“Is something burning?” Samar asked to get rid of her, and almost immediately felt guilty. It’s not your fault, she wanted to say. You’re a nice girl, my destroyer. The truth is that, well, the truth is that Samar is nervous. Nervous! As if she were the young girl here.
Everything has changed so quickly. Samar won’t be teaching the composition class come next fall. This is good; this is new—the result of a campaign by Samar to get, if not tenure, better recognition by the school. In truth, the article by the German journalist—the one published in the winter about the body of Salem Abu-Khdeir—helped Samar make a case for herself as a kind of public intellectual, quoted, as she was, heavily in the piece. (The older professors, old men, always old men, had insisted that exposure in popular outlets should count against her, not for her, but the dean—increasingly obsessed with proving the humanities’ relevance—brushed away these criticisms.) Now, Samar doesn’t have tenure, no, but her photograph is on the landing page for the school as a featured faculty member. Next year, she’ll be teaching a course of her own design: “Novels of Resistance”—no more lower-level composition classes for her.
So yes, she could have called Vera back in order to do it again: to be interviewed about the Girl and the Soldier, to provide (as she did for the Salem article) a kind of cerebral center for the story. Yes, she could have exchanged meaning for exposure. In the case of the Girl and the Soldier, they would have spoken about the anxious intimacy between the oppressed and the oppressor; they might have spoken about the Western fixation on unveiling—revealing, exposing. How what they call progress is a series of commodifications. But she didn’t call her, didn’t give her the quotes—the meaning—that this white woman so craved, because why should Samar peddle out her insights to be quoted briefly in a German-language magazine? She’ll write it herself. Indeed, Samar has started drafting a new article. She’s saving the best bits for herself. She’ll say it in her own words.
In the garden, Samar has plucked off a leaf from a plum tree and is sitting on a bench that Father installed years and years ago. She is under a canopy of grapevines, and the air is cool. Her thirst is less an appetite than a buzz, a hum, an animation inside her. She tickles her nose with the plum-tree leaf. She is, she knows, more sensual now than she has ever been.
Her phone is in her pocket. The messages from the journalist erased; the messages of congratulations saved. Mabruk, they say, mabruk, mabruk. That’s the other reason that Samar never called Vera back. There’s no time. It’s all changed so suddenly: Samar is engaged to be married.
Married.
She still forgets sometimes. When she is home, when she is wandering in the garden that has grown her whole life, when she is bustling around in the kitchen with Fatima, when she is sitting by Mother’s bed to hold her hand, or at her father’s old desk trying to write, it feels, to Samar, impossible that she will leave, that soon she will bring her clothes and books to another home, the home of her husband. Her husband.
Husband. Fiancé. Groom. Abu Hashim. Yusef Abu-Hashim.
He is a widower. None of Samar’s firsts will be his firsts. No matter, no matter. Samar knows enough to know that symmetry is a lie.
One of the hardest parts about getting engaged was how happy it made Fatima, that little full-faced weasel. Fatima’s mother had been instrumental in the engagement, eager to get Samar out of the house so that her daughter could finally move out of the apartment down the hill and begin running the proper house, the grand house. Fatima’s mother diligently monitored the whispers and nods, found out which men might be looking for someone like Samar, which aging men might want to marry (or marry again), not for children but for some housekeeping and companionship. It was an intrusion that maddened Samar—the names always being dropped, casually mentioned—how embarrassing. But with Mother increasingly frail, Samar felt vulnerable, scared. It was the street in Chicago she kept recalling—terror in the middle of the afternoon, the footsteps coming up behind her. Just a jogger, it had turned out, but the fear was real. An unmarried woman. What could she do? She could leave or she could marry. Didn’t it come down to that?
“Did you hear the widower Abu Hashim has come back from America?” Fatima’s crooked-toothed mother said, ostensibly to Fatima, one night as Fatima washed vegetables and her mother—not even bothering to hide what she was doing—used her footsteps to count the length across the kitchen, measuring out space for a new fridge, maybe. The weaker Mother became, the bolder Fatima’s family grew.
