Against the Loveless World

by Susan Abulhawa

  “I have some news. But I’ll tell you later,” he said. First he wanted to know whether I loved the landscape. Had I gone to Jerusalem and prayed in Al Aqsa or been inside the Dome of the Rock? Did I like Bilal’s friends? He said I looked good. He wound his way through the narrow streets of our neighborhood, which felt both familiar and alien. I still disliked Jordan. We had gone there as refugees, and I thought I would forever hold that against the country. Maybe that’s how my parents and grandmother had felt about Kuwait.

  “Tell me now! You know I can’t wait,” I said.

  Our car interrupted a children’s game in the street, and one of the boys cursed profanities at us.

  “We’re very sorry,” my brother yelled back. “I’ll take another road next time.”

  From the side window I could see the boy’s surprise. My brother had a way of disarming people. “It’s okay!” the boy screamed back, wanting us to hear his forgiveness.

  “Impressive,” I said.

  “Yes, well. You’re the one who taught me the power of reacting opposite to expectation.” He tilted his head in a sly grin. It was the lesson I had learned from Um Buraq.

  “Tell me the news,” I said, but he was already pulling up to our building. Piles of uncollected garbage greeted us on the street, a far cry from the pomegranate, orange, almond, and fig trees I had become accustomed to seeing in Palestine. Even in the poorest, most crowded Palestinian neighborhoods, people made a point of planting trees wherever possible, even if only in front-door pots or on rooftops.

  A few neighbors walking by embraced me, their children running ahead to alert my mother. Most had been our neighbors in Kuwait who were likewise kicked out when the Americans came. It was that continuity that made life in Jordan bearable.

  I rushed to kiss Mama’s hand where she waited in the stairwell with more neighbors. Sabah stood behind her, a baby in her arms, waiting to hug me. I missed her too. Sabah had married shortly after our exile from Kuwait and gone to live in Zarqa, about an hour north of Amman. But now her husband had gotten a job in Amman, and they were living nearby.

  Sabah and my mother held me tight as we walked up the stairs to our apartment, neighbors and children trailing in our wake. Sitti Wasfiyeh was waiting inside. I bent to kiss her hand three times, then her forehead and cheeks, inhaling her scent—a mixture of old-woman smell, her homemade olive-oil soap, and the cardamom she put in her morning, noon, and evening coffee. “I missed you so much, habibti,” she said, tears rolling down her face. My grandmother had never uttered anything so tender to me before. “I missed you, too, Sitti,” I said.

  Mama and Sabah brought out plates of food, but Sabah couldn’t stay to eat. “I’ll be here first thing tomorrow after I feed the baby. You’re spending the day with me. Don’t you dare make other plans,” she said, kissed me, and left.

  It was wonderful to be with my family again. Mama had lost weight, but she looked radiant and somehow younger. Sitti Wasfiyeh too was thriving physically and uncharacteristically joyful. The interaction between her and my mother was different, kinder and gentler. It seemed much had changed in the nine weeks of my absence.

  I turned to my brother and whispered, “Tell me the news!”

  “Okay, but not in front of people. Let’s eat first,” Jehad said.

  We had just cleared the meal and were enjoying tea when we heard a knock at the door. In walked my two paternal aunts who had previously wanted little to do with us, who had made every excuse not to take in Sitti Wasfiyeh. They came with baskets of fruit to welcome me home, kissed my cheeks as if we were one big happy family. I was too stunned to protest, and only later thought of better ways I could have reacted. I could at least have asked them what they were doing in our house. My mother rolled her eyes and twisted her lips in my direction, but mostly she played along with the charade, serving them tea and sweets.

  Jehad leaned into my ear. “That’s the news,” he whispered. Even the neighbors seemed disgusted, and politely took their leave, but not without sharing knowing glances with my mother.

  Sitti Wasfiyeh, on the other hand, was positively elated, smiling unceasingly. When they left, she said to no one in particular, “They wanted me to stay with them tonight, but I said I’d rather be here, because I didn’t want them to start fighting over which of their homes I go to. I said I want to spend time with my granddaughter tonight.” My mother, brother, and I exchanged looks, and as soon as we were out of Sitti’s earshot, I finally got the “news.”

