Salt Houses Read online

  Alia’s print is blurred, the edges speckled with dregs. She made a smear as she removed her thumb, a figure like a wing. Salma sees her daughter’s fear, the disquiet the girl cannot say. In the center of the thumbprint is a whirling form. Flight. She looks at Alia’s diamond-shaped face.

  “It will come true. Your wish,” Salma says, this time speaking only to her. Alia blinks, nods slowly. At this, the women cheer and laugh, crowd around Alia with kisses and teasing tones. Salma sinks back into the chair, exhausted. She has given the truth. But amputated.

  It is several hours before the men join them for supper. Lanterns are lit throughout the garden behind Salma’s house, casting everyone in a spongy, pale light. The elders, aunts and uncles, are all seated. The younger people mill around the radio, swaying to the music. Atef and Alia talk to their friends and cousins but glance at each other every few moments. Mustafa remains by Atef’s side, the two men smoking cigarettes and occasionally bursting into laughter. Children run about playing games. The house stands monolithically in the setting sun.

  In Salma’s mind this remains the new house, the Nablus house. She has come to love it, in a resigned way. It is larger than their Jaffa home, the rooms cavernous, high-ceilinged. The previous owners—who’d fled to Jordan—had left their furniture; kitchen cabinets were still littered with biscuit packets and jars of sugar. In the room she was to share with Hussam, she found nightgowns and a stack of the thick, disposable cloths used for menstruation. Widad found notebooks filled with mathematical equations. For weeks, they played a warped game of unsheathing the house’s possessions. Salma had thrown it all away. But the house remained ghosted with its former life, the dinners and celebrations and quarrels it had witnessed. For this reason, Salma never changed the color of the walls or turned the room overlooking the veranda into a library instead of a sitting room.

  Shame, she admonishes herself. She soundlessly delivers a prayer. Lucky. They are lucky. Lucky to have these walls and lucky—it feels tawdry to speak of this to Allah but unavoidable—to have money. Money carried them to Nablus, over the threshold of this house. Money kept them fed and warm, kept their windows draped in curtains and their bodies clothed. Salma had been born poor, lived on bread and lentils until Hussam’s mother chose her for marriage. Again—luck, Salma possessing a docile beauty that caught the older woman’s eye. Widad and Alia and Mustafa, they might have known gunfire and war, but they were protected from it with the armor of wealth. It is what separates them from the refugees in the camps dotting the outskirts of Nablus. Salma still holds her breath, her childhood defense against bad luck, when she has to drive past them.

  Many families from Jaffa wound up in the Balata camp, each tent barely two or three steps away from another. Inside, impossible numbers of people shared the space. Salma has never been in one, only seen the white tents blur by from her car window. But she knew of them from an old housekeeper, Raja, who would speak of the mangled ropes that kept tent sheets stamped into the soil, the smell of camel dung and urine. Raja had seven children, and they, she, her husband, and her mother-in-law shared one tent. They slept by taking turns, several of the children often remaining awake at night so the adults could sleep before rising at dawn for work.

  Salma is ashamed of her queasiness about the camps, her irrational fear that they are somehow contagious. It was a relief to her when Raja resigned due to flaring arthritis. Salma felt a persistent desire to apologize to her, a feeling that was absent with other housekeepers and nannies she employed, usually native Nabulsi girls. Only Raja hummed the haunting, throaty ballads Salma’s own mother used to sing, unknowingly hinting at a kinship that made Salma feel guilty. That this woman should spend days sweeping floors and then go home to a tent. Parallel lives, she sometimes thinks. It was a matter of parallel lives, one person having lamb for supper, the other cucumbers. With fate deciding, at random, which was which.

  “I love this song.”

  “The weather is perfect.”

  “Do you think it’ll hold?”

  “It has to.”

  A group of Alia’s friends speak with wistful, slightly envious tones, as unmarried girls will at the wedding of a friend. They wear bright dresses, their legs bare beneath.

  Salma touches the young maid’s arm as she walks by. “Lulwa, please bring more rose water.”

  Lulwa nods. “Yes, madame.”

  The garden is beautiful. If the house remains haunted, an old ownership hanging over it, the garden is completely hers. The former occupants had tiled over the land, turning it into a marbled courtyard.

