by Eman Quotah
Certain things, she doesn’t mention.
Late in the week, she realizes she’s double-booked herself. At the end of the beach party, she promised to meet Zee on the Corniche the same evening she is supposed to visit Auntie Randah.
She phones Summer to ask what to do, speaking as quietly as she can in the bedroom. Summer advises to have the rendezvous first.
“No one shows up on time for anything here. Your aunt won’t notice you’re late. You can borrow Nasser.”
But that night Summer calls to say Nasser has to take her mother shopping. Hannah has already told Auntie Randah not to send her driver.
Hannah’s seen yellow taxis pass by on the wide boulevard two blocks from her dad’s apartment. While her father and Lamees are performing sunset prayer, she tells Mary she’s leaving for her aunt’s house. At the bottom of the stairs, in the dark entryway with tinted-glass doors, she turns, thinking she’s forgotten her keys. But here they are in her jeans pocket, and there is Fadi, holding onto the balustrade.
“Bye, Fadi. Go back. Yalla,” she says, though she knows he doesn’t understand.
Taking him with her would be a terrible idea. She would never. She’s tempted, though. Having company is nice.
“Upstairs, Fadi. Or your mother and father will yell at me.” She tries to say “up” in Arabic. He grabs her hand. She marches him upstairs and nudges him inside the apartment.
Outside, sunset prayer is ending, and down the street, the corner shop’s metal accordion gate shudders open. Crossing the intersection, she stumbles on her abayah—again!—as she lifts her foot to the high sidewalk. A group of men walk toward her. To appear less conspicuous, she pulls her scarf across her face, the way she’s seen Lamees do.
She treads carefully, because wearing the veil is like wearing dark glasses. What she sees are shadows of cars, but no taxis, passing by on the main road. As though her body has turned to sand, she drifts aimlessly down the sidewalk, past apartment buildings with aluminum balconies, vacant lots strewn with rebar and worn-down tires, yellow dogs sniffing at banana peels. The grass median smells like sewage. The trees’ feathery leaves and coral-colored blossoms appear shrouded.
The taxi driver she hails wears his red-and-white headcloth piled high, so it nearly touches the ceiling. He speaks urgently through yellow teeth. He expects her to understand Arabic. In English, he knows “Where?”
She shows him the address of the restaurant Zee picked, jotted down in her notebook.
The cabdriver speeds up a ramp onto the freeway. After ten minutes or so, they descend another ramp into the streets of the city, hitting traffic that slows them down. The driver leans into his horn often. Hannah concentrates on the green neon signs that flash by on squashed white shops, advertising Pakistani food and tailors and shawarma.
The drive to the Corniche takes forty-five minutes. The cheesy-looking restaurant is made up of huts on stilts in the water and a series of bridges in between. She tells the taxi driver to wait for her. Her face uncovered, she holds onto the handrail as she crosses the first bridge to the maître d’ stand. When the maître d’ speaks to her in Arabic, she feels herself blushing. Not knowing the language that is her birthright is a special kind of stupidity.
With his bouffant black hair, European suit, and bow tie, the maître d’ seems to be looking down on her. Zee is around somewhere, but she made a terrible mistake coming here. How would it look for her to appear in public with an American soldier?
As she walks back to the cab, the water beneath floats dark as a veil. If she threw off her scarf and abayah, they would disappear into the sea.
The cabbie loses his way, and the drive to Randah’s villa takes forever. Hannah doesn’t arrive till nearly ten o’clock, and just as Summer said, Randah doesn’t care. Shoes are piled in the entryway, a warning that many people have gathered. Randah brings Hannah into a room with a gauntlet of people standing, waiting to meet her.
“Your aunts and uncles,” Randah says. “Your grandmother, your grandfather. Your cousins.” She explains each person’s exact relation to Hannah, but the words are as foreign as if she’s speaking in Arabic. Hannah can’t tell these people apart, and yet they seem part of her. They’ve missed her, and she has no idea who they are. They kiss her on both cheeks. The women touch her sleeves, her hair, her cheeks, her ears, as though she were a young child. She nearly kisses a man, introduced as her Uncle Hassan, on the mouth, because she misjudges the direction of their air kisses.
