Salt Houses

by Hala Alyan

  She knows some of the passages by heart. I worry about the children. Sometimes I wake up in this city, look out at the desert. I swear I can hear the adan in Nablus. I can hear Abu Nabil hawking his bread. Brother, I can smell your cigarette, hear you telling me to hurry.

  They come up with theories, what he has told their grandmother, what is secret. They’re not supposed to have the letters, they know this much. The filching has made them precious.

  Manar’s status as the other woman was a technicality; Gabe’s wife had already left when Manar met him. Manar loved his neuroses, his flaws, the smattering of hair on his shoulders and back that he hated, saying it made him feel beastlike. His tenderness. He wept openly during wedding speeches and made a point, every single night before bed, of cupping her face and saying I love you.

  She told Gabriel everything. About her chaotic childhood, chubby daughter of bickering parents, dragged from Paris to Boston to Beirut. Half Palestinian, half Lebanese. How she would make herself ill on the first day of school—the other children always mocked her glasses, called her May-nard—once drinking curdled milk that had cramped her stomach for days. She told Gabe about her parents’ divorce, her love for her father and her disdain for her mother.

  After the divorce, she claimed her father for herself, but sometimes she is envious of Zain’s resentment, the way he still calls him Elie instead of Baba or Dad. She wishes she could wash her hands of her father, fault him for everything. But that would be relinquishing a lovely, familiar topography. She told Gabe of the truce they’d called, she and her mother, though she still felt waves of rage toward her at times. Of how a fight over parking last year ended with Manar, twenty-four years old, screaming like a teenager, We weren’t your children, we were your audience.

  She told him about sitting in classrooms that smelled of chalk and sweat listening to teachers chatter about Salinger and decimal fractions and the ancient Romans, or listening to her friends during recess, all of whom were awfully in love with some boy or another, but how only half of Manar was there. How her history professor once said Arabs instead of terrorists while discussing 9/11, and everyone turned to stare at Manar, her skin burning like a flag.

  She told him about how the only times in school that she’d felt crystallized into her whole self were when she walked down the silent hallways, stepped into the empty bathroom, and looked at herself multiplied in the small mirrors above the sinks, the smell around her bleach and piss.

  “It’s just three weeks,” she’d told Gabe. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Let me come with you.”

  “Gabe,” she finally said. “Please.”

  He was silent for a while. She knew she was hurting him, that he wanted to be part of this. You can’t, she didn’t say. You don’t understand what it’s like. Darling Gabe, born and bred in white suburban America.

  He spoke quietly. “This isn’t the time to be wandering across the world alone.”

  Not alone enough.

  Her truth shamed her; the decision came after she’d found out about the pregnancy.

  Palestine was something raw in the family, a wound never completely scabbed over. Her grandparents rarely mentioned it. Manar’s plan of visiting was always derailed by something: her grandmother’s illness, meeting Gabe, Zain’s graduation.

  Only the children discuss it, during the Beirut summers. For years, Manar nursed an image of herself, dusty, solemn, walking onto Palestinian soil, squinting in the sun. So when she peed on that stick and a little blue cross appeared, marking her to this new, alien life, that image flashed before her. She couldn’t explain it to Gabe. She had to go now; she is as alone as she’ll ever be again.

  When she told her grandfather about her trip, he said only that she should be careful.

  “You don’t know what can happen.” Manar heard static for a second, the line faltering from Amman to Manhattan.

  “Does Teta want anything?” Even asking the question made Manar flinch, thinking of her grandmother in her state: convinced the maids were spies, that Saddam was coming back.

  “Alia,” her grandfather called out. “Manar asks if you want anything from Falasteen.” A mumble. “Falasteen.” There was a long pause, then her grandmother’s muffled voice, punctuated by a sharp, rare laugh from her grandfather.

  “She says, whatever they ask you, give them hell.”

  In the late afternoons, Manar wanders through the Old City, finds cramped teashops to sit in, listens to voices haggling over the price of sandals and soap.

