Chapter Three

Not a Lot of Things

The apartment was quiet in a way it almost never was anymore. Nour stood at the kitchen counter in her soft gown and made coffee — the kind she and Kareem loved, the kind that didn’t get made when everyone was there because Um Kareem preferred hers differently and somehow the kitchen arranged itself around that preference, the way the kitchen arranged itself around everything. She held the cup in both hands and felt the warmth move through her palms.

Nobody was home. She had forgotten what that felt like.

She was a doctor. She knew she shouldn’t be drinking coffee. But this was hers — this cup, this quiet, this morning — and she allowed herself the small rebellion of it, the specific pleasure of a choice made without anyone watching. Nobody would judge because nobody knew. Nobody knew about the coffee and nobody knew about the tiny bump she touched now, through the fabric of her gown. The new life in her. Her secret, still only hers.

She had been planning to tell Kareem since Monday. She had not told him. Every time she composed the moment — the right evening, the right light, just the two of them — there was no evening that was just the two of them, no light that wasn’t shared with four other people, no conversation that didn’t have an audience. So the secret stayed hers. This she could control.

She moved to the rocking chair — her rocking chair, the one she had chosen herself from the store six months ago, wanting it so badly she had felt almost embarrassed by the wanting. She had sat in it exactly once since they arrived. She put on her headphones and closed her eyes and let the music do what it always did, or tried to let it. The chair shifted under her. It didn’t feel the same as it had in the store. She couldn’t tell anymore which things had changed and which things she had.

The song was one Kareem had learned to play on guitar, specifically for her. He had practiced for three weeks and played it badly and then better and then well enough that she had cried — not from the playing but from the fact of it, the fact of a man learning a thing for no reason except to reach her. She remembered that man. She was not sure where he was now, inside all of this. She kept watching his face, trying to catch something there, some signal in large enough letters: I am here and I still love you. She knew she shouldn’t need it spelled out. In the culture she came from, a good husband who stayed and provided was enough, and wanting more was a kind of greed that decent women didn’t indulge.

She opened her eyes.

The family photograph was on the wall directly across from her. His mother, his father, his two brothers — a formal portrait, taken before she existed in any of their lives, framed and hung in the place where she had imagined, once, that a different photograph might go. Beside it, the seven-eyes amulet. No wedding photo. She had not put one up because she had been waiting until the apartment felt like theirs, and the apartment had never felt like theirs, and now she understood it probably wouldn’t.

Is this claiming ownership, she thought, or a reminder of who is first in the line of respect and love?

She didn’t answer herself. The answer was somewhere in the walls.

She called her sister. They talked about the weekend, the party, the families who had come to visit their mother. Nour felt the distance between herself and that house — the specific warmth of it, her mother’s kitchen, her sister’s eyes when she laughed — as a physical thing, a hollow just below her ribs. Then Esraa asked whether Kareem had gotten the position he interviewed for.

Nour said: No.

Just that. Her sister moved on, changed the subject, said something else, and Nour stopped listening because she was back in the moment from last week — the first time, and then the second time — when Kareem had told her what his mother had said. That her son couldn’t find work in this country. That Nour could easily find a cleaning job, a cooking job. That it wasn’t necessary to wait for the German medical board to recognize her diploma.

She was a pediatric specialist. She had earned her place at the best hospital in Baghdad before the war took everything, and she had rebuilt herself in a language she learned in eighteen months, and she was waiting — waiting, not failing, not giving up, waiting for a bureaucratic process to complete itself — and her mother-in-law had looked at all of that and seen a woman who could clean.

And Kareem had repeated it. Twice.

She became aware of her hand. The ring on it — the grandmother’s ring, kept for the future woman who would enter the family, given to her at the wedding with something that looked like welcome. She looked at it now and felt a burning where it sat on her finger. Not the metal. Something underneath. The ring that was supposed to mean you belong here had become the thing that locked her, and she understood now that those two things had perhaps always been the same thing, and she had not seen it until this morning, alone in her rocking chair, with the family photograph on the wall and the bump beneath her hand and the coffee going cold on the table beside her.

She ended the call with her sister.

She called her mother.

She said: I’m coming to visit. I need to come home.

