by Hala Alyan
In the evenings, Riham gathered with her parents and Latif, watching news reports. Abdullah usually fell asleep with his head in her lap. Latif began speaking about the influx of refugees, how the hospital was swamped.
“People are rotting waiting around for antibiotics,” he’d say. “Something needs to be done.” Riham watched his jaw clench and knew something was coming.
In the end, how could she not love him for it? For his generosity, for his power, this man who put his hands on others and healed them. These refugees entered their lives abruptly, bringing lice and night terrors, the endless smell of antiseptic soap and Dettol. They slept in the Fixture, where Riham unrolled carpets and laid out clean sheets. She made pots of stew. How could she begrudge them—with their open mouths and ashamed eyes—Latif?
She couldn’t.
(But the truth is that she begrudged them anyway. They reminded her of the black splotch on her soul that she’d glimpsed that day—years and years ago—in the water, the ways in which she was impure. She has been scrubbing, after all. Every day since.)
She tried to treat them all the same, not to get too involved in their stories, instead playing the role of young wife, slicing bread and cutting tomatoes. But occasionally one of the women would insist on helping her in the kitchen, would speak of cities left behind. At the time, the refugees seemed endless, though there was a lull after the Iraq war, for a while. But every year or so, another conflict erupted, and they’d appear at the door, with different dialects and darker skin. Anytime Jordan opened its doors, Latif opened theirs.
So intently was Riham scrubbing blemishes from her soul that it seemed the refugees affected only her and Latif. Only now, in the past year, has her memory shifted, her mind’s eye fracturing and refocusing on the invisible character, the overlooked.
Abdullah.
There he is, in her revisited memories, in every single scene. The refugees given soup, Abdullah in the kitchen, doing his homework. News reports raging on the television, Abdullah watching. Midnight cries from the Fixture as Latif cleaned wounds, Abdullah in his bed, awake. And the children, the grimy children, Abdullah playing with them in the garden, sharing his toys. At the time, Riham barely noticed it, feeling only a fleeting pride in him.
But now she sees it all. Abdullah’s questions as he watched the refugees: Why are they hungry? he’d ask. Why is God making them hungry?
Why did he have a pillow while they did not? Why would a soldier stab a child?
It started off as ordinary, a little boy fretting. Abdullah asked only Riham, who’d become Mama, soothing him when he woke from nightmares. She didn’t tell Latif; it never occurred to her there was something bigger, that Abdullah would put things together, connect dots to form a chilling picture. The anger came later.
Farida’s house is impressive. The furniture is gilded, and the rooms are filled with imposing, untouchable antiques. Whenever she hosts, her two Filipino maids cover the table with food, grape leaves stuffed with meat and nuts, pastries, three different types of kanafeh. Today, there is a platter of watermelon, sliced into triangles.
“The last of the season,” Farida says, handing them plates. “Enjoy, enjoy.” Farida, like her house, is assiduously regal, her hair pulled back to showcase a long, lean neck. Twice a year she goes to Paris, returning with trinkets for the women, perfumes or ribboned macarons.
Most of the women are doctor’s wives, their friendships forged from necessity, and their solidarity is comforting to Riham. She had few friends growing up, and these gatherings remain a novelty, even after a decade. Some of them met their husbands while volunteering at hospitals, as Riham had. Others, like Hanadi and Lujain, had been nurses themselves before they got married and had children, though these former lives are rarely mentioned.
“This breeze is divine,” Lujain says, nodding toward the open balcony doors. “What a summer.”
“They’re saying it’s going to be a brutal winter.”
“Good, after all that heat.”
“You won’t be saying that after the first snow.”
There is laughter, and the women fill their plates with fruit and sweets. Of them, Riham is the youngest and most devout, the only one veiled. Riham sometimes gets the feeling they view her as a child.
“Did you hear the news last night?”
“Let them rot,” Hanadi says. She pops a grape into her mouth. “To the gallows, I say.”