“The men can be here because they’re our father, our brothers,” Randah says.
Flush with human contact, Hannah sits on the floor cushions between her aunt and maternal grandmother.
She tells her grandfather she has his letters in her purse. She wishes she’d brought her sketch pad so she could draw his face, so like her mom’s.
“Do you want me to translate them?” he says.
She wants to say yes, but she also doesn’t want to let the letters go.
“If I give them to you, you have to give them back.”
“Promise,” he says. He puts the letters in his pocket. “Come visit me next week and I’ll return them to you.” His English is better, less accented than she expected. It sounds almost British.
Randah’s Sudanese cook, Lateefah, has made rice and lamb stewed in milk, diced cucumbers and tomatoes, and a kind of salsa. Eaten with hands and spoons, dinner is served after eleven o’clock. After the guests leave, Randah will not let Hannah go.
Randah’s formal sitting room is decorated with traditional touches that somehow have a modern vibe—like Randah has taken care to reclaim the most relevant parts of the past. Embroidered dresses have been framed and hung on the walls. Instead of Western sofas or Eastern cushions, there are custom-made divans on wood frames. The little carved-wood side tables are topped with glass. A silk rug in dark blues and reds covers the floor from wall to wall. It is the kind of rug Hannah would call Persian, like she would call the gulf on the Eastern coast of this country Persian, when people here call it Arabian.
Randah says she has not talked about her sister in years. She goes on and on. She says she spent the years missing her younger sister—not knowing where she was. There will never be enough words to fill in the canyon of time, Hannah thinks, but Randah tries. She sits with Hannah far into the night, legs folded beneath her. Randah smokes a shisha, sucking on it slowly between sentences, punctuating her stories with a sound like that of a child blowing bubbles in a pool. Fruity smoke wafts up toward the ceiling. Saeedah often gazed at the sea, Randah says, dreaming about faraway places: Cairo, Rabat, Madrid, New York.
“We always fought.” Two years older than Hannah’s mother, Randah lived in Cambridge, England, for five years in the seventies, while her husband studied for a doctoral degree he has never finished. When she speaks in English, Randah’s lips grasp the vowels like delicate pieces of glass. She doesn’t swallow her l’s and r’s like an American does.
“Our aunties said, ‘Sisters fight, but you fight like enemies.’ They lectured us about the importance of family. They said, ‘Me and my brother against my cousin. Me and my cousin against a stranger.’” Auntie Randah leans forward at her waist, takes a hit of apple tobacco, and touches Hannah’s knee with her free hand. “You know the saying?”
Of course Hannah doesn’t. She sips her Vimto, which looked so ruby-red beautiful when she accepted the glass, but tastes like carbonated, sweetened penicillin.
“Well, those aunties spoke the truth, yes?”
Randah’s words come out throaty, coated in smoke. The way she talks about family—the way everyone here does—is more foreign to Hannah than anything else. She has always had only Mama. To have dozens of people feels like a gift, a gift of love that she never expected. Because she is family, they love her.
At the same time, their love is a pressure, a standard she will have to live up to. She can’t abandon it or pretend they never gave it to her. They are family. She has to return their love. They’ll
expect her to stay in Jidda, she can feel that, too, and she’s never intended that as an outcome of this trip. She knows her mind won’t change. Why does that make her feel like a traitor?
“I’ve always wondered why my sister disappeared with you.”
She sucks on her tongue to stay silent, as she does—did—when fighting with her mother. But she and Randah are not fighting.
“Of course she wouldn’t tell you,” Randah says. “Of course you wouldn’t know.” The disappointment in her voice belies the certainty of her words.
Did she think Hannah might have the answer?
“I’m sorry, Auntie,” Hannah says.
