The Pact We Made

by Layla AlAmmar

  He chuckled and started trying to fold a napkin into some sort of origami bird; he couldn’t seem to manage much more than a set of wings before unfolding it and starting over.

  I remembered more of that night in Berlin than I let on. A windy November evening, the air frigid and me sorely defenseless. Yousef and I had endured a long day at the conference and had decided to treat ourselves to a night out. He’d heard of a great club located in a former heating plant down by the river that played house and electronica and other kinds of music that had different names but sounded the same. He’d gone all out, in tight jeans and a button-down with most of its buttons undone. His hair was a dome sloping off his forehead, and he’d gone for a shave at some fancy barber he’d found online. He looked very much like he had at the party where I’d met him, when we’d both been on the brink of leaving our teens to begin our twenties. I opted for the only halfway-appropriate dress I’d brought – not having known that he’d want to go dancing – and I’d let my hair dry into its usual curls. Some makeup and my work pumps, and we were out the door.

  He was right. It was a great club. Thumping bass, strobe lights, young half-naked bodies – all you could want on a Friday night. It was like an industrial warehouse inside, with high ceilings and cement floors and dark tunnels. We drank and danced and laughed and I put on some angel wings that someone was passing out.

  It got late and I went outside for some air. The freezing wind slapped me in the face, jolting me from the haze of booze and whatever the pill I’d taken from Yousef was doing to me. He was nowhere to be found. I’d looked through two of the three floors, but then my head had started to pound, my stomach turning, and I’d needed to get out of there. I only just managed to grab my jacket, clutching it to my middle as I staggered out the door and vomited into a bush.

  Yousef wasn’t answering his phone, and I only had one other number to call. Having to call Bu Faisal was humiliating; he’d been my client for a couple of years at that point, but even in my haze I knew I could lose my job if he revealed anything to the bosses at work. I couldn’t even contemplate what might happen if word of the night got to my mother. But I was outside on a quiet street, littered with construction cones, and it was cold – the kind of cold that makes you forget you’ve ever been warm. I didn’t know where I was, and the little pill was telling me I’d die if I got in a cab alone, or if I tried to walk to the hotel alone, or if I did anything alone.

  What seemed like minutes later, Bu Faisal showed up in a car from the hotel, leaping out and throwing a coat over me. He hustled me into the back seat, murmuring reprimands about catching my death out there and not wearing clothes appropriate for German winters, and what protection was that flimsy jacket against the elements?

  The seats were black and shiny and the heat was on full blast. I sighed happily and mumbled something about my wings and I needed them to fly. He shined a light in my eyes, and then gave two little tsks of his tongue. He removed his coat, pulled off my angel wings and put them in my lap, then made me put the thick, wool overcoat back on properly. My shoulders and arms and all of me was dwarfed by it. It smelled of him, of cigar smoke and woodsy whiskey, and I suddenly felt very calm and safe.

  He spoke softly, as though he knew how badly my head was pounding. ‘There are bad people in the world, Dahlia,’ he said, like this was something I didn’t already know. ‘You’re young and beautiful.’ My belly dropped at that, but in my haze, I attributed it to the speed bump we’d just gone over. ‘People will take advantage of it.’

  ‘I’m almost thirty,’ I murmured.

  ‘Life begins at forty,’ he said, shushing me. He said I was special and had to take better care of myself, but by then my head was on his bicep, my eyes were closed, and I was no longer listening.

  The summer of my thirteenth year we took a big trip, and by big I mean that as well as my family there was Zaina’s and Mona’s. Our parents rented three villas in a gated compound in California – the other end of the world. It was populated by health nuts in short shorts and sports bras and Persian families who drove fancy cars and wore white doctors’ coats and knife-pressed suits.

  They were used to Arabs and accepting of us descending on their compound. The mothers pushing prams smiled at our mothers and gave us sticky cakes and date cookies. The fathers invited ours over for cigars and poker nights. We had communal barbecues by the compound pools, the men arguing about how best to cook the kebab while us kids whined about wanting hot dogs.

