A faint glow from the veranda reaches the garden, outlining the rows he planted in the summer. He can see the silhouette of windflowers, their leaves spiky in the dusk light. Your ridiculous flowers.
She is leaving him. She has already left him. The rage is like a Roman candle lit from both ends. His mouth is dry. She is leaving him, just as her brother did. His fingers sink into the soil around him and he thinks of Nablus.
That day, half a century ago, the sun rose onto a cool and pink morning. Israel had invaded Gaza and the Sinai. There was fighting near the old city. Atef’s skin prickled with anticipation. It’s happening, he thought. It’s happening. The air seemed tinted, hills vibrant in the light.
When he arrived at Salma’s old house, Mustafa was sitting on the front stairs. His legs were tucked at an odd angle, to the side. The cigarette between his fingers was nearly out. Even when Atef bounded up the stairs, Mustafa kept his eyes on the ground.
“What are you doing out here?”
“Atef.” The entreaty in Mustafa’s voice wasn’t unfamiliar. It flickered now and then, the oil-like insecurity beneath the veneer of all that was Mustafa—handsome, magnetic, loved. Atef felt a deep irritation. Now of all times?
“What are you doing out here?” he repeated. Mustafa flung the cigarette, his voice sinking soft as a boy’s.
“I think we should leave.”
Atef blinked. “Leave.” He felt the word in his mouth, a flat stone.
“Go to Kuwait. Or Amman. We can drive into Jordan. The troops are falling back. Nablus is going to fall. We can be in Amman by dinnertime.” He shifted his legs and Atef understood the awkward pose—at Mustafa’s side was a small dark suitcase.
He was leaving.
The imam flashed in Atef’s mind, the men in the mosque, the blue and white flags everywhere. The flyers, posters that screamed Arabs are animals, barbarians. Leaving. He thought of the house behind Mustafa, Khalto Salma’s house, of Alia, who would have given anything to be left behind. Who would have smashed the windows and salted the earth before leaving it. Mustafa’s scared face.
Atef sought the thing that would hurt the most.
“You coward. You fucking coward.” Atef’s voice shook and he heard every word crack, its own gunshot, watched the invisible trail of smoke, but it was too late. He was like a man possessed. I need him, I need him, I need him, his mind panted. “How long have you been planning this? You want to run to your sisters? Hide behind your mother’s skirts?”
Mustafa froze. His eyes found Atef’s in disbelief. Every muscle on his beautiful face tensed, the two men facing each other for a taut, arrested moment. Atef prepared himself for a punch. He urged himself for the final, horrible insult.
“You want to leave, leave. The men will stay.”
Mustafa flinched; it was an unnecessary blow, like shooting a corpse one last time. His face opened like a window, saying everything, all that would come later: The soldiers would come to arrest them in three mornings, the men that would ravage Salma’s house. The cells they would sleep and wake in for weeks. The electricity, Atef’s flesh thrumming until he sang out Mustafa’s name, tossed his name to the torturers, said his name to every question they asked.
How the last time Atef would see Mustafa alive, he would be kicking, kicking at a soldier, and Atef’s stomach would turn, remembering how he’d called him a coward.
None of this had happened yet. In that moment, the bombs were falling elsewhere, Nablus was still quiet. It was morning and the world was changing. Mustafa finally moved; lifting an eyebrow, he rose, bowed his head sardonically to Atef, then turned and opened the front door. He swept inside, marking his choice. He dropped the bag in the foyer.
Atef shakes with the desire to rewrite everything that happened. For years, that was his fiction. Here is Palestine, he would think. Here are the streets we’d walk in Nablus, the neighborhood we grew up in. Here is everything we loved.
With a mental brushstroke he re-creates it, everything, the voices of men hawking bateekh, bateekh on the roads, the marketplace cramped with sweating bodies. Mountains scooped out like melons, crags left bare, smoothed from centuries of wind and rain. Miles of land unspool, whole villages, houses as old as the earth itself.
Then he re-creates Mustafa. Every eyelash. His peppery smell. The spark of the cigarette landing in soil. The blue of Khalto Salma’s front door, the way the frame was splintered.
Punch me, he wants to yell at Mustafa. Tell me to fuck off, hit me in the face. Pick up that goddamn suitcase, walk down the driveway. I would’ve followed you. I would’ve followed you. Take me with you. You can save yourself. We can both live.
But instead, Mustafa lifts his eyebrow and opens that door, and they both walk through it.
Atef can see his family move around in the house, their shadows flitting in the golden windows. Someone turns on the front porch light. It is cool outside, bracing, Atef’s shirt too thin. His legs hurt from sitting too long. Above, the night sky is stippled as a speckled egg. In the breeze, the dying petals of windflowers rustle against one another like skirts. He always loved their yellow.
He moves like a fever, his body its own engine, flinging toward the flowers, hands blind in the dark, fumbling until he finds the spindly stems, their hopeful little throats. He pulls one out, then another. The stems are small in his fingers. A rock pricks his fingertip, the pain heady and welcome.
I’d burn the house down. Yes. Right down over your own head. He rips one windflower after the other out. His fingers begin to bleed.
“Jiddo.”
He turns, panting. The four grandchildren stand in a row, watching him.
“Jiddo.” Abdullah swallows. He is choosing his words delicately. “Mama and the rest are asking about you. They wanted us to bring you in.”
“I had to pull them out.” Atef gestures at the limp flowers. Abdullah looks alarmed. They move closer to the tree.
“She hates them,” he manages. The grandchildren glance at one another. Linah moves first, the beads in her hair clanking together as she kneels in the dark. First Zain, then Abdullah follows, tugging at the flowers with her.
Atef watches them. He remembers the children years ago, putting on plays, organizing birthday songs. For one birthday they’d baked him a cake. A disaster. He’d eavesdropped outside as they’d fretted over the mess they’d made, worrying about the cracked eggs. He could have gone in and cleaned, or scolded them, but he was frozen, motionless in face of their beauty.
Zain and Linah set the flowers in a pile. He tries to imagine being their age. Sixteen. The impossibility of that youth. Manar walks over to Atef, kneels.
“Your grandmother used to live in a house with a garden. In Palestine. With her brother.” Atef feels his breath catch. “I used to go there a lot.”
He has to remember for the both of them. Yes. Atef continues talking.
“A good house. There was a table under the trees. In the summer, we’d sit out there for hours.”