  About a month prior, a man had come in search of Sitti Wasfiyeh to talk about her share of an inheritance in thirty dunums of land in Ein el-Sultan. My grandmother’s village, the oldest town in the world, was being considered as a World Heritage Site, and a team of Palestinian and international archaeologists were seeking permission to create a dig on land that had belonged to her father. Years ago it had been arable farmland, but Israel’s siphoning of water had left it nearly barren. It was in Area A, which was under the Palestinian Authority’s jurisdiction. A few Palestinian families had bribed their way to build homes on the land, and now had to pay sizable amounts of money to my grandmother and her siblings’ heirs for rent and restitution. Universities and institutions funding the excavations were also paying a lot of money for the rights to dig. There was talk of the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Antiquities wanting to buy the property.

  “Subhan Allah!” Mama twisted her face to underscore her sarcasm. “How money has softened the hearts of your aunts!”

  “How much are we talking about?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure overall. But the immediate restitution from the families who built homes without paying rent or buying is a quarter of a million dinars!”

  Noting my shock, my mother continued, “Yeah, it’s crazy. Those bitches snatched up their mama as soon as they heard.” Mama was rarely so blunt. “They negotiated some type of ‘advance’ and took nearly all of it. Suddenly they wanted your grandmother to live with them, but she kept criticizing their kids and whatnot. You know how she is. They brought her back after a couple of weeks and offered to pay me to take care of her.” Mama twisted her face again. “Can you believe it? I just asked them what the hell did they think I had been doing for the past thirty-odd years? Those bitches.”

  “Mama, that’s a lot of money. We can’t just let them show up and take everything!” I protested.

  “There’s not a lot I can do about it. Luckily, your grandmother listens to your brother most of all, and he’s talking some sense into her,” she said. Still, my mother didn’t seem as interested in the money as I thought she ought to be. I suddenly realized that I hadn’t seen her smoke a single cigarette since I’d returned.

  “I quit,” she said matter-of-factly.

  I looked at my mother more closely, noticing new details. She was wearing makeup and her nails were painted. Her hijab was different, more modern and colorful. “Are you in love or something?” I asked.

  “No, silly girl!” she protested. She had gotten a “respectable job.”

  “What are you talking about? You’ve always worked a respectable job!” I said.

  She was employed at a women’s crisis center, answering phones, organizing support group meetings, and managing a team of volunteers. “It’s a DESK JOB! I’m running the whole place. Can you believe it?”

  I had not understood until then how humiliated my mother had felt by her life. The simple dignity of a “desk job,” as she called it, had transformed her. I should have said it again, that her embroidery was more special than any “desk job” could be; that she was an artist; that Western images of professional women don’t have to apply to us; that concepts of respectability and modernity are manufactured. Instead, I just congratulated her. She added, “They’re also training me to use a computer soon. Can you believe it?”

  Sabah came the next morning, bearing gifts of food—dates, mangoes, pomegranates, and vegetables that she raised in pots on her balcony. “Look how red it is. Wait until you taste i
t. I got the seeds from family in Palestine,” she said, holding up a tomato. “Let’s make breakfast. There’s so much to catch up on.” She removed her hijab in the kitchen and started peeling cucumbers. I put on the kettle and got a pan to fry eggs.

  “You still don’t use enough oil, girl,” Sabah said, shaking her head. “And you know you shouldn’t waste good olive oil on frying.”

  “You want me to use that American Mazola piss?”

  Sabah laughed. “A few months in Palestine and you’re sounding like an old peasant.”

  We set out a tray of food for ourselves and Sitti Wasfiyeh, who had awoken hours before me to perform the dawn salat and had been reading the Quran in her usual spot on a floor cushion. She hated sofas and refused to sit on them. “Frangie stupidity,” she would say about most things Western. Our sofas were basically backrests for our floor cushions.

