Finally, reluctantly, Alia agreed to go. Nablus was still flush with the last days of May, the morning cool as Mustafa drove to the airport in Jordan with Atef in the front, Alia sullen in the back seat.
“I hope you didn’t pack any of those skirts. Widad says she doesn’t even show her wrists,” Mustafa remarked.
“How very decent of her,” Alia snarled. The flight was an early one, and they’d all woken before sunrise. Her eyes felt dry, gritty.
“Alia,” Atef said quietly. All week long their house had flickered with arguments about the trip.
Her sister was effectively a stranger, someone Alia had seen four or five times in the past decade, a woman who dressed in dowdy robes and murmured Qur’an verses when alarmed. The prospect of spending a month—a month—with her in Kuwait, a city she envisioned as bare and beige, rankled Alia.
In the airport she pouted. When Atef kissed her, she stuck her tongue in his mouth as punishment. He flinched, looking around, embarrassed at the public display.
“Habibti,” he said, touching her shoulder. The airport was filled with milling people and the sounds of their farewells. Alia shrugged off his hand. She felt banished, sent off like a child, jealous of the two of them spending her favorite month in Nablus without her. She would be missing two weddings and the birth of a close friend’s baby. “Sweetheart, it’s only a few weeks. I love you.”
“You too.” She made her voice indifferent.
Mustafa whistled. “Lighten up.”
“You shut up,” she snapped, turning toward him. She lifted her suitcase and walked toward the gate.
“Ya Alia, that’s the last thing you’re going to say to your kind, handsome brother? Who drove you all the way to the airport? That’s what you’ll leave me with?” Mustafa called out laughingly as Alia stalked off, pretending not to hear.
From the beginning, the trip was a disaster. Alia used that word over and over in conversations with her mother, with Atef, with her friends; she would become ashamed of speaking so lightly.
“It’s been a harsh spring,” Widad had said in the Kuwait airport. But Alia was unprepared for the airlessness that hit her when they stepped outside. She felt ambushed.
Alia registered shock before heat. It was dazzling. She hadn’t known the sun could blaze with such violence, that air could be so blistering that even inhaling seemed an Olympian task. So absolute was the heat that, in mere seconds, she couldn’t recall a time without it.
She was unable to find relief anywhere. During that long month of June, she often dreamed of icy lakes, of walking into an enormous refrigerator the color of lilacs.
She busied herself with the task of cheering up her sister, getting settled into Widad and Ghazi’s large but somber villa in a compound of expat Arab families, mostly professors and engineers and doctors. Ghazi himself is an engineer, working long hours at a firm in the city’s center. Alia had met him twice before, once at her sister’s wedding when she was very young and again five years ago when Ghazi and Widad visited Nablus. She liked him well enough; he was solicitous and careful around her sister. Sometimes he talked too much and there was always a faint odor emanating from him, like cabbage or stale water, but for the most part he struck her as dependable, benevolent.
Her days were usually spent with Widad, often shadowed by the Indian maid, Bambi. Alia took on the role of lively younger sister, encouraging Widad to eat plates of food or go on outings, but such a performance was not in her nature. After a week, her cheeks ached from smiling.
“Let’s go to the market,” she’d say brightly. And: “Let’s visit your friends!”
Those trips seemed endless. Widad had a driver, a sprightly older Indian man named Ajit, and he dutifully chauffeured them to dress shops and other people’s villas. They visited with Widad’s friends, drank tasteless tea in parlors, the women a decade older than Alia. She was used to gatherings in Nablus, where women laughed and smoked and shared dirty jokes, shocking one another with confidences. But these visits were stuffy, the women speaking of silverware prices and the latest heat wave. Alia would go to the bathroom and roll her eyes at herself in the mirror. In the afternoons, they got sweets from a pastry shop near the compound; Widad loved them, and so Alia would eat as well, queasy from the sugar, the syrup too heavy in the heat. By the time they finally got home, Widad would be cheered, talking a little more and laughing, but Alia would feel drained, so bored she’d nearly kiss Ghazi with relief when she heard his key in the door.
Take her, she wanted to shout. It wasn’t that Widad was unpleasant or spiteful. But she was so droopy. So sluggish and melancholy and resigned to her life, its tasks of folding sheets, overseeing Bambi’s dusting, spending hours preparing dinner as she fretted over spices.
“Should we use cardamom?” she would ask Alia in the overheated kitchen. “Or cloves?” And at the dinner table: “I used yogurt instead of milk—is it too filmy?”
One afternoon Alia watched, exasperated, as Widad spent nearly two hours organizing the pantry. She couldn’t comprehend it, this appetite for housework. Her sister was like a mirror of some alternative fate, rolling her husband’s socks, scolding Bambi for oversalting the meat, wandering the rooms of her mausoleum-like villa.
Some evenings Alia spoke with Atef on the telephone. “I hate it here,” she’d whisper like a hostage. “Everything smells like boiled meat. And the heat. Atef, it’s like a furnace.”
“Not much longer,” he would say. “I miss you. We’ll see you so soon.” Gone was her anger at Mustafa, at the two of them for their alliance. She missed her bedroom, the sloping hills of Nablus, the sound of the men laughing over her burned meals. She couldn’t wait for home.
Alia’s return to Nablus was planned for the first Tuesday in June. The final week, she was so excited, she willingly put up with Widad’s chatter about cumin and starching cotton, even helped her cook maqlouba, dropping the slices of eggplant into sizzling pans. She packed her suitcase four days early, stacking gifts for her friends and brother and Atef between layers of clothing.
“You’ll come back? Maybe for Eid?” Widad asked over dinner two nights before Alia’s flight. She had made shish taouk, and the chicken was delicious.
“Why not? Maybe for another month,” Alia agreed and was surprised to find that she meant it. Now that she was about to leave, everything—her sister, Ghazi, their cavernous villa—was cast in a kinder light. She had two helpings of dinner and fell asleep happy.