by Mai Al-Nakib
Julie could not bring herself to speak. Not a single word. Not even when she had seen him pack that tattered straw hat of hers, the floppy one with the thin red ribbon around its brim.
* * *
Julie had been wearing the same hat on the blazing afternoon she boldly – bolder than ever before – placed a Mythos at the tips of Yannis’s long fingers. That was twelve years ago. She was twenty-seven years old then and had decided to go to a place she was certain no other Kuwaiti would be and, if she was especially lucky, no other Arab either. None of the people she had asked had ever heard of Sifnos. They had heard of Santorini, Crete, Rhodes, Mykonos. But not Sifnos, not her secret Sifnos. She wanted out of the trap of Kuwait, the burden of its rights and wrongs. That place – the broken Middle East – often felt foreign to her, an uncomfortable elsewhere. She wanted to have done with everything she felt to be irrevocably beyond her: the desert, the black poison oozing beneath, the white scorching sky, the ominous eyes of judgment and, most of all, her parents. At least for a while. She was sick of the mystery behind her mother’s sadness, her father’s indifference. She was fed up with the guilt her parents made her feel with every loaded sigh, every slow blink of their drained lids.
She was named Ghalia, expensive, because she had come after many miscarriages, stillbirths, early baby deaths. The price paid for her existence may have been her mother Salwa’s emotional balance, her sense of justice and goodness in the world. By the time Ghalia was conscious of them, her parents were utterly detached. To be in the presence of her mother felt like being at the foot of a great Icelandic glacier. She couldn’t ask anything of her; her enormous silence took over every room of their tight house but one. Only Ghalia’s room, with its door firmly shut and locked, her radio, a calming box of noise, always on, provided some reprieve. Ghalia’s father, short and exhausted, offered nothing much to counter his wife’s neglect of their daughter. Rashid was ordinary. He worked at a bank, like many Kuwaitis. Not a swank bank job but a dull one with no chance of advancement. Rashid didn’t care. He wasn’t ambitious. He wasn’t much interested in anything. There was no hidden key to his indifference, no lurking childhood damage or psychological potholes. Rashid drifted and rolled, wanting nothing more sensational than for his days to squeeze through.
In his whole life, Rashid had done only three incongruous things, the first when he was seventeen. After graduating from secondary school, he had decided to move to Paris to learn French. He had stayed for two years and returned fluent in a language that had nothing to do with him. He had studied business administration at university, got his brainless bank job, married Salwa without ever having met her, and tried everything he could to get at least one of her many pregnancies to stick, convinced the babies died, one by one, because he didn’t love his wife. He had never visited France again and never told anyone at the bank he could speak French.
Rashid’s second incongruous act had been to enroll Ghalia in the French School of Kuwait. He had vowed to speak to her only in French, a language Salwa could not understand. This hadn’t done much to lure Salwa back to the land of the living. At the French School, Ghalia, one of the few Kuwaitis there, was christened Julia and nicknamed Julie. Ghalia insisted on being called Julie all the time. Since her mother rarely spoke to her and her parents had little to do with their extended families – Ghalia’s vague army of aunts and uncles, her two sets of grandparents – she could easily forget she was once Ghalia, the expensive one. She slipped into Julie, into a life of milky coffee in the mornings and small, pastel-colored petits fours glacés in the afternoons. A charmed French life in her head: Astérix and Tintin, cahiers and stylos, lavender billowing in the summer rain, homemade yoghurt in small, glass jars. Julie, with long brown hair, eyes as dark as destiny, and a winsome overbite. Julie, not tall, not thin, but hour-glass voluptuous as a teenager and after. Julie in Kuwait with her head in French clouds.
