Though Nazmiyeh had promised Atiyeh she would wait for him in Gaza, she set out in the darkness back to Beit Daras, stepping over and between the nightmares of families asleep on the ground.
The night was black, thick and smooth, as Nazmiyeh walked the desert path back to her village. Stars tinseled the world above her, but she could see neither what stood before her nor what lay beneath her feet. She stopped to pray, bowing and bending in pleading worship. She asked forgiveness for her sins. She called upon Allah to guide her. She begged to find her sister Mariam alive, then entreated the earth to clear her path of scorpions and wild animals. Soon she could see the glow of a fire in the distance and set out toward it, believing that Allah had illuminated her path.
Along the way, she stumbled upon other Palestinians heading in the opposite direction. They could sense one another in the dark, the way fear immobilized them. “Who is there?” a woman’s voice asked in Arabic and Nazmiyeh relaxed upon hearing the Palestinian fallahi accent. “I am trying to get back to Beit Daras to find my sister,” she replied, and the two women moved closer until they could see one another. Several children clutched the woman’s thobe and remained silent as the two, strangers to each other, embraced as if lost family. The woman spoke of unspeakable horrors in her village, warning Nazmiyeh not to return. “I cannot bring myself to describe what they are doing to the women,” she said. Nazmiyeh wished her a safe journey and both prayed for themselves and one another before one set off toward the calling waters of Gaza’s shore, and the other toward the distant flames.
It was nearly daybreak before Nazmiyeh reached the water well in Beit Daras where Mariam often hid when she played with other children. She called softly into the well, but no response came. She was spent, dirty, and thirsty, with blistered feet and nostrils full of sand. The fire had subsided and Nazmiyeh could see uniformed soldiers meandering on the scorched earth. Most were on the hill, looting the larger homes. Their plunder hadn’t yet reached the Masriyeen neighborhood, giving her time to drink from the well before reaching her home undetected. She went into each room, whispering Mariam’s name, but there was no answer. She looked in the kitchen and bathroom, then went to the carved-out space in the wall between the kitchen and the big room, their eavesdropping spot. She paused before turning the corner. It was the last place to look. Please Allah, let her be here.
And there, curled on herself, Mariam was sleeping with her wooden box of dreams, knees tight against her chest. Nazmiyeh dropped to the floor and embraced her sister. “Oh Mariam, habibti!” she sobbed, fear and exhaustion sliding off her shoulders.
Mariam awoke and clung to Nazmiyeh, burying her own sobs in her sister’s bosom.
From the window they could see some villagers in the distance being allowed to leave. Soldiers were taking their belongings and jewelry, but they were allowed to leave. Nazmiyeh felt hopeful. She had been right to come back. To have had faith in Allah. It would be all right. They would give the soldiers whatever they had and go on their way to Gaza. She could walk those thirty-five kilometers again today. They were going to be fine. Allahu akbar.
Nazmiyeh pulled her sister closer, as if to tuck Mariam whole into her body. She kissed her sister’s face and her tears fell, streaking the soot on Mariam’s cheeks.
Neither saw nor heard the two soldiers until one of them yanked Nazmiyeh by her headscarf, pulling it off. Mariam gasped. Nazmiyeh’s abundant copper curls breathed, exhaled, and sliced through the air when she swung around to face her attackers. Her penetrating eyes made the soldiers step back, look at each other. And smile. The soldiers spoke in foreign languages and seemed not to understand one another, using hand gestures to communicate. She moved in front of her sister and began taking off her three gold bangles, the shabka of her dowry. Her husband had broken with tradition and put them on her wrists before their planned wedding. One of the soldiers took them, but the other was not interested in gold and didn’t take his eyes off Nazmiyeh. He moved closer and lifted a fistful of her hair to his face. He inhaled, closed his eyes, grabbed the back of Nazmiyeh’s head, and forced her face to rub against his crotch.
As the soldiers handled her, ripping her clothes, forcing her onto her back, baring her flesh, Nazmiyeh ordered Mariam to turn away and close her eyes and ears as tightly as she could. She said it would all be over soon and they would go on their way. She could endure this, she thought.
