They laugh, embarrassed, looking away. A few months earlier, they were arrested at a demonstration in Jerusalem. In another time, their offense might have earned them a fine, merely a court-issued warning. Instead, both Atef and Mustafa were kept in the penitentiary for four nights.
On the day of their release, Salma sat between Atef’s mother, Umm Atef, and Alia in the courtroom. When the boys’ names were spoken, Umm Atef’s lips began to move, her eyes unblinking. Praying. Salma slipped her hand onto the other woman’s lap, interlacing their fingers. Umm Atef’s hand lay limply until the boys walked into the courtroom flanked by officers. Then she squeezed hard, her wedding ring digging into Salma’s palm. It occurred to Salma in that moment that they were both widows. Atef was the son of a fedayeen, a man who died pointing a gun at an Israeli soldier.
The boys were led with their wrists in cuffs. Alia started to cry. Atef had a swollen, purplish bruise on his cheekbone. Mustafa, Salma saw with great relief, was unmarked, though she would later learn of the contusion over his rib cage, the imprint of a baton that had flecked his urine with blood.
Afterward, the three women waited outside the courtroom. Umm Atef was no longer praying; her eyes sparked like coals. When the two men walked out, she flew at her son. Her beefy fists pummeled Atef’s chest.
“You . . . do . . . this to me . . . you son of a dog . . . you son of a dog . . . you think this is what men do?” She wheezed as she pounded at him.
Atef stood still, his eyes shut. He did not guard himself from his mother’s blows. Only when her wheezing worsened, her body heaving in sobs, did he move. “Mama,” he said softly, taking her into his arms.
Salma said nothing, not outside the courtroom or as they drove home. In the house’s foyer, she sat. She pulled her dress to her knees to feel the cool tiles beneath her. She didn’t speak for hours, listening to Alia, Mustafa, even Lulwa whispering in concerned tones as they scurried back and forth. She watched the sunlight sluice through the windows, collecting in her lap like water. A cup of mint tea cooled untouched at her side. The light turned red, traversing the length of her body, down her legs. It reached her feet, staining them a bright, unlikely crimson.
Dusk had already fallen when Mustafa knelt on the floor beside her. He cradled her feet in his hands, bent and kissed them on the soles as he wept.
“Never, never again,” he promised. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Salma hadn’t seen her son cry in years. It jolted her into embracing him. He smelled boyishly of sweat and the lemongrass soap he showered with, his long eyelashes spiking with tears as they had when he was a child. Alia appeared in the doorway, her legs longer than her nightgown, the hem hovering midcalf. Salma extended her arm and drew Alia against her brother. She enveloped those two miraculous living creatures, and with them Mustafa’s apology—her hungry longing to trust it—crushed them all like a talisman to her chest.
“Save some syrup for the rest of us, Alia,” one of the men calls out across the garden. Alia arches her eyebrow at him and ladles another spoonful onto her plate.
“You don’t tell the bride what to eat,” she retorts to the laughter of the men. She joins the young women sitting on the steps bordered by jasmine shrubs. Alia lifts a forkful of the kanafeh, cools it through pursed lips.
The evening is unseasonably warm, the March breeze light. The wind flutters the edge of Salma’s veil, tickling her neck beneath the fabric. She tugs the veil down automatically, tightens the edges with her fingertips. In the chaos this morning, she forgot the customary pin on either side, the trick of folding that keeps the veil fastened around her face.
Alia’s hair is long, curls coiling compactly beneath her ears. Both of Salma’s daughters remain unveiled, a source of shame for her. She’d grown up with a devout father, waking at four to iron and press his finest dishdasha before he went to the mosque for fajr prayer. Salma would tell herself elaborate stories to try to keep from falling asleep just to catch a glimpse of her father walking down the trail from their hut. The few times Salma succeeded, her vision would be bleary, her father’s silhouette barely visible in the moonlight.
During Ramadan, she would spend the long hours of daylight by her mother’s side in the kitchen, slicing chunks of cantaloupe and stirring lentil soup. She would be dizzy with hunger when the sun set and it came time to break the fast, all the cousins and aunts and uncles seated around steaming bowls. The first bite, usually bread or an olive slick with oil, seemed to her the most delicious thing her young tongue tasted all year round, and she would be filled with a lush, weepy love for Allah.
Her children, Salma knows, do not have such worship for Allah. Widad, the most devout, prays once or twice a day and never misses a day of fasting, but her piety is steeped in fear, not rapture. Mustafa spends Fridays in the mosque but his attitude suggests it’s a social duty, a shared performance with the neighborhood men. And Alia is as mercurial with Allah as she is with all things. For a while after she began menstruating, the girl asked Salma to teach her Qur’an verses, modeled Salma’s veils, and spoke of someday visiting Mecca. But she slowly lost interest, drifting over to tight dresses and Egyptian love songs.
Several months ago, Salma overheard a conversation between Alia, Atef, and Mustafa, her daughter’s defiant voice rising through the walls.
“Allah might be the most useful invention of all!”
Salma was pleased to hear Atef admonish Alia, tell her to hush.
The kanafeh is devoured; Salma’s hands are sticky. Mustafa and Atef are seated, one on either side of her. She senses the mosque talk has sobered them. The final smudges of light are erased from the sky.
“The weather’s going to be perfect for the wedding,” Mustafa says, tipping his head back. Salma follows his gaze. Atef does the same. The night sky is dappled with stars.
“Inshallah,” she murmurs, and the men, chided, repeat the prayer. Salma rises, takes the empty plates from the men. She walks past the huddle of young women, the children chasing one another. Salma’s bladder aches. She turned fifty the previous year, and her body unceremoniously began to murmur discontent. When she bends, her hip throbs; there is a floating curlicue at the corner of her vision, a coil that worsens in sunlight.
She goes in the house and finds Lulwa in the kitchen, ironing a pale silky veil that Salma will wear for the wedding tomorrow. The girl is bent over the hissing metal plate, straining to see any creases in her handiwork.
Salma enters the bathroom and sits upon the porcelain seat with relief. She’s been moving and sitting for hours, and her underwear is damp with sweat, mottled with brownish red. It is the body’s leftover, as the aunts say, the flush from her idle uterus. Before leaving the bathroom, she pauses at the mirror above the sink.
It is a plain face, recognizable to her as water. She tucks stray hairs beneath the wings of her veil, quietly shuts the door behind her.