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Epub ISBN: 9781473538191

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Published by Hutchinson 2017

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Copyright © Hala Alyan 2017
Cover design and lettering: Melissa Four

Hala Alyan has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First published in the USA by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2017
First published in the United Kingdom by Hutchinson in 2017

Hutchinson
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781786330413

SALMA

NABLUS

March 1963

WHEN SALMA PEERS into her daughter’s coffee cup, she knows instantly she must lie. Alia has left a smudge of coral lipstick on the rim. The cup is ivory, intricate spirals and whorls painted on the exterior in blue, a thin crack snaking down one side. The cup belongs to a newer set, bought here in Nablus when Salma and her husband, Hussam, arrived nearly fifteen years ago. It was the first thing she’d bought, walking through the marketplace in an unfamiliar city.

In a stall draped with camelhair coats and rugs, Salma spotted the coffee set, twelve cups stacked next to an ibrik with a slender spout. They rested upon a silver tray. It was the tray that gave Salma pause, the triangular pattern so similar to the one her own mother gave her when she first wed. But it was gone, the old tray and coffee set, along with so many of their belongings, the dresses and walnut furniture and Hussam’s books. All left behind in that villa, painted the color of peach flesh, that had been their home.

Salma cried out when she saw the tray, pointed it out to the vendor. He refused to sell it without the coffee set and so she’d taken it all, walking home with the large, newspaper-swathed bundle. It was her first satisfaction in Nablus.

OVER THE YEARS she has presented the tray in the same arrangement, the ibrik in the center, the cups, petal-like, encircling it. Twice a month the maid takes the tray and other silverware onto the veranda and carefully dabs them with vinegar. It hasn’t lost its gleam.

The cups, however, are well worn. Hundreds of times, Salma has placed a saucer over the rim and flipped the cup upside down, waiting for the coffee dregs to dry. She prefers to wait ten minutes but often becomes occupied with her guests, only to remember much later with a hasty “Oh!” And the cup would be righted, the coffee remnants leaving desiccated, grainy streaks that stained the porcelain a faded brunette hue.

This time, Salma is barely able to wait the customary ten minutes. She listens to the women discuss the weather and whether or not the warmth will last until the wedding tomorrow. It will be held in the banquet hall of a nearby hotel, one that has hosted dignitaries and mayors and even a film star, once, in the fifties. Silk bows have already been tied to the backs of the chairs; tea-light candles set in arcs around the plates wait for flames. When lit, they will look like a constellation. Salma has already tested this, she and the concierge circling the tables and kissing the tips of matches to wicks. The concierge dimmed the lights, and the effect, incandescent and lovely, had warmed Salma.

“Throw out the candles. I’ll order new ones,” she’d told the concierge, aware of his eyes on her, the begrudging awe. Extravagance. But it is Alia, Alia to be wed, and no expense is to be spared. No blackened candles with miserable wick-nubs around the table settings.

With Widad, it was different. Ten years earlier, Salma sat silently throughout her eldest’s wedding ceremony, a pitiful gathering in the mosque, the scent of incense potent around them. When the imam read the Fatiha, Widad started to cry. Her father had died three months earlier. The dying had taken years. Salma would sit beside him after praying fajr and listen to the clatter his chest made as he drew air in and released it. The first light of the day would slowly fill their bedroom. Salma spoke directly to God during those minutes, in a manner that felt shameless to her. She asked for her husband to live. She knew it was selfish, knew his life with its morphine and bloody handkerchiefs wasn’t one he wanted to keep.

More than once he cried out into the night, “They took my home, they took my lungs. Kill me, kill me.” Hussam fiercely believed his illness was tied to the occupation of Jaffa, the city with the peach-colored house they’d left behind.

“KHALTO SALMA, HAS it dried yet?” Around the table, the women watch her with anticipation. Though the captivation, she knows, is mostly among the younger women—her nieces and cousins who’d arrived from Amman for the wedding, Alia’s classmates, whom she still thinks of as children. Even Alia, leaning on her elbows—Salma has the desire to tell her to sit up, to tell her that men hate chalky elbows, but then remembers Atef, the man who is accepting her daughter, elbows and all—looks interested.

The elders—Salma’s sisters and neighbors and friends—watch the cup reading calmly. They’ve seen their mothers do this and their mothers’ mothers. As far as they are concerned, such happenings are as commonplace as prayer.

“Has it stuck?” one of the nieces asks.

“I wonder what it says.”

Salma blinks her thoughts away, rearranges her features. She glances down at the cup, tilts it, frowns. What she has seen is not a mistake.

“It needs more time. I’ll turn it around for another few minutes. The dregs must dry.”

POOR WIDAD. SALMA feels a familiar ache at the thought of her older daughter. She was a woman, sixteen years old, when they left Jaffa. During those three days of terror before they decided to go, as they waited by the radio for news, it was Widad who cared for Alia, carrying her from room to room, boiling rice with milk and sugar to spoon into her mouth.

She’d made a game of the gunfire and artillery. Widad would raise her eyebrows in mock amazement, feigning delight at the muffled explosions outside. Alia clapped her toddler hands, giggled. Resourceful, Salma has often thought about her eldest, though whatever luminosity Widad has seems to materialize only in moments of crisis. Otherwise, she walked around their new house in Nablus wanly, sat through meals without speaking. She never mentioned Jaffa, and when her father, already ailing, told her it was time to marry, she didn’t protest. Only with Salma did she cry, tears falling as she sat in the garden, her body hunched over the steam from her teacup.

