Salt Houses

by Hala Alyan

  The family on the beach has finished eating. Manar watches the mother fold a shawl over one of the children’s shoulders and brush her hair back. At the nearby table, the woman stretches and yawns.

  “Ariana,” the unbearded man says. The woman’s brow furrowed.

  “Don’t start with me, Robert,” she says, sipping at her lit cigarette. Italian, Manar thinks.

  “It’s just for a day. Two, max.” The man is blond, generic, with a British accent. He looks like the men who flood the financial district in Manhattan, except that he is dressed like an expat—cotton pants, pale button-down shirt. He smiles at the woman even as she rolls her eyes and looks over the water.

  The mother on the beach, Manar knows, is married, has a husband somewhere, a home where she folds blankets and sprinkles salt over pots of rice. She wouldn’t have met her husband at a bar or on vacation but through her family, their fathers deeming the match suitable. Manar envisions a simple ceremony, matrons ululating as she entered the courtyard, her father taking the husband aside—a tall, nervous man—and whispering a few stern but kind words, telling him to take care of his daughter.

  Unexpectedly, Manar’s eyes well up, and her plate, the beach, blur into greens and yellows. She ducks her head, blinks.

  She won’t have that with Gabe. Her father, indistinguishable from most white men in Connecticut save for his trim mustache, is absent. Her mother will be confused but happy for her. Her grandfather will say nothing. Manar will never have, she knows, the stability of a preordained life. They have all forfeited that—her friends, Linah, even her own mother—most of all Manar herself. By saying she wanted a different life, by choosing the pubs, flirtations with strange men, and, yes, the sex. The night after night of dating, shaking the hands of men who would break her heart, wearing lipstick and straightening her back. A pregnancy out of wedlock. Yes, she thinks. Something has been lost.

  “American?”

  Manar blinks. Over at the next table, the woman is staring directly at her. Her voice is throaty.

  “Uh.” Beautiful women make Manar anxious. “From all over. Partly from Palestine.”

  The woman’s face breaks into a smile. The men are smoking, eyeing Manar with interest. “We work at an NGO here. I’m Ariana.” Her accent is lilting. “What are you doing in Jaffa? Travels?” She pronounces it Yaffa, like an Arab.

  Manar nods. “Just visiting.”

  The bearded man speaks, stubbing his cigarette out. “We’re going to a festival near the water. Some friends put together a concert, like a fundraiser. It’s not far from here.”

  Ariana props her elbow on the table, drops her chin into her hand. She smiles, alluringly.

  “You should come.”

  The walk is short and pleasant, and though the sun has set, there is a lingering heat. The men and Ariana bicker. The bearded man is Jimmy, the blond Adam. They have known each other for years. The four of them walk in a row, taking up the entire width of the sidewalk. From the way Adam often glances at Ariana, Manar deduces a history, some unrequited love or a former fling. Jimmy, however, looks at Manar when he talks, his mouth frankly sensual. In her loose, flowing blouse, she isn’t showing yet.

  “When I first moved here, I gave myself one month, two, tops. All the shit here, those goddamn checkpoints—I figured I wouldn’t be able to handle it.”

  “Then what happened?” Manar has heard a hundred versions of this story since her arrival.

  Jimmy shrugs. His shoulders strain against the thin fabric of his shirt. “Fell in love. All of us did. It breaks your heart, but it’s impossible to leave.”

  “Don’t let him bullshit you,” Ariana calls. “Jimmy’s about as romantic as a steak knife.”

  “You the pot or the kettle, Annie?” His teeth gleam as he smiles.

  “Don’t call me that.” The sulkiness in Ariana’s voice betrays their dynamic. Adam in love with Ariana. Ariana secretly drawn to Jimmy. Jimmy a free agent.

  Which makes me what? Though Manar knows the answer—random girl at the restaurant, tagging along for some music and company, then disappearing back into her life and out of theirs. Something about the simplicity of it is perversely appealing.

  “There.” Adam points. Manar can see a twinkle of lights up ahead. Music pulses from the distance, a mix of electronica and dirbakeh.

  “Quick toke?” Jimmy fumbles in his pocket and they all stop obediently.

