Introduction

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Excerpt

SALMA

Nablus

March 1963

When Salma peers into her daughter’s coffee cup, she knows instantly she must lie. Alia has left a smudge of coral lipstick on the rim. The cup is ivory, intricate spirals and whorls painted on the exterior in blue, a thin crack snaking down one side. The cup belongs to a newer set, bought here in Nablus when Salma and her husband, Hussam, arrived nearly fifteen years ago. It was the first thing she’d bought, walking through the marketplace in an unfamiliar city.

In a stall draped with camelhair coats and rugs, Salma spotted the coffee set, twelve cups stacked next to an ibrik with a slender spout. They rested upon a silver tray. It was the tray that gave Salma pause, the triangular pattern so similar to the one her own mother gave her when she first wed. But it was gone, the old tray and coffee set, along with so many of their belongings, the dresses and walnut furniture and Hussam’s books. All left behind in that villa, painted the color of peach flesh, that had been their home.

Salma cried out when she saw the tray, pointed it out to the vendor. He refused to sell it without the coffee set and so she’d taken it all, walking home with the large, newspaper-swathed bundle. It was her first satisfaction in Nablus.

Over the years she has presented the tray in the same arrangement, the ibrik in the center, the cups, petal-like, encircling it. Twice a month the maid takes the tray and other silverware onto the veranda and carefully dabs them with vinegar. It hasn’t lost its gleam.

The cups, however, are well worn. Hundreds of times, Salma has placed a saucer over the rim and flipped the cup upside down, waiting for the coffee dregs to dry. She prefers to wait ten minutes but often becomes occupied with her guests, only to remember much later with a hasty “Oh!” And the cup would be righted, the coffee remnants leaving desiccated, grainy streaks that stained the porcelain a faded brunette hue.

This time, Salma is barely able to wait the customary ten minutes. She listens to the women discuss the weather and whether or not the warmth will last until the wedding tomorrow. It will be held in the banquet hall of a nearby hotel, one that has hosted dignitaries and mayors and even a film star, once, in the fifties. Silk bows have already been tied to the backs of the chairs; tea-light candles set in arcs around the plates wait for flames. When lit, they will look like a constellation. Salma has already tested this, she and the concierge circling the tables and kissing the tips of matches to wicks. The concierge dimmed the lights, and the effect, incandescent and lovely, had warmed Salma.

“Throw out the candles. I’ll order new ones,” she’d told the concierge, aware of his eyes on her, the begrudging awe. Extravagance. But it is Alia, Alia to be wed, and no expense is to be spared. No blackened candles with miserable wick-nubs around the table settings.

With Widad, it was different. Ten years earlier, Salma sat silently throughout her eldest’s wedding ceremony, a pitiful gathering in the mosque, the scent of incense potent around them. When the imam read the Fatiha, Widad started to cry. Her father had died three months earlier. The dying had taken years. Salma would sit beside him after praying fijr and listen to the clatter his chest made as he drew air in and released it. The first light of the day would slowly fill their bedroom. Salma spoke directly to God during those minutes, in a manner that felt shameless to her. She asked for her husband to live. She knew it was selfish, knew his life with its morphine and bloody handkerchiefs wasn’t one he wanted to keep.

More than once he cried out into the night, “They took my home, they took my lungs. Kill me, kill me.” Hussam fiercely believed his illness was tied to the occupation of Jaffa, the city with the peach-colored house they’d left behind.

“Khalto Salma, has it dried yet?” Around the table, the women watch her with anticipation. Though the captivation, she knows, is mostly among the younger women?—?her nieces and cousins who’d flown in from Amman for the wedding, Alia’s classmates, whom she still thinks of as children. Even Alia, leaning on her elbows?—?Salma has the desire to tell her to sit up, to tell her that men hate chalky elbows, but then remembers Atef, the man who is accepting her daughter, elbows and all?—?looks interested.

The elders?—?Salma’s sisters and neighbors and friends?—?watch the cup reading calmly. They’ve seen their mothers do this and their mothers’ mothers. As far as they are concerned, such happenings are as commonplace as prayer.

“Has it stuck?” one of the nieces asks.

“I wonder what it says.”

Salma blinks her thoughts away, rearranges her features. She glances down at the cup, tilts it, frowns. What she has seen is not a mistake.

“It needs more time. I’ll turn it around for another few minutes. The dregs must dry.”

Poor Widad. Salma feels a familiar ache at the thought of her older daughter. She was a woman, sixteen years old, when they left Jaffa. During those three days of terror before they decided to go, as they waited by the radio for news, it was Widad who cared for Alia, carrying her from room to room, boiling rice with milk and sugar to spoon into her mouth.

She’d made a game of the gunfire and artillery. Widad would raise her eyebrows in mock amazement, feigning delight at the muffled explosions outside. Alia clapped her toddler hands, giggled. Resourceful, Salma has often thought about her eldest, though whatever luminosity Widad has seems to materialize only in moments of crisis. Otherwise, she walked around their new house in Nablus wanly, sat through meals without speaking. She never mentioned Jaffa, and when her father, already ailing, told her it was time to marry, she didn’t protest. Only with Salma did she cry, tears falling as she sat in the garden, her body hunched over the steam from her teacup.

