The Ruins of Us
KEIJA
PARSSINEN
THE RUINS OF US
A Novel
Dedication
For my mother, the root.
For my father, the wanderer.
For my sister, the poet.
For my brother, the peaceful heart.
For Michael, fiery joy.
Epigraph
Be in this world as a stranger, or as a traveler passing through it.
HADITH, OR SAYINGS OF THE PROPHET
When I wiped you from
the book of memory
I did not know I was striking
out half my life.
NIZAR QABBANI (“FOOLISHNESS”)
Contents
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More...
Advance Praise for Keija Parssinen’s
The Ruins of Us
AT THE AL-QASR
souq, Rosalie al-Baylani stood beneath one of the many date palms that lined the marketplace. She had positioned herself behind the trunk of the largest tree to avoid the blast of wind off the al-Dahna Desert, but nonetheless, the heavy breeze blew her scarf back, the tiny pins she used to secure it popping off and flashing copper before disappearing into the sand. Rosalie set her handbag in the dirt so she could rewrap the scarf around her head. The absence of pins forced her to tuck the fabric’s long edge close to her chin, making her look like a tourist who had never learned to properly veil herself. She was tempted to let it blow away altogether. Her red hair was shining and straight for once, begging to be looked at—a result of the olive oil she had started to mix with her conditioner, the trick Lamees had recommended when Rosalie had complained about the winter’s dulling effects on her hair. She picked up her purse and dusted it off. She should have known better than to attempt a winter-white handbag in Saudi Arabia, where sand was always the victor. Sometimes, though—and Rosalie firmly believed this—in a place as harsh as the Kingdom, you had to do frivolous things to prove you hadn’t forfeited the fight.
She waited patiently for her daughter to come back from the toilets. Rosalie had told her driver to stay in the car.
We’ll only be a moment. Just some small business to take care of.
Today was Mariam’s birthday, and Rosalie wanted them to take in the morning alone. Hard to believe it had been fourteen years since the everlasting night at al-Salama Hospital when Mariam had extended her spongy arms and legs inside the womb and refused to emerge. She was smart even then, choosing to stay inside her protected world rather than emerge into one lit by the explosions of Saddam’s SCUDs. Overnight, Desert Shield had become Desert Storm, Rosalie’s labor marked by the whine of air-raid sirens, and the Eastern Province shuddering beneath the boots of the half-million American troops massed there. During the days that mother and daughter spent recovering, Rosalie had practiced putting on her gas mask as she held Mariam to her breast. There wasn’t a mask small enough for the girl’s infant head. In the neighboring room, a baby had howled unrelentingly. When Abdullah went in search of an explanation about the crying, he returned and informed her there would be no peace until the Bedouin parents decided to return and collect the girl, who had been half turned to rubber by a grease fire. Days passed with the screaming, as if the baby knew she had been abandoned for the weakness that her melted skin would bring into the tents. Even in the time of oil, the desert was about survival.
Rosalie was glad Faisal had come two years earlier. He had arrived much as he existed, quietly, with barely a cry to register his easy, if premature, emergence into the world. And so her wartime baby was loud and brave, and her peacetime baby lived his life like a breeze through palms—a whispered presence.
Now she glanced around the market for Mariam, missing her daughter already, whose years seemed so full of the girlish bravery and devotions that Rosalie remembered from her own childhood. Her abaya moved around her body, the material silken against her bare arms. She had not dressed for the weather. It was midwinter, and the dates were now small and green, closely bunched at the tops of the palms. They wouldn’t begin their turn from green to red to ripe brown until early summer. When they started to drop like falling amber, she would be back to collect them from the merchants. Around her, the shoppers moved quickly through the cool afternoon, the Eastern Province sky bright and empty above them.
Mariam returned and took Rosalie’s hand.
“You looked like you were daydreaming,” Mariam said.
“In a way,” Rosalie said. Memories were their own kind of dream, after all. “I was remembering the day you fought so hard to stay inside my belly. All of a sudden, you went from this calm little ball to a ten-armed monkey.”
“I’m glad I finally decided to come out.”
“Me too, badditi.” She angled her chin toward the beautiful mess of the marketplace. “It’s not so bad out here, is it?”
When speaking with Mariam, Rosalie found herself adopting her daughter’s rapid speech, so that she felt like the girls she overheard in the mall, their Arabic fast and sure, its flow interrupted only by their giggles.
Today, they had already purchased a few items that Mariam carried in a large canvas sack. As they passed the spice merchant’s stall, Rosalie moved discreetly toward the neat conical towers of spices that rose out of the tops of the barrels. She liked to rub a few grains between her fingers as she passed from barrel to barrel. If Abdullah was home when she returned from the souq, he never failed to tell her she smelled like a fortune-teller’s floor.
“Just one more stop and then we’ll go home,” Rosalie said.
She steered her daughter toward the Yemeni’s stall; she was determined to leave with something more than bread and spices. She would buy an intricate bangle from the Yemeni for Mariam to spin on her thin wrist. Adornment started now, in the fragile adolescent years when love was nothing more than a kiss exchanged between harried parents, the promises of songs and movies. It was a good age, fueled by hope and unrequited crushes, uncomplicated by the harder reality of another person. A husband, for instance, who was gone six nights out of seven. Business, he explained. Business is an unkind mistress, she said.
Abdullah, her occasional husband, her true love, was not very interested in birthdays—perhaps because he had lost enough young brothers and sisters that birthdays were not so much celebrated as marked with a sigh of relief—so he had asked her to choose Mariam’s present. Something nice but not ostentatious, he’d said. We don’t want her weighed down by expectations in case she decides to be like her fool father and marry for love, he joked, pinching Rosalie’s hip. She’d puffed out her cheeks and raised both hands in a shrug. It was true. For the most part, they’d been fairly happy fools, in a time and place when marrying for love, and outside the tribe—
far
outside the tribe—were seen as liabilities, or worse, insulting.
The crowds thinned as people prepared for the late-afternoon Asr prayer. Rosalie walked faster, pulling Mariam along behind her. They needed to get there before the jeweler closed for prayer.
“Just a minute,” she called out to the Yemeni as he stepped outside the shop to pull down the security grating.
He put up both his hands as if telling her to slow down.
“Closed for prayer, madam. So sorry.”
“But it’s my daughter’s birthday. You wouldn’t deprive her of the chance to choose her present, would you?”
Reluctantly, the jeweler pushed the grating back up and unlocked the front door.
“No, madam.”
Mariam danced through the cracked door and began to survey the glass cases. Her headscarf fell halfway down her hair, but Rosalie didn’t move to fix it. It was Mariam’s birthday; she should have the carefree moments of the day.
“Let’s not make the gentleman too late for his prayers,” Rosalie said, waiting by the door to indicate that they would make an effort to leave as quickly as possible.
“This one,” Mariam said after a few minutes of careful scouting, pointing to a wide bracelet with roped edges and large flowers etched into the metal. Pretty, but not anything Rosalie would have chosen. That’s all right, she thought. Mariam is growing into who she will become, which is not me. Rosalie felt surprisingly calm in this knowledge. She squeezed her daughter about the waist, then removed her credit card from her wallet and placed it on the glass.