Manar pulls her knees up, resting her chin on her hands. “Which house was this?”
“Your great-grandmother’s. Khalto Salma.” Atef can remember the sound the wind made as it rustled in the doorway, the magnificent rise of the house.
That house. The ones that came after. He thinks of them, instinctively touching the soil again. All the houses they have lived in, the ibriks and rugs and curtains they have bought; how many windows should any person own? The houses float up to his mind’s eye like jinn, past lovers. The sloping roof of his mother’s hut, the marbled tiles in Salma’s kitchen, the small house he shared with Alia in Nablus. The Kuwait home. The Beirut apartments. This house, here in Amman. For Alia, some old, vanished house in Jaffa. They glitter whitely in his mind, like structures made of salt, before a tidal wave comes and sweeps them away.
“I thought I had more time—” Manar stops, embarrassed. Atef waits. “To ask her things.”
“About what?”
His granddaughter shrugs. “Her life.”
He can feel their eyes upon him. Poor innocent things, he thinks. What is a life? A series of yeses and noes, photographs you shove in a drawer somewhere, loves you think will save you but that cannot. Continuing to move, enduring, not stopping even when there is pain. That’s all life is, he wants to tell her. It’s continuing.
He thinks of his beautiful wife, that afternoon in her mother’s garden, the mosque light he saw when he met her. Nablus, filled with flowers. How in love he was, with Mustafa, with his defiant sister, their house, their wealth. I wanted all of it, he wrote once. It was true.
“Ya Alia,” he says aloud before stopping. He wants to tell her everything. “My poor girl.” He has been crying without realizing it. His grandchildren are staring at him, Atef understanding that he is changing their lives, these children who will take this moment and make something of it, turn it into their own lives, remember on their deathbeds the cool air, the stars, their grandfather weeping under a fig tree.
“Jiddo,” Manar says timidly. Atef sighs, turns to her.
“What?” He waits for the platitudes, comfort. But there is only silence. The four children facing him like an army. The girl takes a long breath.
“Stay out here,” she tells him. Her voice is strong. “We’ll tell them to leave you alone.” Around them, the night pulses with wind and insects. “Stay out here a little longer.”
The girl presses a gentle hand on his shoulder, and Atef does.
Manar
* * *
Jaffa
September 2014
“Madame, madame, you come here, we make best fish for you!”
“Fresh watermelon and cream!”
“You like lamb, madame? You like kibbeh?”
“Shaar el banat!”
The eager voices of waiters carry along the Jaffa port. They stand outside the restaurants, sweating in their suits. It is early evening, the sun nearly set, though the air is still hot and humid, thick with the saltiness that reminds Manar of Beirut. Her thighs are sticky beneath the long skirt. The morning sickness of the day—lasting well into the afternoon—has passed and she is hungry. The men smile as she walks by, shake tasseled menus in her direction. When she first arrived in Jerusalem, the chattiness of vendors had thrown her off and she’d respond automatically, more than once allowing herself to be shepherded into a café or a store.
But weeks have passed now, and Manar sees such banter as endearing, harmless. Especially because her time is nearly up; in less than a week she’ll board a plane, spend endless hours over the Atlantic, and then be, unceremoniously, back in Manhattan.
She pauses in front of a restaurant. There is an ornate menu propped up and she scans the items—kibbeh, samak harra, warak anab. A small bald man appears at her side, speaking in Arabic.
“We have a back area with a wonderful view. We’ll get you a table next to the water, you’ll be able to feel the spray on your face!”
She smiles inwardly. She is used to such theatrics.
“Do you have muhammara?”
“Ah, Lebanese?” The man’s smile widens. “Yes, yes, we’ll make it. Special just for you!”
Manar lets herself be ushered through the restaurant, a gold tapestry spelling Allah spanning one side of the wall, and onto the veranda, where several small tables are, indeed, overlooking the Mediterranean. The view is astounding. Instinctively, as has become her habit in certain moments, her fingers clutch her purse, which houses—past the bottle of prenatal vitamins, her passport—the soft, frayed pages of the letters. Her rabbit’s foot.
“Be good to her,” the man says to a young waiter. “She’s a Lebanese sister.”
Manar resists the impulse to correct him. It is exasperating how easily her accent gives her away. It is like a fingerprint, something branding her, exposing her upbringing—Lebanese father, Palestinian mother, Paris, America. A mutt, Seham, her best friend, calls her.
Back in Manhattan, she and Seham meet for drinks after work, sometimes with the other girls they know from school, girls drawn to one another like magnets, commiserating over shared upbringings. They are all young and smart, most of them Palestinian by origin but raised in Denmark, Australia, Seattle, with neutral names like Maya and Dana.
“No wonder you’re messed up. You’ve been emotionally code-switching all your life,” Seham likes to say, and while Manar used to protest, lately she has been accepting it, reveling in the notion that her problems, the disarray of her life, all spring from her heritage.
The flight to Tel Aviv had been long and uncomfortable, the rows of seats filled with Hasidic men and exhausted parents with toddlers. Manar surprised herself by falling asleep for several hours, but somewhere over Portugal, the plane began to rock and she shot upright. Her stomach turned. She barely made it to the cramped toilet before vomiting heartily.
Afterward, she exhaled and spat into the sink. Washing her hands, she avoided her reflection but caught a sidelong blur nonetheless—tangled hair, pale face.
“Christ, Bleecker much?” she mumbled to herself. It was an old joke between her and her cousin Linah, a nod to the sloppy NYU girls spilling out of bars in Manhattan.
Back in her seat, Manar leaned her forehead against the icy window, shut her eyes. She felt a sharp homesickness for Manhattan, though she had been gone for only half a day. The tree-lined streets of Greenpoint, their apartment perpetually smelling of dim sum.
And Gabriel. Sweet, lovely Gabe. His thinning hair, his ex-wife and alimony. His bewildered face when she told him about the trip.
“You want to go now?”
“There isn’t going to be a better time,” she had said.