As the city weakened, Sanaya grew stronger. She woke early each morning and stood on the balcony, leaning out onto the Corniche. Even in its devastation, as she greeted fruit stalls, hawkers, beat-up taxis skimming back and forth between luxury hotels, she couldn’t stop a smile of possession from creasing the corners of her mouth. Beirut belonged to her. The country had already been at war for seven years and here she stood, on the knife-edge of another Israeli invasion. Yet she wasn’t sure the Israelis were coming now, if at all.
She wasn’t sure of anything in this war of rumours. But it might be the end, on a morning such as this. It was all too beautiful to last. The sea cupped the peninsula in a lover’s embrace and waterfront apartments jutted out white and shimmering as if rising straight from the waves. Even the frilled edges of their shrapnel marks seemed to wink at her in the morning sun. She lit a French cigarette and called over her balcony to the apartment below.
‘Hadiya! Come up here before you go to school.’
She had a surprise for the little girl: an old photograph she’d found of herself at the same age. Mirror images of each other, except for the enveloping chador Hadiya was forced to wear. Sanaya butted out her cigarette and went inside. The photograph was propped up on the kitchen windowsill, curling at the edges in the morning damp. She broke up half a bar of wartime chocolate into shards, stirring powdered milk into the saucepan. As she stood at the stove, she thought about what she would have done if Selim Pakradounian hadn’t been so free these past few years with his gifts of food and clothes and cash. Starve probably, like everyone else in west Beirut. He was generous with his money, if not his time. She suspected he had other lovers. She’d heard rumours of an abandoned daughter, living in the Armenian quarter. But she’d learnt to wait and, if she cared to be honest, grown so accustomed to feigning indifference she began to feel it grow cold and hard in her flesh. A secret cyst plumped full of dissatisfaction and regret. She wasn’t sure what he meant to her, or she to him, but it was enough for now to sit out the war together.
She prodded at the frothing milk with a spoon, watching swirls of grey powder turn brown. Not exactly the colour of real chocolate, but a close-enough approximation. Her former self stared out into the future with the same blank gaze Hadiya affected with strangers, as if hiding some delicious irony of childhood. The little girl had the same straight honey strands in plaits, the same self-conscious upright figure. The cheap chocolate refused to melt but Sanaya poured the lumps into a mug anyway, wishing there was more.
Hadiya ran in with her satchel on and her hair flying behind her.
‘Where’s your scarf?’
‘Downstairs. It’s too hot to wear today.’
‘What will your mummy say?’
‘She doesn’t care. And you know Daddy’s still in the south.’
Sanaya couldn’t suppress an intake of breath. She never supposed the fighting would last so long and come so close, with the threat coming ever closer.
‘Here.’ She gestured to the steaming chocolate. ‘Have this.’
Hadiya took the mug in both hands without wanting to betray her hunger, and sipped at the foam. Sanaya knew she wanted to slurp it all down in one ferocious gulp.
‘Drink it quick, you’re late for school.’
‘Mummy’s rushing to work, can you fix my hair?’
She sat the little girl on a kitchen stool facing out into the courtyard, so she’d have something to look at besides the sea, obscured now by a greyish viscous scum, all the detritus of industry and war. The fountain, tiled in Persian blue, splashed in seeming contentment under a solitary fig tree. This year the tree had borne no fruit. Around its perimeter, glazed pots of basil and rosemary had long since been plundered, even the square sweet-grass lawn plucked bald by enterprising cooks. Hadiya settled her buttocks into the seat with a wriggle, letting Sanaya brush out her hair, comfortable in their silent intimacy.
After a decent interval of brushing she began to speak in a dreamy, singsong voice. ‘Our canary’s so cute, isn’t he? Hope the old man downstairs doesn’t cover him up when there’s an air raid.’
‘There won’t be an air raid, Hadiya. What makes you say that?’
Hadiya twirled her tongue around the last of the chocolate.
‘You’ll see. Back home, my pet birdie would sing especially loud during the bombs. He loved it.’
Sanaya brushed and looped the rough, lustrous hair that grew more magnificent the more malnourished the child became, as if in some perverse compensation. Hadiya’s family were Shia Muslim Palestinians from the south of Lebanon, forced out of their camps by the Israeli invasion three years ago, exiled from their ancestral orchards for generations. They arrived in Beirut with two pans and a single blanket.
