“Brothers,” he says aloud. “We must recognize the battle ahead.” He moves in front of the mirror next to the armoire, repeats the line. He frowns. “We must recognize it will not be fought for us.” His dark eyes stare back at him.
He knows he is handsome, although he does what he believes to be a stoic job of hiding this awareness, trying to appear tousled, attractive as an afterthought—the uncombed curls, rumpled shirts. My honey boy, his mother would say when he was a child, and the aunts would coo. Those eyes. That hair. And once, overheard while playing, a murmur from a neighbor: A pity, when the boy gets the beauty instead of the girls. Even as a boy, he understood there was something of an imbalance—Alia’s gangly body and Widad’s plumpness, both sisters’ crooked noses and high foreheads. That he had gotten something not rightfully his.
Six o’clock. Two ties have been discarded; he has settled on a gray shirt and slacks. Outside, the air is cool and pleasant. He is overwhelmed by a sudden desire to walk in the opposite direction, follow the twilight to Aya and her warm bed.
But it is Friday, the one night her family gathers in the hut after mosque, the night she takes her siblings into her mother’s room and leads them in prayer. Although he has never seen this, he can picture it—Aya’s calm voice, her face in the lamplight, the siblings reciting Qur’an under their breath. She can be hard sometimes, even during lovemaking. But he likes to think of her in moments of softness.
His mother worries, he knows, about some predilection keeping him from marrying. Some part of her would be glad—or at least relieved—to hear her son has known the bodies of a dozen women, that he is a man in that sense.
The girls themselves are far-flung, assorted: Amman girls who studied in British universities, a couple of Europeans working with the refugee camps, even the pretty girls that fill the pool hall with their oud perfume and smoke on Saturdays. Whispering incredible, filthy things into his ears, things that leave him both shuttered and pining. You got twenty? You know what I’d let you do? He always felt removed with the girls, as though his body were a detached animal, clawing while he looked on.
Aya is different. She lives near the Nabulsi outskirts, where refugee camps litter the land. Her hut is old; damp clothing hangs from wires around the windows. The people in nearby huts work with their hands, the men in farming and carpentry, the women seamstresses and bakers. None of them are Nabulsi. They have come over the past two decades from villages, the ones soldiers set fire to or sowed with salt. They came from cities like Haifa and Nazareth. Their villages are lost, the names already eroded, replaced with new, Hebrew ones.
Mustafa first came to the neighborhood after an imam asked for help distributing resistance posters. The imam told him of a printing shop near the foothills.
The store reeked of paper pulp and ink. Aya worked in the shop, unrolling the reams of paper, capping bottles of ink. She was polite to Mustafa and Atef whenever they entered, always inclining her head when Mustafa caught her eye. She rarely spoke, but something about her infected him—he thought of her incessantly, her half smile, her fingernails darkened from ink.
Their courtship was a simple one, Mustafa returning to the store alone several times, asking her to print various photographs and flyers. Once, he brought a creased photograph of his father’s—a view of the sea, a print from their old house in Jaffa—and asked her to copy it for him.
“The sea will be blurry,” she’d said, frowning. She leaned over the counter, her fingertips flat against the photograph.
“You have the most beautiful hands,” he replied, touching her wrist.
He’d known girls like Aya, poor girls who lived by different standards than his female friends and relatives. These girls had their faith, but their lives were hard and bitter and full of death. The ones that weren’t married by their early twenties had a recklessness about them, giving their bodies with abandon. They hadn’t been raised on European summers and dinner parties; they had removed shrapnel from their brothers’ legs, had washed their sisters after rape. There was no chamber for love in their bodies, and they appreciated Mustafa’s banter.
But it is another world with Aya, the only time he has lost his footing, as if suddenly darkness has fallen and he has only his fingers, his breath, to guide him.
Aya is dependable. He always sees her near dusk, as the call for prayer is beginning around them. Rather than making their trysts feel illicit, this seems to sanction them. She invariably smiles upon spotting him and then turns, leading him to the hut where she lives with six younger siblings and a bedridden mother. He has only heard the mother coughing, never met her. At the hut, he waits outside the back door, Aya entering first and making sure the children are playing before gesturing for him to follow—Quiet, quiet, she mouths—up the stairs to her room. No one ever comes up there, and he understands that this is all Aya has in the world: those walls, those floor tiles.
Even the room is loyal; always the same narrow bed, the armoire, the cracked mirror. Always the same clean lemony scent, the soap with which she washes everything, even her hair. The same Russian dolls on the tabletop, the same empty vase. Their lovemaking is precise, anticipated—Mustafa first sitting on the edge of the bed and, as though signaled, Aya beginning to remove her clothes.
She never does it coyly. She takes off each piece of clothing carefully, pausing to fold the dress and roll up the stockings, even tuck one brassiere cup into the other. And she never looks at him, standing instead in profile, so that he sees her nakedness in halves—one bare leg, one breast, one shoulder. She has the body of an Egyptian film star, none of that tiny-waisted, long-legged nonsense the wealthier girls obsess over. Aya’s is voluptuous flesh, heavy-breasted, a roll of fat above her hips. Only when she is finished does Mustafa rise and kiss her neck, then her shoulder, finally her mouth. He removes his own clothes haphazardly and afterward must squint in the dark for his underwear, shirt, socks.
He wonders sometimes what happens after he goes, leaving behind his hairs and scent on her sheets. Whenever he thinks of this, he can dredge up only a single image, like a photograph: Aya getting ready for bed, smoothing down the length of the mattress where his body had been, as though some warmth remains. The image is cheerless, and he puts it away instantly.
Several weeks ago, they finally spoke of it. Aya waited until they’d finished making love. He’d noticed her furrowing her brow during it, a distraction about her. For long minutes afterward, they fell into the pattern of their bodies—Mustafa stretching and lighting a cigarette, Aya settling back against the pillow with her eyes shut.
He thought she’d fallen asleep and started when she spoke, her voice low.
“Someone has asked to marry me.”
The pinch in his stomach surprised him. The smoke in his mouth turned sour. He exhaled quickly, wanting to rid himself of the taste.