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By the time the apartment had become quiet enough for Nadia to hear the refrigerator click on in the kitchen, she had stopped believing that quiet meant sleep. Quiet meant only that Michael had finally surrendered to exhaustion on the narrow sofa, one forearm flung across his eyes, and that Karim had been persuaded into his own bed after spending the better part of the evening inventing reasons to pass the doorway again. Quiet meant the neighbours had stopped climbing the stairs and the pipes had ceased their late-night knocking. It meant Cairo had pulled its noise inward for a few hours. Ghalia, who had been home less than a day and already behaved as though she owned every room in which she was carried, remained awake against Nadia's chest with dark, unfocused eyes and the grave expression of somebody considering a difficult question.
Nadia had been told before the birth that the second baby would be easier. She had accepted this in the abstract because people said it so confidently. The body remembered, they said. The mother remembered. One did not panic at every sound the second time. One understood the difference between a dangerous cry and an indignant one, between hunger and discomfort, between a baby who needed something and a baby who simply objected to the world. All of this had seemed sensible until Ghalia arrived and Nadia discovered that experience had not granted her command of newborns. It had only granted her the ability to be confused without assuming confusion meant catastrophe. She could change a nappy without turning it into a military operation, feed her daughter without counting every swallow, and recognise that a sneeze was merely a sneeze. None of this made Ghalia remotely interested in sleeping.
"You have had milk," Nadia murmured, not because she believed the baby understood but because speaking gave shape to the hours. "You are dry. You are warm. Your mother is here. Your father is unconscious. Your brother has been threatened with consequences if he asks one more time whether your eyes have changed colour. There is, as far as I can tell, nothing left for you to object to." Ghalia blinked at her and made a small sound in the back of her throat. Nadia studied the little face and amended, "Except existence itself, perhaps. I admit that is a large adjustment." The baby's mouth twitched. Nadia knew better than to call it a smile, but she smiled anyway. Michael had attempted the first watch with determination and no stamina. He had come home from the hospital carrying bags, blankets, papers and a fear of dropping his daughter that was almost comic in a man who had handled live wiring in buildings older than either of them. He had made tea nobody drank, checked the cot three times, checked the window latch twice, and asked Nadia whether the room felt too warm until she told him he would soon make it too warm by pacing. When Ghalia cried, he had lifted her at once, held her too stiffly, loosened when Nadia laughed, and then walked the length of the sitting room for nearly an hour. It had worked for exactly nine minutes. By midnight his engineering notebook was open beside him, unread, and his head had begun dropping forward between Ghalia's cries.
Nadia had taken the baby from him before he could argue. Michael protested that she needed rest more than he did, which was technically true and completely useless. She told him that if he fell asleep standing up, she would have two people to worry about instead of one. He kissed her forehead with the exhausted solemnity of a man accepting defeat on principle rather than ability and promised to wake in an hour. Nadia did not correct him. Twenty minutes later she found him asleep on the sofa with one sock on and one sock off, as if exhaustion had overtaken him halfway through removing them. Karim had been worse in a more energetic direction. Eleven years of being the only child had given him no practice in pretending indifference. From the moment Ghalia came through the door, he hovered. He wanted to know why her fingers were wrinkled, why her hair lay in one direction and then another, whether she could see properly, whether she knew his voice, whether she could hear from inside the bedroom, whether babies dreamed, and whether Ghalia would remember anything about the day she came home. He had washed his hands so often after being instructed to do so before touching her that Nadia finally told him he was allowed to retain some skin. Each time she looked away, he seemed to have moved six inches closer to the cot.