  Sabah and I laid out the eggs, warmed bread, fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, za’atar, olive oil, labneh, pomegranate, and scalding-hot sweet tea with sage, which we sipped loudly, with exaggerated care, from Arab demitasses.

  “I like tea with sage in the winter. Mint in summer,” Sitti said. “This is good tea.”

  “May you drink it in health and joy, Hajjeh,” Sabah said.

  And Sitti responded, “May God bring enduring joy to you and your child. And may He bring my granddaughter a husband as good as yours.”

  “There’s my grandmother!” I said, glad for the familiarity of her insinuations.

  “What?” she protested. “I’m just praying for you to get a husband. I don’t know if it’s even possible anymore at your age. Shame you didn’t even have a child.”

  I had learned what Mama knew: to be defensive with Sitti Wasfiyeh was silly, because she wasn’t actually trying to be mean. It’s just who she was. “Take a bite from my hand, my beloved grandmother,” I said, extending a bit of bread with labneh and za’atar.

  “May God never deny me these sweet hands of my granddaughter,” she said, eating from my hand.

  Sabah and I left Sitti Wasfiyeh to her daily phone calls to her daughters, her Quran reading, and visits with the neighbors. We chatted in the kitchen while we put the food away and washed dishes. She hadn’t married the boy she loved, but a suitor who was a better practical match. Her family had been left penniless and unemployed, as we all had been when Kuwait kicked us out. Her marriage pulled them back from the brink of destitution.

  “He’s very generous and kind,” Sabah said. They’d fallen in love after marriage, but she admitted it didn’t feel as gratifying as she thought it would.

  “No man is ever as gratifying as we think he will be,” I quipped, and she laughed, the two of us standing shoulder to shoulder over the sink, she washing while I rinsed.

  Sabah asked about Palestine. We had communicated a bit by phone while I was there and she knew enough to ask specifically about Bilal. Of course, I didn’t mention the underground cavern. But I did talk about the bakery, the land, the sheep and goats, Jandal, Jumana—who later sent me a long letter of apology while I was still in Amman—her salon and brothers, the water pipes, the settlements, checkpoints, daily humiliations and indignities. “Israel’s occupation is pretty much what you see on the news. But they don’t show our weddings, cafés, nightlife, shopping, art and music scenes, universities, landscape, farming, harvests. It’s not what I imagined. At the same time, it is everything I imagined.”

  “Television makes it look like an endless war zone,” she said, pulling out a cigarette.

  “Oh no. Not you too?” I pointed to the cigarette.

  “Why don’t you just give in and smoke, Nahr? You’re probably the only adult in the country who doesn’t smoke.”

  “I’m quite fond of my lungs and don’t appreciate everyone polluting them for me.” I yanked her cigarette away and stole the pack.

  “Fine. Give them back. I won’t smoke,” she said.

  “I’ll give them back before you leave.”

  “You’re a bully!”

  “Bilal is a chain-smoker, but he’s considerate around me.”

  “Sounds like love,” she teased.

  “We do love each other,” I said, listening to my own thoughts as I spoke them. “But not how you think. There’s no word for it. It’s romantic, but without a sexual impulse, at least not an overwhelming kind. It’s strangely familiar and comfortable, but not purely friendship either.”

  “Sounds like you skipped right over the first twenty years of marriage and went straight to old married couple love,” she said. “Surely you’re going back?”

  After a few days catching up with friends, the charms of homecoming tapered off and boredom set in. Sitti Wasfiyeh’s inheritance and stories of women at the crisis center dominated conversations at home. I got a job as a cashier at a supermarket in Amman, but the pay was barely enough to cover transportation to and from work. Life in Amman had no substance. Everything and everyone looked the same to me. Every day was a copy of the one before. I went back to threading eyebrows and styling hair on the side. The emptiness of my days was accentuated by the purposeful life my mother was leading. I tried spending more time with my brother at his apartment, but he had a full, busy life. When he wasn’t gardening or managing Sitti Wasfiyeh’s newfound fortune, he was hitting away at his keyboard, all manner of indecipherable code scrolling on his computer monitors. It was an impressive sight, and it underscored how much our paths had diverged from our beginnings together playing in the streets of Kuwait. The family I knew and loved had been transformed nearly overnight. I found myself a source of joylessness in their midst, dissatisfied with everything around me.