“He will take me to Kuwait,” she said, weeping, and Salma touched her daughter’s hair, pulled her to her breast. The tea oversteeped as minutes passed. Ghazi was a good man, had the steadiness and loyalty that would make a fine husband, but her daughter saw only a paunchy, chinless stranger with spectacles, a man who wished to take her to a drab villa compound in the desert. Salma’s heart hurt at the thought of her daughter becoming someone’s young, unhappy wife in a foreign country, but she knew it was for the best.

She never told Widad the truth, how Hussam had consulted her on the matter of Widad’s suitors, which he’d narrowed down to two men. The other was an academic, a professor of philosophy at the local university. Salma knew his sister from the mosque; he came from a well-mannered, educated family. But he was mired in Nablus, in Palestine—he would live and die here. When Hussam asked the boy where he intended to settle down, he answered, “In my homeland, sir. Nothing under this sky will budge me.”

Salma, to Hussam’s surprise, chose Ghazi. At the time, the logic of her verdict was nebulous to her, half formed. It was only when she sat in the mosque and felt relief that she understood her own actions. Widad would be kept safe in Kuwait, far from this blazing country split in two. Her unhappiness, if it came, was worth the price of her life.

Alia was at the ceremony, of course. Eight years old, in a taffeta dress that made a crunching sound when she sat. She twirled outside the mosque, swung her hips like a bell as Widad and Ghazi emerged wed. When Hussam died, Salma had expected Alia to bawl, demand an explanation. But the girl was the calmest of her three children.

“Baba is not hurt anymore?” she’d asked solemnly. And they all wept and embraced the girl—Widad and Salma and her son, Mustafa.

Alia was distinct as a child, unlike Widad with her gentle dolor or Mustafa who went from a colicky baby to a prickly child, throwing tantrums whenever he was refused anything. There were years between each child, years during which Salma was pregnant and miscarried six times. This betrayal of her body hobbled her; she felt shame at her belly, which stretched only to flatten again. In this way she failed, and, though Hussam was kind, bringing her tea each time she lay defeated in their bed, she knew his disappointment. She’d given him a daughter as firstborn—the first woman in five generations to do so—and was able to carry only one son in the basket of her womb.

IT ISN’T THAT Alia is her favorite child. All her children are prized; they are the glow of her. It is more that Salma has always felt drawn to her, a magnetism delicate and stubborn as cobweb thread. Alia is a child of war. She was barely three when the Israeli army rolled through Jaffa’s streets, the tanks smashing the marketplace, the soldiers dragging half-sleeping men from their homes. There would be the birth of a new nation, they declared. Salma and Hussam’s villa sat atop a small hill that overlooked the sea, with orange groves banded beneath it in strips.

Within days the groves were mangled, soil impaled with wooden stakes, oranges scattered, pulp leaking from battered flesh. Alia had cried not at the sound of gunfire but at the smell of the mashed oranges, demanding slices of the fruit. By then, the men who worked for their groves were gone, most having fled, some with bullets nested in their skulls. Hussam refused to leave at first, shaking his fist at the sea and land outside their windows, the view that beckoned them like another room.

“You go,” he told her, “go to your uncles in Nablus. Take the children.” She begged and begged, but he wouldn’t budge. Only when burning rags were hurled into their groves did he tell her, dully, to pack for all of them. They stood on the veranda while the children slept, watching the fire streak across their land, listening to the muffled shouts. The smell of burned oranges rose to them, scorched and sweet.

Only Alia mentioned Jaffa after they arrived at Nablus, with the tactlessness of the very young. She asked for the licorice sticks the grocer used to give her, for the dolls in her old bedroom. She cried at the thunderous sound of automobiles snaking through the Nablus marketplace. Widad and Mustafa looked pained when Alia spoke of these things, glancing at Hussam to see if he’d heard. Their father in Nablus was a transformed creature, cheerless and short-tempered. He no longer made growling sounds when he was hungry, mimicking a lion or bear until they giggled. He no longer asked them to stand straight in front of him and recite Hafiz Ibrahim’s poetry, adopting a mock sternness when they faltered. When he spoke with Widad or Mustafa, he seemed to be unfocused. Every evening he listened to the radio raptly.

But Salma was cheered when her daughter mentioned Jaffa. She felt grateful. Salma missed her home with a tenacity that never quite abated. She spent the first years in Nablus daydreaming of returning. The early days of summer, the vision of the house rising as the road coiled around the cliff. Inside, a miracle: everything as she’d left it, even the damp laundry she’d never gotten to hang up. She understood the flaw of these fantasies. The villa was gone, razed to the soil. The groves had been replanted and new workers picked the browned leaves, new owners baked bread with the orange rinds. Still, her heart stirred when Alia, even at six, seven years old, spoke with the reverence of a mythologist about the enormous Jaffa pomegranates, the seeds that could be spooned out and sprinkled with either salt or sugar, depending on their ripeness.

“They were as big as the moon,” little Alia would say, holding her starfish hands out, her voice confident.

It would become the girl’s most endearing and exasperating quality, how she could become enamored of things already gone.