At twenty-seven, Julie had saved enough money working at a bank – not the same bank as her father, a better bank, a better position with better prospects – to take three months off. She had been traveling to Paris for a couple of weeks a year, every year, since she had started working at twenty-one. She didn’t want to spend her three months there. She wanted something as incongruous as her father’s stay in Paris had been for him all those years ago. She imagined Greece, slow, indigo or cobalt blue waves that looked snowcapped marching knowingly from island to island. It would be warm, not just the temperature (nowhere, after all, was warmer than Kuwait) but the landscape itself. Cliffs with goats proudly perched, winding roads, arid mountains scattered with olive trees, pulsing with bougainvillea. An orange lava heat that made skin bloom beautiful, too good to be true. She chose Greece because it was everything she was not. She was cold, more like her mother than she cared to admit; it was hot. She was quiet, though not yet silent; it was loud, its wind a symphony orchestra. She was contemplative, almost reptilian; it was urgent, like a motorbike or a black wasp. She wanted to spend three months in a place nothing like her, nothing like her mother or her father, nothing like her country or her people. She wanted to be at the edge of an unfamiliar cliff, to jump into waters that knew nothing about her, to be anonymous, transparent, cast away. Sifnos was that place.
* * *
Yannis stretched to touch his wife’s arm, to offer her an apricot. She could muster only the smallest shrug in return, the slightest shake of the head. He let her read. She was grateful for that, eternally grateful for Yannis’s discretion. He never mentioned depression, Prozac, psychiatrists, psychologists. He could have easily. He was a doctor, an internist. He knew many doctors in Paris. They were a close-knit group and he was well-liked, his Greekness an asset, his Frenchness, for a foreigner, impressive.
Yannis knew to back off. He always knew with Julie when it was best to back off and when it was best to inch forward. Rushing never worked. Except that first time with the beer daringly deposited at the tips of his fingers, glimmering butterfly wings she had said. He had just turned thirty and had decided it was time to return to the island for a visit. Yannis had fled Sifnos at seventeen, had gone to Paris to become a doctor. Nobody on the island had been able to understand it. A doctor they could understand, the island always needed an extra doctor. But Paris? Why so far away? Why not Athens? For his parents it was as if he had taken a Turkish dagger and twisted it into their eyes. He had felt the guilt they wanted him to feel, had trained him to feel, in waves, but he had been too young to allow it to change the direction he wanted his life to take. His relatives, his family’s friends and neighbors – the whole island, really – all decided Yannis was marked from the beginning, a northerner at heart, blond, blue-eyed, almost Swedish. A loner, whispered the friendly ones. An anti-social, wayward sort, squawked the less kind. Yannis, like many island boys (and some girls from Kuwait) wanted out of the smallness, the inquisitive gossip, the incestuous involvement. He wanted to do things that everyone around him had not already done a million times before for thousands of years. So off he went to Paris, a doctor in the end, not coming back for over a decade.
That slow summer of his return, he had been waiting for something, waiting in one taverna after another along Platys Gialos. When Julie arrived with her beer, her floppy straw hat with the red ribbon around it, that impossible story of hers – a girl from Kuwait with a mother as silent as stones and a French-speaking father – in Sifnos of all places, he hadn’t been surprised. It was like a tight conclusion to a story. The Kuwaiti girl (she would hate that) with the floppy straw hat. Everything about her already in that hat shading her brooding eyes, her dark hair. Later she would tell him that what had drawn her to him was his blondness, his teal blue eyes – she had never known eyes could be teal colored before – his tall lankiness, his quiet calm. He was so Scandinavian. She liked that he didn’t need props – a novel, a cigarette, backgammon – to sit and stare out at the sea. These details had allowed her to be forward with him, to get herself entangled enough to decide t
his was it. They both had decided quickly, island boy, red-ribbon girl, that this was it.
The third incongruous thing Julie’s father had done – after learning French and sending his daughter to a French school – was to give her easy permission to marry Yannis. She had brought him home with her after the three months on Sifnos, something a typical Kuwaiti girl would never, ever do, might be killed for doing. Her parents, still isolated, still as distant as peace, had not been perturbed in the least, were even dimly satisfied their daughter was finally getting married. People never tired of telling them that twenty-seven was almost a spinster. Yannis had converted to Islam on paper, not for her parents, who didn’t care, but for the law of the land. Julie had quit her job, packed her life, said a formal, clipped goodbye to her parents, her few friends, and moved to Paris, plunging, it seemed, into French clouds and lavender fields, away from glacial sadness forever.
