life or death every time but she always got through it. What it must have felt like to greet each of those babies, their sudden plop into being, a startled screech and the touch of roughened mother-hands on slippery, transparent skin. Did she cherish the approval of the family and indulge in the brief admiration shown her by her husband when he was there?
‘What does it matter either way?’ Selma says to me.
I shake my head and tell her I don’t understand.
‘What does it matter what anyone thinks or says,’ she continues. ‘All you can do is just get on with it.’
Maybe that’s what Alia knew she had to do. I am surprised into silence at the thought. ‘You mean she may not have thought about it at all?’ I ask Selma.
‘I mean she accepted her fate like most women did in those days.’
But I don’t believe that, I begin to say and then stop. ‘What was it, then? What did she really feel?’ I ask instead.
The truth is that I don’t know. I strain to remember the look in her eyes and come up with little more than a mixture of tenderness and distance, the look of a woman with secrets that she will not disclose to a child. Did she love Ameen or had he merely been a part of a destiny she could not avoid? Did she really long to go with him to Africa and did she miss him when he left? Who was her favourite of the children, who held that special place in her heart?
‘If Alia hardened her resolve when it came to bringing up the boys, then what softness was left over for Saeeda?’ I ask Selma. ‘She married off her only daughter before Ameen knew anything about it.’
‘She had no choice,’ Selma retorts. ‘Girls could not be left to fall in love on their own, especially if they were as flighty as Saeeda was.’
‘You remember my aunt?’
‘Yes, of course I do. You do as well, don’t you?’
Saeeda had a small dark mole just above her top lip that moved as she spoke. I remember watching it with intense fascination when I was a child. My aunt took care of Alia and Ameen during the last years of their lives, and we saw her whenever we went up to the village for a visit. Until I moved back to the mountain, my interest in Saeeda had always been superficial.
‘She never told those children that she loved them,’ I say.
‘She didn’t need to,’ Selma replies. ‘They already knew it.’
‘No. Children don’t just know,’ I protest.
I place my hands on my belly and rub gently at the stretching skin beneath my clothes.
‘But they always find out when they grow up,’ Selma says. ‘That you love them, I mean.’
‘Is that what you’re hoping will happen with your own children, Selma?’
She is offended, mutters a quick goodbye and leaves the house.
Spring makes its way into my heart and lifts my spirit. I have the wood stove removed from my room and place the bed underneath the window that faces the front garden. Hovering between sleep and waking in the early morning, I breathe in long and deep and imagine living on the mountain for ever, my child and I self-contained in our splendid, crumbling house. I air out the rooms of the house, and watch the sunlight sweep over the rooftop and stream through the open windows.
Father, dreamer, your thoughts are still hanging in the air of this house, wandering and waiting for you. Do you remember the day you held our hands, my brother Kamal’s and mine, and swung us into the air of this garden? Mother, the silence here is you, the graceful movement of your head turning away and your quiet, wistful step. I think of you both, your plunge into old age, a final acquiescence, a fitting goodbye.
I see Alia shuffling around in old age, dreaming of her boys, a businessman, a lawyer, a doctor and an engineer. They left her, married and had children of their own, taking the city for their permanent home and believing, as all men do, in their immortality. Until they stumbled into complicated lives that demanded the resourcefulness and expanse of vision they had learned from Alia and Ameen.
I wonder how much of their anxiety Alia really felt and have a wish that she showed each of them a moment’s weakness, a taste of unclouded tenderness.
Selma loosens my worries over the impending birth as she would a stubborn knot, visiting me in the evenings and clattering about the house with practiced efficiency. She has put aside clean sheets, towels and two new pillows, and placed them in a plastic bag on top of the bedroom cupboard. ‘We will need them all when the time comes,’ she says with authority.
She tells me my single bed will be too small for the baby and me, and orders a new and larger mattress, which a handyman places over Alia’s old bed in the adjoining room. Her fussing comforts me but makes me feel somehow apart from the coming event and the anxiety begins to return.
‘Alright, what is it now?’ Selma asks with gruff tenderness.
I shake my head, watch as tears fall on the crisp white baby sheets on my lap.
Selma sits on the bed beside me. ‘It’s not unusual to be feeling like this so near your time.’
‘Yes. You’ve told me before,’ I whisper, suddenly realizing that just this once it is not Selma I want beside me.
She pats me lightly on the back and gets up again. ‘It’s time I left,’ she says, making another of her unexplained departures.
I take the notebook from my bedside table and go out to the terrace. It is early afternoon and I have been unable to find comfort in sleep. I feel heavy and lethargic, and my feet are slightly swollen. I lower myself onto the sofa, rest my legs up on it and place a pillow behind my back. When I open the notebook, I am pleased at the sight of pages that are filled with words, at the names of those who came before and are here no longer, in delible now, but I still cannot explain the hollowness in my heart.
I turn to a new page and write Saeeda’s name at the top.
Saeeda
Saeeda was the last child, the happy one, a girl. She had rosy cheeks and dark hair, and as an infant showed an inclination for joy that none in her family possessed.
Alia’s feelings for her daughter wavered between love and irritated concern until the day she promised five-year-old Saeeda’s hand in marriage to a first cousin’s son and no longer felt the need to worry about her future.
Asaad was only thirteen at the time and was already half in love with an olive-skinned and indolent village girl who lived on the other side of the village. Alia had watched one day while Asaad gazed in awe at the girl as she sauntered back from the village spring, a clay jar perched on one of her shoulders, her arms lifted to steady it so that her dress swung high above thin ankles and small feet. As she knelt to rest her jar on the roadside, a gold cross appeared round her neck and swung between the two small breasts bound by her bodice.
Saeeda never knew of her mother’s plans for her, nor of the overwhelming sadness they would make of her life, and grew up thinking the world of herself. Her brothers loved her with guilt-ridden indulgence, trying to make up for the indifference she would encounter as a grown woman. Adel, who was closest to Saeeda in age, was fiercely protective of his sister, fighting off any attempts