IT IS WIDAD that Salma thinks of as she waits for the dregs, remembering how the girl begged for a cup reading before her wedding, weeping when Salma refused. She is glad Widad isn’t here to witness her disloyalty, shamefully glad that Ghazi’s gout had flared up and that Widad—dutiful wife—insisted on staying with him.

Salma hadn’t meant to be unkind. She had felt distraught by Widad’s tears but could not agree to such a thing. Reading the cup of someone with whom you shared blood was unwise, Salma’s mother always cautioned her. The fortune you wished for them would color the fortune you saw, or, worse, you’d be granted clarity and then be bound to reveal what you’d glimpsed. To keep something to yourself when reading cups was treachery. What was seen had to be shared. Many times Salma had read the broken hearts and tragedies of her neighbors, friends, even Hussam’s sisters.

Once, here in Nablus, she read in her neighbor’s cup the death of a male member of her family. Less than a month later she sat in the neighbor’s living room, holding the keening woman as she pulled out tufts of her hair. Her eldest son had spat on a soldier, and a bullet ripped open his neck. When the neighbor was finally put to bed with a sedative, Salma collected the strands of hair from the sofa and rug. The neighbor avoided Salma after that, shuffling away when they met, her averted eyes reproachful. But the others kept coming.

“We are blessed to have this gift of seeing. Allah willed it and we must not misuse it,” her mother would tell Salma. And Salma felt that duty profoundly, the connection that it carved ancestrally with her mother and a great-aunt and others who’d died before Salma lived. She felt, whenever handed a hollow, still-warm cup, that she was being entrusted with something profound. Cosmic.

And she has never transgressed. Until now. Widad would’ve wanted to know if she was marrying the right man. Alia asks no such thing. She is not much younger than Widad was when she wed, is in fact three years older than Salma had been. But Salma worries about Alia, about the way the girl doesn’t worry about herself. It is hastiness, Alia’s love of Atef, which she has proclaimed to Salma, to her friends, in the most cavalier manner.

“I adore him,” Salma once overheard her tell a cousin, as though adoration was a casual, unfussy thing. There is something indecent to Salma about how transparently Alia flourishes her emotions.

Still, Alia looks nervous as she waits for the dregs, unusually somber. Salma had expected some mocking about superstition. Alia is like this, brazen, indelicate with her words. She’d protested the dowry ceremony, insisting that Atef give her only a lira coin as a token and nothing else. Even the sugaring ritual was a battle. She preferred shaving, she announced, sending a cousin for one of the pink plastic razors that had been materializing in recent months on pharmacy shelves. But when the aunts insisted Turkish coffee be brewed for Alia, that the girl drink it slowly so Salma could read her fortune, Alia obeyed. She drank the coffee in silence, her lashes lowered, occasionally blowing on the surface.

“Ya Salma,” one of the neighbors calls out. “It’s been eight minutes. Isn’t it time?”

Salma inhales, touches her hair. Since it is only women at the gathering, her veil and those of the aunts are draped along the windowsill.

“Yes, yes.” With unsteady fingers Salma flips the cup over.

She revolves the cup between her fingers, using only one hand. Her tendons and muscles have memorized these cups, the curving planes, know even to stop instinctively at the jag of the crack. Monumental little things, heavy and hollow at once, with the contradictory weight of eggs. She leans in once more and brings the cup close to her face. The lingering scent of coffee has already turned stale.

There it is. She had not been mistaken. The porcelain surface of the teacup is white as salt; the landscape of dregs, violent.

Lines curve wildly, clusters streaking the sides. Two arches, a wedding and a journey. The hilt of a knife crossed, ominously, with another. Arguments coming. On one side of the teacup, the white porcelain peeks through the dregs, forming a rectangular structure with a roof, drooping, an edifice mid-crumble. Houses that will be lost. And in the center, a smudged crown on its head, a zebra. Blurry but unmistakable, a zebra form, stripes across the flank. Salma wills her face expressionless, though fear rises in her, hot and barbed. A zebra is an exterior life, an unsettled life.

“Umm Mustafa, what do you see?” one of the girls pipes up. Salma lifts her head to the women gazing at her, their eyes questioning.

“Mama?” Alia asks, her voice sounding small. She is so young, Salma suddenly sees.

Salma’s voice is gravelly to her own ears. “She will be pregnant soon. There is a man waiting to take her through a door, a man who’ll love her very much.” All this is true—the fetus shape near the cup’s mouth, the tiny porpoise below the crack.

“Oh, wonderful!”

“Thank Allah.”

“At least now we know he loves her.” Laughing, the cousins tease Alia, who is smiling and flushed, relief plainly—surprisingly—on her face.

“Open the heart,” Salma tells her daughter, holding out the cup. The girl obliges, presses the pad of her thumb to the bottom of the cup, twists it in a half-arc. She returns the cup to Salma, then licks her coffee-smudged thumb.

Alia’s print is blurred, the edges speckled with dregs. She made a smear as she removed her thumb, a figure like a wing. Salma sees her daughter’s fear, the disquiet the girl cannot say. In the center of the thumbprint is a whirling form. Flight. She looks at Alia’s diamond-shaped face.

“It will come true. Your wish,” Salma says, this time speaking only to her. Alia blinks, nods slowly. At this, the women cheer and laugh, crowd around Alia with kisses and teasing tones. Salma sinks back into the chair, exhausted. She has given the truth. But amputated.

