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41 " And Riham remembers, as her grandmother holds her, she remembers, as though in a dream, how she’d been an old woman in the water, how somewhere she was dying and this would be part of that story. How, when the waves rocked her hard enough, she had called out for Allah and no one else. "
― Hala Alyan , Salt Houses
42 " Punch me, he wants to yell at Mustafa. Tell me to fuck off, hit me in the face. Pick up that goddamn suitcase, walk down the driveway. I would’ve followed you. I would’ve followed you. Take me with you. You can save yourself. We can both live. "
43 " The world was addicted to watching; over and over, they were reborn, made whole and silver and resplendent, only to crumple into themselves again. Each time felt like the first time, the destruction so immense it bordered on the majestic. Souad watched the dust-fogged streets, people’s panicked faces as they shrieked for those they loved. She felt her heart move with the shaking cameras. Smoke and fire spilled from the buildings like blood from a gunshot wound, and people began to jump, their little bodies unreal as they lurched from the sky, dolls in someone’s nightmare. One "
44 " where your father was from. America wasn’t like that. You became what you coveted. "
45 " The houses float up to his mind’s eye like jinn, past lovers. The sloping roof of his mother’s hut, the marbled tiles in Salma’s kitchen, the small house he shared with Alia in Nablus. The Kuwait home. The Beirut apartments. This house, here in Amman. For Alia, some old, vanished house in Jaffa. They glitter whitely in his mind, like structures made of salt, before a tidal wave comes and sweeps them away. "
46 " How tiny our lives are, he thinks, swelling to impossible size with love, then shrinking again. He puts an arm around his daughter and pulls her close, this girl he will lose eventually to something. "
47 " That night, when she saw too late her mistake, all those moments that make love and destroy it. Her younger self, almost a mother, brimming with rage. The smell of burned copper. "
48 " When her grandmother taught Riham to pray years ago, Riham asked her about this part, the ears. It struck her as silly, detracting from the gravitas of the ritual. It was because people rarely washed there, Salma had said. It's easy to overlook. "
49 " Easier, she thinks, to remember nothing, to enter a world already changed, than have it transform before your eyes. "
50 " daughter living the life she has foraged, like an island survivor in a palace of shells. "
51 " This remembering, this gentle recitation, calms him, gives him something to focus on. These are facts, the obelisks of his life, and, gleaned, they glow for him—sturdy, true, his. "
52 " Widad and Alia and Mustafa, they might have known gunfire and war, but they were protected from it with the armor of wealth. It is what separates them from the refugees in the camps dotting the outskirts of Nablus. Salma still holds her breath, her childhood defense against bad luck, when she has to drive past them. "
53 " A thought lights in Mustafa’s mind as if ignited by flint. It reminds him of Aya speaking about the proposal. The realization that someone, one you think you know intimately, wholly, has a mystery within. Has thoughts and fears and loves that belong to him or her alone. "