The Ruins of Us by Keija Parssinen

Author:Keija Parssinen [Parssinen, Keija]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Contemporary
ISBN: 9780571282180
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-01-17T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

HERE WE ARE, thought Faisal, two candles dying between us. It was the candles that so thoroughly depressed him, the glowing red wax and bright flames and polished silver candlesticks out of accord with the distinctly noncelebratory mood of the diners. Mariam drooped. Faisal could hear Rosalie swallow her lentil soup, each spoonful going down leadenly. Three nights had passed since the botched family dinner, when Abdullah had failed to show up and his mother had disappeared before they started the salad.

Even after returning from his trip Abdullah had mostly stayed away, leaving Faisal with a weary mother and a fidgeting sister. Faisal tried not to look at Rosalie’s face, fixing his gaze instead on the puckering candles, the chandelier, a small red stain that looked like a bindi against the pale carpet, the badly done oil painting of his father in which his legs looked like large sausages coiled around the midsection of an Arabian stallion. He wondered what Abdullah and Isra were talking about at that moment as they sat at her dining table, just a few hundred meters away. He wondered if they too endured such moments of subterranean silence.

He’d seen Abdullah and Isra drive up to her house, just returned from the trip, their faces rosy, the car filled with duty-free bags from Dubai International. Isra whooshed out of the car, her white dress shocking against her tan shoulders, her abaya crumpled in a heap on the floor of the car. His father honked at him and waved with his good hand. Faisal didn’t wave back, instead fixing his eyes on the crane suspended over the top of the half-done skyscraper going up behind Isra’s house. He stared at the building’s skeleton long enough to make sure there would be no eye contact with them, and long enough to be pleased by the Windex-blue of the skyscraper’s reflective windows.

He was angry with his parents. They had to do everything noisily, misbehaving like children. Knocking on Isra’s door! Isra had gossiped to an acquaintance, and within days, the Diamond Mile was electrified by talk of Rosalie’s antics. Every time he passed by the neighbors’ homes, he imagined the burble of courtyard fountains to be low-throated snickers coming from behind the high walls. In some of the more outrageous versions of events he overheard from Ali and Majid and Hassan, the fig became a bottle of Chanel No. 5 smashed into a thousand shards against Isra’s door, a decaying chicken’s heart black with flies, a fat mongoose with a red ribbon around its neck, sharpening its teeth on the concrete. He wondered if women could keep nothing private—if the great secret of their days was, in fact, that they had none.

“You’re wearing me out with all this chatter,” Rosalie said, her fork poised over her lamb.

He grunted.

“What’s the matter? Did you and Majid have a fight?”

Faisal was surprised. She rarely asked him about Majid because she said she didn’t trust boys trying too hard to be men, so Faisal never told her anything about him.

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