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Their new home, a one-storey stone cottage near the village centre, was Alia’s comfort. She marvelled at its spaciousness and delighted in the opportunity to make her mark on its rooms, to fill its corners with the little knickknacks she could not keep as a child. She placed seashells and coloured stones on window ledges, and embroidered tiny flowers wherever she could: on bed linen and tablecloths, and even on the small cloth sack she used for making yogurt cheese. She especially loved her bedroom, revelling in the smooth texture of freshly laundered sheets and fluffy down pillows.
During the early morning chores that she carried out under the watchful eye of her mother-in-law, Alia would often linger at her bedroom door and contemplate the rays of sun that shimmered on the newly painted walls, then sigh with a secret delight. But she did not reckon on the weight of sudden responsibility. Left to her own devices for the first few months following her marriage, Alia woke one morning to her husband’s expectations and felt herself turn into the diligent and obedient wife she was bound to be. The children arrived in quick succession.
The first son, Salam, the peaceful one, was born after two agonizing days of labour. The women in the family spent the weeks following his birth serving generous portions of sweet brown pudding garnished with pine nuts and almonds to all who came to congratulate them. Alia was glad it was a boy, praise was more easily received than the commiseration that would have followed the birth of a baby girl.
When Salam was two years old, Ameen told her he would leave for Africa to join a distant cousin who had made there a fortune in trade. Alia kept the fear that gripped her heart following Ameen’s unexpected decision to herself, spending the last few nights before his departure in sleepless worry. Moments before leaving for the city to catch the boat for Africa, Ameen held her briefly to him and murmured a quiet goodbye. Though she did not know it, that was to be the most tender moment of her married life.
Salam grew into instinctive gentleness, loving his mother as he did the sea he had not seen, not understanding his father’s long absences.
‘He has gone to Africa to make our fortune,’ his mother told him. ‘Across the sea. Across the sea.’
The Mediterranean became for Salam a blueness that swallowed men and spat them out onto distant, hostile shores.
Three brothers came after him, Rasheed, Fouad and Adel. Alia saw in each of her sons the potential for des tinies beyond the confines of the village they so loved. She groomed the three younger boys for future careers in law, medicine and engineering, and left them to revel in childhood. Salam, she knew, would follow his father as all first-born sons did. In the absence of Ameen, Alia was afraid to show the boys too much affection. She wanted them to grow strong, disciplined like their father, and would reproach them for weeping. She was convinced the emotional distance was more painful for her than for the children and did not waver from her resolve in their wakeful hours. But on long, quiet nights when her loneliness seemed too much to bear, Alia would steal into the boys’ bedroom and, standing in the hollow of the open doorway, would watch the four of them as they slept.
Whenever their father came to visit, the children were wary of him until he shed his air of strange lands and smelled like them of the mountain. They would sit around him in the winter room, warming yogurt sandwiches on the stove, waiting for him to speak, to ask for something that they might obey. Wrapped in a greatcoat made from the finest camel hair, he looked as magnificent as an Arab prince, his skin darkened by another sun. Though he never spoke of Africa, they knew he was as great a man there as he was in the village.
My father this, my father that, Salam boasted to other children, until he turned eighteen and went to work alongside his father in jungle dampness. There he saw the making of men’s fortunes, travelling to and from tribal settlements and selling what he could of his goods, an apprentice in trade. As the years passed and his work expanded, Salam would take the time to sit on the porch of his wooden house enjoying the coolness of the evening, gazing at the stars that visited the skies of Africa and were so unlike those at home, dreaming of his return and leaving the dream to rest in a quiet corner of his heart.
Alia thought Rasheed the most beautiful of her children, with his evenly spaced eyes beneath gently arching eye brows, his straight nose and small mouth that smiled in a graceful upward motion as if in quiet amusement. His demeanour suggested an aged serenity that, in a child, inspired awe in some, disbelief in others. In conversations with his mother, Rasheed would sometimes stop in mid-sentence and appear to give himself an almost imperceptible shake before suddenly picking up where he had left off. Alia began to fear that while blessed with the looks and manners of a patrician, Rasheed did not have the wisdom to cope with life, until the day he came to her as she sat on the edge of the bed, a letter from Ameen crumpled in the palm of her hand, the pain of disappointment clutching at her heart.
