by Eman Quotah
On Saturday morning, Muneer drives to Aladdin’s on Carnegie to stock up on ingredients for the feast. Saeedah has already left for a study group or the library—as usual, he doesn’t know where she’s gone.
He returns with rice, lamb, cilantro, pita, plastic packets of cinnamon and cloves, dried orange and fresh oranges, carrots, tomatoes, and two hot peppers the size and shape of his thumbs. Saeedah sits in the wicker rocking chair reading an Arabic translation of Gone with the Wind. He notices signs that prove his point about bundling up: Her hands have cracked and bled along the knuckles. Her lips are so chapped they look perpetually rouged. Her hair flickers with electricity. He wants to offer her petroleum jelly and ChapStick.
Instead he says, “Didn’t I tell you Jameel is coming?”
She turns a page. “Welcome to him.”
“Do you want to help?”
“Welcome to you.”
It bothers him that she won’t say a straightforward “No.” Alone in the kitchen, he preps the lamb and rice. He grates orange peel into the pot, and the scent adheres to his hands. He goes into the living room to ask Saeedah a question, but she’s disappeared. The empty chair rocks.
He calls into the bedroom, “How much hot pepper in the salad?” His words drown in her silence. Is she in the house?
The doorbell rings, and Jameel arrives with Diane, a woman he’s been dating since last year. She’s an elementary school teacher with long, straight, hennaed hair and a silver cross at her neck the length and width of a pinky nail. Once, when Muneer picked Jameel up at her place, her German shepherd, Jack, scared the shit out of him. This is the story Jameel chooses to tell when Saeedah comes out of the bedroom.
She greets them in Arabic, kisses them on both cheeks, and lets Diane touch her belly and ooh and ahh over her. Everything seems so normal. Muneer can’t believe he thought things were strange between him and Saeedah.
“And Jack licked him on the eye and he had to wash his face seven times!” Jameel says.
“I don’t understand why,” Diane says. “They were kisses.”
“Dogs are dirty,” Saeedah says.
Muneer agrees, yet the way she says it, and the way Diane freezes with her mouth open, as though she is about to disagree loudly, make him jump in quickly.
“He’s a nice dog. I was taken off guard.” He wipes his face, as though the dog has licked him again. “Let’s eat, OK?”
Diane asks if she can help set the table.
“Shouldn’t we sit Saudi-style?” Jameel says.
Muneer doesn’t care, but Jameel seems to want to turn this into some sort of cultural display. They spread a plastic cloth on the floor and eat with their knees bent beneath them. Diane sits cross-legged.
Saeedah takes a mouthful of rice. “You shouldn’t cross your legs,” she says. “It’s not etiquette.”
Diane’s eyes, light-colored like marbles, roll up. She tries to cut a piece of lamb with a spoon. “Let’s sit at the table. Wouldn’t you be more comfortable that way?”
“Can I get you a knife?” Muneer says, feeling sorry for her.
“No, I’m fine.”
Jameel rummages in the kitchen and comes back with a butter knife.
“That’s no help,” Diane says.
Jameel hacks at the meat on Diane’s plate, gives up, tears it with his fingers, and offers it to her. Meanwhile, Saeedah puts on her sneakers. With the door open, she stands outside and lets the below-zero air blow in.
“It’s pretty cold out there,” Diane calls to Saeedah. “Don’t you want a coat?”
Muneer’s growing annoyance with everyone in the room is like water on its way to boiling, minuscule bubbles in his chest popping, then larger ones, bursting pockets of anger. On the soap opera he watches most weekdays to improve his English, there is a psychologist whose three children are addicts, and it has dawned on him that he, Muneer, is a journalism student unable to uncover the truth of whatever is wrong with his wife and his life. Last week, he took the small reporter’s notebook out of his knapsack and stood at the bathroom mirror, interviewing himself.
“When did your wife begin behaving this way? How did she react when you didn’t have enough money to go home over the summer? Is there anything you could do to make things better?”
“I don’t know,” he told the mirror. “No comment.”
In his socked feet and sweatshirt, he joins his wife on the front porch, hugging himself for warmth while flakes of snow turn her hair white as an old lady’s. His teeth clack; it’s that cold. He has never felt so out of place.
