Salt Houses

by Hala Alyan

  “Yes,” she hears herself whisper. “It’s like I can still hear them. I think of them all the time, Aboudi.” She is too afraid to lift her eyes or speak louder, as though he is a moth in her palm that even breath will frighten off. She inhales, takes a gamble. “I know you think you’re the only one that does, habibi. But I do too. All the time.”

  He turns to her. She meets his eyes and sees—to her surprise—fear. “No one ever talks about them. We never say anything. It’s like they were a dream, like we’re all pretending.”

  She knows Abdullah is waiting, knows Rosie will return any second and the doorbell will ring. She knows she must speak now. A memory glints in her mind, one of the refugees helping her rinse parsley years ago, over this very sink. The woman’s fingers had been dark with henna, Riham remembers. She’d spoken of her husband hanging from a tree. How strange, that Riham should remember her now. To think of this woman she’ll never see again.

  And how strange that the only person she wants to tell is Abdullah. Perhaps she will. If not now, then after dinner. Or tomorrow morning. She will tell him about the dreams she still has, how people can leave their mark even after decades. She will tell him her fear, the one she found in the water years ago.

  “Listen,” she says, and the boy looks at her, his eyes asking her to say everything.

  Souad

  * * *

  Beirut

  June 2004

  Souad stirs one spoonful of sugar into her coffee, sighs, then spoons in another. The day and its tasks loom ahead of her. She carries the mug into the dining room, where Manar and Zain sit, eating cereal at the long wooden table she purchased several weeks ago, along with beds and silverware and the azure couch. The essentials, as she keeps telling Karam. She and the children have been here for nearly a month, and the apartment still looks unlived in, the pale blue walls undecorated. Light floods through the curtainless windows.

  There is the sound of clunky footsteps and Alia appears, clicking her tongue. “I should just burn them all.”

  “The boxes?”

  “Tell me, what human being needs six astronomy maps? Six! I told him, ‘Atef, you’re not an astronaut, pick one.’ But he says he can’t decide. And then he makes me promise not to throw anything away.”

  “There’s certainly room, Mama.”

  “Room isn’t the point!” The topic of the boxes is a touchy one. She arrived in Beirut last week with seven of them, filled with old books and clutter from the Amman house. “The point is waste.”

  Manar and Zain continue eating their cereal, familiar with their grandmother’s outbursts. Alia came from Amman to help Souad and the children settle in, but mostly she just complains about Beirut and makes oblique comments about Manar and Zain’s Americanness.

  “There’s enough space,” Souad repeats. “Just put it all in the storage room. I can help you when I get back today.” On cue, Manar sets her spoon down.

  “I’m not coming,” she says. “I don’t need another capricious shopping trip.”

  Capricious. In spite of her irritation, Souad smiles at her daughter, owlish in black-framed glasses as she scowls. They weren’t able to find any of the cereals the kids ate back in Boston, and she’s been buying Rice Krispies, which Manar smothers in sugar. Watching Manar sprinkle sugar on her cereal now makes Souad feel guilty.

  “You don’t have to come,” she says now, using the cheerful tone she has adopted since their move. “You can stay here or go downstairs to Budur’s. But I promise, if you come, you can pick out anything you want for your room.”

  “Anything?” Manar’s eyes sharpen, and Souad sighs. She knows what this will mean—giraffe-print curtains, carrot-hued lampshades. At thirteen, Manar is smart and incisive and sly, the kind of girl who will suffer to make a point. The old Souad would’ve snapped at her, set out rules, but that was before, before everything, and so Souad just sips her coffee and promises:

  “Anything.”

  “Spoiled ajnabi children,” Alia grumbles in Arabic. Souad ignores her.

  “Can Linah come with us?” Zain asks.

  “Yes!” Souad tries for enthusiastic, her impression of a soccer mom. “It’ll be fun. We can go to that shawarma guy afterward, maybe get some sandwiches. Manar, we can fix your bangs.” Souad reaches out to touch them, but the girl recoils.

  “I like my hair like this.”

  “Souad,” Alia says, “those shawarma places are filthy. They use rat meat.”

