NADA AWAR JARRAR

Somewhere, Home

For my family

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Part One

Maysa

Alia

Maysa

Saeeda

Maysa

Leila

Maysa

Maysa

Part Two

Part Three

Also by Nada Awar Jarrar

Copyright

About the Publisher

Part One

Maysa

Winter

This house, my house, saw its beginnings with the marriage of my grandfather. Built to hold the family in its overflowing numbers, the house became a meeting place for grandparents, aunts, uncles, children and numerous cousins from surrounding villages, its rooms expanding around them like sunlight in winter.

My father, Adel, remembers its high ceilings, the echo of footsteps on bare tiles and glimpses of his mother’s long white veil floating through doorways behind her. At three, he once sat on the outside ledge of one of its arched windows and gestured towards the fields beyond, his own private kingdom, before falling into a prickly bush below and getting up a more humble boy. I remember, as a child, holding my hand against the hollow in my father’s scalp and imagining I could feel the memory of that fall between my fingertips.

He would call me to him, ‘Maysa, Maysa’, and speak to me of his life in this house in fragments, in snatches of colour and longing, pausing to be the distant and more familiar figure of my childhood. But he did not know that it was his silences that intrigued me most, those moments between words that allow the imagination to wander.

I saw the brown dust of unpaved roads wrapping themselves round the mountain like arms entwined. I saw the sun on those roads and the air that carried it. I saw stone houses and armies of men and women in black and white sitting in front of them, their hands spread fanlike on their knees, their eyes squinting in the sun. I saw my grandparents, Alia and Ameen, and their five children sitting on low seats round a wood-burning stove in winter, their cheeks flushed red, their hands reaching towards the warmth, their voices low and intimate.

Now, years after they have all gone, as Beirut smoulders in a war against itself, I have returned to the mountain to collect memories of the lives that wandered through this house as though my own depended on it. And as my heart turns further inward, I nurture a secret wish that in telling the stories of those who loved me I am creating my own. The village hangs against the side of a mountain. The mountain grows pine trees and wild thyme, and is no longer home to wild boar and wolf dogs. My grandmother told us, as children, of the famine that struck during the Great War and the fear felt by men walking through the night with sacks of Damascene wheat on their backs, watching for animals that might attack.

The mountain seems tame now by comparison. I stand at the front door and stare lazily into the garden. It is almost autumn, almost cold, almost the end of freedom and summer. At five o’clock the mist appears and hangs listlessly over the house, over its crumbling red-brick roof and around its jagged stone walls. It floats over fig trees and grapevines, and ripens waiting fruit until it is ready for picking. I touch the vine that hangs from the roof and winds its way through the pointed arches that frame the front of the house. It runs along the rusty green balustrade at one end of the terrace overlooking an empty field and the village beyond, and edges towards the faltering wooden front door.

Since my arrival several weeks ago, I have been busily preparing for the cold winters that invade the mountain. Most of my things are now in the large room adjoining the kitchen. My bed is tucked into one corner with a large sofa across from it, and in between them is a Persian carpet woven in red geometric patterns that once belonged to my mother, Leila. Lined up against one of the walls is my grandmother’s oak dressing table which has a full-length mirror stained with age and a secret drawer that no longer opens.

In the centre of the room I have installed the old wood-burning stove where I will boil water for bathing and do most of my cooking throughout the winter months. The kindling wood and dry pine cones are in a large tin container next to the stove and the blocks of firewood that I bought last week are piled high behind the door. The kitchen cupboard is stored with jars of pickled cheeses and green olives, and cloth sacks filled with cracked wheat, lentils, beans and pine nuts line its shelves.

The weather gets colder. I spend much of my days wrapped in blankets sitting on the sofa with a large notebook and sharpened pencils in my hand. When the stove heats up, I breathe in the green scent of burning pine until my head swims with it. Then the notebook slides to the floor, the palm of my hand opens to release the pencils and the words escape and float up to the high ceiling.

