Salt Houses

by Hala Alyan

  A faint glow from the veranda reaches the garden, outlining the rows he planted in the summer. He can see the silhouette of windflowers, their leaves spiky in the dusk light. Your ridiculous flowers.

  She is leaving him. She has already left him. The rage is like a Roman candle lit from both ends. His mouth is dry. She is leaving him, just as her brother did. His fingers sink into the soil around him and he thinks of Nablus.

  That day, half a century ago, the sun rose onto a cool and pink morning. Israel had invaded Gaza and the Sinai. There was fighting near the old city. Atef’s skin prickled with anticipation. It’s happening, he thought. It’s happening. The air seemed tinted, hills vibrant in the light.

  When he arrived at Salma’s old house, Mustafa was sitting on the front stairs. His legs were tucked at an odd angle, to the side. The cigarette between his fingers was nearly out. Even when Atef bounded up the stairs, Mustafa kept his eyes on the ground.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “Atef.” The entreaty in Mustafa’s voice wasn’t unfamiliar. It flickered now and then, the oil-like insecurity beneath the veneer of all that was Mustafa—handsome, magnetic, loved. Atef felt a deep irritation. Now of all times?

  “What are you doing out here?” he repeated. Mustafa flung the cigarette, his voice sinking soft as a boy’s.

  “I think we should leave.”

  Atef blinked. “Leave.” He felt the word in his mouth, a flat stone.

  “Go to Kuwait. Or Amman. We can drive into Jordan. The troops are falling back. Nablus is going to fall. We can be in Amman by dinnertime.” He shifted his legs and Atef understood the awkward pose—at Mustafa’s side was a small dark suitcase.

  He was leaving.

  The imam flashed in Atef’s mind, the men in the mosque, the blue and white flags everywhere. The flyers, posters that screamed Arabs are animals, barbarians. Leaving. He thought of the house behind Mustafa, Khalto Salma’s house, of Alia, who would have given anything to be left behind. Who would have smashed the windows and salted the earth before leaving it. Mustafa’s scared face.

  Atef sought the thing that would hurt the most.

  “You coward. You fucking coward.” Atef’s voice shook and he heard every word crack, its own gunshot, watched the invisible trail of smoke, but it was too late. He was like a man possessed. I need him, I need him, I need him, his mind panted. “How long have you been planning this? You want to run to your sisters? Hide behind your mother’s skirts?”

  Mustafa froze. His eyes found Atef’s in disbelief. Every muscle on his beautiful face tensed, the two men facing each other for a taut, arrested moment. Atef prepared himself for a punch. He urged himself for the final, horrible insult.

  “You want to leave, leave. The men will stay.”

  Mustafa flinched; it was an unnecessary blow, like shooting a corpse one last time. His face opened like a window, saying everything, all that would come later: The soldiers would come to arrest them in three mornings, the men that would ravage Salma’s house. The cells they would sleep and wake in for weeks. The electricity, Atef’s flesh thrumming until he sang out Mustafa’s name, tossed his name to the torturers, said his name to every question they asked.

  How the last time Atef would see Mustafa alive, he would be kicking, kicking at a soldier, and Atef’s stomach would turn, remembering how he’d called him a coward.

  None of this had happened yet. In that moment, the bombs were falling elsewhere, Nablus was still quiet. It was morning and the world was changing. Mustafa finally moved; lifting an eyebrow, he rose, bowed his head sardonically to Atef, then turned and opened the front door. He swept inside, marking his choice. He dropped the bag in the foyer.

  Atef shakes with the desire to rewrite everything that happened. For years, that was his fiction. Here is Palestine, he would think. Here are the streets we’d walk in Nablus, the neighborhood we grew up in. Here is everything we loved.

  With a mental brushstroke he re-creates it, everything, the voices of men hawking bateekh, bateekh on the roads, the marketplace cramped with sweating bodies. Mountains scooped out like melons, crags left bare, smoothed from centuries of wind and rain. Miles of land unspool, whole villages, houses as old as the earth itself.