“What’s going on?” he says.
She turns to him, looking lost. Like she doesn’t know what to tell him.
She steps off the porch. Muneer watches her leave a trail of footprints leading to the car. She revs the engine. He returns to his friends and his nearly finished meal.
“That was strange,” Jameel says.
“The rice is delicious,” Diane says to Muneer. “Is there orange peel in here?”
Jameel scoops spicy duqus onto his rice.
“No problem,” Muneer says. “She’ll be back soon.”
AIRMAIL
There is a gap in Muneer’s memory of Saeedah five or six or seven years wide. She was a dirt-faced, plait-haired little girl in the courtyard one minute, and the next, mashallah, a beautiful woman glimpsed from behind a screen.
At a late-night family gathering at Aunt Faizah’s house, he’d left the men’s salon to go to the bathroom and glimpsed her. The latticework screen between them turned her face into a beautiful jigsaw puzzle, challenging him to piece it together. She had little gold earrings like berries and her palms and fingernails were henna stained, rust red. When she moved her hands, it was like a flash of plumage from behind a bush. He thought of her as a bird, never still except in the pause before it flew from a branch.
Someone saw him, and the girls and women squawked and covered their heads and faces.
“God forgive you, go back to the salon,” Aunt Faizah said.
Before they whisked her off, Saeedah smirked at him, like she was having the last wordless word. She mouthed something: Cigarette? He didn’t smoke, but he slipped outside into the courtyard and waited. The dark sky was swirled with clouds, like foam on Turkish coffee. Servants had set out lengths of plastic cloth, little bowls of cucumbers and tomatoes, chopped cilantro with lime. Soon they would bring out the trays of lamb and rice, spiced with cardamom and cloves. He could already smell the food.
“What are you daydreaming about?” she said.
“God, you’re like a jinni, appearing out of nowhere.”
She wore a black dress with the neckline cut straight across from shoulder to shoulder and the hem at her knee, and a black leather headband. He had never noticed the mole exactly in the middle of her cheekbone before.
“You got cigarettes?”
He covered his mouth with his fingers and nodded toward the gateman and the cook, an Egyptian husband and wife, who were descending the steps burdened by an enormous tray of rice and lamb. It wouldn’t be proper for them to catch him and Saeedah flirting. She curtsied like a queen in a movie and disappeared into the house, leaving him to wish they’d had more time. The rest of the night was other men talking at him.
Muneer and Saeedah’s worlds were separated, but her face lived in his mind. He thought of her often in the weeks to come.
At first, he didn’t think of marrying her. His plans were nearly set: he had applied for a government scholarship to go to the States to study. His brother Bandar had gone to Germany and Belgium and Canada, staying long enough in each place to decide he wanted to study somewhere else. He’d come back from Toronto a few months before with a big, bushy head of hair that their father threatened to cut whenever he saw it. Midsentence while serving a customer he’d say, “Can you believe that’s my son? I’m going to cut his hair in the middle of the night.” Bandar scowled. Muneer marveled at his brother’s disrespect.
From Canada, Bandar
had smuggled a dozen little bottles of alcohol, hiding them in a pair of tube socks stuffed in his shoes. Muneer half admired his brother’s gumption and half considered him an enormous fool. If the customs agents had caught Bandar, they would have thrown him in jail. To drink the gulp-size quantities of rum and schnapps, Bandar, Muneer, Jameel, and two of Bandar’s buddies had driven to the desert outside the city after the last prayer of the day. They veered off-road and drove for five minutes into the desert, keeping the glare of the streetlights in their rearview so they wouldn’t lose their way. The sky was so stacked with stars Muneer felt sure he could count the seven heavens. They spread a blanket on the ground in the beam of the headlights, kicked their shoes off, and swigged two bottles each. It was enough to coat his tongue and warm his cheeks, not enough to get drunk on. Bandar claimed the last two bottles, and at the end of the evening seemed the tipsiest. He’d brought a shisha to mask the smell of alcohol. They smoked for nearly an hour and took turns breathing in one another’s faces to test how well the ruse was working. The smoke tickled their faces. By the end of the night laughter gurgled in their bellies like the water bubbling in the shisha.