What surprised Nadia was not the fascination but the tenderness hidden inside it. Karim had spent the pregnancy announcing practical advantages to having a sibling. He would teach her things. He would have somebody to play games with once she was old enough. He would make sure nobody at school bothered her. He said these things with the air of a person accepting an assignment. Yet when Nadia placed Ghalia in his arms for the first time, his entire body changed. He became so still that even his breathing seemed deliberate. His face, usually quick with opinion, went blank with concentration. He had looked down at his sister and whispered, "She's tiny," as though this were a discovery no adult had made. That was hours ago. Now the apartment was dim except for the lamp near Nadia's chair and the strip of streetlight under the curtains. She had moved from the bedroom because Michael's sleep looked too hard-won to interrupt, and because sitting upright made it easier to keep herself awake. Ghalia had rejected the cot, rejected the cradle Michael's aunt had lent them, rejected being swaddled tightly and rejected being swaddled loosely. She tolerated Nadia's chest. She tolerated Nadia's forearm. She tolerated, for brief stretches, being walked in a slow circle between the sitting room and the kitchen. The distinction between these options had begun to feel philosophical rather than practical.
Nadia pressed her cheek to the baby's soft cap of hair and let herself remember, for a moment, another room and another infant. Karim had been born when she was fifteen, when every ordinary difficulty had arrived tangled with the conviction that adults were watching to see whether she would fail. She had loved him ferociously from the beginning and had also been frightened of him. His hunger frightened her because it seemed inexhaustible. His crying frightened her because she could not always stop it. His sleep frightened her because sometimes he became so quiet that she leaned over him to check his breathing. She had been a girl with a husband only two years older, both of them pretending competence while their families hovered at the edges offering advice that contradicted itself by the hour. With Ghalia, the fear had changed shape. Nadia knew babies survived hiccups. She knew a rash could appear and disappear without tragedy. She knew that loving a child did not make one fluent in that child's needs. She knew, most importantly, that the terrible thought which sometimes came at three in the morning - I do not know what I am doing - could coexist with being a good mother. She wished she could send that knowledge backward to the girl she had been, but time had never shown much interest in being helpful.
Ghalia began to fuss again, her face tightening before the sound arrived. Nadia adjusted her against her shoulder, stood with a quiet groan and began walking. Her body ached in the particular scattered way of recent childbirth, not one pain but a map of them. She moved slowly, one hand supporting the baby's head, the other broad across her back. "Yes, yes," she whispered as Ghalia's complaint gathered strength. "I have also had days when nothing was acceptable. You are not original." The cry sharpened. Nadia bounced gently. "Very well. You are original. No baby before you has ever been tired and angry at the same time. History will remember this night." She reached the kitchen, turned, and saw Karim standing in the hall. He had wrapped his blanket around his shoulders and was barefoot, hair pressed flat on one side. He did not speak at first. He looked past Nadia toward the sofa, where Michael remained asleep, then at Ghalia, then back at Nadia. His eyes had the guilty alertness of a child who knew he should not be awake and hoped the unusual circumstances might suspend ordinary law. Nadia lifted her eyebrows. Karim raised one finger to his lips in a request for mutual discretion that made her nearly laugh.
"What are you doing?" she asked softly. "I heard her." "The neighbourhood heard her. That does not answer my question." He edged into the sitting room, blanket dragging behind him. "I couldn't sleep." "You were asleep when I checked." Karim considered this. "I couldn't keep sleeping." Nadia accepted the amendment and sat again. Ghalia had reduced herself to intermittent grumbles, her cheek warm against Nadia's collarbone. Karim lowered himself onto the rug near her feet rather than taking the other chair. He sat cross-legged, blanket gathered around him, and stared with complete openness. Nadia waited. She had learned that Karim's questions arrived faster if nobody chased them. "Do babies know when everybody wants to sleep?" he asked at last. Nadia looked at him. "Know?" "Like, can they tell?" "That we want to sleep?" He nodded. "And then they stay awake because of it." The seriousness of his face was almost enough to make the theory respectable. Nadia shifted Ghalia higher and said, "You think your sister has been home one day and has already decided to conduct psychological warfare against the family?"
