Salt Houses

by Hala Alyan

  As a child, Souad hadn’t been afraid of the same things her brother and sister were—spiders, heights, sandstorms—and she’d known wordlessly, from a young age, that people thought her intrepid. She was the only girl in the schoolyard to squat next to a lone scorpion and, later, the first one to light a cigarette, to sit daringly in the front seat of a boy’s car, the wind raising her hair into a cloud. People wanted her like this, she understood. They loved watching the fearless.

  This was why, as a girl, she’d never spoken of what she was afraid of. Never said that she was in fact jealous of her siblings, jealous because their fears had such specificity to them, could be labeled and confronted and dismantled.

  What Souad spent her girlhood afraid of was incalculable, nameless. Not a creature so much as a shadow, a room emptied of lighting. She hated dusk; it filled her with dread. Hated the last few stairs when coming down from the roof of her grandmother’s building. When she was in bed sometimes, her small heart pounding just before she fell into sleep, she felt an endless plummet, as though someone had pushed her. Her fear had something to do with not being able to breathe, her mouth filled with water, with some enduring want. A suffocation. It was something like pursuit, something like not being fast enough.

  This is what Souad thinks of as she watches the army tanks roll into the desert in tidy green rows.

  In the living room, Souad watches Lara closely. Since her arrival, Souad has learned to blend in, to act nonchalant and follow the older girl’s lead. They haven’t become close, though Souad has joined her for drinks, met her intellectual French friends, all young professors like Lara. They laugh and tell stories, but, having taken English throughout school, Souad has a meager command of French. Lara’s Arabic is broken after years in Europe.

  Souad knew instinctively that Mimi wouldn’t ask Souad’s mother about rules and curfews. Still, she is careful, always slipping out with Lara, pretending that she spends her evenings working on art projects for her program.

  Ammar flips to an Arab channel, where an American reporter speaks, her words dubbed in Arabic.

  “The United Nations has released its strongest condemnation,” the ethereal voice says as the reporter moves her lips out of sync. Her blond hair is cut above her eyebrows, straight across, like a doll Souad once had.

  Lara stands and stretches, her midriff visible beneath the shirt. “I’m going out.”

  “Okay.” Mimi continues frowning at the television. “With?”

  “Luc,” Lara says.

  “Have fun.”

  “Be safe,” Ammar says.

  Souad watches the exchange, as she always does, with a fascination that still hasn’t abated. In her own home, this would never, ever happen, the topic of boys—even harmless, friendly ones—a minefield of arguments with her mother.

  She knows this is her moment; stands. “I’m going too,” she announces, then holds her breath.

  They barely look up. “Be safe,” Ammar repeats, his eyes on the tanks and bombing onscreen.

  On the street, she fumbles for a cigarette from her purse and smokes as she walks into the evening. She feels a sudden urge, now that she is outside the apartment, to clear her head. This is her favorite thing about the city—the ability it gives you to walk, to literally put space between your body and distress. In Kuwait, nobody walks anywhere.

  Mimi lives in a quiet part of the city, mostly residential, with small, pretty apartments, each window like a glistening eye. The streetlamps are made of wrought iron, designs flanking either side of the bulbs. There is a minimalist sense of wealth in the neighborhood, children dressed simply, the women always adjusting scarves around their necks, their hair cut into perfectly symmetrical lines. Souad walks by the manicured lawns of a grammar school, empty and discarded for the summer. Next to it a gray-steepled church. She tries to imagine that, elsewhere, there is smoke and destroyed palaces and men carrying guns. It seems impossible.

  The night is cool, and Souad wraps her cardigan tightly around her, crosses her arms. A shiver runs through her. She is nervous to see him, a familiar thrill that he always elicits in her. Even before last night.

  Le Chat Rouge is a fifteen-minute walk from Mimi’s apartment, but within several blocks the streets begin to change, brownstones and Gothic-style latticework replaced with grungier alleyways, young Algerian men with long hair sitting on steps and drinking beer from cans. One eyes her and calls out, caressingly, something in French. She can make out the words for sweet and return. Bars line the streets with their neon signs and she walks directly across the Quartier Latin courtyard, her shoes clicking on the cobblestones.

