“Can I stay?” he asks.
She nods and takes a match out, strikes it against the box’s side. As Atef watches her touch the flame to the wick, her face illuminated, he suddenly thinks of Mustafa. Before the war, before the prison. There had been a girl, Atef remembers. He’d completely forgotten about her, a girl Mustafa mentioned at times. Atef tries to hunt the grottoes of his memory for her name. Something buoyant, delicate-sounding. He thinks of the stacks of letters without an address.
Riham holds the candle up to the window, peers through the flame to the moon. Atef is awash with love for her, her thin lips, her thick nose, all the awkwardness of adolescence beginning to crowd her face. He imagines time-lapse photography of her—her youth, then womanhood, wrinkles creasing her forehead, the years whirling by.
He will write to Mustafa about this moment, about her silhouette against the window, how he saw her years come before his eyes. He will tell him about the ways the world has changed. He can see the blank paper in front of him, his fingers curving instinctively. I’m addicted to this, he wrote a while ago. My confessional.
She takes a deep breath and exhales; the flame disappears in a wisp of smoke.
“What did you wish for?” he asks his daughter.
“I’m not supposed to say, Baba.” She hesitates. “For nothing to change.” Her eyes shine up at him.
“That’s a good wish,” Atef says. He imagines Mustafa in a small bungalow in Latin America, tanned, wearing leather sandals. That long-lost girl with him. “A very good wish, duckie.”
How tiny our lives are, he thinks, swelling to impossible size with love, then shrinking again. He puts an arm around his daughter and pulls her close, this girl he will lose eventually to something. She settles against him. For long moments, they sit together in the dark, watching the sky and smelling the sulfur around them.
Riham
* * *
Amman
July 1982
Of the dozens of things that Riham dislikes about spending summers in Amman, the worst is the noise. She has been making a list all morning on the inside cover of her tattered Gone with the Wind, sitting in the kitchen of her grandmother’s house, the quietest place she can find.
It isn’t the mosquitoes that leave itchy welts in the cruelest of places—her eyelids, the space between her toes—or the soap operas the aunts watch compulsively. Not the vague smell of rotten meat when they visit Khalto Mimi’s, a scent Riham attributes to their two cats, of whom Riham is shamefully afraid—once when they leaped onto the dining-room table, Riham jumped and Khalto Mimi’s daughters, Lara and Mira, stared at her—or the fact that her father isn’t with them. Not even that Karam stayed in Kuwait this summer, part of a sports club at his school.
It is the noise. The tireless clamor that Riham cannot escape no matter what she does. Back home in Kuwait, she has her bedroom at the corner of the house, with her rows of books. Any sounds, Priya’s cooking or her parents talking, are always muffled by distance.
Here, the noise is like another creature in the house.
“It’s not mine!” Souad is yelling.
“Now,” their mother says. She is standing in the kitchen, an open pouch of pita bread in her hand. “I’m not saying it again.”
There is the sound of thumping and Souad appears in the kitchen doorway. The early morning light filters through the window above the sink.?Alia points at the clutter of blocks and dolls near the entrance. “That’s not mine,” Souad says again, although her voice wavers.
Their mother closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. When she opens them and speaks, she sounds falsely cheerful.
“Riham,” she croons. “Are you ready to go? Mama,” she calls. “We’re going. But I’m leaving Souad here.”
Souad hoists herself onto the kitchen counter, dangles her bare legs. “No, you’re not,” she says.
Their mother’s cool shatters. “Goddamn it, Souad, every day with you. All I ask is for you to pick up your toys, because someone could trip on them and break their neck. Is that what you want?”
“But they’re not mine!”
“Stop lying, Souad. Whose are they? Teta’s?”
“I don’t know—”
“Fine.”
Riham looks up from her book and watches with interest as her mother begins to clear the toys. She makes for the door. “Since they don’t belong to you or Riham, then they’re just trash, and I’m throwing them out.”
“You can’t do that!” Souad jumps down from the counter.
“Why not? They’re not yours, why should you care if—”
“They’re mine,” Souad says sullenly. Their mother continues to walk away. Souad raises her voice. “They’re mine! They’re mine! Give me.”
“Then clean them up.”
“Okay!”
“Is there a reason everyone’s hollering like maniacs?”
Riham’s shoulders instinctively relax at the voice. Her grandmother walks into the kitchen, a robe the shade of eggplant fluttering around her. She is wearing the paisley veil, Riham’s favorite. Her grandmother is the one bright spot of these summers.
Alia looks abashed. “Everything’s always a battle with her,” she grumbles. “We have a long drive ahead of us and she’s already making trouble.”
Salma picks up a stray doll and hands it to Souad. “Sousu doesn’t mean it, do you, sweet? She’s sorry.”
Souad looks down. She nods. “I’m sorry.”
Alia touches Souad’s hair and says, her voice softer, “Should I make honey or cheese sandwiches for the beach?”
Riham writes down the beach on the list in her small, tidy handwriting.
Summers, they stay with Teta. Her building, which overlooks the city, belongs to the family, Riham knows, and her great-aunts live on the other floors. Her grandmother’s apartment, where each of them has a room, stays the same from visit to visit, filled with framed photographs of their younger selves. At night from the balcony, the city looks like a distant, smoldering thing.
“Your second home,” her grandmother says when they arrive. Every year she gets fatter, her face crinkling up. It saddens Riham to think of her grandmother alone during the year, moving through the large apartment.
But Salma never seems forlorn or lonely. She spends her days cooking with her sisters or in the garden, an enclosed area behind the house sprawling with plants and flowers and one large, gnarled olive tree. She weeds and waters the plants herself, waits for the tomatoes and cucumbers to grow large before picking them. Sometimes she asks Riham to help her clean the vegetables and Riham gets grit beneath her nails.