by Hala Alyan
“I’m happy about it, I really am,” Atef said once, “but it’s just so—”
“I know,” Alia said.
Watching their daughter avert her eyes from food during Ramadan, overhearing the splashing water in the bathroom as she prepared for prayer, listening to her footsteps before dawn as she rose with the muezzin—it was like having a mirror held up to their household, and in the reflection, they saw themselves as lacking.
Alia had grown up with her mother’s praise of Allah, her gentle faith coloring religion a soft hue for Alia so that she loved the muezzin, the Eid festivals, the verses of Qur’an. For Alia, after the war, after Mustafa’s death, these things had not been lost so much as quietly, intentionally misplaced.
And then, years later, Riham wrapped faith around herself as effortlessly as a shawl, never once mumbling a complaint about rising early for prayer, never sneaking bites of bread—as Alia always did—during Ramadan. What could she and Atef do but encourage Riham even though over the years faith seemed to engulf her? To do anything else seemed inconceivable.
In that way, Riham has worn them down as much as Souad, both daughters pushing until Alia and Atef surrendered, in small ways at first, and then bigger ones.
“We need to support her,” Atef would say, his voice uncertain. It was his refrain when Riham veiled, when she took Islamic studies courses at the university, when she began to volunteer at the hospital.
So last year, in the early days of May, when Riham sat her and Atef down and told them in her slow, wistful way that she was to wed one of the Jordanian doctors at the hospital, an older religious widower with a young boy, there was nothing left for the two of them—stunned, they who had made a vow of their silence—to say.
The doctor—this is how Alia still thinks of him, though the wedding was in January, though she should think Latif or Riham’s husband—is a dull man with kind eyes. When he first came to their house for dinner, Alia was struck by how soft-spoken he was, how calm and refined, even his shoes polished.
“I have only the finest intentions toward your daughter,” he’d told them in a voice cultivated by years of reassuring the ill and dying, and the two of them exchanged looks.
“He’s old enough to be your father,” Alia hissed at her daughter afterward and Riham shrugged, unblinking.
“He’s good, Mama. You know that. You can see it.” An enigmatic smile traveled across her face.
“Also,” she’d said, her voice final, “Teta would’ve loved him.” Salma, dead in the ground for nearly a year. Alia felt the fight leave her.
Surprisingly, it was Souad who spoke up the most.
“A child!” Souad stood in her sister’s room, fists on hips as Riham packed her clothes in large suitcases. The doctor was returning to his native Amman after the wedding and would be taking Riham with him. “He has a child, Riham. You’re going to be that kid’s mother. Do you understand that? You still sleep with your stuffed animals.”
Alia silently cheered her youngest on, but Riham bore all their comments with that same patient smile.
“He’s a good man,” she repeated throughout the months and again on the evening of her wedding as Alia adjusted her daughter’s dress and cried predictably. Though she wasn’t crying from happiness or because her daughter was leaving, but rather from the dreariness of it all, the white dress stretching around her chubby daughter’s waist, how ordinary she looked as she beamed at people during the wedding. How old and uninteresting the husband looked, the pouting child with his bow tie askew, the life her daughter was inheriting. How badly she wanted to shake her eldest and cry out that you don’t have to marry the first person who likes you or who says he’ll take you away.
Even the wedding had been boring and had dragged on, guests kindly complimenting Riham’s dress and kissing Alia’s cheeks, the dance floor empty until Souad stood up in her fire-engine-red dress, grabbed her brother’s hand, and began to move her hips in a way the guests would talk about for days.
Atef falls asleep on the couch, his head angled against cushions. Alia watches him. Thousands of times she has done this, and she is struck by the thought. He appears older in sleep, the lines between his nose and mouth deepened. It frustrates her, that he can sleep when she is so wound up, but she knows this is unfair. Sometimes she envies his composure, the way he is able to draw the children to him with his stillness. What are you really thinking, she sometimes wants to yell when he smiles mildly at traffic or goes to his study for hours. Once or twice, she has stormed into his study even though the door had been shut, hoping to catch him in the middle of some depraved nameless act—masturbating? Speaking to a mistress?—but all he was ever doing was writing. This would irrationally annoy her sometimes, all those hours, hiding away in his study, smoking cigarettes. What could he be writing? His mother had died years ago; he rarely spoke to his brothers.