Karim's mouth twitched. "Maybe not decided. Maybe babies just do it." "As instinct?" "Yes." "Like birds knowing how to make nests." "Exactly." Nadia leaned back. "Then it is fortunate she cannot walk yet. Imagine the damage if she had mobility as well as strategy." Karim smiled, but his gaze stayed on Ghalia. The baby opened her eyes, unfocused and dark in the low light. He leaned forward a little, careful not to touch. "She doesn't look tired." "She is very tired." "Then why doesn't she sleep?" "You have asked me versions of this question about yourself for eleven years." "I sleep." "Now. Sometimes. Under supervision." He gave her a look of dignified injury. Nadia nudged his knee with her foot. "To her, everything is new," she said. "Think about it. Air is new. Light is new. Clothes are new. Your voice is new. Being hungry is new, being full is new, being cold for ten seconds while somebody changes her is new. She has never had a boring day because she has hardly had any days at all. She does not know the rules yet."
Karim frowned thoughtfully. "She knew things before she was born." "Some things. She knew my voice. Probably your father's. Possibly yours, since you spent months speaking directly to my stomach whether invited or not." "I was teaching her." "You were describing football matches." "That counts." Nadia conceded with a small tilt of her head. "She knew warmth. Movement. Sounds. But not this. This is all new, habibi. She has a great deal to learn." Karim was quiet long enough that Nadia thought he might be losing the battle with sleep. Then he asked, "Was I like that?" "Worse." His head snapped up. "No." "Much worse. You objected to sleep as a political principle." "Baba says I was easy." "Your father is sentimental and has forgotten the facts." From the sofa, without opening his eyes, Michael said, "I have forgotten nothing." Nadia and Karim both froze. Michael shifted under the blanket he had not had when he fell asleep - Nadia had put it over him an hour earlier - and added, "Karim was a peaceful infant." "You once walked him around a table for forty minutes because if you stopped he screamed."
"Peacefully," Michael said. Karim covered his mouth to keep from laughing. Nadia looked toward the sofa and said, "Go back to sleep." "I am asleep." "Then stop participating." Michael made a sound that might have been agreement and went still again. Karim's shoulders shook under the blanket. Ghalia startled at the movement of Nadia's chest, made a small protesting noise and then settled. "See?" Nadia whispered. "Everyone was once in their booties too. Even you. You arrived not knowing what night was or why people kept putting clothes over your feet." Karim looked down at his bare toes. "Booties are stupid." "You liked yours." "I had no judgement." "At last, a truthful account of infancy." The conversation loosened something in him. He leaned his shoulder against Nadia's knee and let the blanket pool around his waist. For the first time since they came home, he did not ask to hold Ghalia. He simply sat near them, listening to her breathe. Nadia ran her free hand over his hair, smoothing the flattened side until he ducked away on reflex and then leaned back again, pretending the movement had not happened.
"What if she doesn't like me?" he asked. The question was so quiet Nadia almost missed it. She looked down. Karim's face had changed. The curiosity was gone, leaving something younger. Eleven was an awkward age for vulnerability; he guarded it more carefully than he had at seven and less successfully than he would at sixteen. Nadia did not answer too quickly. "She does not know enough yet to have an opinion about your character," she said. "At present, she likes warmth, milk and being held. You are capable of one of those things without assistance." "Only one?" "Do not become ambitious." He smiled reluctantly. Nadia continued, "You don't have to make her like you. You are her brother. That is not an audition. There will be days she adores you and days she wants you out of her room. There will be days you adore her and days you consider asking whether the hospital accepts returns." "Would they?" "No. I checked before we left." Karim laughed again, more freely this time, then glanced at Michael to see whether they had woken him. Michael did not move. Nadia lowered her voice. "You had us alone for a long time. It will feel different. Different is not the same as worse."
