The driveway is empty when she returns, Latif and Abdullah still not home. The house smells of eggplant and meat. Rosie is stirring something when Riham enters the kitchen. On the counter, there is a plate of eggplant slices. She lifts one with her fingers. It is perfectly fried.
“Wonderful,” she says. Rosie nods without lifting her eyes from the bowl.
The muezzin rings out for prayer. Riham does wudu quickly, knowing that Abdullah and Latif will be home any moment. As she prays, the women’s words echo in her mind. She shuts her eyes and, seeing Abdullah’s face, makes a decision.
Without finishing her prayer, she rises. She moves down the hall, past Latif’s study, to Abdullah’s room. The evil eye amulet hanging from the door stares at her accusingly. After a second, she pushes the door open.
She can feel the guilt pulse with each heartbeat. It is a bad habit of hers, vestigial from Abdullah’s youth, when she’d rustle through his drawers, searching for—what? She didn’t know exactly. Evidence, warnings.
Abdullah’s is one of the original rooms of the house. When he got older, they asked if he would prefer a different room, but he demurred, saying he liked the view: trees that bloomed with orange blossoms every April. Riham steps into the room gingerly, as though he is hiding in the closet, furious.
In the boy’s childhood, his room was filled with rows of action figures, toys lined up with military precision. Now the toys are gone, as are the mystery novels he used to love, the schoolbooks. Several versions of the Qur’an appear on his shelves, and books with long titles about divinity and the Prophet, as well as history books and textbooks for the University of Jordan, where he enrolled last month.
One book catches her eye—the blue spine of An Encyclopedia of Insects, which she gave him when he was twelve. He’d been stung by a wasp and became obsessed with them, as well as spiders and ants and scorpions, constantly asking her: “What do they eat?” “When they poison you, where does the poison go?” “Do they dream?” She finally bought the book and he read aloud passages for months.
It warms her heart to see the book still there. She always scans the shelves for it. What she’ll do when it vanishes—discarded like the others—she doesn’t know.
There is a stack of pamphlets on the bedside table, the outline of a minaret and below, in calligraphy, How do you serve Allah? What is he doing with so many of these, dozens of them? Riham answers her own question: distributing.
She flips through the pamphlet; well-worn, tiresome paragraphs about the lost ways of the world, the golden days, returning to Islam in its pure form—Shari’a, Riham thinks—the evils of the West defiling their youth.
She sits down and reads on, engrossed in spite of herself. She agrees with some of the points—religion has become a side note, an afterthought, people are far too entangled with material things. But, she thinks, it is cowardly to coax rage, to turn to condemnation. Prayer is as good as bread, as simple as the dirt she turns over for seedlings. It was what her grandmother used to say in her garden: Allah is in the stem, in my fingers, in the water, and in the drought. Meaning good and bad. Meaning it was too intricate to be whittled down to something one could point at. This was the aversion Riham felt toward those shrewd, bearded men on television—they spoke of the greatness of Allah, of servitude and humility, but they were cloaked in fury, preoccupied with it. They were simply angry.
And it was too easy to blame the West—though certainly their music was all cursing and their films just one nude woman after the other—or greed. That becomes convenient, Riham thinks, just an excuse for bad behavior. There were kings who, five times a day, removed their jewels and silks and knelt, silent and humble, to pray.
Isn’t that what she does? Each day she cleanses and bows, revealing herself, utterly, for Allah. Or perhaps this is what makes her uncomfortable; the pamphlets seem like an attack on her, on Latif, their material comforts and trips to Beirut, the air-conditioned house. But we’re grateful, Riham argues with an invisible jury, so grateful, though she feels herself sometimes clutch this gratitude as if it might prevent it all from being taken away.
She is jolted by the sound of tires on gravel and drops the pamphlet. Outside, the noise of Latif’s footsteps, the door opening, and she rises, following the sounds, his voice, deep and known, calling her name.
He is sitting on the sofa with a newspaper. When he catches sight of Riham, his face creases. He is getting old, she knows, his hair already entirely white. With each passing year, he loses a sliver of his former self, the olive-skinned doctor that she first met. His age is showing and will continue to. The spots freckling the backs of his hands and feet will spread, the veins will get more spidery. Rather than being repulsed, Riham is comforted by his fading looks; this makes him fully hers. It makes her own flaws—the hips, the smattering of acne on her shoulders—more forgivable.
“How’s the to-do list today?” he asks, grinning.
“Crossed off every one,” she reports.
“Bravo. And Farida? How were the madames?”
“Good; they asked about you.”
Latif folds the page back. “They’ve arrested a dozen more in Ramallah.”
“Mama and Baba will be here in a bit. Rosie’s making maqlouba. Another scandal arose.”
“Let me guess.” Latif smiles. “Souad.”
“Karam.” Latif glances up in surprise. “I know,” she says. “Poor boy. He can’t come because Budur has exams, not till the summer. But you know Mama. She’s furious, she’s saying they’re selfish, that no one considers her.”
“Mmm.” He shrugs. “A bit right this time, no?”
Riham feels a ripple of defensiveness. “But she’s not being realistic. They’re busy, Budur’s about to graduate—”
“So let him come with Linah.”
Riham sighs. “You sound like Mama. Please, when she brings it up, just don’t say anything.”
“You know I never do.”
“Where’s Abdullah?” she asks timidly. How infrequently they speak of their son, she realizes.
His brows draw. “I don’t know, perhaps class—” There is the sound of the front door opening and shutting, footsteps.
They look at each other for a second. “There he is.” Relief flickers in Latif’s eyes, and she lets out the breath that she holds whenever the boy is out of their sight.