IT IS SEVERAL hours before the men join them for supper. Lanterns are lit throughout the garden behind Salma’s house, casting everyone in a spongy, pale light. The elders, aunts and uncles, are all seated. The younger people mill around the radio, swaying to the music. Atef and Alia talk to their friends and cousins but glance at each other every few moments. Mustafa remains by Atef’s side, the two men smoking cigarettes and occasionally bursting into laughter. Children run about playing games. The house stands monolithically in the setting sun.

In Salma’s mind this remains the new house, the Nablus house. She has come to love it, in a resigned way. It is larger than their Jaffa home, the rooms cavernous, high-ceilinged. The previous owners—who’d fled to Jordan—had left their furniture; kitchen cabinets were still littered with biscuit packets and jars of sugar. In the room she was to share with Hussam, she found nightgowns and a stack of the thick, disposable cloths used for menstruation. Widad found notebooks filled with mathematical equations. For weeks, they played a warped game of unsheathing the house’s possessions. Salma had thrown it all away. But the house remained ghosted with its former life, the dinners and celebrations and quarrels it had witnessed. For this reason, Salma never changed the color of the walls or turned the room overlooking the veranda into a library instead of a sitting room.

Shame, she admonishes herself. She soundlessly delivers a prayer. Lucky. They are lucky. Lucky to have these walls and lucky—it feels tawdry to speak of this to Allah but unavoidable—to have money. Money carried them to Nablus, over the threshold of this house. Money kept them fed and warm, kept their windows draped in curtains and their bodies clothed. Salma had been born poor, lived on bread and lentils until Hussam’s mother chose her for marriage. Again—luck, Salma possessing a docile beauty that caught the older woman’s eye. Widad and Alia and Mustafa, they might have known gunfire and war, but they were protected from it with the armor of wealth. It is what separates them from the refugees in the camps dotting the outskirts of Nablus. Salma still holds her breath, her childhood defense against bad luck, when she has to drive past them.

Many families from Jaffa wound up in the Balata camp, each tent barely two or three steps away from another. Inside, impossible numbers of people shared the space. Salma has never been in one, only seen the white tents blur by from her car window. But she knew of them from an old housekeeper, Raja, who would speak of the mangled ropes that kept tent sheets stamped into the soil, the smell of camel dung and urine. Raja had seven children, and they, she, her husband, and her mother-in-law shared one tent. They slept by taking turns, several of the children often remaining awake at night so the adults could sleep before rising at dawn for work.

Salma is ashamed of her queasiness about the camps, her irrational fear that they are somehow contagious. It was a relief to her when Raja resigned due to flaring arthritis. Salma felt a persistent desire to apologize to her, a feeling that was absent with other housekeepers and nannies she employed, usually native Nabulsi girls. Only Raja hummed the haunting, throaty ballads Salma’s own mother used to sing, unknowingly hinting at a kinship that made Salma feel guilty. That this woman should spend days sweeping floors and then go home to a tent. Parallel lives, she sometimes thinks. It was a matter of parallel lives, one person having lamb for supper, the other cucumbers. With fate deciding, at random, which was which.

“I LOVE THIS song.”

“The weather is perfect.”

“Do you think it’ll hold?”

“It has to.”

A group of Alia’s friends speak with wistful, slightly envious tones, as unmarried girls will at the wedding of a friend. They wear bright dresses, their legs bare beneath.

Salma touches the young maid’s arm as she walks by. “Lulwa, please bring more rose water.”

Lulwa nods. “Yes, madame.”

The garden is beautiful. If the house remains haunted, an old ownership hanging over it, the garden is completely hers. The former occupants had tiled over the land, turning it into a marbled courtyard.

“I need it out,” Salma told Hussam when they moved in. “I need to see the soil.” It was the only time she’d ever spoken to her husband like that. Hussam seemed taken aback but obliged her, hiring men to remove every tile.

Beneath it was grayish soil, sickly from lack of sun and strewn with pieces of marble. It is odd to think now, watching people walk around, laughing and listening to music, that below their feet had been nothing but the palest worms, not even a blade of grass.

She worked on the soil for months. Nothing happened. Fertilizer, tilling, pruning. She was on the verge of giving up in despair, accepting that she’d never grow a garden, nothing would bloom.

What astonishment, then, to walk outside one morning with her tea, surveying the wasteland, only to see a sliver of sprouting; a weed, but still Salma fell to her knees and stroked it. She had the urge to run into the house, call for the children and Hussam, to show them something, at last, to lift their spirits.

Instead she remained still, touching the sprout, recognizing in that moment that there were some things we are meant to keep for ourselves, too precious to share with others. She shut her eyes and recited the Fatiha.

THE GARDEN HAS done her proud. After that first blade, lush greenery followed, flowers and shrubs and trees pushing through the soil, all the seeds Salma bartered for in the market, the seeds people bought for her—her love for the garden became famous in the neighborhood—blossoming in the courtyard.

She was greedy back then, Salma recognizes, planting contradictory creatures, roots vying for water, especially in the Nabulsi summer. The roses and the gardenia bush, the tomato stalk and the mint shrub; even the perfume overwhelming in those days, a cacophony of scents clamoring to overpower one another.