A door shuts within the house. Karam appears in the doorway, his tufted hair betraying sleep.
“Still not back?” He stifles a yawn.
Alia shakes her head, glances at Atef. “God knows where she is,” she whispers, her temper rising once more.
Karam smiles at her. “She’ll be fine, Mama.” He gestures at his father. “Should I wake him? Get him to bed?”
“He’ll wake on his own. How is the studying going? You’re going to wear yourself out.”
Karam rubs his eyes. In his sweatpants and cotton shirt, dark hair covering his arms, he looks like a man. “Not great. I’ve still got a couple of chapters left.”
“The exam’s tomorrow?”
He nods, and she makes a sympathetic noise, feels keenly for his tired face. His life is a mystery to her, the architecture classes at the college, sketches of buildings that she sometimes glimpses on his desk. He told her once that he wanted to build skyscrapers in Kuwait City, to make it like Paris or Manhattan. She feels a rush of warmth toward him. Her easy one.
“Good luck, habibi.”
She listens to his footsteps recede. When he hit puberty years ago, it had been awkward, the soft-eyed boy suddenly transformed into a gangly teen. Adam’s apple, straggle of facial hair, the lush, fertile smell of adolescent bodies. She became afraid of touching him for a while, afraid of what would be appropriate and what not. It seemed remarkable that his tall, unfolded limbs had come from within her.
Perhaps that was the divide, always, between her girls and Karam. The girls, in a way, were predictable. Made in the image of her—tiny breasts that grew, blood that spotted their underwear, hair that sprouted between their legs. But Karam, with his masculinity, his foreignness, his otherness—he was the miracle that she had borne.
The music show ends and a sitcom begins, some American program with a family, a husband and wife laughingly arguing. There are Arabic subtitles below, but Alia likes to listen to the English. Her English is decent from years of listening to the children talk but especially strong on the esoteric—gorgeous, mind-blowing, bungalow.
Next to her, Atef shifts, his head falling abruptly on his chest. He blinks awake, disoriented for a moment.
“Who?” He is panicked whenever he’s woken suddenly.
Alia places a hand on his shoulder. “You should go to bed.”
He yawns, shutting his eyes. “Will you come?”
“No.” She keeps her voice light. “I’m going to watch this a little longer.” Atef squints at the television.
“An American sitcom? That’s what we’ve come to?” He laughs fondly. “Ya ajnabiyeh.” A phrase Alia’s mother used for the children when they taught her English and French words during the summer. You foreigner.
The mention of Salma is still sobering, even with the time that has passed, time that Alia counts in pairs. Two summers, two birthdays, two Eids. Atef places a hand on Alia’s forehead, as one would with a child.
“May Allah keep her in rest,” he says, his eyes solemn.
“May Allah keep her in rest,” she echoes and is overcome with that familiar sorrow.
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br /> He kisses her before he leaves the room, his breath sour. He has become more chaste over the years, touching her less, and she suspects it has to do with some misguided sense of decorum, as though, now that Alia is nearly forty-five and has to studiously dye the gray streaking her temples, she needs to be treated carefully, as though she is a matron.
She would shock him if she ever said, I loved it when you’d leave marks on my body. It was like touching fire, the heat from those bruises.
He would blink at her, in that good-natured way of his. He would be hurt. Atef probably remembered those nights of lovemaking after his return with shame. Never would he believe her if she told him she has dreamed, in the two decades since, of being touched that way again.
Alone in the room, Alia watches the television family laugh. She feels a heaviness, awakened, she knows, by the mention of Salma. She touches the thin strand of gold she wears around her neck, a gift from her mother at her wedding. Her fingertips still on the metal, pain shoots through her. Like a wave, it passes, the sharpness dulled to an ache.
