Daily, the beekeeper’s widow picked the fruits of her labor for cooking, making herbal remedies, and bartering. She used her vegetables to haggle and bargain for fresh goat’s milk, which she churned into butter, heated into curds and yogurt, strained into labneh, and filtered and dried into cheese. She traded her beets, cabbage, cucumbers, and potatoes for chickens and eggs. While other women waited in their tents, burdened by shock, mud, and humiliation, immobilized by stagnant days of waiting for the next day’s newspaper, for the next ration, waiting for someone to do something, for the rain to come or the sun to set, waiting to go home to Beit Daras, the beekeeper’s widow began to suffuse the air with the smell of normality. She inspired other women to invest themselves in their makeshift dwellings and it was not long before women began to gather as they always had, to wash their laundry, gossip, roll grape leaves, sift through rice to remove rocks and rice bugs. Their husbands put up laundry lines for them and built communal kitchens and underground ovens to make bread. In the congestion of national upheaval and a collective sorrow that would deepen to the roots of history and expand through multiple generations, the refugees of Beit Daras went back to their jokes and scandals. And while they waited to go home, babies were born and weddings were planned. The tug of life’s sustaining banalities pulled them from their cots into communal spaces, where they prayed together, drank the morning’s coffee and afternoon’s tea together. The war had been a great equalizer and put everyone, no matter their family name or fortune, into the same canvas tents lined in equally spaced rows in open, shadeless fields. All the children played together and soon they all, boys and girls alike, attended school taught outdoors or in tents. The scoundrels, saints, gossips, mothers, whores, pious, communists, egoists, pleasurists, and all other ists went back to their former ways in this new, misshapen fate.
In time, mud bricks and corrugated metal replaced the cloth tents and the refugee camps gave rise to a subculture marked by adamant pride, defiance, and an unwavering insistence on the dignity of home, no matter how long it took or how high the price. The camps would become the epicenter of one of the world’s most tangled troubles, and some of the greatest Arab poets and artists would be born from their crowded midst. And there, in the heart of national homelessness, the love and care that the beekeeper’s widow injected into every meal made her domain a source of life from which the aromas of onions, rosemary, cinnamon, cardamom, and cilantro drifted throughout the camp, provoking memory, stories, and hope. At mealtime, her place was always full of people. Neighbors, new and old friends. And of course, once a month, Mamdouh came. He would arrive self-consciously, investing great concentration and will to walk with as much symmetry and grace as he could manage. The bullet to his leg during the Naqba had hit his growth plate, stopping it from growing, while the other had stretched on several centimeters more, warping his gait and making his movements awkward. The lift he added inside one shoe helped, but it was not enough.
The beekeeper’s widow would prepare Mamdouh’s favorite dishes using a special hashweh of her own blend of spices with rice and meat to stuff vegetables from her garden. Mamdouh most loved her koosa, stuffed zucchini in spicy tomato sauce. The time he could spend in her home on payday was as much of a reward as his earnings, not only for her flavorsome food, but because it afforded him an opportunity to see Yasmine, for it was well known, although unuttered, that he would come to ask for her hand in marriage some day when he had saved enough to start a family.
Indeed, he put aside the other third of his wages for that very reason, and in less than a year, Mamdouh had accumulated enough to seek work in Cairo, where he landed a job with a large construction contractor. Before leaving for Cairo, which was at that time administering Gaza, he took his sister and her husband with him to ask for Yasmine’s hand. He offered a modest dowry of two hundred Egyptian pounds and an engagement shabka of a gold necklace with matching dangling earrings. To welcome Yasmine into the family, Nazmiyeh took off one of her own two shabka bangles, which her husband had bought to replace the ones stolen by the soldiers, and she lovingly slipped it on her future sister-in-law’s wrist. The women began zaghareet, ululations that spread a heart’s joy into the air for all to hear.
The trilling announced to the world that Yasmine had accepted, and a spontaneous celebration now began. Neighbors had already congregated outside Yasmine’s home in anticipation, for matters of marriage could never be kept secret in Palestinian communities, and now in the close quarters of the refugee camp, everyone knew nearly everything about everyone. Dancing and singing went on into the night. The beekeeper’s widow and Nazmiyeh, as the female representatives of bride and groom, announced the official engagement party would happen in two weeks, after which Mamdouh would travel to Cairo alone to work and save for their wedding and new home.