She has become more discreet over the years, the trick being to include plants that are restrained in their need. Now the garden is simpler, rows of shrubs extending from the house, an awning vined with grape leaves above the courtyard table. The scent of jasmine laces the air. All throughout this night, she has heard people murmuring and is unable to quell her pride.

“How beautiful.”

“Oh, see the gardenia!”

“Those tomatoes are the plumpest I’ve seen.”

Alia and Mustafa had loved to help with the garden, keeping it clear of certain insects and creatures. After Widad wed and Hussam died, it was just the three of them and they spent long afternoons picking bugs. Salma remembers how gleefully they’d untangle long worms from the soil.

Salma considers her children now, standing beneath the awning. The long table is covered with damask. The men have brought kanafeh and are slicing the cellophane packaging open with knives. Steam rises from the dessert, orange pastry topped with sprinkles of crushed pistachios. Mustafa is handing a plate to Alia, Atef at her side. All three are laughing at something Mustafa has said.

Salma can hear snatches from across the garden. “Thieves … crossing the water … ever!” More laughter. A joke.

Both Mustafa and Alia are tall and brunette, similarly complexioned as their father. For all their talk of revolution and oppression, Salma’s two youngest are not plagued with thoughts of camps and the people inside them. In many ways, they are careless children, both spoiled, given to mercurial moods. Indulged. As children they were allies, and they remain so.

Alia is speaking now with her head ducked, whispering to the two men. One hand holds her plate, the other gestures. Throughout the courtyard, people watch her, men and women. Alia has never been straightforwardly pretty. Her jaw is narrow, her cheekbones too pronounced, giving the impression of an avid cat. She has the same crooked nose as her father, and Hussam lurks in the wide forehead and broad shoulders as well. But her face arrests, has the arched eyebrows and long eyelashes that made Salma’s own mother such a beauty. Unlike many tall women, Alia carries herself well, her spine perfectly straight, the skinny, imperious shoulders squared. When Alia was fourteen and her growth spurt began, Salma had tortured nightmares of her daughter becoming unrecognizable, beastly, her bones shooting out into dreadfully long limbs.

“You should bind her bones,” the aunts used to say. “Let her sleep with cardamom sprinkled on her pillow, it stunts growth.”

But Salma did neither. By then, Widad had been gone for years and Hussam too, and Salma had begun to recognize that the world was no longer made for certain types of women. There was a need for spine and even anger. Widad had Salma’s shape, petite, ample-hipped—all the female cousins were similarly built. Only Alia stood inches above the women, able to look most men square in the eye.

“Mashallah, ya Salma,” Umm Bashar, a neighbor, says. Her veil is damp at the side from perspiration. On her plate a slice of kanafeh is soaked in rose water. “She is like the moon.”

Salma smiles the muted, modest smile perfected by women and tilts her head. “Thank you, Umm Bashar. We are blessed. Allah is great.” She keeps her voice slightly tight, for she knows the power of the evil eye, of even unintentionally drawing envy.

“Although an unusual choice,” Umm Bashar says, glancing over at Mustafa. Salma knows what is coming. It is what the guests have been discussing. “For you to marry the younger one first.” She sighs. “Although I suppose it’s different with men.”

“Alia’s fate was to be married first. Mustafa still has school to finish and is perhaps going to travel to Ramallah for work.” Salma hears her own lie, the weight of it.

“Yes, yes.” A slight pause. “Mustafa is how many years older?”

“Five.” Five, five. Salma recites the number in her sleep because, although she would never admit it to this woman, it is an old worry.

“Ah, five. Well. Everyone is to do what she must. Although mine will be married off in order. Bashar is getting married in the fall and he is two—no, no, three years younger than Mustafa.”

Salma thinks unkindly of Bashar, with his large nose and tiny chin. She has always sensed from Umm Bashar a competitiveness about their sons, because Mustafa is so handsome.

“It is how her father would’ve wanted it.” Salma shuts her voice to signal the end of the discussion. Umm Bashar nods and smiles, overly sweet.

“Well,” she says, glancing at Alia, “she certainly looks lovely. Those streaks of henna in her hair, they suit her complexion.” Salma feels some relief as Umm Bashar walks off, the neighbor’s eyes away from her daughter.

The aunts and cousins held the henna ceremony for Alia the day before and Salma can see flecks of reddish gold in her daughter’s hair, brought out by the torch light. It was a squealing, messy affair, the younger women gossiping as they mixed the henna in a tin basin. Each girl took a handful of the goopy paste and kneaded it, trying to remove twigs and leaves. When the paste was blended, the girls tilted the basin into fabric dough sacks, twisted them shut. The older aunts and Salma prepared Alia’s skin, reciting Qur’an as they brushed the girl’s hair and rubbed lemon juice on her arms and feet. Salma whispered the Fatiha as she massaged the henna paste on her daughter’s hands, staining both palms reddish. One of the aunts punctured the dough sacks with a needle, her hand steady as she maneuvered the paste into a design of whirls and flowers and lattices on the tops of Alia’s hands and feet.

The henna paste smelled strongly, roughly, of barnyards. The older women spoke nostalgically of their own henna ceremonies, and Salma caught a couple of the younger cousins rolling their eyes. This generation was impatient; it was something the neighbors and aunts discussed at great length over afternoon tea visits. They were becoming reckless. When Salma went to collect a dough sack from the younger women, their chattering stilled, each girl looking at her with wide, innocent eyes. They were speaking of the neighborhood boys, Salma knew, of the men they met at school or the youth clubs. Some might even be speaking of the Israeli soldiers, although she preferred to think that such flagrancy remained outside of Nablus, among the Christian girls or the ones who’d gone to boarding school in Europe. Elsewhere.