It was the only time Muneer ever drank alcohol, the only time he was ever tempted.
A few nights later, Muneer and Bandar were hanging out with Jameel at their father’s dress shop downtown in the Balad. Bandar talked about America as though he’d been there before, as though he were an expert on New York and Chicago and Los Angeles.
“Come with me,” he said.
Muneer looked up from the newsmagazine he was reading. Bandar swiped it and hid it behind his back when Muneer reached for it.
“We’ll study together,” Bandar said. His eyebrows lifted on the word study, as if to say, “We will do nothing of the sort.”
Muneer grabbed the newspaper his father had left on a stool by the door. He shared his father’s obsession with other countries’ politics and war, but in the two years since he’d graduated high school, working in his father’s shop, he’d started to yearn for more than talking about the news. He didn’t want to read the newspapers or listen to BBC Arabic anymore. He wanted to hold a microphone to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s face. He wanted to be banging on a typewriter.
“America,” said Jameel. He ate watermelon seeds out of a small metal bowl. In front of the shop, their dads sat on overturned buckets passing the nozzle of a shisha back and forth.
“You can both come,” Bandar said.
They applied. Muneer waited for news of his university applications and went to the shop daily. He thought about Saeedah, writing her name over and over in his mind. Envisioning the smudged kohl under her eyes. He started to regret applying to American universities. What if God meant something else for him? It so happened that Saeedah’s father had run a newspaper called al-Sharqiyah for more than a decade. Muneer could work for him, couldn’t he?
The more he thought about it, the less he wanted to go. One evening while he was drinking tea with his parents, Saeedah’s name fell out of his mouth.
“My sister’s daughter?” his mother said.
Muneer’s father looked up from behind the pink screen of his newspaper.
“It’s not a good idea to marry a relative so close.”
The sentiment was something of a newfangled idea, and Muneer watched for his mother’s reaction. She measured out seven spoons of sugar for Muneer’s father and poured Lipton tea into the small jars they used as their everyday tea glasses. The fat crystals danced in Baba’s glass as she stirred.
She handed the tea to Muneer’s father. “Why shouldn’t he marry my sister’s daughter?” she said. She was a woman who would never raise her voice at her husband, but would not always agree with him.
“Go to America,” Muneer’s father said. “When you come back, think about marriage. Why drag a wife along?”
“You trust young men over there by themselves?” Muneer’s mother asked, and when it became clear from her husband’s face that trust had nothing to do with anything, she turned to her son and said, “It will be lonely there. You don’t believe me, but it will be.”
Soon the letters came from America, battered and stained from crossing the ocean. Muneer and Jameel had gotten into programs in Cleveland. Bandar’s envelopes contained single pages telling him he had not been accepted.
“I won’t go without my brother,” Muneer said.
“By God you’ll go,” his father said. “If you don’t, people will think neither of you was smart enough to go to America.”
In the end, Bandar went to Dhahran to study petroleum engineering. Muneer and Jameel found an apartment in Cleveland through the uncle of a friend of a friend. They arrived in August. The muggy weather, though ten degrees Celsius cooler than at home, nonetheless felt familiar and welcoming. But soon chill crept into the air, the green of the grass and trees vanished like a mirage, and the sky was the dull gray of his mother’s old pots and pans. Everything felt strange. Not necessarily bad, but strange. The cold that burrowed into him, the houses with their aluminum siding and sloped roofs, the lawns, the deciduous trees reaching up to the sky with bare-naked limbs.
He wrote his father letters, and the responses arrived weekly on tissue-thin airmail paper that crackled between his fingers.
I thank God you are learning everything you can, his father wrote. If I were a young man, I would want to be in your place.
In December, no letters arrived. Muneer didn’t dwell on the absence. With exams pressing on his brain, he hadn’t had time to write his father, and so his father had had nothing to respond to. On December 24, Muneer flew home for winter break, his suitcases full of Fruit of the Loom T-shirts for his brothers and Chanel No. 5 for his mother and sisters. When he landed at the Jidda airport and climbed down the jet’s rickety stairs to the desert scrub of the landing pad, Bandar was waiting for him, the ends of his red-and-white shimagh folded over his head casually, as though everything were the same. When they hugged and kissed on both cheeks, the cloth of Bandar’s headdress grazed Muneer’s skin.