In the early evenings I watch the short-lived sunsets, not with a dreaminess, but in a slow and deliberate way, until the sun becomes a part of me too, going down in a blaze of red. Everything beckons me then, the pine trees, the stars and the singing crickets.

At night, when the village falls silent, I sit in my room and listen to the now familiar creaks and sighs of this house and revel within its reluctant embrace. If sleep does not come easily, I lie in my bed and try to imagine old age and loneliness enveloping me, getting closer and closer until they touch my skin and there is no running away from them.

Selma, the midwife, has become a regular visitor. A tall, dark amazon in whom wisdom sometimes outweighs kindness, Selma is a second cousin once removed and chooses to remain in the village because ‘the world out there is no better’. She cares for me as she would an errant younger sister who does not really deserve her sympathy. She does not ask me about Wadih, the father of my child, nor why I decided to return to the mountain after a lifetime in the city. During her morning visits we drink tea made from dried flowers and herbs, and nibble flat, hard biscuits flavored with cardamom and musk. Because I am thirty-two, Selma wants me to be examined by a doctor, but I tell her that my confidence in her abilities is so great that I am certain nothing will go wrong on the day.

After six years of marriage Wadih and I had both given up hope of having a child when I discovered I was pregnant four months ago. For several weeks I lived through something close to stupor, unsure whether to be happy or shocked and sensing in my husband an equal uncertainty. As we slept, exhausted with thinking, his body stretched itself so that it seemed somehow to pass over me, his breath like slow mist in the evening. I stared at him and pressed my hand to his brow, and wished he would wake up and catch me watching him.

‘This city is no place to bring a child into,’ I told my husband.

‘What do you mean?’ There was indignation in his voice. ‘This is our home, Maysa.’

‘What about the fighting? What if something happens to the baby because of this wretched war?’

‘Our baby will be as safe as every other child in Beirut.’

I thought then how lonely a man seems when he is alone, the hesitation in his step, his brows pushed up in astonishment at the finality of solitude, his heart ready to embrace the first curious look, the first hand touching, willing to touch.

Whenever Wadih had something of beauty to show me, the sea rushing and indifferent, the magnificence of mountains in winter or the distance in a blue sky, he would place a hand on the back of my neck and absently rub the skin there until I felt whatever I was looking at move up my spine, down my arms and into my fingertips.

The day before I left for the village we went for a walk on the beach.

‘It’s not just about the fighting, is it?’ he asked me.

‘That house is where everything began, Wadih,’ I whispered.

‘And what about me, Maysa? What about me?’

He walked past me then, another lone figure in the sun, vulnerable and fiercely strong both, as we all are.

* * *

My world feels so small now, the house, the garden and the shadows in between. On the rare occasions when I go down to the village, I encounter no one who can lift my spirits. When she comes to see me, Selma tells me people have begun to talk. Your belly, she says, is going to be difficult to hide soon.

I tell her that I am not afraid of village talk.

‘And the child,’ she retorts. ‘What about the child? What about its father?’

I stand in front of the dressing table and stare at my figure in the full-length mirror. My dark hair looks long and unkempt, and my face is forlorn. I place my hand on my belly and rub gently. I am nothing like my former self, less poised and more vulnerable.

To comfort myself I think that my child will be different from the rest. She will have my dark hair, the sultry green eyes of her father and her skin will glow somewhere between gold and olive. I shall call her Yasmeena and dress her in shades of blue and yellow, and she will grow up to recognize the scents of pine and gorse just like her mother.

It is winter and I am resigned to my fate. My concern for the wilting vine will not be silenced. I fetch the ladder and climb up high enough to touch the trellis and the ropelike, dry branches of the once luxuriant plant. Looking up through the netting at the distant sun, I am overcome by dizziness and fall off the ladder. I lie on the ground for a moment or two, breathing in the mixed smell of earth and dust, and feeling a tingling through my body.

