He surveys the kitchen glumly, as if a roasted chicken or shish kebab might magically appear. He thinks, with dim hope, of his sister. Perhaps she picked something up from the market.
His casual lifestyle is underpinned by Alia and Atef, residing several streets over, their lives spilling into one another’s. They all check in daily, usually gathering at Salma’s house—Mustafa still refers to it as beit immi. Both houses are always unlocked, and they slip easily between them. Mustafa loves the permeability of their days, the way he and the two people he loves most revolve around each other like planets.
As though he has conjured her, Mustafa hears footsteps on the pathway of the house, Alia’s trademark heels.
He moves to the sink and starts to scrape the dish, the pasta already congealed.
“Mustafa?”
“In here,” he calls out. The cigarette turns the drain water brown.
Alia appears in the doorway, her nose wrinkled. “What’s on fire?”
“Dinner.”
“I’m starving,” she says, setting her purse on the table. She wears a long, peasant-style skirt, and as she walks, the hem trails along the floor, rustling up dust.
“Is Atef here?”
“No, we’re meeting at the mosque later.”
“I think it’s going to rain.” Alia lifts the pot lid, frowning. “Another boys-only meeting?”
Mustafa makes a noncommittal sound, busying himself rinsing ash from the sink. His sister is clever, Mustafa knows, clever enough to understand there are secrets, things involving the mosque and men gathering to talk at night. And he knows she resents it, the exclusions, being left in the dark, kept away from a part of her brother’s and husband’s lives. Especially after the prison.
“I’m sure all you’ll be doing tonight is snacking on grapes and discussing the weather,” Alia snaps. “No talk at all of Nasser or Eshkol.”
Perhaps it is jealousy, Mustafa thinks. Alia has always been sturdy, never afraid of mud or worms, not covering her eyes like other girls during lamb slaughtering for Eid. And while she has been given free rein in Nablus, her life different than other wives’—an easygoing husband, days filled with shopping and tea dates and reading—she is still, first and foremost, a woman. No amount of sturdiness will allow her to become one of the mosque shabab.
“No discussions in the mosque,” Alia continues, taking a bite of the pasta and grimacing. “This is disgusting.” She sets the fork down. “No arguments about politics and philosophy.”
All Mustafa’s life, Alia has been the one closest to him. Atef might be his best friend, the shabab his brethren, but he always confided in Alia. They told each other everything, admitting to shoplifting and youthful romances and darker things, such as Mustafa’s hatred of his father.
But this he cannot tell her, the kinship he feels in the mosque; this churning of something ancestral and looming—but what? Revolution? War?—he cannot speak of.
“Those guys,” he says now, casually, “they don’t know their Camus from their Sartre.” He meets her eyes. Alia breaks the tension first, turning toward the bowl of pears. When she speaks, her voice is tight.
“You want your secrets, Mustafa? You and Atef? Keep them.” She moves her hand as though swatting a mosquito. “Anyway, it’s all smoke and gossip with you men.” Her tone is supercilious. She takes out two pears and begins to peel them.
He is ashamed by the wave of relief.
They throw the pasta out, eat the pears hollowed and dolloped with jam. They talk of the weather, Atef’s new job at the university. They swap stories about their mother’s recent phone calls, her perpetual worry for their futures. Before she leaves, Alia kisses Mustafa’s cheek.
“Enjoy the gossip,” she teases. The argument’s temporarily forgotten.
Alone, Mustafa rinses the dishes beneath running water. “We have two choices,” he says. “Abandon our cause or pledge to it.” He likes how the words roll off his tongue, tries raising his voice. “Or pledge to it!”
As if cued, the muezzin begins outside the windows. The echoing tones remind him of the mosque and Atef, whom he is meeting—Mustafa glances at his watch, the face covered in soapsuds—in an hour.
Despite his nerves, he thrills at the thought of the gathering. He leaves the meetings feeling moored, centered, as though someone has finally found the matchstick of his faith and touched fire to it.
Not that kind of faith, though Mustafa has a flighty belief in Allah, an avowal that he recognizes in more honest moments as tactical. If there is ever a sweeping of believers into one room and the rest into the other, he doesn’t want to be on the wrong side of the door. But he loves the mosque for its dusty smell, for the carpet prickling his feet, for the predictable hum of the muezzin more than anything celestial.
No, when Imam Bakri addresses the men, his arms moving like an orchestra conductor’s, when he talks about Allah’s greatness and the coming war and the righteousness of land, Mustafa’s spine tingles at only one word: Palestine.
Atef likes to talk of the overlap of Allah and land, how each is holy in its own way, that, in fact, when one says he loves his country, it is only because he loves his God.
But Mustafa has no patience for such talk, for self-analysis. He prefers the arguments at gatherings, the bickering between himself and Alia. He loves getting angry, that intoxicating rush of blood; his temper is well known—he rips up maps, walks out of dinner parties. He likes the impact of these acts, how people eye him alertly.
“Mustafa, break any teacups lately?” the neighborhood girls like to tease him, referring to one he’d shattered, at age twelve or thirteen, after a particularly fantastic argument with Alia. She’d begun to cry and he, recognizing the cheating inherent in the move—that female trick—had lobbed a teacup across the garden, where it smashed against a tree trunk. The fact that the incident took place in front of dozens of neighbors lent it a legendary air. It was told and retold so many times that some who joke about it are younger than Alia, had not been present or even born when it happened. Mustafa himself barely remembers it.
In his bedroom, Mustafa takes his undershirt off and sniffs it. Smoke and sweat. He chucks it onto the bed, opens his closet door.