by Hala Alyan
“I don’t understand you children!” Riham heard her shout over the phone. “There’s a war, and suddenly everyone has to get married? Look at Souad! Look at your sister, Karam. She’s raising an infant in an attic. Is that the life you want for yourself? What did we send you across the world for? God, at least if you married an American, you’d get the passport.”
It was the greatest insult. Only Karam’s love for his mother kept him from responding. He politely got off the phone and did not speak to her again for a month.
Riham makes a mental note to call him tonight or tomorrow. Their telephone conversations are always brief, Riham muttering platitudes about faith, coming off as vacuous and dowdy. She feels dwarfed near her brother and sister, small and pudgy and boring, even though they are kind to her, as one is to the slow or elderly. She knows her life is dull to them. She sees her life, sometimes, the way an eagle would, circling overhead—herself a tiny dot, moving predictably, making to-do lists, laughing, pouring cups of tea.
“Can you imagine,” Riham once overheard Souad saying to Karam, “that sort of life? The doctor’s wife. Spending your days doing laundry and cooking.” She sighed. “I’d kill myself.”
Karam and Souad, by contrast, are their own worlds. Cavernous, chaotic, beautiful. All she knows of her siblings are her memories of them as children and then, abruptly, snapshots of adults whom she sees every couple of years. Listening to conversation between those two—living minutes apart in Boston, sharing their lives and children—is like listening to a foreign language. When they attempt to include Riham—explaining their work or the city, with its college bars and bookstores—it feels wooden, forced, like they’re trying to help her understand something she simply cannot.
Connecting with the children is easier. Manar and Zain and Linah. Like a charm said thrice over, darlings, all of them, with olive skin and unruly hair. They look like siblings. Riham sees the children in snapshots as well, as infants, then chubby toddlers, then young children. They love her guilelessly, wholly. She holds for them the allure of the exotic; she’s the aunt whose veil they can unfasten to play with her long hair, the aunt who feeds them zaatar, takes them through her garden as though it is a magical land.
With them she is transformed, buoyant, playing with dolls and singing aloud, all of it threaded with jealousy, reaching for the children with a longing closer to hunger than love.
After a while, her father rises. “Don’t forget the pruning. And water them a little more.”
“And tonight?”
He sighs. “We’ll come. She may be a bit much to handle.”
“I’ll make maqlouba.”
“Ah!” Her father laughs. “That might do it.”
She watches him walk, his shoulders thin against the linen of his shirt. “Wait!” she calls out, remembering. “Abdullah. Did you speak with him?”
Her father pauses. “I did,” he says. He seems reluctant to say more.
“And?”
Atef runs a hand through his silver hair, a nervous habit all three children inherited. “The boy is lost, Riham.”
“Did you ask him about the men?”
“He says they’re just friends. That he met them at university. When I pushed, he admitted they were political. That’s who he’s been spending his time with.”
Riham had asked her father to speak with Abdullah. The boy has been staying out late the past couple of months, since he began university. Another mother might suspect girls. But several times, she has glimpsed older men dropping him off at the house, found political pamphlets in his clothing. With Latif’s father dead and his mother’s family in Syria, the boy’s only grandparents were Atef and Alia, who—after their initial bewilderment with Riham’s marriage—loved Abdullah fiercely. But it was Atef the boy seemed most connected to, becoming attached to the man who was around while his father worked endless hours. They walked to the library together, went to Petra. Riham knew it was unfair, asking Atef to speak with Abdullah, taking advantage of the boy’s love and respect for her father. But she was afraid.
“Why is he doing this?” she wonders aloud. “What does he need that we don’t give him?”
“It’s not that simple.” Her father looks pained. “Those sorts of men, those meetings, they give you something that can’t be replicated.”
“So what can I do? I worry about him. Latif worries about him.”
“There’s nothing to do, Riham. He has to learn on his own.” He starts to walk, then pauses. “Those gatherings, they make boys feel like giants.”
She remains in the garden for a while, thinking about Abdullah. When she goes back inside, she crosses chicken off her list and writes maqlouba.