Sanaya suspected the Maronite Christian who owned the apartment below would murder her when he came back from Paris – if he ever came back – seeing the way she had aided the squatters. He’d been away since the beginning of the war – seven years – and it didn’t look like he’d be back any time soon. Although she was Muslim, he’d trusted her to watch out for his property. He and her parents lived in such close proximity for decades, guarding each other’s interests in fear of their own. He took her to church once when she was seven, the same age Hadiya was now, and she remembered the pale wafer he showed her, poking out his tongue. She’d wanted to try it, wondering if it tasted like a vanilla milkshake, those frothy concoctions she begged for on Friday afternoons after school, the paper straw too big for her mouth. Her parents had been more Western than he. No matter. She shook her head and rolled up her sleeves, not entirely convinced how she fitted into these categories, arbitrary labels that changed overnight.
She helped the Palestinians dynamite a three-inch-thick steel door the old man had installed against just such calamities, ripping up brocade curtains for sheets, pulling apart faux Regency couches for makeshift beds. There was something seductive in destruction. She even gave them a set of crockery once destined for her own dowry, rose-patterned ware her mother had ordered all the way from England. It didn’t hurt as much as she expected; she’d given up on marriage. Especially with Selim. Hope-chest pillowcases, her mother’s honeymoon bedspread. All left to her in the convoluted will.
She didn’t regret what she did. She saw the fate of others from the south camping in theatre foyers, alleys behind shops, in the few parks of the city, being robbed of the meagre possessions they had, the women raped, even knifed to death, by Christian extremists.
She and Hadiya’s mother had become friends of a sort, especially now they were both living alone. Rouba’s husband was fighting with a Shia militia against the Israelis, defending the port town of Tyre. No word from him for months now. She brought Sanaya damaged fruit from the stall she worked at; they washed their clothes downstairs together in the courtyard, hanging out sheets to dry in the sun, gossiping and worrying over their health, their hair, their sanity.
Sanaya looked after Hadiya when she came home from school. She’d grown to love the little girl, as though her existence somehow held the key to Sanaya’s own continued survival. If Hadiya was all right, then everything would be. The city breathed along with her. So she fussed, scolded Hadiya when she sulked, made her walk to school with her back straight and toes pointed outward, heeding nothing, ignoring fear.
She kissed the nape of Hadiya’s neck when she was done and the smell of milk and warmth brought on a renewed rush of tenderness.
‘Now run and put your shoes on. Here’s the photo. Hurry, we don’t want to get into trouble from the teacher.’
Hadiya collided with a young man at the open door.
‘Uncle Issa!’
Sanaya took in the spectacle of the man, not yet a man, almost still a boy: incongruous in his torn battle fatigues, tarnished cartridges slung about his hips, the lankness of his shoulder-length hair. He carried a Kalashnikov and couldn’t have been more than twenty. As he sidled into the room, he scooped Hadiya in his arms and kissed the top of her head.
‘I heard your voice all the way outside, Hadi. You’re way too loud for a little girl. Where’s your ma?’
Hadiya didn’t answer but instead looked up at him with something like fear. Sanaya felt something in her retract. Although he spoke coherently enough to his niece, even tenderly, his whole stance revealed a terrible weariness and indifference, resignation bordering on insanity. He eased Hadiya to the floor and dropped to his knees before her.
‘She shouldn’t be out of the house. Setting a bad example again. And where’s your scarf gone?’
At this, he put his head in his hands and rocked on his heels.
‘I should never have gone and left you, now your father’s—’
Knowledge passed through Sanaya like sickness. She had the presence of mind to put out a hand before he could finish the sentence.
‘Go now, Hadiya. Samara’s mummy is waiting downstairs; I heard her honk the horn. I’ll look after your uncle.’ She hugged Hadiya goodbye and led the uncle to the divan.
Hadiya hesitated for a second, spun on her heels and was gone. Sanaya hurried into the kitchen, trying not to let the young man see her consternation at his appearance. She looked out the window, to make sure Hadiya got safely into the waiting car.
‘I’ll get you a drink. Something strong?’
‘Water,’ he whispered.
From her vantage point at the kitchen counter she studied him without allowing him to see her. His eyes were hooded, surprising her, when he glanced up briefly, with their blueness. His hair so matted she could hardly make out its colour, but lightish and web-like where it waved at his neck. Small hands, girlish fingers, a hint of golden down on his exposed forearm. He was still a child. When she gave him the glass of water he drank so quickly some spilled on his front. She wanted to dab at the stain with a napkin, but there seemed no point amid the general disorder.
