Not a nightmare. Each waking, there is this moment—the clearing when she remembers everything, realizes once again what has happened.
Souad sighs and turns, pulling the thin blanket around her. She is a messy sleeper, the sheets always twisted when she wakes. Shutting her eyes, she buries her face in the pillow.
“Sleep, sleep, sleep,” she whispers to herself. She wishes to sleep for hours, until it is midnight outside. But it is too late, her mind is already crowding with everything, the invasion and Elie and her mother’s dreaded phone call. Of the three, the invasion feels, ironically, least pressing.
Souad sits up in bed, wincing at a twinge in her back. She is thirsty, her muscles sore.
An image of Elie comes to mind, his silhouette beneath the streetlamp last night, after the whiskey and dancing. He’d shrugged. Think about it.
Souad’s art professor at school, Madame Jubayli, had recommended her for a summer program at the newly opened L’Institut Supérieur des Arts Appliqués, but when Souad brought up the idea at home, it had caused many arguments, what Karam referred to as “the Paris impasse.”
“They teach painting and textiles; it’s perfect. It’s exactly what I need,” she said, over and over, to her parents. Her father vacillated, diplomatic but reluctant, while her mother outright forbade it.
“You want us to send you to Paris by yourself, like some street girl?”
The months churned on. There were charges and pleading and nightlong fights. Souad convinced Madame Jubayli to meet with her parents and speak about the program, its reputation, the colleagues she knew who taught there. Souad requested a copy of the brochure, went through it line by line. Still her mother refused to let her go.
“You’re just jealous!” Souad finally screamed one evening. “Because you’re stuck in your little life, you want everyone as miserable as you!”
Her mother’s face stormed, and her father finally intervened, telling Souad to go to her room. Souad went, paced, kicked her door and walls, then finally stomped back out to the living room, ready to scream at them both.
But when she drew breath, she collapsed. Falling onto the sofa in front of her parents, she wept like a child.
“Please,” she said between sobs. “Please, please, please.” She finally lifted her head, looked her mother straight in the eye. “Mama. Mama, please.”
Where yelling and bargaining had failed, tears worked. Within a week, Khalto Mimi, who’d moved to France years ago, was called; she agreed to have Souad stay with her for the summer and, like magic, Souad found herself on a plane headed to Paris.
Souad kicks the covers off and gets out of bed. The blue and white room, with lacy curtains and small porcelain figurines, is the elder daughter’s old room, Mira now living in her own apartment near the Sorbonne. In the drawers of the armoire are playing cards, a nightgown, an old notebook covered in stickers.
She is in awe of the girls and their European lifestyles. They are each in their twenties, Lara still living with her mother, both sisters leading sophisticated, unmarried lives. Every Sunday, Mira comes over, and they eat brioche thick with warm berries and watch television, the girls chattering in their alluring fusion of French and Arabic. They wear knee-high boots even on sunny days, and tight, short dresses above them, their hair barely grazing their shoulders. And as much as they coo over Souad’s slimness, her curls, she cannot help but feel unmodern around them, with her skinny legs and long hair. It is the same on the streets of Paris, Souad—who was always the voguish one in Kuwait—feeling plain among the swarms of elegant women smoking cigarettes, their lips painted the color of apples.
But here, at least, her restlessness has found a place. She loved Paris from the beginning. The people were neither friendly nor particularly welcoming, for the most part treating her coolly. It was part of the Parisian appeal, Elie told her. He has summered in Paris since babyhood and has a French passport; he knows the quarters and streets like an old lover. It was Elie who pushed her to do the program at L’Institut so they could be together for the summer.
Their last summer. Then he would remain in Paris for university, and she would return to Kuwait, their lives forking apart. That was their unspoken agreement. Or it had been, until the invasion. Now everything, everything—her family’s house, Karam’s engineering program, Souad’s own reluctant plan of beginning courses at Kuwait University—was suddenly suspended, uncertain, like sand lifted by malicious hands and tossed everywhere.
Souad dresses impulsively. Black leggings, oversize black shirt—in Paris, she retired colors—a cat’s-eye swipe of kohl. Outside, the sun has nearly set.
She walks toward the sound of newscasters, into the living room. At the doorway, she stands for a moment, unseen. Mimi and Ammar sit on the large sofa. Lara’s legs are stretched onto the coffee table; she is painting her toenails. All three of them watch the screen.
“Here she is, Sleeping Beauty Liz Taylor!” Ammar says, catching sight of her. His nickname for her, the absurd moniker for her constant napping and thick eyebrows. “Sit, sit.”
Souad sits next to him, and Mimi speaks, her eyes not leaving the screen. “Your mother called.”
Souad bites her lip, waiting. This is what she has dreaded since the other calls, the first to say they were safe, the second to say they were leaving for Amman as soon as her father organized finances and passports.
“What did she say?”
“Oh.” Mimi sounds distracted. “I told her you were sleeping; it’s been a rough couple of days. That she should let you rest. She said they’ll call tomorrow morning.”
Souad feels a rush of gratitude toward Mimi. “Thank you.”
“Asshole,” Lara blurts as Saddam’s expansive, grinning face appears on the screen, a repeated clip. Oh, God Almighty, be witness that we have warned them, he is saying. The room falls silent, all of them watching the man raise an arm, not a shred of fear on his swarthy face.
The news report cuts to flames, bulldozers. The fires on the television screen—Souad thinks of her neighborhood, the auditorium she walked across in a graduation gown two months ago, the shopping mall. She feels a rising nausea. There are moments, these last few days, when she has felt as lost as a child, the urge to scream like bile in her throat. Souad averts her eyes, fixing them instead on the Persian rug, a landscape of spirals in shades of green.
“He’s insane,” Mimi says.