  “I need it out,” Salma told Hussam when they moved in. “I need to see the soil.” It was the only time she’d ever spoken to her husband like that. Hussam seemed taken aback but obliged her, hiring men to remove every tile.

  Beneath it was grayish soil, sickly from lack of sun and strewn with pieces of marble. It is odd to think now, watching people walk around, laughing and listening to music, that below their feet had been nothing but the palest worms, not even a blade of grass.

  She worked on the soil for months. Nothing happened. Fertilizer, tilling, pruning. She was on the verge of giving up in despair, accepting that she’d never grow a garden, nothing would bloom.

  What astonishment, then, to walk outside one morning with her tea, surveying the wasteland, only to see a sliver of sprouting; a weed, but still Salma fell to her knees and stroked it. She had the urge to run into the house, call for the children and Hussam, to show them something, at last, to lift their spirits.

  Instead she remained still, touching the sprout, recognizing in that moment that there were some things we are meant to keep for ourselves, too precious to share with others. She shut her eyes and recited the Fatiha.

  The garden has done her proud. After that first blade, lush greenery followed, flowers and shrubs and trees pushing through the soil, all the seeds Salma bartered for in the market, the seeds people bought for her—her love for the garden became famous in the neighborhood—blossoming in the courtyard.

  She was greedy back then, Salma recognizes, planting contradictory creatures, roots vying for water, especially in the Nabulsi summer. The roses and the gardenia bush, the tomato stalk and the mint shrub; even the perfume overwhelming in those days, a cacophony of scents clamoring to overpower one another.

  She has become more discreet over the years, the trick being to include plants that are restrained in their need. Now the garden is simpler, rows of shrubs extending from the house, an awning vined with grape leaves above the courtyard table. The scent of jasmine laces the air. All throughout this night, she has heard people murmuring and is unable to quell her pride.

  “How beautiful.”

  “Oh, see the gardenia!”

  “Those tomatoes are the plumpest I’ve seen.”

  Alia and Mustafa had loved to help with the garden, keeping it clear of certain insects and creatures. After Widad wed and Hussam died, it was just the three of them and they spent long afternoons picking bugs. Salma remembers how gleefully they’d untangle long worms from the soil.

  Salma considers her children now, standing beneath the awning. The long table is covered with damask. The men have brought kanafeh and are slicing the cellophane packaging open with knives. Steam rises from the dessert, orange pastry topped with sprinkles of crushed pistachios. Mustafa is handing a plate to Alia, Atef at her side. All three are laughing at something Mustafa has said.

  Salma can hear snatches from across the garden. “Thieves . . . crossing the water . . . ever!” More laughter. A joke.

  Both Mustafa and Alia are tall and brunette, similarly complexioned as their father. For all their talk of revolution and oppression, Salma’s two youngest are not plagued with thoughts of camps and the people inside them. In many ways, they are careless children, both spoiled, given to mercurial moods. Indulged. As children they were allies, and they remain so.

  Alia is speaking now with her head ducked, whispering to the two men. One hand hol
ds her plate, the other gestures. Throughout the courtyard, people watch her, men and women. Alia has never been straightforwardly pretty. Her jaw is narrow, her cheekbones too pronounced, giving the impression of an avid cat. She has the same crooked nose as her father, and Hussam lurks in the wide forehead and broad shoulders as well. But her face arrests, has the arched eyebrows and long eyelashes that made Salma’s own mother such a beauty. Unlike many tall women, Alia carries herself well, her spine perfectly straight, the skinny, imperious shoulders squared. When Alia was fourteen and her growth spurt began, Salma had tortured nightmares of her daughter becoming unrecognizable, beastly, her bones shooting out into dreadfully long limbs.

  “You should bind her bones,” the aunts used to say. “Let her sleep with cardamom sprinkled on her pillow, it stunts growth.”

  But Salma did neither. By then, Widad had been gone for years and Hussam too, and Salma had begun to recognize that the world was no longer made for certain types of women. There was a need for spine and even anger. Widad had Salma’s shape, petite, ample-hipped—all the female cousins were similarly built. Only Alia stood inches above the women, able to look most men square in the eye.