  “Mama.” Souad sees Zain’s brow crease.

  “I love that shawarma place, Mama,” Zain says in a rush. “Those fries are the best.” Zain smiles, eager and shining. It breaks her heart to hear it—that tone, that enthusiasm, carefully prepared for her.

  They walk down one flight of stairs to the apartment where Karam and Budur are staying for the summer. The building is old, with a shabby but charming façade. Near the Corniche, it overlooks shops and endless, winding traffic, and it’s steps away from the American University. The apartments are full of professors and their families, most of whom have been friendly to Souad. Their two apartments, on the fifth and sixth floors, are high enough for them to glimpse the Mediterranean between telephone poles and buildings.

  “It’s a summer house,” Riham had said about the Beirut apartment when she called Souad. “I barely ever use it, Mama and Baba go for only a couple of weeks every year. It’s just sitting around, collecting dust. You’d be doing me a favor.”

  The doors to the two apartments are identical, both with intricate woodwork. Souad knocks once, twice, though she knows it is unlocked.

  Alia lets out a snort. “What is this, America?” She pushes the door open and calls out, “Karam!” Souad looks, briefly, heavenward. “Karam!” Alia strides in and the children and Souad follow her into the foyer.

  “Karam’s not here.” Budur appears, wearing her bathrobe, hair disheveled. “Morning of lovelies,” she exclaims. “Linah’s inside, habibi.” Zain darts past her, and Manar walks toward the balcony in the living room. Budur gestures for Souad and Alia to follow her into the kitchen. Where Riham’s place is painted blue, the walls in Karam and Budur’s apartment are a lush green, and they refer to the apartments as the green one and the blue one.

  “The house smells like cigarettes.”

  “I’ll tell Tika to open the windows, Auntie,” Budur says smoothly. Souad admires her equanimity, the way Budur steps deftly over conflict as she would an overturned shoe. “Tea?”

  “With sugar.” Alia sits at the kitchen table. “Souad’s glasses are filthy.”

  “They’re not.” A vessel throbs behind Souad’s left eye.

  Budur slips by Souad as she gets a mug, squeezing her arm. “Easy,” she says in a whisper. Raising her voice, she tells her, “The dress looks good, Sous.”

  Souad tugs the hem. At the store last week, Budur insisted she buy it as Souad cowered in the dressing room, aghast at her cleavage.

  “She looks like a hooker.”

  “Mama!”

  “What?” Alia shrugs innocently. “You do.”

  “I think she looks lovely. Vibrant.”

  “Vibrant.” The word is lethal in Alia’s mouth. “What divorcée wants to look vibrant?”

  Budur holds a hand up. “Please. Have you seen the women in this city?” She pours a cup of coffee for Souad. “It’s practically a niqab compared to what they wear.”

  Alia snorts. “A city of whores.” Their distaste of Lebanese women is something that unites Alia and Budur.

  “You two,” Souad says, taking the mug, “are single-handedly murdering feminism.” More caffeine can only help, she thinks.

  From somewhere farther inside the apartment, there is a crash, followed by silence, then an explosion of laughter. Budur and Souad catch each other’s eye.

  “Linah,” Budur calls out.

  Linah appears in the doorway, still in her pajamas. Nine years old, she is only months younger than Zain, though she looks much younger, petite for her age and
skinny, with hair so fine it is always slipping out of her braids and ponytails, scattering across her shoulders. Little button nose and those enormous eyes, Riham always says. Even when Linah was a baby, Souad felt drawn to her, with her tantrums, her wolfish grins, difficult but so dear, so touchable, in a way Manar—whose body went slack when held—never was.

  “What was that noise?”

  Linah hides a smile. “Nothing.” Zain appears behind her.

  “Zain, habibi, what was that noise?” Budur asks.

  Zain hesitates, looks at Linah. “We dropped a picture frame. But we’re cleaning it up.”

  Linah glares at him. “Shhhh.”

  “Good boy,” Budur says. “Linah, what did we say about lying?”

  Linah ignores her mother. “Can I have some of your coffee?” she asks Souad.