“What about the women? The children? Not everyone’s a militant.”
Over the years, the conversation has evolved. There was a time, eight, nine years ago, when it revolved solely around the children—diapers and breastfeeding, concoctions of peppermint and olive oil for teething toddlers. Nothing was taboo, and in this way their meetings became sacred. They spoke of cracked, bleeding nipples, of the slackness between their legs after childbirth.
The women would ask her about Abdullah, inviting her in as a mother. Tell us about his grades, they’d say, or What do you do when he won’t eat? In this way they were kind to her.
But the sting of it—no children of her own, Latif surprisingly unwilling to budge on the matter, saying he was too old—never left her. So the recent years have come as a relief. No more is the talk of pregnancy and toddlers, but rather the tribulations of adolescence. It is a different generation, they comfort one another.
“I find brochures,” Yusra says. Riham turns to her attentively. “In Samer’s jackets.”
“PLO?” Hanadi asks.
Yusra shakes her head. “Something else. An Islamic group.”
“Those dogs,” Shahd says. “Going straight for the young ones.”
“What is the draw, I wonder.” Farida purses her lips. “How do good boys get caught up in it?”
“The money.”
“Or maybe the community. There’s that comradeship.”
“It makes them feel like giants,” Riham says slowly. The women nod. The maids circle the room, pouring fresh tea in cups. The women fall silent, contemplating.
“Sons,” Hanadi says. A birdlike woman, she has three of them. “Trouble, trouble, nothing but trouble. You spend your life trying to protect them from everything—fights, women, now political parties.” She shrugs. “And then they grow up and leave you anyway.”
“Nothing’s more difficult than sons,” Lujain agrees.
Farida lets out an elegant snort. “Please. At least sons are predictable. These days, the girls are wilder than the boys.”
The women murmur assent and the talk turns to friends of friends, second cousins, girls led astray. The stories always involve a girl from a good home and some bad influence—a boy or a wayward classmate. So short, they commiserate, is the fall from grace to liquor and cigarettes and sex.
“And after what happened to Maysam!” Farida tsks. “Her Farah went to visit family in Beirut for a week, a week, and now she says the girl is impossible. Going out at all hours, rolling her jeans up. Just last week Maysam came home to find Farah had cut off her hair by herself.”
“No!” Lujain cries out. “Those beautiful curls.”
“The girl said she wanted to be like Britney Spears. I mean, really, these girls are disasters.”
“I say let Farah do whatever she wants with her hair,” Hanadi says, “as long as she keeps her legs crossed.”
“Hanadi!”
“What? Come on, let’s not act like fools. You know what happened to Jehan’s daughter. Nisrine.” The women grow somber, thinking of how the girl had looked wan amid rumors of pregnancy, the family abruptly moving to England. “The truth is these girls aren’t just bobbing their hair and wearing skirts. They’re giving themselves up.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Times are just so different.”
Riham thinks of her sister. She wonders whether Souad was a virgin before she married, if she’d saved herself for the wedding.
“What frightens me is the secrets children keep.”
“I just thank God my Hania isn’
t like that,” Farida says. “A good girl, well behaved.”
The women agree, but Riham remembers the last time she saw Hania, her nails painted a too-bright red. Not that she’d ever say that aloud to Farida.
Is this what happens with her and Abdullah? she wonders. A denial of what is apparent to others? Does love cloud the picture, give us blind spots? Though she is able to see more clearly than Latif. Perhaps that is the advantage of being the substitute mother, one step removed. She can see things Latif cannot.
The driveway is empty when she returns, Latif and Abdullah still not home. The house smells of eggplant and meat. Rosie is stirring something when Riham enters the kitchen. On the counter, there is a plate of eggplant slices. She lifts one with her fingers. It is perfectly fried.
“Wonderful,” she says. Rosie nods without lifting her eyes from the bowl.