“We’ll need to soak the rice,” she tells Rosie in the kitchen. “And defrost the lamb.”
Rosie raises her thin eyebrows. “No chicken?”
“Maqlouba. Mama’s coming tonight.” Rosie shrugs, not particularly interested. Riham likes her indifference. She finds it liberating, a relief from the false cheer and formality of previous maids.
“Please make sure the meat isn’t overcooked. I’m going to Madame Farida’s house in a bit but will be back in time.”
Riham gathers the soft nest of yarn and needles from the basket in the living room. Knitting calms her, reminding her of her grandmother. She turns the television to a popular Turkish soap opera, the voices dubbed in Arabic. While she knits, Riham shakes her head and talks back to the characters.
“He’s going to leave you,” she says to the starlet, blond and slate-eyed. “He’s in love with your sister. He’s just after your inheritance.”
But still the starlet rushes forward, gasping at the crimson flowers, saying yes when he pulls out a ring. The camera zooms in on the ring, alive with sinister sparkle. I’ll love you until the sky is no more.
“Stupid,” Riham says to the screen. “Stupid, stupid girl.”
The air fills with the muezzin’s call for prayer. Three o’clock. If she keeps dawdling, she will be late for Farida’s lunch. Riham winds the leftover yarn, clicks the needles together. On the way to her bedroom, she passes the framed photographs lining the hallway. Her family, in various poses of smiling and laughter. Souad with an infant Manar; Karam and Budur on their wedding day; Latif and Abdullah on the beach.
She performs wudu instinctively, done thousands of times, her hands moving of their own accord, splashing the cool water over her wrists, her ankles. Her lips move soundlessly with prayer. She cups the water, smoothes it over her face, behind her ears.
When her grandmother taught Riham to pray years ago, Riham asked her about this part, the ears. It struck her as silly, detracting from the gravitas of the ritual. It was because people rarely washed there, Salma had said. It’s easy to overlook. Through some network of synapses and cells—once, Latif explained to her how memories formed, the elegant cells shaking with potentiation, synapses in the curved temporal lobe hooking onto one another—it is this memory that has taken hold, latched onto the very act of touching water behind her ears, and she remembers her grandmother, briefly, each time.
As Riham stands over the prayer rug, the curtains in her room drawn—she prefers to pray in dim light—she begins the task of trying to keep her mind pure and focused. Every prayer, it is a struggle. Oftentimes, her mind returns to a single image: her struggling body in the water decades ago, the black splotch she saw in herself. “La ilaha illa Allah,” she begins, the words effortless off her tongue, just as her grandmother taught her.
Her mind skims between her grandmother and her son, Abdullah’s face drifting in her mind’s eye, his stiff back at the dinner table. She prays as snippets of memories drift across the backs of her eyelids like snow. An image of the dishdasha tossed on the couch. Abdullah’s beard, Latif’s tightened lips when his son stays out late. Her grandmother bent over a coffee cup, reading the dregs. She would do it only for guests, refused to do it for Riham and Souad, though they would beg her during the summers.
“
As-salamu alaikum wa rahmatu Allah,” Riham murmurs first to her right shoulder, then to her left. “Ameen.” She slackens her body. She recites the names of everyone in her family, asking Allah to bless them, as always.
“. . . Karam, bless him. Linah, bless her. Mama, bless her. Latif, bless him.” She finishes and rises, then drops back onto the rug again, aghast.
“Oh, and Souad, Souad, bless her.”
She is stepping into her shoes when the telephone rings. She hears Rosie pick up, speak inaudibly, then a pause.
“Madame!”
“Yes, Rosie.”
“It’s Madame Alia. She says to talk.”
Riham sighs, eyeing the front door. “Okay.” She walks to the kitchen and takes the cordless phone from Rosie. “Mama?”
“That girl is ruining your brother.”
Riham rolls her eyes upward, berating herself for taking the call. “I’m pretty sure you said the exact same thing about the American girl he dated.”
Her mother sniffs. “That was different. That girl had an excuse—she was raised American, mannerless, no culture. She couldn’t help herself.”
