Spring by Leila Rafei

Author:Leila Rafei
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 2020-06-12T20:08:04+00:00

*****

After the men finished with her room, Suad opened the front door to hurry them along. But there was one last thing.

“Wait,” said the shorter of the two. Was he Ahmed or Nabil? Not that it mattered.

He led them to Ayah’s desk, where at last, they found items worth taking. The notebook. The computer. As they unplugged the latter and scooped out its hardware, Ayah yelped, and Suad covered her mouth with her hand to keep her from making a scene. She was fine with them taking the computer. Anything to get them out of the house.

By the time they left, dawn was breaking. The night sky had turned to a pale gray. If those men had any decency they would have come by daylight—but they hadn’t any, and to make matters worse, it was time for prayer and now Suad would be late, needing extra time to wash off her embarrassment. She wondered if they even prayed and figured it was better if they didn’t, for all their hypocrisy. In her head she repeated the sarcastic mashallah Ahmed had delivered to her ears, defaming the word. She noticed that the calligraphy framed above the door was now hanging crooked off the nail, as with the framed portrait of the president. She fixed both and turned to Ayah. The seriousness of what just happened seemed to evade her—but then again, they hadn’t gone through her unmentionables, had they?

Suad sat down with her head in her hands. Ayah seemed more upset about the computer than her mother being defiled before her own eyes. In fact, her attachment to that contraption was suspicious in itself. What was inside it—why had the men hauled it away? At first she thought it was a mere matter of theft, to pawn off in some underground cellar where men of their ilk lurked. But for some reason, they’d left the monitor—which to Suad seemed like the most important part. Wasn’t that what made a computer, well, a computer? Instead they’d taken only its innards, as if there were something important inside. Perhaps something like the garbage in Ayah’s notebook. In-soor-jens. She gasped. They had taken that too, hadn’t they?

“What have you done, Ayah?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, mama.”

“This is because of you, you and that khara you read all day.”

That’s what she was reading. Shit. Ayah knew it as she looked down at her bare feet, toes painted purple to match some despoiled bottle on her vanity. Her glasses slipped down her nose and almost fell to the floor. Since the men left, she’d taped them together, but they were still slightly askew. Now they had to be tucked into the folds of her hijab just to stay intact. Suad almost felt pity until Ayah looked up from the floor and took in a quick breath, about to say something horrific. “Speak up,” said Suad, before she even got any words out. “Tell me what was in that computer. Go on.”

“Nothing was inside of it, mama.

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