  “It’ll give you a mustache,” Souad says. She remembers that line, oft repeated by her mother and Khalto Widad in Kuwait. It used to terrify her, the idea of waking up with a bristly mustache like her father’s.

  “No, it won’t!” Fists on her hips, legs splayed out. Even Alia laughs.

  “It’s hot,” Souad says, tipping the mug carefully toward her little face. Linah purses her lips, drinks. Grimaces.

  “It tastes like dirt,” she announces.

  “The last thing that child needs is caffeine,” Alia observes.

  “Caffeine!” Linah yells. “Caffeine, caffeine, caffeine.” She jumps up and down, hopping toward her mother like a rabbit. Zain laughs, delighted at the antics of his younger cousin. Budur doesn’t yell or rebuke the girl, just shakes her head and opens her arms. She holds Linah, still hollering, between her legs and redoes her braids, the dark hair flashing quickly between her fingers. When she finishes, she lays her cheek, briefly, against the top of Linah’s head, then releases her. Linah dashes out of the room, Zain following her.

  “Get dressed,” Budur calls. “Souad wants to leave.” She looks at Souad, raising an eyebrow. “That girl is a terrible influence on Zain.”

  The building is fourteen stories high, with an apartment on each level and an ancient, wrought-iron elevator that skids between floors. In the lobby, it stops an inch higher than the floor, and Linah and Zain make a production of jumping down. Manar follows, ignoring their chatter.

  Souad’s hope is that somehow Beirut will fix whatever hungry, invisible malaise she felt in Boston after Elie left. At first she’d thought it was because she was aging, at the end of her twenties, but no, it was something larger, an epiphany at a gas station one February evening, as she stood holding the gas pump, breathing in that addictive scent, and suddenly she understood that this place was the malaise. It was in the sprawling malls, the highway lights, the tax season, suburban America itself, in whose veins she’d lived and slept and woke for years.

  Beirut called to her. She wanted somewhere new. She wanted to go home, she told Zain and Manar, though Manar just stared at her and said flatly, What home.

  Home as in somewhere familiar, somewhere people look like us, talk like us, where you guys can learn Arabic and be near your grandparents and never come home asking what raghead means.

  The route to the mall is a combination of glitzy buildings and unkempt roads. Souad had visited Beirut in previous summers, but when she and the children arrived a few weeks ago, past midnight on a Friday, it felt different. Exhausted, they’d woven through airplane lines, endured the long wait in airport control, which concluded with the security officer saying, as soon as Souad spoke Arabic, “You’re not Lebanese,” as plainly as though he were stating the sun was hot. When they finally made it to the arrivals gate, Karam was waiting. It was a striking, ethereal landscape as they drove home—the bullet-riddled buildings, glimpses of coastline, billboards whizzing by, the pictures alternating between women posing in lingerie and grave-looking men.

  It is the same here, on the road to the mall. One advertisement shows a woman holding a cigarette with the lines La belle époque est arrivé emblazoned below, while other buildings are papered with flyers of men with liquid, haunting eyes. Martyrs, she thinks.

  Of all the things in this new country—the precipitous streets, the electricity cuts, the war still etched into the city’s skin—this is what frightens her most. The men on the posters—the dead, or the ones hungry for death. Their frenetic, glassy eyes are identical to the hijackers’, whose faces are burned into her memory as though it happened yesterday, Elie coming home early, huddling in front of the television with her, both watching the ash and fire and collapsing buildings on a loop.

  Souad watched the towers fall for days. The world was addicted to watching; over and over, they were reborn, made whole and silver and resplendent, only to crumple into themselves again. Each time felt like the first time, the destruction so immense it bordered on the majestic. Souad watched the dust-fogged streets, people’s panicked faces as they shrieked for those they loved. She felt her heart move with the shaking cameras. Smoke and fire spilled from the buildings like blood from a gunshot wound, and people began to jump, their little bodies unreal as they lurched from the sky, dolls in someone’s nightmare. One newscaster played the recording of an emergency call, a woman’s voice frantic as she begged the operator for help. Souad tried to imagine what she could’ve said to this woman, what anyone could say, what the operator himself finally said. I’m sorry, oh God, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. For weeks, Souad touched her legs, ears, face, her aliveness, imagined herself in that building, looking out of a window, wondering how it felt to realize that you were dying. That you were already dead.

