by Hala Alyan
The cashier rolls her eyes. She takes the basket from Manar and places it on the floor behind her.
“I want the frog!” Linah calls out.
Zain agrees. “Get the frog!”
“We’ll take the frog,” Souad tells the cashier.
In the car, the atmosphere is light, playful. Manar keeps her earbuds in her lap while Souad flips through the radio.
“I saw this white-and-black comforter. I was thinking I could get that,” Manar says as they drive. “Like that hotel we stayed at in Manhattan. Baba said it was modernist.”
The mention of Elie is like a tiny lash, but Souad keeps her voice steady. “That sounds beautiful. We can get a black bed frame, some sheer curtains.”
“And a rug,” Manar adds. Souad fights the impulse to kiss her daughter.
“Like a Prayer” comes on the radio and Souad puts the volume up, starts to sing. When she glances sidelong at Manar, she sees her lips are moving as well. In the back seat, Linah and Zain are dancing, bobbing their heads. Souad rolls the windows down; the warm, humid air rustles around them.
“When you call my name,” Souad yells, and the children erupt in laughter, even Manar. And her heart, her heart, rising with the sound. These are her loves. The hope returns. That treacherous hope, which rises and falls, she can taste it on her lips like salt. She will fix it. She will fix it all.
Once they’re back home, the living room is a mess within an hour, bags and bubble wrap strewn everywhere, Zain and Linah making capes of the packaging paper and running in and out of the rooms.
Souad is putting together a dish rack in the kitchen, immersed in the task of metal links clicking into place, when she hears a thud. A string of curses. She follows the sound into the storage room next to the living room.
Alia is sitting on the tiled floor, her skirt bunched up around her knees, surrounded by partly opened boxes. There is a bookshelf against one of the walls, half filled. Strands of hair curl around her face; she’s flushed and huffing. One of the boxes has tipped over, books spilling across the tiles. “I’m going to divorce your father,” she grumbles.
Souad suppresses a smile. She squats down.
“What’s in them?”
“Who knows? Useless things he collects over the years. They’re just sitting in his study in Amman. You could write in the dust. He can’t throw anything away! Look at this.” She plucks a bulky-looking book filled with loose pages from the nearest box. “A Lifecycle of Plants.” The book falls back into the box with a thump.
Souad sinks to the floor next to her mother, suddenly exhausted. Alia looks at her sharply.
“Are you sick?”
“Just tired.”
“I told you not to drink the water here.”
“Mama, I’m not sick.”
They fall silent. It occurs to Souad that she and her mother rarely sit together; one of them is always trying to get away.
“The kids got stuff from Spinneys,” she says. “We got curtains and plates and new sheets.”
“Good,” her mother says. “This needs to start feeling like their house.”
Souad thinks about her mother’s absence at her wedding, how it seemed like a bad omen, as ominous as an evil godmother’s presence at an infant’s cradle. You’re going to remember this, Alia had told her on the telephone when Souad announced her engagement. You’re going to remember this moment and wish you listened.
“They hate it here.” Souad is surprised to hear herself say this. Her throat tingles. “They miss Elie.” She suddenly feels limp.
The air is stiff between them. Alia looks intently at her lap.
“They’re children,” she mutters. “They’ll get used to it.”
Souad feels tears spring. Without looking up, her mother reaches out, fast as a rattlesnake, and takes her hand. She squeezes it, once, hard.
“You will too.”
Once everyone goes downstairs, getting ready for dinner, Souad walks out onto the balcony. The light is the color of chamomile tea, pale against the floors and walls. This is the trickiest hour for her: dusk, the sun already vanished—that halfness. It is the hour she wants to drink the most, before the dark crushes the city, her longing for a finger of vodka, that first sip like stepping into bathwater.
Enough. Enough. She steps to the balcony railing, watches the nearly vanished sun, a pool of red above the water’s horizon, the air salty and moist.