‘He’s not coming this year, is he?’ asked Rasheed.
Alia shook her head.
‘Your uncle Suleiman just read this to me,’ Alia said, holding the letter up in her hand. ‘No, he’s not coming.’
Approaching his mother very slowly, the boy reached out and placed one small hand gently on her cheek, keeping it there until the tears trickled down onto his fingers. Rasheed treated all his brothers with equal gentleness, showing Fouad the special attention that as a middle child he was never able to solicit from the women in his young life.
Fouad was convinced his grandmother hated him and mistook his mother’s confusion for rejection. ‘I’ll find him, I’ll find him.’ The four-year-old Fouad rubbed his eyes with small hands and lamented to himself.
‘Where are you going, Fouad? Come here. Why are you crying?’
Sheikh Abu Khalil watched the child from astride his donkey.
‘I’ll find him,’ muttered the little boy. ‘I’ll walk to Africa.’
‘Africa. You want to go see your father? Come up and ride. I’ll take you to Africa.’
Abu Khalil jumped off the donkey and lifted the boy onto the cloth saddle. They travelled back home in silence, Fouad finally asking, ‘Is it much further? Is it much further to Africa?’
When, years later, Fouad was able to prove his brilliance by entering medical school at the age of sixteen, his father bought him a new pair of patent leather shoes that squeaked as he walked so that everyone could hear him coming.
At six years old Adel was a dark and thin boy with a quick temper and the long, fine fingers and toes of his father. Alia loved his nervous energy and agile mind, and would sometimes laugh quietly to herself if he got into trouble. As an infant, his grandmother favoured him above the rest, sang to him in her old woman’s voice. He would look into her dried, sunken eyes as she rocked him and together they would remember past lives, dismissed by everyone but the very young and the ageless.
When he was three years old, Adel stepped outside one cold winter’s morning and fell into several feet of snow that had accumulated in the front garden the night before. After an unsuccessful struggle to pull himself up, Adel sank further into the cocoon of snow and fell asleep. A tuft of thick dark hair was all that showed above the snow’s surface. It was a while before Adel was finally found, almost frozen through, his small body curled into a stiff ball, his lips a frightening, ugly blue. Alia carried him inside, undressed him and wrapped him with her own body. Hours later, he pushed her arms away, looked slowly around him and fell into a long, sound sleep.
The children were at once vital and incidental to Alia’s life. She would stop and watch them as they played, four bright-faced boys who loved her with an intensity that sometimes sent her own heart reeling so suddenly that she would wish herself far away and free of them. She could never bring herself to tell anyone about her fear of waking up one day and abandoning her children, choosing instead not to allow herself to love them too much.
As they began to grow older, Alia’s hold over her sons did not diminish. Rather, they seemed to look to their mother for inspiration with even greater enthusiasm, the admiration of followers in their eyes. Between them, Salam, Rasheed, Fouad and Adel drew their mother’s fate as surely as a timely premonition, setting their ambitions against her own and waiting for the future to unfold.
The day that Alia dreamed of changing her life began like any other. She helped the boys prepare themselves for school, made the thickly spread labneh sandwiches they would have for lunch and handed them each a stick of firewood for the classroom stove. Standing on the doorstep, she watched as Salam and Rasheed walked away with the two little ones in tow, a slowness in their step as they tried to shake the last remnants of sleep into wakefulness.
Just as Alia was about to walk back into the house, Rasheed stopped in his tracks and turned round to look straight at her. The early morning sun and gentle mist framed his tall, slim figure and his face in the distance seemed to give out a bright light. Alia’s heart left her for one endless moment and skipped its way to her son, luminescent, reaching for home. Then Rasheed became a schoolboy again and turned away, his back slightly bent with reluctant defeat. He would, she knew, accompany his younger brothers to the village school and then, with Salam, trek several miles to his own in a nearby village.
