Loom: A Novel

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95 Th e t e le v ision bea ms im ages from Baghdad. Lying down on the couch, Salma tries to ignore them but can’t, and finally sits up to watch. The camera pans the desert dotted with charred tanks and plumes of black smoke rising in the hazy sky, then jump cuts to a young correspondent who speaks breathlessly while pointing at the rubble behind him. She tries to listen, to compare what she sees on the screen against her own recollections of war, hiding in a suburb of Beirut while the bombs exploded around her, her head between her knees as if trying to disappear within herself. But the young man’s words wash over her. This war is remote, the TV screening her from any kinship she might feel with people she doesn’t see. The images can disappear in a click, the war vanish in the stream of daily life. This is all she can do. This is the extent of her sympathy offering, this sitting up to watch, despite her best efforts to shut her eyes. ”Have you turned down the thermostat again?” She knows that George hasn’t moved from his chair since her mother-in-law shooed her out of her own kitchen and plopped her unceremoniously on the couch, but she asks anyway for the diversion her question might bring. George ignores her. “You have to hand it to the Americans,” he says. Then, immediately, “They’ll make a mess of things.” She sighs in irritation. She is never sure where he stands on the war. Yet she is grateful, for his words bring back her usual complaints, and in this thawing produced by the humdrum and vague dissatisfactions of ordinary life, she tilts back to rest once again. 96 She has never trusted happiness to enter her fully. She would let herself experience it stealthily, in secret, as if the absence of witnesses precluded the possibility of being required to pay a price. “Salma ya Salama,” her sisters would sing and climb the cherry tree and toss her fruit, although she could have just as easily reached it from her ladder, thank you very much. She was a big girl and didn’t need their help, but they chuckled and stuck out their red tongues and tossed the fruit all the same while dangling their legs in front of her face. Her sisters the twins, you couldn’t tell them apart, and that seemed to give them extra daring. Despite the hot sun she shivered, as much from climbing the ladder to show them she was as good as her word, although she was terrified of heights, as from seeing her sisters perched high in the tree, and she thought, “We might lose all of this.” The week before it had rained for days and the dam could barely hold the river back, and this is when the thought first entered her mind that very little stood between them and death. She trembled at the possibility of losing her sisters forever, and losing this morning with its sun burning the last few clouds in the blue sky and their house and the stream behind it meandering down the mountain like a vein feeding the earth. She thought that, as long as there was breath in her lungs, she would have to be on her guard, for there was evil in the world. So she froze on the ladder and the blood drained from her fingers and toes, and, holding her breath, she told herself, “As long as I don’t let it out, we will be here forever. Just don’t let it out, and everything will be all right.” The sky shimmered. If you held still, the air itself became visible and enveloped everything like a silky film. But her sisters noticed something was up and came down from the tree, laughing like the whole thing was a game. They pried her hands away and laid her on the grass kicking and screaming and letting the precious air out of her lungs. She understood that day that all she would ever manage to save was her own skin, if she was lucky. Her sisters slapped her cheeks and jumped around her, flitting in and out of her vision, which was blinded by the sun filtering through the treetops. The two of them were unable to sit still, as if a motor was running through their legs and the...