She didn’t ask him how Hadiya’s father died. Her instinct was to get him to take a shower, but she knew how this could be misconstrued. Instead she sat beside him on the divan until he fell asleep. She removed his boots and covered him with a cotton sheet. His body a dead weight at her touch.
As usual bombs fell and she could hear them far away across town. One explosion was fairly close that day and rattled the empty vase on the mantel. She put it in a cupboard. She’d latticed all her windows, the shower screen, mirrors and glass doors with masking tape. Only the picture frames, etchings of a faded pre-war Lebanon and solemn, pinched portraits of her forbears, were free of the patterns of potential annihilation.
She felt safe though; the bombs never came as close as here. It would be very unlikely if her block were to suffer a direct hit. Although she lived in west Beirut, it was the southern suburbs, the Palestinian camps of Sabra-Shatila, Bourj al Barajneh, that bore the brunt. Her city was divided by a no-man’s land of crushed steel and toppled buildings, a Green Line not many had the courage to cross. The swarming camps of the Palestinians were teeming with filth and fear now, the Armenian quarter and Christian east, where Selim lived, still remaining untouched. But for how much longer?
She went out onto the balcony, trying to see. Nothing, only the sea before her: serene, limpid, a great swallowing eye. Sea draining colour from city and sky, sucking light from the pavement, the people, the pale, unhealthy fronds of the few palms still left standing on the Corniche. Hadiya, somewhere among those mismatched and rubbled streets, sitting up straight at her desk as Sanaya had taught her, mouthing her multiplication tables. A normal little girl at school, a normal day. Here, by the water, it was as if the war didn’t exist.
Issa still didn’t wake. Sanaya wandered around her apartment, straightening an ornament here, jerking a doily flat, rearranging the silk flowers just so. How pointless it all seemed. There wasn’t much to do; she cleaned incessantly. She went into her bedroom, kicked off her slippers. For how many years, how many days and days had she looked at these same yellowish walls, these glossy brocaded curtains, the green upholstered chair her mother chose when she first married? It stood at a deliberately casual angle to the corner, the way her mother would place it when she was alive. Nothing in this room had changed. It was a monument, a mausoleum. Sanaya was born in this bed, napped under its covers. As a child, she would hide in the space between the bed and the wall, playing with her dolls, serenely content in a world of her own making. She never entered the room when she was a teenager.
Now she lay on top of the bedspread, staring at the ceiling. The plaster rose was cracked and flaking; a large grey moth nearby stayed very still, miming death.
Hadiya’s father was dead.
She thought about breaking the news to Rouba, decided it was better for her to hear it from Issa. Was this cowardice or logic? Stupid men, always fighting. She wondered if Issa saw him die. She tried to nap. Restless. The vein in her right temple itching. She got up to make Arabic coffee, sipped it slowly while standing at the stove, watching the sleeping man. In repose, his face was gracious as a child’s. She turned the cup over on its saucer to tell her own fortune, knowing this ploy could never work. Fate knew just who was cheating.
Sanaya woke early the next morning and sat up in bed. She was so still she could hardly feel herself breathe: statue, column, pillar of salt. A pale dawn spread itself out over the sea, smooth as a fresh sheet. The few last stars shimmered on the horizon and wind from the ocean set the palm trees on the Corniche alight with the first of the sun’s rays. She sat, holding her dressing-gown closed over her breasts with one hand and Selim’s erect penis with the other. She studied his sleeping face, moved his foreskin up and down indifferently, then, suddenly changing her mind, crept out of bed.
She sat on her balcony overlooking the sea, alert to any noises from the bedroom, and lit a cigarette from a large box – Cuban this time. Another gift from Selim, her ritual before breakfast. She exhaled with a voluptuous slowness, happy if only for a moment to sit, to revel in her aloneness, in her seeming safety. Her apartment was intact, unlike the other blocks she passed on her walks, doll’s houses with facades torn off, women bathing, cooking, hanging washing in full view, assailed by the honking of cars and trucks. It allowed her to feel contained, with its creamy ornate ceilings, flaking pink-papered walls, the concrete balcony that was beginning to crumble in the sea mist that sprayed over it every evening in fine silver beads. A pearl necklace just like her mother’s, kept in a flat blue satin box. Tiny bubbles, like the faint sheen of sweat on Selim’s upper lip when he grew passionate, when he made his pronouncements on politics and women, women and religion, when they made love.
