by Hala Alyan
“The storage room. It’s where she puts anything she doesn’t know what to do with.”
Linah wrinkles her nose. “It stinks.”
“So hold your breath.”
She follows Zain down the hallway to the little room next to the living room. It is the size of a closet, strewn with crates and boxes and a half-filled bookshelf. The mess is glorious, sprawling across the floor like an animal whose limbs they have to step around. The room is a museum of their old lives.
“It’s like Narnia,” Linah breathes.
The sparklers are soon forgotten as the two of them dig through the boxes, finding stuffed animals and broken jump ropes, toys they couldn’t remember ever having. For the first time since the war, Linah feels buzzing, alive as she plucks through the mess. One basket is filled with old scarves of Souad’s, and Linah tries one on, tossing it over one shoulder. I’ll call you sometime, she says silently to a young man.
“My Game Boy!” Zain leans down to pick up a weathered console. An entire shoebox is devoted to old Beanie Babies, and Linah pulls the plush bodies out, the fabric smelling of dust.
The electricity comes on; the sounds of the movie float in from the living room. But neither of them move. Zain is taking books from a cardboard box.
“God, these are so old they’re falling apart. Look at this.” He lifts a purple-spined one, the cover in Arabic calligraphy. A lone page falls out and drifts to Zain’s lap.
“Do you think your mom ever comes in here?” Linah likes the image of Souad sneaking in after everyone falls asleep, lining up the Beanie Babies and wearing her colorful scarves. “To look at this stuff?”
There is no reply. When Linah turns to Zain, she sees that he is frowning down at a book in his hands. “This one has something in it,” he says.
Linah cranes her neck. The cover of the book is a dull brown, an image of a plant turning toward a painted sun. From inside the cover, Zain pulls out a bundle held together with an old, tawny rubber band. They both huddle around it. There is page after page of ancient-looking paper, lined with someone’s neat handwriting. Some of the handwriting is in blue ink, some in black. The paper is creamy, thin with age.
“It’s in Arabic,” Zain says, disappointed. Neither he nor Linah can read Arabic well. “There’s, like, a hundred pages.”
“I think it’s someone’s journal.” Linah sits upright. The prospect is dizzying—access to secrets; a thousand times better than being a detective. “We found someone’s journal!”
“No.” Zain squints at the writing. “They’re letters. Look, there’s the heading, and a signature at the end of each one.”
Linah’s mind whirls. Letters from her parents to each other? From Elie to Souad? From old friends?
“And dates at the top. This is from 1998,” Zain says.
“That’s a seven, idiot.”
“Okay, from 1978.” The moment is broken by the front door opening. Voices call out for them.
“Linah! Zain!”
“Where are they?”
They freeze. Footsteps. Zain mouths the words Oh no, and Linah thinks instantly of the natour, the adults finding out about their excursion. They rise, dusting themselves off. Zain slips the bundle of papers under his shirt.
But when they walk back into the living room, the adults—Khalto Riham, Linah’s father, Souad—are talking about the news. They barely glance at them. Even Manar looks concerned. Karam opens the curtains, letting in the last of the dusky light.
“Hey!”
“Where’d you guys go?” Souad says.
Zain glances at Linah. “The electricity went out.”
“Well, it’s back. The TV reception froze downstairs; the channels aren’t working. We need to try this one.”
“Sorry, kids, you’ll finish your movie later.”
“Put those cushions back. What is this, laundry?”
They reluctantly stack the cushions. Zain moves carefully, bending awkwardly at the waist. He holds a cushion in front of him.
“This is laundry. Jesus, Souad, when’s the last time you—”
“I keep telling her!”
“Not now, Manar! Karam, I’m sorry, there’s been a full-fledged war going on outside, I’ve put household chores on hold.”
“Apparently.” Linah’s father speaks under his breath, but Souad glares at him.
“Channel eight,” Khalto Riham says and Manar flips through channels.
