“Je me fous du passé.” Elie’s voice, baritone, by her side.
She glances at him through her eyelashes. His eyes are shut, and a pure, boyish delight fills his face as the music drifts around them.
And she feels not love but detachment, an odd calmness as she watches him, as if she’s appraising a house she’s not sure she wants to live in. I wouldn’t have to leave, she thinks. The realization settles over her, imagining tomorrow, her mother’s fingers dialing the phone, a lifetime of Souad, Souad, where were you, when will you be home.
After the song is over, she decides. After the violinist bows and smiles, and the applause scatters, she will walk him over to the fountain, will slip her body against his and lean into his ear. Will whisper, Yes.
Riham
* * *
Amman
October 1999
Riham stands straight and leans over, grazing her toes with her forefingers. She straightens and mutters, “Six,” before repeating the stretch. Once she reaches ten, she stands and begins to do lunges. Farida and the other women recommended them for the twinges in her lower back.
“And they won’t hurt your behind either,” Farida quipped, too refined to say ass. Riham knows that the other women do these exercises for the results, the tightening of calves and elongated spines. But she likes the process itself, hearing her joints pop, feeling the tendons and muscles stretch and tense, the quiet of her bedroom as she counts aloud.
After the lunges come the sit-ups, then the long, pointy-toed stretches with each leg propped on the windowsill. She likes to pretend she is a ballerina warming up before a performance, though she is over thirty and corpulent, to put it nicely. Still, she tells herself—in defiance of the body she was given, the tepid Amman morning outside the window—for these few minutes she is transformed, a Russian soloist prepping for the stage, her hair sweeping against her knees as she bends, as far as she can, an audience of well-dressed people waiting for her to walk into the spotlight.
Her favorite part of the day is this—late morning, after breakfast, the men out of the house, Abdullah at university, Latif already at the hospital. Last May, he was promoted to medical director, and Riham had invited all their friends over, cooked a feast of chicken and lamb and rice with the maid, Rosie, to celebrate. People milled around until midnight; afterward, Latif kissed Riham and said he felt like a celebrity.
Next to the windowsill is a notebook with a blue pen. Half the pages have already been used, and Riham opens to today’s list. Latif likes to tease her. “A to-do list for the president,” he says. The mockery stings but Riham just smiles. “A clear mind is a clear heart,” she tells him, and she loves to examine the day before her, still not begun.
Today, the list is short: Breakfast, exercise, hemming her dress, the garden, basting the chicken, tea at Farida’s, dinner. With satisfaction, she crosses off breakfast and exercise with tidy swipes. She wraps her veil around her hair as she makes her way to the living room. Walking past the kitchen, she can hear Rosie’s voice, the young girl singing songs about flowers and men in her language.
The house is a large one. It has the high ceilings and tiled floors of a space that seems to multiply itself, giving the impression of something vast and swelling. When Riham and Latif first moved in after their wedding, it had been smaller, with three bedrooms and the living room, which opened to a garden. The other bedrooms, the study, the veranda, came later, as the years went on.
Riham thrilled at each addition, finding a certain magic in the renovation of the house, the weeks and weeks of construction, laborers scurrying around, the thin coat of dust that layered everything, everything, until she couldn’t take it anymore, would be on the verge of telling everyone to leave when, finally, the workers would step back and reveal another room, gleaming and white, belonging to her.
It reminded her of gardening, the crop of new spaces, walls and floors blossoming, the way the house—and in this she took matriarchal pride—grew.
Except the Fixture. She avoids the wooden shed near the garden, entering it only if she must. Over the years, they took to calling it that—the Fixture—as though it were temporary. She never told Latif that part of her joy last year—part of the extravagance of the dinner party—was in his retiring the Fixture, the plain space with five cots and drawers full of medical instruments that he’d used less and less frequently as time went by. There had been spikes, of course, after wars, invasions, when it seemed the Fixture was swarming with people, the desperate and moneyless coming to Latif’s door, sent by family in other countries. Latif would suture wounds, clean out gunshots, without taking a single dinar.
“Please, the doctor,” they would say when she opened the door at their knocking, sometimes in the middle of the night. “We were told to come here. They said he would help. They said he helps everyone.”
Certainly it was something to be proud of—the distinguished doctor husband who felt so keenly for the fallen, he tried to heal them all. And for the first few years, Riham was proud, making soup and tea for the men, offering them fruit when they got strong again and walked around her gardens.
But eventually another side of her shone through, a side she was ashamed of and so never shared with Latif—the irritation, the utter boredom of it. Selfishly, she wanted her house, her husband to herself. She watched the lives of her friends, wives of other doctors, with envy—the men home for dinner, no stink of unwashed bodies in their yards.
She never spoke of it. It was a stain, she recognized, an unclean part of herself, what Latif would call a faltering. So she did what she always did in those moments. She prayed. The men came less and less often, going instead to government clinics as Latif grew older. But Riham kept praying, exhausted, wishing she could stop the resentment. And when Latif accepted the position at the hospital, announcing he would end the home practice, she felt a full, rushing relief: if she couldn’t change the faltering in herself, at least she wouldn’t be reminded of it anymore.