  Every weekend she packs her worn backpack, walks east to the bus station near Damascus Gate, boards one of the buses to a different city. Tel Aviv, Haifa, Hebron. And the West Bank—that concrete wall a menace, always jolting her freshly when it appears—Bethlehem, Ramallah, Nablus.

  These places she has read about, circles on a map, suddenly emerge, smelling of fruit and car exhaust. I’m in Ramallah, she marvels to herself. This is Haifa. Her pang for Palestine had always been an amorphous thing. It was a hat rack for all her discontent. But suddenly Palestine is real. It is filled with people who have her hair and voice; people live here, she realizes stupidly. They wake under this sun, celebrate anniversaries, march at funerals, watch settlements and checkpoints multiply. While she was busy sleeping with American boys and writing essays about the diaspora, there were people over here being Palestinian.

  At checkpoints, she shows her passport, waits for the click of fanged metal doors; the Israeli soldiers always nod her through. She tries to keep her face impassive, to communicate scorn in her walk. The passport is my key, she writes Zain once.

  It is difficult to capture this trip in her e-mails. Certain evenings she sits at the Internet café near the hotel, at a loss what to write to friends and family and Gabe. She uses words like arresting and eye-opening—how to explain the rows of teenagers in uniforms, the women sandwiched together in checkpoint lines, the confusion of being hit on by Israeli men, the way every Palestinian she has met has been kind but pitying, as though aware She is not like us—and clicks Send.

  A part of her had fantasized that the trip would restore in her some faith, a land to which she’d feel unflinching attachment. She wanted to be shaken to the core. She’d envisioned reading Darwish in seaside cafés, kneeling to gather handfuls of soil into her pocket.

  But from the beginning, nothing has felt as it should. When the plane intercom crackled on, a man’s voice murmuring, We are landing in Tel Aviv Ben Gurion International Airport, everything seemed to accelerate. It all happened in minutes, the flight attendants plucking headphones, fastening overhead bins, the Hasidic man across the aisle rocking with prayer. Manar pressed her forehead against the window, craning to see the strips of ordinary land. From the air, it could be anywhere—grids of buildings, highways spidering like veins between the swaths of reddish earth, the slate blue of the Mediterranean flicking against the shoreline.

  Her mind was strangely blank as she watched the landscape. She clasped her purse.

  The passport control lines were long and slow. Manar watched American-looking families smile up at the officers in the glass booth, lugging their diaper bags and backpacks. A trio of tanned girls giggled at something a security guard said. Passports flitted between the officers’ fingers like birds, the pages flipped through, stamps steady and final. When it’s your turn, Seham had told her, be polite. Avoid eye contact. Smile.

  When her moment came, Manar slid her passport under the glass and waited. Her officer was thick-browed, a younger Pacino.

  “Manar,” he mused. He rifled through it, the pastel, faded stamps on the pages, paused at a recent one. Even through the glass Manar recognized the Arabic lettering. Beirut. The man narrowed his eyes toward her.

  “Arab?”

  He directed her, in accented English, to a waiting room, a cordoned-off space with a mounted television, where a heavyset female officer took Manar’s passport and told her to sit.

  Several other people sat in plastic chairs
lining the dirty windows. They’ll have you sit with the other Arabs. Across from Manar, an older woman fanned herself with a newspaper, jiggling her leg and cursing quietly.

  “Every time. Those dogs.” When an officer appeared, asked her to follow him, the woman spoke to him in Hebrew, then, switching back to Arabic, muttered, “Of course, Your Majesty, of course.”

  The television played a news report in Hebrew, footage of a fire somewhere. Manar waited. Her legs were cramped from the long flight but she was afraid to stand and stretch, then ashamed of that fear.

  After nearly three hours, a young officer appeared in the doorway and said her name. He looked twenty. She rose, her heart pounding, the leather purse strap sticky between her fingers. The man led her down a drab-looking corridor, several doors ajar.

  “In here.” The room was windowless, painted the shade of milk. There was a long table, a metal chair on either side. Manar sat, the man barely glancing up as he shuffled through a file of papers, her passport clipped to the top. “So.” He looked up. “Why are you here?”