For how long, she didn’t say. She wasn’t sure. Maybe a week. Maybe longer. Maybe she would sit in her mother’s kitchen and drink coffee that nobody judged her for and feel the walls at the right distance from her body and understand, eventually, what she wanted to do about an apartment in Germany where the light was wrong and the ring burned and the love on offer had always been conditional — if my mother likes you, I will love you more — and she had not understood the condition until she was already wearing the ring.

She touched the bump one more time, gently.

This she could control.

Kareem walked home through the street of linden trees, the canopy of them making a tunnel over the pavement. He used to love this smell back home. Here it was the same smell and entirely different — present but not exciting, familiar but not his. He had stopped being able to explain this to people who hadn’t left a place behind.

He passed the flower shop at the corner and thought of Nour. She liked daisies. She had always liked daisies — not roses, not the expensive ones, just daisies, which she said looked like they were trying to be cheerful and mostly succeeding. He looked at the buckets outside the shop and kept walking. They couldn’t afford so many things in this country that they had taken for granted at home. They used to go out every other night, the two of them, somewhere simple, just to be somewhere together. Now his mother cooked every day and when they mentioned eating out she gave them the speech about wasted money and poorly cooked food and their health, and the evening would rearrange itself around that, the way evenings rearranged themselves around everything now.

He had taken the longer road home. He knew this about himself — that he had taken the longer road — and he didn’t examine it too closely. He needed the extra minutes. Since his parents had moved in he couldn’t be alone with his thoughts at home anymore. Someone always needed to know where he had been and why the phone hadn’t rung from the last place he’d applied. He loved his parents. He had wanted to help them when they arrived, had wanted the family around him in a country where everything else was foreign. He had not understood what wanting that would cost.

He was worried that Nour would find work before him. The medical board process was slow, everyone said so, it could take another year, and he knew that, and still the worry sat in him like something swallowed wrong. For women it was perhaps easier — they had household skills, they could find something while they waited. He had thought this and he had said a version of it, twice, and he had not understood, until he watched Nour’s face the second time, that he had said something that could not be unsaid.

He had stopped outside the door with the parsley in his bag.

He had stood there and looked at the door — the divider between him and Nour, between the man he was on the street and the man he became inside the apartment — and he had taken out his phone and called his brother and arranged to meet at the coffee shop at the corner. It was still early. He would talk to her in the evening. He had looked one more time at the door and then he had walked back the way he came.

He had bought the parsley. Not the daisies.

He came back to an apartment that had changed while he was gone.

His mother was in the armchair crocheting a doily, her needle moving faster than usual, almost punishing the work for existing. His father was at the dining table with Nour, a magazine open between them, Nour gesturing at something on the page. When Kareem greeted them Nour didn’t look up. She kept her eyes on the magazine. She said his name without raising her head.

He felt it immediately — something shifted, something different in the room, a temperature that hadn’t been there this morning. He looked at his mother. She hadn’t said a word since he walked in. She was looking at her doily. Her needle kept moving.

That was bad.

He sat down on the couch like a boy who had broken something and didn’t know yet what. He asked his mother if she had cooked the rice. He held up the parsley. His mother didn’t answer. Nour stood up from the table, touched him on the shoulder, and told him to sit down — the meal was ready.

He felt the touch of her hand through his jacket. He sat.

His parents said they would eat later. Nour took the place across from him at the table. She had tea in front of her, not food. She wrapped both hands around the cup the way she did when she was cold, or when she needed something to hold.

He watched her and said nothing. The apartment was very quiet. Even his mother’s needle had stopped.

“Can you drive me to the airport tomorrow morning?” Nour said. She was looking at the tea. “My flight is at nine. I hope you don’t have any appointments.”

The air stopped moving.

He thought: did I forget something. Did she say something yesterday while they were watching television. He went back through the previous days looking for a conversation he might have missed, a plan she might have mentioned. He found nothing. He was so shocked that his fork slipped from his hand and fell on the floor. Nour got up immediately and brought him a new one from the kitchen. She set it beside his plate and sat back down across from him and looked at her tea.

He did not ask where she was going. He already knew, in the way you know things your body understands before your mind catches up. He looked at her hands around the cup. He looked at the ring on her finger — his grandmother’s ring, given at the wedding, the one that was supposed to mean she belonged here.

“Did you pack yet?” he said.

She looked up at him then. Just for a moment. Something moved across her face that he couldn’t name — not anger, not sadness, something older and quieter than either.

“Not yet,” she said. “I won’t take a lot of things with me.”

In the next room, the needle started moving again.