Nazmiyeh did not understand what the soldier yelled before forcing himself into her. She clenched her teeth, biting the agony of rape lest it escape from her voice and reach Mariam’s ears.
“Scream!” the soldier demanded in his language as he shoved himself harder into her. “Scream!” He pulled her body up by the hair, but Nazmiyeh understood neither his words nor his desire to hear her suffering. Instead, she continued to endure the assault as silently as possible. She could not see Mariam and was unsure where her sister had gone. She closed her eyes, remembering her husband, Atiyeh, that beautiful man, on their first night together. She had held her voice then, too, knowing that his mother and sisters were probably listening behind the marital door. It was a devious complicity of memory that provoked her to jerk her head violently, trying to uncouple that image from this reality. The soldier thought she was resisting, which pleased him.
The other soldier took the place of the first one, who now tried to thrust himself into her mouth. He slapped her repeatedly. “Scream!” he ordered. “Scream!”
She saw his eyes, gray slits in sacks of fat. His lips were moist with drool and sweat ran from his brow. The grip of her jaw tightened on itself and the soldier grew angry and moved away, mumbling in his language. “I know how to make this whore scream!”
He returned dragging Mariam by her hair, like a limp doll, her wooden box of dreams clutched to her chest. The sisters locked their eyes for an interminable instant, though not long enough to fit a word before the bullet to Mariam’s head rang out through eternity, her wooden box of dreams falling open, its contents spilled. From the terrible knowing that the sun would never fully rise again in her life, a wild howl bellowed from the depths of Nazmiyeh.
The soldier with the gray eyes laughed, excited by the scream he had so badly wanted to prise from her, and he pushed aside the other to fuck the bloodied body of this voluptuous Arab woman. Nazmiyeh’s wail continued as he ejaculated in her body, then the other moved in to pollute her as she stared at Mariam in an expanding crimson puddle. With an exhausting will, she kept screaming, as if her voice could lacerate reality thoroughly enough that she wouldn’t ever have to face it.
Two more soldiers arrived, aroused by the vulgarity, and yanked her by the hair into a new position. Even those defiant locks were defeated and limp with sweat. More soldiers moved in and out of her body, scraping away her life until they had had enough. She lay there, a hollow carved-out thing streaked in spent tears, crusted blood, and dried fear. She listened to the hiss of her breath and surrendered to the silence of wanting to die, waiting for them to kill her, too.
Then, Mariam moved. Her little sister rose from the corpse on the ground and crouched before Nazmiyeh. She cupped her sister’s swollen, tearful face in her small bony hands, gently, and repeated words that had passed between them before, “You are the most spectacular person I have ever known, my big sister. Don’t ever forget how special you are, or how loved you are. We will always be together.”
“I don’t understand. How are you talking to me?” Nazmiyeh asked, without uttering a word.
“Everything that happens is as it should be. Someday, this will all end. There will be no more hours, no more soldiers, and no countries. The most anguished pains and blissful triumphs will fade to nothing. All that will matter is this love,” Mariam said, though her lifeless body lay in its blood.
Nazmiyeh tried to gather her sister’s body into her arms, even as her apparition continued to speak. “Please leave me here. I do not want to leave Beit Daras,” Mariam said. “You must go now. Have a daughter, and name her Alwan.
Now, go!”
“Go!” An Israeli officer who just arrived at the scene called out to the soldiers to leave the Arab woman and take the body of the child to be burned with the others. Without a word, without looking at anyone, without fear, Nazmiyeh summoned a cold punctilious rage to gather her sister’s papers, notebooks, and pencils. She covered her breasts with Mariam’s box and what remained of her ripped clothes. She stood on borrowed strength, semen and blood running down her legs, and walked away with broken steps, without looking back.