She made some tea, drank it gazing at the horizon, now milky white, indistinct, heat haze emanating from the city like sleeping breath. The tulip-shaped tumbler sparkled with refracted light. Hadiya always insisted on drinking her chocolate milk from one, entailing many refills. Yesterday morning she had pointed to the chandelier in the dining room and said she was drinking from the very same glasses that held those tiny electric candles. Little glasses filled with light. Little Hadiya, loved more with each passing day, loved more desperately because she was in so much danger. Her uncle Issa, out in the streets, fighting with Hezbollah against the PLO, against the Christian Phalange, against his own Shia comrades in Amal, and the Sunni Mourabitoun militia. Hand to hand for an alley or gutter, a few square inches of rubble to make the futility worth it for a while.
Sanaya shaded her eyes, peered closer, stood up. Planes. Planes arcing into the city, making for the Corniche, whirr and buzz of machinery flattening sound. Planes. Another bombing. She stood still at the rail, not daring to move. All around her, daisy-yellow pieces of paper dropping from the sky, so fast and thick she bowed her head and shut her eyes until the fluttering ceased and the silence was replaced by familiar sounds: horns honking, screech of tires, sough of sea, neighbours below exclaiming, leaflets in their clammy hands. She picked one up from the balcony floor: ‘10 June 1982. We shall capture the city in a short period. We have committed a large part of our air, naval and ground forces for the area of Beirut—’
She looked up. A series of quick taps at the door. Rouba came running in with more leaflets and the morning paper, already smudged by the sweat pouring from under her arms.
‘Sanaya, did you see what those Israelis—’
She didn’t finish. Sanaya ran to the bedroom and closed the door on Selim, carefully, so as not to wake him. She turned to Rouba.
‘My little cousin is sleeping here. Her mother had to work overnight in the factory and couldn’t look after her.’
Rouba nodded slowly, keeping up the pretence.
Sanaya crumpled all the leaflets and threw them in the kitchen bin, grabbed the newspaper and spread it out in front of her, reading the blurred headlines. She thought she might be reading the same line over and over but couldn’t be sure. Her breath caught in her throat, a lump she pushed down with the heel of her hand. Her eyes filled. Was it fear? It couldn’t be. Anger? Nostalgia for the city that she knew now – knew in the quiet unshakeable way of the dreaded truth – would be destroyed again and again? Operation Peace for Galilee. Rouba grabbed one of the balls of paper and smoothed it out behind her back. Sanaya looked up.
‘Tea, Rouba? Would you like some tea?’
‘I need to go downstairs in a minute. Hadiya might wake and will be scared if I’m not there. Give me half the paper; you can have the rest.’
When Rouba divided the paper, Sanaya turned to the back pages and read the atrocities of the day: kidnappings, bombings, torture, interrogations. Two hundred dead in a single Israeli air strike. Another day in Beirut. Except for one piece of news confirming those floating missives: the Israeli land army was sweeping north to Beirut and would reach the outskirts of the city in four days. She stood, shaking. Her voice when she spoke was unrecognisable.
‘Send her upstairs when she wakes. I have some fresh eggs.’
She lived in the heart of the PLO enclave in west Beirut. Her waterfront promenade and the boulevards that radiated from it still retained the beauty of an Orient past so idealised and yet so corrupted in these halfway countries, neither East nor West: delicately amoral, carelessly imprecise, in an advanced state of decay. The scraggly palm trees were indicative of it, the heat that embraced then lacerated, the grit between her teeth from watery coffee sold by vendors at the seaside, overblown fruit hawked by peasants from the south.
In these last few days before the Israeli invasion she discovered – reluctantly, shyly, almost ashamed – how much she was bound to this city. In refusing to leave, in clinging to her flimsy life, she found something interior, precious and reserved, close to love, for the city that mirrored her every breath, her every moan and fear. At night she lay back on her kilim cushions and smoked shisha tobacco scented with apples, gazing out into the middle distance past crowds on the seafront, as if by doing this she might somehow avert their shared fate.
When she was younger, she thought she would travel as soon as she could, explore the whole of Europe – live on the fringes, flout moral codes, a fleeting sparkling citizen of the world. She would promise herself in those nights spent lying awake in bed, hearing the clock tick, hearing her parents argue: When I turn thirty I’ ll be somewhere completely different, Cyprus maybe, Greece, or taking in the shimmer-heat of the south of Italy. She envisaged days of lassitude and iced drinks, nights of tanned skin and cool passion. She had no ambitions; studying was always a chore. She wasn’t good at anything in particular, and hadn’t really minded. She liked dancing, music, was capable of putting people at ease. She didn’t judge. That was her one shining achievement. Now she wished she had something: a hobby, a passion to occupy her days, to make life sing. She should have gone away when she had the chance.
