by Hala Alyan
“They’re even sweeter than the Lebanese ones. May I?”
Alia is surprised at her forthrightness, the girl’s hand extended. Four or five bracelets circle her wrist. Alia holds the basket out, and the girl takes several, peels them. For moments, there is silence.
“I’m Telar.” Then, as if just remembering: “Thank you.”
“Alia.” Though the girl is significantly younger, though it would be appropriate for her to refer to herself as Tante Alia or Khalto Alia, something about the girl makes that seem unnecessary.
“Are you a student at the college?” Alia finally asks.
The girl looks animated, as though Alia has asked the correct question. She begins to talk rapidly, her bracelets clanging as she moves her hands. “As if the dogs would let us go to school. My education? Mortar and gassing. One hundred nights of death, while that bastard sleeps in his marble bedroom.”
Alia’s mind whirs. She puts it together, guesses.
“Saddam.”
“That dog.” The girl spits, as though the very name is something bitter in her mouth. “He drove us to the wasteland; he took the gold from our flesh.”
So the girl is Kurdish. Alia watches her, sidelong, with interest. The reddish hair, kohl thick beneath her lower eyelashes. There are stories about the Kurds, whisperings about magic and gypsies living in the underbellies of cities. The girl eats the rest of her figs, sucking at the skins before tossing them onto the sand. She lights a cigarette and speaks again, her voice vehement.
“We came a while back, my mama and siblings. Seven of us. Baba died, of course. All the men did. The army rounded them up, slit their stomachs in front of our houses, shot the knees of anyone who cried out. To the women—” The girl spits again, slitting her eyes toward the sea. “To the women they did awful things. They made husbands watch. They made little children watch.”
“I’m sorry,” Alia says. Telar ashes her cigarette and Alia sees that her nails are bitten, blackened around the edges. Something like revulsion stirs within her.
“He’s a godless, motherless bastard,” the girl is saying. “Left us starving. We ate paper when there wasn’t any rice left.” She takes a long breath. “But at least we left before the gas. Poison! You hear about that? He dropped poison on children. They’re saying the dead smelled apples and fell to the ground.”
Alia’s stomach lurches. Suddenly she wishes the girl would stop talking, would leave her alone. She thinks of the teabag left carelessly on the kitchen counter. Odd, to be nostalgic for something that has gone nowhere; she feels melancholic thinking of her stovetop, her teapot, as though it is all a country she has dreamed up. She tries to think of how to offer money delicately to the girl, who seems like the kind for whom charity is censure.
“You know what it’s like to be hungry?”
Alia blinks at her, this girl with dirty nails and cigarettes. What would Souad think of her? she wonders. Would she furrow her brow, step to the side? Or would she be enchanted, as she is by parties and the new hotels in Kuwait? Souad. Alia says her name silently. Taken by the ajnabi men with their accents and tailored suits, taken by the attention—daughter, it is awful—that a girl with tight jeans and a devastating smile can attract.
“Pardon?” Though she heard the question.
“Hungry. You ever been hungry?” The girl continues before Alia can respond. “I don’t mean late-dinner hungry. Or having to wait for your maid to finish cooking a meal.” She lets out a quick, angry laugh.
Alia remembers with shame the bread back in her house, the crust she threw in the sink. The years of uneaten chicken and rice, chucked into the trash. The utter waste.
The girl, Alia suddenly knows, would have no patience for Souad. For either of her daughters. The children of a professor—well fed, spoiled, ungrateful. Alia is oddly gratified by the thought.
Alia shakes her head. She opens her mouth to say no, admittedly not, and is surprised to hear herself say, “Once.”
The girl turns to her, eyes disbelieving. “When I was pregnant,” Alia says. “When I gave birth to my youngest.” And Alia remembers with rocking clarity that pain, coiled and endless in her abdomen, the labor that had lasted nearly two days. “It’s like it was yesterday or, no, just this morning. Like it just happened. Everything I ate, for days, I couldn’t keep down.” Not even water. The doctors had said it was the difficult labor, the bleeding and ripping, her body unable to digest. “The first two days it was awful, like a long fast. But then.” Her hospital room always darkened by a curtain. Atef begging her to eat bread. Outside, a warm, bright winter and fires burning in the desert. “Then . . . it was like madness. Every inch of me begging for food. And my body refusing it.”
