In Atef’s imaginary photographs, the transformation is astonishing. In the beginning, a stark desert, the landscape sparsely decorated with industrial buildings and compounds. And then, whoosh, years pass and things begin to crop up—restaurants, Indian, Pakistani, Lebanese, with bright signs; the newer mosques; the billboards cautiously advertising toothpaste and banks; and, slowly, the cranes and concrete pillars, dunes of sand turned into construction sites.
Whoosh. The photograph trembles and changes once again. More years pass. The cranes and pillars are gone, and buildings appear in their place, a telecommunications center. The outskirts of the desert, reddened with sand, are becoming compounds with swimming pools, their villas blooming like flowers. More restaurants are opening downtown, so that driving past them at night gives the impression of tangled light, neon comets. Whoosh. More years. It’s the late seventies, and even Kuwait is feeling it. The billboards are bolder now, showing toothy women advertising veils, travel-agency images of the Eiffel Tower. Driving through the city no longer feels as contradictory as it used to—certain areas sand and air, others fully urban; it feels like a city now, with a distant melancholia about it, like all cities.
Atef pulls in to the entrance of the Mubarakiya souk and parks. Over the years, most of his friends—and Alia as well—have come to view the marketplace as outdated, a holdover from the old days. Sprawling and loud, its mazelike stalls and shops fill the air with saffron and cinnamon. Men’s voices hawk goods with an energy so ample it seems to fill one’s mouth.
Atef loves it.
When he first arrived in Kuwait, he would weave between the stalls like a sleepwalker. Here was a place where nobody wanted anything from him except coins. He began offering to pick up spices and bread and rice, spent hours walking the kiosks, stealing touches of camel-skin rugs, accepting samples of olives and goat cheese, overwhelmed and comforted by the cacophony of vendors. It was the only place he felt relief those first months, and he came to view it as a sort of haven, a makeshift mosque.
Even now, ambling past stalls, nodding at various vendors, he feels warmth at the familiarity of their cries.
“Sir, good morning, sir, sample the melon?”
“Three for ground coffee! I’m giving it away!”
“Buy perfume for the madame? Jasmine, gardenia, irfil, irfil!”
Atef ignores them all, walks to the corner stall where an older man hunches over a radio, a splinter of khat dangling from his teeth. He is muttering under his breath, surrounded by an arrangement of fresh fruit, baskets of dewy berries and apples.
“Morning of luck, Abu Mohsin,” Atef greets the man.
Abu Mohsin grunts without looking up. “Is it Friday already?”
“It’s my daughter’s birthday. I came for some strawberries.”
“You know where everything is.” Abu Mohsin fiddles with the antenna, curses. “Goddamn American piece of shit. They can take over the world, they can’t build a radio?”
“Might be good for you if it’s broken,” Atef teases. “All those Egyptian soap operas are going to melt your brain.”
Abu Mohsin looks at him blackly. “Bah.” He spits the khat on the ground and rises as though Atef is an unwanted houseguest who must be entertained. “Strawberries, you said?”
As Abu Mohsin rifles through the baskets, he asks, “Which girl is it? The lighter one or the one with the curls?”
Atef smiles, then rearranges his face as Abu Mohsin turns to him with a basket. Now and then the old man slips up and shows his hand, reveals that he pays attention to the tidbits Atef shares during these visits.
“The lighter one. Riham.”
Abu Mohsin hands him the basket. Atef touches the strawberries, picking a plump one. The strawberry is warm from the sun, specks of dirt clinging to the fine hairs. The fruit seems to throb with redness. Atef is pleased by the color, knows Riham will admire it. Riham, who is forever tugging his arm to show him a particularly yellow flower or the sky swirled with pastels at sunset. Sometimes she brings home drawings from school, underwater scenes with violet jellyfish, sketches of girls dancing on a beach. He tapes them up in his office at the university, the pictures placed next to his framed diploma and teaching awards.
“You going to taste it or commune with it?” Abu Mohsin folds another wad of khat between his teeth.
Atef bites into the strawberry—sweetness, ripe, with a hint of tart. It is perfect.
“I’ll take four baskets,” he tells Abu Mohsin.
The older man looks pleased for an instant before his eyes sharpen, shrewd, as though he’s remembering he is the vendor of all this unlikely fruit. “You want some cherries? Arrived this morning. Sweet as a virgin’s thighs.”
Atef laughs uneasily. Such talk makes him uncomfortable. “All right. One basket.” Abu Mohsin’s eyebrows knit together. “Okay, okay. Two.”
“Sugar from Morocco,” Atef calls as he walks into the kitchen, sets the bags on the floor. “Are they awake?”
“The girls are getting ready,” Priya says, hefting the cloth sack of sugar. “Karam is in the sunroom. You want more coffee, sir?”
“Sure,” Atef says. “And, please, those cherries.”
The sunroom is actually a storage room. Three windows cover one side, filling it with sunlight. It is unofficially Karam’s playroom, where he spends hours coaxing figures out of wood.
The boy sits at the desk Atef bought for him. Slats of wood are scattered around a small birdcage. In the sunlight, his curls are nearly golden, his hair lighter than the others’. Karam had been born in February, not even two years after Riham—Alia’s pregnancy a blur, her drawn, sleepless face, the flurry of Atef’s academic projects—and it was as though he sensed the chaos he was being brought into. He was a calm infant, an agreeable toddler. Whenever Atef entered the room, Karam would babble with joy: “Ata, Ata.” Even when he fell or was jostled in play by Riham, he didn’t cry; his eyes went liquid, but he made no sound.
The fascination with wood came two years ago, when Atef took the boy to the market during Eid, stalls lined with toys and Bedouin goods—crafted jewelry, satchels of soap, and wooden figurines carved with perfection into limbs and grave faces. A Bedouin man sat on the ground, paring a piece of wood impossibly fast, tossing the shavings to his side. Karam was awestruck, his mouth pursed in transfixion. He insisted on staying until the man finished. The figurine was a swan with a graceful neck, which the Bedouin gave to Karam, telling him gruffly, “This is for luck.”
The swan still rests on the shelf above Karam’s bed, along with a myriad of objects and figures the boy has since created, in varying stages of skill. A duckling, an elephant with a drooping trunk. The creations are rudimentary but solid.
Atef feels a pang at times watching the neighborhood boys play soccer on the compound lawn, elbowing one another in dirty shirts. His own memories of childhood involve camaraderie—a scraped knee, the elation of making a goal, playing games of tag.
Alia defends their son’s quietness, his solitary play. When she speaks, Atef watches her face cloud over, knows she is remembering the boys in Nablus.