“Mama—”
“But Budur,” her mother continues, undaunted, “why, we practically raised that girl! She was with us most of her childhood. Good parents, good upbringing. That whole mess with the first husband, I’ll grant you, wasn’t pretty, but these things happen. But what—”
“He was terrible to her.”
“—what I don’t understand is why on earth she would start putting on these airs. Going for her undergraduate degree, wonderful. I’m happy about that. You know I’ve always supported women getting an education. I pushed you and pushed you. And Souad! I was devastated when she had Manar instead of going to college and so happy when she finally got her degree—”
“You called her pretentious, Mama.”
“Well, art is pretentious. But Budur, she took her courses, she got her education. She has a small child, for God’s sake. Even the master’s, I can understand. But in literature! And now, it’s taking away from her family, depriving Linah’s grandparents of seeing her.”
“Baba says they’re coming in the summer.”
“I knew it! You and your father have been gossiping about me,” her mother accuses. “This always happens. You sit in that garden and talk about me, like I’m some pariah.”
Riham sighs. “Mama, you know that’s not true. He was just telling me the news. We’re all disappointed about it.”
“Good. If you’re so disappointed, you’ll call your brother. Tell him this is unacceptable. Talk to Budur if you have to. Tell them they simply have to come.”
The thought of Riham issuing commands to her brother makes her smile. She softens her voice, uses the one she reserves for her mother. “Okay, Mama. I’ll see what I can do.”
“You’re the only good one, dear. The only one that listens. Allah give you grace.” Even though she knows her mother is mercurial, that Riham is praised only because she never talks back, she cannot help but feel a small glow at her mother’s words.
“I’m worried about Abdullah,” she says impulsively.
Her mother snorts. “Finally. It only took you and Latif a year to catch on. I’ve been telling you since that boy turned sixteen, something’s off. He’s too easily taken in. I talked and talked, and no one listened. You see? Maybe if you and your father spent less time gossiping and more time listening, the boy wouldn’t be in trouble now. And Latif’s no help. A good man, yes, but too quiet. A father needs to speak up, needs to take charge. Not like your father, mind you. I had to be the father for you three. We let you kids run wild with your American cartoons, playing, and reading novels. We let you all become soft.”
Riham sighs. “Mama, I have to go.”
The last time Souad and Karam visited, they both seemed taken aback by the change in Abdullah. “It’s like he’s a jihadi,” Riham overheard Souad joke to Karam once. The evening of their final dinner, they sat in Riham’s garden, swatting mosquitoes and eating watermelon. The conversation drifted, predictably, to politics.
“The Americans and their missiles,” Atef had said to Karam. “Can you please tell your boy Clinton to take it down a notch?” It was an inside joke, Karam’s fondness for Clinton.
“Tell your fundamentalists to stop first,” Karam countered. The conversation turned to Monica Lewinsky, then the situation in Palestine.
“They’re saying it’s getting worse.”
“The Intifada didn’t stop the settlers.”
Abdullah spoke suddenly, with violence. “You’re all wrong.”
“What do you mean, son?” Latif asked gently.
“All of this, all of you, this joke of a conversation. A group of middle-class Arabs, most of them more American than Arab”—here he looked pointedly at Souad and at the tank top that showed the tops of her breasts—“from the comfort of a mansion, speaking about the plight of the poverty-stricken. As if any of you have stepped foot in a refugee camp. You barely speak Arabic with your children.” Again a glance toward Souad, Budur, Karam. “You’re fair-weather Arabs, all of you.”
“He’s got a point!” Karam tried for a joke. “We’re addicted to American television, that’s true, but I don’t think it’s a crime.” Uncertain laughter rippled. Riham caught Latif’s eye; he looked away.
Abdullah turned to Karam. “Do you know the words to the Fatiha?”
“Abdullah!” Both she and Latif spoke at the same time.