The girl smokes, considering. “I know it’s not the same,” Alia says in a rush. “I know it’s not. But it was still—you asked if I was ever hungry.”
Telar nods. She adjusts a silver chain around her wrist. “What happened?”
“My daughter was born.” Alia tries to remember, really remember. “And everything was suddenly loud and sharp.” Riham and Karam were quiet children. Those early years, Alia thinks, newly in Kuwait, newly a mother, she’d been a sleepwalker. “It was like being shaken awake.” Only with Souad did everything change, that screaming, selfish child.
“I never forgave her,” Alia says slowly. “But I also never thanked her.”
“When we came here, my sister, the littlest one, she’d cry and cry for rice pudding.” The girl drops the cigarette and steps on it. “It was terrible. Here she was, this tiny thing, no memory, just wanting and needing.” Telar laughs. “When she’s old enough, I’ll tell her that story. Of how she cried and cried, then cried harder when we told her there was none.”
Alia remembers her mother telling her, back in Nablus, that she used to cry for something when they left Jaffa. Though she cannot remember what. She has now forgotten twice.
“Coming here was terrible. I didn’t think we would ever survive it.”
“What else could you do?” Alia says.
The girl nods. “For weeks, we touched each other’s faces, trying to make sure we hadn’t dreamed it. We drank water slowly. Everything we did was like that. Slow, careful.” Alia thinks of Atef’s chin against her temple this morning, watching him walk down the driveway. How there is something precious in those gestures, and tragic, too, accumulated over the years. Her daughter is still sleeping, she thinks, her long limbs akimbo like in girlhood. Next to Alia, Telar has fallen silent, watching the water. Alia holds out the figs for the girl to take another, and she does.
Souad
* * *
Paris
August 1990
Souad wakes with a start. The sound of a French news channel trumpets through the rooms. She has been sleeping fitfully since the invasion, at odd hours. Everyone in the house has been doing the same, Khalto Mimi and her brother Ammar taking long naps after lunch, Lara sleeping through the afternoons and waking at night.
She blinks against the pillowcase, squinting toward the open curtains. The streaks of setting sun stain the wooden floors red. From the television, the newscasters’ words drift through the room in bursts.
“Troops . . . vacillating . . . the borders.”
Not a nightmare. Each waking, there is this moment—the clearing when she remembers everything, realizes once again what has happened.
Souad sighs and turns, pulling the thin blanket around her. She is a messy sleeper, the sheets always twisted when she wakes. Shutting her eyes, she buries her face in the pillow.
“Sleep, sleep, sleep,” she whispers to herself. She wishes to sleep for hours, until it is midnight outside. But it is too late, her mind is already crowding with everything, the invasion and Elie and her mother’s dreaded phone call. Of the three, the invasion feels, ironically, least pressing.
Souad sits up in bed, wincing at a twinge in her back. She is thirsty, her muscles sore.
An image of Elie comes to mind, his silhouette b
eneath the streetlamp last night, after the whiskey and dancing. He’d shrugged. Think about it.
Souad’s art professor at school, Madame Jubayli, had recommended her for a summer program at the newly opened L’Institut Supérieur des Arts Appliqués, but when Souad brought up the idea at home, it had caused many arguments, what Karam referred to as “the Paris impasse.”
“They teach painting and textiles; it’s perfect. It’s exactly what I need,” she said, over and over, to her parents. Her father vacillated, diplomatic but reluctant, while her mother outright forbade it.
“You want us to send you to Paris by yourself, like some street girl?”
The months churned on. There were charges and pleading and nightlong fights. Souad convinced Madame Jubayli to meet with her parents and speak about the program, its reputation, the colleagues she knew who taught there. Souad requested a copy of the brochure, went through it line by line. Still her mother refused to let her go.
“You’re just jealous!” Souad finally screamed one evening. “Because you’re stuck in your little life, you want everyone as miserable as you!”
