Bride of the Sea Read online

  BRIDE OF THE SEA

  A NOVEL

  EMAN QUOTAH

  To Mom and Baba

  And to Andrew

  “We do tell you the best of stories … When Joseph said to his father, ‘O father, I have dreamt eleven stars and the sun and the moon; I saw them prostrating to me’ / [His father] said, ‘O my son, do not tell the story of your dream to your brothers …’”

  —The Qur’an, SURAT YUSUF (JOSEPH)

  CONTENTS

  Basmalah 2018

  Out of the Lake 1970

  Buqjah

  Geckos and Jam Jars

  Airmail

  ‘Uqbalak

  Mentor Headlands

  “You Are Divorced” 1974–1975

  Witnesses

  Draeger’s

  Getaway 1975

  Suitable Girls 1975–1985

  Ya‘qub’s Blindness

  Routine

  Beneath the Mothers’ Feet

  Madinah Wedding

  Toledo 1975

  Aspiration 1980

  Hacienda Road

  Everything

  Found 1987

  Apparition

  Trespass

  La Samah Allah

  Where Do We Go

  “My Name Isn’t Sally” 1975

  Desert Shield 1990–1991

  You Drive Me Crazy

  First Impressions

  Taif

  Social Life

  Resolution 678

  Gone

  W 1987

  Convert 1998

  Sanctuary

  Forgiveness

  Detained 2003

  Memoir

  Gone South

  Dreams 2018

  Last Wish

  Relics

  Passport

  Return

  Acknowledgments

  Reader’s Guide

  BASMALAH

  2018

  Hannah dreams the family buries her mother, a woman they haven’t seen in more than forty years. Hannah herself hasn’t seen her mom in twenty years. The family buries Sadie in view of the Red Sea, a few miles from Jidda, where she was born. The water is a perfect, unending slab of turquoise.

  Hannah focuses on the horizon. The Arabian Peninsula and everything on it disappear—the land behind her, beneath her, beside her. Hannah stands on firm ground. Ahead of her: miles and miles and miles of sea.

  Before the burial and the sea, Hannah is in a small room with low cushions. Her mother’s body lies in the middle of the floor on a sheet spread over a silk rug. Women in mourning white hunch over the body, the sleeves of their long dresses rolled to the elbows. Though she can’t see their faces, Hannah knows—the way you sometimes know in dreams—who is touching her mother’s lifeless skin. Hannah’s grandmother, Aunties Randah and Riham, a handful of female cousins.

  They wash the hands and face three times, the arms, the feet, as though preparing the body for prayer. As though the dead could pray. They slide the washcloth down the body’s right side and its left side, press the stomach with their flat palms to force a bowel movement. After they wash the body, they expertly swaddle it in white cotton, as though readying a baby for sleep. All that shows is a pale face, cheeks like crumpled sheets of unbleached paper.

  The women burn sandalwood incense. In real life, someone would be howling with grief, calling her mother’s given name: “Saeedah!” They would call Hannah’s name, too, her other name: “Oh, Hanadi! God have mercy on your mother! God forgive her and protect her!”

  In this dream: watery silence, as though they are at the bottom of the sea. Her mother looks harmless. Quiet and still. An object.

  The sea becomes a great, brown, expansive lake. A sea again. A lake. Hannah turns from the water. Men in white thawbs, brown mishlahs, and white headdresses carry the body, the bundle that is her mother, down a beach that shines like a coin.

  The body is veiled, disguised. It could be anyone. Maybe it is not her mother. Maybe bodies have been switched.

  Soon the men, these uncles and cousins, both close and distant, are digging and digging, their thawbs hiked up around their waists and tucked into their boxer briefs, their mishlahs and headdresses thrown into a big pile on the sand. Behind the men are waves, and there is sound: a whoosh and crash and someone cussing, and though Hannah doesn’t understand the Arabic words, she recognizes the tone of frustration, like someone stubbing a toe or jolting an elbow.

  Meanwhile, the men dig and dig and the sand won’t stop filling in, and the cussing continues, and the waves crash.

