The Brooklyn Rail

This month, Mo Ogrodnik publishes a propulsive, polyphonic novel about life in the Gulf. The story follows five women as they struggle to overcome a patriarchal architecture and rigid class hierarchies. The selection here follows Dounia, transplanted to the ‘dream city’ of Ras-al-Khair and questioning how circumscribed the life of her future offspring might be. It’s rare for a novel this moving to move with such pace. Ogrodnik’s novel covers a lot of cultural ground (Saudi Arabia, Syria, the UAE, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Yemen, and NYC) while evincing a deep understanding of how people feel and cope with how they feel, irrespective of geography.

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Duty tugged Dounia out of bed like a marionette, belly first, then limbs. The chandelier caught the morning light, tossed red marbles across the tiles, and illuminated a path to the kitchen, where she waited for the water to boil at the soapstone sink. This part of her day was routine. She poured steaming water over the tea and set the timer to three minutes.

Outside, in the Saudi Dream Development, a gardener worked beneath a green mesh tarp. Rows of tomatoes and clementines slouched against wooden stakes and received a daily soaking of desalinated water from a Dutch sprinkler system. Despite these efforts, the plants wilted and lost their leaves. Today, the gardener arrived with a fresh pallet of plants, a different breed of tomato. The gardener’s efforts were futile, and Dounia found Basma’s insistence on harvesting fruit and vegetables from sand an indulgent form of torture on the plants. But the tomatoes reminded Basma of childhood, a time when she ran free from house to house and ate lunch from the neighbors’ gardens. Yes, it’s painful to accept the past is over, thought Dounia.

The timer rang. Dounia poured condensed milk into the tea until it turned caramel, added two heaping teaspoons of sugar, and set the silver tray with a white lace napkin. Once she considered adding her own teacup, but this ritual was about service, not camaraderie. She balanced the tray in one hand and pushed the elevator button, stepped inside the steel room, and watched the doors close. There was the familiar lilt of loneliness as she ascended the two floors before the doors opened.

“Dounia, is that you?”

She hesitated outside Basma’s room before entering. Minutes late, already a failure. She situated the tray on Basma’s lap.

“I didn’t know where you were.”

“The water took longer to boil today.”

Dounia took the tub of Vaseline from the nightstand and struggled to lower her pregnant body—legs spread, almost squatting— onto the stool at the end of the bed. She scraped beneath Basma’s toenails with an orange stick, washed her feet and legs with a warm towel and sandalwood soap, and then buffed her toenails with a pink felt board. For thirty minutes, she scooped tablespoons of Vaseline into her hands and spread the milky grease around Basma’s swollen ankles, across her arches, and between her toes. She traced the woman’s blue roped veins with her palms and circled her walnut ankle bones with her thumbs as Basma closed her eyes for quiet time, a time for Ibrahim and mourning. And in the silence, Dounia entered her own sorrow.

Mid-May. Paris. The Tuileries Garden. Months before the wedding. A dress fitting. Her sister had come along, and in retrospect, the entire trip was planned around that afternoon: the intervention. They’d gone to the Cy Twombly show at the Louvre. Dounia bought a postcard from the exhibition of a sand dune with the words “Wilder Shores of Love” scrawled in red across the sky. Twombly was an artist “who straddled the raw and the cooked,” and she wrote to Hamed how this could be their anthem. She was on the precipice of things and felt the adrenaline of an uninhabited future ready to take form, but she also was aware of trying to conjure something that still felt precarious and remote.

They ambled along the gravel paths of the garden, stopped at a cluster of green metal chairs beside a bed of hollyhocks, took off their shoes, stretched across the slats, and raised their chins to the spring sun. Not far away, men played bocce in the sand, and Dounia listened to the thud and tap of wooden balls.

Her mother had grown up in Paris, in Barbès, an Algerian neighborhood near Montmartre, a place she refused to show her daughters, because in October 1961, five months after she was born, her parents had marched in protest of the Algerian curfew and her mother, Dounia’s grandmother, had been killed. Her mother grew up with a single Algerian father who worked hard and was fearful of public transportation, a man who installed extra locks on doors. When her mother was twenty-seven, she met a Saudi man at the café where she waitressed near the Sacré Coeur and agreed to marry him and move to the Kingdom. When Dounia pressed for more details, her mother would shut down and say, “The story’s simple. France was never home.” And yet Paris was the location her mother chose for the conversation.

A plane flew overhead, and the three women looked upward toward the white trails blooming across the cloudless sky. In the silence that followed, her mother and sister regarded her.

“What?”

“I want you to know… I love you very much, and no matter what you decide, my devotion to you will never waver,” said her mother.

