Omar drops the cigarette. “Piece of shit,” he mutters. He nods at Mustafa as he walks away. “Your house tonight, right?”
Mustafa remembers. He told the men to come over after the mosque for coffee and shisha. They are supposed to alternate among their homes, but the other men have wives and families.
“Yes, my house,” Mustafa says, and Omar walks back to the construction site.
It was Imam Bakri’s idea for Mustafa to speak tonight. Imam Bakri assured him that he would be fine, that whatever he said would be gold, pure spun gold.
“There are some men visiting from Jerusalem,” Imam Bakri told him. “I want them to see us, our congregation, what a fine brotherhood we have here. I want you to speak.”
When Mustafa began to ask questions, the imam smiled. “It’ll come to you. You’ll move their hearts, leave them catching their breath. It’s what you do.”
From a distance the house appears unaltered, the doorway framed by trees. Only upon closer inspection do signs of neglect become apparent—the untrimmed hedges, the windows streaky with dust, a slackness to the doorknob, which turns too easily in Mustafa’s hand. When Salma first announced she was moving to Amman, no one believed it. Mustafa and Alia teased her about abandoning her post, privately assuring each other that she’d never leave. Even now, a year after she’d packed suitcase after suitcase with her belongings and moved into a small house near her sister, Mustafa still half expects her to return.
With Salma gone, the house is his. He has inherited his living mother’s rooms and garden and at times is filled with childish resentment, as though given a beautiful trinket that he cannot touch without its breaking.
He walks through the foyer, the sitting room, pauses to unbutton his dress shirt and toss it on the couch. “They want us to crumple. To surrender,” he mutters absently as he enters the kitchen. Crumple sounds odd, reminds him of paper. “They want us to yield.” Better.
The kitchen counters are scattered with newspapers, a bowl of pears—his favorite—and cellophane bags of bread and crackers. A jar of pickles sits atop one of honey; there is a grayish plant he never remembers to water on the windowsill above the sink.
“You know she only left because she thinks it’ll jolt you into marriage,” Alia said to him once, inciting one of their rapid-fire arguments. He was insulted by the accusation because he knew it to be true.
Every week his mother sighs on the telephone. “I worry about you in that house by yourself. Without a wife, a nice woman to cook you meals, keep you happy. Habibi, you are so alone.”
During Mustafa’s last visit to Amman, Salma and his aunts had transparently introduced him to several women, hosting dinner after dinner where he made strained conversation with the girls and their mothers. His aunts made interjections.
“You know, Mustafa finished university in three years.”
“Habibti, have you visited Nablus?”
“So pretty, look at that skin. Is your whole family fair?”
The trip felt like one long held breath, him politely smiling and nodding, the aunts and Salma sitting on the balcony afterward and discussing the girls, how Suzanne was a brilliant cook and Amal had a degree in literature and Hind had the loveliest green eyes. Mustafa found himself thinking of Aya, of her long hair always plaited into a braid, the rasp in her voice like burned sugar.
On his last evening, they’d asked which one he liked best. Mustafa answered, “None of them.”
His mother’s disappointment was palpable. Her voice was streaked with uncustomary anger:
“Go, go back to Nablus. You want to be alone forever? Because that’s the life you’re building for yourself.”
Mustafa walks around the kitchen scratching his head. He does his familiar dance, opening the drawers, eyeing the detritus in the refrigerator. He takes a jar of olives, peers suspiciously into it. Fuzz grows around the rim.
His grocery shopping is haphazard. Some mornings he wakes early, full of energy and purpose, sets out to the marketplace before work and returns with bags of tomatoes, cheese wedges, pita bread still steaming. Other times he scrounges, making meals of almonds and a handful of figs, a desultory bite of fruit.
The past two weeks have been scavenging, Mustafa pulling together meals of bread and olive oil, at times boiling a lamb chop. Some evenings Atef and Alia come over, Alia occasionally roused into the role of wife, trying her hand at some ambitious meal. Koussa, their mother’s warak anab. It is invariably a failure, Alia a worse cook than Mustafa. Both of them were raised in the manner of wealthy Nabulsi children, always a maid to cook and clean and wash their clothes, such that Alia’s first experience with laundry as a bride was a catastrophe of blanched shirts and dyed socks, now an oft-referenced family joke. She deprived Atef of his socks, poor man.
Mustafa finds a half-empty box of spaghetti in the drawer. He smokes while waiting for the water to boil. When he upends the box of pasta into the pot, the strands fan out.
“But who’ll cook for you?” his mother had asked when she left, taking Lulwa with her. “Who will clean?” She wanted him to get a maid, a part-time housekeeper at least.
“I will,” Mustafa told her. But the truth is the disarray doesn’t bother him; most of the time he barely sees the mess. Only after speaking with his mother does the unkempt state of the house come into relief. Those moments, all he can see is the peeling paint, the puff of dust when he stomps on the rug, the cigarette ash in his bathroom sink. He thinks of how, when his mother lived in the house, the rooms smelled of lavender, how he was never allowed to smoke indoors.
When the guilt becomes overpowering, he gathers dishrags and fills a bucket with water. On those days, he scrubs each tile of the kitchen floor, soaps the windows, even dusts the bathroom cabinets.
The cigarette is nearly out. Mustafa flicks it into the kitchen sink, then turns his attention to the pot, the spaghetti now limp and snarled.
He remembers a meal his mother used to make, pasta with béchamel. He tries to recall the ingredients. Cream—a dusty can in the pantry—and oil and salt. There was a fourth ingredient, he knows, but he cannot remember what it was. Cloves? Sugar? Or was it vinegar? Something unexpected. He goes with sugar, two spoonfuls into a bowl with the cream, whisking it until he gets bored.
The pasta looks delicious, steaming and shiny with oil. “Salt,” he mutters to himself, then, feeling daring, he rustles around the spice cabinet. A dash of cardamom and several shakes of paprika. He takes a bite and immediately spits it out. It tastes like car fumes.