Selma arrives but she is less than sympathetic.

‘I found blood.’

‘Lie down and let me look at you,’ she says, gently pushing me onto the bed. ‘What made you do it?’

‘The vine is dying.’

‘Dying? It’s coming on to winter. Of course it’s dying. It’ll come back to life next year.’

I turn my head to the wall, fight back tears and hope she does not notice my distress.

‘Yes,’ she says abruptly after completing the examination and walks into the bathroom to wash her hands.

‘Yes, what?’ I call to her with alarm.

‘The baby may have been affected by the fall. We’ll have to call in a doctor.’ She comes back into the room.

‘You know I don’t want a doctor, Selma. You know that’s why I have you.’

‘I know that you care about this baby more than about your pride.’

This house, this old, dilapidated house, was once a castle, alive and spilling over with energy. My grandmother sat in a wooden-backed chair at the southern window, watching for the last of her children running home from school, and now there are shadows where she has been, shadows without sunlight, clouding my vision, filling me with fear.

The doctor is a small man with a smooth face and delicate features. We do not talk during the examination.

When he is done, he sits down on the edge of the chair opposite my bed, his brown doctor’s bag placed by his feet. His voice is soft. ‘Yes, well, the baby is alright, but you’ll have to make sure this doesn’t happen again.’

Outside, the morning is well under way. I can hear the revving of engines and the children who use my front garden as a short cut on their way to school. The smell of pine cones burning in the stove fills the room with a soft scent and I cannot stand this man’s clinical distance.

‘You think I should be having this baby in a hospital, don’t you, doctor?’

He looks taken aback. Then he stands up and prepares to leave, holding a piece of paper in one hand and his bag in the other. ‘I’ll ask Selma to fill in this prescription for you. If you notice any more bleeding, please call me.’

Selma sees him to the door and returns to my bedside. ‘I’ll go and get that medicine for you now.’ She pulls the bed sheets up so that they almost touch my chin. ‘Do you need anything else?’

The defiance rushes from me and leaves a sudden fluttering fear behind it. I reach for my friend’s arm. ‘Why can’t I be more like Alia?’

Selma’s reply is gentle. ‘Do you think Alia never had moments when she felt unsure of herself?’

‘I don’t know what to think any more,’ I say with a sigh. ‘I’m trying so hard to understand.’

‘What is there to understand? Your grandmother was capable and dutiful like most women had to be at that time.’ Selma pats me on the shoulder and stands up. ‘You have no way of knowing all these things now, Maysa,’ she says in a matter-of-fact voice.

‘But I can imagine, can’t I?’ I call out as she walks out of the door.

My woman’s body carries itself from this doorstep along the dirt road beyond and falters by the apple tree where children played it seems a hundred years ago. Like the yolk of an egg, I am alone and sheltered. I shift around on stiffening hips and wish for summer. I know that this journey I take, I take without guidance, without searching, without hope. I walk alone and into the sun.

* * *

I am wakeful again and feel regret inching its way into my resolve. I get up to feed the wood stove and place a concoction of flowers and herbs into a pot to make a hot drink.

Outside, there is unqualified silence. I begin to wonder if I would not manage to rest easier if I moved into another room. I wrap a thick blanket round myself, light a candle and tiptoe to the other side of the house where the four boys, my father and his brothers, once slept.

The room is spacious and bitterly cold. I can see them, Salam, Rasheed, Fouad and Adel, lying one against the other for warmth on mattresses placed together to accommodate their growing bodies. I hear their breathing and see the shadowy figure that makes her way into the room, and feel the gentle kisses she gives them on flushed cheeks.

‘Boys may grow soft if shown too much affection,’ my grandmother whispers. ‘My boys will be men.’

I sigh and wrap the blanket more closely round my shoulders. I want to have worn a different history, begun a different past. I want to have been a Chinese warrior, a rounded Eskimo, or perhaps a Scottish prince. I want to have looked up at wider skies, walked through thicker forests, waited for longer winters. Anything but this weighted, haunted longing for a distant past.