IT IS PAINFUL to think of how Hussam would disapprove of the way she raised Alia. Hussam had been a man of precise faith; his was a life of mosques and fasting and austerity. Salma loved her husband in a distant way, mostly because he wasn’t a man who inspired anything stronger. In their marriage he remained reserved, chaste even in their most intimate moments. Only after his illness did he begin to yell and curse, and by then his mind was no longer his.

He wouldn’t have been prepared for the changes sweeping the youth. The way the West has begun to seep into their cities, the way the occupation divided the generations sharply. The youth drawn to glitter, the elders to bitterness.

Sometimes she has arguments with him in her head, a vestigial habit from twenty years of marriage.

All the girls are doing it, she’d say defensively when Alia began to go out with her friends, when she made it clear she would never veil.

“And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty.” A verse from the Qur’an, Hussam’s favorite tactic in arguments.

This is what our life is now, Hussam. The youth are scattered. This is what it is to live under the rifle.

She could imagine him frowning, shaking his head, disappointed with her weakness. Perhaps if you’d raised her better. Perhaps if you’d read her more Qur’an, taken her to the mosque more. An imagined pause. If I were there, she wouldn’t be so far from Allah.

Well, you’re not here.

Such is the ease with which one can silence the dead.

“YAMMA, HAVE SOME.” Mustafa approaches Salma, a plate in hand. He has puddled the syrup onto the very center of the kanafeh slice, just as she likes it. The cheese will soak up the sugar. She looks up at his lanky frame.

“You should see how nervous Atef has been,” Mustafa confides. “I swear he changed his tie seven or eight times.”

“Gray suits him.”

“Gray, blue, orange—who cares! I told him, a suit is a suit is a suit.”

Salma smiles, drops her voice to a whisper: “The groom is fussier than the bride.”

They laugh together. Only with Mustafa does she banter like this, the two of them conspiratorial. The aunts say he is too attached to her and to Alia, that fatherlessness has stunted him. Selfish as she feels, Salma prays on each of Mustafa’s birthdays for the boy to stay with her for one more year, his sports cleats and laundry and dirty dishes cluttering the house.

Mustafa waves Atef over; the other man looks relieved as he moves toward them. His gait is stiffened in the formal clothes.

“What a lovely tie, Atef,” Salma says archly. Mustafa laughs.

“You too, Khalto?” Atef asks, mock wounded. He grins down at her, teeth white against his beard. He is handsome in the manner of old pasha rulers, the somber-looking men in history books.

“Will you be going to mosque tomorrow?”

The two men hesitate, exchanging a glance that she catches. “Yes, Yamma,” Mustafa finally says. “Only for the prayers. We promised Imam Ali.”

“We’ll be done by ten. Back in time for breakfast,” Atef confirms. All three stand in silence, the unsaid a living thing between them.

“Good,” Salma says. She tries to liven her voice: “You boys keep each other out of trouble.”

They laugh, embarrassed, looking away. A few months earlier, they were arrested at a demonstration in Jerusalem. In another time, their offense might have earned them a fine, merely a court-issued warning. Instead, both Atef and Mustafa were kept in the penitentiary for four nights.

On the day of their release, Salma sat between Atef’s mother, Umm Atef, and Alia in the courtroom. When the boys’ names were spoken, Umm Atef’s lips began to move, her eyes unblinking. Praying. Salma slipped her hand onto the other woman’s lap, interlacing their fingers. Umm Atef’s hand lay limply until the boys walked into the courtroom flanked by officers. Then she squeezed hard, her wedding ring digging into Salma’s palm. It occurred to Salma in that moment that they were both widows. Atef was the son of a fedayeen, a man who died pointing a gun at an Israeli soldier.

The boys were led with their wrists in cuffs. Alia started to cry. Atef had a swollen, purplish bruise on his cheekbone. Mustafa, Salma saw with great relief, was unmarked, though she would later learn of the contusion over his rib cage, the imprint of a baton that had flecked his urine with blood.

Afterward, the three women waited outside the courtroom. Umm Atef was no longer praying; her eyes sparked like coals. When the two men walked out, she flew at her son. Her beefy fists pummeled Atef’s chest.

“You … do … this to me … you son of a dog … you son of a dog … you think this is what men do?” She wheezed as she pounded at him.

Atef stood still, his eyes shut. He did not guard himself from his mother’s blows. Only when her wheezing worsened, her body heaving in sobs, did he move. “Mama,” he said softly, taking her into his arms.

Salma said nothing, not outside the courtroom or as they drove home. In the house’s foyer, she sat. She pulled her dress to her knees to feel the cool tiles beneath her. She didn’t speak for hours, listening to Alia, Mustafa, even Lulwa whispering in concerned tones as they scurried back and forth. She watched the sunlight sluice through the windows, collecting in her lap like water. A cup of mint tea cooled untouched at her side. The light turned red, traversing the length of her body, down her legs. It reached her feet, staining them a bright, unlikely crimson.

Dusk had already fallen when Mustafa knelt on the floor beside her. He cradled her feet in his hands, bent and kissed them on the soles as he wept.

