The smell turns Alia’s stomach, and she averts her eyes. “Maybe later.”
In the kitchen alcove, Bambi sits with Priya, the maid Widad arranged for Alia months ago. The two women speak their trilling language with each other, a mountain of potatoes, carrots, parsley, and beans on the table between them. Their heads are ducked over it as they chop the vegetables.
“Hello,” Alia says to them, and they return the greeting.
“Madame,” Priya says in her slow English. “Sir call earlier. I tell him you in shower. He call back later.”
“Mmm.” Alia busies herself with the radio on the counter. “Thank you.” Her mind snarls, as it does whenever it’s confronted with her husband these days. The radio knobs are fat and thick beneath her fingers as she tunes.
“Which dress are you wearing tonight?” Widad asks.
“Oh.” Alia captures the tinkling of a news station’s melody. “The black one,” she says. She twists the volume knob. The news music halts, cut by the gloomy tones of a woman’s singing.
“Oum Kalthoum.” This song is one of the Naksa songs that have cropped up in recent months, sorrowful violins and intonations lamenting the losses of the war. The defeat. Every day on every channel the songs play, haunting the living rooms, the marketplaces, even the schools, all over Kuwait and, Alia knows, other Arab cities. Grieving the death of men, all the land lost, but mostly the defeat itself, the hot, mushrooming shame of it. These tunes are more familiar to Alia than any childhood lullaby now, these songs that seems to skulk everywhere.
Both sisters make a sound at the same instant, a grunt of frustration. Alia turns to Widad, sees her sister’s eyes uncharacteristically mischievous.
“Turn it off. For the love of Allah,” Widad says.
Alia laughs, surprised. She adopts the droning voice of the newscasters and politicians on the television over the past months.
“Brothers, sisters. This is a period of mourning. Wear your black. Tell your children to grieve.” Aping solemnity, Alia sings along with the chorus tunelessly. “Ahhh-uhhh.”
“Alia!” Laughter rocks Widad, shocked but delighted. She shakes her head as Alia splays her fingers, tilting her head as she shouts along to the song. Priya and Bambi giggle. Widad lifts her hands from the mint leaves, covers her face. “Turn it off,” she says, gasping. “Turn it off.”
Satisfied, Alia turns the volume down. She sits across from Widad, picks a bunch of mint. Through lowered lashes, she glances across the table, warmed by the smile on her sister’s face, the unexpected expression of pleasure.
“The meat needs another hour or so.” Widad squints at the clock above her head. The mint is washed and dried, the vegetables cut into trim squares. “That should give us plenty of time to add the vegetables.” She turns to Priya and Bambi. “Is the food prepared for your party?”
“Yes, madame,” Bambi says.
The second party was Widad’s idea, a gathering for the maids and drivers of the guests, held in the shack—dubbed the Little House—near the villa where Priya slept. Priya and Bambi seem excited, all week long talking about what music to play and braiding bits of tinsel for decoration. Watching them, Alia feels ashamed of her unhappiness.
“Do you have everything you need?” she asks them now in English. She relishes speaking it, the language lost to her since school days. Back then, it was her favorite subject, those melodic, liquid vowels. “Do you need more juice or sweets?”
“No, madame,” Bambi says.
“No, madame,” Priya parrots. She is petite, barely a year older than Alia, who finds being so close in age to someone this cheery disconcerting.
“Did you say the Awadahs are coming?” Widad asks her sister.
“Yes, and the Khalils. The university dean.”
“How wonderful,” Widad says dreamily. “They’re good people. I’m so happy Atef’s meeting people at the university. Ghazi said he’s doing really well.”
“Yes.” Alia stops, not wanting to be disloyal.
“It’ll take time,” Widad says. “For both of you.”
An aphid hides between the mint leaves. Alia holds the wriggling body in her fingers, then crushes it into a tissue. When Atef accepted the professorship at the university, she’d been stunned. She’d thought Kuwait was a transition for them, a temporary sojourn.
“And now you’re filling the house with friends,” Widad continues. “Building a new life.” She reaches across the table and squeezes Alia’s hand. Her eyes are earnest. “After Nablus, after—” She pauses. “After Mustafa.”
Alia ducks her head. “Perhaps.” Her duplicity pounds in her ears. She has told Widad nothing of her pregnancy and—worse—nothing of the idea that has taken hold in her mind, growing lush with time, intoxicating.
Amman. To her mother, her aunts, to the cousins and childhood friends who moved there from Nablus after the war. The idea had struck her like rainfall, simple and clear: They should move to Amman.
Instead of staying in Kuwait’s wasteland, the endless afternoons of television and heat, let them go to Amman, the coffee shops and vendors hawking fruit, neighborhoods filled with old friends. Yes, everyone was distraught, mourning the houses and cities they’d left behind, the men beneath the soil. Shouldn’t they mourn together? Palestine has vanished for them—this knowledge crept up on Alia slowly, a new death every morning: Mustafa gone, Nablus gone—but they can find the ashes in Amman, collect them to build another life.
The pregnancy is further motive. Amman has knotted like a vine in Alia’s mind, her conviction that, if they go, something can be saved. She and Atef could shed the snakeskin of this year, begin to laugh again, lament and heal with their friends in Amman. They could start their family there, live in a house near her mother; everything could be all right. She knows in her bones that if she could show Atef all this, could show him the image in her mind—their salvaged life—he would see it and understand. He would go.