by Hala Alyan
They find Alia in the waiting room. Outside, they stand dully in the atrium. Atef crosses and then uncrosses his arms. “I guess we go home now.”
Souad sniffles. She embraces her mother.
Alia frowns and leans back, eyes her daughter sharply. “What have you done?”
And in spite of themselves, even as Souad cries, they all laugh.
The traffic is bad and by the time they reach the house—a silent car ride, even the radio crackling in protest—the sun has already set. Umm Najwa is standing outside the house, smoking. She drops the cigarette as they climb out of the car. She scans their faces hard, then nods. “Well.”
In the foyer of the house, a metallic scent greets them. Souad drops her purse, sniffs.
“Goddamn it. I told them to turn the oven off.” Her voice rises as she stalks off. “Did I or did I not tell you idiots—”
“I’m tired,” Alia grumbles.
“I’ll take you to bed,” Atef says.
“No.” Umm Najwa puts a gentle, firm hand on his arm. “I’ll do it.”
“It should be me,” he says. His mouth is terribly dry. He tries to remember the last time he drank water. Hours ago. Before the hospital.
“You go sit. Yalla,” Umm Najwa says to Alia. “Let’s get you in bed.”
“We should wait for him,” she says brightly.
They watch her warily. Finally, Atef speaks. “Who?”
Alia tilts her head, looks at Atef as though he is the one who is confused. “Mustafa.” Atef feels an invisible fist inside his stomach clench.
“He’ll come later,” Umm Najwa tells her soothingly. “Now we’ll go and take a nice bath.”
For moments after they disappear down the hallway, none of them, not Atef nor Karam nor Riham, say anything.
“It’s always going to be like this,” Karam says, the realization in his voice.
Riham shakes her head. “No.” She begins to unwind her veil. “It’s going to get worse.” She speaks plainly, which is, Atef thinks, the most Riham of responses. To accept, to welcome the bad news.
He follows them into the living room, where Abdullah, Zain, and the girls sit. Souad stands in front of them, blocking the television. Everyone looks tense.
“It was one thing,” Souad is saying. “One goddamn thing.” The children are defiantly silent.
“What happened?” Karam asks.
“The chicken is burned. All of it.” Souad glares; the children avoid her eyes. “I swear to God, I could entrust toddlers with more—”
“Mama, we get it,” Zain snaps. Souad looks taken aback, then continues.
“Oh, you get it? Really? Then tell me why we’re having fries for dinner.”
“We can order in,” Abdullah says.
“Souad,” Riham murmurs. From the foyer, the sound of a door opening and shutting.
“What’s that smell?” Budur walks in, carrying grocery bags. She had told Karam to go to the hospital with his family, respectfully busying herself for the day.
“They burned the chicken!”
“It’s just a little crisp,” Abdullah offers.
Linah and Manar whisper something and giggle. Across the sofa Abdullah lets out a snort of laughter.
“Shut up,” Souad barks. “It’s one thing to be useless, it’s another to be insolent.”
“We can order in?” Budur says innocently. Karam shakes his head at her.
“You’re all spoiled!” Souad rants.
“Jesus Christ, no one wanted chicken anyway,” Linah mutters.
“Linah!” Budur drops the bags. The anger is contagious, rushing like wildfire between them.
“Guys, guys.” Karam holds his hands out. “Let’s all take a breath, okay? We’re tired, it’s been a long day.” He turns to the children beseechingly. “The doctor did some tests. It’s not good.”
The four faces transform.
“What happened?” Zain’s brow furrows.
“Did you tell him about the memory thing?” Abdullah asks.
“It’s Alzheimer’s,” Souad spits out. Atef wants to hit her. He watches the children—what children?—grow dismayed. Budur gasps. Zain blinks and ducks his head, and Atef wants to hug him, the boy always first to tears.
“Souad!” Riham admonishes.
“Are they sure?” Manar looks stunned. She turns to Karam. “What does that mean?”