She still loves him. This is the fact she wakes up to each morning. She checks it, sometimes, a tongue probing an aching tooth, making sure it still hurts. This seems most shameful of all, that she would still love someone who didn’t love her, who had left her—sometimes that very word dazes her; she was left—in fact. But she cannot help it. She hates him and she loves him and she will never forgive him. These three verdicts line up for her like soldiers. It is her truth.
She’d never loved him more than when he’d left. Of those days after his departure, she sees only gray—that endless Bostonian winter—and evenings that seemed to last for weeks. She found herself playing old songs, songs from their days in Paris, singing along in French. In the afternoons—those dead, wasted hours, the children at school—she would flip through photographs, tracing the planes of his face. Aware, even as she did, that there was something vaguely ridiculous about the act, filched from the movies. On the rare evenings that she cooked, she made Elie’s favorite dishes and cried as the children ate.
What Souad marvels at most is the time. Squandered. The whirlwind that swept her life since she was eighteen—eighteen, that night at the fountain, and then the hasty marriage and then Manar and those years trying to be a mother, a wife—Time. That is how she thinks of it, as a person, Time, as something terrifying and tremendous. What else could account for it? How the years had spun by, the 1990s in their entirety now one big blur of Paris and Boston, of shitty neighborhoods and cheap restaurants and the kids getting colds—there were certain winters, entire winters, that were captured in her memory as the single, swift motion of swooping down with a wad of tissues and squeezing little noses, squeezing so that the snot ran green and viscous—and the fights, she and Elie yelling for hours. It was Time, whirling her along, spinning, spinning, until it finally stopped, and she looked around, blinking, and she was thirty-two.
Enough. She says it aloud, softly, to herself on the empty balcony.
“Enough.” The word is its own heartbeat.
She walks down the stairs carefully. There is a slight chill in the air. Tomorrow she will swim, she decides, before summer is over. She will wear the black bikini she bought with Budur, will stay until the sun begins to set, then eat those tiny fried fish from a restaurant along the coast.
At Budur’s apartment, she pushes open the door and steps inside, takes off her shoes and walks barefoot toward the dining room. The voices are loud, Karam saying something, Budur laughing. For a moment she pauses in the hallway, watching them—Karam and Budur, one at each end of a table covered with a cream tablecloth on which is a tray of lamb and rice. Her mother sits halfway down, flanked by Linah and Zain; Manar is on the other side, breaking a piece of bread.
Manar says something and Linah laughs, imitating the way Manar brushes her hair out of her eyes, and a smile lights Manar’s face. Souad’s heart swells with gratitude. She feels a fierce urge to tell her daughter how beautiful she is, how beautiful she will be. She takes a breath, suddenly starving for the delicious-smelling meat, and steps into the dining room. There is a clamor, faces turning toward her from the table, hands holding out plates, voices rising, telling her to take a chair, asking if she wants sugar with her tea, telling her to sit, sit and eat.
Linah
* * *
Beirut
July 2006
“We could be back in ten minutes.” On her bed, Linah stretches her leg out toward the window, toward a swath of late-afternoon sun. There is a spider climbing up the curtains. She moves her bare foot; the dust dances.
“They’ll
know.”
She sprawls on the pillow, speaking against the fabric. Her voice is muffled: “I’m going to die of boredom.”
“No one dies of boredom,” Zain answers. “It’s not like cancer.”
Linah shoots her leg out and kicks him, sharply, in the shin.
“Ow!”
“Help me,” she groans. She turns over, flinging her arms over her head. “I’m dyyyying.”
Linah waits. Finally, she sits up, frowning at Zain in her desk chair, where he’s playing a game on the computer. She scoots to the edge of the bed and peers over his shoulder. The label of his T-shirt is sticking out and he needs a haircut, his curls falling past his ears.
“So,” she says, irritated. “You’re backing out.”
“I’m not,” he says evenly. On the computer screen, he shoots a trio of zombies.
“You said you’d do it.”
