Shame, she admonishes herself. She soundlessly delivers a prayer. Lucky. They are lucky. Lucky to have these walls and lucky—it feels tawdry to speak of this to Allah but unavoidable—to have money. Money carried them to Nablus, over the threshold of this house. Money kept them fed and warm, kept their windows draped in curtains and their bodies clothed. Salma had been born poor, lived on bread and lentils until Hussam’s mother chose her for marriage. Again—luck, Salma possessing a docile beauty that caught the older woman’s eye. Widad and Alia and Mustafa, they might have known gunfire and war, but they were protected from it with the armor of wealth. It is what separates them from the refugees in the camps dotting the outskirts of Nablus. Salma still holds her breath, her childhood defense against bad luck, when she has to drive past them.
Many families from Jaffa wound up in the Balata camp, each tent barely two or three steps away from another. Inside, impossible numbers of people shared the space. Salma has never been in one, only seen the white tents blur by from her car window. But she knew of them from an old housekeeper, Raja, who would speak of the mangled ropes that kept tent sheets stamped into the soil, the smell of camel dung and urine. Raja had seven children, and they, she, her husband, and her mother-in-law shared one tent. They slept by taking turns, several of the children often remaining awake at night so the adults could sleep before rising at dawn for work.
Salma is ashamed of her queasiness about the camps, her irrational fear that they are somehow contagious. It was a relief to her when Raja resigned due to flaring arthritis. Salma felt a persistent desire to apologize to her, a feeling that was absent with other housekeepers and nannies she employed, usually native Nabulsi girls. Only Raja hummed the haunting, throaty ballads Salma’s own mother used to sing, unknowingly hinting at a kinship that made Salma feel guilty. That this woman should spend days sweeping floors and then go home to a tent. Parallel lives, she sometimes thinks. It was a matter of parallel lives, one person having lamb for supper, the other cucumbers. With fate deciding, at random, which was which.
“I love this song.”
“The weather is perfect.”
“Do you think it’ll hold?”
“It has to.”
A group of Alia’s friends speak with wistful, slightly envious tones, as unmarried girls will at the wedding of a friend. They wear bright dresses, their legs bare beneath.
Salma touches the young maid’s arm as she walks by. “Lulwa, please bring more rose water.”
Lulwa nods. “Yes, madame.”
The garden is beautiful. If the house remains haunted, an old ownership hanging over it, the garden is completely hers. The former occupants had tiled over the land, turning it into a marbled courtyard.
“I need it out,” Salma told Hussam when they moved in. “I need to see the soil.” It was the only time she’d ever spoken to her husband like that. Hussam seemed taken aback but obliged her, hiring men to remove every tile.
Beneath it was grayish soil, sickly from lack of sun and strewn with pieces of marble. It is odd to think now, watching people walk around, laughing and listening to music, that below their feet had been nothing but the palest worms, not even a blade of grass.
She worked on the soil for months. Nothing happened. Fertilizer, tilling, pruning. She was on the verge of giving up in despair, accepting that she’d never grow a garden, nothing would bloom.
What astonishment, then, to walk outside one morning with her tea, surveying the wasteland, only to see a sliver of sprouting; a weed, but still Salma fell to her knees and stroked it. She had the urge to run into the house, call for the children and Hussam, to show them something, at last, to lift their spirits.
Instead she remained still, touching the sprout, recognizing in that moment that there were some things we are meant to keep for ourselves, too precious to share with others. She shut her eyes and recited the Fatiha.
The garden has done her proud. After that first blade, lush greenery followed, flowers and shrubs and trees pushing through the soil, all the seeds Salma bartered for in the market, the seeds people bought for her—her love for the garden became famous in the neighborhood—blossoming in the courtyard.
She was greedy back then, Salma recognizes, planting contradictory creatures, roots vying for water, especially in the Nabulsi summer. The roses and the gardenia bush, the tomato stalk and the mint shrub; even the perfume overwhelming in those days, a cacophony of scents clamoring to overpower one another.
She has become more discreet over the years, the trick being to include plants that are restrained in their need. Now the garden is simpler, rows of shrubs extending from the house, an awning vined with grape leaves above the courtyard table. The scent of jasmine laces the air. All throughout this night, she has heard people murmuring and is unable to quell her pride.
“How beautiful.”
“Oh, see the gardenia!”
“Those tomatoes are the plumpest I’ve seen.”
Alia and Mustafa had loved to help with the garden, keeping it clear of certain insects and creatures. After Widad wed and Hussam died, it was just the three of them and they spent long afternoons picking bugs. Salma remembers how gleefully they’d untangle long worms from the soil.
Salma considers her children now, standing beneath the awning. The long table is covered with damask. The men have brought kanafeh and are slicing the cellophane packaging open with knives. Steam rises from the dessert, orange pastry topped with sprinkles of crushed pistachios. Mustafa is handing a plate to Alia, Atef at her side. All three are laughing at something Mustafa has said.
Salma can hear snatches from across the garden. “Thieves . . . crossing the water . . . ever!” More laughter. A joke.
Both Mustafa and Alia are tall and brunette, similarly complexioned as their father. For all their talk of revolution and oppression, Salma’s two youngest are not plagued with thoughts of camps and the people inside them. In many ways, they are careless children, both spoiled, given to mercurial moods. Indulged. As children they were allies, and they remain so.
Alia is speaking now with her head ducked, whispering to the two men. One hand holds her plate, the other gestures. Throughout the courtyard, people watch her, men and women. Alia has never been straightforwardly pretty. Her jaw is narrow, her cheekbones too pronounced, giving the impression of an avid cat. She has the same crooked nose as her father, and Hussam lurks in the wide forehead and broad shoulders as well. But her face arrests, has the arched eyebrows and long eyelashes that made Salma’s own mother such a beauty. Unlike many tall women, Alia carries herself well, her spine perfectly straight, the skinny, imperious shoulders squared. When Alia was fourteen and her growth spurt began, Salma had tortured nightmares of her daughter becoming unrecognizable, beastly, her bones shooting out into dreadfully long limbs.
“You should bind her bones,” the aunts used to say. “Let her sleep with cardamom sprinkled on her pillow, it stunts growth.”
But Salma did neither. By then, Widad had been gone for years and Hussam too, and Salma had begun to recognize that the world was no longer made for certain types of women. There was a need for spine and even anger. Widad had Salma’s shape, petite, ample-hipped—all the female cousins were similarly built. Only Alia stood inches above the women, able to look most men square in the eye.