I move to the large cupboard at one end of the room and pull at its rickety doors. I have been planning to clear it out for weeks. When I get it open, a cloud of dust rushes into the room and I step back for a moment. The cupboard is empty except for a pile of books on its bottom shelf. There are story books and school books, Arabic, History and Mathematics, each with a child’s name inscribed on the inside front cover. I open a literature textbook that once belonged to my uncle Rasheed and imagine his small head bent over in reading, a pencil in his hand and his heart somewhere hopeful.

I lift my head and savour the infinite silence of the night. Memories and imaginings mix together in my mind so that I can no longer tell which is which. My breath becomes uneven. I return the textbook to the cupboard and just as I prepare to get up notice a thick, leather-lined notebook on top of the pile. I pick it up and blow some of the dust off its cover. When I open it, I realize that it is some kind of ledger, its yellowed pages lined with black and bold red ink. I leaf through it and in my excitement tear off one of the pages. The notebook is empty, no words to comfort or inspire me.

I crumple the torn paper in my hand, make a ball with it and throw it up in the air. I begin to tear out other pages from the notebook and scatter them around the room, then stop. I get up and return to my room, hugging the notebook to my chest. Its smell intrigues me, stale, musty, with a hint of the sharp scent of virgin paper. I sit on my bed, look at it in the weak light of the candle on the table beside me and reach for a pencil. I open the front cover of the notebook and turn to the first page where I write Alia’s name in big letters across the top.

I once asked my grandmother if when they were very young she had ever wondered what her children’s future would be. It was only months before Alia’s death and she was very frail, escaping into a vast silence when she could, waiting patiently on her invalid’s bed. I looked into her eyes, her skin was white and transparent, and her face, under the thin white veil that she still insisted on wearing, looked small and clean.

She placed her hand on my arm and pulled herself up slightly. ‘I knew,’ Alia said.

‘You knew what they dreamed they would be?’ I asked.

She shook her head with impatience and gripped my arm. Then she suddenly let go and laid her head back on the pillow. ‘They were my dreams too,’ she said before turning her head to the wall.

Late into the night, I lie down on the bed and close my eyes, the notebook resting loosely in my arms.

Alia

Alia mistook her dissatisfaction for sorrow. Taking a moment’s breath from children and home, she would stand at her doorstep and imagine she saw a tall ghost of a man walking towards her, striding as though he led the people behind him. Although he would vanish before she could make out his features, Alia guessed it was her husband, Ameen, forever in Africa, missing her, finally coming home. Wearing a long black skirt and top, her head covered in a diaphanous white veil that fell across her shoulders and down her back, Alia would see herself running towards the figure like a gull to the sea, wrapping him in wings and comfort.

Yet, on Ameen’s infrequent visits home, with the children’s excitement and the stir of his presence in the village, he seemed no more real than that figure she always imagined, so transparent was his touch, so short their time together. Between his coming and going, another baby would be made and she, left like Mother Nature, would have to fend for herself. Then her heart would sit inside her with nothing to lighten its dull, insistent thud.

On Alia’s wedding day, crowds of men stood in the front yard of her new home, surrounding her husband Ameen, shaking his hand and wishing on him a dozen sons. Alia sat on a pedestal in the living room, the women around her in a neat semicircle, their voices echoing through the still new house like future memories.

At nineteen, Alia had been ready for marriage, ready to discard a transitory adolescence that had left her no wiser to the mysteries of adulthood. Ameen was her mother’s choice, a second cousin whose enthusiasm for life and strength of will would lead to greater things. There was no courtship, little need for negotiation between the two families and, when the wedding day dawned on a bright summer morning, Alia felt her spirit soar at the possibil ities before her.

They would continue to live in the small mountain village their families had inhabited for hundreds of years, a quiet haven balanced on the side of Mount Lebanon and named after the refuge of ancient gods.