  Jimmy lights a slim white joint, and the scent of hashish fills the air. They each take long, luxuriant tokes. When Adam hands it to Manar, she is reluctant but inhales deeply, overcompensating, and is rewarded by an instant rush. She silently apologizes to Gabe. One toke, she reasons. It can’t hurt.

  “Christ.”

  Jimmy laughs amiably. “Strong shit, eh?” When Manar hands him the joint this time, she returns his open stare, feels her entire being buzzing with this, all of it—the two men, beautiful Ariana, this night so far away from New York, Gabe, the life awaiting her there, even the stones, thousands of years old, surrounding them.

  As good as any, she thinks.

  The music is surprisingly inviting, people dancing in groups on the sand. The singer is a homely woman, her voice hauntingly clear above the drums. Teenage boys move through the crowd surreptitiously, selling beer. When Jimmy buys her one, she lifts it to her closed lips and then tosses it discreetly on the sand. Ariana and Adam have vanished, dancing somewhere in the throngs of people.

  “Give us a dance?”

  She thinks of Gabe. Their closetful of his cable-knit sweaters. His earnest love. It’s just dancing, she tells herself.

  She lets Jimmy tug her into the crowd, the bodies moving to the beat, the music loud and feverish, lets him spin her over and over until she isn’t thinking about Gabe anymore, or Manhattan, or anything.

  “Where are you from?” Jimmy’s breath is warm in her ear.

  Manar considers. “We moved a lot. But my grandparents, well, my mother’s parents, are from Nablus. They left during the ’67 war.”

  “And before that?”

  Manar cocks her head. “What do you mean?”

  “A lot of people”—Jimmy twirls her around, slightly out of breath—“went to Nablus after ’48. But they were originally from Jerusalem or Acre or Jaffa.”

  “I know that.” The trace of petulance in her voice is telling. She does know that and yet had never applied that to her grandparents. She thinks of Teta, sitting in that armchair in her living room in Amman, blinking at the television, that perpetual expression of confusion on her face. Where did you grow up? Manar asks her silently. What do you remember of it?

  Now Manar is in the center of the crowd, making serpentine circles with her hips, hair falling into her eyes. Jimmy dances nearby, singing along to the Arabic lyrics. She is pouring another beer into the sand, then lifting the empty bottle to her lips. She is kicking her shoes off.

  It all reminds her of the celebrations she read about in history classes, the extravagant parties the ancient Greeks used to throw before battle. Naked women, orgies, wine by the barrel, and, everywhere, wild music. She thinks of the slaughters going on, the occupation surrounding them, all the revolutions that flicker and blaze and die. It would seem like such a monumental, brave, lovely act, all this revelry in the face of war, except that Manar knows it has always been like this.

  It fascinates Manar—not just history in general, with its empires, collapses, and revivals, but also the faint, persistent echoes that seem to travel through the millennia. Land eaten and reshuffled, homes taken—daughters and sons speaking enemy languages, forgetting their own—the belief that we are owed something by the cosmos.

  Then she is moving through the dancers, Jimmy’s arm around her, the two of them walking in the sand—Where are my shoes?—up to a cluster of large rocks. Jimmy guides her between the rocks, out of sight of the revelers. The music is distant, drowned out by the waves.

  “I’m glad you came out with us,” he murmurs. “Ya sitt Nablus.” M
anar feels her heartbeat in her throat.

  He’s going to kiss her. She could let him. It could be a story she tells Linah and Zain, Seham back in Manhattan. You’ll never believe . . .

  Suddenly, an image of Gabe pouring Sprite into the champagne flute. Manar pulls back.

  “My shoes.” Manar faces him for a moment. In the moonlight he looks older. “Wait here.”

  His smile is slow, distracted. Manar walks rapidly, her bare feet sinking into the sand. She walks past the boulders, past some men smoking, past the crowd—where people are still dancing, perhaps kissing, perhaps loving one another. It is late, she thinks, so late it is nearly early and soon the sun will begin to rise. She walks until she reaches the cobblestone street, little pebbles piercing her feet. For ten, fifteen minutes, she keeps moving, until she cannot hear the music anymore, away from the beach, between houses, until she finds a secluded-looking archway between two trees and, finally, she sits.

