The Arsonists' City

by Hala Alyan

There was a whiteness that seemed to transcend race in these spaces; they conferred whiteness upon anyone inhabiting them.

An outcry in an echo chamber isn’t much of an outcry.

not all itches need to be scratched, that sometimes you have to look desire firmly in the eye and say, Not today.

Who needed to dissect sexuality? They clearly loved one another. They burned for one another.

And even though there’s no one to ask, she has an inkling that, if she were to ask her mother or anyone else, they’d say the greater sin was hers.

There’s little room for empathy when people are starving in the streets.”

Grief will make you laugh at the funeral, weep over the cereal bowl; it will buzz your feet until they start dancing in the middle of the night. It’s grief that inspires the unlikeliest of bedfellows. It will convince you, tugging at the hem of your ragged cotton robe—the one you’ve had since your father bought it for you in Latakia when you were fifteen, the one that will always smell hazily of summer—that the building is on fire, the world is on fire, and you’ll find water in only one place: a city as far away from here as you can imagine. Grief will pack your bag, quit your job, buy a white dress. It will make you say yes.

I’m the white feminist here, she thinks. It’s wildly uncomfortable; she’s so used to being a minority in America, and it’s chastening to have that reversed, to be talking to a family servant about inheritance.

Idris ruffles Mazna’s hair, an absentminded gesture, one that travels through Mazna straight to Naj’s heart.

Merry reminds the family of themselves. Of their privilege. Of what they have. In America they are considered brown. You become attached to that. You are given a name and you respond to it. They are brown in America. There is something self-righteous that lives alongside that marginalization, the mispronounced names, the Your English is so . . . , the sideways glances in department stores. But there are browner bodies out there. There are women who take care of your grandfather while you’re thousands of miles away—or ten minutes away—women whose own families are thousands of miles away, women who are washing your plates and washing vegetables for your dinner.

Her family had maids. It doesn’t matter that Merry has her passport, that she sleeps in a guest bedroom, that she comes and goes as she pleases. Naj’s family, her beloved grandparents, had paid a woman a paltry amount to leave her country and life, and no amount of love for her, no legacy of two decades, of trips home for the holidays, of she’s like family, can erase the reality that she is not, in fact, family, that Merry seems fortified by this truth, attached to it more than anyone, which Naj is both self-conscious of and grateful for. It holds them liable; it grants them no exit from the funhouse of their place in the order of things: they are moneyed.

“A morbid little genius. People are used to looking at blown-up kids? Scale it back. Make them feel bad for orchids.”

He knows his mother, because he’s like her. She made him in her image, the two failed artists. He knows how to hurt her.

When Mimi was a child, his father was a god, and he’d never forgiven him for it.

She thought of Hana’s silk scarves, the bar of soap she stole. Their wealth, she realized, was purely ornamental. It existed in stationary ways: the House, fine clothes, inherited jewelry. It wasn’t liquid.

The realization detonates, but distantly, in a room she’s no longer in.

This was months ago. A laughable amount of time. She’d assumed there’d be so much more of it, so much they wouldn’t know what to do with it, time to be bored and quarrel and sulk. She hadn’t known to pay attention.

That is the true panic—since that first doctor’s appointment, the future hasn’t expanded; it’s telescoped.

never thought of her own, save when she heard the occasional admonishing from her mother to avoid the sun—her complexion darkened easily. But here, she gawks in wonder at the black skin of the highway toll collector, the pale forearms of her doctor. Neighborhoods are arranged by skin. Jobs. Schools.

He told me that if you forget the name of your land, that’s when it’s really lost.”

We could go back, she always suggests. That’s ridiculous, he always replies. And so the years pass.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and everything ends and begins, and she forgives him,

All brown women look alike. She imagines all the brown women in the world lined up in a row, like soldiers or flowers, a line long as the horizon. She wonders how many of them have hurt one another, and for nothing. For a white man. For a photograph by the pool.

Everything is easier with hope—picking up the children, chopping vegetables for soup, fucking Idris.

He would marry her, he knew, and he did, but it was like a fairy tale or a Greek myth—always half wrong, a caveat to every happiness.

the way people used to sing and mourn at the same time in the old days. They probably still do. In places of God. In places without money. In the refugee camps.

They’d just walked by a refugee child poking into the stores. A shopkeeper had called him Palestinian trash. Zakaria had clenched his fists and given the boy a wad of cash. May you never see your people like this, he’d said to her. Even one of them. That’s all it takes. Then it might as well be all of you.

She knows only the twigs of facts she collected over those months: He disliked tangerines. He loved her. She’d taken those twigs and created a man out of them, and she has missed that man every day for decades.

But she understands how people can use you. How the wanting can empty you out.