Salt Houses Read online

  Dusk had already fallen when Mustafa knelt on the floor beside her. He cradled her feet in his hands, bent and kissed them on the soles as he wept.

  “Never, never again,” he promised. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Salma hadn’t seen her son cry in years. It jolted her into embracing him. He smelled boyishly of sweat and the lemongrass soap he showered with, his long eyelashes spiking with tears as they had when he was a child. Alia appeared in the doorway, her legs longer than her nightgown, the hem hovering midcalf. Salma extended her arm and drew Alia against her brother. She enveloped those two miraculous living creatures, and with them Mustafa’s apology—her hungry longing to trust it—crushed them all like a talisman to her chest.

  “Save some syrup for the rest of us, Alia,” one of the men calls out across the garden. Alia arches her eyebrow at him and ladles another spoonful onto her plate.

  “You don’t tell the bride what to eat,” she retorts to the laughter of the men. She joins the young women sitting on the steps bordered by jasmine shrubs. Alia lifts a forkful of the kanafeh, cools it through pursed lips.

  The evening is unseasonably warm, the March breeze light. The wind flutters the edge of Salma’s veil, tickling her neck beneath the fabric. She tugs the veil down automatically, tightens the edges with her fingertips. In the chaos this morning, she forgot the customary pin on either side, the trick of folding that keeps the veil fastened around her face.

  Alia’s hair is long, curls coiling compactly beneath her ears. Both of Salma’s daughters remain unveiled, a source of shame for her. She’d grown up with a devout father, waking at four to iron and press his finest dishdasha before he went to the mosque for fajr prayer. Salma would tell herself elaborate stories to try to keep from falling asleep just to catch a glimpse of her father walking down the trail from their hut. The few times Salma succeeded, her vision would be bleary, her father’s silhouette barely visible in the moonlight.

  During Ramadan, she would spend the long hours of daylight by her mother’s side in the kitchen, slicing chunks of cantaloupe and stirring lentil soup. She would be dizzy with hunger when the sun set and it came time to break the fast, all the cousins and aunts and uncles seated around steaming bowls. The first bite, usually bread or an olive slick with oil, seemed to her the most delicious thing her young tongue tasted all year round, and she would be filled with a lush, weepy love for Allah.

  Her children, Salma knows, do not have such worship for Allah. Widad, the most devout, prays once or twice a day and never misses a day of fasting, but her piety is steeped in fear, not rapture. Mustafa spends Fridays in the mosque but his attitude suggests it’s a social duty, a shared performance with the neighborhood men. And Alia is as mercurial with Allah as she is with all things. For a while after she began menstruating, the girl asked Salma to teach her Qur’an verses, modeled Salma’s veils, and spoke of someday visiting Mecca. But she slowly lost interest, drifting over to tight dresses and Egyptian love songs.

  Several months ago, Salma overheard a conversation between Alia, Atef, and Mustafa, her daughter’s defiant voice rising through the walls.

  “Allah might be the most useful invention of all!”

  Salma was pleased to hear Atef admonish Alia, tell her to hush.

  The kanafeh is devoured; Salma’s hands are sticky. Mustafa and Atef are seated, one on either side of her. She senses the mosque talk has sobered them. The final smudges of light are erased from the sky.

  “The weather’s going to be perfect for the wedding,” Mustafa says, tipping his head back. Salma follows his gaze. Atef does the same. The night sky is dappled with stars.

  “Inshallah,” she murmurs, and the men, chided, repeat the prayer. Salma rises, takes the empty plates from the men. She walks past the huddle of young women, the children chasing one another. Salma’s bladder aches. She turned fifty the previous year, and her body unceremoniously began to murmur discontent. When she bends, her hip throbs; there is a floating curlicue at the corner of her vision, a coil that worsens in sunlight.

  She goes in the house and finds Lulwa in the kitchen, ironing a pale silky veil that Salma will wear for the wedding tomorrow. The girl is bent over the hissing metal plate, straining to see any creases in her handiwork.

  Salma enters the bathroom and sits upon the porcelain seat with relief. She’s been moving and sitting for hours, and her underwear is damp with sweat, mottled with brownish red. It is the body’s leftover, as the aunts say, the flush from her idle uterus. Before leaving the bathroom, she pauses at the mirror above the sink.