  “My mother’s going to call tomorrow,” she told Elie yesterday. She wasn’t sure why she said it, but it felt necessary. “They’re taking me to Amman.” In the near dark, Elie’s face was peculiarly lit, the sign making his skin look alien.

  “You could stay here,” Elie said. He smiled mockingly. “You could get married.”

  Souad had blinked, her lips still wet from the kiss. “Married?” She wasn’t being coy—she truthfully had no idea what Elie meant. Married to whom? For a long, awful moment, she thought Elie was suggesting she marry one of the other Lebanese men, that he was fobbing her off on a friend in pity.

  “Yes.” Elie cocked his head, as though gauging the authenticity of her confusion. He smiled again, kinder this time. He closed his fingers around hers so that she was making a fist and he a larger one atop it. They both watched their hands silently for a few seconds, an awkward pose, more confrontational than romantic, as though he were preventing her from delivering a blow. It occurred to her that he was having a difficult time speaking. She felt her palm itch but didn’t move. Elie cleared his throat, and when he spoke, she had to lean in to hear him.

  “You could marry me.”

  Now, even in re-creating that moment, Souad feels the swoop in her stomach, her mouth drying. It is a thing she wants in the darkest, most furtive way, not realizing how badly until it was said aloud. Eighteen years old, a voice within her spoke, eighteen.

  Too young, too young. And her parents, her waiting life.

  But the greater, arrogant part of Souad’s self growled as if woken. Her steps clacked with her want of it. The self swelled triumphantly—Shame, shame, she admonishes herself, thinking of the war, the invasion, the troops and fire, but she is delighted nonetheless.

  They met at the Shuja’a café in Kuwait a year ago. It was a space near the university where the intellectuals went to smoke cigarettes and talk about the war in Beirut and the Intifada. People sat around circular tables and drank Turkish coffee. It was a favored spot for those who considered themselves Communists, the young men wearing all black.

  Souad loved it. She felt like an academic, crushing her cigarette neatly when she was finished with it, the lipstick stains around the butt unspeakably elegant to her. In the Shuja’a café, she felt like a version of herself that was nearly complete, someone whom others would want. Would envy. She spoke in a low, murmuring voice, batted her eyelashes. It was different than the boat parties and dancing, where the ajanib fluttered around her. There, she got more attention but it felt too easy, those blue-eyed men hungry for her laugh. At the café, women were poets or working on manifestos. They wore baggy pants and cursed like the men.

  The pity of it, then, was that she felt out of place at the café. She hated to admit it but knew it was true. Souad had never been a strong student; she didn’t have a sturdy sense of history or politics. Frankly, the topics bored her. She just wanted the sickle necklaces and the berets. Still, she faltered through Marxist writings and began to read the newspaper. She learned to laugh when the men finished a sentence with a sardonic arch of their eyebrows, for this signified they’d said something they found—in a self-defeating way—funny.

  Souad began calling Elie’s group of friends the Libanais, a nod toward their French-infused upbringing, and they seemed taken by her. Elie was the center of the group, with bushy eyebrows and an ego
tistic charm about him. He was the quintessential Libanais, leaving Beirut after the violence began, summering in France since boyhood, and attending the Lycée Français in Kuwait. When he argued with the other men, he switched to French, the language silky and eruptive in his mouth. Three years older than Souad, he had already begun university, studying political science, though his true passion was writing.

  “I’m moving to Paris,” he told her the night they met. “At the end of this year, I’m transferring there to study writing.” He spoke to her about his dead mother and overbearing father, how Elie had finally struck a deal with his father, after much argument: Elie would move to France after two years at Kuwait University.

  “How can you know you’ll still hate it here in a year?”

  He’d looked at her pityingly, as though she were a child. “Some things you know, poupée.” The nickname, meaning “doll,” stuck. Souad hated it, but she learned not to throw tantrums. In Elie she’d met someone, finally, who was more volatile than she.