The muezzin rings out for prayer. Riham does wudu quickly, knowing that Abdullah and Latif will be home any moment. As she prays, the women’s words echo in her mind. She shuts her eyes and, seeing Abdullah’s face, makes a decision.
Without finishing her prayer, she rises. She moves down the hall, past Latif’s study, to Abdullah’s room. The evil eye amulet hanging from the door stares at her accusingly. After a second, she pushes the door open.
She can feel the guilt pulse with each heartbeat. It is a bad habit of hers, vestigial from Abdullah’s youth, when she’d rustle through his drawers, searching for—what? She didn’t know exactly. Evidence, warnings.
Abdullah’s is one of the original rooms of the house. When he got older, they asked if he would prefer a different room, but he demurred, saying he liked the view: trees that bloomed with orange blossoms every April. Riham steps into the room gingerly, as though he is hiding in the closet, furious.
In the boy’s childhood, his room was filled with rows of action figures, toys lined up with military precision. Now the toys are gone, as are the mystery novels he used to love, the schoolbooks. Several versions of the Qur’an appear on his shelves, and books with long titles about divinity and the Prophet, as well as history books and textbooks for the University of Jordan, where he enrolled last month.
One book catches her eye—the blue spine of An Encyclopedia of Insects, which she gave him when he was twelve. He’d been stung by a wasp and became obsessed with them, as well as spiders and ants and scorpions, constantly asking her: “What do they eat?” “When they poison you, where does the poison go?” “Do they dream?” She finally bought the book and he read aloud passages for months.
It warms her heart to see the book still there. She always scans the shelves for it. What she’ll do when it vanishes—discarded like the others—she doesn’t know.
There is a stack of pamphlets on the bedside table, the outline of a minaret and below, in calligraphy, How do you serve Allah? What is he doing with so many of these, dozens of them? Riham answers her own question: distributing.
She flips through the pamphlet; well-worn, tiresome paragraphs about the lost ways of the world, the golden days, returning to Islam in its pure form—Shari’a, Riham thinks—the evils of the West defiling their youth.
She sits down and reads on, engrossed in spite of herself. She agrees with some of the points—religion has become a side note, an afterthought, people are far too entangled with material things. But, she thinks, it is cowardly to coax rage, to turn to condemnation. Prayer is as good as bread, as simple as the dirt she turns over for seedlings. It was what her grandmother used to say in her garden: Allah is in the stem, in my fingers, in the water, and in the drought. Meaning good and bad. Meaning it was too intricate to be whittled down to something one could point at. This was the aversion Riham felt toward those shrewd, bearded men on television—they spoke of the greatness of Allah, of servitude and humility, but they were cloaked in fury, preoccupied with it. They were simply angry.
And it was too easy to blame the West—though certainly their music was all cursing and their films just one nude woman after the other—or greed. That becomes convenient, Riham thinks, just an excuse for bad behavior. There were kings who, five times a day, removed their jewels and silks and knelt, silent and humble, to pray.
Isn’t that what she does? Each day she cleanses and bows, revealing herself, utterly, for Allah. Or perhaps this is what makes her uncomfortable; the pamphlets seem like an attack on her, on Latif, their material comforts and trips to Beirut, the air-conditioned house. But we’re grateful, Riham argues with an invisible jury, so grateful, though she feels herself sometimes clutch this gratitude as if it might prevent it all from being taken away.
She is jolted by the sound of tires on gravel and drops the pamphlet. Outside, the noise of Latif’s footsteps, the door opening, and she rises, following the sounds, his voice, deep and known, calling her name.
He is sitting on the sofa with a newspaper. When he catches sight of Riham, his face creases. He is getting old, she knows, his hair already entirely white. With each passing year, he loses a sliver of his former self, the olive-skinned doctor that she first met. His age is showing and will continue to. The spots freckling the backs of his hands and feet will spread, the veins will get more spidery. Rather than being repulsed, Riham is comforted by his fading looks; this makes him fully hers. It makes her own flaws—the hips, the smattering of acne on her shoulders—more forgivable.