  Manar remains in the archway for a long, long time, as though in a trance, until the low thrum of the muezzin stirs her. Suddenly, she is aware of everything. The sky beginning to lighten, her filthy feet, the growl in her stomach. Even the contents of her purse are jumbled around; her phone has run out of battery. The fold of shekels that she’d tucked in her wallet is gone. But here, yes, here is the zippered pocket, the bundle of paper, and Manar pulls out the letters, opens them for the hundredth time, like an archaeologist afraid she missed something all along. She goes through the pages until she finds her favorite passage.

  Last night, I dreamed of refugees stealing rubble—a woman’s braceleted hand, someone’s eyes, it begins. The word eyes is crossed out, then rewritten above.

  I dreamed of the men in Zarqa, the camps, in army bases all over America. They met in secret rooms, unfolded maps, and pointed, grooming for war, woke and stamped outside in boots. Their rage woke them. It marched their legs up trails, snowdrifts, sand dunes, their breath precise and measured with each step. Onward, onward, the land urged them. They aimed their rifles at a target, imagined an enemy heart, and pulled the trigger.

  Impulsively, Manar begins to read aloud. Her voice is hoarse from the singing earlier. She thinks of the plays she used to do with Zain and Linah years ago, imagines an audience listening in the archway in front of her.

  “But Mustafa, we still thirst for it. Our mutiny is our remembering.”

  She pauses for a second, the sound of a car in the distance, the purr of someone’s engine. She returns to the page, transfixed.

  “Our remembering the hundred names of that land,” she continues. “This is what it means to be alive.”

  Finally, Manar packs the letters away and rises grimly, walks down the street until she finds an unopened store, and pauses, checking her reflection in the glass. It is disheartening—savage hair, drooped mascara. She scowls at her reflection.

  “Idiot,” she mutters. The precision of the word pleases her and, unbidden, she smiles. She trails her fingertips across her abdomen. Suddenly aching for the sea, she walks the narrow streets, past shuttered beauty salons and bakeries, until she makes a turn and there, pale in early light, the water waits.

  Jaffa. There is that desire, the old wanting, to say something. For someone to bear witness as she speaks.

  Bits of shells and pebbles pierce her feet along the sand, a cool relief as her toes touch water. She takes a breath.

  “I’ve come here for no reason.” The starkness of the words strikes her as hilarious. She begins to laugh. “No . . . reason . . . at . . . all.” The laughter takes on an edge of hysteria and it occurs to her that she might cry. Sobering, she walks along the shoreline, the water icy against her ankles.

  It is beautiful, all of it—the hastening of the waves, how the water gathers itself as though spilling white petals onto the sand. The sky has the colorlessness of moistened paper; it looks like it might tear. And the sunlight touches everything, spinning it into gold. Her tired mind alights on myths—Midas, Icarus, the stories she spent years memorizing. Everything she has forgotten.

  She sits, the water lapping her skirt. A testimony, she decides. On the wet sand, she writes letters with her finger.

  Alia, she traces. Alia Yacoub. She pauses, considering. Atef Yacoub. The sand is soft beneath her toes, ticklish. She draws a line between the two names and another one below. A family tree. Riham, Karam, Souad, she traces. Next to her mother’s name, Manar writes Elie. She draws an X between them. A handful of stars, like white freckles, are still visible in the sky. Abdullah, Manar, Linah, Zain.

  Looking at the names, she speaks again. “We were all here.” She speaks slowly. She holds her wet palm to her cheek, then runs it through her hair. She imagines her whole family standing on this shoreline, in a row. Oddly cheered by the image, she pulls her knees to her chin and muses to the waves, “Even you, Teta.”

  She draws a final line from her own name. Gabriel. Below, an arrow that leads to a small question mark. Leah? June? Dara? There is a human, she realizes, that she will have to name.

  Shutting her eyes, Manar tips her face toward the sky. When she opens them, a man and his young boy are walking along the sand, watching her. The man has a fishing net hoisted around his shoulder, dirty, gray knots. He is frowning, a mixture of disapproval and concern on his face as they walk closer to her. The boy’s face is beautiful, a fawnlike docility about his eyes. He stares at Manar, openly curious.