Shuttled by Randah’s driver, Hannah gets back to the apartment after two in the morning, feeling satisfied, though quite a bit sheepish that the poor man had to stay up so late to drive her home. The stories Randah told her tonight were like sandstone bricks slowly stacking up, building for her a past she’d never known she had. It isn’t a solid structure. But she sees the ruins of the life her mother left behind, rather than an empty expanse of nothing. She’s grappling with some of the details, things that would be punch lines in America but seem to be normal here. How her parents are cousins. How her mother’s father for a short period had two wives at once. Randah told her about these aspects of their family as though they were nothing to hide. How shocked should she be? Could she love two people at once? Could she be married to two people at once? Should she see any kind of equivalency between her grandfather’s polygamy and kissing Zee at the beach?
How much a part of this family does she want to be? It’s a constant thrumming question, but it confronts her loudly now. Her father stands outside the apartment building, bareheaded, his thawb unbuttoned at the neck. His white undershirt peeks out. She has never seen him angry before.
He opens the door for her, and the courtesy makes her want to spit before he speaks.
“Where the hell have you been?”
“You know. Aunt Randah’s. Why are you shouting?”
“I’m not shouting.”
“Why are you swearing at me? You could have called me at her house.”
“You can’t go gallivanting around Jidda in the middle of the night. If you get in trouble, I’m the one who’ll go to jail. That’s the way it is here.”
She leaves her father in the apartment’s entryway, pretending she’ll never see him again, and crawls into bed, a thin wall separating her from the rest of the family.
The next morning, her father is eating breakfast on the living room floor when she comes out of her room. He apologizes.
“You came here to see people, to see your family. But call next time.”
“I should go back home,” she says.
“This is your home.”
She hears how hard he’s trying to persuade her.
RESOLUTION 678
Summer hears from someone who hears from Zee: He doesn’t understand why Hannah stood him up. He wants to see her again.
“He’s got a girlfriend,” Hannah tells Summer over the phone.
“I can take you to the American Consulate to meet him. At the canteen they have ham sandwiches, beer.”
“You’re not listening.” Hannah tries to think of what she misses about America; it’s not ham sandwiches or beer. She misses the change of seasons. Brittle leaves on the ground. It’s a week before Thanksgiving. They might have snow there.
“I heard you,” Summer says. “But it’s casual.”
“I guess.”
“I’ll find out when he wants to meet you!” Summer squeals, seeming as excited as if the date were hers.
Summer tells Hannah about rumors that a group of women—university professors and businesswomen—have been apprehended driving in Riyadh.
“They’re blacklisted. They lost their jobs.”
“Wow.” Hannah shivers. She misses driving, gripping a steering wheel, walking up the steps to her own apartment.
Three days later, at 11:30 a.m. sharp, Nasser delivers Hannah to the front gate of the consulate, and Hannah’s American passport gets her in. She passes through a series of narrow, hospital-green hallways to the small dining hall where Zee waits. He wears his desert fatigues and looks younger than she remembers.
He orders ham and cheese and a Budweiser. She orders Caesar salad and a Reuben. He wants to know how long she’s lived in the United States, how long she’s been in Saudi, when she’s going back.
“I’ve always lived there,” she says. “I took the semester off. I guess I have to go back in January.”
“Ohio’s not so far from Indiana.” As though there is some chance they can be acquainted beyond this isolated instant in history, this strange convergence of coincidences that has brought them together.
“Don’t you go wherever the military sends you?”
“Sort of. I guess my girlfriend wouldn’t like this.” He points back and forth between them. “And neither would your boyfriend.”
It’s a joke to reestablish the boundaries of their relationship, which belongs here, in this country, in the few spaces where commingling of the sexes is allowed.
“Been back to the tape shop?” Zee says, as though wanting to return to their almost meet-cute, their original point of entry into each other’s lives.
“My father doesn’t have a driver.”
“The music here is so much cheaper than at home. But I miss beer. And pizza.” He offers her a sip.
“They have pizza here.” She pushes the bottle away.