  One of the men realizes they forgot to say God’s name before they started. That part Hannah understands—a miracle of dream-translation.

  The men put down their shovels. Together, their voices singsong and thrumming, they say,

  Bismillah-ir-rahman-ir-raheem.

  In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.

  OUT OF THE LAKE

  1970

  BUQJAH

  In weekly letters to his family in Jidda, Muneer will not write about coming back to the Cleveland Heights rental house after his journalism class and driving up the dark, half-shoveled driveway, his headlights illuminating Saeedah in a bank of snow up to her knees. She wears jeans and a turtleneck stretched tight across her belly, which is as round and hard as if she’d tucked a football under her top. No coat. Her lips are darkened with cold, her hair bright and glistening with flakes. She holds a metal shovel above her head, as though she wants to thwack someone.

  He won’t write that he’s surprised she’s home. She never tells him how she spends her time or who she’s with, or asks him to drop her off or says she needs the car, or answers with more than “class” or “study group” or “the library” when he asks where she’s going with the classmates who come to pick her up.

  She is nineteen. He is twenty-three. They have been married for a year and a half and their first child will be born soon. And the word divorce is whispering in his ear, a secret no one else knows.

  Muneer does not want to hear it. “God forgive me,” he says, yanking up the parking brake and leaping out of the car without cutting the engine. “For God’s sake, what are you doing?” he yells, his voice harsh against the night’s snowy hush. He grabs Saeedah’s arm, and she wrenches it back.

  “Come inside,” he whispers. “It’s too cold.”

  “I’m sweating.” She leans on the shovel. “Leave me alone.”

  “Let me finish the shoveling,” he says. “It’s better for the baby.”

  “I can do it.”

  Icicles hang like legs of lamb from the eaves of their rental house, and six-foot-high, coal-black snow piles obscure the sidewalks. Standing outside this short time he finds himself shivering despite his long johns, wool socks, fur-lined boots, a turtleneck under a sweatshirt under a down coat. His toes feel like marbles. His breath leaves his body like a storm cloud.

  He leaves her shoveling. His fingers stick to the ice-cold doorknob as he opens the unlocked front door. She says it’s the heat of shoveling that made her shed her outerwear, but every day she forgets her hat and gloves, her scarf. This is not the first time she’s ventured into the northeast Ohio winter with no coat.

  “Jinn take her,” he mumbles as he shoves his way inside and slams the door.

  The foyer’s warmth soothes him, until he sees her gloves like shriveled leaves on the floor. Her scarf winds its serpentine way to the door, as though she took the time to spell her first initial with it as she left. Her stiff knit hat is propped beside the gloves.

  He drapes her coat over his arm, turns the porch light on, and again steps outside. Bundled in snow and night, the world looks smaller and snugger than usual.

  Saeedah has moved to the driveway—but wh
en he gets nearer, he fears her shovel, the way it slices through the snow, the way she seems to be keeping him at a distance with the purposefulness of her shoveling. With a deep sense of futility, he holds the coat open while she digs the driveway clean, the sound of her scraping ice echoing along the dark street. Someone else is shoveling somewhere, too. When she gets to the car, she opens the door, reaches in to turn it off, and removes his keys. He comes down the steps. She gives him the keys. He keeps the coat. She goes back to shoveling.

  Back in the house, he folds and stacks Saeedah’s things and sits in the lawn chair she has placed by the door to take off his boots. He tells himself he has stopped being angry that Saeedah won’t take care of herself, or let him take care of her. She’ll do what she does, no matter the consequence. His mother told him so, before he and Saeedah were engaged.

  He doesn’t know what to do.

  He tugs his first boot so hard he nearly falls off the chair.

  Jinn take her.

  He heats leftover lentil soup over the stove, ladles it into a bowl, squeezes a little lime into it, leaves it on the table for Saeedah, and goes to bed without eating. He’s not hungry.

  Every day lately, including these seconds before sleep, is as tension-filled as a final exam. Tonight, as usual, he’s wide awake for an hour, listening for her, hearing nothing, not even the door slamming shut—did she ever come in?

