in our splendid, crumbling house. I air out the rooms of the house, and watch the sunlight sweep over the rooftop and stream through the open windows.
Father, dreamer, your thoughts are still hanging in the air of this house, wandering and waiting for you. Do you remember the day you held our hands, my brother Kamal’s and mine, and swung us into the air of this garden? Mother, the silence here is you, the graceful movement of your head turning away and your quiet, wistful step. I think of you both, your plunge into old age, a final acquiescence, a fitting goodbye.
I see Alia shuffling around in old age, dreaming of her boys, a businessman, a lawyer, a doctor and an engineer. They left her, married and had children of their own, taking the city for their permanent home and believing, as all men do, in their immortality. Until they stumbled into complicated lives that demanded the resourcefulness and expanse of vision they had learned from Alia and Ameen.
I wonder how much of their anxiety Alia really felt and have a wish that she showed each of them a moment’s weakness, a taste of unclouded tenderness.
Selma loosens my worries over the impending birth as she would a stubborn knot, visiting me in the evenings and clattering about the house with practiced efficiency. She has put aside clean sheets, towels and two new pillows, and placed them in a plastic bag on top of the bedroom cupboard. ‘We will need them all when the time comes,’ she says with authority.
She tells me my single bed will be too small for the baby and me, and orders a new and larger mattress, which a handyman places over Alia’s old bed in the adjoining room. Her fussing comforts me but makes me feel somehow apart from the coming event and the anxiety begins to return.
‘Alright, what is it now?’ Selma asks with gruff tenderness.
I shake my head, watch as tears fall on the crisp white baby sheets on my lap.
Selma sits on the bed beside me. ‘It’s not unusual to be feeling like this so near your time.’
‘Yes. You’ve told me before,’ I whisper, suddenly realizing that just this once it is not Selma I want beside me.
She pats me lightly on the back and gets up again. ‘It’s time I left,’ she says, making another of her unexplained departures.
I take the notebook from my bedside table and go out to the terrace. It is early afternoon and I have been unable to find comfort in sleep. I feel heavy and lethargic, and my feet are slightly swollen. I lower myself onto the sofa, rest my legs up on it and place a pillow behind my back. When I open the notebook, I am pleased at the sight of pages that are filled with words, at the names of those who came before and are here no longer, in delible now, but I still cannot explain the hollowness in my heart.
I turn to a new page and write Saeeda’s name at the top.
Saeeda
Saeeda was the last child, the happy one, a girl. She had rosy cheeks and dark hair, and as an infant showed an inclination for joy that none in her family possessed.
Alia’s feelings for her daughter wavered between love and irritated concern until the day she promised five-year-old Saeeda’s hand in marriage to a first cousin’s son and no longer felt the need to worry about her future.
Asaad was only thirteen at the time and was already half in love with an olive-skinned and indolent village girl who lived on the other side of the village. Alia had watched one day while Asaad gazed in awe at the girl as she sauntered back from the village spring, a clay jar perched on one of her shoulders, her arms lifted to steady it so that her dress swung high above thin ankles and small feet. As she knelt to rest her jar on the roadside, a gold cross appeared round her neck and swung between the two small breasts bound by her bodice.
Saeeda never knew of her mother’s plans for her, nor of the overwhelming sadness they would make of her life, and grew up thinking the world of herself. Her brothers loved her with guilt-ridden indulgence, trying to make up for the indifference she would encounter as a grown woman. Adel, who was closest to Saeeda in age, was fiercely protective of his sister, fighting off any attempts to harm her, assuring her that she was as good as any boy he knew.
But whenever he urged her to find the strength to hit back at trouble, she would shake her dark head and smile. ‘You’re my courage, Adel. There’s enough anger in you for both of us.’
That was when he determined to look out for her for the rest of their lives.
Like her brothers, Saeeda attended the village school, but unlike them her enthusiasm was for the company rather than the learning. She was an unexceptional student who would incite her friends into spontaneous laughter and smile as soon as the teacher approached to reprimand them.
The only uncertainty Saeeda felt was in her mother’s presence, sensing Alia’s restless heart and wanting to reassure her. Saeeda would often rush in from the garden to sit by her mother and reach out to touch her hand lightly. Alia would look up from whatever she was doing and smile at the little girl, before turning away without seeing the light in her daughter’s eyes falter.
In early adolescence Saeeda refused to wear the long white veil her mother had ordered for her from Damascus, tentatively touching the delicate white silk and then pulling her hand away.
‘What is it, Saeeda?’ Alia asked.
Saeeda shook her head and did not answer.
‘Is it the material? It’s the best silk to be found anywhere.’
Saeeda looked at her mother and replied in a whisper, ‘I don’t want to cover my hair.’
‘What do you mean? You know very well that all the women in the family do.’
‘I won’t cover my hair!’ Saeeda said before stomping out of Alia’s room.
Later that day Saeeda found the veil neatly folded in a small square on her bed. She picked it up and gently shook it out. She scrunched the material in one hand and lifted it up to her cheek. It was softer than she had imagined and smelled faintly of the olive oil soap her mother used to wash her hands. Tiptoeing across the hall, Saeeda sneaked into Alia’s bedroom and walked up to the dressing table. She placed the veil on her head and watched the folds of silk fall over her narrow shoulders. She lifted one end of the cloth, threw it over one side and admired the way the whiteness set off her black hair and rosy cheeks. I am beautiful, she thought, and twirled lightly round.
‘Saeeda, what are you doing?’ Adel stood in the doorway watching her.
Saeeda tore the veil off her head, and rushed out of the room and into the garden. Alia was tending to her flowers and did not see Saeeda run as fast as her legs would take her to the pine forest behind the village school. She buried the veil and returned home.
When Saeeda married at fifteen, her father and eldest brother were not there to see the despair in the young groom’s eyes. He was dressed up, his hair combed back, and after the wedding was sent home with a child on his arm, a child unaware of the dramatic turn her life was about to take. The marriage lasted less than a year, cut short by the groom’s sudden departure for South America. He was never heard of again.
Saeeda lost her little-girl look and took on the re sponsibil ity of caring for her departed husband’s parents. Until their deaths the old couple took from her all the attention they thought their due. Unused to housework, Saeeda did her best to keep their home clean and tidy, looking for corners to wipe dust away from as she had seen her mother do, scrubbing the old people’s clothes with the natural soaps she bought from the village souq and hanging them out to dry on the front-yard clothesline.
On early summer mornings Saeeda would reluctantly get out of bed and check on her in-laws, and coax them into the armchairs she had placed on the front terrace where they could watch the comings and goings of their neighbours. Then she would rush into the kitchen, boil some flower tea and make the labneh sandwiches they loved. As she sat talking to them, asking after their health, insisting on an enthusiasm for the day that she did not feel, her thoughts would wander to her childhood and the endless joy some moments had held.
She