“Never, never again,” he promised. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Salma hadn’t seen her son cry in years. It jolted her into embracing him. He smelled boyishly of sweat and the lemongrass soap he showered with, his long eyelashes spiking with tears as they had when he was a child. Alia appeared in the doorway, her legs longer than her nightgown, the hem hovering midcalf. Salma extended her arm and drew Alia against her brother. She enveloped those two miraculous living creatures, and with them Mustafa’s apology—her hungry longing to trust it—crushed them all like a talisman to her chest.

“SAVE SOME SYRUP for the rest of us, Alia,” one of the men calls out across the garden. Alia arches her eyebrow at him and ladles another spoonful onto her plate.

“You don’t tell the bride what to eat,” she retorts to the laughter of the men. She joins the young women sitting on the steps bordered by jasmine shrubs. Alia lifts a forkful of the kanafeh, cools it through pursed lips.

The evening is unseasonably warm, the March breeze light. The wind flutters the edge of Salma’s veil, tickling her neck beneath the fabric. She tugs the veil down automatically, tightens the edges with her fingertips. In the chaos this morning, she forgot the customary pin on either side, the trick of folding that keeps the veil fastened around her face.

Alia’s hair is long, curls coiling compactly beneath her ears. Both of Salma’s daughters remain unveiled, a source of shame for her. She’d grown up with a devout father, waking at four to iron and press his finest dishdasha before he went to the mosque for fajr prayer. Salma would tell herself elaborate stories to try to keep from falling asleep just to catch a glimpse of her father walking down the trail from their hut. The few times Salma succeeded, her vision would be bleary, her father’s silhouette barely visible in the moonlight.

During Ramadan, she would spend the long hours of daylight by her mother’s side in the kitchen, slicing chunks of cantaloupe and stirring lentil soup. She would be dizzy with hunger when the sun set and it came time to break the fast, all the cousins and aunts and uncles seated around steaming bowls. The first bite, usually bread or an olive slick with oil, seemed to her the most delicious thing her young tongue tasted all year round, and she would be filled with a lush, weepy love for Allah.

Her children, Salma knows, do not have such worship for Allah. Widad, the most devout, prays once or twice a day and never misses a day of fasting, but her piety is steeped in fear, not rapture. Mustafa spends Fridays in the mosque but his attitude suggests it’s a social duty, a shared performance with the neighborhood men. And Alia is as mercurial with Allah as she is with all things. For a while after she began menstruating, the girl asked Salma to teach her Qur’an verses, modeled Salma’s veils, and spoke of someday visiting Mecca. But she slowly lost interest, drifting over to tight dresses and Egyptian love songs.

Several months ago, Salma overheard a conversation between Alia, Atef, and Mustafa, her daughter’s defiant voice rising through the walls.

“Allah might be the most useful invention of all!”

Salma was pleased to hear Atef admonish Alia, tell her to hush.

THE KANAFEH IS devoured; Salma’s hands are sticky. Mustafa and Atef are seated, one on either side of her. She senses the mosque talk has sobered them. The final smudges of light are erased from the sky.

“The weather’s going to be perfect for the wedding,” Mustafa says, tipping his head back. Salma follows his gaze. Atef does the same. The night sky is dappled with stars.

“Inshallah,” she murmurs, and the men, chided, repeat the prayer. Salma rises, takes the empty plates from the men. She walks past the huddle of young women, the children chasing one another. Salma’s bladder aches. She turned fifty the previous year, and her body unceremoniously began to murmur discontent. When she bends, her hip throbs; there is a floating curlicue at the corner of her vision, a coil that worsens in sunlight.

She goes in the house and finds Lulwa in the kitchen, ironing a pale silky veil that Salma will wear for the wedding tomorrow. The girl is bent over the hissing metal plate, straining to see any creases in her handiwork.

Salma enters the bathroom and sits upon the porcelain seat with relief. She’s been moving and sitting for hours, and her underwear is damp with sweat, mottled with brownish red. It is the body’s leftover, as the aunts say, the flush from her idle uterus. Before leaving the bathroom, she pauses at the mirror above the sink.

It is a plain face, recognizable to her as water. She tucks stray hairs beneath the wings of her veil, quietly shuts the door behind her.

AT THE FAR end of the lawn, the men have begun to gather by the fig tree, untangling themselves from the laughter and gossip of the women. The women settle around the table, the torches casting shadows upon their faces.

“I’ve heard the border might close,” one of the women says.

“They’re saying Egypt loves a war.”

“Egypt loves a good soap opera.”

“Speaking of, did you see that last episode …”

Familiarly, the talk settles into shows and their favorite starlets. War is war; they are bored of it. The children sit scattered around the women or curled in their mothers’ laps. The ibrik roasts over a flame in the courtyard’s entrance, the perfume of coffee drifting across the garden. The coffee set has been washed and dried, the mosaic tray oiled. Alia sits at the head of the table, a younger cousin settled on her lap. Alia braids the child’s hair, smiling at one of the neighbors’ stories.

Mustafa and Atef have joined the men by the fig tree. The torch light barely reaches them, and Salma struggles to make out the white of their shirts. One of the young boys at the table squirms from his mother’s arms and skips over to the men, arms outstretched to his father. The father kneels down and hoists the boy onto his hip. Salma watches the men gesture. Their hands blur in the dark. Smoke from the cigarettes hovers above them.