“I said okay to the cigarettes.” His voice drops at the last word and they look toward the shut bedroom door, though Linah knows they shouldn’t worry about anyone walking in. The adults are always in the living room since the airport was bombed last week—huddled around the television, cursing when the electricity cuts out, taking turns running to Hawa’s for platters of greasy baked chicken, which they’ve eaten for lunch and dinner for days. “Not going to Abu Rafi’s.”
“If we take them from your mom, she’ll know it was us.”
The zombies fall to the ground, green blood oozing. Zain turns to her.
“I don’t know.”
“We haven’t left the apartments in a week. They won’t even let us walk to the dikaneh. It’s like we’re prisoners.” If her father were here, he would tell her to stop being a drama queen. But Zain just nods. “It’ll be fun. We’ll leave when everyone’s watching the news.”
Zain looks unconvinced. “I guess.”
“You promised,” she accuses him. She’d come up with the idea weeks ago, before the war started, when she saw a group of older girls leaning against the railing on the Corniche. Their long brown legs dangled as they smoked. They looked glamorous and mysterious, the smoke drifting from their lips.
“Okay, okay,” he says.
Linah recognizes Zain’s tone—he’s convinced. She leans back in bed, satisfied, the insect still scrambling up the curtain.
The last two weeks have been mind-numbing. The electricity cuts out every few hours, like it does every summer, but she and Zain can no longer wander outside, go to the video store down the street, where the AC is always on, delightfully freezing. Nor can they go to Malik’s to get ice cream, or down to the beach. The adults have even forbidden them to go onto the balcony. They still sneak out sometimes, for the breeze. When the adults are in one apartment, they migrate to the other.
Watch television, the adults keep telling them, but whenever they put in a movie—drawing all the curtains and sitting on the tiled floor, where it is coolest—they rarely get to finish it. They’ll be halfway through when the adults rampage in, ordering them to move and open the curtains, yelling at them for the crumbs on the floor. The cable has been shaky the last few days; sometimes one apartment will abruptly stop receiving a signal.
Go to the other apartment, they’ll tell them. Everyone is distracted and upset, the trashcan full of cigarette butts.
Summers aren’t supposed to be like this, Linah thinks. Summers are supposed to be about swimming at the beach, spending nights bowling and going out to dinner, staying up playing video games. And this summer, this summer was supposed to be the best, because she was finally eleven, and the adults were allowing her and Zain to go to the beach alone, without Manar there to babysit.
But now it’s ruined. The summer is just heat and mosquitoes and the bombings that sometimes make the windows shake. All the adults do is talk about evacuation and warships and explosions. They watch men yell on the television and shake their heads.
It’s been nine days. Nine days since Linah woke to Zain saying her name, his face afraid.
“Something’s wrong.”
Her first thought was the adults had found the ants that she and Zain were catching with sugar cubes inside plastic bottles.
“The ants?” she asked, sitting up.
He shook his head. “Something happened to the airport. Your mom says to get up. Everyone’s freaking out.”
The next few hours were chaos. Noises of traffic and honking below them, voices carrying from the street. The adults watched television and yelled at Linah and Zain whenever they went near a window.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen,” her mother said, her voice taut.
The day was spent in the living room of the green apartment, the adults insisting the children remain nearby. The news reports showed the same images over and over: Streaks of smoke from the airport. An old man talking about prisoners. Airplanes dropping bombs like eggs from their abdomens. Khalto Riham made plates of bread and labneh, and they ate on the couches, eyes fixed on the television. The conversation was cryptic and urgent.
“You don’t think they’ll fight back? It’ll be suicide.”
“Thank God Latif and Abdullah aren’t here.”
“And Mama and Baba! Can you imagine Mama here?”
“They should return the men.”
“I can’t believe you’d say that!”
“Without the airport, how could—”
“Hush, not in front of the children. People are driving through Syria.”
“The UN won’t let this continue.”
“When has the UN ever done anything?”
One of the men on the news wore a white robe. He had twinkling eyes and a long beard. Linah recognized him from posters near the mall. The billboards showed him speaking, his hand outstretched as though about to swat a fly, and behind him a landscape of mountains. Once, when she was at her friend Susan’s house in Boston and they were playing in the living room while her father watched the news, the bearded man came on.