He picked at a loose thread on the blanket. "I know." "Knowing things does not prevent feeling them." This time he did not answer. Ghalia's hand had worked free of the blanket and rested against Nadia's chest, fingers opening and closing without purpose. Karim watched it. After a moment he held out one finger, stopped short of touching her and looked up for permission. Nadia nodded. He placed the tip of his finger against Ghalia's palm. Her hand closed around it with startling strength. Karim inhaled. Nadia watched his whole face brighten. "That is a reflex," she told him, because she would not lie simply to improve the moment. "She grabbed me." "She would grab a spoon." "There isn't a spoon here." "An excellent point. At this moment you are unquestionably her favourite available object." He ignored the insult. Ghalia held on. Karim sat perfectly still as though any movement might break an agreement. Nadia saw him trying not to smile and failing. In that instant, the age difference between them seemed both enormous and irrelevant. Eleven years meant he would remember her infancy. He would be nearly grown before she reached school. He could carry her long before she could keep up with him, teach her things before she understood why he was allowed freedoms she was not yet old enough to have. Nadia had worried, during the pregnancy, that the distance might prevent closeness. Watching him now, she understood that closeness would simply take a different shape.
Ghalia's grip loosened. Karim kept his hand where it was until her fingers opened completely. "Can I hold her?" "You are half asleep." "I'm not." "You are wearing a blanket as clothing." "That doesn't mean anything." "It means you are not at your sharpest." He began to protest, then stopped when Nadia shifted. She settled Ghalia securely across her lap rather than handing her over and said, "Sit beside me." Karim scrambled onto the wide chair's arm before she could object, then slid carefully into the narrow space beside her. Nadia arranged his arms and laid Ghalia across them while keeping one hand beneath the baby's shoulders. Karim's seriousness returned instantly. "Her head," Nadia reminded him. "I know." "Knowing things does not prevent dropping them." "Mama." "I am simply applying tonight's philosophy consistently." He rolled his eyes, but his arms tightened correctly. Ghalia stirred, mouth searching briefly, then settled again. Karim looked almost offended by the trust of it. "She's warm." "Babies generally are." "No, I mean really warm." "She has been using me as furniture for three hours."
They sat that way while the apartment remained suspended in the thin hours before dawn. A car passed outside. Somewhere in the building a tap ran, then stopped. The call to prayer was still some distance away. Karim's eyelids began to droop despite his denials. Nadia watched him fight it because he did not want to surrender the baby. His head tipped once, jerked upright, tipped again. "Enough," she said gently. "Bed." "I'm awake." "You just fell asleep while arguing that you were awake." "I was thinking." "With your eyes closed?" "It helps." She took Ghalia back. Karim rose with exaggerated dignity, wrapped the blanket around himself again and stood for a moment uncertainly. "If she cries, can you wake me?" Nadia stared at him. "No." "But what if you need help?" "Then I will wake your father, who contributed fifty percent of the problem." From the sofa came a muffled, "I heard that." "Excellent," Nadia said. "Your shift begins in ten minutes." Michael's hand emerged from beneath the blanket in what might have been surrender. Karim lingered. Nadia reached out and caught his wrist. "You do not have to prove you are a good brother in one night. Go sleep. There will be mornings. Many of them."
He nodded. At the hallway he turned back. "She's going to know me, though?" Nadia understood what he meant this time. "Yes," she said. "Before you realise it." Karim went to bed. For several minutes Nadia sat without moving. Ghalia had finally closed her eyes, though Nadia did not trust the development. Michael pushed himself upright on the sofa, hair disordered, face marked by the cushion seam. He looked toward the hallway and then at Nadia. "How long was he there?" "Long enough to accuse the baby of intentional sleep deprivation." Michael considered. "Strong theory." "Do not encourage him." He rubbed his face and held out his arms. "Give her to me." "You can barely see." "I can see the baby." "There are two lamps in this room and you are squinting at both." "Nadia." She let him take Ghalia. Michael settled her against his chest more naturally than he had earlier, exhaustion having stripped away some of his fear. Nadia stood and stretched carefully, feeling every joint complain. Michael watched her. "Bed," he said.