* * *
Yannis vowed to be patient this summer. Her mother had jumped out of a window just four weeks ago. Her mother was dead and her father didn’t seem overly distraught. Only three days after Salwa’s death, Rashid’s daily routine had gone back to normal. Bank, home, bed, interspersed with a few words to Julie in French and silent pats like afterthoughts on his grandchildren’s heads. It had been hellish with the children in that house in Kuwait for the two worm-like weeks of their stay. For three days immediately following Salwa’s suicide – the three days he imagined Julie wanted nothing more than to be left alone with the space left by her mother, now even more silent than stones – masses of people poured into the house. For three unending days, all the obnoxiousness in the universe oozed through the front door. People told Julie how sorry, truly sorry, they were for her loss, how she had to put herself in Allah’s hands, to be strong for her father and her children. Yannis would be patient this summer, but he knew that Salwa’s leap out of a window – a suicide that was a sin in Islam, condemning her to a hell neither she, nor her husband, nor her daughter, nor he, for that matter, believed in – was not the cause of Julie’s silence, her setting adrift, a pumice floating alone on dark water.
Julie’s silence had started a few years after Zoé was born. No. If he was truthful, it had started exactly after Zoé was born. Julie began taking longer to respond to questions. He would catch her glowering at nothing in particular, a valley between her brows, and he would have to repeat her name two, three times before she would acknowledge his voice, his presence. She stopped smiling, that quick flash that could light the world, never frequent to begin with, soon completely absent. Sex came in droplets, water forced from bricks. She didn’t want it, he could tell, but even the effort to refuse him required too much of her. He couldn’t stand feeling like she was doing him some terrific favor, allowing him to stretch into slick pockets. To have to ask for sex is a diminishment, a pathetic little death. For Yannis, the last five years were obliterating. There were no kisses, no embraces. He still reached to touch her arm, her thigh, her belly. He couldn’t stop himself, pretending he was trying to get her attention, but just wanting desperately to touch any part of her, to grasp the memory of straw and red ribbon. He recognized Julie becoming Salwa. She had told him all about her absent, blotted-out mother, boxed in a cubicle nobody could access. He could see it happening to Julie. He was a doctor, of course he could see it. But she was so grateful when he said nothing, when he left her alone.
Yannis was forty-two. They had been coming to Sifnos every summer since that first summer they met. He was tired now, exhausted. He wanted her to snap out of it, to help him with the children, to fuck him again. He wanted to desire her. Not just her. He wanted to desire.
There it was, the island rising before them. He prepared his camera. He collected these shots, these yearly advents. They would stay at a hotel in Platys Gialos, not with his parents. He couldn’t tolerate their noise, their prying, their meaning well, their invasion of Julie and the children. He wanted to stretch out – a flying cat, yes, why not? – on the hotel lounge chairs. He wanted to feel his skin burn, to feel the breeze cool it off. He wanted to stare at the half-naked bodies of young girls from behind dark sunglasses like some oily, desperate man. Sometimes he wanted to be as silent as Julie. Other times he wanted to create the grandest ruckus the island had ever seen or heard. He wasn’t certain yet which way the summer would go.
Julie would turn forty this year. She felt fifty, maybe sixty. When she was fifty Zoé would only be fifteen, a minx with an hour-glass figure like her own. How would Julie manage it? She was already so tired. She had no humor left in her. She knew she was at an impasse. She knew they were too – her husband and her children. They could have been together, four starfish together in an underwater paradise. It seemed impossible now. From the moment of her daughter’s birth, Julie had felt pursued by a gaping mouth with sharpened teeth catching at her clothes. For the first two years she had managed to wrap any flapping material tightly around her body, mostly flying clear of the sticky teeth. But before long Julie found herself sinking deeper and deeper into that gaping hole. For a while she had managed to rejoin the other three, perfection under glass, for months at a time. But too soon there was glass rising between them and her – at first clear, then more opaque, more and more crackled, finally a sandblasted mess. She wasn’t sure anymore. She was evil. She was lost. She was floating away on clouds without borders, no place to speak of, nobody left, nobody from the very beginning for Ghalia, for Julia, for Julie. A Kuwaiti girl in a French school. How could it ever have worked? What had he been thinking?