  “Mashallah, ya Salma,” Umm Bashar, a neighbor, says. Her veil is damp at the side from perspiration. On her plate a slice of kanafeh is soaked in rose water. “She is like the moon.”

  Salma smiles the muted, modest smile perfected by women and tilts her head. “Thank you, Umm Bashar. We are blessed. Allah is great.” She keeps her voice slightly tight, for she knows the power of the evil eye, of even unintentionally drawing envy.

  “Although an unusual choice,” Umm Bashar says, glancing over at Mustafa. Salma knows what is coming. It is what the guests have been discussing. “For you to marry the younger one first.” She sighs. “Although I suppose it’s different with men.”

  “Alia’s fate was to be married first. Mustafa still has school to finish and is perhaps going to travel to Ramallah for work.” Salma hears her own lie, the weight of it.

  “Yes, yes.” A slight pause. “Mustafa is how many years older?”

  “Five.” Five, five. Salma recites the number in her sleep because, although she would never admit it to this woman, it is an old worry.

  “Ah, five. Well. Everyone is to do what she must. Although mine will be married off in order. Bashar is getting married in the fall and he is two—no, no, three years younger than Mustafa.”

  Salma thinks unkindly of Bashar, with his large nose and tiny chin. She has always sensed from Umm Bashar a competitiveness about their sons, because Mustafa is so handsome.

  “It is how her father would’ve wanted it.” Salma shuts her voice to signal the end of the discussion. Umm Bashar nods and smiles, overly sweet.

  “Well,” she says, glancing at Alia, “she certainly looks lovely. Those streaks of henna in her hair, they suit her complexion.” Salma feels some relief as Umm Bashar walks off, the neighbor’s eyes away from her daughter.

  The aunts and cousins held the henna ceremony for Alia the day before and Salma can see flecks of reddish gold in her daughter’s hair, brought out by the torch light. It was a squealing, messy affair, the younger women gossiping as they mixed the henna in a tin basin. Each girl took a handful of the goopy paste and kneaded it, trying to remove twigs and leaves. When the paste was blended, the girls tilted the basin into fabric dough sacks, twisted them shut. The older aunts and Salma prepared Alia’s skin, reciting Qur’an as they brushed the girl’s hair and rubbed lemon juice on her arms and feet. Salma whispered the Fatiha as she massaged the henna paste on her daughter’s hands, staining both palms reddish. One of the aunts punctured the dough sacks with a needle, her hand steady as she maneuvered the paste into a design of whirls and flowers and lattices on the tops of Alia’s hands and feet.

  The henna paste smelled strongly, roughly, of barnyards. The older women spoke nostalgically of their own henna ceremonies, and Salma caught a couple of the younger cousins rolling their eyes. This generation was impatient; it was something the neighbors and aunts discussed at great length over afternoon tea visits. They were becoming reckless. When Salma went to collect a dough sack from the younger women, their chattering stilled, each girl looking at her with wide, innocent eyes. They were speaking of the neighborhood boys, Salma knew, of the men they met at school or the youth clubs. Some might even be speaking of the Israeli soldiers, although she preferred to think that such flagrancy remained outside of Nablus, among the Christian girls or the ones who’d gone to boarding school in Europe. Elsewhere.

  It is painful to think of how Hussam would disapprove of the way she raised Alia. Hussam had been a man of precise faith; his was a life of mosques and fasting and austerity. Salma loved her husband in a distant way, mostly because he wasn’t a man who inspired anything stronger. In their marriage he remained reserved, chaste even in their most intimate moments. Only after his illness did he begin to yell and curse, and by then his mind was no longer his.

  He wouldn’t have been prepared for the changes sweeping the youth. The way the West has begun to seep into their cities, the way the occupation divided the generations sharply. The youth drawn to glitter, the elders to bitterness.

  Sometimes she has arguments with him in her head, a vestigial habit from twenty years of marriage.

  All the girls are doing it, she’d say defensively when Alia began to go out with her friends, when she made it clear she would never veil.

  “And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty.” A verse from the Qur’an, Hussam’s favorite tactic in arguments.