  They want to make it hard, Seham had said. That way, we don’t want to come back.

  The questions were predictable, repetitive. He asked about her family, where she grew up, her life in New York. There was a smattering of acne around his mouth; she could tell from the way his fingers hovered over his jawbone he was self-conscious about it. In spite of herself, she felt a tug of sympathy.

  “And your father?” he asked.

  In Connecticut, writing bad novels, she wanted to say, but jokes seemed unwelcome. “In America as well.”

  Where had her mother been born? When had her grandfather left Nablus? Where did her mother live now? Why were there so many Lebanese stamps in her passport? Had her grandfather ever returned to Israel? What precisely did her grandfather do in Amman?

  The interest in her grandfather was disorienting. Her tall and quiet jiddo, always clicking peppermint candies against his teeth when he sipped tea. During the summers, entire evenings could go by without him speaking.

  When did her grandfather get a Jordanian passport? Who purchased the house in Amman? When had her grandmother left Nablus?

  “I don’t know,” Manar said to the officer over and over.

  He looked at her with disdain. “You don’t know?”

  He brought her water and crackers. He asked her to write down where each grandparent was born and she paused, uncertain. Nablus, she wrote for her mother’s parents and, beside it, a question mark. Was it Nablus? That was where they left, she remembered. Had there been somewhere before that? She racked her memory. A faint nausea began to trickle over her like a raw egg.

  Pick your battles, Manar, she could hear Seham saying.

  But she was hot and tired and thirsty and was already speaking, her voice shrill and angry: “My grandfather’s in his eighties. He hasn’t been here”—she couldn’t bring herself to say Israel—“in decades. What’s the point of these questions?”

  The young man looked up sharply, a frisson of something—contempt, distaste—rippling through his eyes.

  “It’s security, miss.”

  He left her for a while, twenty, thirty minutes. She could hear voices in the hallway, someone laughing. The floor was made of ugly diamond-shaped tiles. She began counting them, then gave up. Finally the door opened. The officer set her passport on the table.

  “Your purse,” he said. “I have to search it.”

  Everything was excruciatingly slow, her own fingers lifting the purse strap from her lap, his fingers opening the flap, pulling out lipstick, vitamins, several sticks of gum. She watched him rifle around, finding the zippered pocket. She could feel the jagged metal beneath her own fingertips. He pulled out the bundle of letters. For a moment, neither of them spoke.

  “This?” He looked up at her sharply. He unwound the twine. “What are these?”

  An image of Zain’s face, trusting, floated up to her. The lines upon lines, an entire history in words. She imagined her grandfather’s story in this man’s hand, her jiddo’s tidy rows of writing. His life. They’d take the letters. Linah and Zain would kill her.

  “Miss?”

  Help me, she whispered silently and something stirred, miraculously, leaping through her esophagus, her stomach darting, splitting her until she bent over. Vomit streamed from her mouth like relief, hot and toxic, splattering the ugly tiles. She could feel the man’s shocked eyes on her. Her breath was ragged.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said triumphantly.

  The officer looked irritated, as though they were playing a game and she had cheated. Bullshit, he seemed to be thinking, but was too afraid to say it. She could see his mind whirring, imagining potential articles on the Huffington Post, lawsuits, miscarriages.

  Not worth it, his shrug said. He dropped the letters back into her purse, pushed it toward her with the heel of his hand.

  He stood, nodded behind her, toward the door, the long hallway, the passport lines, the rows of cabs, the land.

  “Go,” he said.

  Nothing quite as dramatic happened after the airport, but the feeling of things being off has persisted. Everywhere she goes, she feels surplus, unnecessary. Her first time in the Old City, she was fascinated by the Wailing Wall. She froze, watching the throngs moving like water, toward the wall, away from the wall. A group of young people near the entrance wore uniforms. The female soldiers were unsettlingly beautiful.