“Ah,” Fatima said, loudly. Her husband, Samar’s brother, was napping in his childhood bedroom before dinner. His boys were watching TV. (Fatima is hoping for a girl this time.)
Samar was at the kitchen table with Mother, trying to get her to drink more water.
“Is he the one with the son in Atlantis?” Fatima asked.
“In Atlanta, yes,” the mother said. “The son sends back a lot.”
It was obvious that they had rehearsed this. Samar was burning up. She had told them to stop. She had told them to stop trying to set her up with all these leftover men. (Then what are you? She could see the retort in their eyes.)
“He likes books,” Fatima said, glancing at her mother to confirm the line. “I hear he likes books.”
Abu Hashim the widower. A gentle man, unhurried. His children are grown; his oldest, yes, lives in America with children of his own. His younger son works in Saudi, and a daughter who lives with her in-laws inside, yanni, in East Jerusalem. It took, he told Samar later, years and years for his daughter to get her blue hawiyya, and so much money. All that to say, when Samar moves into his home—her husband’s home, husband, husband—it will be just the two of them. His home is lovely, one of the old stone buildings by the university. Not much land for a garden, but well built and vine-covered. Samar has a room for her desk—her own room to work in. And it is not so far from Mother, just a cab ride away, not so far.
A gentle man. Yes, he seems to Samar like a gentle man. Is it age? He is over sixty; she is barely past forty, although still bleeding, and she wonders . . . but no matter.
She doesn’t know if she is making a mistake. It’s true. She doesn’t know. Nobody willingly gives up an entitlement, not even a gentle man. So she will cook, yes, and clean. But he will, she senses this, bring her cups of black tea when she is writing. Sugar and sage. She will have a room to write in—not her late father’s desk dragged into her bedroom, but a separate room for writing. A desk overlooking the small, tangled garden that, at some point, Samar will coax into order.
“I admire your voice,” he said to her during their courtship, fiddling with his hands when he came to see her at home. Mother sat in the corner—this was back in the spring, and she was not yet confined to bed—grinning away. “Your writing,” he went on, “it sounds like you.”
In this moment, she thought suddenly of Father and how happy he would have been to hear this man praise his daughter’s mind. “Thank you,” she said. Later, only when they became more familiar, did Samar say suddenly one afternoon when they were sitting some distance apart on the bench in the garden, “I wish you could have met my father.” Her father reading his newspaper, her father at the window, waiting for history to right itself. Her father, killed by hope, by his own broken heart.
“I would have loved to meet him,” Abu Hashim said. “Allahyerhamo.” Not yet taking her hand in his. A gentle man.
Fiancé. Husband. Widower. Abu Hashim. An engineer. He still works, although nothing full-time. For years, he lived away from home, on great ships that traversed the oceans looking for gas—an engineer in perpetually crooked glasses (her imagination here) surrounded by a tough and able-bodied crew who sometimes held boxing matches belowdecks. Sweat and darkness. But now he is back; he is home in the home his parents left him. Of his late wife, Allahyerhamha, Samar knows little except for the specter of a horrible and fast-acting cancer years ago.
Is the marriage a mistake? Does it matter? In the end, Samar felt she had two choic
es: to leave, to push and push until she got a one-year teaching fellowship elsewhere—Chicago held promise—or to stay and marry. How could she stay in her childhood home once Mother goes? Relegated to some back room in what will become Fatima’s house? Unbearable. To go from berating the girl for her overly sweet tea, her unconvincing mopping, to go from that to being the withered branch with no rights, no power. No. Not that. So what, then? Leave here for good? Pull up her roots?
Sitting on this bench, the grape leaves trembling in the smudged light of gloaming, Samar tries to look upon her mother’s house, the house her father built, the way a stranger might see it in passing. Solidly built, without the affectation of a winding staircase, so popular these days. Stone and high windows. A kind of fortress. This is the house where Samar has marked every Ramadan of her life, except for the years she spent at Oxford.
The wedding will be after Ramadan, of course, a few days after Eid. Quiet, quick. They would have done it before if there’d been time.