Barbarians, Susan’s father had said, spitting the word from his mouth like an olive pit.
Her understanding of it all is half formed, hazy. She knows there are good guys and bad guys, like in Spider-Man movies and the Sherlock Holmes books that she and Susan swap. She has heard her parents talk about Israel and Palestine, wars and land and people dying. Linah knows that someone is wrong and this is why everything is happening—the airport burning and the men on the television, the shouts on the streets below them, the rumbles that resound every few hours when night falls, just yesterday shaking a bathroom window so hard they woke to its shattering. She is afraid that she might die but more afraid that everyone else—especially her father and Zain—will die, and then she’ll be alone, like that girl in the movie she watched a while ago who was by herself after a plane crash in the tropics.
The adults won’t elaborate. Only Khalto Riham pays any attention to them, asking if they’d like to sit with her and recite Qur’an. It is something they do with her in the summers—Linah’s earliest memory is of curling up with Zain in Riham’s bed in Amman for an afternoon nap, the air smelling of almonds and mothballs, Khalto Riham reciting the Fatiha. Even then Khalto Riham seemed separate from the other adults, as though the rest—Linah’s mother, Souad—were children. It is the reason they call her Khalto instead of her first name—it seems sacrilegious with Riham.
Several days ago, Khalto Riham found them on the green apartment’s balcony, swaying on the porch swing. Instead of scolding them, she sat down and read verses from her small, worn Qur’an.
“There’s a war,” she told them. “People are fighting, bad things are happening. People are dying. We can’t do anything but wait. And pray.”
They’d sat out there for nearly an hour, the sun setting over the water, the sounds of traffic screeching below, but Khalto Riham didn’t flinch once, her voice strong and even as she went over the suras.
“O Allah,” she said, at the very end. “Please keep these darlings safe.”
During the su
mmers, Linah plays with Zain’s friends from school, all neighborhood children: Camille, Alex, Tony. Zain has been friends with them since third grade. Before the war, the five of them would hang out on the Corniche, talking about video games and movies, as waves crashed behind them.
The connection among all of them—something Linah has suspected for a while but been unable to put into words, something she’s been understanding more and more—has a lot to do with difference. There is something about them that feels unlike the other kids, especially those back at her school in Boston. Tony spends a lot of time in trouble. Alex has a sister with Down syndrome. And Camille, who is beautiful with long blond hair, is painfully shy except in their little group, spending her time drawing seascapes in her notebooks.
They all come from elsewhere. Alex’s father is Jordanian, Tony’s is Swedish, and Camille’s mother is British. They are all mishmashed and mixed up, which draws them together, Linah sees, just like the siphonophores she studied in biology last year.
As for Linah, she feels her difference glow through, something phosphorescent beneath her skin. Weeks ago, Linah and Camille were getting ice cream at Malik’s when the most popular girl at Zain’s school, Marie, overheard Linah talking about Jbail.
“You’re not even Lebanese.” Marie’s voice rung out loud and sharp, several patrons in the store turning to stare.
Taken aback, Linah stammered through an answer. “W-we have an apartment here, we come every summer—”
The other girl’s mouth twisted meanly. “You think that matters? With your weird accent in Arabic.” A couple of girls behind her tittered. “You think your people deserve to be here? My mom told me all about them. Palestinians killed my uncle during the war.” Linah felt dozens of eyes upon her, heard whispering. Camille froze like a deer.
And Linah felt confused, was speechless, wanting to say something about how no one ever really talked about being Palestinian in her house, the same way no one talked about being Iraqi, that when either set of grandparents came over, they spoke of things like villages and bombings with a sort of mournful resignation, as though the places in question had vanished into thin air. She wanted to say something about how she’d never been to Iraq or Palestine, that she knew only Boston and Beirut, that this was her home in the summers, and Marie must be wrong, because whoever it was that killed her uncle, it wasn’t Linah’s people, whatever that meant.