Somewhere, Home

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‘Stories?’

‘Your grandmother and her family, did you find out about her? You talked about it so much, I just assumed . . .’

I had forgotten telling him. It was long ago, very soon after we met. I said I wanted to spend time on my own on the mountain to gather stories about my grandmother and her children and put them in a book to read to my own children one day.

Wadih leans forward in his seat and looks closely at me. His eyes, the lines in his handsome face are achingly familiar and I feel the urge to reach out and touch him. Instead, I stand up and pick at branches of the vine that are draped over the balustrade.

‘Are things alright in the city these days?’ I ask my husband.

‘The fighting flares up and calms down again. We manage to live during the gaps in between.’

‘I haven’t felt lonely,’ I tell him. ‘Nor have I,’ he replies. ‘I only missed you.’

I return to the sofa. ‘I missed you too,’ I say truthfully. ‘I haven’t really discovered anything new, but I’ve been trying to write my own thoughts down, my own unfocused musings.’ I laugh sheepishly and look up at him but he says nothing.

A rush of heat makes its way up into my face and I place my hands on my cheeks in an attempt to cool them. ‘That silence,’ I say, ‘that relentless, obstinate silence, it makes me feel unloved.’

Wadih gets up and goes into the house. He returns with the leather folder he brought with him, places it on the dusty tiles and unzips it open. Inside there is a small pile of white cardboard squares with drawings on them. He brings the top one to me. The drawing looks remarkably like my house except that the façade is much neater, the rooftop is even and the terrace is wider underneath the clean stone arches.

Wadih brings me the second drawing. This one is of the inside of the house. There is a bright kitchen that opens onto a large dining room, and the living room is spacious and colourful with furniture and patterned Persian carpets. ‘This is of the bedrooms,’ he says, handing me the third drawing. ‘I think we’d have to add on another bathroom, especially now the baby is coming.’

I pull at his sleeve. ‘What is this?’

‘You do want us to live here, don’t you? The house will have to be renovated so I made some preliminary drawings for you to look at before we make a final decision.’

‘Did Selma tell you to come here?’ I ask him.

He reaches out and places his hand on the back of my neck and rubs gently at my skin. ‘Does it matter now?’

I shake my head and look down at the drawings.

There is music in this house, the kind that pushes gently against the outlines of my body and makes me sway this way and that. Wadih has brought the old stereo player with him from the city and plays our favourite records in the same progression again and again every evening until I find order in anticipation and am strangely comforted.

While Wadih and the men he has hired work on the house in preparation for our child’s birth, I lie on the terrace sofa, notebook in hand and a humming between my lips. I have taken to making small illustrations in the page margins, butterflies, shining suns, flowers and geometric shapes in the same pattern as the tiles, which I fill in with the colours Wadih keeps on his desk. He is amused by the childlike drawings, though he does not ask to read the words that lie alongside them.

Occasionally, whenever Selma comes to sit outside with me and to shake her head at the noise the workers are making, she inquires about the contents of the notebook.

‘Just my thoughts, Selma,’ I reassure her. ‘Nothing important.’

Each time she seems satisfied with my answer. ‘I’ve never been one for reading, anyway.’

I feel a sudden inexplicable envy at the freedom implied in her words.

Despite the heat, there is a slight breeze blowing across the terrace when Wadih comes out to join me. I pull up my legs to make room for him to sit down and feel the baby kick through my skin and against my knees.

‘She’s very active today.’ I smile at my husband and rub my belly.

‘You’re going to have a real shock if it ends up being a boy,’ Wadih says and ruffles my hair.

I shrug my shoulders and reach for the notebook.

‘Still writing?’

I nod. ‘About my mother this time.’

‘But your mother never lived here,’ Wadih says.

‘No, but this is where they met, isn’t it?’

I can almost swear to having heard Adel’s and Leila’s voices murmuring along with mine on lonely nights in this house, but I do not mention this to Wadih.

‘What are you going to do with it when you’re done?’ he asks, pointing at the notebook.

‘I don’t know. Read the stories to our child perhaps.’

‘Yasmeena,’ Wadih says in an uncertain voice. He lifts my legs and lays them in his lap.