  I remember walking around the property at dusk, when the night sounds were just kicking up – the crickets and buzzing things whose names I did not know. So different from the dead nights of Kuwait, where you heard nothing but cars on the road. The nights were alive in California, in this green and golden oasis with its flashing billboards and theme parks you could see into from the highway. I never heard cars though from where I stood amid the dark, thick trees at the end of the property, just an orchestra of night sounds.

  Reza would often find me there. He was two years older than me and lived with his parents in one of the nicer villas, one on higher ground, with a view of the whole compound spread out beneath them – all spider-web alleys, turquoise pools, and multipurpose courts – like a modern-day Cordoba. His mother, a beautiful woman with dark eyes and long silk for hair, who I knew only as Aunt Sheri, was the social director of the place. She organized charity dinners, picnics and pool parties, Scrabble tournaments and Pictionary nights. She knew the best caterers and where to find the freshest seafood. She wore cashmere and dainty heels and jeans that looked too nice to barbecue in. Her jewelry was big and loud, huge stones hanging from her ears and throat, massive bangles jingling on her wrists. So different from my mother, who wore her house dara’a to the park and jammed a baseball cap over her hijab when we went to Disneyland, and whose everyday jewelry consisted of a gold wedding band and tiny diamond studs that no one saw.

  Reza favored his mother, with big, dark eyes and the softest, blackest hair I’d ever seen. He had her build, tall but with delicate bones, his features fine and smooth as marble. He was nothing like his father who, squat and fleshy, looked like a lump of dough someone had given up on.

  Reza kept to himself a lot, rarely showing up at his mother’s events, and when he did, he was removed. He’d be on a lounge chair, brown chest thin and shining in the sun, while we splashed in the pool; he’d only get in the water when we’d migrated to the food. At picnics, while we kicked footballs and threw frisbees, he’d be under a tree, his nose in a book with a terrifically adult cover – something monochrome with an austere, gray-haired man gazing into the distance.

  I was the only one he talked to, always at night when I roamed the compound. Sometimes I’d have to wait until everyone had gone to bed, then I’d sneak out of the villa and make my way through the maze of pink and blue hydrangeas and water fountains to the edge of the property where the trees were tall shadows and the air was alive with sounds. Reza would find me there. We’d walk through the sharp grass and he’d name trees in the dark, plucking up fallen leaves to show me the differences and I’d nod along even though I couldn’t see the veins or edges he was talking about. He explained how to calculate the temperature by counting cricket chirps and when it worked I thought he was a sorcerer. From him I learned that my name was a flower that grew in Mexico, and it was beautiful and wild as a goddess. He said it in the same breath in which he gave me my first and only nickname – ‘Kol Kokab’ – which he said was Dahlia in Farsi. I found this dubious since in Arabic it meant ‘every planet’, but he just laughed when I said that. He talked about phases of the moon and knew the Latin names of constellations and the love I felt for him that summer might be the loveliest emotion I’ve ever had, which is terribly sad, but which, in my more charitable moments, I regard with a kind of sentimental awe.

  Those emerald grounds were our paradise. We kicked through tall grass, searching out little treasures: shiny coins, camouflaged GI Joe figures, and a rainbow of h
air clips. We split our finds; he’d march toy soldiers across my shoulders and I’d slip pennies into his pockets.

  He unearthed a nazar on the night he gave me my first kiss. It gleamed blue and white against the dark earth, like early-morning dew. He picked up the hard stone. It was a pendant, the silver chain dangling loose in the breeze. We bent our heads over it and he wiped it clean with his thumb. It shone like a beacon, reflecting the streetlights and the moon like a blinking eye. The ‘pupil’ was black and rough to the touch as though the dirt were permanently embedded in it.

  Reza reached out to put it on me, but I backed away.

  ‘It belongs to someone,’ I said with a shake of my head.

  He tried again, smiling as he replied, ‘Finders keepers.’

  He clasped the pendant around my neck and then he kissed me. He kissed me there, beneath an orange tree, with that night concert going on around us – the chirping and hooting, the rustling leaves, and the wet sound of our mouths pulling apart and coming together.

