other for warmth on mattresses placed together to accommodate their growing bodies. I hear their breathing and see the shadowy figure that makes her way into the room, and feel the gentle kisses she gives them on flushed cheeks.
‘Boys may grow soft if shown too much affection,’ my grandmother whispers. ‘My boys will be men.’
I sigh and wrap the blanket more closely round my shoulders. I want to have worn a different history, begun a different past. I want to have been a Chinese warrior, a rounded Eskimo, or perhaps a Scottish prince. I want to have looked up at wider skies, walked through thicker forests, waited for longer winters. Anything but this weighted, haunted longing for a distant past.
I move to the large cupboard at one end of the room and pull at its rickety doors. I have been planning to clear it out for weeks. When I get it open, a cloud of dust rushes into the room and I step back for a moment. The cupboard is empty except for a pile of books on its bottom shelf. There are story books and school books, Arabic, History and Mathematics, each with a child’s name inscribed on the inside front cover. I open a literature textbook that once belonged to my uncle Rasheed and imagine his small head bent over in reading, a pencil in his hand and his heart somewhere hopeful.
I lift my head and savour the infinite silence of the night. Memories and imaginings mix together in my mind so that I can no longer tell which is which. My breath becomes uneven. I return the textbook to the cupboard and just as I prepare to get up notice a thick, leather-lined notebook on top of the pile. I pick it up and blow some of the dust off its cover. When I open it, I realize that it is some kind of ledger, its yellowed pages lined with black and bold red ink. I leaf through it and in my excitement tear off one of the pages. The notebook is empty, no words to comfort or inspire me.
I crumple the torn paper in my hand, make a ball with it and throw it up in the air. I begin to tear out other pages from the notebook and scatter them around the room, then stop. I get up and return to my room, hugging the notebook to my chest. Its smell intrigues me, stale, musty, with a hint of the sharp scent of virgin paper. I sit on my bed, look at it in the weak light of the candle on the table beside me and reach for a pencil. I open the front cover of the notebook and turn to the first page where I write Alia’s name in big letters across the top.
I once asked my grandmother if when they were very young she had ever wondered what her children’s future would be. It was only months before Alia’s death and she was very frail, escaping into a vast silence when she could, waiting patiently on her invalid’s bed. I looked into her eyes, her skin was white and transparent, and her face, under the thin white veil that she still insisted on wearing, looked small and clean.
She placed her hand on my arm and pulled herself up slightly. ‘I knew,’ Alia said.
‘You knew what they dreamed they would be?’ I asked.
She shook her head with impatience and gripped my arm. Then she suddenly let go and laid her head back on the pillow. ‘They were my dreams too,’ she said before turning her head to the wall.
Late into the night, I lie down on the bed and close my eyes, the notebook resting loosely in my arms.
Alia
Alia mistook her dissatisfaction for sorrow. Taking a moment’s breath from children and home, she would stand at her doorstep and imagine she saw a tall ghost of a man walking towards her, striding as though he led the people behind him. Although he would vanish before she could make out his features, Alia guessed it was her husband, Ameen, forever in Africa, missing her, finally coming home. Wearing a long black skirt and top, her head covered in a diaphanous white veil that fell across her shoulders and down her back, Alia would see herself running towards the figure like a gull to the sea, wrapping him in wings and comfort.
Yet, on Ameen’s infrequent visits home, with the children’s excitement and the stir of his presence in the village, he seemed no more real than that figure she always imagined, so transparent was his touch, so short their time together. Between his coming and going, another baby would be made and she, left like Mother Nature, would have to fend for herself. Then her heart would sit inside her with nothing to lighten its dull, insistent thud.
On Alia’s wedding day, crowds of men stood in the front yard of her new home, surrounding her husband Ameen, shaking his hand and wishing on him a dozen sons. Alia sat on a pedestal in the living room, the women around her in a neat semicircle, their voices echoing through the still new house like future memories.
At nineteen, Alia had been ready for marriage, ready to discard a transitory adolescence that had left her no wiser to the mysteries of adulthood. Ameen was her mother’s choice, a second cousin whose enthusiasm for life and strength of will would lead to greater things. There was no courtship, little need for negotiation between the two families and, when the wedding day dawned on a bright summer morning, Alia felt her spirit soar at the possibil ities before her.
They would continue to live in the small mountain village their families had inhabited for hundreds of years, a quiet haven balanced on the side of Mount Lebanon and named after the refuge of ancient gods.
Their new home, a one-storey stone cottage near the village centre, was Alia’s comfort. She marvelled at its spaciousness and delighted in the opportunity to make her mark on its rooms, to fill its corners with the little knickknacks she could not keep as a child. She placed seashells and coloured stones on window ledges, and embroidered tiny flowers wherever she could: on bed linen and tablecloths, and even on the small cloth sack she used for making yogurt cheese. She especially loved her bedroom, revelling in the smooth texture of freshly laundered sheets and fluffy down pillows.
During the early morning chores that she carried out under the watchful eye of her mother-in-law, Alia would often linger at her bedroom door and contemplate the rays of sun that shimmered on the newly painted walls, then sigh with a secret delight. But she did not reckon on the weight of sudden responsibility. Left to her own devices for the first few months following her marriage, Alia woke one morning to her husband’s expectations and felt herself turn into the diligent and obedient wife she was bound to be. The children arrived in quick succession.
The first son, Salam, the peaceful one, was born after two agonizing days of labour. The women in the family spent the weeks following his birth serving generous portions of sweet brown pudding garnished with pine nuts and almonds to all who came to congratulate them. Alia was glad it was a boy, praise was more easily received than the commiseration that would have followed the birth of a baby girl.
When Salam was two years old, Ameen told her he would leave for Africa to join a distant cousin who had made there a fortune in trade. Alia kept the fear that gripped her heart following Ameen’s unexpected decision to herself, spending the last few nights before his departure in sleepless worry. Moments before leaving for the city to catch the boat for Africa, Ameen held her briefly to him and murmured a quiet goodbye. Though she did not know it, that was to be the most tender moment of her married life.
Salam grew into instinctive gentleness, loving his mother as he did the sea he had not seen, not understanding his father’s long absences.
‘He has gone to Africa to make our fortune,’ his mother told him. ‘Across the sea. Across the sea.’
The Mediterranean became for Salam a blueness that swallowed men and spat them out onto distant, hostile shores.
Three brothers came after him, Rasheed, Fouad and Adel. Alia saw in each of her sons the potential for des tinies beyond the confines of the village they so loved. She groomed the three younger boys for future careers in law, medicine and engineering, and left them to revel in childhood. Salam, she knew, would follow his father as all first-born sons did.
