“I’ll… haggle with him.”
She bites her lip before bursting out laughing. “Haggle with him?” she repeats. “What do you think this is? Souq Al-Hamidiyah?”
I point at the mahogany frame that houses a canvas Layla painted. It’s a painting I’ve always loved looking at. Dark blue skies mingling with the gray sea at the horizon. I have no idea how Layla was able to capture it so clearly, as if it were a photograph; the water sometimes feels like it’s about to drip out of the frame’s edges, soaking the rug. The clouds are congealed and huddled together, moments before a storm.
“Who convinced that man to let you buy the frame for half price?” I fold my arms. “That gorgeously made frame? Was it you?”
Layla smiles. “No, it was you.”
“Yes, it was. So… I’ll haggle with him.”
But I don’t say the rest of what I’m thinking. That I’m only humoring her. That I’m torn between my duty to my brother and to the hospital, the ropes holding me on each side both fraying at the edges. And I don’t know which will give before the other.
Though something in her gaze makes me suspect she knows all of that.
“You talk about Germany as if it’s the land where all our dreams will come true.” My eyes catch back on the painting. It looks so real. “We don’t speak the language. We can barely speak English as it is, and we have no family there. We’ll be stranded in the middle of nowhere, and there are many who would try and take advantage of us. Refugees are being swindled out of everything they own, you know that. Not to mention kidnapped.”
Once, a lifetime ago, I wanted to live a year in Europe. Another in the States. Canada. Japan. Planting seeds in all the continents. I wanted to do my master’s degree in herbology and collect plants and medicinal flowers from all over the world. I wanted the places I visited to remember that Salama Kassab walked through them. I wanted to take these experiences and write children’s books with pages etched in magic and words that whisked the reader away to other realms.
“What about you?” I had asked Layla one day. “Where do you want to go?”
We were in the countryside at my grandparents’ estate the summer after we finished high school. University life was just two months away. The apricots were ripe and we had spent the whole morning filling a dozen baskets of them to eat and to give to our neighbors. We were taking a break, lying on our backs over the picnic blanket and watching the clouds. The sun was hidden behind them, her rays turning the sky into an azure blue. A butterfly flapped her wings and a bumblebee buried herself into a daisy. It was a quiet day, a good day where hopes and dreams would be traded. Where sweet childhood memories would be revisited.
Layla breathed in deeply, taking in the apricot scent. “I want to paint Norway.”
“Like the whole country?” I laughed.
She turned to me and raised her hand to flick my nose. I squealed and covered it.
“You’re not funny.” She rolled her eyes, but a smile played on her lips.
“I’m hilarious,” I said and turned to my side. My hijab slipped a bit and my bangs peeked out. It was all right because we were hidden away from any passerby’s eyes. I shrugged it off a bit, and my ponytail fell to the side.
Layla sat up and looked around. Spotting no one, she gathered my ponytail behind my back and slipped off the hair tie.
“I have seen all shades of blue except the one in Norway,” she said quietly. Her voice carried over the breeze. “I’ve only seen it on Google, and it was breathtaking. I want to see the real thing. I want to paint every shade and have an art exhibition. Something calledBlue from Every Angle. I don’t know.”
I turned around. “That sounds so beautiful, Layla. Very Studio Ghibli.”
She smiled and began braiding my hair. Something she did whenever I was stressed. “I have dreams that will take me away from here.”
In her glance, I could see the question—would I be okay if she left? She and I had been joined at the hip ever since we were born. She was as close as a sister to me. With her being an only child and me an only daughter, we’d forged that relationship on our own.
“Salama!” we heard Hamza call from the distance. “Layla! Yalla, lunch is ready.”
Layla’s eyes sparkled at the sound of his voice, and she jumped up and ran toward him. He caught her by the waist and they nearly fell down.
I stood up. Watching them, I felt as if I were standing on the other side of a door I couldn’t walk through.
Layla’s brows furrowed. “What’s wrong?”
I realized my expression had been forlorn and quickly cleared it away with a smile. “Nothing.”
How childish my worries were back then. How innocent were our dreams.
Now, a pregnant, starved girl sits before me, her eyes too large for her face, while my stomach rattles about like an empty drum.
“Salama,” Layla says, and I look at her, snapping out of my daydream. “Today was full of sadness, wasn’t it?”