Another awkward half hour of conversation and he escorts her to the gate. He kisses her goodbye, though the guard is staring straight at them. She tastes beer on his breath. Is it the beer or being American that makes him so bold, so cocky?
In the car, she puts her hand on her racing heart. Can Nasser hear it? In her purse she has a package: a manila envelope she found in a drawer at her father’s apartment, inside of which she has stuffed the FYC tape and the twenty-page letter for Malik—full of impressions of her visit, but no confession about Zee. Last night, she took ten minutes to decide whether to sign it “Love, Hannah,” or “Sincerely, Hannah,” or “Best, Hannah.” In the end, she wrote “XXX OOO Hannah.”
Before filling the envelope, she emptied it of old black-and-white passport-size photos with fluted edges like stamps, showing her father in a ghutrah, his face bleached by the flash so that he had no nose. The envelope had an address written on it in Arabic in permanent marker. On top of that, she Scotch-taped a piece of white paper with Malik’s address on it. M. Thomas, she wrote, to be on the safe side. Wouldn’t want anyone to know I’m corresponding with a boy. She meant to give the envelope to Nasser with a few riyals for airmail postage, to mail while she was at the consulate, but she forgot.
“Can we go to the post office?” she says.
“Miss, I have to go back to pick up Madam.” Nasser accelerates through a yellow light as they speed below a looming underpass.
“I’ll take a taxi.”
“Your father won’t like that, Miss.”
“I’ve done it before. Who’s going to tell him?”
“I can’t leave you with a taxi driver, Miss.”
She gives up. At her father’s apartment, Lamees and Mary are setting the floor for lunch, which they eat at two o’clock. Muneer is not able to leave the paper for lunch today, Lamees says.
Hannah isn’t hungry. She pokes at her rice with her spoon.
“You don’t eat?” Lamees says. “Have you decided to be on a diet?”
The family naps in the midafternoon, and so Hannah waits till they sleep. As she slips on her sandals, she feels someone brush her leg.
“Fadi, go back to sleep.”
He hums and tries to hug her. She can’t resist him. Holding hands, they walk to the corner store. Two men lean against the store’s shelves of toilet paper and biscuits. They wear their shimaghs with no iqal, and they chew reedy sticks that smell like tree sap. Hannah waves her phone card, and when they respond in Arabic, sh
e waves it again.
The men point to the two orange pay phones in the back of the store.
Hannah half keeps an eye on Fadi circumambulating the store as she dials. She has to punch in the intricate combination of digits three times before she gets through to her mother’s answering machine. In her purse are the letters to her mother from her grandfather, along with his translations. They contain no key to the mystery of why her mother chose to disappear and not come back to Jidda. Instead, they are full of two decades of news about births and marriages and her grandfather’s newspaper, members of the Saudi royal family he’s interviewed, a meeting with Muhammad Ali.
She should be happy to have this family history, but instead she’s livid that she has to read it after the fact rather than experience it.
“Where the hell are you?” Hannah says into the handset while the message plays. It beeps over her words. She pulls her scarf closer to her hairline. The men stare. Have they never seen a woman before?
“It’s me. I wanted to let you know I’m in Jidda. Seeing the place you grew up.”
Hannah hasn’t seen or talked to her mother in three years, since she ran away to Toledo. She sets the handset into its cradle. Calling her mother seemed like something she should do until she did it. She regrets leaving her ghostly, metallic voice—a piece of herself—on the tape.
Fadi is going up and down the short aisles of the tiny store.
She calls W, leaves a short message about where she is, and apologizes for not calling in so long.
Dialing the United States is getting easier the more she does it. She calls her mother again. Why not?
“Mama. Sadie. If you’re there, pick up. Pick up, Mama.”
She hears herself gasp when the phone picks up, as though she were eavesdropping on her own conversation.
“What are you doing there?”
“I want to know why. Why we had to disappear.”
“You don’t understand. They wouldn’t have let me stay here with you. They would have taken you from me.”