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.

I turn to a new page and write Saeeda’s name at the top.

Saeeda

Saeeda was the last child, the happy one, a girl. She had rosy cheeks and dark hair, and as an infant showed an inclination for joy that none in her family possessed.

Alia’s feelings for her daughter wavered between love and irritated concern until the day she promised five-year-old Saeeda’s hand in marriage to a first cousin’s son and no longer felt the need to worry about her future.

Asaad was only thirteen at the time and was already half in love with an olive-skinned and indolent village girl who lived on the other side of the village. Alia had watched one day while Asaad gazed in awe at the girl as she sauntered back from the village spring, a clay jar perched on one of her shoulders, her arms lifted to steady it so that her dress swung high above thin ankles and small feet. As she knelt to rest her jar on the roadside, a gold cross appeared round her neck and swung between the two small breasts bound by her bodice.

Saeeda never knew of her mother’s plans for her, nor of the overwhelming sadness they would make of her life, and grew up thinking the world of herself. Her brothers loved her with guilt-ridden indulgence, trying to make up for the indifference she would encounter as a grown woman. Adel, who was closest to Saeeda in age, was fiercely protective of his sister, fighting off any attempts to harm her, assuring her that she was as good as any boy he knew.

But whenever he urged her to find the strength to hit back at trouble, she would shake her dark head and smile. ‘You’re my courage, Adel. There’s enough anger in you for both of us.’

That was when he determined to look out for her for the rest of their lives.

Like her brothers, Saeeda attended the village school, but unlike them her enthusiasm was for the company rather than the learning. She was an unexceptional student who would incite her friends into spontaneous laughter and smile as soon as the teacher approached to reprimand them.

The only uncertainty Saeeda felt was in her mother’s presence, sensing Alia’s restless heart and wanting to reassure her. Saeeda would often rush in from the garden to sit by her mother and reach out to touch her hand lightly. Alia would look up from whatever she was doing and smile at the little girl, before turning away without seeing the light in her daughter’s eyes falter.

In early adolescence Saeeda refused to wear the long white veil her mother had ordered for her from Damascus, tentatively touching the delicate white silk and then pulling her hand away.

‘What is it, Saeeda?’ Alia asked.

Saeeda shook her head and did not answer.

‘Is it the material? It’s the best silk to be found anywhere.’

Saeeda looked at her mother and replied in a whisper, ‘I don’t want to cover my hair.’

‘What do you mean? You know very well that all the women in the family do.’

‘I won’t cover my hair!’ Saeeda said before stomping out of Alia’s room.

Later that day Saeeda found the veil neatly folded in a small square on her bed. She picked it up and gently shook it out. She scrunched the material in one hand and lifted it up to her cheek. It was softer than she had imagined and smelled faintly of the olive oil soap her mother used to wash her hands. Tiptoeing across the hall, Saeeda sneaked into Alia’s bedroom and walked up to the dressing table. She placed the veil on her head and watched the folds of silk fall over her narrow shoulders. She lifted one end of the cloth, threw it over one side and admired the way the whiteness set off her black hair and rosy cheeks. I am beautiful, she thought, and twirled lightly round.

‘Saeeda, what are you doing?’ Adel stood in the doorway watching her.

Saeeda tore the veil off her head, and rushed out of the room and into the garden. Alia was tending to her flowers and did not see Saeeda run as fast as her legs would take her to the pine forest behind the village school. She buried the veil and returned home.

When Saeeda married at fifteen, her father and eldest brother were not there to see the despair in the young groom’s eyes. He was dressed up, his hair combed back, and after the wedding was sent home with a child on his arm, a child unaware of the dramatic turn her life was about to take. The marriage lasted less than a year, cut short by the groom’s sudden departure for South America. He was never heard of again.