When she heard of the accident, Alia was in the courtyard with her mother-in-law stirring a huge cauldron of tomato sauce which, once cooled, would be preserved in glass jars for winter stores. Alia’s cousin Iman was running towards the house, her veil flailing behind her, her eyes wild.
‘Alia, Alia,’ Iman shouted. ‘The boys. Hurry.’
Alia did not wait for Iman to reach her. She stood up, grabbed her skirt and flew towards her cousin.
‘The school in Salima . . . Alia, it collapsed over the children and Salam and Rasheed are inside with the others.’
Alia stood still as a rush of fear made its way through her, sending a tingling feeling into her fingertips and down to her toes. She began to run. She ran down through the village souq, past the local school where her two younger boys were safe and sound. She ran the twisting, winding road that led to Salima as fast as the lithe hyena she had once glimpsed as a child on a walk in the woods. She ran, her long pigtail coming loose and trailing behind her, lightning beneath her feet. She shouted an angry pledge to God that if her boys survived the disaster she would never let longing into her heart again.
When she got to the school, she saw a group of men standing among the rubble shouting instructions to one another and attempting to lift the large pieces of limestone that had been the single-storey school building. Dozens of bewildered-looking young boys covered with dust wandered around the school grounds, some weeping, others silent. Alia’s eyes skimmed over their faces, her heart thumping.
‘Mama, Mama.’
She felt two pairs of thin young arms wrap themselves round her and looked down to see her sons looking up at her. She held them tightly to her and kissed the tops of their heads, and felt unable to speak.
On the way back home Alia learned that Salam had jumped onto a window ledge as soon as the rumbling began.
‘But Rasheed was at the lunch table with the others, Mama,’ Salam said. ‘He was the only one to survive.’
Alia grasped Rasheed’s hand a little tighter and repeated a silent prayer.
Later that night, as the children slept, Alia tiptoed out of the house and made her way to the small church that stood at the heart of the Christian area of the village. Hesitating, she pushed the large wooden door open and went in. She had never believed she would one day see the inside of a church and was taken aback by the thick, calm air that filled the near-darkness.
A priest with a large cloth in his hand was wiping objects on a big, rectangular table at one end of the room. He looked up as Alia approached. ‘Yes?’ he asked, until she came up close. ‘Welcome, welcome. You’re Ameen’s wife, aren’t you?’
Alia hung her head.
‘Is everything alright?’ the priest continued. ‘Shall we go outside and sit down?’
She nodded and followed the priest into the courtyard.
‘How can I help you, my daughter?’ he asked her once they had sat down.
‘I need you to write a letter for me. It’s very important.’ He nodded and waited for her to continue.
‘It’s to my husband. He’s in Africa and I need him to come home. I . . .’ Alia squeezed her eyes shut and hoped the priest hadn’t seen in them the beginning of tears.
‘I’ll help you write the letter,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry, my dear. No one will know about this but the two of us.’
Alia sighed with relief and lifted her head to the sky.
My husband Ameen,
God willing you are well and happy in distant Africa. We are all fine here, thank God, and everyone asks after you. The priest is writing this letter for me and I am grateful to him for that because these words belong only to you now.
When the sun begins to set and the boys are washed and fed and preparing to sit quietly over their school work, there is whispering in our house, a relief in our voices at the blessed ending of another day, a kind of resignation too. That is when I think of you most, of the scent of you and the way your arms swing briskly at your sides when you walk. And as I close my eyes and let the hush sweep over me, I imagine your body brushing noiselessly past my own and begin to dream of a more certain touch.
And try as I might, Ameen, even deep in the night when I am in bed and restless, I cannot see your face; your features, fine and grave, escape me. Are his eyes round or almond-shaped? I ask myself. Does his brow crease when he thinks and do his lips droop or disappear in anger?
Then other questions come to mind about what your life is like so far away and whether you have found your own comforts there, your own release. I pray for you.
Salam is grown and will soon be ready to join you in Africa. Rasheed, Fouad and Adel wait for you as I do. God be with you.
