Salt Houses

by Hala Alyan

  “Amazing,” Zain says.

  Linah opens her eyes, keeping her body straight as an arrow, her breath coming fast, not wanting to speak and spoil things, the world upside down. For a moment the tiles of the balcony are her roof and the stars wheel past her feet like some mossy, glittering carpet.

  Atef

  * * *

  Amman

  June 2011

  It began with her forgetting the word pomegranate. “Hand me a—” Alia said one evening last year. The most peculiar expression spread across her face, like she was a sleepwalker awoken too soon. She blinked.

  Atef waited. “What?”

  “One of the, ah . . .” She began to look afraid. “The red one,” she’d finally muttered, pointing at the fruit. Small incidents followed: her wandering around the neighborhood, the misremembering of Atef’s birthday.

  “Something’s not right,” Riham finally said weeks ago as the two of them sat in the garden. “This thing with Mama. Something’s wrong.”

  Atef averted his eyes. “She just gets that way, Riham.”

  “She’s getting—” Riham hesitated. “Worse. More confused. Mixing things up.”

  Atef thought of his wife, her tea with two and a half sugar cubes every morning, the little rituals of her life. “I’m sure it’s nothing. Getting older. Happening to all of us. Just yesterday it took me twenty minutes to find my keys.” His chatter is telling. Over the last few years, Alia’s eccentricities had flared up—how she puzzled over directions, her confusion with names—but they were always cloaked in general cantankerousness.

  “Baba.” Riham took a long breath. “Yesterday, when she came over for dinner, I left her for a minute because I got a phone call. It took me an hour to find her afterward.”

  Atef’s heart stilled. “Where was she?”

  “On the balcony.”

  “Oh.” Relief emptied his lungs. “She’s always liked the view.”

  “No.” The faintest impatience rose in Riham’s voice, so rare it silenced Atef. “You know those aluminum latches, the ones we used to lock when the children were babies? Well, they were open. She was trying to climb down.”

  “What?” He thought, uselessly, of the pale windflowers in the garden, an argument he’d had with Alia months ago, when she’d called his love of flowers hopeless. “Why would she do that?”

  Riham sighed, and it was in that small exhale that Atef understood he’d been protected, that Riham had been shielding him as much as she could.

  “She says it’s the war. That Saddam is coming and she has to escape.”

  That evening, he had watched Alia as she ate dinner, washed her face, got into bed. And suddenly he saw. Like the optical illusions his grandchildren loved, once the image emerged, he couldn’t return to not seeing it. There was his wife, her skin ashy, her hair frizzed and white.

  “That girl,” she pronounced before bed, “is stealing my lipstick.” Atef didn’t ask which girl.

  Smoothing her hair back from her face, Atef’s hand slid over her thin, mottled scalp, the delicate bone of her skull.

  “She won’t let us dye it,” Riham told him later. “She thinks the hairdresser is trying to poison her.”

  He realized that, for once, he was seeing Alia as she was. That, for the past decade, he’d seen his wife made up, never without perfect hair and manicured fingernails, layers of foundation powdered across her skin, the lips outlined and filled in with her coral lipstick. That beneath it, all along, was this frailty.

  From the kitchen there is the sound of female laughter. Souad, Atef thinks. But when he walks in, Linah and Manar are sitting at the table sprinkling zaatar on pita bread spread thick with strawberry jam. They are both wearing gypsylike dresses of gauzy fabric. Linah has woven sea-colored glass beads through her hair, which is gathered atop her head; the beads scatter in every direction like fireworks. Their chatter stops at the sight of him.

  “Hi, Jiddo,” Manar says, her voice bright.

  “Is Teta ready for the doctor?”

  Atef hesitates. “We’re working on it. Riham and Umm Najwa are talking to her now.”

  “She’ll go,” Linah says softly, and Atef knows someone has already told them about Alia’s outburst this morning, how she refused to get dressed, yelling at him that she didn’t need to see a doctor.

  “Seen your father?” he asks Linah.

  Linah shrugs. “Maybe outside.”