“Why are you home?” Muneer said. Bandar’s midyear break fell in January, and Muneer hadn’t expected to see him for more than a few days.
“Baba passed away,” Bandar said in Muneer’s ear. “God have mercy on him.”
The words made no sense. Bandar’s hot breath tickled and smelled of frankincense gum. Muneer couldn’t suppress a giggle. His brother pinched him, hard, on the forearm. It hurt like hell.
“He had a stroke,” Bandar said. “Two weeks ago.”
“Don’t lie.”
But it was true. Muneer’s father was dead and the past two weeks of Muneer’s life had been the lie. The meals Muneer had eaten, the TV shows he’d watched, the thoughts he’d had—wrong, wrong, wrong. Every small happiness he’d experienced—a free pizza his boss had given him, an A he’d gotten on a quiz—was a deception. He’d been wrong to look forward to going home and seeing his father, kissing his father’s round cheeks; watching his bent, turbaned head as he cleaned his fingernails, one by one, with the cap of a ballpoint pen; listening to him talk about the young Arab generals and the new unity and how their country should be part of that, not leave it to Egypt and Iraq.
Instead, Muneer should have been rubbing his fists into his eyes to stop crying. He should have been helping wash his father, wrap him, and bury him. He should have been looking at his father’s face one last time.
At night, lying on a thin mattress next to his brother with the book-hard pillows he wasn’t used to anymore, Muneer wanted to put his hand into his chest and pull his whole heart out. He tried. He placed his fingers against his sternum and pressed harder and harder until it hurt and his fingers seized up and he had to go outside to stretch them out and moan with pain and grief because he might wake up his brother if he stayed inside.
Oh, but that was a lie, to let the family think he wasn’t angry that they had not told him and sent for him immediately.
Muneer’s mother wore mourning
white and never left the house, as was the custom for four months and ten days after a husband’s death. She kept her hair covered, though only her children and sisters surrounded her. Until his last week at home, Muneer never saw her alone. One evening he found her sitting in the formal salon, pouring tea.
“Sit with me,” she said.
“I’m not going back to America.”
She mixed his tea with sugar, the way she would have mixed his father’s tea. Muneer winced at the sweetness of it.
“God keep you for me and protect you,” she said.
The next day she told his brothers he had decided to stay in Jidda.
They had come to their father’s formal sitting room, where they sat on low cushions around the perimeter, to decide how they could best care for their mother. There were also two sisters to marry off. It would not be hard to find families willing to marry them. And there was Lujayn, the littlest, to take care of.
“You have to go back to America,” they told Muneer. “For Baba and for Mama. She needs us to support her, so you need a good degree from over there.”
“And let you lie to me again when someone else dies?”
“God forbid,” said Salem, the oldest.
“God knows what will happen, and we’ll do what’s best, with His guidance,” said Sameer.
Bandar came up with the idea that Muneer take a semester off and help out in his father’s store. If he had not stayed those extra months, he might not have married Saeedah.
‘UQBALAK
The engagement happened more because of God’s will—and Muneer’s mother’s—than his own. On a warm May night, a few months before he was to return to the States, he took his mother to Saeedah’s sister’s wedding. In Aunt Faizah’s courtyard, strands of lights were strung from the top of a pole to the edges of the wall. His mother went inside, complaining about the climb she would have to make to the roof where the women were sitting. In the courtyard, servants had unrolled threadbare woolen rugs from edge to edge and laid out cushions. Some of the men, the early arrivals, sat with their thawbs stretched like trays across their laps and the tops of their socks revealed. Shisha smoke hovered above their heads. Aunt Faizah’s husband, Fareed, jumped up when he saw Muneer. Of Uncle Fareed’s children, Saeedah looked most like him. Muneer could not look at this man without thinking of the daughter. The way their eyebrows were set high above their eyes, so they looked skeptical or like they were laughing at a joke no one else understood. The dark purple of their lips. The square set of their shoulders, like a doorframe or a gate. Like they stood between him and something mysterious. Were they protecting him from forces that threatened him? Or keeping him from something he wanted? He couldn’t be sure, and at the time, the uncertainty intrigued him.
