They make an almost normal tableau, Riham thinks. A small family in the kitchen: mother, father, son. Father reading the newspaper, son sitting in silence, and mother—mother placing olives, nuts, dried apricots in porcelain bowls near the sink, the setting sun making the plants on the windowsill glow emerald. Stealing furtive glances at the two men behind her, identical in their reticence.
It is almost seven. Her parents will arrive any minute. She can practically taste the chill in the room, yearns for Rosie to return to the kitchen, fill it with her uninterested energy. Abdullah sits two chairs from his father. He has lit a cigarette, and the kitchen is filled with the smell of smoke. He looks like a surly prince from a former era, the beard stark on his young, delicate face.
Riham pictures the pamphlets in his bedroom, that sinister minaret. He’s angry with his parents, with everything. Angry in a way that frightens her.
“How were classes?” Latif asks, folding the newspaper away. His voice is gruff.
Abdullah keeps his eyes down. He lifts a shoulder.
“Are you learning anything interesting?”
There is a silence, then Abdullah’s voice. “No.”
Latif looks at Riham. He shakes his head.
“I’m going to clean up,” he says, defeated. “They’ll be here soon.” He leaves the kitchen. Riham returns to her work, a quickly moving shape catching her eye on the windowsill.
“Oh!” She draws a sharp breath. “Oh!” She sees Abdullah tense. “Come, Aboudi, come see.” What frightened her, she sees, is on the other side of the glass. A beetle. Horns, shiny black shell, a grotesque mouth.
Abdullah walks to her. They watch the insect pause, then turn and scuttle the opposite way, its body surprisingly agile.
“The khapra beetle,” Abdullah says. The encyclopedia. Riham is silent with hope.
“You always knew them so well,” she tells him. A smile glimmers beneath his beard.
“It’s easy,” he says. “You just learn the armor.” He filches an olive from the bowl, pops it in his mouth.
“Hey!” She slaps his wrist and they smile at each other, shyly. It is like learning music, she thinks, getting him to come to her. Trying not to startle a wary creature. Thoughts swarm her mind, all the things she might say right now, to bring him back.
She follows his eyes past the window, to the garden, to the Fixture. They both watch it for a moment.
“Your father was saying we might put a greenhouse out there,” she says.
“It’s strange.” His voice is boyish. Soft for the first time in months. “Isn’t it?”
And she knows exactly what he means. At last. They were joined in this, after all, weren’t they, in the aftermath of strangers’ lives, the detritus that Latif brought to them. It emboldens her, to see something Abdullah does.
“Yes,” she hears herself whisper. “It’s like I can still hear them. I think of them all the time, Aboudi.” She is too afraid to lift her eyes or speak louder, as though he is a moth in her palm that even breath will frighten off. She inhales, takes a gamble. “I know you think you’re the only one that does, habibi. But I do too. All the time.”
He turns to her. She meets his eyes and sees—to her surprise—fear. “No one ever talks about them. We never say anything. It’s like they were a dream, like we’re all pretending.”
She knows Abdullah is waiting, knows Rosie will return any second and the doorbell will ring. She knows she must speak now. A memory glints in her mind, one of the refugees helping her rinse parsley years ago, over this very sink. The woman’s fingers had been dark with henna, Riham remembers. She’d spoken of her husband hanging from a tree. How strange, that Riham should remember her now. To think of this woman she’ll never see again.
And how strange that the only person she wants to tell is Abdullah. Perhaps she will. If not now, then after dinner. Or tomorrow morning. She will tell him about the dreams she still has, how people can leave their mark even after decades. She will tell him her fear, the one she found in the water years ago.
“Listen,” she says, and the boy looks at her, his eyes asking her to say everything.
Souad
* * *
Beirut
June 2004
Souad stirs one spoonful of sugar into her coffee, sighs, then spoons in another. The day and its tasks loom ahead of her. She carries the mug into the dining room, where Manar and Zain sit, eating cereal at the long wooden table she purchased several weeks ago, along with beds and silverware and the azure couch. The essentials, as she keeps telling Karam. She and the children have been here for nearly a month, and the apartment still looks unlived in, the pale blue walls undecorated. Light floods through the curtainless windows.
There is the sound of clunky footsteps and Alia appears, clicking her tongue. “I should just burn them all.”
“The boxes?”
“Tell me, what human being needs six astronomy maps? Six! I told him, ‘Atef, you’re not an astronaut, pick one.’ But he says he can’t decide. And then he makes me promise not to throw anything away.”
“There’s certainly room, Mama.”
“Room isn’t the point!” The topic of the boxes is a touchy one. She arrived in Beirut last week with seven of them, filled with old books and clutter from the Amman house. “The point is waste.”
Manar and Zain continue eating their cereal, familiar with their grandmother’s outbursts. Alia came from Amman to help Souad and the children settle in, but mostly she just complains about Beirut and makes oblique comments about Manar and Zain’s Americanness.
“There’s enough space,” Souad repeats. “Just put it all in the storage room. I can help you when I get back today.” On cue, Manar sets her spoon down.
“I’m not coming,” she says. “I don’t need another capricious shopping trip.”
Capricious. In spite of her irritation, Souad smiles at her daughter, owlish in black-framed glasses as she scowls. They weren’t able to find any of the cereals the kids ate back in Boston, and she’s been buying Rice Krispies, which Manar smothers in sugar. Watching Manar sprinkle sugar on her cereal now makes Souad feel guilty.
“You don’t have to come,” she says now, using the cheerful tone she has adopted since their move. “You can stay here or go downstairs to Budur’s. But I promise, if you come, you can pick out anything you want for your room.”
“Anything?” Manar’s eyes sharpen, and Souad sighs. She knows what this will mean—giraffe-print curtains, carrot-hued lampshades. At thirteen, Manar is smart and incisive and sly, the kind of girl who will suffer to make a point. The old Souad would’ve snapped at her, set out rules, but that was before, before everything, and so Souad just sips her coffee and promises:
“Anything.”
“Spoiled ajnabi children,” Alia grumbles in Arabic. Souad ignores her.
“Can Linah come with us?” Zain asks.
“Yes!” Souad tries for enthusiastic, her impression of a soccer mom. “It’ll be fun. We can go to that shawarma guy afterward, maybe get some sandwiches. Manar, we can fix your bangs.” Souad reaches out to touch them, but the girl recoils.
“I like my hair like this.”
“Souad,” Alia says, “those shawarma places are filthy. They use rat meat.”