  He has many faults. He becomes grandiose when he drinks, is prone to exaggerated gestures and endless, solipsistic speeches. He winks at waitresses. He emanates a certain smell, not entirely unpleasant but slightly baked in, like leather or day-old bread, especially after a night of drinking. He seems not to see her sometimes, blinking when she speaks to him as though he’d forgotten she was there. And Souad, accustomed to attention—the youngest of her family, the liveliest of her friends—is scathed by such indifference.

  Still, when he kisses her, pulling her summarily against him, she feels all of her selves scatter and then, exquisitely, repair.

  Souad walks the length of the courtyard until she sees the fountain, two teenage girls sitting at the marble lip and smoking cloves. One of them wears large, black-framed glasses and is speaking rapidly in French while the other girl nods. Souad crosses them and sees the red of the Chat Rouge sign.

  She pauses outside of the entrance, watching her reflection in the dirty, reddish glass, her chest split by the curve of the g. She is afraid. Though Elie mystifies and infuriates her in many ways, Souad understands him well enough, she realizes slowly, that she will know instantly whether he meant what he said last night. She will know as soon as he looks at her.

  For a moment, Souad remains outside, listening to the girls, catching the words jamais and collier and merde. It is like listening to an orchestra. She wishes she could walk up to them and take a seat, ask them if she should go home, ask them what will become of Kuwait, whether she should trust Elie.

  A couple stagger out of the bar, laughing and carrying beer cans. The air from the bar whooshes outside—music and chatter—and Souad steps in.

  The bar is always crowded, chain smokers seated around small tables. One side of the room has a long wooden bar, the bottles behind it twinkling like jewels. Ivan, the bartender, pours glass after glass, his silver hair cut into a pageboy, a gold hoop dangling from each ear.

  The group, Albert, Sami, Marcel—the Libanais who spend their summers in France—sit on stools, their usually boisterous tones muted, glum. Elie is at the edge of the bar, his eyes on the television, another news story about Kuwait—already the flames and bulldozers are familiar to Souad—his expression grave. The television flickers on his face, his eyes hollowed and somehow older, much older.

  Watching the forlorn expressions, Souad feels something click within her and she knows that she will remember this moment, that she will come back to this as the crux of her life, the instant when she fully understood the gravity of it. There would be no return. Her clothing—so much of it borrowed from Budur—the large evil eye dangling from her window. The map she’d hung after an argument with her mother years ago, enormous, spanning an entire wall with blues and greens. Her old school, the chalk on her classroom floor, the market her father likes to buy melons from. She suddenly recognizes it all as lost. It is enough to make her weep, and she walks to them, wishing to tell Elie, praying that he will be kind.

  “Souad!” Albert says, and voices tangle in greeting. Souad keeps her eyes on Elie, watching him as he turns. She sees the truth assemble itself on his face. And she knows: He meant it. He meant what he said last night, and he means it still.

  “Do you see this bullshit?” Sami asks her.

  “It’s awful,” she says, trying to keep the joy out of her voice. He meant it, he meant it.

  There are murmurs of assent, and Souad walks to Elie’s side. A horrible thought crosses her mind, a doubt—that he would never have asked if Saddam hadn’t invaded—and she is briefly, disgustingly, grateful for the flames on the television. She shakes her head to banish the thought.

  “You came.” His voice is low, full.

  “They’ve burned everything.”

  “I know.”

  Souad watches the news, a pretty reporter speaking, though the sound is muted. Behind Elie and Souad, people are having lively conversations in French. They wouldn’t be able to find Kuwait on a map.

  She orders a whiskey sour, eats the cherry first. The alcohol is harsh on her tongue, but she drinks gratefully. She and Elie talk carefully, predictably, about other things. The airport closing, his father going to Lebanon.

  “And you?” she asks, her heart filling with the question. She is afraid, suddenly, of saying yes or no.

