As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow (11)

I clear my throat. “There are still more patients—”

“Your life is just as important as theirs,” he interrupts, his voice leaving no room for negotiation. “Your. Life. Is. Just. As. Important.”

I close my eyes, trying to hold on to his words, trying to believe them; but each time I try to catch the letters, they vanish from my grasp.

Nevertheless, I stand on unsteady legs as Dr. Ziad throws a white sheet over the bodies.





Layla doesn’t say anything for a long time after I slump down on the couch.

With my eyes closed, I relay my conversation with Am, my voice cracking when I tell her the price. I hate him. Innocent lives don’t matter when he can fill his pockets from our suffering. No one wants to escape more than people who have been broken down to the core. They’re looking for a lifeline, no matter how brittle it may be.

“Say something,” I beg, and open my eyes when she stays quiet. She stares at the coffee table in front of her. She’s thinking of a plan. And then she grimaces.

“I have nothing to say.” Her brows are furrowed. “Unless…”

“Unless?”

“We could sell our gold?” She twirls a strand of hair around her finger. The late-afternoon sun filtering through the stained windows pools in the middle of the living room, turning the Arabian rug under us into something ethereal. I watch the way the light dances around my shadow between the forest-green plants sewn into the material. If I focus on it, I can pretend whatever exists outside the yellow halo is all right—is safe.

Sell our gold.

Gold is passed on through our families. Deep beneath its glittering surface, it holds our history and stories in its thick braided strands.

When I went back to my demolished building after the bombing, I wasn’t able to find anything that belonged to me. The granite ensured it. My gold is still under there, buried, but Layla’s is here. Gold that Hamza gave her as part of her dowry.

“Who would buy it?” I ask.

Layla shrugs. “Maybe Am would accept it instead of money.”

I’ve never heard of anyone buying their way with gold, and we’re surely not the first ones to think of it. And anyway, I’m not willing to part with Layla’s—my family’s—gold like that. Not to someone as crooked as Am.

“He didn’t say money or gold.” I pick at the threads spilling out of the couch. “If he wanted gold, he’d say it.”

Layla watches me while I continue to poke at the strands.

“So you don’t want to try and ask him?” she finally says.

“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.