“Aren’t you going to sit down?” her father asked.
“No, Ayan and I are fasting,” the sixteen-year-old replied.
Her father did not pursue the topic. Leila and her big sister, Ayan, who was in the bathroom, were strict when it came to fasting. Women were not permitted to perform religious rituals while unclean, and the girls wanted to catch up on the days they had missed as soon as possible. Mondays and Thursdays were the best days, when the Prophet Muhammad fasted. Today was Thursday.
Ramadan had been an ordeal. This year the fasting month had fallen in July, when the sun did not go down until after ten o’clock at night and rose just a few hours later. It was long to go without food and drink. Now, during Dhu al-Hijjah—the month of the pilgrimage—the girls were fasting again and had intensified their daily prayer. It was the most sacred period in the Islamic calendar, the best time for the hajj, to travel as a pilgrim to Mecca. Good deeds counted for more now than at other times of the year.
* * *
Ismael, the third brother, who was between Ayan and Leila in age, entered the kitchen with a towel wrapped around his waist. He was on his way to the bathroom, where Ayan had just finished. If he encountered his sisters when strutting around half-naked, he usually lurched into them for fun. “Don’t!” they would shout. “Mom, he’s annoying us!”
The three teenagers—Ayan, who was nineteen years old; Ismael, eighteen; and Leila, sixteen—had drifted apart. The sisters complained that their brother was only interested in working out, hanging around with friends, and playing computer games. His lack of attendance at the mosque did not go unnoticed. It was embarrassing. “You’re not a Muslim!” Ayan had recently shouted at him, and had gone on to urge her mother to throw him out. She could not live with someone who did not pray.
“He’s just confused!” their mother had said in his defense.
“Kick him out!”
“In the summer,” their mother said, trying to mollify her, “I will take him to a sheikh in Hargeisa, ask him to pray over him, talk to him…”
Ayan had been vociferous in these arguments; Leila had merely followed her lead. The previous evening, when Ismael came home from training, Leila had rushed over and thrown her arms around his neck.
“Oh, Ismael! I’ve missed you!”
“Huh? I’ve only been gone a couple of hours…”
“Where were you?”
“At the gym.”
“How was the workout?”
“Eh … I was working on my upper body. Chest and arms.”
Girls. Seriously. Leila had been mad at him for ages, and then suddenly she was all sweetness and light.
Ismael put on jeans and a shirt and joined the others for breakfast. He opened the refrigerator door, where alongside the note bearing the word thallaja—refrigerator in Arabic—the girls had stuck up words of wisdom from the Islamic Cultural Centre of Norway. On a green sticker, torn at the edges as though someone had tried to peel it off, was written, Allah does not see your wealth and property, He sees your heart and your actions. A purple sticker read, Let he who believes in Allah and the Last Day treat his neighbor with kindness, be generous to his guests and speak the truth, which is good, or remain silent (e.g., refrain from improper and impure talk, slander, lies, spreading rumors etc.).
Ismael stood at the counter spreading mackerel in tomato sauce on three slices of wholemeal bread. The eighteen-year-old was particular about his protein intake and thought his parents used too much oil in their cooking, as well as boiling food too long and frying things to a crisp. He wanted pure, healthy, simple food and disliked Somali seasonings and spices.
He joined the others at the table, bumping playfully into his little brothers as he sat down. Isaq responded by punching him on the arm; Jibril merely squirmed and asked him to stop.
“Let the boys eat,” Sara said.
* * *
The day was slow to break; it would still be a while before the sun appeared over the roofs of the apartment blocks in the east.
Sadiq was on sick leave. He had injured his shoulder when a crate fell on him at the Coca-Cola warehouse. Next week he was going to a physiotherapist he had been referred to by NAV, the Norwegian welfare authority. Thoughts flew through his mind. It was a long time since he had heard from his mother in Somaliland. Was she sick? He would make sure to call her later today.
From the girls’ room he heard a wardrobe door slam and something heavy being moved. Ayan had left secondary school in the spring and was working as an on-call employee for an agency offering personal assistants to elderly people who, as it stated in her contract, required practical assistance in everyday life. It was a sort of gap year before she went to college.
She came out of the bedroom with a suitcase.
“What are you doing with that?” Sadiq asked.
“Aisha is borrowing it,” Ayan replied. “She’s taking a trip.”
The girls and their friend often borrowed things from one another. Aisha lived a few streets away. The sisters sometimes asked their father to drive them over. On one such trip he had asked what they carried in the plastic bags they had taken back and forth. Aisha’s washing machine was broken, they explained, and they were doing her laundry. Aisha was a couple of years older than Ayan; when her husband left her, she had moved back in with her mother and sisters, along with her baby.
Ayan dragged the suitcase behind her down the hall. At the front door she stopped by the mirror and wrapped her curly hair in a hijab.
The elder daughter had inherited her mother’s features: a curved forehead, soft, round cheeks, and deep-set eyes. She tightened the hijab until there was not a single strand of hair showing, pulled a jilbab, a sort of hooded tunic, over it, and finally added a loose cloak. The hallway