She knows without hearing any of it what they are saying, the names they are repeating, the dates. Soon, there will be an argument; there always is. Blisters of rage, which must be drained. And the women, intimate with such scenes, will rise wearily, go to their husbands or brothers or fathers. Speak to them in soothing voices.

Salma can see the bubbling of the ibrik at the courtyard entrance. Lulwa rushes toward it carrying the coffee set. Black liquid has begun to spill over the edge, causing sparks in the flame. Salma makes a gesture with her hand, trying to catch Alia’s eye. Alia should be the one to serve the coffee, on this last night as a single woman, the cups set carefully on the tray, memorizing who wants sugar and who wants it bitter. Serving the old men first, then the hajis, then Atef. Pausing in front of the man who will be her husband, demurely, one of thousands of times she will serve him coffee.

But Alia doesn’t see Salma’s beckoning. She has finished the child’s braid and is kissing the top of her dark hair.

Salma feels a slow weariness in her limbs. An image of the wedding tomorrow swims, unbidden, before her. The hall empty, chairs toppled, tablecloths stained oily from the candles. Dinner plates abandoned, the feasts now carnage, strewn fish bones and globules of lamb fat. Salma sees her daughter’s makeup as it will be after hours beneath hot lights—waxy, crinkles of mascara at the corners of her eyes. The wedding dress, with its beaded bodice and cream-puff sleeves, creased from all the dancing. Across the table, Alia yawns and Salma imagines her tomorrow evening, tired, happy, leaving in Atef’s arms.

“God, that breeze is amazing,” one of the women says.

“Not that they’d notice.” An aunt nods toward the men. “They’re starting.”

Salma turns. The men are talking more rapidly now. A few look annoyed, shaking their heads. Their voices are audible. She returns her gaze to her daughter. Alia looks at her and smiles, rolling her eyes good-naturedly. The gesture lights the girl’s face.

THIS IS WHY she saw the zebra, Salma thinks. Because it is Alia, darling, baby Alia. Love and fear for the girl have the same metallic taste. Doubt—beautiful doubt—glimmers now. Surely her vision was clouded. Can she even be certain of what she saw? She tries to remember the valley of the coffee cup, can conjure up only the alarm. Perhaps it wasn’t even a zebra but a bear or wolf, some other four-legged creature. Alia laughs across the table. Yes, Salma thinks, her hand outstretched to her youngest, miming the lifting of the ibrik. The form in the coffee cup flashes in her mind. Yes, it must’ve been a horse. Not a zebra, but a horse with smudges, a speckled horse. It means travel, perhaps, even a difficult first pregnancy, but luck; it also means luck.

MUSTAFA

NABLUS

October 1965

“BROTHERS, WE HAVE come to a crossroad,” Mustafa recites under his breath. “We cannot continue as we are.”

He pauses at a patch of grass bordering the road and squints up at the sky. The late afternoon is cool, the setting sun disappearing behind the hills. Each morning and evening, he walks along the valley between his house and the school, preferring it to driving. It clears his head. His job is a simple one, teaching arithmetic to adolescents at a nearby school, and though he enjoys it—the elegance of mathematics, the satisfaction of watching pupils solve equations—it feels dull occasionally, rote. The walks give him time to pound the earth with his sandals.

Up ahead is another hill, small houses with vegetable gardens out front. Beyond them are the simpler huts, with cracked windows and pots of water boiled for heat. Aya lives in one of those huts. Mustafa goes by them, keeping his eyes on the top of the middle hills, rising against the plum sky. The view is regal.

“We cannot continue as we are,” he repeats.

There is a construction site to the left, and men mill around smoking cigarettes. Mustafa undoes the first two buttons at his neck as he walks past.

“Brothers, we are losing a fight.” Too meek. “Brothers, we are losing a fight.” He tries a sweeping gesture with his hand. He is pleased with the effect and does it again, this time with both hands.

“Have you finally lost your mind?” Mustafa looks up to see Omar, one of the mosque shabab, walking toward him from the site. Omar wears the green construction uniform, perspiration soaking the collar.

“This is what it’s come to, brother?” Omar asks, grinning. “Roaming the streets and talking to yourself?”

Mustafa holds his hands up in defeat, grins back. “We are a lazy generation.” It is a well-worn joke among the men at the mosque, a reference to Israeli pamphlets calling Arab men cowardly and indolent. He waves toward the construction. “How’s the building going?”

“Starts and stops. Bastards are stingy with permits.” Omar spits on the road, a stream of brown. “And if not that, we get hassled on zoning. If we’re not getting fucked from one side, it’s coming from the other.”

Omar pulls out a pack of cigarettes and hands one to Mustafa. They light them and smoke, facing the valley. For a couple of moments they are silent, each lost in thought. Then a whistle cuts through the air and they turn to see the construction overseer gesturing to Omar.

“Let’s move it, sweetheart,” the man calls out nastily. “You’re not paid to chat with your friends.”

Omar drops the cigarette. “Piece of shit,” he mutters. He nods at Mustafa as he walks away. “Your house tonight, right?”

Mustafa remembers. He told the men to come over after the mosque for coffee and shisha. They are supposed to alternate among their homes, but the other men have wives and families.

“Yes, my house,” Mustafa says, and Omar walks back to the construction site.