Dounia shaded her brow with her hand and looked at her sister, who now sat upright beside their mother. “Okay…?”

“You’ve always been so… spirited,” offered her sister. “Weddings feel exciting, but times are different now,” said her mother.

“And picking the flowers, food, and gifts for the registry feels festive,” added her sister. “I’ve been to dozens of weddings and

seen what awaits you on the other side. I know you don’t want to end up like me, thirty and living with our parents, but I have more freedom than all my friends. Don’t think you’ll be the exception.”

But I am the exception, thought Dounia. I am different.

“After all this planning and stimulation is a life, your life,” continued her mother. “I want you to understand what you’re choosing. More and more young women are deciding not to get married. You can run the date farm, a very successful business you’ll both inherit. You’ll have your freedom. There are different ways for women to form a life.”

“So many of my married friends are unhappy,” said her sister.

“People get divorced now. Women can leave,” said Dounia.

“It’s a legal commitment, not easy to undo,” said her mother.

Dounia and her sister met each other’s gaze. “You want me to call off the wedding?”

“No. I’m asking you to think seriously about getting married.” “Do you think there’s something wrong with Hamed?”

Her mother shook her head and seemed pained by her inability to adequately express her concerns. “Marriage is a relationship with the entire family. Your mother-in-law has tremendous power. Marriage is not for everyone. Motherhood is not for everyone. I did not understand how lucky I was. Nana taught me to manage the date farm, but now there are many opportunities for women to work in Saudi. You don’t need to get married. Not every woman should follow in the traditions of marriage and motherhood. You could start your own business.”

Dounia watched the men play bocce and envied the loose throw, the flight of balls hurled into the air, the thuds in sand, the huddle around landing. Her mother’s concern for her freedom was ill- timed and dubious. When she’d surprised her parents with her acceptance to Berkeley and Yale, her mother forbade the opportunity. True, she’d applied in secret and had not shared her passion for conservation and political science, but that was to avoid the public humiliation of rejection. Her months of research—taking virtual tours, following students on Instagram, and imagining afternoons on green quads, in large lecture halls, and all-nighters with black coffee—had ended in success. And she wanted to bring everything she learned back home, to contribute to the conservation and governance of the country she loved. She was nervous to tell her parents, and when she finally did, she was devastated by their response. Her father was proud but guarded in his con- gratulations. Her mother was furious and didn’t speak to her for days. There was no brother to be her guardian in the States, and her mother wasn’t about to move to California, much less New Haven. A week later, her mother hosted a celebratory dinner for Dounia’s acceptance to the women’s campus at King Saud University in Riyadh. She would never attend college in the States, and when Dounia was sullen, she was called ungrateful. Her mother determined the boundaries of her freedom, and this conversation in the Tuileries Garden was no different.

True, Dounia could stay at home, take trips with her family to London, Paris, and Japan, care for her parents as they aged. She’d inherit the date farm and beehives that had been in the family for generations. She’d become a steward, alongside her sister, of their history. But who wants to inherit a life?

Dounia fingered the edge of the postcard she’d written to Hamed. She knew she was trying to conjure love, but the desire to leave, to catapult into something new, was better than rooting into the familiar. Ibrahim, her father-in-law, was an impressive man who saw her potential. She’d thrive under his care. Her sister, whom she loved, would not, could not, become her life partner. She thought of Cy Twombly’s sculptures. House paint, wax on fabric, twine, wire, and nails. Marriage offered the same materials as her old life, but with the opportunity to reimagine something new. Twombly expressed ambition with household items. I can do that, she thought. I can change how I see. Create strange things from the familiar. She wanted to talk about the white sculptures, the crayon and colored pencil drawings, the still life series created from jars, but it seemed impossible to explain any of this to her mother and sister, who sat across from her, waiting for a response. The next morning, they returned to Riyadh. Under June suns, wedding plans commenced: fonts, the weight of paper, shades of cream. A guest list of hundreds. No expense was spared, the invitations alone were $30,000, and when they toured the hotel on the Arabian Gulf, her father mistook Dounia’s longing and believed it could be sated with a view.

Basma’s sighs summoned Dounia back to the room, to her mother-in-law marooned in bed. A woman who described her feet as cushions of pins and needles. Neuropathy stunted her mobility, but her mind was still alive. Petite, like Hamed, her face maintained a dignity that failed to respond to any kind of touch. A woman who, despite her formality, insisted on the importance of human care and duty among family members. Dounia searched the woman’s features for signs of pleasure, to mark a path for her to follow, but nothing seemed to matter. Whether Dounia rubbed, pounded, or stroked across the woman’s skin, Basma’s eyes remained closed, her face indifferent, and Dounia dreaded the day when she’d drain and bandage Basma’s bedsore wounds.