her own mother’s dress is wet and caked with sand. She tried to swim as well, Riham understands. It’s like bathwater, see?
“You’re a strong little girl,” the bearded man says. “You kept kicking.” Riham tries to imagine this man carrying her, her body in his arms, but she feels no embarrassment.
“Thank you,” she says, and everyone starts laughing, even her mother, the hysterical laughter of the relieved.
Riham pushes her hair back, her hands less shaky now. She squints in the sunlight, people’s voices around her.
“It’s a miracle.”
“They need lifeguards here.”
“That water can be so dangerous.”
The sun glints and Riham sees, for the first time since waking, the water between the legs of people, that astonishing blue. She says something under her breath. No one hears except her grandmother, who bends down. She rubs a rough, callused hand through Riham’s hair as the voices around them continue.
Her grandmother’s arms are firm around her body. “Yes,” her grandmother says quietly, so no one else hears. “Yes, He saved you.”
And Riham remembers, as her grandmother holds her, she remembers, as though in a dream, how she’d been an old woman in the water, how somewhere she was dying and this would be part of that story. How, when the waves rocked her hard enough, she had called out for Allah and no one else.
Alia
* * *
Kuwait City
April 1988
Alia stirs the spoon in her teacup vigorously, though the sugar has long since dissolved. She finds the clanking comforting. A distraction. Outside the living-room window, night has fallen; the streetlamps are on. She glares into the night as though she can will a car—and from it, a lanky, disobedient body—into appearing.
“She’s still not back?”
Atef appears in the doorway. He frowns, dozens of lines around his face springing to life.
Alia shakes her head. She is tired but somewhat invigorated, her mind still buzzing from the fight hours earlier.
“It’s nearly eleven,” Atef says. “You should sleep.” Though it is slight, Alia can hear the accusation in his words. Atef loves the calm, listening to Oum Kalthoum in the evenings as he reads over his students’ exams. He finds such conflict unnerving.
“You should be more concerned,” Alia shoots back. Instantly his face falls, and she regrets her words.
He sighs. “Fine.”
Gesturing for her to move over, he joins her on the couch. For moments, there is silence, and she feels the anger radiating from her skin. On the television screen a Lebanese music show plays, beautiful girls taking the stage and singing.
“She may just go to Widad’s again,” Atef finally says.
“Widad makes it worse!” The outburst is cathartic. “She just coddles her, cooks her meals. What the girl needs is discipline.”
“Widad can’t just turn her away.” He sounds expressly unhappy to be having this conversation again.
“Oh! God forbid,” Alia says sarcastically. She lifts the teacup. It has cooled and fills her mouth with lukewarm sweetness. They fall silent once more, watching a young woman move around the stage in a blue dress. The audience applauds.
Several moments later, Alia erupts:
“Never, never, would something like this happen with the others.”
“Alia—”
“Never, Atef! Not once. Karam is a boy, he’s supposed to be the one that stays out late and gets into trouble. But no, never. He studies and sees friends, he goes to the university, he comes home and sleeps in his bed.”
“Comparing them gets us nowhere.”
“And Riham,” Alia continues, aware of the shrillness in her voice but unable to stop. “Can you imagine? She doesn’t even sneeze out loud.”
Atef clears his throat; Alia pretends not to hear. “Only Souad,” she finishes triumphantly. “Only her.”
“Different personalities, Alia. You know that,” Atef says. He is careful during these talks not to say the thing she knows he wants to. She knows this because she heard him say it, last year after an argument between her and Souad. She’d overheard him speaking with Widad, his voice low:
“I’ve never seen two people more alike.”
The earlier argument was about sugar. Souad eats it sprinkled between slices of bread, and she leaves trails on the kitchen counters, attracting ants. Priya is constantly killing them, using a sponge spotted with their bodies.
Over and over, Alia and Atef have told Souad to use a plate. Atef is good-humored about it, making jokes about unwanted guests, but Alia has been sharper, bringing up Priya’s arthritis.
“We’re going to have an infestation,” she told her.
The girl never listened. Still she ate the sugar sandwiches, still the trails appeared, followed eagerly by the ants. For weeks, Alia stewed—the thoughtlessness! The selfishness, the entitlement. Unwilling to inconvenience herself even in the smallest ways.
So when Alia happened upon Souad that afternoon, taking a bite out of a half-eaten sandwich, the sugar crumbs falling right in front of her eyes, she’d snapped, screaming something about the girl being a brat and poking the embers of their ancient, age-old fighting until it roared a brilliant, unrelenting red.
“You’re insane,” Souad had hurled later as she tugged her shoes on in the doorway. Crumbs of the now-forgotten sandwich clung to her lips. “Absolutely insane.” Then there was the slam of the front door, and she was gone.
The clock above the television blinks nearly midnight. On the TV, the dancers behind the singer move their hips suggestively. They no longer wear the short skirts and feathered hair of previous decades, the style Alia had grown up with—tight sweaters, eyeliner, frosty lipstick—and still favors.
Instead the women dress as Souad does, in too-tight jeans and leather. Alia finds it unattractive, pushy. Perhaps fashion reflects each generation’s women, Alia thinks, and she is plea
sed by the thought. She wants to tell Atef, but there is still a distance between them, his kindly silence an affront. His face is illuminated, the dancing women causing ripples of blue and green across his face.
The singer finishes and bows, applause surrounding her. The dancers exit the stage and the lights dim. Another singer walks on in a long dress, a hijab wound around her head. Alia recognizes her—the Moroccan singer who’d abruptly announced her faith a few months ago, swapping her trademark short dresses for a veil.
“I wonder what her mother thought,” Alia comments. She keeps her voice light, glances sidelong at Atef. It is a peace offering. The volatility of their marriage, when the children were younger, has cooled over the years, yielded to camaraderie.
He clears his throat, considering. “Maybe she had another daughter to make up for it.” They both laugh and Alia scoots closer to him on the couch.
In some ways, it is truly comical. The Miniskirt and the Veil, she likes to quip to her friends. Quick nicknames for her daughters, well intentioned but occasionally ringing caustic to another’s ears.
The truth is that Alia can scarcely make sense of it—the two daughters, years apart, one godless and unruly, the other veiled and earnest and married. Though both are intense, Alia thinks at times, prone to immoderation. In some ways, not so dissimilar, a restlessness drumming through them that has them rifling through selves like dresses on a rack.
It is not that Alia dislikes Riham’s faith; rather, she is vaguely uncomfortable by its visibility. Riham was always a quiet girl, and in her adolescence signs began to emerge, the girl asking about veils, saying she wished to fast for Ramadan. And Alia and Atef, proud but perplexed, exchanged worried glances.