“The United Nations has released its strongest condemnation,” the ethereal voice says as the reporter moves her lips out of sync. Her blond hair is cut above her eyebrows, straight across, like a doll Souad once had.
Lara stands and stretches, her midriff visible beneath the shirt. “I’m going out.”
“Okay.” Mimi continues frowning at the television. “With?”
“Luc,” Lara says.
“Have fun.”
“Be safe,” Ammar says.
Souad watches the exchange, as she always does, with a fascination that still hasn’t abated. In her own home, this would never, ever happen, the topic of boys—even harmless, friendly ones—a minefield of arguments with her mother.
She knows this is her moment; stands. “I’m going too,” she announces, then holds her breath.
They barely look up. “Be safe,” Ammar repeats, his eyes on the tanks and bombing onscreen.
On the street, she fumbles for a cigarette from her purse and smokes as she walks into the evening. She feels a sudden urge, now that she is outside the apartment, to clear her head. This is her favorite thing about the city—the ability it gives you to walk, to literally put space between your body and distress. In Kuwait, nobody walks anywhere.
Mimi lives in a quiet part of the city, mostly residential, with small, pretty apartments, each window like a glistening eye. The streetlamps are made of wrought iron, designs flanking either side of the bulbs. There is a minimalist sense of wealth in the neighborhood, children dressed simply, the women always adjusting scarves around their necks, their hair cut into perfectly symmetrical lines. Souad walks by the manicured lawns of a grammar school, empty and discarded for the summer. Next to it a gray-steepled church. She tries to imagine that, elsewhere, there is smoke and destroyed palaces and men carrying guns. It seems impossible.
The night is cool, and Souad wraps her cardigan tightly around her, crosses her arms. A shiver runs through her. She is nervous to see him, a familiar thrill that he always elicits in her. Even before last night.
Le Chat Rouge is a fifteen-minute walk from Mimi’s apartment, but within several blocks the streets begin to change, brownstones and Gothic-style latticework replaced with grungier alleyways, young Algerian men with long hair sitting on steps and drinking beer from cans. One eyes her and calls out, caressingly, something in French. She can make out the words for sweet and return. Bars line the streets with their neon signs and she walks directly across the Quartier Latin courtyard, her shoes clicking on the cobblestones.
“My mother’s going to call tomorrow,” she told Elie yesterday. She wasn’t sure why she said it, but it felt necessary. “They’re taking me to Amman.” In the near dark, Elie’s face was peculiarly lit, the sign making his skin look alien.
“You could stay here,” Elie said. He smiled mockingly. “You could get married.”
Souad had blinked, her lips still wet from the kiss. “Married?” She wasn’t being coy—she truthfully had no idea what Elie meant. Married to whom? For a long, awful moment, she thought Elie was suggesting she marry one of the other Lebanese men, that he was fobbing her off on a friend in pity.
“Yes.” Elie cocked his head, as though gauging the authenticity of her confusion. He smiled again, kinder this time. He closed his fingers around hers so that she was making a fist and he a larger one atop it. They both watched their hands silently for a few seconds, an awkward pose, more confrontational than romantic, as though he were preventing her from delivering a blow. It occurred to her that he was having a difficult time speaking. She felt her palm itch but didn’t move. Elie cleared his throat, and when he spoke, she had to lean in to hear him.
“You could marry me.”
Now, even in re-creating that moment, Souad feels the swoop in her stomach, her mouth drying. It is a thing she wants in the darkest, most furtive way, not realizing how badly until it was said aloud. Eighteen years old, a voice within her spoke, eighteen.
Too young, too young. And her parents, her waiting life.
But the greater, arrogant part of Souad’s self growled as if woken. Her steps clacked with her want of it. The self swelled triumphantly—Shame, shame, she admonishes herself, thinking of the war, the invasion, the troops and fire, but she is delighted nonetheless.
They met at the Shuja’a café in Kuwait a year ago. It was a space near the university where the intellectuals went to smoke cigarettes and talk about the war in Beirut and the Intifada. People sat around circular tables and drank Turkish coffee. It was a favored spot for those who considered themselves Communists, the young men wearing all black.
Souad loved it. She felt like an academic, crushing her cigarette neatly when she was finished with it, the lipstick stains around the butt unspeakably elegant to her. In the Shuja’a café, she felt like a version of herself that was nearly complete, someone whom others would want. Would envy. She spoke in a low, murmuring voice, batted her eyelashes. It was different than the boat parties and dancing, where the ajanib fluttered around her. There, she got more attention but it felt too easy, those blue-eyed men hungry for her laugh. At the café, women were poets or working on manifestos. They wore baggy pants and cursed like the men.
The pity of it, then, was that she felt out of place at the café. She hated to admit it but knew it was true. Souad had never been a strong student; she didn’t have a sturdy sense of history or politics. Frankly, the topics bored her. She just wanted the sickle necklaces and the berets. Still, she faltered through Marxist writings and began to read the newspaper. She learned to laugh when the men finished a sentence with a sardonic arch of their eyebrows, for this signified they’d said something they found—in a self-defeating way—funny.
Souad began calling Elie’s group of friends the Libanais, a nod toward their French-infused upbringing, and they seemed taken by her. Elie was the center of the group, with bushy eyebrows and an egotistic charm about him. He was the quintessential Libanais, leaving Beirut after the violence began, summering in France since boyhood, and attending the Lycée Fran?ais in Kuwait. When he argued with the other men, he switched to French, the language silky and eruptive in his mouth. Three years older than Souad, he had already begun university, studying political science, though his true passion was writing.
“I’m moving to Paris,” he told her the night they met. “At the end of this year, I’m transferring there to study writing.” He spoke to her about his dead mother and overbearing father, how Elie had finally struck a deal with his father, after much argument: Elie would move to France after two years at Kuwait University.
“How can you know you’ll still hate it here in a year?”