  Her body jostles him awake at two in the morning. They lie under the electric blanket, back to back, an inch of hot, staticky air between them like an unbridgeable river.

  He says in English, “You have to bundle up before you go outside.” Bundle. Is there an equivalent verb in Arabic? There is a noun: buqjah.

  She fidgets against him, her feet still ice cold. He shifts his legs up toward his chest and tries again, in Arabic: “We’re not in Jidda.”

  “You’ve said that before. We’re not in Jidda. I say, I’m not a child.” Her voice is as icy as her feet. “Maybe you think I should go home to my mother. Maybe I will.”

  She’s threatened to go home before. He knows better than to believe her. He knows how she feels about her mother.

  He yearns to feel what they share, to reach around her and touch her belly. The child growing. Something stops him, a lack of courage, as though he were eight years old and staring at a villa’s wall. Wanting to climb it, knowing he can get up but not get down. He was that kind of child, one who stopped himself from doing things, who would rather observe. She was the kind of girl who scrambled up and didn’t think twice. No risk seemed to scare her; nothing changed her mind.

  Who will the baby take after? He prays for an answer. He prays to strike the hidden word divorce from his head.

  GECKOS AND JAM JARS

  First cousins by their mothers, Muneer and Saeedah grew up together. When he was six or seven and she was a toddler with springy hair, gazelle’s eyes, and teeny fingernails like colorless pomegranate seeds, she went missing in her family’s three-story villa, in the middle of an evening gathering. Aunt Faizah, Saeedah’s mother, had invited her six sisters and their families for dinner. Before the meal, the children played in the courtyard. When they were called inside, someone noticed that Saeedah had gone missing. For half an hour, they scoured the house. The aroma of roasted lamb followed them everywhere, and Muneer became so overcome with hunger he could barely remember why they were tromping up and down the stairs. Unable to find the girl, the aunties herded the children back outside. The women stood in the walled courtyard and whistled, as though they could call a little girl like a falcon.

  Muneer’s mother narrowed her eyes till they were the tiniest bit ajar, like the eyes of the sleepy alley cats they’d passed on their walk to Aunt Faizah’s villa. “Clearly, the girl’s not out here.”

  “She’s not inside,” Aunt Faizah said. She held her little twins, one in the crook of each arm, like two melons. Her features were stretched with worry, her gaze tethered to the gate.

  “How does a little girl get out the gate? And if she did, she’d never go very far,” Muneer’s mother said.

  “Maybe her father left it open. He’s always doing things like that.”

  “Say a prayer for the Prophet and go back inside. She’s not outside.”

  “How do you know?”

  Muneer sidled to the stairs and started to climb, dragging his arm along the wooden balustrade. No one followed him or seemed to notice. Upstairs, a series of narrow green hallways led past spacious, dark rooms with ceiling fans whirring. He stepped into the rooms one after the other and let the cool air ruffle his hair, until he found himself in a rose-colored room on the top floor. A gecko the size of his pinky basked in a single line of sunlight that slashed the wall. The lizard’s stringy tail flicked nervously; its pinpoint eyes were dreamy. Over the fan’s humming he faintly heard a girlish voice singing: “Wazaghah, wazaghah, wazaghah.”

  There she was, in a built-in cupboard with a dark green slatted door, her fingertips poking through. He couldn’t possibly have seen her face through the wood and the shadows, but in his memory, he glimpses her gap-toothed smile, and he knows that she is calling, “Gecko, gecko, gecko.”

  He thinks of that day in the morning when he finds Saeedah already in the kitchen eating saltines. She’s left the cupboard door wide open and the soup bowl empty in the sink. He can’t tell for sure if she ate the soup or dumped it, but hopefulness tugs at him.

  “Let’s go to the beach,” he says.

  The suggestion is surprising to him, and last-ditch, he admits. But why not? They spent the best day of last summer at the beach, after they learned she was pregnant. She had been sullen for weeks, ever since they’d decided they couldn’t afford to go home for the summer. Her father would have paid for it, but Muneer wouldn’t accept his offer. One day, he would work at his father-in-law’s newspaper, and he wanted it not to be a matter of wastah—connections—but rather of professional integrity.