The newscaster looks frazzled, headlines in Arabic whizzing by on the bottom of the screen. Linah catches only a handful of the newscaster’s words: military, shelling, security. Linah tries to read the sentences, but they glide by too quickly. Whenever she goes to Amman, her grandmother scolds her father and Souad: You’ve raised these children as Americans. They barely understand what their grandmother is saying to them. Linah likes her grandmother but is slightly afraid of her, her razor-sharp nails and the way she glances over whatever room she is in, like she is bored.
The newscaster says something about an announcement, and the camera shifts to a wall with green banners. A bearded man walks to a podium and begins to talk. Linah thinks of the wiry-haired woman, the way she had said Only the bread. The man says something about justice. His eyes snap when he speaks.
“Oh, for God’s sake.” Souad scoots to the edge of the sofa and slides the living-room balcony door open. She lights a cigarette, holding up the other hand, palm first, toward Khalto Riham and Karam. “Not a word, I’m serious. My living room. Not a word.”
“So what have you kids been doing?” Linah’s father asks her distractedly.
“Watching a movie,” she says. Her voice sounds strange to her ears; she wonders if the adults can hear it. Perhaps her father does because he doesn’t say anything else, nothing about their lungs or going to the other apartment.
“Monkey,” Linah’s mother says over Souad’s head. “I was thinking we should order that pizza tonight. What do you think? If I have another bite of chicken, I’m going to cluck.” She laughs again.
Suddenly Linah cannot bear to hear the newscaster’s voice, her mother’s laugh. It is wrong, all of it. She stands, Zain’s worried face blurring at her side.
“I’m taking a shower,” she announces.
“Linah, the hot water.”
Linah turns to her father. He looks so sad, so ordinary, all of a sudden, his eyeglasses smudged. I’m getting old, he’d joked the day he got them, and Linah shivered at the thought.
“I’ll only use the cold,” she says to him gently. “Promise.”
The green apartment feels empty, deflated, though Linah can hear plates clattering in the kitchen, Tika’s steps. She wants to run to her, embrace her.
Her bathroom is colorful, the only room her parents let her decorate. There is a mirror over the sink with soccer decals from when she was younger framing it. A shaggy, rainbow-colored bath rug on the floor, the bottom of the bathtub covered in stickers.
Linah turns on the hot water, pulling the handle all the way to the left, to the very hottest. She removes and drops her clothes on the bathroom floor and stands for long minutes in front of the mirror, steam beginning to billow around her, examining her body. This seems to her a necessary task, something she must endure. Her body is fascinating. In the past few months, she has secretly peeped through the keyhole and watched the women in her household as they prepare to shower, inspecting their bodies: Manar with her excess flesh and a triangle of dark hair between her legs; Souad small-breasted, hairless everywhere; and her mother, a trimmer patch of hair and with bigger breasts than the others.
Her own body is predictable, unchanging. Skinny. Flat, flat, flat. Like the landscape of tundra that they studied in geography class.
“Miss No Tits,” she says aloud. She heard an eighth-grader say it once, when the boyish gym teacher walked by in the hallway.
When she has used up the hot water, Linah walks to her bedroom, leaving a trail of wet footprints in her wake. From her closet, she chooses a nightg
own her grandmother brought her from Amman.
“They left,” she says aloud, echoing the maid’s words. She wants to go home, although the thought makes her feel babyish. Why do the adults like this city? If it were up to her, she’d never come back. She would go to summer camp with Susan in the Berkshires, where the girls stay up late telling scary stories and make friendship bracelets. There’s horseback riding and theater and water-skiing; Linah stole one of the brochures from Susan’s house last summer and read every page.
Instead of going upstairs, Linah walks down the hall into her parents’ room. Like the rest of the apartment, the walls are painted green, and the ceiling has a white, curling trim. A Persian rug the shade of persimmons spans the room in front of the bed. This is where they used to rehearse their plays, she and Zain and Manar, the space perfect for jumping and dancing around. Above the bed, there is a painting of an Iraqi souk with stalls of silver jewelry and spices, one man holding out a palmful of fruit.