She despised her parents and their small-minded existence, that bitter, hard-earned, middle-class wealth, a dirt-floor factory and its underpaid workers. Manufacturing cheap nylon pantyhose; sheer nude, opaque white, dirty black, she refused to ever wear a pair. She loathed the obligatory end-of-year appearance, the grudging line-up to shake her hand, such a good girl, such a compliant daughter, the pretty child of the boss. Handing out presents, meagre parcels of tangerines and roasted nuts. Her parents would bend down, whisper in her ears, twin conspirators. You know all this is for you. She knew it wasn’t. If she were dead, her parents would still be doing it. Now they were dead in her place, and she felt as if she had killed them.
She had dreaded the petty rounds of protocol, decorum: endless afternoon visits to fourth cousins and distant friends of friends. Muslim boys chosen for her to marry one day, all on display like so many fake clown-heads at the circus. Aim for the mouth, pop in a ball, win the prize. They sat in a row on stiff high-backed chairs, gobbling down food, betraying their indifference to her with their lack of manners. She watched them, sipped, never smiled. Tea and syrup cake disappearing down their gullets, scent of rosewater, glasses of pure arak poured from a little green bottle for the ladies. She hated it all: Beirut the implacable hostess, Beirut the hypocrite matron, Beirut the painted whore. Now, at the age of thirty, she realised just how much she belonged to Beirut, and the city to her.
It could be because she was now all these things. The slapdash hostess, the failed matron, the virgin whore. Beirut and she had an understanding, or at least something in common. She finally appreciated – if not accepted – her role in a society that alternately condemned and praised her for the very same attributes on different days. And she was no longer ashamed. No, she was defiant. It was easy to be when there was no longer anything to lose.
By day she walked, if it was safe enough to venture out. She walked through her tiny neighbourhood of Ras Beirut, waving in complicit denial to the odd herb- or egg-sellers squatting on the kerb with their kitchen-garden wares, oblivious to the threat of bombs. She passed the young Syrian – a Yezidi, a devil-worshipper, her neighbours whispered – who sat in exactly the same position every day, on a corner in the shade. He was a beggar, dressed in rags like all the other beggars and gypsies she passed, but he begged for words, not money. All around him in plastic bags were words cut from newspapers and books, bus tickets or food packets, or written on tiny squares of wrapping paper. War. Devastation. Kalamata olives. Sadness. Lux soap. One way to Jbeil. Futility. She knew he’d gone mad, shell-shocked by the death of his wife and four children during an air raid two months ago. They had only moved to Beirut this year from their village in Syria. He was at work when it happened; a day labourer, a simple man. Now he sat in his unmoving position, serene eyes staring up to the sky, murmuring his broken mantra as people walked by. ‘A word to give me, sir? A word to spare, young lady?’
She always stopped and gave him one, bending down to his level, where the smell of his unwashed hair and clothes overpowered her, dismayed by his black bare feet. Each time she forced herself to linger, smile and make small talk after he wrote down her word in his incongruously perfect handwriting. Sometimes she slipped him some money and ran away before he had time to protest.
She power-walked past the American University campus and cheap student cafes, now bricked-up completely by their frightened owners. She rounded the strafed Gefinor building, once the modern pride of Beirut, to the tree-fringed road twisting through the old, crumbling quarter of Ain Mreisseh, where the last of the city’s Ottoman villas were being picked off one by one like toy targets. Their red-tiled roofs made them easy to spot, their cheerful character easy to justify bombing. What right had they to look so complacent in a dying city?
There was a certain tree on this route. Miraculously it had escaped the shelling and stood bent in the ruined courtyard of one of those villas. Old and twisted, its trunk thickening to low-lying roots, a woman’s legs and pubis with no torso. On the opposite side, as if merged into it, were the thicker legs and squat penis of a man. Twin lovers with no heads, no eyes, no hearts. She couldn’t abandon this tree. Whenever she became tempted to escape – take her money, leave the apartment to looters, seek refuge with Selim in east Beirut or Cyprus – she thought of the tree, so brave, so foolhardy, so achingly beautiful in the face of decay. Then she knew she had to stay. The tree had become her Beirut.