Her mother’s face stormed, and her father finally intervened, telling Souad to go to her room. Souad went, paced, kicked her door and walls, then finally stomped back out to the living room, ready to scream at them both.
But when she drew breath, she collapsed. Falling onto the sofa in front of her parents, she wept like a child.
“Please,” she said between sobs. “Please, please, please.” She finally lifted her head, looked her mother straight in the eye. “Mama. Mama, please.”
Where yelling and bargaining had failed, tears worked. Within a week, Khalto Mimi, who’d moved to France years ago, was called; she agreed to have Souad stay with her for the summer and, like magic, Souad found herself on a plane headed to Paris.
Souad kicks the covers off and gets out of bed. The blue and white room, with lacy curtains and small porcelain figurines, is the elder daughter’s old room, Mira now living in her own apartment near the Sorbonne. In the drawers of the armoire are playing cards, a nightgown, an old notebook covered in stickers.
She is in awe of the girls and their European lifestyles. They are each in their twenties, Lara still living with her mother, both sisters leading sophisticated, unmarried lives. Every Sunday, Mira comes over, and they eat brioche thick with warm berries and watch television, the girls chattering in their alluring fusion of French and Arabic. They wear knee-high boots even on sunny days, and tight, short dresses above them, their hair barely grazing their shoulders. And as much as they coo over Souad’s slimness, her curls, she cannot help but feel unmodern around them, with her skinny legs and long hair. It is the same on the streets of Paris, Souad—who was always the voguish one in Kuwait—feeling plain among the swarms of elegant women smoking cigarettes, their lips painted the color of apples.
But here, at least, her restlessness has found a place. She loved Paris from the beginning. The people were neither friendly nor particularly welcoming, for the most part treating her coolly. It was part of the Parisian appeal, Elie told her. He has summered in Paris since babyhood and has a French passport; he knows the quarters and streets like an old lover. It was Elie who pushed her to do the program at L’Institut so they could be together for the summer.
Their last summer. Then he would remain in Paris for university, and she would return to Kuwait, their lives forking apart. That was their unspoken agreement. Or it had been, until the invasion. Now everything, everything—her family’s house, Karam’s engineering program, Souad’s own reluctant plan of beginning courses at Kuwait University—was suddenly suspended, uncertain, like sand lifted by malicious hands and tossed everywhere.
Souad dresses impulsively. Black leggings, oversize black shirt—in Paris, she retired colors—a cat’s-eye swipe of kohl. Outside, the sun has nearly set.
She walks toward the sound of newscasters, into the living room. At the doorway, she stands for a moment, unseen. Mimi and Ammar sit on the large sofa. Lara’s legs are stretched onto the coffee table; she is painting her toenails. All three of them watch the screen.
“Here she is, Sleeping Beauty Liz Taylor!” Ammar says, catching sight of her. His nickname for her, the absurd moniker for her constant napping and thick eyebrows. “Sit, sit.”
Souad sits next to him, and Mimi speaks, her eyes not leaving the screen. “Your mother called.”
Souad bites her lip, waiting. This is what she has dreaded since the other calls, the first to say they were safe, the second to say they were leaving for Amman as soon as her father organized finances and passports.
“What did she say?”
“Oh.” Mimi sounds distracted. “I told her you were sleeping; it’s been a rough couple of days. That she should let you rest. She said they’ll call tomorrow morning.”
Souad feels a rush of gratitude toward Mimi. “Thank you.”
“Asshole,” Lara blurts as Saddam’s expansive, grinning face appears on the screen, a repeated clip. Oh, God Almighty, be witness that we have warned them, he is saying. The room falls silent, all of them watching the man raise an arm, not a shred of fear on his swarthy face.
The news report cuts to flames, bulldozers. The fires on the television screen—Souad thinks of her neighborhood, the auditorium she walked across in a graduation gown two months ago, the shopping mall. She feels a rising nausea. There are moments, these last few days, when she has felt as lost as a child, the urge to scream like bile in her throat. Souad averts her eyes, fixing them instead on the Persian rug, a landscape of spirals in shades of green.
“He’s insane,” Mimi says.