  “Yalla.” The father nudges his son. He eyes Manar warily.

  Manar is shaken with the desire to protest, to speak with the man in Arabic. But she can see herself through the fisherman’s eyes: drenched, squatting in seawater. Not a woman in the throes of revelation, but something peripheral, another unnecessary foreigner. Ajnabiyeh, she can hear him thinking.

  This is what makes her drop her eyes. It is what pulls her up, rising unsteadily, the wet skirt clinging to her legs as she bows her head in apology. A large wave washes over the sand, the water eating her words, her family come and gone in this sea that belongs to none of them.

  “I’m leaving,” she says to the man in Arabic.

  As she walks past them, she glances up only once. The man is still watching her, but his expression has changed. She nods, and the man nods back.

  Epilogue

  * * *

  Beirut

  The television is always on. Always there is the sound of war, elsewhere. In certain moments the sounds buzz together into incoherence, a language she neither recognizes nor trusts. At these times, Alia tries to keep her eyes on the long, Z-shaped scratch on the coffee table. Or a chip in her coral nail polish; the slight fray of the curtains. Whatever is undone. Alia finds the flaws when the blankness comes and she clutches them as though for life.

  The comforting sound of the washing machine, Umm Najwa’s feet pattering down the hallway, and Alia wakes. She likes this bedroom, the greens soothing, sunlight streaming through the thin curtains. Still, she misses her bedroom in Amman. The almond tree outside her window.

  The pain is worst in the morning.

  “Umm Najwa,” she calls, and within seconds the woman appears at the door.

  “Good morning.” Umm Najwa has a coarse Palestinian accent. “Are we getting up?” Fists on her hips, she eyes Alia. “It’s a special day,” she continues cheerfully, “do you know why?”

  Alia turns away from her. She breathes in the cotton of her pillow.

  “Go away.”

  There is a baby in this house. Or perhaps it is the other house, loud with voices and slamming doors. The rooms seem interchangeable, everyone appearing and vanishing, and at the center is the baby. Everyone is smitten with her. Cooing and singing lullabies, applauding when she gurgles. Once Alia asked about the mother, and the girl with frizzy hair walked over and kissed her cheek. When the baby cries the girl bounces her on her hip. Sometimes the mother—the name, Manar, arrives simply, fluently, to Alia at times—gives the baby to Alia and she holds her.

  In those moments Alia freezes. S
he smells the baby, her scent of milk and sugar. When she looks up, everyone is watching with shining eyes.

  They are wrong. She knows something is different. Amiss. When she remembers what it is, there is a sorrow that scalds her throat, as though she has eaten a handful of chili peppers and cannot remember to swallow. This is why—though how to put to words that silken rope of remembering, of weaving through days, then losing what is lost again—she answers with such gruffness when they ask questions. Faces lit with hope, their voices small as children’s, even Atef’s. Alia, do you remember Zain? Mama, do you know where we are?

  “Yes, yes,” she answers caustically at such times, transforming their expressions into hurt. “What do you think I am, an idiot?”

  One of the kindest people in the house is a skinny girl. Young, eighteen or nineteen. Her body is girlish with sharp elbows and knees, but there is something womanly about her face, even aged. Such sad eyes, Alia thinks, wants to ask her what has broken her heart. She imagines some tragedy, perhaps a dead lover—so young—or illness.

  But whenever the girl catches sight of Alia, her face turns luminous.

  “How’s the lovely?” she teases. “Shall we go see the plants?” And slowly the girl helps her up, taking most of Alia’s weight. Despite her frame, the girl is strong. Alia suspects a sturdiness about her bones. The girl likes to take her to the balcony, a view of telephone wires and people and water.

  Once outside, the girl pulls back leaves of tall, tangled plants, dozens of pots dotting the balcony, some with tomatoes on the vine, others sprouting flowers in shades of white and blue and purple. Alia likes to watch her pluck the dead, browned leaves, water the soil. They sit for what feels like hours, until the sun sets over the water. Aside from talking to the plants, the girl doesn’t speak much. Sometimes Alia catches the girl lost in thought. The sadness seems pronounced then, etched into the downturned mouth, the long, dark eyelashes.