“How’s the to-do list today?” he asks, grinning.
“Crossed off every one,” she reports.
“Bravo. And Farida? How were the madames?”
“Good; they asked about you.”
Latif folds the page back. “They’ve arrested a dozen more in Ramallah.”
“Mama and Baba will be here in a bit. Rosie’s making maqlouba. Another scandal arose.”
“Let me guess.” Latif smiles. “Souad.”
“Karam.” Latif glances up in surprise. “I know,” she says. “Poor boy. He can’t come because Budur has exams, not till the summer. But you know Mama. She’s furious, she’s saying they’re selfish, that no one considers her.”
“Mmm.” He shrugs. “A bit right this time, no?”
Riham feels a ripple of defensiveness. “But she’s not being realistic. They’re busy, Budur’s about to graduate—”
“So let him come with Linah.”
Riham sighs. “You sound like Mama. Please, when she brings it up, just don’t say anything.”
“You know I never do.”
“Where’s Abdullah?” she asks timidly. How infrequently they speak of their son, she realizes.
His brows draw. “I don’t know, perhaps class—” There is the sound of the front door opening and shutting, footsteps.
They look at each other for a second. “There he is.” Relief flickers in Latif’s eyes, and she lets out the breath that she holds whenever the boy is out of their sight.
They make an almost normal tableau, Riham thinks. A small family in the kitchen: mother, father, son. Father reading the newspaper, son sitting in silence, and mother—mother placing olives, nuts, dried apricots in porcelain bowls near the sink, the setting sun making the plants on the windowsill glow emerald. Stealing furtive glances at the two men behind her, identical in their reticence.
It is almost seven. Her parents will arrive any minute. She can practically taste the chill in the room, yearns for Rosie to return to the kitchen, fill it with her uninterested energy. Abdullah sits two chairs from his father. He has lit a cigarette, and the kitchen is filled with the smell of smoke. He looks like a surly prince from a former era, the beard stark on his young, delicate face.
Riham pictures the pamphlets in his bedroom, that sinister minaret. He’s angry with his parents, with everything. Angry in a way that frightens her.
“How were classes?” Latif asks, folding the newspaper away. His voice is gruff.
Abdullah keeps his eyes down. He lifts a shoulder.
“Are you learning anything interesting?”
There is a silence, then Abdullah�
��s voice. “No.”
Latif looks at Riham. He shakes his head.
“I’m going to clean up,” he says, defeated. “They’ll be here soon.” He leaves the kitchen. Riham returns to her work, a quickly moving shape catching her eye on the windowsill.
“Oh!” She draws a sharp breath. “Oh!” She sees Abdullah tense. “Come, Aboudi, come see.” What frightened her, she sees, is on the other side of the glass. A beetle. Horns, shiny black shell, a grotesque mouth.
Abdullah walks to her. They watch the insect pause, then turn and scuttle the opposite way, its body surprisingly agile.
“The khapra beetle,” Abdullah says. The encyclopedia. Riham is silent with hope.
“You always knew them so well,” she tells him. A smile glimmers beneath his beard.
“It’s easy,” he says. “You just learn the armor.” He filches an olive from the bowl, pops it in his mouth.
“Hey!” She slaps his wrist and they smile at each other, shyly. It is like learning music, she thinks, getting him to come to her. Trying not to startle a wary creature. Thoughts swarm her mind, all the things she might say right now, to bring him back.
She follows his eyes past the window, to the garden, to the Fixture. They both watch it for a moment.
“Your father was saying we might put a greenhouse out there,” she says.
“It’s strange.” His voice is boyish. Soft for the first time in months. “Isn’t it?”
And she knows exactly what he means. At last. They were joined in this, after all, weren’t they, in the aftermath of strangers’ lives, the detritus that Latif brought to them. It emboldens her, to see something Abdullah does.