  Souad felt the falling of those men and women; she felt the human ache of watching that plummet. What does any of it mean, she wanted to ask, when you are a body, a body you suddenly love, a body that is tumbling through the air?

  “They’re jumping” was all she’d actually said to Elie that long-ago night, and he shook his head, his eyes red. He clutched her body to his—for weeks they were fine after that, a second honeymoon, though it proved temporary, which must’ve happened in many homes across the country—and kissed her temple, whispering something she hadn’t caught. I love you. Or Wouldn’t you?

  If we go, Souad had told her children, we’ll be free. We’ll make a new life. An old friend of hers helped her find a job at the American University, as an adjunct lecturer teaching an English introduction course to freshmen. It is a straightforward syllabus, uninspiring, with a meager salary, since she doesn’t have a doctorate—has, in fact, only a barely completed undergraduate degree in design, which she cobbled together over a string of nighttime classes and online workshops, a thankless task that took her six years—but still she is grateful.

  Sometimes she sits on the balcony floor, smoking alone, smoking not for the nicotine but for the simple pleasure of watching smoke rise into a series of helixes and curlicues in the dark. The noise downstairs, even in the middle of night, of honking cars and people arguing and laughing doesn’t bother her. Her heart rises with the sound of Arabic. If she shuts her eyes, it is as though she is sitting in the café downstairs, men having conversations around her, and she doesn’t have to speak, doesn’t have to say a single word to be with them.

  She had missed the muezzin, the food, even her own tongue faltering in Arabic. In Beirut, she has gone back to being Palestinian. To everyone from the cabdrivers to the bank tellers, her accent exposes her. It reminds her of Kuwait. As a girl, this cataloging of origins never struck her as strange; Kuwait was a place of expatriation and everyone seemed to come from somewhere else. Elie had his Lebanon, Budur her Iraq. Even if a person’s heritage was flimsy, unused for years, you were where your father was from.

  America wasn’t like that. You became what you coveted. Memories were short. She met Mexicans, Germans, Libyans, who spoke accented English but responded, From here, whenever asked. Souad became brown. People’s eyes glazed over when she tried to explain that, yes, she’d lived in Kuwait, but no, she wasn’t Kuwaiti, and no, she had never been to Palestin
e, but yes, she was Palestinian. That kind of circuitous logic had no place over there.

  After the towers fell, other passengers on the T eyed her, but living in a liberal suburb meant people were kinder about it. Tell us if you need anything, the playdate mothers would say. If anyone’s rude to you. Outside of Boston, she felt it more. During a trip to Texas once to visit a friend, she and Budur stopped at a gas station for cigarettes. Souad felt the clerks’ gaze—two young Midwestern men, eyes like icepicks—on them the entire time. One of the men flung the change at her, several coins falling to the ground. Souad’s fear was like a bell, waking her. As they were leaving, she caught the words terrorist and bitch and a burst of laughter.

  “The Undertaker is going to win.”

  “No way! He’s so weak. Triple X is going to beat him.”

  “Nuh-uh. You’ll see, he’s a loser.”

  “Only because he cheats! Remember last time, he hit Shawn Michaels with a chair and the referee didn’t see him.”

  “That referee was stupid!”

  “You’re stupid!”

  “Guys,” Souad says. The clamor in the back seat quiets, Linah and Zain continuing their argument in whispers. Souad makes out the words idiot and champion and chair several times in rapid succession. For the past year, wrestling has been Zain’s favorite thing, and since their arrival, Linah has quickly caught on. They’ve always been like this—Linah and Zain, born months apart, devoted to each other. In Boston, they grew up together, wore each other’s clothing, Linah inheriting Zain’s overalls and toys, the two of them inventing games involving pirates and robots.

  Souad arrives at an intersection, pauses at the oncoming cars. The jeep behind her honks, and the car behind that as well. The man in the jeep makes a gesture for her to drive. “Just wait,” she mutters. She inches toward the turn, then loses her nerve. “Oh, go, go,” she says, waving the driver on.