“He will take me to Kuwait,” she said, weeping, and Salma touched her daughter’s hair, pulled her to her breast. The tea oversteeped as minutes passed. Ghazi was a good man, had the steadiness and loyalty that would make a fine husband, but her daughter saw only a paunchy, chinless stranger with spectacles, a man who wished to take her to a drab villa compound in the desert. Salma’s heart hurt at the thought of her daughter becoming someone’s young, unhappy wife in a foreign country, but she knew it was for the best.

She never told Widad the truth, how Hussam had consulted her on the matter of Widad’s suitors, which he’d narrowed down to two men. The other was an academic, a professor of philosophy at the local university. Salma knew his sister from the mosque; he came from a well-mannered, educated family. But he was mired in Nablus, in Palestine?—?he would live and die here. When Hussam asked the boy where he intended to settle down, he answered, “In my homeland, sir. Nothing under this sky will budge me.”

Salma, to Hussam’s surprise, chose Ghazi. At the time, the logic of her verdict was nebulous to her, half formed. It was only when she sat in the mosque and felt relief that she understood her own actions. Widad would be kept safe in Kuwait, far from this blazing country split in two. Her unhappiness, if it came, was worth the price of her life.

Alia was at the ceremony, of course. Eight years old, in a taffeta dress that made a crunching sound when she sat. She twirled outside the mosque, swung her hips like a bell as Widad and Ghazi emerged wed. When Hussam died, Salma had expected Alia to bawl, demand an explanation. But the girl was the calmest of her three children. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. The novel begins with a cup reading—and a lie by omission. Salma sees dark omens in her daughter’s coffee cup on Alia’s wedding day, but chooses not to reveal them. She sees crossed knives, crumbling houses, and the image of a zebra: “A zebra is an exterior life, an unsettled life” (page 9). But Salma later questions what she saw in the cup: “Not a zebra, but a horse with smudges, a speckled horse. It means travel, perhaps, even a difficult first pregnancy, but luck; it also means luck” (page 23). In what ways does Alia’s life—including her emotional life
and relationships—fulfill these two interpretations of her mother’s vision?

2. As readers, we follow this family through several major real-world events: the Six-Day War, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the 9/11 attacks. How does viewing history through the prism of these individual lives change the way you think of those historical events?

3. In the one chapter narrated from Mustafa’s perspective, we see him gradually become inspired (or radicalized) by Imam Bakri. But he also acknowledges that his belief in Allah is “flighty” and that “if there is ever a sweeping of believers into one room and the rest into the other, he doesn’t want to be on the wrong side of the door” (page 31). What do you think influences this character to become involved in increasingly violent politics?

4. At the end of the novel, on page 270, we learn that in fact it was the mild-mannered scholar Atef who pushed Mustafa—the handsome orator—to stay in the Six-Day War. Were you surprised by that revelation? How did it change your understanding of those two characters?

5. Atef’s letters to Mustafa help him cope with the trauma of being a prisoner of war, and on page 103, he thinks, “He will write to Mustafa about this moment . . . He will tell him about the ways the world has changed. He can see the blank paper in front of him, his fingers curving instinctively. I’m addicted to this, he wrote a while ago. My confessional.” Do you think Atef prefers to be an observer of life rather than a participant? How does his approach to life differ from that of his wife?

6. Salma’s garden in Nablus (i.e., Palestine) is described throughout the novel as various characters enjoy, remember, or mourn for it. Does the garden function as a symbol of something larger in this book? What does it represent to you?

7. On page 132, Alia overhears her husband Atef say, of Alia and her daughter Souad, “I’ve never seen two people more alike.” In what ways are Alia and Souad alike? Did you find their relationship to be believable, as a mother and daughter?

8. Souad’s life, as well as her temperament, echoes that of her mother. Both women find themselves away from home during a military invasion, for instance. What similarities or differences did you notice in how these two women handled similar circumstances?

9. Other parallels can be found between Salma, Widad, Riham, and Manar. All four women are described as heavyset, quiet, bookish, and devout. How do they differ, in your opinion—and how are those differences reflected in the way other characters react to each of them?

10. The multigenerational scope of this novel gives readers a chance to watch characters grow from children to parents themselves. Do you think Souad’s parenting style reflects any particular aspects of how she was raised by Alia and Atef?

11. Alia and Atef each secretly have a “favorite” child, though they would never admit it—just as Salma has a soft spot for her youngest, Alia. Did you find this to be a realistic portrayal of how parents feel about their children—and do you understand why each of these parents favored the particular child they did?

12. What was your impression of Abdullah, Riham’s stepson? Were you anticipating a different trajectory for his character?

13. What parallels do you see between Mustafa, the middle child between a quiet older sister and a spirited younger one, and Karam, who occupies a similar place in his family?

14. The book’s title, Salt Houses, is explained by Atef on page 273. But just before that passage, on page 270, he muses that Alia “would have smashed the windows and salted the earth” before leaving her mother’s house in an invasion. What do these two very different uses of the word salt evoke for you, as a reader?

15. Of the main characters—Alia, Atef, Souad, Riham, Manar, and Linah—which do you think shows the most interesting development throughout the novel?

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