Abu Hashim made his quiet, self-deprecating jokes. “We could always marry during Ramadan,” he said, adjusting his glasses. A tall man. Thin and elegant. “A bargain wedding!”
Mother was bedridden by then. Samar’s brothers and an uncle sat with legs spread wide on low sofas in the salon. Abu Hashim had come to speak to them about Samar, to ask their permission. Her men. They had all laughed at his joke: a wedding without a meal. Samar brought in the tea on a tray. Then she left the room, left the men to talk. She went to hold her mother’s hand.
“Mama,” Mama said to Samar, delirious, distracted.
“Mama,” replied Samar, tapping her mother’s hand, avoiding the spot where her IV drip was needled into her papery skin.
“Mama,” Samar’s mama said again. There are days when that is all Mother says. Mama, Mama. To Samar, to Fatima, to her sons. Mama, Mama.
Later, Samar’s brothers repeated Abu Hashim’s joke to the whole family: a Ramadan wedding, a bargain wedding. Samar sensed—perhaps overly sensitive, she knows—that there was a glint of cruelty in it. Samar, a bargain bride, a withered branch. Samar over forty. Barely, but over. And all of this like some farce of a real wedding. Wasn’t it?
“Halas,” Samar said to her brothers, her voice so much higher and sweeter than the voice she thinks of as her own. She saw Fatima and her mother exchange a conspiratorial glance, and wondered if they would giggle about it the next day when Samar left for campus—how young Samar sounded, how nervous.
It will not be a big wedding. They’ll host guests at home, meaning at Abu Hashim’s home. The home she must now come to think of as her own. It will be a quiet wedding. No abduction rite, with Samar fake weeping—or really weeping; girls get very into it—torn from her mother. No enormous dress swallowing her, no pale face painted on her face.
A small party. They’ll greet the guests as man and wife. No elaborate ritual around the loss of her girlhood. No ululations of women watching her be taken away to sex, sex, sex.
And yet.
He’s a gentle man. He’ll be gentle, she tells herself. He’ll be unhurried. It is not his first wedding night. His children are grown. These are the ways she reassures herself. This is something extra for him—a bonus near the end. She is happy with this arrangement, because, she imagines, so much of herself will remain for herself. In this marriage, they will each have their privacy.
Samar is not scared of sex. Oh, no, she is anything but scared. To be touched! To touch! She has waited so long, deferred and deferred. Sometimes, sitting in the little room of her mother’s salon, Abu Hashim telling them about some element of chemical engineering, she’ll feel a kind of wild fire rushing up from her stomach, lower than her stomach, up to her throat. She’ll see his hands, thick, able fingers, and want to press her deepest part up against him right there. To be touched, to be touched—this does not scare her. If she is scared—if there is a buzz of fear—it’s when she thinks about being seen. To be naked in front of a man. To see herself through his eyes, to wonder if her breasts look as deflated as she fears, if the pudge of her loose lower belly is obvious. Samar doesn’t think of her own body as wasted, but sometimes, she’ll feel the places where what was full is now, in a sense, empty. Or she’ll pause when plucking out the gray hairs from the part of her scalp. She plucks them one by one—gray baby hairs she hasn’t dyed yet. But she has paused to ask herself, Who has seen me? Who has borne witness? Then, immediately, she feels embarrassed for having indulged such thinking. Is that why she said yes? To be witnessed? To be seen?
The day is gone. The sun has slipped. Soon the adhan will call the end of the fasting day. Fatima must be arranging the table, or sitting once again by Mother’s bed to encourage her to sip a bit more tea, or perhaps, she is continuing her less-than-subtle casing—visualizing where she might put a new couch, or standing with her arms crossed in the dining room, assessing the table, which seats eight, and could she fit in an extra leaf? Then turning to the curtains, feeling the rich, heavy material in her tiny hand, unsure if she’ll keep it as it is, meaning sumptuous, or will she go with something that lets in more light. The bedroom that Samar’s brothers shared will become Fatima’s sons’ bedroom. And Samar’s bedroom? The one that remained hers when she went off to Oxford, the one that was waiting when they called her back, when her parents called her back? That bedroom will become, Samar imagines, the nursery for the girl Fatima is carrying.