‘Yasmeena,’ I call into the breeze. ‘Yasmeena.’

Leila

Leila first noticed the pointed arches that framed the front of the house and thought how lovely a creeping vine would look on them, green and luscious in spring, red and gold in autumn. As it was, the outside of the house looked bare, the jagged white stone and neat red roof almost forbidding. But inside it was different. Signs of home and family were in the fading, comfortable furniture, in the slightly scuffed tile floors and the settled air beneath high ceilings. In the living room a shaft of sunlight came through the large picture windows that overlooked the village souq where Leila could make out small figures moving in and out of the shops and along Somewhere, Home.

Leila, her sister Randa and their parents Nadia and Mahmoud were ushered to their seats by Alia, a moon-faced woman in a loose-fitting long black skirt and top with a diaphanous white veil hanging over her shoulders. Leila felt an accustomed shyness steal its way into her chest and move up into her face. She held her head down and tried to shake the feeling away.

‘Welcome to you all. Ahlan, Ahlan,’ Alia said.

They seated themselves around the room, the young women on the sofa and their parents in armchairs near the door. Alia spoke in clear, rounded tones, her white hands placed neatly on her knees as she sat on the edge of a high-backed chair. Leila shifted in her seat and stared at the older woman, unable to understand what she was saying.

‘She’s lovely-looking, isn’t she, for a woman her age?’ Randa whispered into Leila’s ear.

Since their arrival from America two months before, the young women had given up trying to understand the language their parents had grown up with and which they had neglected to pass on to them. As Alia and their parents conversed, Leila and Randa could only smile back.

It was not the first time they felt out of place in a country they had heard referred to since childhood as ‘back home’. Back home was where fragrant pine trees grew into tall umbrellas and rivers chimed down to a light-blue sea. Back home were snowy winters and balmy summers, and gentle sunshine everywhere in between. There were sandy beaches and mountains where houses perched as if on a breath of air, and people with sing-song greetings of ‘how are you’, ‘God be with you’ and ‘you have honoured our house with your presence’, at every turn.

But everywhere the little girls had looked in the green, leafy fields of West Virginia where they lived, in the small stucco house that met them on their return from school each day and the sharp, clear sound of the English they spoke with their friends was a home without memories, without a stirring, weighted past. They learned to let their minds wander whenever their parents’ conversations turned to Arabic, until the words they no longer strained to understand stumbled over one another and became one long tune that lulled them into a secret comfort.

She felt Randa nudge her and pull her up.

A tall young man with a high forehead and fine eyebrows was reaching out to shake Leila’s hand. ‘Bonjour,’ he said, smiling gently at her.

‘This is Rasheed, my son,’ Alia said with pride in her voice.

The man bent his head gracefully and when he looked up again Leila noticed a scar in the shape of a wide arch just above his left eyebrow. She saw him lift a long, smooth hand and lightly touch the scar, then he looked at Leila and smiled again. ‘Je suis désolé, mais je ne parle que le français et l’arabe,’ Rasheed said with a polite laugh. He placed a chair by Mahmoud and began talking to the older man.

Leila looked away. Since their return to the old country she had watched an unsettling joy light up her parents’ eyes every time they met relatives they had missed in their thirty-year absence, or whenever they happened upon a once familiar spot. She had felt a resistance build up within her to sharing a similar certainty in a country that she knew could never be home. Now, everything and everyone she encountered had to be approached with caution. Who would ever know? Leila asked the image in the bathroom mirror late at night when everyone who knew her had fallen asleep. Who can sense the fear in my heart? She would stare back at the large brown eyes wide in astonishment, lips mouthing a silent, round ‘O’, skin lacklustre in the faint light. The next day she would try again to erase suspicion from her memory, smiling when she could and taking delight in sudden moments of clarity, only to feel doubt creeping back into her, an insistent companion. She turned her head to look out the window once again and let sunlight dazzle her eyes until the figures around her faded into a pleasant blur.

‘Hello, there, nice to see our long-lost cousins from Virginia at last.’ The voice was abrupt, the English heavily accented. He found her hand and shook it hard.