Linah walks through the room, lifting things and returning them—the jewelry box, a small wooden bird her father made years ago. She feels hungry for touch. She opens her parents’ closet and trails her fingers through the clothing, her father’s khakis and T-shirts, the two silk ties he brings every summer, her mother’s dresses. She ducks her head to the turquoise gown her mother wears to parties, inhales. Gardenia, a tinge of sweat. The smell makes her sad, as though her parents were in another country instead of just upstairs.
When she was a child, she used to wear her mother’s dresses. She would mimic the things she overheard her mother saying on the phone about work and the family. Sometimes her mother would help, on rainy weekends when they were both bored, draping pearls around Linah’s neck. Her mother would dab her Dior perfume behind Linah’s ears, calling out, There’s a lovely lady here for you, Karam, and her father would come into the room. He would always stagger and clutch his heart when he saw her, pretend not to recognize her, until they all laughed, and she would twirl, feeling beautiful.
She steps onto the balcony of her parents’ room barefoot, the night air warm and heavy. There are several potted plants with large, purplish leaves that her father waters every morning. Souad never remembers to water the ones upstairs. Her balcony is strewn with dead plants.
Her parents’ balcony is large, with an iron rod railing that overlooks the traffic and slivers of sea between buildings. There is a chair and table with someone’s empty mug on it. Next to the table is a jasmine plant, her mother’s favorite. Something about those eager, white-faced flowers makes Linah’s chest ache.
She sits next to the plant and lowers her face into the tangled leaves as though into a pillow. It hurts, a branch poking her in the ear. Still, she stays like that for a moment, breathing in the sweet scent.
Eventually she disentangles herself, leans back against the wall. She tilts her head up, sees the night sky. It occurs to her she hasn’t been alone in the past two weeks. The sky is clear tonight, a crescent moon shining. A reverberating sound rumbles from the distance. Bombing, from the south. She remembers the world outside, the burning. They’re slaughtering us, a woman had said into the news camera. A lone siren rings out.
A part of her hopes they will come looking for her, the adults, their faces anxious. It was something she used to do as a child, though her mother would scold her: She would hide in closets or under the bed and hear their voices break with fear until, finally, she’d appear. She never understood the anger that would bloom then, the yelling. I’m giving you a gift, she always wanted to say. You thought I was lost, but I never was.
Something is different. There are streaks of light cleaving the night sky, punctuated by low rumbling that feels close. Linah stands transfixed, feeling the ground around her quiver. From the balcony, she can see hooks of smoke begin to rise between the buildings, from the south. After fifteen, twenty minutes, the balcony door slides open.
“Finally,” Zain says.
Linah sighs. “Found me.”
Zain looks confused. “Were you hiding?” He slides the door closed and sits opposite from her, his bare feet dirty. “They bombed another building. The newscaster said so. Everyone’s freaking out upstairs.”
“Do you think we’re going to die?”
“Don’t be stupid,” Zain says but his voice trembles. In the moonlight, his eyes are huge and shiny.
They watch the lights arch across the land, like fireworks in reverse. From here, the entire skyline is lit up, smoke billowing, covering buildings and sea, as though the earth has been replaced with fire and smoke. Are the woman’s children waiting for her call? Linah wonders. What does she do in that large apartment once the sun sets—for Linah imagines a marbled, stuffily decorated apartment, old Beirut style, sprawled with uncomfortable, gilded furniture, a guest living room, large bay windows—now that she is no longer waiting?
“We’ll take Tika with us if we leave,” Zain says. This is how they are sometimes, intuiting each other’s thoughts.
They are silent for a moment, thinking of the woman.
“I wish Teta were here,” Linah says suddenly. She pictures her grandmother sweeping through the apartments, snapping at the adults to buy something other than stale chicken, complaining about the heat. Her prickliness would be a tonic. There were certain things her teta understood wordlessly, like the Eid she told Budur to let Linah wear jeans for dinner if she wanted. Linah wants to tell her grandmother about the woman at Abu Rafi’s, to hear her say something smart and sharp and perfect.
Zain tosses something at her, and she catches it instinctively. A matchbox. He grins. “Bad-word club.” He holds his palm out, the cigarette pack slightly bent. “I found them in your shorts. On the bathroom floor.”
“What about the ash?”