  Then he re-creates Mustafa. Every eyelash. His peppery smell. The spark of the cigarette landing in soil. The blue of Khalto Salma’s front door, the way the frame was splintered.

  Punch me, he wants to yell at Mustafa. Tell me to fuck off, hit me in the face. Pick up that goddamn suitcase, walk down the driveway. I would’ve followed you. I would’ve followed you. Take me with you. You can save yourself. We can both live.

  But instead, Mustafa lifts his eyebrow and opens that door, and they both walk through it.

  Atef can see his family move around in the house, their shadows flitting in the golden windows. Someone turns on the front porch light. It is cool outside, bracing, Atef’s shirt too thin. His legs hurt from sitting too long. Above, the night sky is stippled as a speckled egg. In the breeze, the dying petals of windflowers rustle against one another like skirts. He always loved their yellow.

  He moves like a fever, his body its own engine, flinging toward the flowers, hands blind in the dark, fumbling until he finds the spindly stems, their hopeful little throats. He pulls one out, then another. The stems are small in his fingers. A rock pricks his fingertip, the pain heady and welcome.

  I’d burn the house down. Yes. Right down over your own head. He rips one windflower after the other out. His fingers begin to bleed.

  “Jiddo.”

  He turns, panting. The four grandchildren stand in a row, watching him.

  “Jiddo.” Abdullah swallows. He is choosing his words delicately. “Mama and the rest are asking about you. They wanted us to bring you in.”

  “I had to pull them out.” Atef gestures at the limp flowers. Abdullah looks alarmed. They move closer to the tree.

  “She hates them,” he manages. The grandchildren glance at one another. Linah moves first, the beads in her hair clanking together as she kneels in the dark. First Zain, then Abdullah follows, tugging at the flowers with her.

  Atef watches them. He remembers the children years ago, putting on plays, organizing birthday songs. For one birthday they’d baked him a cake. A disaster. He’d eavesdropped outside as they’d fretted over the mess they’d made, worrying about the cracked eggs. He could have gone in and cleaned, or scolded them, but he was frozen, motionless in face of their beauty.

  Zain and Linah set the flowers in a pile. He tries to imagine being their age. Sixteen. The impossibility of that youth. Manar walks over to Atef, kneels.

  “Your grandmother used to live in a house with a garden. In Palestine. With her brother.” Atef feels his breath catch. “I used to go there a lot.”

  He has to remember for the both of them. Yes. Atef continues talking.

  “A good house. There was a table under the trees. In the summer, we’d sit out there for hours.”

  Manar pulls her knees up, resting her chin on her hands. “Which house was this?”

  “Your great-grandmother’s. Khalto Salma.” Atef can remember the sound the wind made as it rustled in the doorway, the magnificent rise of the house.

  That house. The ones that came after. He thinks of them, instinctively touching the soil again. All the houses they have lived in, the ibriks and rugs and curtains they have bought; how many windows should any person own? The houses float up to his mind’s eye like jinn, past lovers. The sloping roof of his mother’s hut, the marbled tiles in Salma’s kitchen, the small house he shared with Alia in Nablus. The Kuwait home. The Beirut apartments. This house, here in Amman. For Alia, some old, vanished house in Jaffa. They glitter whitely in his mind, like structures made of salt, before a tidal wave comes and sweeps them away.

  “I thought I had more time—” Manar stops, embarrassed. Atef waits. “To ask her things.”

  “About what?”

  His granddaughter shrugs. “Her l
ife.”

  He can feel their eyes upon him. Poor innocent things, he thinks. What is a life? A series of yeses and noes, photographs you shove in a drawer somewhere, loves you think will save you but that cannot. Continuing to move, enduring, not stopping even when there is pain. That’s all life is, he wants to tell her. It’s continuing.

  He thinks of his beautiful wife, that afternoon in her mother’s garden, the mosque light he saw when he met her. Nablus, filled with flowers. How in love he was, with Mustafa, with his defiant sister, their house, their wealth. I wanted all of it, he wrote once. It was true.

