“I’ll get it.” Atef chooses a maroon mug with hearts on it. A birthday present from the children last year. “I was thinking of going to the market. Picking up some strawberries.”
A small, approving nod. “For Riham.”
Atef smiles as he pours himself coffee from the ibrik. “Yes, and some figs if they have them.”
“Good. I can make a fruitcake.”
“For the party at Widad’s? Riham will love it.” Atef likes these exchanges, the moments he shares with Priya while the family sleeps.
Priya lifts the dress, shakes it firmly. She makes an appreciative sound. “If you buy some cane sugar, I can make pudding.”
“I’ll buy ten kilograms of sugar,” he declares theatrically and Priya laughs her low laugh, shaking her head.
He takes his coffee into the study they furnished last year, the wooden desk and tightly packed bookshelf. At the doorway, he waits for a second, looking down the hallway, before shutting the door behind him and moving to the books. He finds the brown spine and pulls it out, his heart quickening familiarly at the touch of the smooth cover, the book opening in the middle like a mouth, revealing the sheaf of papers. They are held together by a rubber band, a blue Bic pen tucked under it.
He turns the last page over—April 29, 1977—the ink spidery through the paper, and sits at the table. He glances at the door before beginning to write.
I wake up and it feels like my lungs are dropped in ice and I have to count, one two three four, listen to myself taking in air. Sometimes I wonder if this is really the waking world: coffee in a red mug, three children sleeping in three rooms, the television blaring in the background.
Years ago, when the pills and diet changes and vitamins didn’t work, Dr. Salawiya recommended letters.
“They say it can help. It’s a way to organize your thoughts, explain what you’ve been through. Write them to your wife, your family back in Palestine.”
But when Atef sat down, it was Mustafa’s name that tumbled out, his eyes that he saw. At first he wrote just about the dreams, the whittled faces of the soldiers, but then he began to talk to him about other things, daily things, always starting the letters with his friend’s name, writing about Riham winning the spelling contest, how Souad upended a glass of milk during a tantrum. He told him, delicately, about Alia, how neither of them ever spoke of Palestine.
I’m crazy, a part of him realized. If anyone finds this, they’re going to think I’m crazy.
But it was the only thing that helped. Pretending that Mustafa was still somewhere in the world, still in Nablus or, better yet, in Peru or Thailand, living one of his dozen lives, pretending that a rickshaw was delivering Atef’s letters to a doorstep somewhere, his friend laughing and sucking his teeth as he read them. Sometimes—in his more reckless moments—he even bargained with himself: They never gave us a body, it’s not impossible, lots of men left Palestine during those months, what if, what if.
Atef pauses before finishing the letter. They always make me say your name. I was afraid I called it out in my sleep, that Alia might’ve heard. But when I woke, she hadn’t moved. Even though it feels unnecessary, he still signs his name, in a complicated flourish at the bottom of the page.
He has chosen a particular book for this job: A Lifecycle of Plants. He tucks the letters in, then replaces it in the far left corner of his bookshelf. The spine is drab and brown. He knows no one will ever touch it.
Atef drinks the rest of his coffee too hot, and as he steps outside the house, his tongue feels raw. He moves it over his front teeth, winces, does it again. The car, a silver sedan, is new, a gift he bought for himself after his promotion at the university last year. What pride that letter had brought, seeing his title embossed in golden ink—Honorable Professor—with precise handwriting. A far cry from his childhood in Nablus, from the rice his weary mother ladled, the clamor of his six brothers in their house. His brothers are far-flung now—Amman, Istanbul, the youngest two lost in the bowels of Israeli prisons.
In certain moments, Atef feels the small miracle of his luck perched on his shoulder like a parakeet—something alive, trilling a new song. He feels it even now, fluttering in his chest as he pulls out of his driveway. If left unaddressed, the whirring becomes torrential, threatening to spill over into tears as it often did those years after the war. And so, as he steers the car down the road, passing the rows of white villas and palm trees, Atef quietly recites: It is spring. He has a lovely home. He has three healthy children and a wife. It is his elder daughter’s birthday today, and he is going to buy strawberries for her.
This remembering, this gentle recitation, calms him, gives him something to focus on. These are facts, the obelisks of his life, and, gleaned, they glow for him—sturdy, true, his.
Over the years, the compound has grown, as have others in the neighborhood. While theirs remains mostly Arabs, other Palestinians, and Syrians, the nearby compounds—admittedly nicer, with pools and frantically watered lawns—are luring in more Westerners. Atef sees them in the grocery store and the shops, their golden hair hypnotic.
Atef complains, as the rest of their friends do, of the influx of Americans and British, of the ways the “international”—primarily Western—schools have become mixed, teaching English and French just as vigorously as Arabic. Of the increase of English shows on the television. And yet, when it came time to enroll the children in school, Atef fought with Alia to put them in one of those international schools.
“So they can share lunch with ajanib?” Alia had asked. She felt distaste toward the foreigners, found them greedy. “And learn their ABCs? What for?”
Atef thought for a while before replying. “There are sides,” he finally said, because he could think of no better way to put it. “And I want them to be on the right one.”
Sometimes he imagines a series of time-lapse photographs, like the ones of a tree undergoing changes in foliage or a seascape during sunrise. Only this is of Kuwait City. Although it has happened bit by bit, Atef can picture it after years of driving the same streets. Over and over and over, the whole city bursting into life.