“Are you a student at the college?” Alia finally asks.
The girl looks animated, as though Alia has asked the correct question. She begins to talk rapidly, her bracelets clanging as she moves her hands. “As if the dogs would let us go to school. My education? Mortar and gassing. One hundred nights of death, while that bastard sleeps in his marble bedroom.”
Alia’s mind whirs. She puts it together, guesses.
“Saddam.”
“That dog.” The girl spits, as though the very name is something bitter in her mouth. “He drove us to the wasteland; he took the gold from our flesh.”
So the girl is Kurdish. Alia watches her, sidelong, with interest. The reddish hair, kohl thick beneath her lower eyelashes. There are stories about the Kurds, whisperings about magic and gypsies living in the underbellies of cities. The girl eats the rest of her figs, sucking at the skins before tossing them onto the sand. She lights a cigarette and speaks again, her voice vehement.
“We came a while back, my mama and siblings. Seven of us. Baba died, of course. All the men did. The army rounded them up, slit their stomachs in front of our houses, shot the knees of anyone who cried out. To the women—” The girl spits again, slitting her eyes toward the sea. “To the women they did awful things. They made husbands watch. They made little children watch.”
“I’m sorry,” Alia says. Telar ashes her cigarette and Alia sees that her nails are bitten, blackened around the edges. Something like revulsion stirs within her.
“He’s a godless, motherless bastard,” the girl is saying. “Left us starving. We ate paper when there wasn’t any rice left.” She takes a long breath. “But at least we left before the gas. Poison! You hear about that? He dropped poison on children. They’re saying the dead smelled apples and fell to the ground.”
Alia’s stomach lurches. Suddenly she wishes the girl would stop talking, would leave her alone. She thinks of the teabag left carelessly on the kitchen counter. Odd, to be nostalgic for something that has gone nowhere; she feels melancholic thinking of her stovetop, her teapot, as though it is all a country she has dreamed up. She tries to think of how to offer money delicately to the girl, who seems like the kind for whom charity is censure.
“You know what it’s like to be hungry?”
Alia blinks at her, this girl with dirty nails and cigarettes. What would Souad think of her? she wonders. Would she furrow her brow, step to the side? Or would she be enchanted, as she is by parties and the new hotels in Kuwait? Souad. Alia says her name silently. Taken by the ajnabi men with their accents and tailored suits, taken by the attention—daughter, it is awful—that a girl with tight jeans and a devastating smile can attract.
“Pardon?” Though she heard the question.
“Hungry. You ever been hungry?” The girl continues before Alia can respond. “I don’t mean late-dinner hungry. Or having to wait for your maid to finish cooking a meal.” She lets out a quick, angry laugh.
Alia remembers with shame the bread back in her house, the crust she threw in the sink. The years of uneaten chicken and rice, chucked into the trash. The utter waste.
The girl, Alia suddenly knows, would have no patience for Souad. For either of her daughters. The children of a professor—well fed, spoiled, ungrateful. Alia is oddly gratified by the thought.
Alia shakes her head. She opens her mouth to say no, admittedly not, and is surprised to hear herself say, “Once.”
The girl turns to her, eyes disbelieving. “When I was pregnant,” Alia says. “When I gave birth to my youngest.” And Alia remembers with rocking clarity that pain, coiled and endless in her abdomen, the labor that had lasted nearly two days. “It’s like it was yesterday or, no, just this morning. Like it just happened. Everything I ate, for days, I couldn’t keep down.” Not even water. The doctors had said it was the difficult labor, the bleeding and ripping, her body unable to digest. “The first two days it was awful, like a long fast. But then.” Her hospital room always darkened by a curtain. Atef begging her to eat bread. Outside, a warm, bright winter and fires burning in the desert. “Then . . . it was like madness. Every inch of me begging for food. And my body refusing it.”
The girl smokes, considering. “I know it’s not the same,” Alia says in a rush. “I know it’s not. But it was still—you asked if I was ever hungry.”
Telar nods. She adjusts a silver chain around her wrist. “What happened?”
“My daughter was born.” Alia tries to remember, really remember. “And everything was suddenly loud and sharp.” Riham and Karam were quiet children. Those early years, Alia thinks, newly in Kuwait, newly a mother, she’d been a sleepwalker. “It was like being shaken awake.” Only with Souad did everything change, that screaming, selfish child.
“I never forgave her,” Alia says slowly. “But I also never thanked her.”
“When we came here, my sister, the littlest one, she’d cry and cry for rice pudding.” The girl drops the cigarette and steps on it. “It was terrible. Here she was, this tiny thing, no memory, just wanting and needing.” Telar laughs. “When she’s old enough, I’ll tell her that story. Of how she cried and cried, then cried harder when we told her there was none.”
Alia remembers her mother telling her, back in Nablus, that she used to cry for something when they left Jaffa. Though she cannot remember what. She has now forgotten twice.
“Coming here was terrible. I didn’t think we would ever survive it.”
“What else could you do?” Alia says.
The girl nods. “For weeks, we touched each other’s faces, trying to make sure we hadn’t dreamed it. We drank water slowly. Everything we did was like that. Slow, careful.” Alia thinks of Atef’s chin against her temple this morning, watching him walk down the driveway. How there is something precious in those gestures, and tragic, too, accumulated over the years. Her daughter is still sleeping, she thinks, her long limbs akimbo like in girlhood. Next to Alia, Telar has fallen silent, watching the water. Alia holds out the figs for the girl to take another, and she does.
Souad
* * *
Paris
August 1990
Souad wakes with a start. The sound of a French news channel trumpets through the rooms. She has been sleeping fitfully since the invasion, at odd hours. Everyone in the house has been doing the same, Khalto Mimi and her brother Ammar taking long naps after lunch, Lara sleeping through the afternoons and waking at night.
She blinks against the pillowcase, squinting toward the open curtains. The streaks of setting sun stain the wooden floors red. From the television, the newscasters’ words drift through the room in bursts.
“Troops . . . vacillating . . . the borders.”