  I complained about the grocery stores: “There’s so much packaged crap and not enough fresh produce,” I said to my mother, holding up a box of a strange pasta. “What is macaroni and cheese? How do you put cheese in a box unrefrigerated?” I complained about the weather: “How can it be so cold here and so hot just a few miles east in Kuwait?” Jehad thought that was a real question and began a science lesson. I complained about the water: “It’s making my hair dull”; about the taxis: “They’re all cheats”; and, of course, about my aunts: “Why are those two-faced bitches in our house so much?”

  “Nahr, don’t be so negative,” my brother finally reproached me when I suggested, for the millionth time, that my opportunistic aunts were trying to steal Sitti Wasfiyeh’s money. “Look how happy our grandmother is. What difference does it make why they visit? They don’t have control of her money. Our grandmother is no fool. She’s leaving plenty for her daughters and our cousins too. But don’t think she doesn’t love us,” he said.

  It turned out Sitti Wasfiyeh was secretly building a home in the Sweifiyeh neighborhood in Amman for my mother. “And for you too, Nahr,” Jehad said. Our mother didn’t know. How nice the surprise will be, I thought.

  My life felt aimless, and I blamed the whole of Jordan. Now, because it was not Palestine. Because Bilal was not here. Because no one needed me here. How I would have loved to see Um Buraq at that hour. I could hear her in my mind: Go fuck his brains out. Wage a revolution together. Fear death, but never fear life. Fall in love if you must, but remember cruelty always has a dick. How it pained me to think of her caged. It seemed to me the freest individuals were the ones who ended up in state prisons.

  Um Buraq would probably tell me that I was the one who had changed, not my family. I’d gone to Palestine to get a divorce, but I’d left with a sense of my worth as a woman who could engage with the world intellectually, who could love and be loved; a woman who could understand that the vast outdoors was more beautiful than anything humans could make. I dared to imagine being part of something as important as resistance and national liberation. The idea of transporting the weapons had settled in me, then morphed into a plan.

  In the six months since leaving Palestine, I hadn’t received any e-mail. But I continued to visit the Internet café once in a while to check my mailbox. I would compose, then delete, messages to
Bilal, until one day my brother alerted me to check my e-mail. “Bilal sent you an e-mail. I didn’t even know you had e-mail!” he said.

  “You talk to Bilal?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why hasn’t he called me?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just relaying a message.”

  Dear Nahr, Everyone here misses you, me especially. I hope you’re well and I hope you’ll come back, at least to visit. You always have a home here.

  I read the e-mail many times.

  Dear Bilal, I’m very happy to get this electronic letter from you. I’ve been thinking a lot about things and I’d love to come back to help you with the harvest to transport your olive oil.

  I hoped my letter was discreet enough. He answered immediately.

  There is no need to do anything. We have everything covered, but please do come back. You are sorely missed.

  I didn’t know where I’d live, or what I would do if I went back, but there was no returning to Kuwait, and no place for me in Amman. I wasn’t sure there was in Palestine either, but I longed to return, and gave myself a couple of months to save some money and sort out the logistics.

  Finally I had a clear goal, and it felt good to work toward it. I asked for more hours at my job, and booked as many beauty appointments as I could. I made and sold body butters, cleansers, and moisturizers, imagining Bilal would be waiting for me.

  At a client’s home a week later, I was dyeing and styling the hair of teenage twin sisters in advance of a classmate’s fourteenth birthday party. Their mother was paying me to “make them look better than everyone else.” She wanted her daughters’ hair to be “shiny, silky, and blondy” but didn’t want to send them to a salon where “everyone would know they got it done.” I charged her extra and made her pay in advance. The girls were pleasant enough, and I was working efficiently as they chatted about school, boys, and girls who were jealous of them. The TV hummed in the background, their younger siblings played noisily, and their mother paced about on the phone, in and out of the room, barking orders periodically for the little ones to behave.