Your wife
Alia.
It was that secret hour between dawn and waking, and Alia stood leaning against the doorway of her home, gazing at the village below. Behind her the sleeping sounds of four boys and their father floated in and out of the spacious rooms, muffled in dreams. She lifted her hands and laid them against her cheeks, then took a deep breath of the sharp spring air and stepped slowly out into the courtyard.
The village was quiet. Rows of umbrella pines stood still and tall, dotted among the stone houses and the narrow dirt road that wound its way between them. In the distance she could make out the moving figures of Milad, the milk-seller, and his donkey. For one moment she imagined she heard the clanking sound of the tin cans filled with pungent goat’s yogurt as they bumped against one another on top of his saddle. In the pink sky overhead, thin clouds of smoke wafted out of a lone chimney and vanished into the morning.
Someone besides myself is awake then, Alia said to herself.
She placed her hand on her lower belly and tried to feel for the budding child she knew was there. This time it would be a girl and she would name her Saeeda.
Alia shook her head and reached down to pluck at a weed wedged between the cobblestones at her feet. The courtyard was strewn with dry pine needles and needed a thorough sweeping. When she straightened up and turned towards the house, catching sight of the four pointed arches outlining the porch and the red-brick rooftop slanted evenly above them, she felt a sudden rush of pleasure. ‘Our house,’ she whispered. ‘Our beautiful house.’
Maysa
Spring
The vine is coming back to life. I can see bright green shoots pushing out of its branches that revel in the sun and make tiny shadows on the tiled floor below. Every morning I carry a plateful of fruit and a cup of flower tea out to the terrace, sit on an old sofa I have placed there and stare out at the view. The village wakes with a start, to the sound of children preparing for school and shopkeepers rolling up the corrugated-iron fronts of their shops, to the smell of wood stoves being relit and the sight of the thin white smoke that rises from them.
Soon after the first small commuter bus inches its way up a steep hill and away to the city, cars appear, dozens of them that whiz up and down the main road. By then, the movement of people and machines appears almost frenetic and I carry the remains of my breakfast back into the quiet of my house lest the anxiety invade me too. There, I wonder how different Alia’s mornings must have been, the duties of house and children to see to, stretching her days into a fever of physical activity. She once told me that she had always favoured early mornings in the village, those moments before the children woke up, when the house pulsed with their collective heartbeat and she could stop and contemplate her fortune.
I look down at my now huge belly that hangs low and round over my legs and feet. I wear different versions of large, comfortable sweatsuits that have only just begun to strain against my widening girth. Selma has cut my hair so that it frames my face in a curly dark cap and lifts the circles from under my eyes. My skin has lost its flaky winter appearance and glows with the freshness of the mountain air. If I did not know better, I would believe Selma when she tells me that a woman who grows prettier as her pregnancy advances is carrying a girl.
The doctor, I know, already has an inkling of the gender of my child, but after the tests I have taken at his clinic he has refrained from telling me which it is and I have feigned indifference. He has extracted from me a promise that I will let him know as soon as labour pains begin and that I will be willing to go to a nearby hospital if he thinks it necessary. ‘We have to think of the baby.’
Alia had all her babies at home, with her mother-in-law and a local midwife in attendance. It was a matter of life or death every time but she always got through it. What it must have felt like to greet each of those babies, their sudden plop into being, a startled screech and the touch of roughened mother-hands on slippery, transparent skin. Did she cherish the approval of the family and indulge in the brief admiration shown her by her husband when he was there?
‘What does it matter either way?’ Selma says to me.
I shake my head and tell her I don’t understand.
‘What does it matter what anyone thinks or says,’ she continues. ‘All you can do is just get on with it.’
Maybe that’s what Alia knew she had to do. I am surprised into silence at the thought. ‘You mean she may not have thought about it at all?’ I ask Selma.
‘I mean she accepted her fate like most women did in those days.’
But I don’t believe that, I begin to say and then stop. ‘What was it, then? What did she really feel?’ I ask instead.
