She tried to treat them all the same, not to get too involved in their stories, instead playing the role of young wife, slicing bread and cutting tomatoes. But occasionally one of the women would insist on helping her in the kitchen, would speak of cities left behind. At the time, the refugees seemed endless, though there was a lull after the Iraq war, for a while. But every year or so, another conflict erupted, and they’d appear at the door, with different dialects and darker skin. Anytime Jordan opened its doors, Latif opened theirs.
So intently was Riham scrubbing blemishes from her soul that it seemed the refugees affected only her and Latif. Only now, in the past year, has her memory shifted, her mind’s eye fracturing and refocusing on the invisible character, the overlooked.
Abdullah.
There he is, in her revisited memories, in every single scene. The refugees given soup, Abdullah in the kitchen, doing his homework. News reports raging on the television, Abdullah watching. Midnight cries from the Fixture as Latif cleaned wounds, Abdullah in his bed, awake. And the children, the grimy children, Abdullah playing with them in the garden, sharing his toys. At the time, Riham barely noticed it, feeling only a fleeting pride in him.
But now she sees it all. Abdullah’s questions as he watched the refugees: Why are they hungry? he’d ask. Why is God making them hungry?
Why did he have a pillow while they did not? Why would a soldier stab a child?
It started off as ordinary, a little boy fretting. Abdullah asked only Riham, who’d become Mama, soothing him when he woke from nightmares. She didn’t tell Latif; it never occurred to her there was something bigger, that Abdullah would put things together, connect dots to form a chilling picture. The anger came later.
Farida’s house is impressive. The furniture is gilded, and the rooms are filled with imposing, untouchable antiques. Whenever she hosts, her two Filipino maids cover the table with food, grape leaves stuffed with meat and nuts, pastries, three different types of kanafeh. Today, there is a platter of watermelon, sliced into triangles.
“The last of the season,” Farida says, handing them plates. “Enjoy, enjoy.” Farida, like her house, is assiduously regal, her hair pulled back to showcase a long, lean neck. Twice a year she goes to Paris, returning with trinkets for the women, perfumes or ribboned macarons.
Most of the women are doctor’s wives, their friendships forged from necessity, and their solidarity is comforting to Riham. She had few friends growing up, and these gatherings remain a novelty, even after a decade. Some of them met their husbands while volunteering at hospitals, as Riham had. Others, like Hanadi and Lujain, had been nurses themselves before they got married and had children, though these former lives are rarely mentioned.
“This breeze is divine,” Lujain says, nodding toward the open balcony doors. “What a summer.”
“They’re saying it’s going to be a brutal winter.”
“Good, after all that heat.”
“You won’t be saying that after the first snow.”
There is laughter, and the women fill their plates with fruit and sweets. Of them, Riham is the youngest and most devout, the only one veiled. Riham sometimes gets the feeling they view her as a child.
“Did you hear the news last night?”
“Let them rot,” Hanadi says. She pops a grape into her mouth. “To the gallows, I say.”
“What about the women? The children? Not everyone’s a militant.”
Over the years, the conversation has evolved. There was a time, eight, nine years ago, when it revolved solely around the children—diapers and breastfeeding, concoctions of peppermint and olive oil for teething toddlers. Nothing was taboo, and in this way their meetings became sacred. They spoke of cracked, bleeding nipples, of the slackness between their legs after childbirth.
The women would ask her about Abdullah, inviting her in as a mother. Tell us about his grades, they’d say, or What do you do when he won’t eat? In this way they were kind to her.
But the sting of it—no children of her own, Latif surprisingly unwilling to budge on the matter, saying he was too old—never left her. So the recent years have come as a relief. No more is the talk of pregnancy and toddlers, but rather the tribulations of adolescence. It is a different generation, they comfort one another.
“I find brochures,” Yusra says. Riham turns to her attentively. “In Samer’s jackets.”
“PLO?” Hanadi asks.
Yusra shakes her head. “Something else. An Islamic group.”
“Those dogs,” Shahd says. “Going straight for the young ones.”
“What is the draw, I wonder.” Farida purses her lips. “How do good boys get caught up in it?”
“The money.”
“Or maybe the community. There’s that comradeship.”
“It makes them feel like giants,” Riham says slowly. The women nod. The maids circle the room, pouring fresh tea in cups. The women fall silent, contemplating.
“Sons,” Hanadi says. A birdlike woman, she has three of them. “Trouble, trouble, nothing but trouble. You spend your life trying to protect them from everything—fights, women, now political parties.” She shrugs. “And then they grow up and leave you anyway.”
“Nothing’s more difficult than sons,” Lujain agrees.
Farida lets out an elegant snort. “Please. At least sons are predictable. These days, the girls are wilder than the boys.”
The women murmur assent and the talk turns to friends of friends, second cousins, girls led astray. The stories always involve a girl from a good home and some bad influence—a boy or a wayward classmate. So short, they commiserate, is the fall from grace to liquor and cigarettes and sex.
“And after what happened to Maysam!” Farida tsks. “Her Farah went to visit family in Beirut for a week, a week, and now she says the girl is impossible. Going out at all hours, rolling her jeans up. Just last week Maysam came home to find Farah had cut off her hair by herself.”
“No!” Lujain cries out. “Those beautiful curls.”
“The girl said she wanted to be like Britney Spears. I mean, really, these girls are disasters.”
“I say let Farah do whatever she wants with her hair,” Hanadi says, “as long as she keeps her legs crossed.”
“Hanadi!”
“What? Come on, let’s not act like fools. You know what happened to Jehan’s daughter. Nisrine.” The women grow somber, thinking of how the girl had looked wan amid rumors of pregnancy, the family abruptly moving to England. “The truth is these girls aren’t just bobbing their hair and wearing skirts. They’re giving themselves up.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Times are just so different.”
Riham thinks of her sister. She wonders whether Souad was a virgin before she married, if she’d saved herself for the wedding.
“What frightens me is the secrets children keep.”
“I just thank God my Hania isn’t like that,” Farida says. “A good girl, well behaved.”
The women agree, but Riham remembers the last time she saw Hania, her nails painted a too-bright red. Not that she’d ever say that aloud to Farida.
Is this what happens with her and Abdullah? she wonders. A denial of what is apparent to others? Does love cloud the picture, give us blind spots? Though she is able to see more clearly than Latif. Perhaps that is the advantage of being the substitute mother, one step removed. She can see things Latif cannot.