  “Fuck Beirut,” he says, a glimmer of his old self showing. “I keep telling them. Makes no sense, trading one war for another. My aunts say the mountains are fine. But Jesus—a village life? Sheep and chamomile tea every morning? Non, merci.” He squints his eyes at the television in a gesture Souad recognizes as studiously casual. “Your mama still going to Amman? Did you talk to her?”

  “I missed her call,” Souad says, her mouth dry. This is it; they are coming to the heart of it. “But it’s still Amman. Amman for everyone.”

  She holds her breath as Elie swallows his beer, turns finally to her. His eyes fill with recognition, then transform entirely. Gentling, dark and warm. He looks luminous.

  “Hey,” he says.

  Souad turns. Fucking Séraphine. She is a childhood friend of Elie’s from the summers he spent in Paris. She stands, a shot glass in each hand. A blue scarf is twisted attractively around her torso, slithers of pale skin showing. Tassels fall against her hips. Eyes like a cat’s, bottle green. Her nose tiny and sloping, a smattering of freckles across her cheeks. Over the weeks, Séraphine appeared at various parties and bars; Souad befriended her with the wariness of one who wishes to keep a threat close.

  Okay, boys, okay, one at a time, Séraphine will say at last call when the Chat Rouge men clamor to buy her another drink. She seems to pick favorites arbitrarily. Sometimes Sami, one of the Libanais visiting from Kuwait; sometimes Émile, a thin bearded Parisian. A slew of other artistic, handsome men. On any given night, she focuses almost exclusively on one man, often letting him kiss her before reapplying her lipstick right at the table, with everyone watching her.

  “Whiskey,” Séraphine says now. “For this shitty night.”

  She sets down one for Souad and one for herself, and Souad lifts hers. They clink glasses. Souad swallows, welcoming the fire in her throat.

  “Assieds.” Elie stands, and Séraphine smiles at him, taking his chair. Now she and Souad are next to each other, one of her tassels against Souad’s thigh.

  Séraphine clicks her tongue. “Horrible, c’est incroyable, ce qu’ils ont fait.” She glances at Souad, switches to English. “He is a terrible man, Saddam.”

  Rage inexplicably bubbles within Souad. How dare she, this tiny exquisite thing, click her tongue and look sad? Séraphine’s face is grave, her eyes on the television, on images of troops barricading the city. Souad wants to shake her. How dare she gaze mournfully at the screen?

  You can’t leave me, she’d told Karam yesterday, her voice breaking. You can’t.

  Sousi. You can’t imagine what it’s like here. Everything’s gone.

  “They’ve burned everything” is all Souad says now,
repeating herself, and the other woman hugs her, abruptly, enveloping Souad in the scent of something spicy, like cinnamon or pepper.

  One news report replaces another. The volume remains muted while French-language updates about the invasion travel across the bottom of the screen. As the rest of them watch, Souad looks around at the faces of the Libanais. She remembers her bitterness toward Séraphine and feels ashamed, small. Sami, she knows, went to college on a scholarship; his family lives in a small house in the city’s center. They would have no money to leave. Marcel’s brother worked with the royal family—no one has heard from him since the day before yesterday. Missing, assumed dead; Souad remembers the phrase from history class, the line that emerges during any catastrophe. She says, again, a quick prayer for her family, her friends, her aunt Widad, Budur, all those still alive.

  Everyone talks of news back home, stories of their families, the people they know in Kuwait. The French, Émile and Séraphine, remain respectfully silent, listening.

  “I heard they’re looting the hotels.”

  “They’re saying the soldiers barricaded the roads.”

  “My sister can’t get out. They’ve shut down the electricity.”

  “The water too. He’s making the sick die of thirst in the hospitals.”

  “And in the outskirts? They’re going to start eating sand out there.”

  “America will come in.”

  “Fuck America. It’s because of America that son of a cunt has power.”

  The voices swirl and become louder, people arguing, their eyes never leaving the television. Ivan pours them shots of vodka, refusing to take their coins. Souad wonders what the other patrons must think of them, with their raised voices and Arabic.