“Fuck the ash.”
Zain lights an unbent cigarette for Linah. She holds it, smoke trailing the tip, with a sort of wonder. She remembers the girls on the railing, how they held the cigarettes with their two fingers sticking pertly up. Linah mimics the gesture and takes a drag. The smoke scorches and she coughs. Zain does the same.
“It burns.” He gasps.
“But it gets smoother.” Three, four, five drags, and the smoke goes down more easily. She parts her lips and watches it drift from her mouth. Zain clears his throat. “I think Jiddo wrote the letters. He was writing to someone named Mustafa. Do you know who that is?”
Linah scans her memory. The name is dimly familiar, but she can’t place it. She shakes her head.
“Well, he was someone in Palestine. Jiddo sent him the letters. I started reading one of them. He wrote something about a house.” Zain unfolds a paper from his pocket and reads, stumbling over the Arabic. “There are rooms for each of us here, and even more. It reminds me of your mother’s house, how you always said it felt too big after she left.”
“If he sent them, why were they in the storage room?”
Zain shrugs. “I don’t know.” He seems uninterested and Linah understands why. The letters suddenly seem far away, something that happened years ago. They aren’t now, like the bombings or the woman’s voice breaking in the store.
“Abu Rafi is a motherfucker.” Linah says the word slowly, cautiously. It is the first time she has fastened any of the bad words onto a person.
“Look,” Zain whispers, gesturing at the scene in front of them. Even with the explosions and ambulance sirens wailing in the distance, the air so thick with smoke it tickles her throat, it is somehow enchanting. The missiles roar white and dazzling, like comet tails.
The colors, the brilliant light. It reminds Linah of when she was younger, years ago in Boston, one summer night when their families went to a carnival. It had rained earlier and the air was sweet and damp, the grass still dewed with water. Her sandals made a squelching sound, and, later, when her father washed her feet in the bathtub, streaks of grass and soil circled the drain.
There had been a Ferris wheel and they all rode it together. While they inched toward the
top, fireworks exploded above them, marbling the sky with color, aglitter like rock candy. Look at that sky, she heard her mother call to her father. You could just eat it up.
Watching the water burn, Linah remembers her mother’s voice, the way her hair had whipped around, dark, beautiful, a memory she’d entirely forgotten. She remembers how Elie bought them all ice cream, her fingers sticky afterward, remembers Souad kissing his neck. Linah thinks of how she misses him, how he is halfway across the world, and she feels sad for Zain and even Manar. The memories fill her with longing, the way memories of her childhood leave her wistful. Make her feel as though she is spinning, bursting out of her skin, the world around her lunatic and whirling, the world hers—even the burning buildings, even the bombs, even the sounds of people crying on the street—but it is moving fast, so fast, her childhood receding while she is still trying to catch her breath.
“Khalto Riham was saying the Israelis won’t stop bombing for weeks.” Zain’s voice startles her. Linah tries to shrug, though Zain is looking away. The smoke is hurting her lungs less and less. She attempts to make a smoke ring, but it comes out wobbly.
“It’s sweet,” Zain says.
“Menthol.”
“My dad hit my mom once.” Zain speaks musingly. The words hang between them. Linah wants to say something, something about adults being flawed, or how they break things without meaning to, but then she changes her mind. Suddenly, all she wants to do is see Zain smile. She jumps to her feet in one swift motion, holding out the cigarette to him.
“Hey!” Zain’s face is startled as he takes the cigarette.
Linah steps back and shuts her eyes. She counts to three and flings her body forward, her hands obediently catching her, hoisting her into a handstand. She can hear the smile in Zain’s voice when he speaks.
“Wow,” she hears him say, “how do you do that?”
Linah keeps her eyes shut, her body vertical. In a moment, her arms will begin to ache. But for now, she feels light as air. She wants to do cartwheels. She wants to find the wiry-haired maid and ask her to move in. She wants to hug Zain, to show him how her heart pounds out of her skin sometimes. She wants to run inside, throw her arms around her father, and kiss his cheek. Whisper into his ear, There’s a lovely lady here for you, Karam.