“What? Is it wrong of me to ask? To be concerned about the spiritual fate of those around me? My family?” The word dripped from his tongue. “If I don’t speak, no one will. This is exactly the problem. Arabs go over to the West, fall in love with their fake gods, their starlets and music stars, drink their poisoned water—”
“We have a Brita,” Souad muttered.
“It’s disgusting.” Abdullah ignored Souad. “We lose our culture. We sell our souls. Instead of getting fat off of their land, we should be fighting them, arming to the teeth. We should be returning to Allah. The people who are going to save us, they aren’t those spineless politicians. It’s the men inside the mosques.”
Abdullah sat back in his chair, looking satisfied. He lifted his teacup and slurped. Silence.
“If you think that, you’re a fool.” Alia’s voice rose, sharp. Riham was shocked by the ferocity in her voice.
“Mama—”
“Those men hand out lines like candy; they’re trying to brainwash our boys.”
“Mama—”
“No, no. You listen to me, boy.” Abdullah lifted his eyes reluctantly to meet Alia’s. “You listen to me. What those men are trying to do, what they’re trying to sell you, this idea that you’re lost and they’re saviors and the rest of the world is evil, that what you need is to bow and surrender and fight, they’ve been doing that for decades. You think you’re their first one? They’ll pick up anyone hungry enough to listen. So don’t sit there thinking you’re special. Don’t sit there thinking you have some great secret. We’re all a mess. Iraq’s a mess, Lebanon’s a mess, don’t even get me started on Palestine. But if you think those hypocrites are going to save anything, those liars wearing God like some gold to attract boys . . . well, then you’re an idiot.”
No one spoke. Latif eventually cleared his throat, asked about Boston, and Souad answered with visible relief, told him of the children’s school. Rosie brought out coffee, and everyone spoke of other things. Abdullah remained silent, ashing his cigarette into the wildflowers, though they’d asked him dozens of times not to.
Riham didn’t say anything. She watched her mother. She remembered her uncle, dead for decades now. Riham remembered how, when she was a girl, she would listen for mentions of him, would look at photographs of the wickedly handsome man smiling in the sun. She fell in love with him, in a way. She would wonder about his voice, if he’d ever loved anyone, what songs he’d sung when he was happy.
Abdullah was five when she wed Latif.
Latif had spoken about him matter-of-factly, telling her about his son just as he’d told her about the house that waited for her in Amman. At the time, everyone thought her mad.
“But he’s so old. And with a son . . .” her childhood friends would say, trailing off uncertainly. Her father suggested that she might wait before deciding. Souad was most direct, telling her she was making a mistake.
“You can’t just enter a child’s life and pretend you’re his mother.”
But they had been wrong. For years and years, they were wrong. Within a few months in Amman, Riham learned tidbits about the woman before her, Abdullah’s mother, dead for most of the child’s life. Whatever memories he had of her must have been dim and few. Somehow, the fact that she wasn’t Abdullah’s biological mother didn’t dampen her love for him. It made it fiercer. As he grew, she’d look at him sometimes, watch his dark head bent over the dining table, and her chest would fill with love. Latif worked constantly; the boy had been raised by a string of maids. No father, no mother. He was hers, hers alone.
She fretted, as Abdullah grew older, about what she wanted for him. More and more, it seemed like the fate of mothers was to lose their children to other cities, to London or Istanbul or Los Angeles. She spent years worrying that she would lose him to the place she’d lost her siblings, to America, that he would grow up without Allah.
She needn’t have worried about Abdullah leaving. She should have worried about what was happening right in front of their faces. The Fixture, the mangled bodies.
It was 1991. The Gulf War had ended, and Riham was always afraid. Every night she dreamed of islands, something shining—necessary, imperative for her to reach—across the water. The world, as she knew it, was over. So much of her parents’ money was lost, the Iraqi forces shutting the banks down. They used the inheritance that Salma had left behind, selling her apartment and buying a small house in Amman, filling it with new furniture, carpets, teapots. Karam was in America, speaking of snow and highways over the staticky telephone line. And Souad had taken the most bizarre turn of all, remaining in Paris, a hasty wedding, moving out of Khalto Mimi’s house and into an apartment with Elie.