Saeeda lost her little-girl look and took on the re sponsibil ity of caring for her departed husband’s parents. Until their deaths the old couple took from her all the attention they thought their due. Unused to housework, Saeeda did her best to keep their home clean and tidy, looking for corners to wipe dust away from as she had seen her mother do, scrubbing the old people’s clothes with the natural soaps she bought from the village souq and hanging them out to dry on the front-yard clothesline.

On early summer mornings Saeeda would reluctantly get out of bed and check on her in-laws, and coax them into the armchairs she had placed on the front terrace where they could watch the comings and goings of their neighbours. Then she would rush into the kitchen, boil some flower tea and make the labneh sandwiches they loved. As she sat talking to them, asking after their health, insisting on an enthusiasm for the day that she did not feel, her thoughts would wander to her childhood and the endless joy some moments had held.

She thought back to Thursday nights when her mother wore a long white veil of Damascene silk wrapped tightly round her head, covering her soft hair and showing only familiar eyes. ‘I’m going to the prayer reading,’ she would tell the children through silk. ‘You may sit outside and listen. Quietly, children.’ They would sit and stare at the rows of polished shoes arranged neatly outside the prayer room beside Grandfather’s grave. It was there Saeeda committed the most magnificent act of defiance of her life. Sneaking past her waiting brothers, she grabbed an armful of shoes and threw them across the garden before reaching out for more. Then, cheeks flushed and eyes sparkling, she turned from her staring brothers, laughing loudly, her head flung back, and ran away. She was married a year later.

When her in-laws died, Saeeda returned home to live with Alia and Ameen, and at twenty-eight prepared once again to put the comfort of others before her own. She watched the two people who, one in her presence and the other in his absence, had shaped her life and loved them with the same intensity she had as a child, the anxiety she had once felt turning into insistent tenderness. She took over the running of the house, working quickly and quietly, her efforts imperceptible, mindful of her parents as she might have been of the children she never had.

Alia did not know what to do with the woman Saeeda had become. She would watch her daughter doing the housework and prepare to criticize a mattress unturned or a floor left unswept when something would stop her and the words refused to make themselves heard. In time, Alia realized that her heart had begun to dictate her actions. The tears that doctors told her were the result of the stroke she had suffered came to her without warning, trickling down to the taste of salt in her mouth. If Saeeda noticed her mother’s sadness, she did not comment on it, discreetly handing the older woman a handkerchief and then moving on to something else.

Saeeda’s attachment to her father grew as he became older and more vulnerable. Whenever he complained of pain in his arthritic hands, she would pour a spoonful of olive oil into her own and gently massage it into his long fingers, rubbing slowly at the swollen joints and humming a quiet tune to soothe him. Once, as she reached out to take his hand, he lifted it, placed it lightly on her face and smiled with such sweetness that Saeeda thought her heart would drop.

‘Are you alright, Father?’ she asked him.

‘You’re a good child,’ he whispered in his old man’s voice. ‘A good child.’

When Ameen died, Saeeda had just turned forty-two. She was rounder than she had once been, but her black eyes still betrayed hope and the rosy white complexion that had always been her only claim to beauty had not withered. Her mother was by then feeble.

Saeeda’s brothers insisted on bringing in a middle-aged widow from a nearby village to help care for Alia.

With extra time on her hands, Saeeda decided to tend to the long-neglected garden of the family home. She began by clearing it of the debris that had accumulated over the years, making way for the herb and flower beds she planned for, and raking the pebbles out of the earth. She scrubbed the floor of the terrace clean until the criss-cross pattern on the tiles that covered it shone in the sun, and had the iron balustrade around its edges painted with the same dark-green colour as the front door. She planted a clinging vine that would climb up the balustrade and enclose the terrace in green. Then she placed tall yellow rose bushes at the end of the garden overlooking the souq, and pink and red geraniums just behind them where they could be seen from the terrace.