“No,” Lara says deliberately. “He’s an asshole.” Ammar snorts with laughter.
There is a lived-in feeling in the apartment, one of camaraderie and airiness, a nonchalance among them that reminds Souad of those Amman summers, how envious Souad would be of Mimi’s lackadaisical upbringing of her daughters. There were times in the past weeks when Lara lay her head on her mother’s lap, and Mimi braided her hair. Souad cannot imagine ever doing such a thing herself with Alia. With her mother, Souad is her prickliest self, a cat stroked the wrong way.
During yesterday’s phone call, her mother had yelled. The line was staticky and her voice kept being cut off.
“Goddamn this phone! Souad—Atef, I can’t hear a damn thing.”
Souad’s mouth was dry as she repeated into the receiver, “Mama? Mama?”
“Yes—Souad—can you hear me?” A coarse sound, like the rustle of leaves, muffled the line. This alarmed Souad, as though the sound were somehow pulling her mother away. Suddenly her mother’s voice broke through, clear. “. . . goddamn reception. Can you hear me?”
“Yes, yes!” Souad stood on her tiptoes, pressing a palm against the counter in Mimi’s kitchen. The granite was smooth and cool. “How are you? What are you all doing?”
“Souad, we’re leaving. In a couple of days, I think. It depends on how quickly . . . with the car . . . the airport’s gone . . . Your father’s trying to sort things out with the bank—not sure how long.” Her mother spoke rapidly, in fragments, and Souad had a difficult time understanding. “We can take only a few things,” her mother continued. “Small enough to carry. I know you have some clothes, but is there anything you want me to—that I should take.” Only at these last words did her mother’s voice falter; there was a distant clicking sound, like a swallow.
Souad was confused. “Take where?”
“Take with us.” A familiar irritation crept into her mother’s tone. “Souad, we’re leaving Kuwait. We have to. Everyone is.”
“But on the news they said it’ll be over soon. That Europe or America will help.” Even to her own ears, Souad’s voice was childish, whining.
“Habibti.” Her mother’s tone softened. “We don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“But they’re saying—”
“We’re leaving.” Alia ignored her, kept talking. “Things are ba
d, they’re getting worse. What do you want me to take?”
Their house rushed through Souad’s mind. The rooms, the photographs on the walls, the sunlight through veranda windows. Her own bedroom, suddenly empty—she knows the room as she knows her own body, and she couldn’t conjure a single image of it.
“Nothing,” Souad heard herself saying. “None of it.”
“Are you sure?” Her mother sounded startled. “What about your jewelry? Clothes?”
“Nothing,” Souad repeated, firmly. “I’ll see it all when we go back.”
“Souad,” her mother said. “Souad, no one knows what will happen. We have to get to Amman as soon as possible.” There was static on the line, and then her mother’s voice returned. “. . . so we’ll send you the ticket as soon as we get there. Probably next week.”
“A ticket to where?” Souad felt slow, muddled.
“To Amman, Souad,” her mother said. “I don’t want you so far away while this is happening.”
“But Mama”—a wild, spinning panic rose in Souad’s throat, Elie appearing in her mind, so few nights left—“Mama, the program isn’t over for three more weeks.”
“Souad!” Her name hurled like a knife through Alia’s teeth—disgust, pity—and Souad fell silent. Her mother took a deep breath, and when she spoke again, it was with finality, the way one speaks to those in shock. “Souad, there is a war.”
Souad sits impatiently in the living room, jiggling her leg. She glances at her watch every few minutes. It is only eight, and the Elie nights, as she has come to think of them, with their sidewalk cafés and bars and glasses of sherry, begin around now, everyone gathering at Le Chat Rouge to start the evening.
The phone call looms ahead of her. And with it her old life, slung, no longer hers and morphing into something unrecognizable: Amman, a new house, Riham and her family.
And Karam—her ally, the only one in her family she feels close to—when she spoke with him yesterday, his voice somber: “Sousi, I might be going to America. The architecture program in Amman isn’t strong. We called a university in America, one where Baba’s dean went, somewhere called Boston. They said they’d consider an emergency application. They’re calling it asylum.”