Salma died in winter, on the eve of a momentous thunderstorm that raged over Amman for three days, three nights. Alia had traveled to Amman the previous week by herself at the urging of her aunts.
“She’s not well,” they said. “It’s getting worse.” For years, Salma’s health had been failing, a mysterious illness that afflicted her lungs, muscles, even her sleep.
During that week Alia brewed her mother tea, sliced cantaloupe onto platters. At night she curled childlike in her mother’s bed, her dreams slashed with tigers and floods, caves of burning lanterns.
Whenever her mother let out moans of pain, Alia rubbed circles on her back. When her mother’s breathing steadied, Alia continued to rub until her wrists ached, lost in thoughts about her mother dying. It was the most awful thing Alia could imagine, a fate that filled her with sharp, peppery fear. When Alia envisioned her mother dead, she couldn’t imagine anything beyond that—the boiling of rice, the trimming of hair. It was, simply, incomprehensible.
Men later referred to the storm as biblical, talked about the sickly shade of rainclouds, the bolts of lightning that forked the sky. The afternoon it began the two of them were sitting in her mother’s garden. Salma was feeling better and berated Alia for traveling to Amman.
“You have children to care for,” Salma scolded. “Your aunts are a bunch of worriers.”
Alia watched her mother pick at her cheese sandwich, pushing the tomato slices aside, breaking tiny bits of bread to eat.
“The jasmine came out nicely,” Salma said. Above them, clouds hung low and gray in the sky.
“It’s the late winter,” Alia said. “Shall I cut some for the vase?” She rose as she spoke, brushing crumbs from the djellaba she wore, one of the old garments from her girlhood. She liked wearing them around her mother, the musty smell tugging at something wistful. At the jasmine shrub, Alia stood on her tiptoes until she pinched a stem with several flowers, the petals startlingly white against the green leaves.
Twirling the stem, Alia brought the flowers to her nose and inhaled. Perfume, heady, a sweetness she could nearly taste. Something fat and wet plopped on her wrist.
“Oh!” Alia heard behind her, turning to find her mother’s arm extended to the sky, eyebrows raised. “It’s raining.”
Alia walked back to her mother. When she reached the chair, Alia lowered her own arm, carefully presenting the raindrop—still a perfect half-sphere—to her mother. “I know.”
Salma touched Alia’s hand, lightly dabbed the raindrop with her fingertip. Around them, rain began to fall softly but adamantly, plunking into the half-drunk tea, moistening the bread of the sandwiches. Her mother’s face creased into a smile, rain splashing her hair. She looked up at Alia, her eyes impish, joyful.
“Let’s go inside.”
Salma died later that evening, after the sky had darkened, drizzle giving way to a downpour. Wind and rain obscured the view as Alia drew the bedroom curtains.
“Recite for me, habibti.” Salma’s voice had been muffled beneath the blanket, slightly out of breath. Alia lay next to her. Thunder exploded in the distance.
“Bismillah,” she began. Slowly, she recited the Qur’an verses, keeping her voice steady. She chose her mother’s favorites—al-Fatiha, al-Kursi—feeling shy as she spoke. When she finished, her mother’s breathing had evened.
“There is no Allah but Allah,” Alia said softly and turned to her side, her forehead touching Salma’s shoulder. The sound of rain surrounded them as they slept.
Alia woke first to the thunder. Only then, disoriented, did she realize that Salma was talking in a low voice.
“You must remember.” Salma spoke urgently. Sitting up, Alia saw in the dark that her mother’s eyes were wide open, staring past Alia, toward the window.
“Mama?” Alia willed her voice calm.
“When it happens, you must find a way to remember.”
“When what happens, Mama?” An icy fear seized her. She had never heard her mother speak this way before.
“I was wrong. I thought I could make myself see something that wasn’t there. But it was a lie. I saw the houses, I saw how they were lost. You cannot let yourself forget.” Her mother began to cough, her voice frenzied.
Light, Alia thought. She needed light to see her mother, the dark suddenly terrifying for her. In panic, she rose and stumbled to the window, pulled at the curtains until they finally gave and slid open. Outside, rain churned in sheets, blurring the streetlamps. Above, nothing was visible, the sky dark.