  But the news of the baby had made her smile, and the mood lasted for days. He was giddy, too. They hadn’t told their families in Saudi or their friends here, and they held hands in the car as he drove through the low-rise suburbs toward Lake Erie, down the greenway, alongside the salt factory, the giant mural of the Morton salt girl in her rain boots. Saeedah loved the beach, though the water was fresh and brown and smelled like algae, not salty and blue and fishy like the sea they grew up with. They tugged off their sneakers and socks, rolled their jeans up to their knees, walked to the lighthouse and climbed on the rocks. They gazed across the vastness of Lake Erie, no shore in sight, as though they were gazing into the future. The wind whispered around them, lifting Saeedah’s nearly waist-length hair like black wings.

  Muneer and Saeedah had never seen a lake before. They didn’t know that most lakes don’t stretch to the horizon like the sea. The sky was as blue as the Red Sea, and they fell on their backs looking up at it, letting the sun warm their faces. Ahead of them lay the baby’s birth, Muneer’s graduation in the spring, his yearlong internship in the States before going back to be a reporter for her father.

  The waves lapping against the shore sounded like a prayer whispered over and over. The sand felt like a net, holding them. He would like to go back to the beach and recapture the feeling. But Saeedah waves her arm at the window, the porridge-gray sky, and the wiry trees. She smiles a wide, taut smile and rolls her eyes.

  “Wouldn’t you say it’s too cold for the beach?”

  Last winter—her first—wasn’t like this. She wore her hat and gloves and wound the itchy blue scarf around her neck, and together they complained about the weather. They’d watched the year’s first snowfall, the flakes like thousands of tiny miracles. They’d held out their hands and the snow landing on their skin felt like nothing. “Mashallah,” they’d said together, standing in the driveway. Their tongues stuck out involuntarily to catch the little bits of moisture, and their words came out garbled: “Mathallah, mathallah.”

  Neither of them knew how to cook, so
they’d spent a month’s rent on phone calls to their mothers. To measure the rice, they’d need a jam jar, his mother had said. He and Saeedah hadn’t hesitated, emptying a whole jar of raspberry jam into the garbage disposal. Saeedah bent her ear to the phone, pulling the cord across the living room so she could relay their mothers’ recipes to Muneer in their kitchen, which was not much bigger than a bathroom. The Bukhari rice came out too moist, stewed with cinnamon sticks and cardamom pods that lay bloated and spent alongside the chunks of lamb. Later, they tried chicken and rice poached in milk. Saleeg was meant to be soggy, Muneer joked, so of course they mastered it easily.

  Back home, each of these rice dishes was served on large round aluminum platters to dozens of guests. In Ohio, Muneer and Saeedah ate their Bukhari rice and saleeg straight from the pot. They discussed inviting friends over to share the food they cooked, but there wasn’t room, and truthfully, he didn’t want to share her. Her laughter, like the wind chimes tinkling on their neighbor’s porch. The sound of her voice reciting ingredients to him. The way her lip and eyebrow jutted up to the right as she concentrated on chopping onions and cilantro for hot sauce.

  What he and Saeedah need, he decides, moving quickly from the beach idea, is people around them. People to eat their food. Muneer invites his best friend Jameel to come over Saturday evening after their shift at the pizza parlor, where they both earn a little extra to send home to their families while they live on student stipends from the Saudi government. He and Saeedah have Muneer’s small stipend. They have to stretch it further than a single guy like Jameel.

  Jameel is studying to be a dentist. He drinks beer, smokes menthol Lucky Strikes, and dates American girls. His teeth are whitened and as startlingly bright as his patent leather loafers, while Muneer’s teeth are stained yellow from too much fluoride in the drinking water growing up in Jidda. The two of them went to the same public high school, and their fathers had neighboring dress shops in the Old City. Jameel’s father had the greater business acumen, opening stores in new parts of the city with the help of his other sons.