whenever he urged her to find the strength to hit back at trouble, she would shake her dark head and smile. ‘You’re my courage, Adel. There’s enough anger in you for both of us.’
That was when he determined to look out for her for the rest of their lives.
Like her brothers, Saeeda attended the village school, but unlike them her enthusiasm was for the company rather than the learning. She was an unexceptional student who would incite her friends into spontaneous laughter and smile as soon as the teacher approached to reprimand them.
The only uncertainty Saeeda felt was in her mother’s presence, sensing Alia’s restless heart and wanting to reassure her. Saeeda would often rush in from the garden to sit by her mother and reach out to touch her hand lightly. Alia would look up from whatever she was doing and smile at the little girl, before turning away without seeing the light in her daughter’s eyes falter.
In early adolescence Saeeda refused to wear the long white veil her mother had ordered for her from Damascus, tentatively touching the delicate white silk and then pulling her hand away.
‘What is it, Saeeda?’ Alia asked.
Saeeda shook her head and did not answer.
‘Is it the material? It’s the best silk to be found anywhere.’
Saeeda looked at her mother and replied in a whisper, ‘I don’t want to cover my hair.’
‘What do you mean? You know very well that all the women in the family do.’
‘I won’t cover my hair!’ Saeeda said before stomping out of Alia’s room.
Later that day Saeeda found the veil neatly folded in a small square on her bed. She picked it up and gently shook it out. She scrunched the material in one hand and lifted it up to her cheek. It was softer than she had imagined and smelled faintly of the olive oil soap her mother used to wash her hands. Tiptoeing across the hall, Saeeda sneaked into Alia’s bedroom and walked up to the dressing table. She placed the veil on her head and watched the folds of silk fall over her narrow shoulders. She lifted one end of the cloth, threw it over one side and admired the way the whiteness set off her black hair and rosy cheeks. I am beautiful, she thought, and twirled lightly round.
‘Saeeda, what are you doing?’ Adel stood in the doorway watching her.
Saeeda tore the veil off her head, and rushed out of the room and into the garden. Alia was tending to her flowers and did not see Saeeda run as fast as her legs would take her to the pine forest behind the village school. She buried the veil and returned home.
When Saeeda married at fifteen, her father and eldest brother were not there to see the despair in the young groom’s eyes. He was dressed up, his hair combed back, and after the wedding was sent home with a child on his arm, a child unaware of the dramatic turn her life was about to take. The marriage lasted less than a year, cut short by the groom’s sudden departure for South America. He was never heard of again.
Saeeda lost her little-girl look and took on the re sponsibil ity of caring for her departed husband’s parents. Until their deaths the old couple took from her all the attention they thought their due. Unused to housework, Saeeda did her best to keep their home clean and tidy, looking for corners to wipe dust away from as she had seen her mother do, scrubbing the old people’s clothes with the natural soaps she bought from the village souq and hanging them out to dry on the front-yard clothesline.
On early summer mornings Saeeda would reluctantly get out of bed and check on her in-laws, and coax them into the armchairs she had placed on the front terrace where they could watch the comings and goings of their neighbours. Then she would rush into the kitchen, boil some flower tea and make the labneh sandwiches they loved. As she sat talking to them, asking after their health, insisting on an enthusiasm for the day that she did not feel, her thoughts would wander to her childhood and the endless joy some moments had held.
She thought back to Thursday nights when her mother wore a long white veil of Damascene silk wrapped tightly round her head, covering her soft hair and showing only familiar eyes. ‘I’m going to the prayer reading,’ she would tell the children through silk. ‘You may sit outside and listen. Quietly, children.’ They would sit and stare at the rows of polished shoes arranged neatly outside the prayer room beside Grandfather’s grave. It was there Saeeda committed the most magnificent act of defiance of her life. Sneaking past her waiting brothers, she grabbed an armful of shoes and threw them across the garden before reaching out for more. Then, cheeks flushed and eyes sparkling, she turned from her staring brothers, laughing loudly, her head flung back, and ran away. She was married a year later.
When her in-laws died, Saeeda returned home to live with Alia and Ameen, and at twenty-eight prepared once again to put the comfort of others before her own. She watched the two people who, one in her presence and the other in his absence, had shaped her life and loved them with the same intensity she had as a child, the anxiety she had once felt turning into insistent tenderness. She took over the running of the house, working quickly and quietly, her efforts imperceptible, mindful of her parents as she might have been of the children she never had.
Alia did not know what to do with the woman Saeeda had become. She would watch her daughter doing the housework and prepare to criticize a mattress unturned or a floor left unswept when something would stop her and the words refused to make themselves heard. In time, Alia realized that her heart had begun to dictate her actions. The tears that doctors told her were the result of the stroke she had suffered came to her without warning, trickling down to the taste of salt in her mouth. If Saeeda noticed her mother’s sadness, she did not comment on it, discreetly handing the older woman a handkerchief and then moving on to something else.
Saeeda’s attachment to her father grew as he became older and more vulnerable. Whenever he complained of pain in his arthritic hands, she would pour a spoonful of olive oil into her own and gently massage it into his long fingers, rubbing slowly at the swollen joints and humming a quiet tune to soothe him. Once, as she reached out to take his hand, he lifted it, placed it lightly on her face and smiled with such sweetness that Saeeda thought her heart would drop.
‘Are you alright, Father?’ she asked him.
‘You’re a good child,’ he whispered in his old man’s voice. ‘A good child.’
When Ameen died, Saeeda had just turned forty-two. She was rounder than she had once been, but her black eyes still betrayed hope and the rosy white complexion that had always been her only claim to beauty had not withered. Her mother was by then feeble.
Saeeda’s brothers insisted on bringing in a middle-aged widow from a nearby village to help care for Alia.
With extra time on her hands, Saeeda decided to tend to the long-neglected garden of the family home. She began by clearing it of the debris that had accumulated over the years, making way for the herb and flower beds she planned for, and raking the pebbles out of the earth. She scrubbed the floor of the terrace clean until the criss-cross pattern on the tiles that covered it shone in the sun, and had the iron balustrade around its edges painted with the same dark-green colour as the front door. She planted a clinging vine that would climb up the balustrade and enclose the terrace in green. Then she placed tall yellow rose bushes at the end of the garden overlooking the souq, and pink and red geraniums just behind them where they could be seen from the terrace.
But it was the herb garden that Saeeda was most proud of, a small square plot just outside the kitchen door, which she filled with basil and thyme, parsley, mint, rosemary and coriander, everything she loved to touch and smell and taste in her