  It is a plain face, recognizable to her as water. She tucks stray hairs beneath the wings of her veil, quietly shuts the door behind her.

  At the far end of the lawn, the men have begun to gather by the fig tree, untangling themselves from the laughter and gossip of the women. The women settle around the table, the torches casting shadows upon their faces.

  “I’ve heard the border might close,” one of the women says.

  “They’re saying Egypt loves a war.”

  “Egypt loves a good soap opera.”

  “Speaking of, did you see that last episode . . .”

  Familiarly, the talk settles into shows and their favorite starlets. War is war; they are bored of it. The children sit scattered around the women or curled in their mothers’ laps. The ibrik roasts over a flame in the courtyard’s entrance, the perfume of coffee drifting across the garden. The coffee set has been washed and dried, the mosaic tray oiled. Alia sits at the head of the table, a younger cousin settled on her lap. Alia braids the child’s hair, smiling at one of the neighbors’ stories.

  Mustafa and Atef have joined the men by the fig tree. The torch light barely reaches them, and Salma struggles to make out the white of their shirts. One of the young boys at the table squirms from his mother’s arms and skips over to the men, arms outstretched to his father. The father kneels down and hoists the boy onto his hip. Salma watches the men gesture. Their hands blur in the dark. Smoke from the cigarettes hovers above them.

  She knows without hearing any of it what they are saying, the names they are repeating, the dates. Soon, there will be an argument; there always is. Blisters of rage, which must be drained. And the women, intimate with such scenes, will rise wearily, go to their husbands or brothers or fathers. Speak to them in soothing voices.

  Salma can see the bubbling of the ibrik at the courtyard entrance. Lulwa rushes toward it carrying the coffee set. Black liquid has begun to spill over the edge, causing sparks in the flame. Salma makes a gesture with her hand, trying to catch Alia’s eye. Alia should be the one to serve the coffee, on this last night as a single woman, the cups set carefully on the tray, memorizing who wants sugar and who wants it bitter. Serving the old men first, then the hajis, then Atef. Pausing in front of the man who will be her husband, demurely, one of thousands of times she will serve him coffee.

  But Alia doesn’t see Salma’s beckoning. She has finished the child’s braid and is kissing the top of her dark hair.

  Salma feels a slow weariness in her limbs. An image of the wedding tomorrow swims, unbidden, before her. The hall empty, chairs toppled, tablecloths stained oily from the candles. Dinner plates abandoned, the feasts now carnage, strewn fish bones and globules of lamb fat. Salma sees her daughter’s makeup as it will be after hours beneath hot lights—waxy, crinkles of mascara at the corners of her eyes. The wedding dress, with its beaded bodice and cream-puff sleeves, creased from all the dancing. Across the table, Alia yawns and Salma imagines her tomorrow evening, tired, happy, leaving in Atef’s arms.

  “God, that breeze is amazing,” one of the women says.

  “Not that they’d notice.” An aunt nods toward the men. “They’re starting.”

  Salma turns. The men are talking more rapidly now. A few look annoyed, shaking their heads. Their voices are audible. She returns her gaze to her daughter. Alia looks at her and smiles, rolling her eyes good-naturedly. The gesture lights the girl’s face.

&nbs
p; This is why she saw the zebra, Salma thinks. Because it is Alia, darling, baby Alia. Love and fear for the girl have the same metallic taste. Doubt—beautiful doubt—glimmers now. Surely her vision was clouded. Can she even be certain of what she saw? She tries to remember the valley of the coffee cup, can conjure up only the alarm. Perhaps it wasn’t even a zebra but a bear or wolf, some other four-legged creature. Alia laughs across the table. Yes, Salma thinks, her hand outstretched to her youngest, miming the lifting of the ibrik. The form in the coffee cup flashes in her mind. Yes, it must’ve been a horse. Not a zebra, but a horse with smudges, a speckled horse. It means travel, perhaps, even a difficult first pregnancy, but luck; it also means luck.

  Mustafa

  * * *

  Nablus

  October 1965

  “Brothers, we have come to a crossroad,” Mustafa recites under his breath. “We cannot continue as we are.”