"That is an instruction?" "A plea. You are frightening me." "Why?" "Because you have the expression you get when you decide you are not tired simply because being tired is inconvenient." She opened her mouth, closed it, and pointed at him. "That is unfairly accurate." "I have known you a long time." Nadia looked at Ghalia. The baby's face had gone peaceful at last. "If she wakes-" "I know." "She may want feeding." "Then I will bring her." "Do not wait until she is furious." "Go to bed." She went, mostly because the mattress looked suddenly like the finest object ever made. In the bedroom she lowered herself onto the edge and listened. Michael murmured something to Ghalia in Greek, too soft for Nadia to make out. The sound pulled a memory loose: Michael at seventeen, holding newborn Karim as if somebody had placed a glass vessel in his arms and ordered him not to breathe. They had survived that frightened beginning. Not elegantly, not with the serene competence adults liked to invent in retrospect, but they had survived it together.
Nadia lay down and woke perhaps forty minutes later to sunlight beginning to thin the darkness around the curtains. For one confused second she thought the apartment was silent because something was wrong. Then she heard Ghalia making small rooting noises and Michael whispering that breakfast arrangements were beyond his department. Nadia smiled into the pillow before opening her eyes. When she came out, Michael was in the chair with the baby and Karim was standing beside him, hair still wild, fully dressed despite the hour. He had apparently abandoned sleep in favour of readiness. "She woke up," he announced. "I gathered." "Baba said I could help." Michael looked at Nadia over Karim's head and gave a helpless shrug. Nadia sat, took Ghalia and began feeding her. Karim hovered for only a moment before remembering himself and sitting on the floor. He talked in a low voice about the day ahead, about which relatives might visit, about whether he could show Ghalia the mobile he had made for above the cot, and about a book he had decided to read aloud to her even though Michael had pointed out that she would not understand it. Nadia told him understanding was not always the reason people liked being read to.
The first visitor arrived before anyone in the apartment was properly ready for visitors. Michael's older sister Eleni knocked with the restraint of somebody who understood there was a newborn inside and then entered carrying enough food for a household twice their size. She kissed Nadia, kissed Michael, caught Karim around the shoulders when he tried to sidestep her, and then stopped dead at the sight of Ghalia. All of her briskness dissolved. "Oh," she said, very softly, and Nadia watched Karim watch that transformation with interest. Until then the adults had been behaving as if Ghalia were both the centre of the world and a problem requiring constant management. Eleni simply stared. Within twenty minutes the kitchen table was crowded with covered dishes, Michael had been told twice that he looked terrible, Nadia had been told three times to sit down while already sitting down, and Karim had been asked to fetch a clean cloth, a glass of water and then another chair. On the third request he looked toward Nadia with the first flash of resentment she had seen since the baby came home. It was small and understandable. Yesterday he had been the child people arrived to see. Today he was apparently a useful pair of legs attached to a tea service.
Nadia caught his eye and said, "Leave the chair. Your aunt is standing because she arrived with an entire restaurant and deserves the consequences." Eleni laughed and found her own chair. Karim's expression eased. Nadia did not make a lesson of it, but she stored the moment away. A new baby could absorb a room without meaning to. Adults would need reminding that the older child had not become furniture simply because he was suddenly large by comparison. Eleni asked whether Karim had held his sister yet. Before he could answer, Michael announced, "At three in the morning. During a secret conference." Karim glared at him. Nadia said the conference had produced important findings about infant strategy, which made Eleni demand the full story. By the time Karim finished explaining his theory, improving it in several places, he was laughing at himself. He showed Eleni how Ghalia had gripped his finger and insisted that although Nadia claimed it was a reflex, the timing had been suspiciously personal. "Of course it was personal," Eleni said at once. "She has excellent judgement."