The soldiers seemed not to care. No one grabbed or called after her. It would not have mattered to her if they had. One foot after the other, Nazmiyeh was carried by her little sister’s words. The feel of Mariam’s palms on her cheeks. The maturity of Mariam’s voice. The love. When she finally became aware of her surroundings, she had already walked six kilometers on the path to Gaza, where other fleeing Palestinians converged. It was then that she saw a group of men engulfed in flames. As she came closer, she realized they were Zionist soldiers, and she saw her mother and Mamdouh lying on the ground. Atiyeh was there, too, trying to lift her brother. Nazmiyeh ran toward them, trying to call out, but sound was still locked in her throat. The rage and resolve that had carried her this far dissolved and her legs felt wobbly. She pushed on, and when her voice was liberated, what emerged from her lips was a promise from another time and another place.
“Alwan!” was all she could yell, and she kept hollering that name into the wind until she reached what remained of her family.
II
But the violence of an alien story burned those meandering native days, and the Mediterranean Sea lapped at our history’s wounds along the shores of Gaza
THIRTEEN
My teta Nazmiyeh hung the sky every morning, like a sapphire sheet on a clothesline pirouetting in the breeze.
The Refugees moved about, beset by confusion for days. Sufficient tents were not distributed for weeks and people slept on the earth, with stones and insects and animals. Bodies accustomed to hard work and pious habits still awoke before sunrise, only to be met with the sluggishness of dormant fate that carved up their days into repeating lines and rows. They lined up five times a day for salat. They lined up twice a day for bread and soup. They lined up for communal toilets. Queues even invaded their dreams and shaped their rebellious thoughts, such that when some imagined fighting back, they thought of lining up first for weapons, then marching off as rows of fighters. And when the United Nations officials arrived, the refugees lined up to put their names in a registry, handwritten entries in thick notebooks. In return, they received small booklets to be stamped once for every ration received. As the reality of their predicament crystallized with every passing year, the refugees held on to every bit of proof of home to pass onto their children. These ration booklets would thus accumulate into pieces of identity and inheritance, sometimes framed in museum halls.
When Nazmiyeh walked away from her rapists on that fateful day in 1948 without once being stopped, she understood that Mariam was still with her, that what she saw had not been a hallucination. Mariam’s persistent soul protected her. She was sure of it and she never doubted her sister could hear her. So she spoke to her often. At first it baffled Atiyeh to watch his wife speak to no one while she cleaned, while she bathed, washed their clothes. After each salat, she’d say, “Habibti, Mariam.” Before they made love, she would call out to Mariam not to watch. In time, Atiyeh grew accustomed to it and even considered that Mariam was perhaps watching over their family from the unseen realm. After all, Nazmiyeh reminded him, hadn’t he once been struck mute by the sight of Sulayman?
“Do not doubt an existence merely because you cannot see or hear it, husband,” Nazmiyeh said to him. “I know I saw and heard Mariam that day, as I see and hear you now before me. She is the reason we survived our journey here when Zionists went on a killing spree after Sulayman set their soldiers aflame.”
When her first child was born, a boy with gray eyes, Nazmiyeh saw only the eyes of her rapist and she cried out to the shadows, “This one is the son of the devil. Is Allah testing me? How can I love this thing? How do I love a son of the devil?” Astaghfirullah! The midwife put the baby to Nazmiyeh’s teats, but she pushed him away and continued to beseech what she could not see. “Mariam, tell me!”
“You are delirious right now on account of the labor, but your crazy talk better stop before you let this baby starve, woman!” the midwife warned.
Nazmiyeh turned her head and spied something in a dim corner of the room. She grinned, then laughed. It was knotted up and all-wrong laughter. The midwife, a woman from Beit Daras who could remember the hajje who had shat in the river and spoken to the djinn, surmised that Nazmiyeh was her mother’s daughter and was at that moment speaking to the forbidden realm. She looked to the corner of the room to see the object of Nazmiyeh’s gaze and saw nothing but random papers with childish drawings in an open wooden box. The midwife quickly collected her things, muttering Quranic verses, and left in such a hurry that she forgot to collect her fee from the husband waiting outside.
Atiyeh swaddled his firstborn and stood over Nazmiyeh’s deserted eyes. The infant could not be assuaged and Atiyeh tried to coax his wife to feed her baby. He stroked her hair, put the baby in her unwelcoming limp arms, then took him back. He tried to calm the baby, but the crying hunger clawed at both father and son.