Her city had become an amphitheatre of terror. Here in west Beirut, once home to the liberal intelligentsia and artists, where Christians and Muslims lived side by side, people now asked each other’s background and religion before committing to anything, before buying a bunch of grapes, accepting a simple offer of help. Everyone had become adept at euphemism. She’d be surprised if anyone could ever speak to one another in plain, honest terms again. They’d lost the knack. Now there were code words for everything. Seven years of civil war were called the events. Shrapnel had become confetti. Wounds were scratches. Death, our grinning friend.
The sounds of bombs and guns and the whirring of Israeli planes echoed from the apartments terraced on the mountainside all the way down to the sea. Commercial streets became empty spaces between onslaughts. When there was a ceasefire called, for minutes or hours – never longer – men scurried out for anything they could find in the shops along Rue Hamra and the women stayed at home, trying to ignore this war they thought had ended long ago.
Sanaya didn’t stay home. She cloaked herself in her blue abaya and a pair of sequinned sandals she’d filched from one of the overflowing bins lining the Corniche. Spoils of war, discarded last week by fleeing Christians bound for the east of the city. She imagined the woman’s panic: Leave this? Take that? Making two piles: hairdryer, reject; handmirror, must have; sequinned sandals, not sure – this third pile for objects requiring the clarification of attachment. Her husband sweeping up the piles on his way to the car, dumping them in the nearest gutter, ignoring her protestations.
Sanaya walked blind and fast in her discarded sandals and she walked this way to keep hold of her sanity. She didn’t allow herself to see, to really see this devastation wreaked by her own neighbours on each other. No matter she walked past bombed apartment blocks exactly like hers, through shopping arcades collapsed and folded like paper flowers, as gunmen followed her through neighbourhoods pockmarked by shrapnel, demanding her identity card; no matter she stopped and showed it to them repeatedly, either smiling or keeping calm, a splitsecond decision between life and death. She stood with them on streets guarded by other uneasy sentinels: a few palms, bare and spindly, their fronds blown off by car-bomb blasts.
She woke late in viscous heat to militiamen on loudspeakers. She was thankful Selim wasn’t there; he’d gone back to east Beirut last night. She sat up, looked out the window. Syrians – she could tell from the tattiness of their uniforms.
‘The Israeli leaflets are poisoned,’ they boomed. ‘Come down to the bonfires immediately.’
She put on a pair of rubber gloves, rummaging in the kitchen bin for the leaflets she had crumpled and thrown in there yesterday. She didn’t believe the Syrians – or at least only half-believed them. But it wouldn’t do not to be seen downstairs at the bonfire. She jumped at a sudden pounding on the door and opened it to a Syrian soldier who thrust out a plastic bag. He didn’t speak. Her hands were shaking in their irregular pink gloves; it wouldn’t do to let him see her shake. He would think she had something to hide.
He looked around the room as he stood at the door, weapon easy by his side. She turned to follow the trajectory of his gaze, suddenly seeing the room as he must see it: faded opulence, bourgeois pretension, chandeliers and fake-marble columns and iridescent urns so much evidence of her betrayal to the cause. He’s a socialist. Comes from some dirt-poor village in the desert. I could be killed for this in west Beirut.
She pulled off her gloves, beckoned him inside. Now he turned his attention to her and again she saw herself as he must see her: an aging woman in a rose-coloured robe, breasts loose and sagging, a oncebeautiful face raddled by sleep and humidity. A decadent imperialist. A whore.
‘Coffee? Glass of tea?’
He slapped his lips together once, twice. The sound was faintly nauseating to her.
‘Some water.’
She brought it to him where he stood, watched as he drank. Something in the way he held the glass reminded her of Hadiya’s uncle. Issa too had drained the liquid in a gulp, pouring the water into his mouth from above in the peasant fashion, without allowing the glass to touch his lips.
‘Sa’ laam aleikum,’ the soldier said when he was finished.
‘Sa’ laam,’ she breathed.
When he’d gone she stood on the balcony, leaning over the railing. Rouba was in the courtyard, hanging out her washing.
‘What was his problem, Sanaya?’
‘Syrian. Wanting leaflets to burn. Do you have any?’
Rouba smirked.
‘I have one, but I’m keeping it. Don’t like the Syrians. Never liked them. Coming here telling us all what to do.’
Sanaya watched her shake out a pillowslip with a sharp, decisive flick. Rouba, too, was defiant in almost imperceptible ways. Gnarled and misshapen, another foolhardy tree.