"Do not undermine science in my home," Nadia replied. "You married my brother. Science has already suffered here." Michael, carrying plates from the kitchen, stopped and looked wounded. Karim laughed so hard he had to put down his tea. Ghalia slept through the entire exchange in Nadia's arms, which seemed deeply unfair after the night's events. When Eleni finally rose to leave, she bent over the baby for one last look and then surprised Karim by kissing his forehead too. "Congratulations, big brother," she said. He tolerated the kiss with the rigid patience of an eleven-year-old in public, but Nadia saw the pleasure behind his embarrassment. After the door closed, he stood there for a moment touching the place on his forehead as though checking whether the title had left a mark. Michael began clearing dishes. Nadia watched Karim drift toward the cot, then stop himself and turn toward the kitchen instead. "Do you need help?" he asked. Michael looked at him. "With the dishes?" "Anything." There it was again: the urge to earn his new place by usefulness. Nadia recognised it because she had spent too many years doing the same thing in different forms. She said, "You can help by eating the pastry your aunt brought before your father discovers it." Michael objected that this was slander. Karim needed no second invitation. He took the largest piece, then broke it in half and offered part to Nadia.
"That was not the instruction," she said. "I'm sharing." "With me specifically, so your father cannot take it." "That is still sharing." Nadia accepted the half. They ate standing beside the table while Michael complained about conspiracies. The sweetness stuck to Nadia's fingers. Karim talked about a friend who wanted to see the baby and then, after a pause, asked whether friends were allowed yet. Nadia told him one quiet visitor was acceptable if Karim understood that Ghalia was not an exhibit. He said he understood, then immediately began planning what he would show his friend first. Nadia let him. Being proud was allowed too. Later, after breakfast, when Michael had gone to wash and Karim was carrying empty tea glasses to the kitchen, Nadia found him standing beside the cot. Ghalia was asleep in it at last, having apparently decided daylight was an acceptable time for surrender. Karim had placed one hand on the edge but was not touching her. He looked less like a guard than a boy learning the dimensions of a changed home.
"You know," Nadia said from the doorway, "you are still allowed to leave the room." He glanced back. "I know." "You are still allowed to see your friends." "I know." "You are still allowed to be eleven." That made him turn fully. "I know, Mama." She believed him, mostly. Nadia crossed the room and rested her hand on the back of his neck. "Good. Because she has plenty of adults. She needs a brother." Karim looked down at the cot. "What does a brother do?" Nadia thought of the previous night's questions, of his finger caught in Ghalia's fist, of the way he had asked whether she would know him. She could have given him duties, and he would have taken them too seriously. Instead she said, "You will find out together." The answer seemed to satisfy him more than a list would have. He leaned lightly into her side. In the cot, Ghalia slept on, tiny and untroubled, her whole body contained within a space Karim could have occupied with his schoolbag and still had room left over. Nadia stood with her son beside her and her daughter before them, aware of the strange arithmetic by which a family expanded: not by dividing what had existed, though it could feel that way in the anxious hours, but by asking everybody to become somebody slightly new.
Karim had gone to bed an only child. He had woken a brother. The change was too large to happen in one night, of course. It would happen again when Ghalia first recognised him, when she reached for him deliberately instead of by reflex, when she cried at his leaving and later shouted at him to get out, when he carried her half asleep from one room to another, when he discovered that being older did not make him automatically right. But the first small piece of it had already taken place in the dim sitting room at three in the morning, under a blanket worn like a cloak, while Cairo slept around them and Ghalia refused to. Nadia squeezed the back of his neck. Karim complained that she was messing up his hair, though there was plainly nothing left to ruin. Michael called from the bathroom asking where his clean shirt had gone. Ghalia began to stir. The kettle clicked on in the kitchen. The apartment, quiet for perhaps four minutes, returned to itself. Nadia smiled and went to meet the noise.