  He pauses at a patch of grass bordering the road and squints up at the sky. The late afternoon is cool, the setting sun disappearing behind the hills. Each morning and evening, he walks along the valley between his house and the school, preferring it to driving. It clears his head. His job is a simple one, teaching arithmetic to adolescents at a nearby school, and though he enjoys it—the elegance of mathematics, the satisfaction of watching pupils solve equations—it feels dull occasionally, rote. The walks give him time to pound the earth with his sandals.

  Up ahead is another hill, small houses with vegetable gardens out front. Beyond them are the simpler huts, with cracked windows and pots of water boiled for heat. Aya lives in one of those huts. Mustafa goes by them, keeping his eyes on the top of the middle hills, rising against the plum sky. The view is regal.

  “We cannot continue as we are,” he repeats.

  There is a construction site to the left, and men mill around smoking cigarettes. Mustafa undoes the first two buttons at his neck as he walks past.

  “Brothers, we are losing a fight.” Too meek. “Brothers, we are losing a fight.” He tries a sweeping gesture with his hand. He is pleased with the effect and does it again, this time with both hands.

  “Have you finally lost your mind?” Mustafa looks up to see Omar, one of the mosque shabab, walking toward him from the site. Omar wears the green construction uniform, perspiration soaking the collar.

  “This is what it’s come to, brother?” Omar asks, grinning. “Roaming the streets and talking to yourself?”

  Mustafa holds his hands up in defeat, grins back. “We are a lazy generation.” It is a well-worn joke among the men at the mosque, a reference to Israeli pamphlets calling Arab men cowardly and indolent. He waves toward the construction. “How’s the building going?”

  “Starts and stops. Bastards are stingy with permits.” Omar spits on the road, a stream of brown. “And if not that, we get hassled on zoning. If we’re not getting fucked from one side, it’s coming from the other.”

  Omar pulls out a pack of cigarettes and hands one to Mustafa. They light them and smoke, facing the valley. For a couple of moments they are silent, each lost in thought. Then a whistle cuts through the air and they turn to see the construction overseer gesturing to Omar.

  “Let’s move it, sweetheart,” the man calls out nastily. “You’re not paid to chat with your friends.”

  Omar drops the cigarette. “Piece of shit,” he mutters. He nods at Mustafa as he walks away. “Your house tonight, right?”

  Mustafa remembers. He told the men to come over after the mosque for coffee and shisha. They are supposed to alternate among their homes, but the other men have wives and families.

  “Yes, my house,” Mustafa says, and Omar walks back to the construction site.

  It was Imam Bakri’s idea for Mustafa to speak tonight. Imam Bakri assured him that he would be fine, that whatever he said would be gold, pure spun gold.

  “There are some men visiting from Jerusalem,” Imam Bakri told him. “I want them to see us, our congregation, what a fine brotherhood we have here. I want you to speak.”

  When Mustafa began to ask questions, the imam smiled. “It’ll come to you. You’ll move their hearts, leave them catching their breath. It’s what you do.”

  From a distance the house appears unaltered, the doorway framed by trees. Only upon closer inspection do signs of neglect become apparent—the untrimmed hedges, the windows streaky with dust, a slackness to the doorknob, which turns too easily in Mustafa’s hand. When Salma first announced she was moving to Amman, no one believed it. Mustafa and Alia teased her about abandoning her post, privately assuring each other that she’d never leave. Even now, a year after she’d packed suitcase after suitcase with her belongings and moved into a small house near her sister, Mustafa still half expects her to return.

  With Salma gone, the house is his. He has inherited his living mother’s rooms and garden and at times is filled with childish resentment, as though given a beautiful trinket that he cannot touch without its breaking.

  He walks through the foyer, the sitting room, pauses to unbutton his dress shirt and toss it on the couch. “They want us to crumple. To surrender,” he mutters absently as he enters the kitchen. Crumple sounds odd, reminds him of paper. “They want us to yield.” Better.

  The kitchen counters are scattered with newspapers, a bowl of pears—his favorite—and cellophane bags of bread and crackers. A jar of pickles sits atop one of honey; there is a grayish plant he never remembers to water on the windowsill above the sink.