On the day of the official engagement celebration, the beekeeper’s widow bought meat on credit from the butcher, whom she would later repay with fresh produce, and prepared a feast of tender lamb cooked in cumin, cinnamon, and allspice and sprinkled with browned pine nuts over a bed of rice; heaps of rolled grape leaves and stuffed zucchini; various salads; mezze; and cucumber in yogurt sauce with mint and garlic. It was a meal that the refugees would speak about for weeks to come. “No one can cook like the beekeeper’s widow,” they all said. And Mamdouh replied, “Indeed, because she cooks with her heart.” The women guests spoke fondly of Mamdouh among themselves. He was a fine choice for Yasmine, even though he was lame and had no family except one sister, they said. One woman sucked through her teeth in irrepressible disapproval toward Nazmiyeh. “Everybody knows that woman can give a tongue-lashing with no shame and it’s not anything to be proud of,” she said. But another neighbor retorted, “Allah protect us from your tongue. That poor woman has been quiet as a mouse, pushing out one baby after another since the war. Bite your tongue and repent. I won’t have you talking about Um Mazen like that on her brother’s happy day!”
FIFTEEN
Suddenly homeless refugees after Israel took everything, Palestinians were ripe for both pity and exploitation throughout the Arab world, where the brightest Palestinian minds bore fruit for other nations, and once proud farmers chased the call of bread, becoming desperate workers far from their lands. My great-khalo Mamdouh was swept up in that stream of cheap labor that kept carrying him farther and farther away.
In Cairo, Mamdouh worked without respite. He lived in a dormitory with other Palestinian laborers. Every day, he awoke to the call of the adan beckoning the faithful to prayer and performed the morning salat before heading to his job, and at the end of the day, he would muster the energy for a cup of tea and a light dinner with his comrades before collapsing into bed. Sometimes, he stayed awake to count his money, which he kept in a small purse strapped to his body at all times until he could deliver his earnings to Yasmine for safekeeping. He took two days off each month to travel back to Gaza, where the beekeeper’s widow, Yasmine, and Nazmiyeh would have spent the previous day planning and preparing his favorite foods. They would be waiting for him with water warming over a flame so he could have a proper bath, the only one he got each month because only cold water came out of the dormitory tap. A simple cotton dishdasha would have been washed and kissed by the sun on the lines for him, and when he finally arrived, by taxi or rickshaw, the three women of his heart would wrap him with kisses and blessings.
Each time, he brought them small gifts and tales from Cairo. On one such visit, he spoke of news from Kuwait, where oil was pushing up new cities and industries, and a new society of entitled Bedouins was paying Palestinians to do everything from building and staffing their hospitals and schools to cooking their meals and wiping their asses. Several of his Palestinian comrades in Cairo had already moved to Kuwait and spoke fondly of the desert. “I was thinking maybe we could all go there,” he suggested, even though he knew his sister Nazmiyeh would never leave Palestine and he wasn’t sure his Yasmine would, either. The beekeeper’s widow, on the other ha
nd, was ready to soar wherever the wind would take her, except to desert soil, where food could not grow from the ground; and Kuwait was merely a desert by the sea.
Nazmiyeh was in her fifth pregnancy when Mamdouh and Yasmine moved to Kuwait. Before they left, Nazmiyeh held her bother’s face, then Yasmine’s. She kissed them with tearing eyes and repeated the words that Mariam had deposited in her being: “We will always be together.”
Nazmiyeh felt the sting of being the only one of her family left in Gaza, but she knew Mariam was always there, and so was her husband, Atiyeh, a man who fought his own family to defend her. They had never accepted Nazmiyeh and, as more of his brothers married, the band of women who hated his wife grew more vicious under the lead of his mother, who never let it pass that her son had married beneath him. They said Nazmiyeh was bewitched like her mother, Um Mamdouh, and would invite evil wherever she was. Her sharp tongue was proof of the devil in her, they said. They thought she shook her ass purposefully when she walked and said they felt sorry for Atiyeh to have to endure such shame. They said her hijab wasn’t tight enough around her head and that she sometimes let her copper curls fall for all to see.