  I hold those moments in snow globes in my mind, perfectly preserved miniatures of our trees and grass and night orchestra and endless sky. And every so often I’ll come across that nazar in an old jewelry box, or a constellation will flash across the screen in some movie, and those snow globes in my mind will shake until our leaves rustle and our stars tumble and fall.

  7

  They Spin Finely

  It was like some bizarre voir dire, I thought as Um Khaled walked us through the questionnaire. Mama and I hadn’t been there long, only enough time to be shown to two winged armchairs and receive two glasses of tepid water. Enough time for Um Khaled to apologize profusely for the state of her ‘office’.

  As far as my admittedly meager knowledge went, these things were normally conducted in the home, but we’d been directed to an apartment building in a questionable part of town. Rundown and derelict, built in the 80s by the look of it. Bare-footed children ran through the street, clothes and rags hung from windows, and the elevator was a ramshackle Otis with a scratched-off maintenance card. Um Khaled’s office was a spartan apartment: white kashi tiles, the kind they don’t use anymore; white walls; wide aluminum-paned windows looking out over nothing. There was a tapestry of the opening verse of the Quran on one wall and a blue evil eye talisman hanging by the door. There was a rolled-up prayer rug in the corner. Our seats were opposite a metal desk littered with papers and files, and she sat in a rickety, swiveling desk chair behind it.

  Um Khaled was what I expected a matchmaker to look like: wide, expressive black eyes, laugh lines and crow’s feet, large mouth. She looked like someone who’d brought peace of mind to a lot of people. She had a broad nose that she kept passing a hand over, as though afraid it might have wandered off. On her head was the standard black hijab, but her abbaya was lightweight and loose. It said, Don’t be nervous. I’m just like your mother beside you.

  Mama was indeed dressed just like her. They spoke the same language and got along perfectly. They had a shared history of experience, a shared frame of reference. It was not completely alien to me, this talk of how much easier it had been in their day, how much more seriously people had taken the business of marriage, but it was foreign enough for me to be unnerved by it.

  ‘Fill this out, Habeebti,’ she said, turning to me with a toothy smile and sliding the pages across the desk. ‘You can have your mother help, or you can do it on your own, as you like.’

  I wondered if just letting Mama fill it out for me was an option, but Um Khaled got up and disappeared into another room, leaving us alone with this exam and a pen.

  ‘Yella, let’s see,’ Mama said, positioning the top page between us. ‘Obviously he must be a college graduate … Sunni …’ She started ticking her way down the line. ‘He must make more than you, what a stupid question! Older or younger, it doesn’t matter.’

  I leaned back in my seat and left her to it. I couldn’t believe she’d actually dragged me here. I couldn’t believe Baba had allowed it. It was humiliating for everyone involved; couldn’t she see that? What would people think, if they knew she’d had to resort to a khataba to sort out her problem child? Did she honestly think this Um Khaled was going to find someone remotely compatible with me?

  ‘You’ve never been married,’ Mama murmured with a tick on the page.

  That wasn’t the real question, though. It was just a subtle way of asking whether I was a virgin or not.

  I wondered what else she planned on lying about.

  Several moments later, she turned to me. ‘Dark, medium, or fair skin?’

  ‘Does it really say that?’ I leaned over to look.

  ‘Hmm, we’ll put medium, it’s better.’ She ticked that one. ‘Widowed or divorced is okay. Children are fine, right?’

  ‘I don’t know, are they?’

  She pursed her lips and frowned like all this was my fault, which I suppose in a way it was. ‘I want to say no, but we have to be realistic, Dahlia.’ She ticked yes, but said no to sons. I asked what the difference was. ‘Daughters will stay with the mother.’ She’d thought of everything. She let loose a laugh. ‘La baba, we don’t need your beach house. We have our own, hamdilla.’

  ‘Ha?’ Um Khaled said, leaning around the door frame. ‘Is everything okay in here?’ She waved a Filipino maid in.

  ‘Hamdilla,’ Mama answered.

  The maid replaced our empty glasses with fresh ones and set down two istikans of strong, brown tea and a small plate of butter cookies in their transparent wrappers. ‘Thank you,’ I said. She scurried out without a word; Um Khaled followed her back into the other room.