The truth is that I don’t know. I strain to remember the look in her eyes and come up with little more than a mixture of tenderness and distance, the look of a woman with secrets that she will not disclose to a child. Did she love Ameen or had he merely been a part of a destiny she could not avoid? Did she really long to go with him to Africa and did she miss him when he left? Who was her favourite of the children, who held that special place in her heart?
‘If Alia hardened her resolve when it came to bringing up the boys, then what softness was left over for Saeeda?’ I ask Selma. ‘She married off her only daughter before Ameen knew anything about it.’
‘She had no choice,’ Selma retorts. ‘Girls could not be left to fall in love on their own, especially if they were as flighty as Saeeda was.’
‘You remember my aunt?’
‘Yes, of course I do. You do as well, don’t you?’
Saeeda had a small dark mole just above her top lip that moved as she spoke. I remember watching it with intense fascination when I was a child. My aunt took care of Alia and Ameen during the last years of their lives, and we saw her whenever we went up to the village for a visit. Until I moved back to the mountain, my interest in Saeeda had always been superficial.
‘She never told those children that she loved them,’ I say.
‘She didn’t need to,’ Selma replies. ‘They already knew it.’
‘No. Children don’t just know,’ I protest.
I place my hands on my belly and rub gently at the stretching skin beneath my clothes.
‘But they always find out when they grow up,’ Selma says. ‘That you love them, I mean.’
‘Is that what you’re hoping will happen with your own children, Selma?’
She is offended, mutters a quick goodbye and leaves the house.
Spring makes its way into my heart and lifts my spirit. I have the wood stove removed from my room and place the bed underneath the window that faces the front garden. Hovering between sleep and waking in the early morning, I breathe in long and deep and imagine living on the mountain for ever, my child and I self-contained in our splendid, crumbling house. I air out the rooms of the house, and watch the sunlight sweep over the rooftop and stream through the open windows.
Father, dreamer, your thoughts are still hanging in the air of this house, wandering and waiting for you. Do you remember the day you held our hands, my brother Kamal’s and mine, and swung us into the air of this garden? Mother, the silence here is you, the graceful movement of your head turning away and your quiet, wistful step. I think of you both, your plunge into old age, a final acquiescence, a fitting goodbye.
I see Alia shuffling around in old age, dreaming of her boys, a businessman, a lawyer, a doctor and an engineer. They left her, married and had children of their own, taking the city for their permanent home and believing, as all men do, in their immortality. Until they stumbled into complicated lives that demanded the resourcefulness and expanse of vision they had learned from Alia and Ameen.
I wonder how much of their anxiety Alia really felt and have a wish that she showed each of them a moment’s weakness, a taste of unclouded tenderness.
Selma loosens my worries over the impending birth as she would a stubborn knot, visiting me in the evenings and clattering about the house with practiced efficiency. She has put aside clean sheets, towels and two new pillows, and placed them in a plastic bag on top of the bedroom cupboard. ‘We will need them all when the time comes,’ she says with authority.
She tells me my single bed will be too small for the baby and me, and orders a new and larger mattress, which a handyman places over Alia’s old bed in the adjoining room. Her fussing comforts me but makes me feel somehow apart from the coming event and the anxiety begins to return.
‘Alright, what is it now?’ Selma asks with gruff tenderness.
I shake my head, watch as tears fall on the crisp white baby sheets on my lap.
Selma sits on the bed beside me. ‘It’s not unusual to be feeling like this so near your time.’
‘Yes. You’ve told me before,’ I whisper, suddenly realizing that just this once it is not Selma I want beside me.
She pats me lightly on the back and gets up again. ‘It’s time I left,’ she says, making another of her unexplained departures.
I take the notebook from my bedside table and go out to the terrace. It is early afternoon and I have been unable to find comfort in sleep. I feel heavy and lethargic, and my feet are slightly swollen. I lower myself onto the sofa, rest my legs up on it and place a pillow behind my back. When I open the notebook, I am pleased at the sight of pages that are filled with words, at the names of those who came before and are here no longer, in delible now, but I still cannot explain the hollowness in my heart.