“What shall we name our firstborn, Nazmiyeh? How about Mazen? Do you want to be Um Mazen, my love? Let him eat from his mother now.”
“Name him Iblis!” she said. Devil.
Atiyeh paced nervously, unable to console the baby boy whose cries echoed now from the abyss of abandonment. Finally, Atiyeh held their son in one arm and swung the other across his wife’s face, slapping her with the full force of his angst. “Nazmiyeh! You will feed this child now, woman, or by Allah, I will divorce you!”
Nazmiyeh looked into her husband’s face and saw eyes of steel glistening with tears. She reached out her arms, slowly taking her crying child to her breast, and he latched on with a ferocity that first repulsed Nazmiyeh. But soon, her son’s suckling created a rhythm that spilled through her until she was a river, fluid and calm. She rocked herself in a languid cadence of maternity, mesmerized by the attachment of his mouth to her breast. Her body continued swaying, mother and son becoming one, and quiet tears dampened her cheeks. Atiyeh took her hand, and his fingers danced with hers, as they had done in an irretrievable time and place on the first Thursday of each month.
Later, she spoke to Mariam. “Please stay with me, sister.”
Sometimes Nazmiyeh would ask Mariam to give her a sign that she was still there. “I will never doubt it, sister,” she said, nine months pregnant with her fourth child as she crouched bathing the first three, each separated by ten months in age. They were all boys and with every new pregnancy, Nazmiyeh prayed for the girl she was destined to name Alwan. “Maybe give me a sign, sister.” Occasionally she would open Mariam’s wooden box and leaf through the papers, which bore writing she could not understand. These were times when Nazmiyeh wished she could read. She would put them back gingerly, careful not to tear anything, and place the box on her highest shelf, out of her children’s reach, protected between rows of folded clothing.
By the time she delivered her fifth boy, the pain of childbirth had become akin to the chill of winter or the sweat of summer, sometimes difficult to bear, but well known and dealt with. She paced, squatted, and pushed repeatedly until the child was ready and the midwife could pull it out. Nazmiyeh held her breath. “What is it?” she asked. Another boy. She inhaled the room’s stale air and closed her face, eyes tight, forehead furrowed, thinking of the next preganancy she’d have to endure soon, until her daughter, Alwan, could be born. She slowly exhaled her disappointment and asked Allah that the next one be a girl.
FOURTEEN
The beekeeper’s widow was related to us only by love. This childless woman was happy anywhere, as long as she could dig her
hands into a fertile earth, let life-giving dirt live under her nails, and talk to the plants she grew.
Mamdouh stared at his ration booklet, issued by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which indicated he was the head of household. But there was no house and there was nothing to hold. He lived in a tent he shared with his sister Nazmiyeh, her husband, Atiyeh, their children, and Atiyeh’s parents. But Mamdouh was rarely there. For much of the first two years after they were forced from Beit Daras, he slept on the sand of Gaza’s shore under a canopy of stars. He found work as an assistant to a local blacksmith and gave one third of his earnings to Nazmiyeh and one third to the old beekeeper’s widow. He thought it was the right thing to do to honor the man who had been a surrogate father. There was another reason. During the years he had spent as the apprentice, Mamdouh and the beekeeper’s youngest daughter, Yasmine, had fallen in love. They had never spoken of it, and certainly never acted on it, for she had been betrothed and then married. Even after her husband had been killed by the Jews, she and Mamdouh had communicated their feelings only in rare glances, when he would arrive to give money to her stepmother.
The beekeeper’s widow was a cheerful woman who loved to cook, and that remained unchanged despite war, dispossession, widowhood, and poverty. She was the beekeeper’s third wife, not much older than Yasmine herself. And though the two young women had not cared for one another in better times, they became bound by their past as the only two survivors of their family after the war, and they made a tender home together from shared wounds, loss, and the widow’s love of food. Her days were spent cooking and securing the best ingredients for the next day’s meals. Within weeks of moving into a refugee’s life, she had collected her broken heart and scoured the landscape for an open plot of land where she could plant a small garden.
The Blue Between Sky and Water Page 4