But it was the herb garden that Saeeda was most proud of, a small square plot just outside the kitchen door, which she filled with basil and thyme, parsley, mint, rosemary and coriander, everything she loved to touch and smell and taste in her cooking. She spent so much time tending this part of the garden that the heady scents seeped into her clothes and skin, and stayed there so that she only had to lift her hands to her face and the smell of fresh basil mixed with the sharpness of parsley, mint and the exotic aroma of thyme and coriander would fill her nostrils.

Villagers said that it was the fragrance emanating from that herb garden that lured the stranger to Saeeda’s doorstep one summer afternoon. He carried a large sack of unshelled peanuts in one hand, a gray felt fedora in the other.

Saeeda and Alia had been sitting on the terrace in the imperfect shade of the still young vine, sipping aniseed tea in silence. Saeeda put down her cup and walked up to the man. He was small, thin and had the kind of face that from a distance seems familiar. She thought at first that he had lost his way, until he asked to see her father.

‘My father passed away over a year ago,’ Saeeda said, shaking her head.

‘May the loss be compensated in your own life.’ He paused before adding, ‘I once worked with your father in Africa. I wanted so much to see him and thank him for all he did for me.’

Khaled came from a small village across the mountain. Returning home after a twenty-year absence, he carried the mystery of distant places about him that Saeeda’s father once had. She sat Khaled next to her mother, served him tea and sweetmeats, and listened to the stories of adventure Ameen had neglected to tell her and her brothers. When he left some time later, the two women made their way into the house and prepared for bed.

‘I never knew Father had such an exciting time of it in Africa,’ Saeeda said.

Alia grunted.

Saeeda could feel her mother’s eyes following her around the room. ‘Is everything alright, Mother?’ Saeeda turned and asked.

Alia only looked at her daughter more closely. ‘Let’s go to bed, then.’

* * *

Khaled came regularly after that, sometimes as often as three times a week, always carrying a gift for Saeeda and her mother, always with a smile on his small, angular face. Saeeda was welcoming though she did not quite understand his interest. He was nothing like her beloved brothers, all with families of their own, strong and no longer needing her or their mother. Khaled was fragile, a man whose energy seemed finally to have dissipated after years of exile and hard work. In Saeeda he seemed to find the pause from activity that he needed, the quietness of a resigned existence. They sometimes spoke for hours, Khaled telling her of his years in Africa, Saeeda recounting stories of her childhood. At others they would sit in silence, watching the movement of the village around them and fussing over Alia if she sat with them.

Saeeda began to look forward to Khaled’s visits, not allowing her thoughts to wander beyond them but sensing suppressed anticipation inside her nonetheless.

One evening Khaled arrived later than usual to find Alia already in bed and Saeeda preparing to follow. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, standing at the front door. ‘I must be disturbing you.’

‘Come in, Khaled.’ Saeeda opened the door wider. ‘Come in.’ She showed him into the living room where a small side lamp cast shadows across the walls. ‘Can I get you anything?’ she asked him.

‘No, no, please. I just want to talk to you.’

Saeeda sat down and looked closely at Khaled. Suddenly she felt uneasy.

‘We are friends, you and I, aren’t we?’ he began.

She nodded.

‘I feel I can tell you anything and you would understand.’

Saeeda smiled.

‘They want me to get married!’

‘They?’

‘The family. There’s a cousin from our village, they want me to marry her . . .’ He got up and began pacing up and down the room.

Saeeda’s heart raced and her eyes followed his every movement.

‘They don’t know,’ Khaled continued. He turned and looked straight at her. ‘I already have a family back there. I told you about it, didn’t I?’ he said. ‘We never married. She is African.’

Saeeda shook her head in disbelief and continued to stare at Khaled.

‘I left her and the children, thinking I would be able to stay away,’ he said, sitting down next to her. ‘Your father knew about it. He understood, was so kind.’ He started to cry.

Saeeda reached for him and then pulled her hand away. She was surprised at how angry she was.

