“Everyone says I should accept.”
Another woman might’ve said such a line coquettishly, with the undertones of a challenge, but Aya spoke simply. Somewhere in the house there was a crash and then laughter. The children had broken something.
“Who is he?” Mustafa asked.
“It doesn’t matter.” She kept her eyes shut. In the dimness, he could make out the faint wings of her eyebrows lifting. “A neighborhood boy. The son of one of my father’s old friends. He wants a wife, children. He’d take care of my sisters and brothers. My mother.”
“I can give you money.”
“And what would you be giving me money for?” Her voice turned steely. It is their oldest fight, Mustafa trying to leave money—tucked beneath the pillow, inside the Russian dolls—Aya always refusing. Mustafa considered revisiting the arguments, the money left to him by his father, the sheer surfeit of it.
Instead he asked, “Will you marry him?” In the darkness, he couldn’t make out the details of her features—the dimple in her chin, each curl. But he knew them intimately. Better than anyone else’s face, it startled him to realize.
There was the sound of exhaling.
“No,” she said distinctly. Mustafa’s relief steadied him. He watched her push her hair back, a rasp against the pillow that he found arousing.
“Why not?”
She sat up, pulling her knees to her chest. Her expression was inscrutable. She spoke the way one might to a dimwitted child.
“Because I would never be able to love him.”
The unsaid crowded them in the small room. It was the first time either of them had spoken that word aloud. It seemed to signal something for Aya. The rest—the implication that she couldn’t love him because that love, finite, was already elsewhere—she kept silent, gathered with them in the dark.
But why not? The question sometimes jars Mustafa awake. It has even been asked directly by Atef, the only person who knows about Aya.
“She’s good,” Atef said to him once. “Others, they’ll see that. They’ll look past the rest.”
The rest being the hut, the coughing mother, the litter of siblings, Aya’s own pliant body bucking under his. His mother’s horrified expression at her son marrying beneath him; Alia’s perplexity at his choice. The aunts and neighbors would talk for years. Even the men at the mosque, most of them educated and well off, would be taken aback; for all their talk of solidarity with the poor, they are repelled by them.
“They won’t,” Mustafa replied, his tone signaling an end to the conversation.
Mustafa walks toward the mosque, the air sobering. He is late for Atef, and his body vibrates with that familiar urge from earlier, to turn and walk in the opposite direction of the mosque, to plead illness or even cowardice.
In these moments, he remembers his mother. Her face in the courtroom years ago. His promise at her feet: Never, never. He knows she would never believe that he and Atef did stop for a long time, avoiding the politics and the mosque and spending their evenings together, alone, in the garden at night. They spoke about the future, Palestine, their own fears. But they stayed away from the other talk.
It had been an exercise in futility. Like asking two men living near the sea never to touch the water. The mosque, its thrum of male conversation, the way those walls seemed to palpitate with life and ferocity—what other home was there for two fatherless men?
“We’re sitting here like boys,” Atef once said in a rare outburst. He gestured at the night sky, the garden around them. “While outside, things are happening. The world is happening.”
Mustafa understood. Every day he woke feeling like he might surge, like he wore his skin too tightly. Every newspaper was splashed with faces of the martyred.
When they returned to the gatherings, the men greeted them like long-lost warriors. Their spell in prison, brief though it was, lent them an air of authenticity. Just like that, they had it back: the sermons, the dust motes swirling during noon prayer, the laughter and fury of the men at evening gatherings. And, of course, Imam Bakri.
The man is younger than the other imams, in his early forties. While the other imams are aloof, retiring to the offices after prayers, spending their time with one another, Imam Bakri will gather in the courtyard with the congregation, chatting with the men. Now and then, he even swipes a cigarette from them.
“Imam Bakri, Allah is watching,” the men tease him and he grins back.
“Allah knows how sweet tobacco is.” He is a stocky man with dancing eyes, and he has a gift—one that Mustafa recognizes in himself, though it’s a tenth of the imam’s—of making the person he is speaking to feel bathed in light.
Rumors coursed through the mosque. The imam was imprisoned for a long time, some said, and was in Nablus to flee some darkly heroic charges. He was a Marxist, others countered, a fighter cloaked in imam’s robes. Some—though they were quickly shushed—even hinted that he was an Israeli spy or informant.
His lectures were electrifying.
He spoke of politics, of land lost. “We are pawns in a sick and depraved game,” he liked to say. “We can either play or overturn the chessboard.”
Mustafa became smitten. The man was awfully magnetic, and more than anything Mustafa wanted to be found, wanted the imam to focus on his face among the sea of congregants and recognize something there.
“He’s brilliant,” Mustafa told Aya once. “You should hear the things he says. It’s like a fever goes through the room. I need to talk to him.”
Aya seemed unimpressed.
“Nothing good comes from those sorts of men,” she said. “They lure and lure and if you find yourself next to them, what does it mean? That you’ve got a hook in your lip.”
No matter. He felt starved for the imam’s attention. For months, he yearned to share a cigarette with him. He rehearsed what he would say, practicing different tactics, from contrarian to sycophant.
I think this country is sinking as well.
We are its only hope.
But doesn’t retaliation make it worse?
We need a new approach.
Mustafa fantasized about catastrophes—an earthquake, an assassination—bringing them together, him stuck in the imam’s office. Or, better yet, Imam Bakri making an urgent request, perhaps needing an accomplice or somewhere to hide out, and Mustafa coming through, humbly refusing to accept thanks for his help.
In the end, it was merely a rainstorm in August. Mustafa was walking home from work at the school when the clouds bricked over. Rain began to fall. He stopped at the mosque to wait.