  “You know she only left because she thinks it’ll jolt you into marriage,” Alia said to him once, inciting one of their rapid-fire arguments. He was insulted by the accusation because he knew it to be true.

  Every week his mother sighs on the telephone. “I worry about you in that house by yourself. Without a wife, a nice woman to cook you meals, keep you happy. Habibi, you are so alone.”

  During Mustafa’s last visit to Amman, Salma and his aunts had transparently introduced him to several women, hosting dinner after dinner where he made strained conversation with the girls and their mothers. His aunts made interjections.

  “You know, Mustafa finished university in three years.”

  “Habibti, have you visited Nablus?”

  “So pretty, look at that skin. Is your whole family fair?”

  The trip felt like one long held breath, him politely smiling and nodding, the aunts and Salma sitting on the balcony afterward and discussing the girls, how Suzanne was a brilliant cook and Amal had a degree in literature and Hind had the loveliest green eyes. Mustafa found himself thinking of Aya, of her long hair always plaited into a braid, the rasp in her voice like burned sugar.

  On his last evening, they’d asked which one he liked best. Mustafa answered, “None of them.”

  His mother’s disappointment was palpable. Her voice was streaked with uncustomary anger:

  “Go, go back to Nablus. You want to be alone forever? Because that’s the life you’re building for yourself.”

  Mustafa walks around the kitchen scratching his head. He does his familiar dance, opening the drawers, eyeing the detritus in the refrigerator. He takes a jar of olives, peers suspiciously into it. Fuzz grows around the rim.

  His grocery shopping is haphazard. Some mornings he wakes early, full of energy and purpose, sets out to the marketplace before work and returns with bags of tomatoes, cheese wedges, pita bread still steaming. Other times he scrounges, making meals of almonds and a handful of figs, a desultory bite of fruit.

  The past two weeks have been scavenging, Mustafa pulling together meals of bread and olive oil, at times boiling a lamb chop. Some evenings Atef and Alia come over, Alia occasionally roused into the role of wife, trying her hand at some ambitious meal. Koussa, their mother’s warak anab. It is invariably a failure, Alia a worse cook than Mustafa. Both of them were raised in the manner of wealthy Nabulsi children, always a maid to cook and clean and wash their clothes, such that Alia’s first experience with laundry as a bride was a catastrophe of
blanched shirts and dyed socks, now an oft-referenced family joke. She deprived Atef of his socks, poor man.

  Mustafa finds a half-empty box of spaghetti in the drawer. He smokes while waiting for the water to boil. When he upends the box of pasta into the pot, the strands fan out.

  “But who’ll cook for you?” his mother had asked when she left, taking Lulwa with her. “Who will clean?” She wanted him to get a maid, a part-time housekeeper at least.

  “I will,” Mustafa told her. But the truth is the disarray doesn’t bother him; most of the time he barely sees the mess. Only after speaking with his mother does the unkempt state of the house come into relief. Those moments, all he can see is the peeling paint, the puff of dust when he stomps on the rug, the cigarette ash in his bathroom sink. He thinks of how, when his mother lived in the house, the rooms smelled of lavender, how he was never allowed to smoke indoors.

  When the guilt becomes overpowering, he gathers dishrags and fills a bucket with water. On those days, he scrubs each tile of the kitchen floor, soaps the windows, even dusts the bathroom cabinets.

  The cigarette is nearly out. Mustafa flicks it into the kitchen sink, then turns his attention to the pot, the spaghetti now limp and snarled.

  He remembers a meal his mother used to make, pasta with béchamel. He tries to recall the ingredients. Cream—a dusty can in the pantry—and oil and salt. There was a fourth ingredient, he knows, but he cannot remember what it was. Cloves? Sugar? Or was it vinegar? Something unexpected. He goes with sugar, two spoonfuls into a bowl with the cream, whisking it until he gets bored.

  The pasta looks delicious, steaming and shiny with oil. “Salt,” he mutters to himself, then, feeling daring, he rustles around the spice cabinet. A dash of cardamom and several shakes of paprika. He takes a bite and immediately spits it out. It tastes like car fumes.