Karam opens his mouth but Souad rushes on, furious. “It means she needs help and she’s going to keep forgetting things and what she needs is good grandchildren, not idiots who sit around watching this shit and not following directions—”
“Souad.”
“—so instead of false shocked sympathy, maybe you could help out, all of you, instead of tramping around at night and drinking and smoking weed and—”
As she speaks, something happens to the four children, a hardening, their faces bricking over. Atef can see it coming. “Enough,” he implores.
Too late. Manar hisses: “Oh, as if you even love Teta in the first place.”
For a moment, there is a sensation of suspension. Free fall.
“Manar, habibti,” Riham begins.
“No, no, let her talk. She hates me.”
“I don’t hate you—what are you, five?”
“She doesn’t mean—”
“Zain, stay out of it.”
The voices rise. The children sit up and suddenly they are divided. Alliances between the children—what children?—and the adults. Atef realizes he has been lumped together with the adults and wants to argue the injustice of that. Budur takes a step forward, distraught.
“Everyone’s upset,” she calls over the bickering. “And saying unnecessary things. Unkind things. We just need to—”
“This has nothing to do with you,” Linah says acidly to her mother. “Why are you always involving yourself in everything?”
“This isn’t helping anyone,” Budur says.
A low, sarcastic snort. “Oh, give me a fucking break.”
“Linah!” Karam yells.
“What?” Linah hurls back.
“We’re sitting here,” Manar says, “worried about Teta, trying to distract ourselves, then you guys come home and start screaming hysterically about chicken.”
“Like they’re going to understand,” Linah tells her.
“Wasted breath.”
“Goddamn it, Linah,” Karam begins, but there is no time, because the others are already speaking, louder, louder, their voices a cacophony.
“You guys are always making a big deal out of nothing! This is just like last summer.”
“Leave her alone!”
These are mine, Atef thinks. These children.
“Kis ikhtkom,” Souad hisses in Arabic. “You barbarians.”
“Oh God, here we go.”
Atef feels the sound gathering before he makes it, a squall between his ribs.
“Enough!” he roars.
Everyone falls silent, staring at him—gentle Jiddo who rarely speaks, quiet with his peppermint candies, who sits in armchairs and watches television—with newfound amazement.
He finds Souad and Karam sitting on the veranda, swaying back and forth on the swing. The sky has darkened and stars are visible. They look chastised, a duo of misbehaving children. He thinks of what Linah said, all the things he doesn’t know of their lives.
“Baba,” Souad begins. “That was . . .” Her voice trails off. Finally, she pats the swing next to her. “Sit.”
There is a pack of cigarettes on her lap and she taps one out; Karam takes another.
“Don’t smoke,” she tells him, exhaling a milky stream.
“Okay,” Karam says, touching the cigarette tip to a flame.
“Insubordinate.” Souad turns to Atef. “I tried.”
Atef stretches his legs out, his left loafer falling onto the floor. He inhales greedily, wants one himself, but it always hurts his throat.
“Look at that,” Souad says. Atef thinks she is referring to th
e smoke, but when he turns to her, she is gazing at the sky, the yellowish stars.
“Which one’s the North Star?” he asks. “I can never tell.”
“You find the Dipper.” Holding the cigarette steady between her teeth, Souad extends her arm. “And then you trace the line. Follow the pointer stars. There.” Atef follows his daughter’s finger and suddenly he sees it, bright, higher in the sky than the others.
Atef lets himself picture the courtyard of the nearby mosque, the rustle of olive trees, the blank stone of the graves. Death in rows. His son once told him about a cemetery plot in Boston where seven, eight generations of a family were buried. Karam marveled at the concept, full centuries of family buried in the same dirt. Here, there was only Salma and Widad, the aunts that moved here from Nablus. No one knows where Mustafa was buried. Atef, when his time comes, will be buried here as well. What about his children, he thinks, would they be buried in America? Beirut? What about the grandchildren? The thought of their death startles him and he twists his mouth, admonishes himself with a silent God forbid.
His daughter’s laughter is the balloon string tugging him earthward. It pulls him back into himself. He and Karam turn to her, curious.
