“Mashallah, ya Salma,” Umm Bashar, a neighbor, says. Her veil is damp at the side from perspiration. On her plate a slice of kanafeh is soaked in rose water. “She is like the moon.”
Salma smiles the muted, modest smile perfected by women and tilts her head. “Thank you, Umm Bashar. We are blessed. Allah is great.” She keeps her voice slightly tight, for she knows the power of the evil eye, of even unintentionally drawing envy.
“Although an unusual choice,” Umm Bashar says, glancing over at Mustafa. Salma knows what is coming. It is what the guests have been discussing. “For you to marry the younger one first.” She sighs. “Although I suppose it’s different with men.”
“Alia’s fate was to be married first. Mustafa still has school to finish and is perhaps going to travel to Ramallah for work.” Salma hears her own lie, the weight of it.
“Yes, yes.” A slight pause. “Mustafa is how many years older?”
“Five.” Five, five. Salma recites the number in her sleep because, although she would never admit it to this woman, it is an old worry.
“Ah, five. Well. Everyone is to do what she must. Although mine will be married off in order. Bashar is getting married in the fall and he is two—no, no, three years younger than Mustafa.”
Salma thinks unkindly of Bashar, with his large nose and tiny chin. She has always sensed from Umm Bashar a competitiveness about their sons, because Mustafa is so handsome.
“It is how her father would’ve wanted it.” Salma shuts her voice to signal the end of the discussion. Umm Bashar nods and smiles, overly sweet.
“Well,” she says, glancing at Alia, “she certainly looks lovely. Those streaks of henna in her hair, they suit her complexion.” Salma feels some relief as Umm Bashar walks off, the neighbor’s eyes away from her daughter.
The aunts and cousins held the henna ceremony for Alia the day before and Salma can see flecks of reddish gold in her daughter’s hair, brought out by the torch light. It was a squealing, messy affair, the younger women gossiping as they mixed the henna in a tin basin. Each girl took a handful of the goopy paste and kneaded it, trying to remove twigs and leaves. When the paste was blended, the girls tilted the basin into fabric dough sacks, twisted them shut. The older aunts and Salma prepared Alia’s skin, reciting Qur’an as they brushed the girl’s hair and rubbed lemon juice on her arms and feet. Salma whispered the Fatiha as she massaged the henna paste on her daughter’s hands, staining both palms reddish. One of the aunts punctured the dough sacks with a needle, her hand steady as she maneuvered the paste into a design of whirls and flowers and lattices on the tops of Alia’s hands and feet.
The henna paste smelled strongly, roughly, of barnyards. The older women spoke nostalgically of their own henna ceremonies, and Salma caught a couple of the younger cousins rolling their eyes. This generation was impatient; it was something the neighbors and aunts discussed at great length over afternoon tea visits. They were becoming reckless. When Salma went to collect a dough sack from the younger women, their chattering stilled, each girl looking at her with wide, innocent eyes. They were speaking of the neighborhood boys, Salma knew, of the men they met at school or the youth clubs. Some might even be speaking of the Israeli soldiers, although she preferred to think that such flagrancy remained outside of Nablus, among the Christian girls or the ones who’d gone to boarding school in Europe. Elsewhere.
It is painful to think of how Hussam would disapprove of the way she raised Alia. Hussam had been a man of precise faith; his was a life of mosques and fasting and austerity. Salma loved her husband in a distant way, mostly because he wasn’t a man who inspired anything stronger. In their marriage he remained reserved, chaste even in their most intimate moments. Only after his illness did he begin to yell and curse, and by then his mind was no longer his.
He wouldn’t have been prepared for the changes sweeping the youth. The way the West has begun to seep into their cities, the way the occupation divided the generations sharply. The youth drawn to glitter, the elders to bitterness.
Sometimes she has arguments with him in her head, a vestigial habit from twenty years of marriage.
All the girls are doing it, she’d say defensively when Alia began to go out with her friends, when she made it clear she would never veil.
“And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty.” A verse from the Qur’an, Hussam’s favorite tactic in arguments.
This is what our life is now, Hussam. The youth are scattered. This is what it is to live under the rifle.
She could imagine him frowning, shaking his head, disappointed with her weakness. Perhaps if you’d raised her better. Perhaps if you’d read her more Qur’an, taken her to the mosque more. An imagined pause. If I were there, she wouldn’t be so far from Allah.
Well, you’re not here.
Such is the ease with which one can silence the dead.
“Yamma, have some.” Mustafa approaches Salma, a plate in hand. He has puddled the syrup onto the very center of the kanafeh slice, just as she likes it. The cheese will soak up the sugar. She looks up at his lanky frame.
“You should see how nervous Atef has been,” Mustafa confides. “I swear he changed his tie seven or eight times.”
“Gray suits him.”
“Gray, blue, orange—who cares! I told him, a suit is a suit is a suit.”
Salma smiles, drops her voice to a whisper: “The groom is fussier than the bride.”
They laugh together. Only with Mustafa does she banter like this, the two of them conspiratorial. The aunts say he is too attached to her and to Alia, that fatherlessness has stunted him. Selfish as she feels, Salma prays on each of Mustafa’s birthdays for the boy to stay with her for one more year, his sports cleats and laundry and dirty dishes cluttering the house.
Mustafa waves Atef over; the other man looks relieved as he moves toward them. His gait is stiffened in the formal clothes.
“What a lovely tie, Atef,” Salma says archly. Mustafa laughs.
“You too, Khalto?” Atef asks, mock wounded. He grins down at her, teeth white against his beard. He is handsome in the manner of old pasha rulers, the somber-looking men in history books.
“Will you be going to mosque tomorrow?”
The two men hesitate, exchanging a glance that she catches. “Yes, Yamma,” Mustafa finally says. “Only for the prayers. We promised Imam Ali.”
“We’ll be done by ten. Back in time for breakfast,” Atef confirms. All three stand in silence, the unsaid a living thing between them.
“Good,” Salma says. She tries to liven her voice: “You boys keep each other out of trouble.”