* * *
At the hotel, Yannis got them all ready to go down to the pool, a pool at the edge of a cliff. He sat on a wooden lounge chair scrutinizing the pretty girls spread out before him like cards. He turned briefly toward Julie. His wife’s eyes seemed closed, the air around her dotted with ladybugs. What would having that blonde one there change? He stared at her without shame. Would a push between unfamiliar, elastic thighs make him feel younger, if only for a hard second? The blonde looked up and noticed him staring. Yannis did not look away. She lowered her sunglasses slightly and surveyed him from the top of his head down to his toes. She pushed her sunglasses back up, flipped onto her stomach, and untied her white bikini top.
Julie’s eyes were half-closed. She didn’t mind. It didn’t bother her that he looked, that he desired something about them, maybe the curve of their calves or their sharp clavicles. “I love the way your hat casts small shadows around your clavicles,” he had declared to her when she spoke to him for the first time, when she had offered him a beer, a gesture he hadn’t realized then was audacious for her. She had laughed out loud, her teeth exposed, amused by his specificity. She cringed now to think of that hat packed away at the bottom of her suitcase.
The blonde girl stood. She sauntered toward the changing room. She glanced back at Yannis. He considered following her. Julie, he predicted, would turn away like air. He stood too, stretched his arms above his head. He wasn’t sure what to do or what he wanted. Julie’s straw hat.
He had never been as happy as when she had come to him that first time, except for when the children were born, his Jules and then the miracle of Zoé, after months of Julie laying flat in bed, her mother’s bitter history of misbirths flapping shadows around her shoulders, those precious clavicles, all the while. He was not exceptional. A good doctor, but not exceptional. A good husband, lover, but not exceptional. A good father, he tried to be exceptional, but he wasn’t convinced he was or that they, his two, would remember him that way. Julie was adrift, cast away on a different island, a different planet, maybe on a star burning inside out. They would remember her vacancy always, and they would not remember him as their savior.
He glanced toward the changing room. She was still in there, perhaps waiting for him. He edged toward it like a thief. He could hear his children speaking to each other.
“Regarde! Les poissons, là!”
“Où? Quels poissons?”
“Là, là, regard
e bien!”
What fish? How could there be fish in the swimming pool? But Jules insisted, directing his sister’s head toward the skimmer, the dark, rectangular shelf in every pool that shoots an electric bullet of fear into the hearts of children everywhere. At first Zoé didn’t want to look into the hole, but her brother took her by the orange arm puffs and propelled her to it. She peeked inside.
“C’est vrai, c’est vrai! Il y a des poissons! Trois petits poissons! Regardez!”
Jules left Zoé bobbing in her orange floaters, her turquoise swimsuit one size too big so it would last two summers, head tilted to one side, gulping fish with her eyes. He ran to tell his parents about the improbable fish. Jules, confident, open, thumb unsucked after a few hours in the Sifnos sun, ran along the wet edge of the pool. Yannis turned to Julie. She fixed her obsidian eyes on him and, for the first time since he could remember, she smiled.
She watched Jules run toward his father’s wide open arms. What if he tripped and cracked his skull? What if Zoé panicked alone in the deep end and choked her small lungs? What if Yannis had a heart attack, a stroke, a car accident in a tunnel? What if, on a sharp blue day like today, the three of them took a helicopter to another island and it fell out of the sky? What if Yannis decided, at last, to take the children and walk into the sunshine? She shut her eyes, inhaled desperately the sharp Meltemi wind.