the look on her face. ‘I thought you would understand, Saeeda.’
She folded her arms over her heart. ‘We can’t all be loved the way we want to be.’
His once fine face seemed suddenly ungenerous and pinched. She looked away.
‘I’m sorry. I just came to let you know, I’m leaving the country next week. You won’t see me again.’
The next day Saeeda was clearing up in the kitchen after lunch. When Alia got up from the table, Saeeda turned to her. ‘Mother, what do you say we take the tea out on the terrace?’
The air was fresh and a subtle breeze lifted the green vine leaves into a gentle flutter. The two women settled themselves on the old sofa. Saeeda leaned over and poured the tea. She handed her mother a cup and took one for herself. It was that quiet hour between day and sunset, when village life seemed to float as if on an afterthought.
Saeeda felt a sudden impatience. ‘Did you love my father?’ she asked her mother.
Alia stared back at her. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Just that. Did you love your husband, Mother?’
‘In those days no one talked about love,’ Alia replied firmly. ‘I saw little of Ameen through most of our marriage, until he turned old and needed me to care for him.’
Saeeda looked at her mother and felt a deep, wide anger moving through her body. She had a sudden urge to get up and run, anywhere, away from her mother’s indifference, beyond the house and the village and everything she had ever known. ‘Did you at least miss him?’ she asked, trying to keep her voice even.
Alia put her cup down, bent her head and placed her hands in her lap. When she looked up, her face had the waxed look of age all over it. ‘I wrote him a letter once, asking him to come home,’ she said with a weak smile. ‘It was after the two older boys were hurt when the school collapsed over them.’ She shook her head and looked past Saeeda. ‘I never sent it.’
Why didn’t you let him know you needed him, Mother? Saeeda wanted to ask, until she remembered what had happened to her the night before and the enormity of her own fears.
‘Does that man want to marry you?’ Alia had recovered herself.
‘You mean Khaled?’
‘He was here last night, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes, he was.’
‘What was he thinking, coming so late?’
‘It wasn’t that late, Mother. I had been planning on staying up a little longer anyway.’
‘Does he want to marry you?’ Alia persisted.
‘No, Mother,’ Saeeda said, shaking her head. ‘I don’t love him. I don’t want to leave our home. I never have.’
Maysa
Summer
I wake to the sound of someone knocking on the front door. The early mornings are still cool and I wrap myself in a blanket before going to open the door. Wadih is standing on the terrace with a small suitcase in one hand and a large leather folder in the other. He has no jacket on. ‘Come in,’ I tell him.
He walks past me and stands in the hallway for a moment.
‘Come through here.’ I point to my room. ‘Just give me a moment to get dressed and make us some tea.’
He places his things on the floor and sits on the unmade bed.
‘Will you wait?’ I ask him.
He nods his head and looks away. This, I think to myself, is the moment I usually feel anger at his silences. I take my clothes into the bathroom and shut the door.
When I come out again, Wadih is not in the room. I run a hand through my wet hair and go into the kitchen to find him stirring a pot of flower tea, his head bent low over the fragrant steam floating from it.
‘It smells wonderful, doesn’t it? Like a garden in spring.’
‘Wonderful.’ Wadih is smiling.
‘Let’s have the tea out on the terrace,’ I say, putting cups and saucers on a tray and grabbing the biscuit box.
We carry the things outside and make ourselves comfortable on the sofa, now warm with the early morning sun. Wadih pours the tea and hands me a cup. I place it on the table, put my hands on top of my belly, feeling for our child.
‘It’s very soon, isn’t it?’ he asks, looking down at my hands.
‘I’m having it here in the house.’
‘Yes, I thought you would.’
I feel a sudden remorse. ‘There will be a doctor with the midwife in case of any problems,’ I tell him. ‘I’ve had all the tests and everything. It’s going to be alright.’
‘Did you find your stories?’ Wadih asks after a short silence.
‘Stories?’
‘Your grandmother and her family, did you find out about her? You talked about it so much, I just assumed . . .’
I had forgotten telling him. It was long ago, very soon after we met. I said I wanted to spend time on my own on the mountain to gather stories about my grandmother and her children and put them in a book to read to my own children one day.
Wadih leans forward in his seat and looks closely at me. His eyes, the lines in his handsome face are achingly familiar and I feel the urge to reach out and touch him. Instead, I stand up and pick at branches of the vine that are draped over the balustrade.
‘Are things alright in the city these days?’ I ask my husband.
‘The fighting flares up and calms down again. We manage to live during the gaps in between.’
‘I haven’t felt lonely,’ I tell him. ‘Nor have I,’ he replies. ‘I only missed you.’
I return to the sofa. ‘I missed you too,’ I say truthfully. ‘I haven’t really discovered anything new, but I’ve been trying to write my own thoughts down, my own unfocused musings.’ I laugh sheepishly and look up at him but he says nothing.
A rush of heat makes its way up into my face and I place my hands on my cheeks in an attempt to cool them. ‘That silence,’ I say, ‘that relentless, obstinate silence, it makes me feel unloved.’
Wadih gets up and goes into the house. He returns with the leather folder he brought with him, places it on the dusty tiles and unzips it open. Inside there is a small pile of white cardboard squares with drawings on them. He brings the top one to me. The drawing looks remarkably like my house except that the façade is much neater, the rooftop is even and the terrace is wider underneath the clean stone arches.
Wadih brings me the second drawing. This one is of the inside of the house. There is a bright kitchen that opens onto a large dining room, and the living room is spacious and colourful with furniture and patterned Persian carpets. ‘This is of the bedrooms,’ he says, handing me the third drawing. ‘I think we’d have to add on another bathroom, especially now the baby is coming.’
I pull at his sleeve. ‘What is this?’
‘You do want us to live here, don’t you? The house will have to be renovated so I made some preliminary drawings for you to look at before we make a final decision.’
‘Did Selma tell you to come here?’ I ask him.
He reaches out and places his hand on the back of my neck and rubs gently at my skin. ‘Does it matter now?’
I shake my head and look down at the drawings.
There is music in this house, the kind that pushes gently against the outlines of my body and makes me sway this way and that. Wadih has brought the old stereo player with him from the