Once, here in Nablus, she read in her neighbor’s cup the death of a male member of her family. Less than a month later she sat in the neighbor’s living room, holding the keening woman as she pulled out tufts of her hair. Her eldest son had spat on a soldier, and a bullet ripped open his neck. When the neighbor was finally put to bed with a sedative, Salma collected the strands of hair from the sofa and rug. The neighbor avoided Salma after that, shuffling away when they met, her averted eyes reproachful. But the others kept coming.
“We are blessed to have this gift of seeing. Allah willed it and we must not misuse it,” her mother would tell Salma. And Salma felt that duty profoundly, the connection that it carved ancestrally with her mother and a great-aunt and others who’d died before Salma lived. She felt, whenever handed a hollow, still-warm cup, that she was being entrusted with something profound. Cosmic.
And she has never transgressed. Until now. Widad would’ve wanted to know if she was marrying the right man. Alia asks no such thing. She is not much younger than Widad was when she wed, is in fact three years older than Salma had been. But Salma worries about Alia, about the way the girl doesn’t worry about herself. It is hastiness, Alia’s love of Atef, which she has proclaimed to Salma, to her friends, in the most cavalier manner.
“I adore him,” Salma once overheard her tell a cousin, as though adoration was a casual, unfussy thing. There is something indecent to Salma about how transparently Alia flourishes her emotions.
Still, Alia looks nervous as she waits for the dregs, unusually somber. Salma had expected some mocking about superstition. Alia is like this, brazen, indelicate with her words. She’d protested the dowry ceremony, insisting that Atef give her only a lira coin as a token and nothing else. Even the sugaring ritual was a battle. She preferred shaving, she announced, sending a cousin for one of the pink plastic razors that had been materializing in recent months on pharmacy shelves. But when the aunts insisted Turkish coffee be brewed for Alia, that the girl drink it slowly so Salma could read her fortune, Alia obeyed. She drank the coffee in silence, her lashes lowered, occasionally blowing on the surface.
“Ya Salma,” one of the neighbors calls out. “It’s been eight minutes. Isn’t it time?”
Salma inhales, touches her hair. Since it is only women at the gathering, her veil and those of the aunts are draped along the windowsill.
“Yes, yes.” With unsteady fingers Salma flips the cup over.
She revolves the cup between her fingers, using only one hand. Her tendons and muscles have memorized these cups, the curving planes, know even to stop instinctively at the jag of the crack. Monumental little things, heavy and hollow at once, with the contradictory weight of eggs. She leans in once more and brings the cup close to her face. The lingering scent of coffee has already turned stale.
There it is. She had not been mistaken. The porcelain surface of the teacup is white as salt; the landscape of dregs, violent.
Lines curve wildly, clusters streaking the sides. Two arches, a wedding and a journey. The hilt of a knife crossed, ominously, with another. Arguments coming. On one side of the teacup, the white porcelain peeks through the dregs, forming a rectangular structure with a roof, drooping, an edifice mid-crumble. Houses that will be lost. And in the center, a smudged crown on its head, a zebra. Blurry but unmistakable, a zebra form, stripes across the flank. Salma wills her face expressionless, though fear rises in her, hot and barbed. A zebra is an exterior life, an unsettled life.
“Umm Mustafa, what do you see?” one of the girls pipes up. Salma lifts her head to the women gazing at her, their eyes questioning.
“Mama?” Alia asks, her voice sounding small. She is so young, Salma suddenly sees.
Salma’s voice is gravelly to her own ears. “She will be pregnant soon. There is a man waiting to take her through a door, a man who’ll love her very much.” All this is true—the fetus shape near the cup’s mouth, the tiny porpoise below the crack.
“Oh, wonderful!”
“Thank Allah.”
“At least now we know he loves her.” Laughing, the cousins tease Alia, who is smiling and flushed, relief plainly—surprisingly—on her face.
“Open the heart,” Salma tells her daughter, holding out the cup. The girl obliges, presses the pad of her thumb to the bottom of the cup, twists it in a half-arc. She returns the cup to Salma, then licks her coffee-smudged thumb.
Alia’s print is blurred, the edges speckled with dregs. She made a smear as she removed her thumb, a figure like a wing. Salma sees her daughter’s fear, the disquiet the girl cannot say. In the center of the thumbprint is a whirling form. Flight. She looks at Alia’s diamond-shaped face.
“It will come true. Your wish,” Salma says, this time speaking only to her. Alia blinks, nods slowly. At this, the women cheer and laugh, crowd around Alia with kisses and teasing tones. Salma sinks back into the chair, exhausted. She has given the truth. But amputated.
It is several hours before the men join them for supper. Lanterns are lit throughout the garden behind Salma’s house, casting everyone in a spongy, pale light. The elders, aunts and uncles, are all seated. The younger people mill around the radio, swaying to the music. Atef and Alia talk to their friends and cousins but glance at each other every few moments. Mustafa remains by Atef’s side, the two men smoking cigarettes and occasionally bursting into laughter. Children run about playing games. The house stands monolithically in the setting sun.
In Salma’s mind this remains the new house, the Nablus house. She has come to love it, in a resigned way. It is larger than their Jaffa home, the rooms cavernous, high-ceilinged. The previous owners—who’d fled to Jordan—had left their furniture; kitchen cabinets were still littered with biscuit packets and jars of sugar. In the room she was to share with Hussam, she found nightgowns and a stack of the thick, disposable cloths used for menstruation. Widad found notebooks filled with mathematical equations. For weeks, they played a warped game of unsheathing the house’s possessions. Salma had thrown it all away. But the house remained ghosted with its former life, the dinners and celebrations and quarrels it had witnessed. For this reason, Salma never changed the color of the walls or turned the room overlooking the veranda into a library instead of a sitting room.