“No,” Lara says deliberately. “He’s an asshole.” Ammar snorts with laughter.
There is a lived-in feeling in the apartment, one of camaraderie and airiness, a nonchalance among them that reminds Souad of those Amman summers, how envious Souad would be of Mimi’s lackadaisical upbringing of her daughters. There were times in the past weeks when Lara lay her head on her mother’s lap, and Mimi braided her hair. Souad cannot imagine ever doing such a thing herself with Alia. With her mother, Souad is her prickliest self, a cat stroked the wrong way.
During yesterday’s phone call, her mother had yelled. The line was staticky and her voice kept being cut off.
“Goddamn this phone! Souad—Atef, I can’t hear a damn thing.”
Souad’s mouth was dry as she repeated into the receiver, “Mama? Mama?”
“Yes—Souad—can you hear me?” A coarse sound, like the rustle of leaves, muffled the line. This alarmed Souad, as though the sound were somehow pulling her mother away. Suddenly her mother’s voice broke through, clear. “. . . goddamn reception. Can you hear me?”
“Yes, yes!” Souad stood on her tiptoes, pressing a palm against the counter in Mimi’s kitchen. The granite was smooth and cool. “How are you? What are you all doing?”
“Souad, we’re leaving. In a couple of days, I think. It depends on how quickly . . . with the car . . . the airport’s gone . . . Your father’s trying to sort things out with the bank—not sure how long.” Her mother spoke rapidly, in fragments, and Souad had a difficult time understanding. “We can take only a few things,” her mother continued. “Small enough to carry. I know you have some clothes, but is there anything you want me to—that I should take.” Only at these last words did her mother’s voice falter; there was a distant clicking sound, like a swallow.
Souad was confused. “Take where?”
“Take with us.” A familiar irritation crept into her mother’s tone. “Souad, we’re leaving Kuwait. We have to. Everyone is.”
“But on the news they said it’ll be over soon. That Europe or America will help.” Even to her own ears, Souad’s voice was childish, whining.
“Habibti.” Her mother’s tone softened. “We don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“But they’re saying—”
“We’re leaving.” Alia ignored her, kept talking. “Things are bad, they’re getting worse. What do you want me to take?”
Their house rushed through Souad’s mind. The rooms, the photographs on the walls, the sunlight through veranda windows. Her own bedroom, suddenly empty—she knows the room as she knows her own body, and she couldn’t conjure a single image of it.
“Nothing,” Souad heard herself saying. “None of it.”
“Are you sure?” Her mother sounded startled. “What about your jewelry? Clothes?”
“Nothing,” Souad repeated, firmly. “I’ll see it all when we go back.”
“Souad,” her mother said. “Souad, no one knows what will happen. We have to get to Amman as soon as possible.” There was static on the line, and then her mother’s voice returned. “. . . so we’ll send you the ticket as soon as we get there. Probably next week.”
“A ticket to where?” Souad felt slow, muddled.
“To Amman, Souad,” her mother said. “I don’t want you so far away while this is happening.”
“But Mama”—a wild, spinning panic rose in Souad’s throat, Elie appearing in her mind, so few nights left—“Mama, the program isn’t over for three more weeks.”
“Souad!” Her name hurled like a knife through Alia’s teeth—disgust, pity-—and Souad fell silent. Her mother took a deep breath, and when she spoke again, it was with finality, the way one speaks to those in shock. “Souad, there is a war.”
Souad sits impatiently in the living room, jiggling her leg. She glances at her watch every few minutes. It is only eight, and the Elie nights, as she has come to think of them, with their sidewalk cafés and bars and glasses of sherry, begin around now, everyone gathering at Le Chat Rouge to start the evening.
The phone call looms ahead of her. And with it her old life, slung, no longer hers and morphing into something unrecognizable: Amman, a new house, Riham and her family.
And Karam—her ally, the only one in her family she feels close to—when she spoke with him yesterday, his voice somber: “Sousi, I might be going to America. The architecture program in Amman isn’t strong. We called a university in America, one where Baba’s dean went, somewhere called Boston. They said they’d consider an emergency application. They’re calling it asylum.”
As a child, Souad hadn’t been afraid of the same things her brother and sister were—spiders, heights, sandstorms—and she’d known wordlessly, from a young age, that people thought her intrepid. She was the only girl in the schoolyard to squat next to a lone scorpion and, later, the first one to light a cigarette, to sit daringly in the front seat of a boy’s car, the wind raising her hair into a cloud. People wanted her like this, she understood. They loved watching the fearless.
This was why, as a girl, she’d never spoken of what she was afraid of. Never said that she was in fact jealous of her siblings, jealous because their fears had such specificity to them, could be labeled and confronted and dismantled.
What Souad spent her girlhood afraid of was incalculable, nameless. Not a creature so much as a shadow, a room emptied of lighting. She hated dusk; it filled her with dread. Hated the last few stairs when coming down from the roof of her grandmother’s building. When she was in bed sometimes, her small heart pounding just before she fell into sleep, she felt an endless plummet, as though someone had pushed her. Her fear had something to do with not being able to breathe, her mouth filled with water, with some enduring want. A suffocation. It was something like pursuit, something like not being fast enough.
This is what Souad thinks of as she watches the army tanks roll into the desert in tidy green rows.
In the living room, Souad watches Lara closely. Since her arrival, Souad has learned to blend in, to act nonchalant and follow the older girl’s lead. They haven’t become close, though Souad has joined her for drinks, met her intellectual French friends, all young professors like Lara. They laugh and tell stories, but, having taken English throughout school, Souad has a meager command of French. Lara’s Arabic is broken after years in Europe.
Souad knew instinctively that Mimi wouldn’t ask Souad’s mother about rules and curfews. Still, she is careful, always slipping out with Lara, pretending that she spends her evenings working on art projects for her program.
Ammar flips to an Arab channel, where an American reporter speaks, her words dubbed in Arabic.