He wrote his father letters, and the responses arrived weekly on tissue-thin airmail paper that crackled between his fingers.
I thank God you are learning everything you can, his father wrote. If I were a young man, I would want to be in your place.
In December, no letters arrived. Muneer didn’t dwell on the absence. With exams pressing on his brain, he hadn’t had time to write his father, and so his father had had nothing to respond to. On December 24, Muneer flew home for winter break, his suitcases full of Fruit of the Loom T-shirts for his brothers and Chanel No. 5 for his mother and sisters. When he landed at the Jidda airport and climbed down the jet’s rickety stairs to the desert scrub of the landing pad, Bandar was waiting for him, the ends of his red-and-white shimagh folded over his head casually, as though everything were the same. When they hugged and kissed on both cheeks, the cloth of Bandar’s headdress grazed Muneer’s skin.
“Why are you home?” Muneer said. Bandar’s midyear break fell in January, and Muneer hadn’t expected to see him for more than a few days.
“Baba passed away,” Bandar said in Muneer’s ear. “God have mercy on him.”
The words made no sense. Bandar’s hot breath tickled and smelled of frankincense gum. Muneer couldn’t suppress a giggle. His brother pinched him, hard, on the forearm. It hurt like hell.
“He had a stroke,” Bandar said. “Two weeks ago.”
“Don’t lie.”
But it was true. Muneer’s father was dead and the past two weeks of Muneer’s life had been the lie. The meals Muneer had eaten, the TV shows he’d watched, the thoughts he’d had—wrong, wrong, wrong. Every small happiness he’d experienced—a free pizza his boss had given him, an A he’d gotten on a quiz—was a deception. He’d been wrong to look forward to going home and seeing his father, kissing his father’s round cheeks; watching his bent, turbaned head as he cleaned his fingernails, one by one, with the cap of a ballpoint pen; listening to him talk about the young Arab generals and the new unity and how their country should be part of that, not leave it to Egypt and Iraq.
Instead, Muneer should have been rubbing his fists into his eyes to stop crying. He should have been helping wash his father, wrap him, and bury him. He should have been looking at his father’s face one last time.
At night, lying on a thin mattress next to his brother with the book-hard pillows he wasn’t used to anymore, Muneer wanted to put his hand into his chest and pull his whole heart out. He tried. He placed his fingers against his sternum and pressed harder and harder until it hurt and his fingers seized up and he had to go outside to stretch them out and moan with pain and grief because he might wake up his brother if he stayed inside.
Oh, but that was a lie, to let the family think he wasn’t angry that they had not told him and sent for him immediately.
Muneer’s mother wore mourning white and never left the house, as was the custom for four months and ten days after a husband’s death. She kept her hair covered, though only her children and sisters surrounded her. Until his last week at home, Muneer never saw her alone. One evening he found her sitting in the formal salon, pouring tea.
“Sit with me,” she said.
“I’m not going back to America.”
She mixed his tea with sugar, the way she would have mixed his father’s tea. Muneer winced at the sweetness of it.
“God keep you for me and protect you,” she said.
The next day she told his brothers he had decided to stay in Jidda.
They had come to their father’s formal sitting room, where they sat on low cushions around the perimeter, to decide how they could best care for their mother. There were also two sisters to marry off. It would not be hard to find families willing to marry them. And there was Lujayn, the littlest, to take care of.
“You have to go back to America,” they told Muneer. “For Baba and for Mama. She needs us to support her, so you need a good degree from over there.”
“And let you lie to me again when someone else dies?”
“God forbid,” said Salem, the oldest.
“God knows what will happen, and we’ll do what’s best, with His guidance,” said Sameer.
Bandar came up with the idea that Muneer take a semester off and help out in his father’s store. If he had not stayed those extra months, he might not have married Saeedah.
‘UQBALAK
The engagement happened more because of God’s will—and Muneer’s mother’s—than his own. On a warm May night, a few months before he was to return to the States, he took his mother to Saeedah’s sister’s wedding. In Aunt Faizah’s courtyard, strands of lights were strung from the top of a pole to the edges of the wall. His mother went inside, complaining about the climb she would have to make to the roof where the women were sitting. In the courtyard, servants had unrolled threadbare woolen rugs from edge to edge and laid out cushions. Some of the men, the early arrivals, sat with their thawbs stretched like trays across their laps and the tops of their socks revealed. Shisha smoke hovered above their heads. Aunt Faizah’s husband, Fareed, jumped up when he saw Muneer. Of Uncle Fareed’s children, Saeedah looked most like him. Muneer could not look at this man without thinking of the daughter. The way their eyebrows were set high above their eyes, so they looked skeptical or like they were laughing at a joke no one else understood. The dark purple of their lips. The square set of their shoulders, like a doorframe or a gate. Like they stood between him and something mysterious. Were they protecting him from forces that threatened him? Or keeping him from something he wanted? He couldn’t be sure, and at the time, the uncertainty intrigued him.
Uncle Fareed kissed Muneer on both cheeks.
“’Uqbalak,” he said.
May you be next. Muneer never quite knew how to respond. The sentiment was especially awkward coming from Saeedah’s father.
“God willing, Uncle.” He hoped he didn’t sound eager. Then, an invisible thread drew Muneer’s chin upward, as though a fisherman had hooked him. Saeedah’s face popped out over the ledge of a second-floor window, and her hennaed hand waved. Perhaps someone was calling her, because she disappeared, thank God, as Uncle Fareed looked up to see what had caught Muneer’s attention.
Uncle Fareed seemed to guess it had been someone. “Young man, keep your gaze down, like the Prophet says.” He chucked Muneer under the chin, as though he were greeting a little boy, and noticed the folded-up newspaper Muneer carried under one arm.
“Is that my paper?” He grabbed it and pretended to read the headline. Uncle Fareed had studied in Cairo and apprenticed at its famous newspapers.
It was not his paper and Muneer felt a bit embarrassed by that.
Uncle Fareed tapped Muneer’s arm with the rolled-up newspaper and handed it back. “How are your studies?”
Muneer kept his eyes on his hands to avoid seeking a glimpse of Saeedah. He imagined himself inside the house, following her from duty to duty as she wrapped ribbons around the candles for the zaffah, curled her sisters’ hair, and brushed her face with powder.
“I should have gone to Egypt. English is too much for me.”
“You’re blessed to learn anything you can. You should have written for me while you were here—why didn’t I think of it?”