I am the roar without the bite, Mustafa thinks unexpectedly. The empty lion.
“Listen.” Atef speaks more quietly, as if intuiting Mustafa’s thoughts. “I know it’s hard. We could turn around right now. We could leave. There’s always an easier way. Right?” The line filched from Imam Bakri’s best sermon.
Friends, there is always an easier way.
Mustafa stands. He brushes his hands on his pants. He recognizes distantly that this moment will matter. “Let’s go,” he says to his best friend, who is still crouching in the dirt, and begins to walk.
The room in the mosque is overheated. The men sit in rows on the carpet, thirty or so of them, the smell of bare feet souring the air. The fluorescent lighting is harsh and two fans whir above, recycling the same tired air. Mustafa and Atef sit in the fourth row. The imam’s sermon has already stretched over an hour and around them men look tired, as though willing themselves back to their cool homes.
Imam Bakri stops speaking, clears his throat. His eyes scan the congregation, and Mustafa sits up taller. The imam sees him, nods. Atef squeezes his arm and Mustafa rises. He makes his way to the front.
Mustafa is thinking of the curtains in Aya’s room, a soft teal color that seems misplaced there. Something about those curtains has always saddened him, a color too bright for such a place. He pictures Aya in her bed. Asleep. Or, no—he edits the image—rising to the sound of her mother’s cough, dampening a cloth to run over her face.
The Jerusalem men sit in the front row. Mustafa nods at them and one of the men, the long-haired one, nods back.
Aya wearing the creamy nightgown, the one he has glimpsed in her closet but never seen on her. They have never shared sleep. This strikes him as terribly sad, and he looks toward the ceiling.
The imam sits next to the Jerusalem men, mutters something to them. A man sneezes and several voices rise, blessing him.
A small part of him—which he already recognizes as a lost, former self—longs for his mother’s garden, the sound of wind rustling the leaves. He takes a breath, his feet flat against the carpet. His right toe itches.
“Brothers,” Mustafa says.
In his peripheral vision, he sees a glint, but when he turns to the window, it is gone. A storm. He can feel it in his bones, in the hairs of the back of his neck. God forbid, he hears in his mother’s voice, that childhood prayer, and he repeats the words to himself. Another crinkle of light; this time he sees it flowering the sky. Seconds later, a rumble. The air is still. Something is coming. He can feel it in his teeth.
In the crowd, Atef moves his hand, a small gesture for action.
Mustafa swallows. Without removing his eyes from Atef—faith, strength, that quiet—he speaks.
“Brothers,” he says again. “We must fight.”
Alia
* * *
Kuwait City
December 1967
Steam rises as water rushes from the faucet. Alia drops her nightgown on the bathroom floor. She kneels at the lip of the bathtub, grazes the water with her fingertip, winces. The water is always hot, too hot. Splotches of mold have begun to appear on the yellow curtain—Widad picked it out, saying the color would be cheery—even though they’ve lived in the house, Atef and she, less than four months.
Standing beneath the water, Alia keeps her eyes on the small window directly in front of the shower. Beyond it, several inches of Kuwait City are visible—the parking lot of their compound, the other villas, a swath of sidewalk. The relentlessly blue sky. She shampoos her hair then shuts her eyes and steps backward into the stream, the water plugging her ears.
For a moment she is submerged, without breath. She stands under the water until her lungs ache. Afterward, she soaps her body; the thick Kuwait saboun is coarse, drying her skin out. She rubs it in circles over her torso, remembering as she always does the white, silky jasmine soap she used in Nablus.
The steam trails her as she steps out of the tub. Atop the toilet is a cabinet, towels folded in neat stacks. She chooses a mint-colored one, her favorite, and wraps it tightly around herself.
“Oh God,” she moans. She presses her palms against the sink, trying to quell the nausea.
She leaves behind wet footprints as she walks into the bedroom. The vanity is lined with dozens of bottles and tiny pots, perfumes and creams and makeup, Atef’s lone contribution a bottle of cologne. From a porcelain box, Alia takes out several bobby pins, puts them between her teeth, and faces the mirror. Her hair curls damply over her breasts. She begins the intricate, familiar task of pinning it.
When she finishes, Alia lifts her chin and swivels. Wryly, she catches her own eye. She undoes the towel, forces her gaze over her naked body. The bare shoulders, the dark-tipped breasts. Lower still, to the unavoidable: her rounding belly.
The anxiety that arises is habitual, acidic. Alia shuts her eyes and inhales deeply. Count to ten, she commands herself. She holds her breath before releasing it with a faint oof.
She has tried to tell Atef a dozen times.
The baby was never meant to be a secret. When Alia felt the first ripples of nausea back in October, she thought her body was still recovering from the desert heat. Kuwait remained sweltering well into autumn, and the heat fogged her brain, left her feeling boneless.
Each time, she loses her nerve. The prospect of discussing it embarrasses her—to tell him is to allude to that night in August, when she found him in the bathtub. The only time since his return—not lovemaking so much as something desperate, a frenetic coupling, arching and clutching and biting. For a week after, her lips were swollen; a trail of bruises laddered deliciously on each thigh. Even she understood the sickness of such a crazed night, the nature of Atef’s grief. In those early weeks, none of them could mention Mustafa’s name without Atef weeping.
Now that months have passed—her body doing her the favor of remaining slender, only a slight plumping below her navel—now that he no longer sits limply in front of the television, no longer moves through the rooms of their new house as a sleepwalker might, Alia remains too frightened to say anything that might unnerve him. What she knows about her husband, what she thought she knew about the man, has scattered like dandelion seeds beneath a child’s breath since he returned from the war.
Alia’s trip to Kuwait had been in response to a plea from her mother. Widad hasn’t been well, her mother told her, with her myriad ailments and a recent flare-up of arthritis.
“She’s always asking about you,” Salma told her over the phone. “She asks why you never visit.”
“I didn’t realize the roads to Kuwait were one-way.”
“Don’t be uncharitable, Alia. She’s struggling.”