the magnificence of mountains in winter or the distance in a blue sky, he would place a hand on the back of my neck and absently rub the skin there until I felt whatever I was looking at move up my spine, down my arms and into my fingertips.
The day before I left for the village we went for a walk on the beach.
‘It’s not just about the fighting, is it?’ he asked me.
‘That house is where everything began, Wadih,’ I whispered.
‘And what about me, Maysa? What about me?’
He walked past me then, another lone figure in the sun, vulnerable and fiercely strong both, as we all are.
* * *
My world feels so small now, the house, the garden and the shadows in between. On the rare occasions when I go down to the village, I encounter no one who can lift my spirits. When she comes to see me, Selma tells me people have begun to talk. Your belly, she says, is going to be difficult to hide soon.
I tell her that I am not afraid of village talk.
‘And the child,’ she retorts. ‘What about the child? What about its father?’
I stand in front of the dressing table and stare at my figure in the full-length mirror. My dark hair looks long and unkempt, and my face is forlorn. I place my hand on my belly and rub gently. I am nothing like my former self, less poised and more vulnerable.
To comfort myself I think that my child will be different from the rest. She will have my dark hair, the sultry green eyes of her father and her skin will glow somewhere between gold and olive. I shall call her Yasmeena and dress her in shades of blue and yellow, and she will grow up to recognize the scents of pine and gorse just like her mother.
It is winter and I am resigned to my fate. My concern for the wilting vine will not be silenced. I fetch the ladder and climb up high enough to touch the trellis and the ropelike, dry branches of the once luxuriant plant. Looking up through the netting at the distant sun, I am overcome by dizziness and fall off the ladder. I lie on the ground for a moment or two, breathing in the mixed smell of earth and dust, and feeling a tingling through my body.
Selma arrives but she is less than sympathetic.
‘I found blood.’
‘Lie down and let me look at you,’ she says, gently pushing me onto the bed. ‘What made you do it?’
‘The vine is dying.’
‘Dying? It’s coming on to winter. Of course it’s dying. It’ll come back to life next year.’
I turn my head to the wall, fight back tears and hope she does not notice my distress.
‘Yes,’ she says abruptly after completing the examination and walks into the bathroom to wash her hands.
‘Yes, what?’ I call to her with alarm.
‘The baby may have been affected by the fall. We’ll have to call in a doctor.’ She comes back into the room.
‘You know I don’t want a doctor, Selma. You know that’s why I have you.’
‘I know that you care about this baby more than about your pride.’
This house, this old, dilapidated house, was once a castle, alive and spilling over with energy. My grandmother sat in a wooden-backed chair at the southern window, watching for the last of her children running home from school, and now there are shadows where she has been, shadows without sunlight, clouding my vision, filling me with fear.
The doctor is a small man with a smooth face and delicate features. We do not talk during the examination.
When he is done, he sits down on the edge of the chair opposite my bed, his brown doctor’s bag placed by his feet. His voice is soft. ‘Yes, well, the baby is alright, but you’ll have to make sure this doesn’t happen again.’
Outside, the morning is well under way. I can hear the revving of engines and the children who use my front garden as a short cut on their way to school. The smell of pine cones burning in the stove fills the room with a soft scent and I cannot stand this man’s clinical distance.
‘You think I should be having this baby in a hospital, don’t you, doctor?’
He looks taken aback. Then he stands up and prepares to leave, holding a piece of paper in one hand and his bag in the other. ‘I’ll ask Selma to fill in this prescription for you. If you notice any more bleeding, please call me.’
Selma sees him to the door and returns to my bedside. ‘I’ll go and get that medicine for you now.’ She pulls the bed sheets up so that they almost touch my chin. ‘Do you need anything else?’
The defiance rushes from me and leaves a sudden fluttering fear behind it. I reach for my friend’s arm. ‘Why can’t I be more like Alia?’
Selma’s reply is gentle. ‘Do you think Alia never had moments when she felt unsure of herself?’
‘I don’t know what to think any more,’ I say with a sigh. ‘I’m trying so hard to understand.’
‘What is there to understand? Your grandmother was capable and dutiful like most women had to be at that time.’ Selma pats me on the shoulder and stands up. ‘You have no way of knowing all these things now, Maysa,’ she says in a matter-of-fact voice.
‘But I can imagine, can’t I?’ I call out as she walks out of the door.
My woman’s body carries itself from this doorstep along the dirt road beyond and falters by the apple tree where children played it seems a hundred years ago. Like the yolk of an egg, I am alone and sheltered. I shift around on stiffening hips and wish for summer. I know that this journey I take, I take without guidance, without searching, without hope. I walk alone and into the sun.
* * *
I am wakeful again and feel regret inching its way into my resolve. I get up to feed the wood stove and place a concoction of flowers and herbs into a pot to make a hot drink.
Outside, there is unqualified silence. I begin to wonder if I would not manage to rest easier if I moved into another room. I wrap a thick blanket round myself, light a candle and tiptoe to the other side of the house where the four boys, my father and his brothers, once slept.
The room is spacious and bitterly cold. I can see them, Salam, Rasheed, Fouad and Adel, lying one against the other for warmth on mattresses placed together to accommodate their growing bodies. I hear their breathing and see the shadowy figure that makes her way into the room, and feel the gentle kisses she gives them on flushed cheeks.
‘Boys may grow soft if shown too much affection,’ my grandmother whispers. ‘My boys will be men.’
I sigh and wrap the blanket more closely round my shoulders. I want to have worn a different history, begun a different past. I want to have been a Chinese warrior, a rounded Eskimo, or perhaps a Scottish prince. I want to have looked up at wider skies, walked through thicker forests, waited for longer winters. Anything but this weighted, haunted longing for a distant past.
I move to the large cupboard at one end of the room and pull at its rickety doors. I have been planning to clear it out for weeks. When I get it open, a cloud of dust rushes into the room and I step back for a moment. The cupboard is empty except for a pile of books on its bottom shelf. There are story books and school books, Arabic, History and Mathematics, each with a child’s name inscribed on the inside front cover. I open a literature textbook that once belonged to my uncle Rasheed and imagine his small head bent over in reading, a pencil in his hand and his heart somewhere hopeful.
I lift my head and savour the infinite silence of the night. Memories and imaginings mix together in my mind so that I can no longer tell which is which. My breath becomes uneven. I return the textbook to the cupboard and just as I prepare to get up notice a thick, leather-lined notebook on top of the pile. I pick it up and blow some of the dust off its cover. When I open it, I realize that it is some kind of ledger,