When she turned back to her mother, Salma was dead, her face tilted toward the window. Her open eyes glistened in the limp, streetlamp light.
And then she was gone, the ordinary dullness of death taking Salma as it took everyone, Alia stunned and heartbroken at the predictability of it all. What followed was banal, excruciating—the funeral, Atef and the children flying in from Kuwait, the body washed and wrapped in white, being reminded of other deaths, of Mustafa, of her father, loss after loss after loss, as though rehearsed.
But since that evening, there remains a mystery, a question that plagues Alia: What remembering had her mother meant, what lie?
Alia doesn’t realize she has fallen asleep until she wakes, a sound of tires screeching from outside. She jolts upright, blinking in the glow of the television. As she stands—already the anger is flooding her body with adrenaline—she remembers some scenery of water, pillars shooting out of the ocean. A dream she was just having, or a painting she’d seen somewhere?
From the foyer come muted, shuffling sounds. There is murmuring, a low laugh. Alia cocks her head and listens. Budur, Souad’s closest friend since grade school. They walk slowly, one hushing the other, past the entrance of the living room.
“I can’t believe—”
“I know.” More laughter, and Souad flips the light on; Alia squints at the sudden glare. Her daughter wears jeans and a shirt so tight Alia can make out the lace of her bra.
“Mama.” Souad looks caught out but quickly rearranges her features to convey irritation. “What are you doing standing there in the dark?” She glances at the television. “What are you watching?”
Alia looks at the grandfather clock on the wall. “It’s two in the morning.”
Both girls fall silent, a glance exchanged between them. Budur looks scared; it is Souad who speaks up. “We ran a little late. I didn’t realize the time.”
“Where were you?” Alia feels the fury clog her. She crosses her arms over her robe.
Souad shrugs. “Out.”
“Out, Souad? Out where?”
“Yes, Mama.” Souad rolls her eyes. “We went out for a bit, it got late, now we’re home. Budur, let’s go to the—”
Alia begins to scream. “Out? Out? You think that’s what other girls are doing? Staying out till all hours of the night?” There is immense relief in yelling.
Souad slits her eyes at her mother, and, though her daughte
r is smaller than she, Alia nearly steps back. Since girlhood, there has been something queenly about her, formidable.
“That sandwich,” Souad says viciously. “This is about those stupid crumbs. You stayed up to yell at me for it?”
Next to her, Budur bites her lip, looking as though she might cry. “I’ll go to the room.”
Alia softens toward Budur. Poor thing. Souad is perpetually the culprit in that relationship, Alia knows. The one that pushes her to do things. When they were twelve, she’d caught them smoking cigarettes in the yard. Budur had instantly begun to cry, saying, Sorry, sorry. Souad had taken another puff before she stamped the cigarette out with her sneaker.
“Go, Budur, habibti,” Alia says.
“No, you stay,” says Souad.
Both of them speak at the same time, then glare at each other. Budur hesitates for a moment before retreating, her footsteps quiet and light in the hallway.
“I want you to be happy.” Alia changes tactics. “Acting this way isn’t good for you.”
Souad snorts, and Alia wants to slap her. “Happy?” She drops her purse onto the floor with the languor of the unaffected, but Alia sees her daughter’s jaw tensing and it satisfies something small and petty in her. “You mean like Riham’s happy? Or like you’re happy?”
“Oh, oh, this again? It’s like living in a theater. You want everyone to be unhappy so we can be like one of your American films.” In recent months, Souad’s disappointment with the family has been a keen, living thing.
“Don’t talk to me about living in a fantasy.”
“What—”
Souad smiles like someone about to sweep a poker table.
“You’ve been pining over Amman like some jilted lover.”
This halts Alia. “I’m waking up your f-father,” she stammers. “He’ll deal with you. He should know what time his daughter traipses home.”
It is an empty threat, and they both know it. Atef is a tepid disciplinarian at best, too soft with the children. Souad arches an eyebrow.