Jimmy laughs amiably. “Strong shit, eh?” When Manar hands him the joint this time, she returns his open stare, feels her entire being buzzing with this, all of it—the two men, beautiful Ariana, this night so far away from New York, Gabe, the life awaiting her there, even the stones, thousands of years old, surrounding them.
As good as any, she thinks.
The music is surprisingly inviting, people dancing in groups on the sand. The singer is a homely woman, her voice hauntingly clear above the drums. Teenage boys move through the crowd surreptitiously, selling beer. When Jimmy buys her one, she lifts it to her closed lips and then tosses it discreetly on the sand. Ariana and Adam have vanished, dancing somewhere in the throngs of people.
“Give us a dance?”
She thinks of Gabe. Their closetful of his cable-knit sweaters. His earnest love. It’s just dancing, she tells herself.
She lets Jimmy tug her into the crowd, the bodies moving to the beat, the music loud and feverish, lets him spin her over and over until she isn’t thinking about Gabe anymore, or Manhattan, or anything.
“Where are you from?” Jimmy’s breath is warm in her ear.
Manar considers. “We moved a lot. But my grandparents, well, my mother’s parents, are from Nablus. They left during the ’67 war.”
“And before that?”
Manar cocks her head. “What do you mean?”
“A lot of people”—Jimmy twirls her around, slightly out of breath—“went to Nablus after ’48. But they were originally from Jerusalem or Acre or Jaffa.”
“I know that.” The trace of petulance in her voice is telling. She does know that and yet had never applied that to her grandparents. She thinks of Teta, sitting in that armchair in her living room in Amman, blinking at the television, that perpetual expression of confusion on her face. Where did you grow up? Manar asks her silently. What do you remember of it?
Now Manar is in the center of the crowd, making serpentine circles with her hips, hair falling into her eyes. Jimmy dances nearby, singing along to the Arabic lyrics. She is pouring another beer into the sand, then lifting the empty bottle to her lips. She is kicking her shoes off.
It all reminds her of the celebrations she read about in history classes, the extravagant parties the ancient Greeks used to throw before battle. Naked women, orgies, wine by the barrel, and, everywhere, wild music. She thinks of the slaughters going on, the occupation surrounding them, all the revolutions that flicker and blaze and die. It would seem like such a monumental, brave, lovely act, all this revelry in the face of war, except that Manar knows it has always been like this.
It fascinates Manar—not just history in general, with its empires, collapses, and revivals, but also the faint, persistent echoes that seem to travel through the millennia. Land eaten and reshuffled, homes taken—daughters and sons speaking enemy languages, forgetting their own—the belief that we are owed something by the cosmos.
Then she is moving through the dancers, Jimmy’s arm around her, the two of them walking in the sand—Where are my shoes?—up to a cluster of large rocks. Jimmy guides her between the rocks, out of sight of the revelers. The music is distant, drowned out by the waves.
“I’m glad you came out with us,” he murmurs. “Ya sitt Nablus.” Manar feels her heartbeat in her throat.
He’s going to kiss her. She could let him. It could be a story she tells Linah and Zain, Seham back in Manhattan. You’ll never believe . . .
Suddenly, an image of Gabe pouring Sprite into the champagne flute. Manar pulls back.
“My shoes.” Manar faces him for a moment. In the moonlight he looks older. “Wait here.”
His smile is slow, distracted. Manar walks rapidly, her bare feet sinking into the sand. She walks past the boulders, past some men smoking, past the crowd—where people are still dancing, perhaps kissing, perhaps loving one another. It is late, she thinks, so late it is nearly early and soon the sun will begin to rise. She walks until she reaches the cobblestone street, little pebbles piercing her feet. For ten, fifteen minutes, she keeps moving, until she cannot hear the music anymore, away from the beach, between houses, until she finds a secluded-looking archway between two trees and, finally, she sits.
Manar remains in the archway for a long, long time, as though in a trance, until the low thrum of the muezzin stirs her. Suddenly, she is aware of everything. The sky beginning to lighten, her filthy feet, the growl in her stomach. Even the contents of her purse are jumbled around; her phone has run out of battery. The fold of shekels that she’d tucked in her wallet is gone. But here, yes, here is the zippered pocket, the bundle of paper, and Manar pulls out the letters, opens them for the hundredth time, like an archaeologist afraid she missed something all along. She goes through the pages until she finds her favorite passage.
Last night, I dreamed of refugees stealing rubble—a woman’s braceleted hand, someone’s eyes, it begins. The word eyes is crossed out, then rewritten above.
I dreamed of the men in Zarqa, the camps, in army bases all over America. They met in secret rooms, unfolded maps, and pointed, grooming for war, woke and stamped outside in boots. Their rage woke them. It marched their legs up trails, snowdrifts, sand dunes, their breath precise and measured with each step. Onward, onward, the land urged them. They aimed their rifles at a target, imagined an enemy heart, and pulled the trigger.
Impulsively, Manar begins to read aloud. Her voice is hoarse from the singing earlier. She thinks of the plays she used to do with Zain and Linah years ago, imagines an audience listening in the archway in front of her.
“But Mustafa, we still thirst for it. Our mutiny is our remembering.”
She pauses for a second, the sound of a car in the distance, the purr of someone’s engine. She returns to the page, transfixed.
“Our remembering the hundred names of that land,” she continues. “This is what it means to be alive.”
Finally, Manar packs the letters away and rises grimly, walks down the street until she finds an unopened store, and pauses, checking her reflection in the glass. It is disheartening—savage hair, drooped mascara. She scowls at her reflection.
“Idiot,” she mutters. The precision of the word pleases her and, unbidden, she smiles. She trails her fingertips across her abdomen. Suddenly aching for the sea, she walks the narrow streets, past shuttered beauty salons and bakeries, until she makes a turn and there, pale in early light, the water waits.
Jaffa. There is that desire, the old wanting, to say something. For someone to bear witness as she speaks.
Bits of shells and pebbles pierce her feet along the sand, a cool relief as her toes touch water. She takes a breath.