“Remember that black dress? That time at Khalto Widad’s house for dinner? How she stood up to leave and when we asked her why, she said—”
“‘I hate this collar,’” Karam supplies. “‘A hundred dinars to itch like hell.’”
The bubble of laughter between them grows into a hysterical giggle. Souad is the first to pop it, her gasp of laughter suddenly turning into a sob. Atef feels the weight of his daughter droop against him. She puts an arm around his shoulder, tucks her chin on it. He remembers her monkeyish limbs as a child, the way she would stick her tongue out at passersby on the street. “Baba,” she whispers. He waits but there is nothing else.
The veranda door slides open; Riham steps out in front of the swing. She stares at them for a second.
“Not now, Riham.” Souad ashes the cigarette. “No lectures on smoking.”
Riham holds her arm out, wiggles her fingers.
“Gimme.” The three of them gape at her.
“Have you lost your mind?”
Riham waits, her arm extended. Souad glances at Karam, then erupts into laughter. She hands over the cigarette, looking at her sister, astonished.
“Is this happening? Am I hallucinating?”
Riham puts the cigarette between her lips; they watch her take a long, solid drag, like an inmate on furlough. Tilting her head back, she holds the smoke for a second before blowing it all out in one exhale.
“Mother,” Souad says, her voice stunned, “of God. Who the fuck are you?”
“Souad,” Atef says automatically.
“Sorry, Baba.”
“What?” Riham asks innocently. She flicks the cigarette; the four of them watch it arch over the veranda railing. There is laughter in her voice, a girlish joy at surprising them. “It’s been a long day.”
Atef remains outside after his children leave. Alia, Karam, the grandchildren. His mind darts and then skips. What is there left to think about? So the children know. The grandchildren know. Weariness settles over him and he repeats it: They know, they know. It relieves him of a certain weight. So they’ve seen their parents up close, as one does with statues in Florence. The cracked toes and chalky masonry.
Suddenly he is asleep. He accepts this fact, understands it as he understands that where he is now—standing on a sunlit street corner, cars honking around him—is a perfectly reasonable place to be. Of course he is here. He looks down and sees his hands are unlined. The hands of a young man.
“Atef.” The voice is low and soft and laughing. It is Alia. She is impossibly young. She looks almost like a child, wearing a long swirling skirt, her black hair cut close to her chin. This is my life, he thinks, this street corner. He remembers the skirt. He recalls his wife walking toward him, smiling, music drifting from the open window of a car. Looking around, he sees the grocery store, the familiar lot. Kuwait.
“Out of oranges again.” That voice once more, almost seductive. “I’ll bring you some back from Amman.” She takes his hand in her own.
The oranges. Atef remembers abruptly, violently. He hasn’t thought of them, he knows, since that day. He remembers the glowing spheres, Alia pulling them out of her suitcase after a summer with her mother, packed between socks and bras, but he knows, even as he clasps her hand, that the memory is false. A lie. She never brought any back. But he remembers the promise, his heart light to hear her laughter, even as he dreaded her trip. All this time, a part of him was waiting for the gift.
“You’re going to forget.” He hears himself speak. Immediately her hand goes slack and Alia stops. Her expression is a mixture of admiration and pity. She places a hand on his cheek and he is overpowered by nostalgia. For this. For this moment—for those years, his young wife’s hand. For Kuwait. For everything as it used to be. Because he knows that the dream is about to end, that it will all be over in a minute.
She keeps her hand against his cheek. Speak, he wants to scream, quickly, there is no time left.
“Habibi,” she says. Dark hair perfectly coiffed, plum lipstick, those beautiful legs. “I can’t stay.”
Atef wakes with a jolt, like someone being shaken, but when he looks around, there is nothing of the dream. Everything unaltered. Just him on the swing, the swish of traffic from the distance, the stars threaded between telephone poles. The road, the honking, Alia—he can still feel the heat of the Kuwaiti sun. He touches his face and it is wet. It feels like he has been crying for days. He rubs at his eyes, embarrassed.