  “How is it possible,” Manar begins, “in this day and age, that everyone is always looking for someone in this family? Everyone has a cell phone.” She turns to Atef. “Mama was just asking about you.”

  “It’s a post-tech metaphor,” Linah quips, “for how alone we all are.”

  “Please. It’s textbook narcissism. Assuming people need to appear at our whim.” Manar snaps her fingers. A speck of zaatar dots her chin. Atef is enjoying listening. He likes the girls, their wit, their deadpan.

  “True,” Linah says thoughtfully, waving a piece of bread around like a wand. “Look at how Mama panics when one of us doesn’t answer the phone, like, immediately.” She still has the choppily cut hair, the lip and nose piercings, from her early adolescence. There were rumors, last year, of drugs. He overheard a conversation she and Riham had once, a reference to an arrest, some boy she ran away with for a few weeks.

  He is touched that they’ve all come. The grandchildren, especially. He expected excuses, begging off. Souad still in Beirut; Karam and Budur in Boston; the grandchildren all over. For the past few years, they’ve visited less and less, and Alia is too unwell to fly herself.

  But there had been a cascade of phone calls all day—Zain, Linah, Souad. They called with their flight information, times of arrival, soft words of concern.

  The grandchildren spoke in faltering Arabic when they arrived, leaving their lives—Abdullah from university in London, Manar from an internship in Manhattan, Linah and Zain’s summer camp in Vermont. It didn’t matter what they were doing. They came.

  Riham strides into the kitchen, her face tired. “She’s coming. Umm Najwa’s getting her dressed. Morning, girls.” Umm Najwa has been Alia’s nurse ever since she broke her hip years ago.

  “Morning,” they return.

  “Baba, you should get the files ready.” The pile of medical records, from doctor visits in Beirut and Kuwait, that he keeps locked in his study alongside passports, his diploma, the children’s birth certificates. My husband, the hoarder, Alia used to say. It’s come to good use, he returns silently now. I’ve kept your whole history. As Atef leaves the study with the stuffed manila envelope, he finds Abdullah in the hallway, looking hesitant.

  “Jiddo,” he begins. “I wanted to see how you were doing.”

  Atef feels a startling lump in his throat. “I’m—” There doesn’t seem to be a word convincing enough. “I’m just waiting on your grandmother.”

  “It’ll be good to know,” Abdullah says softly. “Whatever it is.” His grandson’s starting to get wrinkles around his eyes, his hairline receding. He resembles his father more and more. For a long time, they worried about Abdullah, with his piousness and rigidity, the afternoons he spent yelling about politics with older men from the neighborhood. Atef tried to talk with him, but the boy remained unreadable as stone. Then the towers fell in America, and the war started in Iraq. Suddenly, something within Abdullah eased, seemed to snap awake.

  Now he pulls his grandfather to him, abruptly, surprisingly—the boy is usually more restrained—muffling the word as Atef says it.

  “Inshallah.”

  Everyone is in the kitchen when Atef returns, Karam and Souad standing around the girls at the table. Riham is adjusting Alia’s blouse, pulling a loose thread from the fabric. Zain is stirring his coffee, raising his eyebrows at Manar while Souad speaks.

  “We don’t know how long we’ll be gone,” she is saying. “Make sure you baste the chicken, do not forget to take it out at seven . . . Zain, are you listening? Manar, make sure to take it out at—”<
br />
  “Mama, okay!”

  “We’re not six,” Zain says.

  “The chicken needs to be basted in lemon juice,” Souad continues, undaunted, “and then put some salt—”

  “Oh my God.”

  Karam tugs at Souad’s sleeve. “Come on.”

  “Yes, Jesus, please. Get her out of here.”

  “Manar, hush.”

  “Okay, time to go,” Riham says soothingly.

  Alia makes a sudden, violent sound and they all turn to her. She is standing by the doorway, her head ducked forward. Atef can see pink scalp beneath her thinning hair. When she lifts her head, there is a flash of teeth. She is laughing.

  “Mama,” Karam says. She turns to him, smiling girlishly.

