Part 17 (1/2)

And this is how, in real life, we also started dancing. First Madame got up. Like the video, she swayed her hips. She swayed over to Baba, and shook her chest. ”Come on, Bea,” so Lema and I both got up. Lema followed Madame's lead. She isolated her ribs.

I also tried to follow Madame. She danced over. ”Hips, not feet, Bea. These are your hips.” Dounia bounced around us like a teacup.

From his chair, Baba clapped loudly.

I asked, ”What's the matter, Baba, you don't like to dance?”

Madame answered for him, ”He's shy, can't you tell?”

Nisrine came in from the kitchen.

”What was your wedding like, Nisrine?”

”I wore a red dress. It was my sister's before me. I almost fell over, because the embroidery was so heavy.”

We stayed dancing and dancing. And then, all of a sudden Dounia got tired of dancing, she began to knock into us instead, and the room came together, and as she knocked, we lost our balance, and we all fell on top of one another, laughing, our limbs still moving on the soft carpet like upturned insects. For a moment, I couldn't tell which of us was which. My arms were beside Dounia's head, which ran into Lema's shoulder, which lay across Nisrine's back. We had once been a fourteen-armed creature called Baba.

Madame switched off the TV. She said, ”Look how happy Nisrine is, her husband's far away.”

Nisrine said, ”I'm not happy.”

”Yes you are, you're all breathless and glowing. You see, Bea? Foreigners like it here. They don't really want to leave.”

But, Nisrine was becoming more and more distracted. We saw it in the apartment, the way dust clung to the ceilings, hung from spiderwebs that gathered like chandeliers.

I noticed the dust in my books.

Before, I had scoured these books for ways to understand love. Now, I began to scour them for ways to understand Nisrine, for the right thing to say to keep her happy with us.

Nisrine was not trying, I thought. She just had to try harder.

At least she has love, I thought, and deep down, I still felt my own small wish.

Nisrine said, ”If Baba leaves, I don't think I'll be able to stay in this house.” She meant, if Baba was taken. Baba was the one who still wanted her here, Madame didn't.

At night, we leaned out over the balcony.

”What do you think about Baba?”

”I don't know. I don't know what to think.”

”Maybe we could ask Adel to help.”

But, Adel had not helped Nisrine when she left.

She sighed, puffed out her cheeks. ”I want someone to do something for me, and I want to do something. We are always inside, and nothing ever changes. Why can't Adel sweep in and take me by the waist and kiss me, if he really loves me? Why can't he save me? Why can't we save Baba?”

We wanted to, so much.

Nisrine was always the first I turned to in our house, the first I talked to. Now, though, she no longer remembered all her words. Sometimes, you didn't know if she understood because no matter what, she nodded blankly. It made me lonely.

Nisrine had once told me about the word that meant maid, and heroine, and moveable house, and we had let our imaginations soar around it.

I began to see how the maid really is the house. How she makes the house-without her, we drifted, stooping at the corners to avoid the spiderwebs. And outside, unrest.

In April, the winds swept up the desert in the evenings, and the city had no hill to block them, only a small mountain. They pooled around the mountain, catching the air currents in hot, breathless spurts, they waited and gathered strength. In the evening there were small dark smudges of smoke like birds on the horizon. We kept the windows closed against the soot and the smell. Sometimes, Nisrine remembered to sweep the dust, but she might as well not have, because the winds blew through the house and left it dirty.

There was a c.o.c.kroach in the bathroom. It had been sitting there all morning. Madame didn't kill it. She came into the kitchen and said, ”Nisrine, we must mop the house today, it is just too dirty. There are bugs starting to live here, you hear me? We must mop the floors.”

It was a small kitchen, and in the spring heat, it was beginning to smell of olive oil and macaroni. Nisrine was singing like she always did, and was.h.i.+ng the juice gla.s.ses. There was a special sponge Madame reserved just for the juice gla.s.ses, so they didn't begin to smell like grease. Nisrine used the sponge to suds all the gla.s.ses. Then she used another sponge to suds our dirty spoons. While she washed, she hummed and looked out the window.

An hour later, the c.o.c.kroach was still in the bathroom, beneath the sink. I thought about spraying water on it, but perhaps it could swim. I didn't mind, I left it alone. I went into the kitchen, where Nisrine was singing a love song. The gla.s.ses shone on the counter, very neatly. She was arranging the pots and pans. ”No one wants to see us together,” she sang.

The c.o.c.kroach stayed all day, until it was eaten by a rat in the evening. There was a scream from Baba in the bathroom. The children and I came running.

”Amal,” Baba called. He turned to us. ”Go get your mother. Tell her to mop the floors.”

ADEL WATCHED ALL THIS, and thought how Nisrine was like a dove: hard to hold, hard to keep. She came out to the balcony, and sometimes it was as if she didn't know him. After their first love, there was not any more.

He said, ”Nisrine, I think about you in that terrible house and I cry, and I cry.” You love someone, and then they are in trouble and want to leave, and you don't know how to help them.

Nisrine had never seen her policeman cry. She had seen him laugh and play, the shadows of his face in pa.s.sion.

He came to her to tell her he cried now, often. In Adel's Arabic, the word for crying sounded almost like the word for reciting a verse of the Quran: aya, aya. Adel's accent was thick like his mother's, and when he forgot to speak with education it was very thick, and the q's came out g's and k's came out tsh, and he repeated the word for crying twice every time he said it.

”I love you, Nisrine, do you believe me? I aya, aya.”

But, Nisrine was losing her Arabic. She might have believed him, but she was tired. ”Don't speak to me in your language, I don't understand you.”

Adel had no other language. He might have touched her, but the sky lay always between them. They needed a new language, one that did not rely on words; they did not know where to find this.

”I aya, aya, Nisrine. I go to the rooftop, and I aya, aya alone.”

It is hard to know what changes a person.

Adel had watched Nisrine grow tired; he had watched her veil slip. She had always been neat, her nails always painted red to entice him. Now, they began to flake. He still carried the feel of her soul around in him.