The house was finally peaceful.
Everyone was gone.
No more Aziza hugging at her legs.
No more Leah or Salim to clean up after.
No more Shafiq, either.
Just the sound of a car passing outside and the shouts of a group of boys playing.
Kathmiya slept.
The next day, she shopped for too much food at the market and cooked too many orange lentils with rice for one person. After dinner, she ate a few of the narrow pistachio nuts from Turkey that Salim favored.
But he didn’t come back.
No one came back.
The following day she went out just for air. Only to walk. She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt so free. But it was an uncomfortable gift, purchased at the cost of Leah’s pain.
Kathmiya stopped at different booths in the marketplace, pausing to look at the goods she could never own: the glowing copper pots, the sparkling silver, the books she might hope to read but couldn’t afford to buy. In the dingy gray dress she wore, she was obviously too poor, too Midaan, too outcast to be a customer.
Day after day, she meandered further through the city, watching men in cafés, purchasing a sour yoghurt drink on the street, picking up a newspaper someone else had left behind. Her mind was filled with thoughts of all she’d seen by the time she got home, but it was not full yet, and she flipped through Salim’s magazines, imagining the world beyond. Could she go to Baghdad someday? Kathmiya had left the marshes against her will, but now she wondered whether she might one day strike out just to travel. To busy cities where people didn’t know her past and would let her have a future.
The ability to read letters and write phonetically did not exactly translate into literacy, but Kathmiya could make out some signs in shop windows. One said, “Dresses from Baris.” She wondered who Baris was. The styles were classy; beautiful but not overstated, not strange.
She walked by the shop a half dozen times, trying to appear casual while she studied the dress she liked best, with its bell-shaped sleeves, high neckline and long, flouncy skirt. Modest but still fun. She would have liked to buy it but that was impossible.
Oh, well, she thought. It’s ugly anyway.
But she couldn’t forget the dress. The next day she purchased three yards of a deep burgundy-colored cotton, evenly hued, with none of the light and dark washes left by the vegetable dyes used in the marshes.
All the sewing she’d done her entire life, never once had it been for fun. For herself. Kathmiya was starting to see that on the other side of solitude lay freedom.