  “Ya Alia,” he says aloud before stopping. He wants to tell her everything. “My poor girl.” He has been crying without realizing it. His grandchildren are staring at him, Atef understanding that he is changing their lives, these children who will take this moment and make something of it, turn it into their own lives, remember on their deathbeds the cool air, the stars, their grandfather weeping under a fig tree.

  “Jiddo,” Manar says timidly. Atef sighs, turns to her.

  “What?” He waits for the platitudes, comfort. But there is only silence. The four children facing him like an army. The girl takes a long breath.

  “Stay out here,” she tells him. Her voice is strong. “We’ll tell them to leave you alone.” Around them, the night pulses with wind and insects. “Stay out here a little longer.”

  The girl presses a gentle hand on his shoulder, and Atef does.

  Manar

  * * *

  Jaffa

  September 2014

  “Madame, madame, you come here, we make best fish for you!”

  “Fresh watermelon and cream!”

  “You like lamb, madame? You like kibbeh?”

  “Shaar el banat!”

  The eager voices of waiters carry along the Jaffa port. They stand outside the restaurants, sweating in their suits. It is early evening, the sun nearly set, though the air is still hot and humid, thick with the saltiness that reminds Manar of Beirut. Her thighs are sticky beneath the long skirt. The morning sickness of the day—lasting well into the afternoon—has passed and she is hungry. The men smile as she walks by, shake tasseled menus in her direction. When she first arrived in Jerusalem, the chattiness of vendors had thrown her off and she’d respond automatically, more than once allowing herself to be shepherded into a café or a store.

  But weeks have passed now, and Manar sees such banter as endearing, harmless. Especially because her time is nearly up; in less than a week she’ll board a plane, spend endless hours over the Atlantic, and then be, unceremoniously, back in Manhattan.

  She pauses in front of a restaurant. There is an ornate menu propped up and she scans the items—kibbeh, samak harra, warak anab. A small bald man appears at her side, speaking in Arabic.

  “We have a back area with a wonderful view. We’ll get you a table next to the water, you’ll be able to feel the spray on your face!”

  She smiles inwardly. She is used to such theatrics.

  “Do you have muhammara?”

  “Ah, Lebanese?” The man’s smile widens. “Yes, yes, we’ll make it. Special just for you!”

  Manar lets herself be ushered through the restaurant, a gold tapestry spelling Allah spanning one side of the wall, and onto the veranda, where several small tables are, indeed, overlooking the Mediterranean. The view is astounding. Instinctively, as has become her habit in certain moments, her fingers clutch her purse, which houses—past the bottle of prenatal vitamins, her passport—the soft, frayed pages of the letters. Her rabbit’s foot.

  “Be good to her,” the man says to a young waiter. “She’s a Lebanese sister.”

  Manar resists the impulse to correct him. It is exasperating how easily her accent gives her away. It is like a fingerprint, something branding her, exposing her upbringing—Lebanese father, Palestinian mother, Paris, America. A mutt, Seham, her best friend, calls her.

  Back in Manhattan, she and Seham meet for drinks after work, sometimes with the other girls they know from school, girls drawn to one another like magnets, commiserating over shared upbringings. They are all young and smart, most of them Palestinian by origin but raised in Denmark, Australia, Seattle, with neutral names like Maya and Dana.

  “No wonder you’re messed up. You’ve been emotionally code-switching all your life,” Seham likes to say, and while Manar used to protest, lately she has been accepting it, reveling in the notion that her problems, the disarray of her life, all spring from her heritage.

  The flight to Tel Aviv had been long and uncomfortable, the rows of seats filled with Hasidic men and exhausted parents with toddlers. Manar surprised herself by falling asleep for several hours, but somewhere over Portugal, the plane began to rock and she shot upright. Her stomach turned. She barely made it to the cramped toilet before vomiting heartily.

  Afterward, she exhaled and spat into the sink. Washing her hands, she avoided her reflection but caught a sidelong blur nonetheless—tangled hair, pale face.

  “Christ, Bleecker much?” she mumbled to herself. It was an old joke between her and her cousin Linah, a nod to the sloppy NYU girls spilling out of bars in Manhattan.