But the isolation they created for Nazmiyeh and Atiyeh only drew them closer. One baby came after another into a life that barely brought enough food, and evenings spent counting coins from each day’s catch of fish. It was a life that blossomed tenderly, with routines, silliness, tears, and demands. When the boys were small, Nazmiyeh would harness them two at a time to her back as she toiled, and as they grew, one by one they would accompany their father on his fishing boat in the Mediterranean Sea, where they learned to see magnificence and wonder, and to bow to Allah in humility and gratitude every day surrounded by water for miles. Nazmiyeh would wait on the shore until they disappeared into the sea’s expanse. Sometimes, she would stay there a while longer, staring into the mysterious blue between sky and water, singing Mariam’s song.
O find me
I’ll be in that blue
Between sky and water
Where all time is now
And we are the forever
Flowing like a river
SIXTEEN
When Teta Nazmiyeh talked about her brother, Mamdouh, or my khalo Mazen, her eyes would change. They became empty rooms that she’d enter and hurry to furnish with their stories. It was not nostalgia, but a chore of memory, a task to keep them near.
Three years after Mamdouh and Yasmine left, they returned for a visit with their firstborn, a one-year-old boy they had named Mhammad, after Yasmine’s father, the old beekeeper of Beit Daras. Nazmiyeh, of course, always pregnant or nursing, and with children dripping from her arms, took in Mhammad and pleaded with her brother to move back to Gaza where the boy could grow up with his cousins and in his own homeland. Even if it wasn’t Beit Daras, it was still Palestine. But Mamdouh had found a place in Kuwait where he was thriving, having ascended rapidly from a laborer to construction foreman. His lack of sufficient schooling was masked by a natural mathematical and spatial prowess. He was deft at reading blueprints and engineering plans, and a well-known Palestinian architect had taken Mamdouh under his tutelage in Kuwait.
“Palestinians are building Kuwait from the sand up,” he told Nazmiyeh. “You should see! My mentor is designing the layout of the entire country. Another Palestinian has already established Kuwait’s military and still another Palestinian has established its police force. The leading doctors and surgeons are all Palestinian and they are running nearly every domestic ministry, from education to the interior.” Mamdouh paused, then announced proudly, “I am going to be an architect.”
With so many childbirths close together, Nazmiyeh was never without babies strapped to her back, clinging to her legs, or dangling from her breasts. Though she complained endlessly of their boundless needs, and she swatted at the older ones like irritating flies when they were too demanding or misbehaved, she was always heartbroken when they left for the sea with their father. She would wait at the sandy Mediterranean shore in the void of their absence, watching the roll of one wave follow another. For the man and boys of Nazmiyeh’s heart, the enchantment of fishing was also in the homecoming to the woman waiting for them with exuberant anticipation, large meals, and, for Atiyeh, lovemaking that went long into the night, changing forms until his soul would ache, depleted by his love for her.
But their delight was always hampered by Nazmiyeh’s despondency when they left. So, during those early years after the Naqba, when Gaza was ruled by Egypt, it was decided that one of the older sons would stay behind when Atiyeh went for overnight fishing trips. It was during one such time in the winter, when twelve-year-old Mazen, her eldest, had remained home as man of the house, that Nazmiyeh had swept through the Nusseirat refugee camp like a tornado, kicking up dust and fury that reminded everyone who knew her why she should not be crossed.
Earlier, just an hour before, Mazen had stormed through the house, tears and fury pumping through his young body, incredulity shaking his voice as he confronted his mother, “Were you raped? Am I the son of your rapist?”
Nazmiyeh stiffened. She stepped away from the vegetables she had been cutting, looked into her son’s eyes, gray, almost as blue as the morning sky. Her firstborn who had suckled at her breast longer than any of the others, now on the doorstep of manhood. She took him into her arms, absorbing his rage and humiliation.
“No,” she began, with implacable calm. “Who told you that?”
Mazen gave her a name.
“I know that boy,” she said and walked out her front door, Mazen following.
She didn’t need to go far before spotting the boy with his friends. He ran when he saw her approach, and Nazmiyeh called to the others, “You better stop him or I’ll cut off all your ears! Every last one of you!”