  Mama was still ticking away, thankfully without consulting me, and I plopped sugar cubes into our drinks, stirring them with the same tiny gold spoon until the white sugar melted into a swirl at the bottom of the glass and then disappeared completely. I took a sip of mine. Too hot.

  ‘How much did you pay for this?’ I asked, blowing the steam off my tea.

  ‘A nominal fee. It was nothing, don’t worry.’

  ‘I’m not worried,’ I replied with a scoff. I was sure we’d spent more for less. ‘I’m only asking.’ She ignored me, tick, tick, ticking away. She must have been on the second or third page by then.

  ‘Yes, please God, a quick engagement,’ she said with another tick.

  I sat up and stopped her hand. ‘What?’

  She looked at me, her thin black brows dropping into a frown. ‘It’s asking if you’d prefer a long or short engagement.’

  ‘Define long or short.’

  She glanced down at the page. ‘Less or more than six months.’

  ‘Are you insane?’ I grabbed the pen from her hand and put a dark tick on the ‘more than’ space.

  ‘Dahlia—’

  ‘No, Mama. It’s enough I let you drag me here; you’re crazy if you think I’m going to let you ship me off to the first man Um Khaled brings by. It should be a year – six months is nothing!’

  ‘Your father and I were engaged for less than three months. It was the same with your aunts and uncles. Your Aunt Norah was only engaged for three weeks if I remember correctly.’

  Three weeks. It seemed impossible. You might as well just marry someone off the street. I shook my head and said, ‘Well, that was a different time, as you insist on reminding me.’

  The last trip our families took together was perhaps our most eventful. It was not uncommon for entire families to undergo a mass exodus to Europe to escape the brutal heat of summer in the Gulf, and it seemed like everyone joined our vacation that year. We had rented apartments within blocks of each other and did everything together. Bu Faisal and his wife and kids had taken an apartment down the block as well, and as always, we’d folded them into our family outings.

  I was unhappy with the vacation. I had begged to return to California, to that state, that country, that Mama’s family finds too far to manage, but nobody listens to kids. I’d spent that spring avoiding the family beach house. Feigning a fear of my
usual summer brown and a sudden hatred of sea water, I’d stayed behind with a maid each weekend. Not Mama, Baba, Zaina or even Mona could induce me to go. I stayed home with my colored pencils, my paints and easel, and my coffee-table art books that Baba ordered for me. I got very pale that year. Not dark to begin with, I paled to Wednesday Addams-level white. I was nothing but papyrus skin, blue veins and angry scratches. So translucent, it was like you could see right through me. I should have liked to disappear.

  The family chalet meant Uncle Omar – Mama’s cousin – and I already had a hard time avoiding him at the weekly family lunch. What had started as ‘accidental’ touches had become the pressing of his body against mine as he moved behind me to take his place at the dining-room table; his eyes crawled all over my body when I stood to go anywhere; and his hand often found its way under my hair to squeeze my nape like I belonged to him.

  If it was hard to avoid him at home, it was damn near impossible to do in London. The family went everywhere together – on walks in Hyde Park, to theme parks outside the city, on trains to visit historical sites out in the country. The only time we separated from the men was when we went shopping, and so I became a shopper. Every day I would beg and beg to go to Selfridges or Harrods or just up and down Oxford Street for hours on end. It was easy since Nadia was getting married that fall, so there was always that justification for a shopping day. But my sister has never been much of a shopper, and she found her dress the first week we were in London. By the end of that first month, she had shoes and a veil and honeymoon clothes, and it became harder to convince her to go to the stores. When I would suggest it in the morning over breakfast, she’d shake her head and frown and Uncle Omar would glance over at me with narrow eyes and an unkind smirk on his lips.

  I could not tell anyone. I did not tell anyone. The shame of it would have dissolved me from the inside. The longer I stayed silent, the harder it was to say anything. Was I complicit? Was it, on some level, my own fault? Was I inviting the attention? I couldn’t open myself up to that possibility, could not make it real by speaking of it.