Khaled looked up at her and opened his eyes wide when he saw the look on her face. ‘I thought you would understand, Saeeda.’

She folded her arms over her heart. ‘We can’t all be loved the way we want to be.’

His once fine face seemed suddenly ungenerous and pinched. She looked away.

‘I’m sorry. I just came to let you know, I’m leaving the country next week. You won’t see me again.’

The next day Saeeda was clearing up in the kitchen after lunch. When Alia got up from the table, Saeeda turned to her. ‘Mother, what do you say we take the tea out on the terrace?’

The air was fresh and a subtle breeze lifted the green vine leaves into a gentle flutter. The two women settled themselves on the old sofa. Saeeda leaned over and poured the tea. She handed her mother a cup and took one for herself. It was that quiet hour between day and sunset, when village life seemed to float as if on an afterthought.

Saeeda felt a sudden impatience. ‘Did you love my father?’ she asked her mother.

Alia stared back at her. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Just that. Did you love your husband, Mother?’

‘In those days no one talked about love,’ Alia replied firmly. ‘I saw little of Ameen through most of our marriage, until he turned old and needed me to care for him.’

Saeeda looked at her mother and felt a deep, wide anger moving through her body. She had a sudden urge to get up and run, anywhere, away from her mother’s indifference, beyond the house and the village and everything she had ever known. ‘Did you at least miss him?’ she asked, trying to keep her voice even.

Alia put her cup down, bent her head and placed her hands in her lap. When she looked up, her face had the waxed look of age all over it. ‘I wrote him a letter once, asking him to come home,’ she said with a weak smile. ‘It was after the two older boys were hurt when the school collapsed over them.’ She shook her head and looked past Saeeda. ‘I never sent it.’

Why didn’t you let him know you needed him, Mother? Saeeda wanted to ask, until she remembered what had happened to her the night before and the enormity of her own fears.

‘Does that man want to marry you?’ Alia had recovered herself.

‘You mean Khaled?’

‘He was here last night, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes, he was.’

‘What was he thinking, coming so late?’

‘It wasn’t that late, Mother. I had been planning on staying up a little longer anyway.’

‘Does he want to marry you?’ Alia persisted.

‘No, Mother,’ Saeeda said, shaking her head. ‘I don’t love him. I don’t want to leave our home. I never have.’

Maysa

Summer

I wake to the sound of someone knocking on the front door. The early mornings are still cool and I wrap myself in a blanket before going to open the door. Wadih is standing on the terrace with a small suitcase in one hand and a large leather folder in the other. He has no jacket on. ‘Come in,’ I tell him.

He walks past me and stands in the hallway for a moment.

‘Come through here.’ I point to my room. ‘Just give me a moment to get dressed and make us some tea.’

He places his things on the floor and sits on the unmade bed.

‘Will you wait?’ I ask him.

He nods his head and looks away. This, I think to myself, is the moment I usually feel anger at his silences. I take my clothes into the bathroom and shut the door.

When I come out again, Wadih is not in the room. I run a hand through my wet hair and go into the kitchen to find him stirring a pot of flower tea, his head bent low over the fragrant steam floating from it.

‘It smells wonderful, doesn’t it? Like a garden in spring.’

‘Wonderful.’ Wadih is smiling.

‘Let’s have the tea out on the terrace,’ I say, putting cups and saucers on a tray and grabbing the biscuit box.

We carry the things outside and make ourselves comfortable on the sofa, now warm with the early morning sun. Wadih pours the tea and hands me a cup. I place it on the table, put my hands on top of my belly, feeling for our child.

‘It’s very soon, isn’t it?’ he asks, looking down at my hands.

‘I’m having it here in the house.’

‘Yes, I thought you would.’

I feel a sudden remorse. ‘There will be a doctor with the midwife in case of any problems,’ I tell him. ‘I’ve had all the tests and everything. It’s going to be alright.’

‘Did you find your stories?’ Wadih asks after a short silence.

‘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.

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