Behind Sammar the house was sleeping, hummed by fans and air coolers. Siesta before sunset and the time for praying and tea, going out or visitors parking their cars on the pavement outside. Her aunt’s house was a busy house, a lot of coming and going, snapping open the tops of Miranda bottles, boiling water for tea, special trays for guests, an elegant sugar bowl. Hanan lived on the top floor with her husband and four children. Sammar had known Dalia, who was the same age as Amir, but she had seen the two-year-old twins only in photographs. And of course the baby was new, asleep now with Mahasen downstairs. Sammar sat on the porch and there was no breeze, no moisture in the air, all was heat, dryness, desert dust. Her bones were content with that, supple again, young. They had forgotten how they used to be clenched. Her skin too had darkened from the sun, cleared and forgotten wool and gloves. She waited for everything else to forget: the inside of her and her eyes. Her eyes had let her down, they were not as strong as they had been in the past, not as strong as the eyes of those who had not travelled north. She must shield them with blue lenses and wait for them to forget like her bones had forgotten and her skin. She wanted to pick up life here again. People smile when I come into a room and this tree is for me, this scrawny garden, this sun. These children are all mine, the one I carried inside me and the ones I did not.
No one will tell me get out of here, get away, get away from me.
‘Sammar, Sammar’: it was the neighbour’s daughter calling from across the wall. Sammar walked across the porch, down the steps towards the car-port. There was a tap and a sink on the floor with a raised cement edge. Standing on it she could talk to Nahla who was standing on the arms of a chair. Two days ago, in this same position, Nahla had lost her balance and fallen. She was undeterred though and now shook hands with Sammar and kissed her over the wall.
‘If you fall again, you’ll break and be in bandages at the wedding.’ Nahla was getting married next month. She was beautiful, with dimples and dark-coloured veils that never slipped off her hair, rectangular gauze falling at each side of her face, balancing somehow without the aid of a pin or a broach.
‘I’m not going to fall off. Last time I had these stupid sandals on and they made me slip’.
‘What are you wearing now?’
‘I’m barefooted. Bring the children and come over.’
‘I can’t. They’re swimming.’
‘Where?’
‘I got them this paddling pool when I came. Aunt Mahasen wanted me to get roller blades for Amir but I got the pool instead. I’ve been here a month and only got round to filling it up for them today. Come and see them. They look nice.’
In a few minutes Nahla was admiring the paddling pool. She took off her sandals, lifted her skirt and waded in, adding to the children’s excitement. Amir leaned on the side and the water started spilling out.
‘Stop it, Amir. You’re getting rid of all the water.’ Nahla took hold of his arm and pulled him but he wriggled free, his ribs showing and his knees covered with scars from cuts and mosquito bites.
Sammar got the hose to add to the water in the pool. She sprayed Amir and Dalia and they squealed and ran out of the pool across the garden, the ribbon in Dalia’s hair wet and falling over her shoulders. Hassan got water on his face and he started to splutter and gasp, his hair wet curls covering his brow.
‘I’m sorry, my love.’ Sammar put the hose down and wiped his bewildered face. He wasn’t crying and soon went back to his game of filling a cup with water and pouring it over the side of the pool.
‘Sammar, come in, the water’s nice. I don’t feel so hot now.’
‘No, I’m too old.’ She smiled and turned to spray the dust off the jasmine bushes that lined the border of the garden.
‘You’re not old,’ said Nahla. ‘Haven’t you seen Hanan?’ Nahla puffed out her cheeks and did an exaggerated waddle from one side of the pool to the other.
Sammar laughed, looking to check that Dalia hadn’t noticed they were speaking about her mother. It was true though. Hanan did look matronly and walked as if she was still pregnant. ‘It’s just because of the baby,’ she said, putting down the hose to water the flower beds. ‘She’ll become slim soon especially now she is back to work.’ Hanan was a dentist.
‘She was like that even before the baby, you didn’t see her. No, you look years younger than her.’
Sammar took off her glasses. The sunlight was startling white, ruthless. She wiped water off the lenses with the hem of her blouse. Compliments on her looks hardened her inside. What was the use?
‘How’s your mother now?’ she asked. Nahla’s mother was ill with malaria. Yesterday Sammar and Mahasen had gone to visit her.
‘Al hamdulillah, she’s up today. Lots better. But I’m afraid all the preparations for the wedding will tire her,’ she kicked the water, made little waves. ‘Our luck isn’t very good.’
‘Why not?’
‘The Syrian club is booked on the day we want.’
‘Try another club.’
‘The Syrian is the best, so we might change the date.’ Nahla bent down and started playing with the twins’ cups and beakers, showing them how to pour from one to the other.
‘I haven’t been to a wedding for ages,’ said Sammar. ‘Yours will be the first.’
‘Didn’t you go to weddings in Scotland?’
‘No.’
Nahla looked at her with wide, kohl-rimmed eyes, ‘Why not?’
‘I didn’t know many people there. Sometimes I saw wedding couples outside churches having their photographs taken. They don’t get married like us at home. They get married in church or…’
‘Yes, I’ve seen them in films.’ Nahla didn’t seem interested in how people got married in other parts of the world, ‘I hope your aunt Mahasen will come to my wedding.’
‘I don’t know. Has she been going to weddings?’
‘No, not since Tarig,’ Nahla paused, ‘Allah, have mercy on him.’
‘Allah, have mercy on him,’ Sammar repeated. ‘Even if Aunt Mahasen doesn’t go to the party at the club she’ll come to the agid at your house.’
Nahla stepped out of the pool splashing her sandals with water. Pretty ankles, painted toenails, all the preparations for a bride. Sammar was like that once, years ago, years ago before Scotland, before Tarig died.
Here in this house, in this language and this place, were all the memories. All that had been taken away from her. A photograph of Tarig when she had walked into the house for the first time. Smiling, sitting back in a chair, at ease with everything. So young. So young and confident compared to her. He did not know her anymore. The young man in the photograph did not know the Sammar who had lived alone in Aberdeen. The photograph made her cry, tears coming from the fatigue of the journey, the strain of the past weeks in Egypt, the excitement of seeing Amir again, and he so cool, accepting her hugs and kisses as he would from the many visitors and relations who crossed his life. When she cried her aunt and Hanan started to cry. Hanan feeding the baby, sniffing into a tissue, Mahasen still and straight-backed, her tears falling without her face crumpling, without the indignity of sobbing. Only after they had cried together did the awkwardness of their meeting begin to break, the years she was away. Only then was it as if reaffirmed that she was who she was, Amir’s mother, Tarig’s widow coming home.
She walked Nahla to the gate, then it was time to get the children out of the pool, take them indoors, give them showers. The bathroom was so hot that she dripped with sweat while they dripped with water. Soap and squeals. ‘You put soap in my eyes!’, screams, guilt, Hassan’s blood-shot accusing eye, his slippery arm beating against her skirt, ‘Bad Sammar, ugly Sammar.’