He expects to find Souad and Riham in the living room. But there is no one there. Bedrooms, he thinks. He wonders where the grandchildren have gone.
The house, slapped silent after the earlier fight. From the hallway Atef can hear muffled tones and the sound of the mournful, folksy music Manar prefers. He moves in that direction.
“Allah.” The word pops out of his mouth.
Alia. Slumped on the armchair. She must have come back out by herself. There is a dusting of egg yolk on her chin. Only the lamp is on, grotesquely shadowing her face. For a moment he is still, cannot bear to touch her. He moves slowly toward her. She is dead, he realizes.
Suddenly there is a rustling sound; it takes a few seconds for him to understand it is coming from his wife’s throat. Not dead. Asleep. Her chest is moving, he sees. As if to punctuate her aliveness, she lets out a long snore.
Atef feels oddly let down. He had prepared for an epiphany. He reaches down and strokes her hair, but the gesture is forced. He knows if she wakes, she will snap at him.
The only light comes from the kitchen. From that room he can hear voices calling out. Laughter. He walks toward the noise hungrily. At the edge of the hallway, he stands still, peering through the door. The door is slightly ajar and the voices of the grandchildren are audible.
“. . . so fucked.”
“She called me Yasmin this morning. I don’t even know who that is.”
“It’s probably a dead friend of hers. So fucking morbid.”
“Remember how she used to scold us? Earlier I set a mug down and jumped, thinking she’d come out.”
“‘Don’t they use coasters in Amrika?’” Their laughter is kind.
“God.” Manar’s voice sobers. “This house feels like a mausoleum. I told Gabe last night, if he got sick I’d burn the house down. It’s just too sad. It’s like she’s this living ghost, moving from room to room. I don’t know how he stands it.”
They are talking about him, Atef realizes.
“He loves her,” Abdullah’s voice reproaches.
Manar falls silent with the rest. Atef can hear them thinking about his love.
“But doesn’t it feel”—here a long pause—“so small?”
Atef hears the tremor in Manar’s voice. He remembers an argument years ago, between her and Abdullah, when she’d st
ood up during dinner and yelled at him, Even a saint can be a dick. Alia had told the story over and over, laughing.
“Maybe it’s not about being small or big.” Linah takes a breath, then exhales; Atef can smell a cigarette. “Maybe it’s like becoming part of someone. Like there’s no you that exists without them.”
“She’s right.” Zain pauses. “It’s what he always wrote about.”
Atef shoots upright, his ears burning. He cranes forward to hear his grandson’s sentence.
“. . . He has to remember for the both of them now.”
He flees to the garden, the familiar maze of shrubs and trees, stumbles in the dark for the familiar dip of land that leads to the fig tree, where he sits.
Of course he’d known about the letters. After the boxes went to Beirut, he’d realized too late the letters were in them. He’d stopped writing them years before, but the proximity was comforting, finding the brown spine of that book every now and then, knowing the life housed within.
He kept reminding himself to check the boxes when they visited Beirut, but the summers were always whirlwinds, a hurricane of arguments and children running around, protests and roadblocks in the city. He’d remember on the plane home, vow to check the next time.
Years after the war, he finally did, quietly sneaking into the blue apartment’s storage room while everyone went to the beach, going through every single box. It took hours, the air filled with dust and mold. He eventually found A Lifecycle of Plants, but it lay limply in his hands, flat. Just a regular book. The letters were gone.
His mind spun through possibilities. Alia? Oh God. Oh God, please. But no, she would’ve said something, would have thrown every single page in his face. His own children were unlikely culprits: Souad too uninterested, Riham too deferential, Karam too respectful.
The grandchildren, then.
He was stunned to find himself smiling. Slowly, then laughing, harder and harder, alone in the small room. It was the oddest thing: he didn’t mind. It was like dropping the weight of a planet. Like finally stepping back.
What had they thought reading them? He will never know. To ask would be to spoil the whole thing, he thinks now. Better to give the world over intact, let them speculate. They know him. Yes. He is glad.