her head, covering her soft hair and showing only familiar eyes. ‘I’m going to the prayer reading,’ she would tell the children through silk. ‘You may sit outside and listen. Quietly, children.’ They would sit and stare at the rows of polished shoes arranged neatly outside the prayer room beside Grandfather’s grave. It was there Saeeda committed the most magnificent act of defiance of her life. Sneaking past her waiting brothers, she grabbed an armful of shoes and threw them across the garden before reaching out for more. Then, cheeks flushed and eyes sparkling, she turned from her staring brothers, laughing loudly, her head flung back, and ran away. She was married a year later.
When her in-laws died, Saeeda returned home to live with Alia and Ameen, and at twenty-eight prepared once again to put the comfort of others before her own. She watched the two people who, one in her presence and the other in his absence, had shaped her life and loved them with the same intensity she had as a child, the anxiety she had once felt turning into insistent tenderness. She took over the running of the house, working quickly and quietly, her efforts imperceptible, mindful of her parents as she might have been of the children she never had.
Alia did not know what to do with the woman Saeeda had become. She would watch her daughter doing the housework and prepare to criticize a mattress unturned or a floor left unswept when something would stop her and the words refused to make themselves heard. In time, Alia realized that her heart had begun to dictate her actions. The tears that doctors told her were the result of the stroke she had suffered came to her without warning, trickling down to the taste of salt in her mouth. If Saeeda noticed her mother’s sadness, she did not comment on it, discreetly handing the older woman a handkerchief and then moving on to something else.
Saeeda’s attachment to her father grew as he became older and more vulnerable. Whenever he complained of pain in his arthritic hands, she would pour a spoonful of olive oil into her own and gently massage it into his long fingers, rubbing slowly at the swollen joints and humming a quiet tune to soothe him. Once, as she reached out to take his hand, he lifted it, placed it lightly on her face and smiled with such sweetness that Saeeda thought her heart would drop.
‘Are you alright, Father?’ she asked him.
‘You’re a good child,’ he whispered in his old man’s voice. ‘A good child.’
When Ameen died, Saeeda had just turned forty-two. She was rounder than she had once been, but her black eyes still betrayed hope and the rosy white complexion that had always been her only claim to beauty had not withered. Her mother was by then feeble.
Saeeda’s brothers insisted on bringing in a middle-aged widow from a nearby village to help care for Alia.
With extra time on her hands, Saeeda decided to tend to the long-neglected garden of the family home. She began by clearing it of the debris that had accumulated over the years, making way for the herb and flower beds she planned for, and raking the pebbles out of the earth. She scrubbed the floor of the terrace clean until the criss-cross pattern on the tiles that covered it shone in the sun, and had the iron balustrade around its edges painted with the same dark-green colour as the front door. She planted a clinging vine that would climb up the balustrade and enclose the terrace in green. Then she placed tall yellow rose bushes at the end of the garden overlooking the souq, and pink and red geraniums just behind them where they could be seen from the terrace.
But it was the herb garden that Saeeda was most proud of, a small square plot just outside the kitchen door, which she filled with basil and thyme, parsley, mint, rosemary and coriander, everything she loved to touch and smell and taste in her cooking. She spent so much time tending this part of the garden that the heady scents seeped into her clothes and skin, and stayed there so that she only had to lift her hands to her face and the smell of fresh basil mixed with the sharpness of parsley, mint and the exotic aroma of thyme and coriander would fill her nostrils.
Villagers said that it was the fragrance emanating from that herb garden that lured the stranger to Saeeda’s doorstep one summer afternoon. He carried a large sack of unshelled peanuts in one hand, a gray felt fedora in the other.
Saeeda and Alia had been sitting on the terrace in the imperfect shade of the still young vine, sipping aniseed tea in silence. Saeeda put down her cup and walked up to the man. He was small, thin and had the kind of face that from a distance seems familiar. She thought at first that he had lost his way, until he asked to see her father.
‘My father passed away over a year ago,’ Saeeda said, shaking her head.
‘May the loss be compensated in your own life.’ He paused before adding, ‘I once worked with your father in Africa. I wanted so much to see him and thank him for all he did for me.’
Khaled came from a small village across the mountain. Returning home after a twenty-year absence, he carried the mystery of distant places about him that Saeeda’s father once had. She sat Khaled next to her mother, served him tea and sweetmeats, and listened to the stories of adventure Ameen had neglected to tell her and her brothers. When he left some time later, the two women made their way into the house and prepared for bed.
‘I never knew Father had such an exciting time of it in Africa,’ Saeeda said.
Alia grunted.
Saeeda could feel her mother’s eyes following her around the room. ‘Is everything alright, Mother?’ Saeeda turned and asked.
Alia only looked at her daughter more closely. ‘Let’s go to bed, then.’
* * *
Khaled came regularly after that, sometimes as often as three times a week, always carrying a gift for Saeeda and her mother, always with a smile on his small, angular face. Saeeda was welcoming though she did not quite understand his interest. He was nothing like her beloved brothers, all with families of their own, strong and no longer needing her or their mother. Khaled was fragile, a man whose energy seemed finally to have dissipated after years of exile and hard work. In Saeeda he seemed to find the pause from activity that he needed, the quietness of a resigned existence. They sometimes spoke for hours, Khaled telling her of his years in Africa, Saeeda recounting stories of her childhood. At others they would sit in silence, watching the movement of the village around them and fussing over Alia if she sat with them.
Saeeda began to look forward to Khaled’s visits, not allowing her thoughts to wander beyond them but sensing suppressed anticipation inside her nonetheless.
One evening Khaled arrived later than usual to find Alia already in bed and Saeeda preparing to follow. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, standing at the front door. ‘I must be disturbing you.’
‘Come in, Khaled.’ Saeeda opened the door wider. ‘Come in.’ She showed him into the living room where a small side lamp cast shadows across the walls. ‘Can I get you anything?’ she asked him.
‘No, no, please. I just want to talk to you.’
Saeeda sat down and looked closely at Khaled. Suddenly she felt uneasy.
‘We are friends, you and I, aren’t we?’ he began.
She nodded.
‘I feel I can tell you anything and you would understand.’
Saeeda smiled.
‘They want me to get married!’
‘They?’
‘The family. There’s a cousin from our village, they want me to marry her . . .’ He got up and began pacing up and down the room.
Saeeda’s heart raced and her eyes followed his every movement.
‘They don’t know,’ Khaled continued. He turned and looked straight at her. ‘I already have a family back there. I told you about it, didn’t I?’ he said. ‘We never married. She is African.’
Saeeda shook her head in disbelief and continued to stare at Khaled.
‘I left her and the children, thinking I would be able to stay away,’ he said, sitting down next to her. ‘Your father knew about it. He understood, was so kind.’ He started to