  Back in her seat, Manar leaned her forehead against the icy window, shut her eyes. She felt a sharp homesickness for Manhattan, though she had been gone for only half a day. The tree-lined streets of Greenpoint, their apartment perpetually smelling of dim sum.

  And Gabriel. Sweet, lovely Gabe. His thinning hair, his ex-wife and alimony. His bewildered face when she told him about the trip.

  “You want to go now?”

  “There isn’t going to be a better time,” she had said.

  “There lit-e-rally”—his fingers tapped the syllables in the air; the man could veer toward the pedantic when frazzled—“couldn’t be a worse time.”

  Five weeks earlier, he had filled their apartment with lilies and popped a champagne cork, though they filled her glass with Sprite. He got down on one knee and cried a little, held out a hand for hers. She said yes, but he made her repeat it two, three times, until they were both laughing.

  “I want to see it,” she said.

  “But it’s not going anywhere,” he countered. “What’s the urgency?”

  But that was precisely it—the urgency was there was no urgency. There never would be. For years she watched news reports of the settlements, the phosphorus dropped over Gaza, camps swelling with eyeless children. Anger held her up with burning little hands, assembled itself into chants of Free Palestine, free, free Palestine with the rest of the Justice for Palestine group during Apartheid Week at Columbia. For years she kept a poster taped above her desk of a young man mid-hurl, a stone flying in the air. Along the border were sentences calligraphed in Arabic. His arm arched like an arrow, his face hidden beneath a scarf. The stone had just left his fingertips. A part of her knew such posters were romanticism, envy at best. Still, she hoped he hit what he was aiming for.

  The sun dips into the sea. From Manar’s table, she can make out a fisherman on a distant rock. At the table next to hers, a brunette in an expensive-looking dress sits with two men, laughing and talking. There are two bottles of arak on the table, the plates littered with fish bones and napkins. The men are handsome, fair-skinned. The bearded one looks over at Manar several times and smiles.

  Manar busies herself with the menu, aware of how sensual the air feels, the beauty of the seascape around her. Throughout her time here, the awful facts—checkpoints, soldiers, camps—are often softened by captivating landscapes.

  “Yes, madame? Are you ready?” An older waiter appears at her side. Something about the flower he has tucked into his lapel, jaunty and red, reminds Manar of her father.

  She smiles up at him. “Muhammara. And whatever else you recommend.”

  “Ah, what a responsibility.” The man pretends to study the sea, then snaps his fingers. Even his profile has something of Elie in it, the lifted chin, the hawkish nose. “Hammour, grilled, with green beans and potat
oes, hummus on the side.”

  “Perfect.”

  “And anything to drink? We have wine, arak . . .”

  “Just water, please.”

  “Water,” the waiter repeats. He approves.

  Wherever she goes, she keeps the letters in her purse, wrapped in tissue paper and bound with twine.

  Zain gave them to her the last time he visited from Boston. “Take these with you,” he said, holding out the parcel, and she blinked back tears. They were his prized possession, prized being the operative word, as he had stolen—borrowed, he insisted—the letters years ago and never returned them.

  “Zuzu,” she began, but he held a hand up.

  “You should have them out there. You can try to find things in the letters, maybe even the house.”

  She had felt the urge then to tell him everything, about the baby, about Gabe’s proposal, confessing—Yes, he was married, but it wasn’t working anyway, she went back to Iowa with her family, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to keep the baby but I can’t seem to get rid of it, I love him but he’s so American, sometimes I feel suffocated by everything I have to explain to him—all the things she will have to tell the family. But she simply held her hand out, took the bundle.

  “Thanks.”

  The letters have stayed with Zain all these years. During the summers he brings them to Beirut, where the family gathers for long weeks. The four of them—Linah, Zain, Manar, and Abdullah—sit out on the balcony, lighting cigarettes and discussing the letters. Abdullah helped translate the passages from Arabic, as the rest of them confused tenses and verbs. They talk about the letters like a book, their grandfather writing about the war in Nablus, his years in Kuwait. The people he refers to—a dead great-uncle, old friends, their own parents—seem as exotic as characters in a movie, and as unlikely.