Any second now, the call will go up, and Samar’s nephews will tear out of the house to fetch her back inside for the Iftar meal. Samar has known her nephews all their lives. Sweetness and terror: helping their mother mop the house on Fridays, chasing after pigeons in the courtyard. They are good boys. In her way, Samar is essential to them—her insistent questions about their homework, the quiet house she keeps with Mother, the treats she brings back from her travels. What will they think of Samar the wife? Do they think of her as old? Do they equate Samar with her own mother? Two old women in a house too big for them?
At Oxford, Samar thought of herself as old already, already too old. She was barely thirty, but she felt like a spinster. Foolish girl. If only she’d known how young she was when she was young. She tries not to think about Oxford too much. The early days, over a decade ago now, when she was finishing her PhD, she thought that she might never come home, although that’s not quite right. She knew she would come back, but let herself imagine she might not. Oxford, Oxford. Lonely days. But lonely days that felt—no other word—important. She thinks of long afternoons in the student housing, unsure what to do with herself in those hard-to-place hours before sunset. Sundays in England were the worst—a nebulous, unformed day you had to get through while waiting for the week to start. She would sit at her cheap plywood desk by the window. She fed coins to the radiator. Often, she tried to read, but dropped her book at the sound of the plaintive cries, radiating through the wall—ragged, tinny sounds of a desperate coupling that filled her neighbors’ Sunday afternoons. When she opened her window, she only heard them louder. Sometimes she wasn’t sure. Sometimes it could have been weeping. “Please don’t let me die of loneliness,” she would whisper, closing her window again. At times, she wondered if it wasn’t birds, playing tricks on her lonely ears. Crows, complaining to one another, or the thin notes of longing issued by the lone heron that flew from tree to tree in the commons. She might laugh then. What would Lacan say about such a desperate imagination?
Oxford, Oxford. When Ramadan came at Oxford, Samar found herself cheating—breaking the fast before it was time. Before, that had never been an issue for her. Even as a young girl, sitting with the older women to fold chopped, honeyed nuts into pastries, to tend to meat, Samar did not feel herself tempted. But in Oxford, she found herself taking water during the fast. She would wake up from a daydream and find that she was drinking a glass of water from the sink in her room. Why bother to stop? There was nobody there. Back then, Ramadan was falling in the winter. There was no need to take water: cold days, damp, she probably d
rank enough water through her skin. The thirst wasn’t a question of hydration, she thinks, but of displacement. Who was she away from the dip in the step of her mother’s threshold? Who is she? To tell her, she needs to walk where the driveway leans left, to walk under the canopy of pale green in the house’s entryway, to come home to the smell of her mother’s cooking, to nurse petty rivalries with her sisters-in-law, to abide the manic energy of her nephews. Sitting on her father’s bench in the dying light, Samar feels—Samar knows—that she can’t leave without losing herself. She can’t do that again. Death to leave, death to stay. Is that free will? Choosing what you love enough to let it kill you?
And now and all at once, here it is. The adhans’ calls begin to rise up from the valley and the hills. Voices blending and weaving, voices outdoing one another in an expansive, ephemeral symphony. For today, for now, the fast is over.
Acknowledgments
First and with my whole heart, my thanks to Hadeel and her beautiful family, without whom this book would not be: thank you, Hadeel and Shadi, for giving me a home in Bethlehem, thank you for telling me about your struggle and trusting me to hear it. Thank you to Caesar Hisham, the greatest tour guide in all the land and the one who opened the door for me. Thank you Hani, Sabah, and Mohammad, for treating me like a sister.
This novel was written almost entirely while I was a student at the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. That program is led by the brave and tireless Michelle Latiolais. Michelle, you believed in this book even before I did. Thank you for giving me the space and fortitude to write it. I love you. For the support and guidance, thank you to Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Danzy Senna, Amy Gerstler, and Professor Julia Lupton.
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