They obeyed, frightened of this woman’s legendary ire. As she reached the boy, who was squirming to get away from the group holding him, Nazmiyeh grabbed him by the ear and began beating him with her slipper. The more he cried out, the harder she whupped him. People gathered. An elderly man stepped in, demanding Nazmiyeh stop and proclaiming the oneness of Allah to calm her. La ellah illa Allah. She did, for not even Nazmiyeh would violate the social order of respecting the elderly. But she continued yelling at the boy, insisting that he reveal who had told him the filth he was spreading.
Later that evening, the boy and his mother and grandmother arrived at Nazmiyeh’s home. His recoiled demeanor reminded Nazmiyeh of the day Atiyeh, stunned to silence by Sulayman, had come to their home in Beit Daras to beg her mother’s forgiveness. Nazmiyeh smiled, inviting them in for tea.
“Um Mazen, my son told me what he said, and I came here to tell you two things. First, to finish beating my son if you want. Second, that he heard no such thing from my home. It was the old midwife. She said in front of my son that when she delivered Mazen, you screamed he was the son of the devil,” the woman said.
“Tfadalo, sisters.” Nazmiyeh served the tea. “I will deal with the midwife when my husband and sons are back.”
The homecoming Atiyeh and his sons had come to expect was replaced this time with business urgency. The mukhtar of the town had been summoned to settle the matter of the midwife’s terrible gossip and Atiyeh’s arrival was eagerly awaited.
The men convened. Atiyeh, the mukhtar, the midwife’s husband, and several elders. The meeting began with coffee and an expression of repentance from the midwife’s husband. He assured Atiyeh that he had put his wife in her place and regretted her tongue that had dishonored them both. To rectify, he offered Atiyeh one of his wife’s gold bangles. They hadn’t much else to give. The mukhtar recommended that Atiyeh accept the offering, which would end the dispute, and he did. They shook hands, embraced, and greeted each cheek of the other in brotherhood, and the meeting ended with tea and sweets. The next day, Nazmiyeh went to the market, her wrist exposed with a new gold bangle, which she flaunted for a week to teach the old midwife a lesson before giving it back, a magn
animous gesture that earned Nazmiyeh the respect and eternal loyalty of the midwife.
No one dared utter a word on the matter again, and the midwife denied ever having had an ill thought about Nazmiyeh. People quickly forgot about it, but doubt was planted in young Mazen’s heart and it would germinate in him a deep sense of solitude and a quiet but fierce impulse of national resistance. He stopped going on the fishing trips and became his mother’s protector.
SEVENTEEN
Teta Nazmiyeh’s legs would sometimes buckle and she’d have to stop whatever she was doing until movement returned to them. This sudden paralysis usually lasted only a few minutes, sometimes a few days. A traditional medicine woman told her not to worry. She said angels were watching over her, that arresting her legs was their way of protecting her from walking into harm. My teta believed it, sure that Mariam was her angel, and proof came during the Six-Day War.
When Nazmiyeh was carrying her tenth son, in 1967, Israel attacked Egypt, igniting a war that would last only six days and would bring a new generation of Zionist soldiers parading triumphantly into her life. The first one she saw up close wore thick-rimmed black glasses, an irrelevant innocence misplaced in malevolent militarism. His young face was infected with power and coated with the filth of invasion as he pointed his rifle with forbidding authority. Atiyeh and their older sons had been rounded up and taken away in a truck with other men. So, Nazmiyeh was alone with her terrified small children clinging to her caftan when her eyes set upon the soldier and he barked orders at her to walk along. Seized by a dormant rage that provoked her to rush in attack, her legs went limp and she fell to the ground before the soldier could fire at her. Her legs simply folded beneath her. It would be three years before she could walk again. Now forty years old, Nazmiyeh was certain that Mariam had intervened to save her, for she surely would have been shot. Neighbors lifted and carried her to a designated zone while helmeted soldiers in ominous uniforms and tall boots, identical sons of a Zionist bitch, ransacked and looted their homes, raped and killed, burned the land, and renewed the glory of Arab degradation.
The Blue Between Sky and Water Page 5