  This is what our life is now, Hussam. The youth are scattered. This is what it is to live under the rifle.

  She could imagine him frowning, shaking his head, disappointed with her weakness. Perhaps if you’d raised her better. Perhaps if you’d read her more Qur’an, taken her to the mosque more. An imagined pause. If I were there, she wouldn’t be so far from Allah.

  Well, you’re not here.

  Such is the ease with which one can silence the dead.

  “Yamma, have some.” Mustafa approaches Salma, a plate in hand. He has puddled the syrup onto the very center of the kanafeh slice, just as she likes it. The cheese will soak up the sugar. She looks up at his lanky frame.

  “You should see how nervous Atef has been,” Mustafa confides. “I swear he changed his tie seven or eight times.”

  “Gray suits him.”

  “Gray, blue, orange—who cares! I told him, a suit is a suit is a suit.”

  Salma smiles, drops her voice to a whisper: “The groom is fussier than the bride.”

  They laugh together. Only with Mustafa does she banter like this, the two of them conspiratorial. The aunts say he is too attached to her and to Alia, that fatherlessness has stunted him. Selfish as she feels, Salma prays on each of Mustafa’s birthdays for the boy to stay with her for one more year, his sports cleats and laundry and dirty dishes cluttering the house.

  Mustafa waves Atef over; the other man looks relieved as he moves toward them. His gait is stiffened in the formal clothes.

  “What a lovely tie, Atef,” Salma says archly. Mustafa laughs.

  “You too, Khalto?” Atef asks, mock wounded. He grins down at her, teeth white against his beard. He is handsome in the manner of old pasha rulers, the somber-looking men in history books.

  “Will you be going to mosque tomorrow?”

  The two men hesitate, exchanging a glance that she catches. “Yes, Yamma,” Mustafa finally says. “Only for the prayers. We promised Imam Ali.”

  “We’ll be done by ten. Back in time for breakfast,” Atef confirms. All three stand in silence, the unsaid a living thing between them.

  “Good,” Salma says. She tries to liven her voice: “You boys keep each other out of trouble.”

  They laugh, embarrassed, looking away. A few months earlier, they were arrested at a demonstration in Jerusalem. In another time, their offense might have earned them a f
ine, merely a court-issued warning. Instead, both Atef and Mustafa were kept in the penitentiary for four nights.

  On the day of their release, Salma sat between Atef’s mother, Umm Atef, and Alia in the courtroom. When the boys’ names were spoken, Umm Atef’s lips began to move, her eyes unblinking. Praying. Salma slipped her hand onto the other woman’s lap, interlacing their fingers. Umm Atef’s hand lay limply until the boys walked into the courtroom flanked by officers. Then she squeezed hard, her wedding ring digging into Salma’s palm. It occurred to Salma in that moment that they were both widows. Atef was the son of a fedayeen, a man who died pointing a gun at an Israeli soldier.

  The boys were led with their wrists in cuffs. Alia started to cry. Atef had a swollen, purplish bruise on his cheekbone. Mustafa, Salma saw with great relief, was unmarked, though she would later learn of the contusion over his rib cage, the imprint of a baton that had flecked his urine with blood.

  Afterward, the three women waited outside the courtroom. Umm Atef was no longer praying; her eyes sparked like coals. When the two men walked out, she flew at her son. Her beefy fists pummeled Atef’s chest.

  “You . . . do . . . this to me . . . you son of a dog . . . you son of a dog . . . you think this is what men do?” She wheezed as she pounded at him.

  Atef stood still, his eyes shut. He did not guard himself from his mother’s blows. Only when her wheezing worsened, her body heaving in sobs, did he move. “Mama,” he said softly, taking her into his arms.

  Salma said nothing, not outside the courtroom or as they drove home. In the house’s foyer, she sat. She pulled her dress to her knees to feel the cool tiles beneath her. She didn’t speak for hours, listening to Alia, Mustafa, even Lulwa whispering in concerned tones as they scurried back and forth. She watched the sunlight sluice through the windows, collecting in her lap like water. A cup of mint tea cooled untouched at her side. The light turned red, traversing the length of her body, down her legs. It reached her feet, staining them a bright, unlikely crimson.