“Guys,” Souad says. The clamor in the back seat quiets, Linah and Zain continuing their argument in whispers. Souad makes out the words idiot and champion and chair several times in rapid succession. For the past year, wrestling has been Zain’s favorite thing, and since their arrival, Linah has quickly caught on. They’ve always been like this—Linah and Zain, born months apart, devoted to each other. In Boston, they grew up together, wore each other’s clothing, Linah inheriting Zain’s overalls and toys, the two of them inventing games involving pirates and robots.
Souad arrives at an intersection, pauses at the oncoming cars. The jeep behind her honks, and the car behind that as well. The man in the jeep makes a gesture for her to drive. “Just wait,” she mutters. She inches toward the turn, then loses her nerve. “Oh, go, go,” she says, waving the driver on.
“He’s probably cursing you out,” Manar informs her, taking an earbud out. Ominous music thumps from the headphones.
“He probably is,” Souad says cheerfully.
“He was right,” Manar says. “You should’ve gone.” Manar puts the earbud back in and leans her head against the window frame. Her wiry hair—not thin like Elie’s or curly like Souad’s but some unfortunate in-between, a charmless frizz—halos around her, and she shuts her eyes.
Paris had transformed for her after the wedding, its vivacity turning leaden. The days became shorter, colder; the permanence of the invasion sank in. On particularly icy mornings, Souad caught herself daydreaming about Kuwait. For a summer, Paris seemed infinite, vast, with its shops and museums and cafés. But as her new home, the city chafed, the cobblestone streets always crowded, the sky pocked with clouds.
Elie cajoled his father for money as a wedding gift; within a month he’d conjured an apartment for them in a dark, ugly building in the Belleville neighborhood, sandwiched between a Chinese restaurant and an Indian fabric shop.
Souad was charmed by the doll-like rooms at first, clapping her hands with delight at the pink-tiled bathroom and the skylight above their bed. She twirled through the bare apartment that first day, awash in morning light, mentally constructing their lives—lace curtains for the tiny picture windows, the kitchen stocked with French cheeses and spaghetti. They painted the walls yellow and bought vanilla-scented candles for the living room.
In the end, the vanilla smell was overpowering and the yellow nauseated her, especially after she became pregnant; the color reminded her of egg yolks. Elie had a life outside the apartment. He had his novel, his university courses, which he loved, long nights of debate and conversation with other students in wine bars. Souad had nothing. She couldn’t explain it to Elie, her random bursts of tears. Her irritation. Restlessness. She went to classes reluctantly and then the afternoons stretched, interminably, ahead of her. The longing of the day, the object, was him coming home to her. For a year, this went on. Soon, another winter came, her second in Paris, and she swelled with Manar.
One day, many months after the invasion of Kuwait, he came home to find her weeping in front of the television.
“They used them as target practice,” she said, sobbing.
She’d just watched a report on the invasion, bursting into tears whenever the animals were mentioned, the way the Iraqi troops unlatched the cages, shot the fleeing creatures. There was one image of a giraffe, bullets buried in its torso. Souad remembered the giraffes of her childhood, wondered if this was one of the ones she’d loved as a girl.
“Shh. Let’s turn it off.” He put his arms around her bulging belly, nuzzled her neck.
But it was freezing, and she had been crying for hours, and his breath was sour against her face, turning her stomach.
“Don’t touch me,” she said miserably.
He stiffened. The arms disappeared from around her waist. They had a fight, the first of hundreds that would follow in the coming years—at restaurants, during the children’s birthday parties, after an evening of drinking, before an evening of drinking—fights that would eventually become commonplace, predictable. But that time, they’d never yet been as cruel with each other, Elie’s voice vicious, calling her pitiful. And Souad, trembling with anger, heard herself yell awful things back, about her regrets, shrieking that she’d made a mistake. It was terrible and frightening, what they could do.
But also—a relief. Such relief, after months being the too-young wife struggling to learn French and getting lost in Parisian alleyways. The anger was bracing. It reminded her of herself.
He stomped out eventually, slamming the door. She prepared dinner in tears, cursing him as she stirred spaghetti in a secondhand copper pot. The cream sauce clotted into lumps. A realization: she hated Paris.
It wasn’t the animals she was weeping for, or the lost city; it was herself. Her mother was right. She missed everyone: Karam, her father, Budur. Cradling the mound of her belly, Souad shook with a perverse, hungry longing for her mother, for Alia’s coolness; she ached for her to stroll into this cramped apartment and lift a single, sarcastic eyebrow.
That was where she drew her strength. The image of that lifted eyebrow. Her mother’s voice. Well, Souad, look what you’ve done.
She thought wistfully of the bracing anger she’d felt earlier.
And she let the pot scorch.
This is what Souad thinks of these days. That night, when she saw too late her mistake, all those moments that make love and destroy it. Her younger self, almost a mother, brimming with rage. The smell of burned copper.
There was the after, of course. The house, Elie’s graduation and teaching job, their move to America. In some ways Boston came as a relief, even with its snow and broad accents. Souad left Paris easily, the city she’d never learned to love. In Boston, their life was quieter, constructed around their having small children. They lived in a series of cramped apartments near Suffolk, Souad taking the children on playdates with the kids of other young mothers in the neighborhood, spending her afternoons pouring apple juice and making small talk about teething. And the weekends were full of birthday parties and barbecues in the park with Budur and Karam, building snowmen during the winter. Every couple of summers, she booked flights to Amman with them and the children—Elie always begged off, saying he needed to write. They trudged through airports with huge suitcases duct-taped together on the impossibly long journey to visit Alia and Atef. Then two months of shisha and arguing with her mother and swimming in salt water, the children becoming ropy and brown, in need of haircuts.