  “I hated the movie,” she says brightly in Arabic. “It was outrageously dull.”

  “Let’s go,” Atef says.

  In the car Atef sits up front with Karam, Alia and their daughters in the back. Atef fiddles with the car radio, finds a station with Ziad Rahbani singing. Static crackles every few seconds. Atef can feel Karam steal glances at him as they drive, Riham’s voice audible as she speaks with Alia.

  They pass the storefronts on Mecca Street, street vendors shaking bags of dates at cars, a boutique bikini shop with mannequins wearing ocean-colored spandex. Atef doesn’t look out of the windows, not at the restaurants or pretty coeds walking on the street, the girls who get younger and younger every year. Atef looks straight in front of him, at the windshield, staring at everything and nothing at once.

  Beside him, Karam opens his mouth, then shuts it. Atef knows the boy wants to say the right thing. There is no right thing. Atef wants to tell his children that they don’t understand, that their view from the sidelines is incomplete, that somehow in the murky cave of his marriage—not exactly happy but not unhappy either, given to strain, months at a time when Alia retreats into her fury and Atef into himself—is a miraculous conch of love, something unpolished but alive, pulsing.

  The specialty clinic is attractively built, spare and white and sunny. They register in the atrium and Atef thinks about the people who come to these offices and hear horrible news, of brain tumors and cancer, then have to walk back out into the atrium. The beauty of the space, he thinks, must be devastating. As for the rest of the patients—merely brushing a close call, nothing but migraines, clean blood tests—they must be dazed with relief, suddenly grateful for every dust mote.

  Please, Allah, let us be among the dazed.

  The prayer is shoddy and shameful. Atef is a man of makeshift faith, at best, lacking his own mother’s quiet belief or Riham’s tenacity. He wants a God who coolly pats his hand, a God who has better things to do. Riham and Souad talk to the receptionist behind the desk, Riham carrying the photocopied pages of her mother’s medical file. Bless her, Atef thinks. The women in his life are more efficient than the men. Atef thinks of Manar and Linah. In a hospital, they would take brisk charge.

  “I’m going to be late for Sima’s.”

  “Alia, Sima will wait.”

  “How do you know? I said I’d be there at six.” Sima had been a neighbor of theirs in Kuwait.

  “I already called her, said we’d be a little late. She said not to worry, that you should see the doctor first.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes.” Atef tries to make his voice reassuring. He talks to Alia with the tone he used when the children were young, a voice that reemerged when his grandchildren were born.

  “Mama, this is Dr. Munla.” A short, balding man in khakis. He smiles and shakes Alia’s hand.

  “Madame Yacoub, it’s a pleasure.”

  “I’m late for Sima,” Alia informs him.

  The doctor is unruffled. “Then we’ll make this as quick as possible.” He turns to the others. “We can go to my office.”

  “I hate seeing her like this,” Atef hears Souad whisper to Riham. “It’s like watching a lion caged.”

  They follow the doctor down a hallway decorated with landscape paintings. His office is painted a bright robin’s-egg blue, diagrams of brain anatomy covering the walls. There is a plastic model of a brain on the doctor’s desk, different sections in pastel colors. They sit around the room, Souad perching on the exam chair. The doctor sits at his desk and lifts his arms, as though performing for them.

  “We’re going to do several tests today,” he begins. He speaks for some time about machinery, the validity of MRI imaging, measuring brain fluid, testing reflexes, cognitive assessment—vague, ominous-sounding tasks that they don’t understand.

  “For brain imaging?” Riham asks.

  “My brain is fine,” Alia says.

  “I’m sure it is, madame,” the doctor says. “It’s just routine.”

  Atef desperately likes him, in that way one likes people who carry tremendous power to bring bad news. He can envision the doctor after work, sitting on some balcony somewhere as he pours a glass of arak, touching his wife’s hair, telling her of the terrible ways the human body can betray.

  “I’ll take you in now,” he says to Alia. “We’ll start with some basic tests.”

  “I’m late for Sima,” she says once more. She chews her lower lip and looks adrift.

  “We’ll be done before you know it,” the doctor says.