  In every guidebook she read, there was the same truism—the magic of Jerusalem. How you would walk through it and breathe history. How you could feel it in the stones. Reading the books, Manar felt a rising excitement. Would she touch it then, finally? That parched, grasping part of herself, thirsty to feel something that would link her, in some ancestral way, to the world?

  But Al-Aqsa had been a disappointment, the Holy Sepulcher as well. Though each marketplace was perfumed with spices, each mosque framed with beautiful calligraphy, she felt uninspired. Sometimes she felt a swell as the sun set over Jerusalem, the city alive with its low, intimate thrumming. But the moment was always interrupted by something, a motorcade whizzing by, a child’s cry, her own phone ringing.

  It reminded her of vacations as a child. She prepared for cities the way she prepared for exams, reading about them, researching history and sightseeing, and something in this erudite approach left her floundering when she actually got there. Before a trip to Quebec or the Grand Canyon or London, she’d take out books from her school library, devour images of mountains, skyscrapers, fill her mouth with borrowed adjectives (stunning, colossal, breathtaking, otherworldly) so that when she finally arrived, there was nothing left to see, nothing left for her—already prepared for the awe—to say.

  Nablus was the biggest disappointment of all. She’d expected to feel kinship. Though her grandparents’ stories were infrequent, this was where they grew up, where they had met and wed.

  Manar had formed an image of Nablus: an expansive, generous land peppered with olive groves, valleys between yellow hills. In one of the photos, her younger grandparents grinning into the camera, she could see slivers of indigo sky, bunches of wildflowers.

  But there were no wildflowers. The bus from Ramallah was musty, cramped with the sweating bodies of middle-aged men. Outside the window, swaths of land blurred by, blanched hills dotted with trees. Biblical, Manar thought, of the groves, the occasional cluster of goats or donkeys.

  A prickle of claustrophobia as the bus drove into Nablus—those endless cliffs and hills, the vast rising at either side. It made her feel caved in. Landlocked.

  She’d looked for her great-grandmother’s house for hours, finally showing an old photograph of Alia’s to marketplace vendors who shrugged and gave vague directions toward the cliffs. She walked and walked until she saw a pale minaret in the distance, remembered in a flash her grandfather mentioning a mosque, and headed for it; she eventually arrived at a row of houses and, suddenly, there it was: the pitched roof from the photographs, a hedge of
jasmine bushes. A house unmistakably shaped like the one in the photograph, though different, the front yard smaller, the exterior repainted blue, the wire clothesline gone.

  Manar stood there for a long time, holding the photograph in her hand, her grandmother and grandfather half a century younger, a bearded man next to them, his arm casually draped around Alia. Her great-uncle. Mustafa. He’d died a long time ago, before any of them had been born. Manar looked at the grainy photograph, then the real house, then back again. She bade herself to feel something, some internal tectonic shift. But she just felt like an interloper, trespassing on memories that had nothing to do with her.

  This morning, Manar decided on a whim to visit Jaffa. The city has a pacifying effect on her, the shoreline jutting out to meet the sea. The city is worn, shabby but enchanting, the walls scribbled with graffiti. Up close, Jaffa shows its age.

  Even here in the restaurant, the tables are cracked, the wood faded. The waiter brings Manar her fish decorated with lemon slices, a sprig of mint tucked at the corner of the plate. She is touched.

  “Enjoy,” he tells her.

  Manar lemons and salts the fish. She chews slowly, the tastes a revelation—lemon peel, coriander, mint. She watches the coastline, the trio at the nearby table. The woman has twisted her dark hair into a bun and, in the dusk light, her profile is regal. She makes a dismissive gesture toward the men, frowns. The three of them speak in animated, accented English but the waves are loud, and Manar can hear only snippets of the conversation—something about a day trip, a lost suitcase, the woman’s desire to go to Petra.

  As the sky darkens, the waiters light lanterns. The effect is romantic. On the beach, some hundred yards away, a veiled woman sits with two small children on a bed sheet spread over a rock, all of them eating fruit.

  The bearded man catches Manar looking and smiles at her. He lifts his glass, raises it in a gesture of salute. Manar does the same, then looks away, her cheeks hot.