  The four of them return to the waiting room. Half an hour passes by; an hour. There is a television mounted on the wall and they obediently watch what’s playing, a movie that’s halfway through.

  “Is that woman his wife?” Karam asks.

  “I think she’s a police officer,” Riham says.

  Souad leaves twice to smoke. She barely glances at the television, instead texting on her cell phone. Every now and then, the corners of her lips twitch up. There is a man, Atef intuits, has been for some time. But in this way his youngest is oddly private. She hasn’t mentioned anyone since Elie.

  When he and Alia go to Beirut, they stay with their daughter. After the war, she redecorated the apartment, painted over the walls. Souad filled it with black and white—black couches and tables, white walls and rugs. Even the curtains were black, lacy like a widow’s veil.

  Atef couldn’t imagine living with all that monochrome, but Souad always seems happy when he visits—this, too, hints at a romance—mocking him, morbidly funny. She shows him around Hamra, pointing out places that have changed, taking him to the small boutique shop she and her friend opened a couple years ago.

  “It’s the most impractical thing to do in this economy,” she said cheerfully, walking around the closet-size space, one wall made entirely of glass and overlooking a busy street where college students scurry by. Unusual, pretty things fill the store, mirrors and coral necklaces and leather-bound notebooks.

  But she must be onto something, because people want beautiful things even in hard times—perhaps especially in hard times—and the store keeps her afloat. Atef ends each trip feeling wistful, watching his daughter living the life she has foraged, like an island survivor in a palace of shells.

  The movie ends and another begins, a thriller with an elaborate car chase in the first five minutes. “It’s taking long,” Atef finally says.

  Riham checks her watch. “We want him to be thorough, Baba.”

  “She’s going to be frantic.”

  “The doctor’s great with her.”

  “I bet it’s a good sign.” Souad looks up from her phone. “If they’d found something, he’d be hollering at us to come in.” She pronounces hollering incorrectly, her Arabic dwindled after so many years abroad. Your daughter, the Amrikiyeh, Alia scoffs.

  The thought of his wife, hawkish and strident, hurts and Atef stands. “I’ll get us something to drink. Coffee? Juice? There’s a dikaneh across the street.”

  “I’ll go, Baba,” Karam says, but Atef waves him off.

  “The walk will do me good.”

  “Coffee,” Karam says. “Sugarless for me.”

  Atef turns to his daughters. “And you?”

 
“Sprite.”

  “Orange juice.”

  Leaving the hospital is a relief, the sun lovely upon his face. He walks rapidly, as though shedding the place, tall buildings on either side, hospitals and businesses and banks. Atef turns past an outdoor café where a group of young women sit, smoking cigarettes and chatting. One of the women wears a sleeveless dress, showing arms covered in intricate, colorful tattoos. This is the Amman that is coming, the future—inked women, beautiful gay boys, youth and subversion. Atef is strangely cheered by the thought.

  On his way back, as he approaches the clinic entrance, he sees someone waving her arms. Souad.

  “Baba! We’ve been looking for you,” she cries. “The doctor’s finished.”

  The office seems starker, the doctor grim behind his desk. A nurse has taken Alia to another room and Atef wishes he could go to her.

  “Many of the tests won’t be back for a few days. But I’d like to talk about preliminary impressions.”

  Madame Yacoub, the doctor says, is changing. Atef notices for the first time the diplomas hanging in their gilded frames, the calligraphy elegant and precise. They look imperial.

  “It’s not good news,” the doctor says matter-of-factly.

  They listen. The doctor’s words fall, oil drops in water, beads, sliding over Atef. He watches his daughters’ faces, his son’s. The words float in and out, as though Atef is submerged, lifting his head above water every few minutes.

  “In terms of cure . . . what will happen . . . to prepare yourself . . . research is showing . . .” Atef feels drunk watching the man’s mouth move. Suddenly, everyone is rising, Karam shaking hands with the doctor.

  “I’ll see you next week,” Munla says. “I’ll have more information then.” He shakes Atef’s hand, and Atef doesn’t want to let his hand go.