Tawfiq walked away, then ran. And found himself alone with the blue expanse of the Mediterranean. “I just sat there for a while,” he told Khaled. “Then I went home.”
FORTY
I was too young and jealous at first to see the enchantment that Rhet Shel brought to our world. I blamed her for my own hurt. When Baba killed Simsim, my favorite chicken, he yelled at me to stiffen my spine, grow up, be a man. He said, “Boy, you can’t name a chicken. This is meat, Allah’s blessing that keeps us alive.” He said, “Here, come help me pluck these feathers, son.” I did, and then I was in charge of slaughtering the chickens. Rhet Shel got my job of feeding them. It was not long afterward that the world changed, and I went into the blue.
Khaled would Steady his being, invoke the name of Allah, and mumble to himself before moving the blade deftly in one swift motion across the slender bird neck.
Rhet Shel, now three years old, was given charge of feeding the chickens. She would throw the feed with the fitful and feeble skill of a toddler, spreading the seeds only around her little feet, and sometimes in her braided hair, a daily spectacle her father loved to observe. Abdel Qader would stand in the doorway with his coffee and cigarette, watching Rhet Shel delight as the chickens flocked around her to eat. She tried to impose order. “No, no, no, chicken!” she would scold her feathery friends, pointing her chubby index finger for authority. “Let the baby chickens eat, too. Move, move. No, no, no. Bad chicken!”
Everyone who knew Abdel Qader understood that Rhet Shel was the song that made his heart dance. She was perhaps his greatest love. To Khaled, Rhet Shel was a nuisance who could get away with anything, praised for everything she did, no matter how infantile. She had no chores except feeding the chickens, which she couldn’t do properly, and when Khaled tried to correct her, his father yelled at him. Worse, Khaled was warned not to allow Rhet Shel to see him slaughtering chickens. “I don’t want her to be sad,” his baba said. And Khaled resented them both because nobody ever worried about his feelings. Did his father think it was easy for Khaled to kill and pluck? So what if Rhet Shel was a girl and so little? She wasn’t so innocent. It would be good for her to stiffen her spine, grow up. She should understand that chickens were not pets. They were meat, a blessing from Allah. So, he was only doing her a favor when he arranged it so she accidentally saw him killing her favorite chicken on the roof. It was the one with the white ribbon around its neck.
“I told you to spare that one, didn’t I?” Abdel Qader screamed at Khaled.
“Yes, Baba. But …”
“Don’t talk back to me! You did this on purpose. I specifically told you not to slaughter that chicken, and I tied the ribbon on it to make sure you didn’t make a mistake.”
“The ribbon fell off, Baba,” Khaled begged, then felt the hot slap of his father’s fury across his face.
“Don’t lie. Never lie, boy! NEVER lie!” Abdel Qader removed his belt to strike Khaled again.
I feel a kind of stillness, as if my body itself has become a moment of silence. A hollowed-out cave of a life within a life. I see my father; his rage has turned to alarm. Then to fear. Then to terror.
“Khaled! Khaled!” Abdel Qader cried, dropping the belt.
Rhet Shel had run into the room, crying, to save me when she saw Baba hit me.
“My son! My son! What is wrong? I am sorry, my son. I am sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. Khaled! Please answer me, son. What have I done?” Abdel Qader was pleading now and Rhet Shel was crying. Alwan rushed in.
“Abu Khaled, this happened the other day, too, and he snapped out of it,” Alwan said to her husband.
“What’s happening to him?” he asked, horrified and spiritually unhinged by the rolling eyes and blank expression settling on his son’s face.
“Lay him down. This happened before. He was okay when I rubbed his chest like this,” Alwan said, trembling.
The way my mother rubs my chest is soothing, and I feel love surge through me. My sister, Rhet Shel, is still sobbing. She has attached herself to me and I feel compassion bind us. I feel sorry and ashamed for killing her chicken.
“Tawfiq and Wasim brought him like this a few weeks ago. They said his eyes just started rolling in the middle of a convesation,” Alwan said to her husband.
“He needs to see a doctor, Alwan. You should have told me about this,” he said.
“I thought it was just because he’s sensitive. It only lasted a few minutes.” Alwan was now rubbing more vigorously, with a mother’s deepest dread. She looked at her husband, the same anxiety passing back and forth between them, when Khaled’s eyes seemed to focus as he blinked a few times.
“What’s going on? I don’t need to see a doctor,” Khaled said.
Khaled
“You feel like a child playing around with a magnifying glass, burning up ants.”
—Israeli soldier, on attacking Gaza
I knew December 27, 2008, would be no ordinary day. It would mark the first full decade of my life, that important passage from single to double-digit age.
Coming from large families where birthdays passed like any other day, Alwan and Abdel Qader did not concern themselves with such fancies. Besides, Hajje Nazmiyeh was superstitiously opposed to birthday celebrations, given that Mazen had been kidnapped the only time she ever threw a birthday party. But Khaled had made such a fuss of his birthday, counting down the days for months, that he inspired a sense of expectancy in the family, and plans for a party materialized. Even Abdel Qader joined. “So, son, how many days left?” he would ask whenever the spirit moved him.
Tawfiq and Wasim, who were already in the double-digit age, told me that turning ten was magical. They said it would give me sudden powers. I asked like what. They snickered and told me I had to wait. But I could tell they were pranking me. They did that sometimes because I was the youngest of them.
When the kids went off to school, Alwan began baking a cake. Hajje Nazmiyeh reluctantly agreed not to forbid the party. “You were too young to remember the last time we had a birthday hafla in this family,” Hajje Nazmiyeh said to Alwan.
“Yumma, the Jews didn’t take Mazen because you threw a party for my first birthday. Please be reasonable. This will make Khaled so happy,” Alwan pleaded.
“May Allah touch our lives with His mercy, daughter,” Hajje Nazmiyeh said, giving in to reason despite the vapors of premonition in her breath.
I thought Wasim and Tawfiq were lying to me. But they were telling the truth. Turning ten was everything they said and more. It was magical, like they said. Even the Jews came to celebrate with me. The whole of Gaza, and I think the whole world, celebrated my tenth birthday.
Classes were just letting out the first shift and the streets were filled with children either coming or going to school when Israel dropped the first bombs. Explosions shook the earth, hurtling buildings and bodies and all the things of living in broken parts that sailed through the air in all directions. There was no place to run.
Gaza burned.
Khaled stood where he was, going into the place his mother called “episodes,” for which she had sought help from doctors who had no help. It was a quiet place of refuge, deep inside him. A place of blue.
Great fireworks made the ground shake. Cars drove through the streets blaring their horns and people ran everywhere, yelling and waving their hands in the air. Ambulances turned on their sirens and raced through the streets. Israel sent planes for me, flying so low that buildings shook and all the windows broke open. I had been wrong about the Jews. They are wonderful. Baba is wrong about them, and I ask Allah to forget all my prayers to punish them.
Blood poured and dust rose. Smoke painted lungs and hearts raced. The remaining flour mill, the last source for bread, was bombed. Schools, homes, mosques, and universities, too. Then Israel sprayed Gaza with white phosphorous.
They brought helicopters that sent out enormous streams of white confetti that streaked the sky like a spiderweb. And the confetti landed like a mi
llion candles with a million flames. Some people caught the confetti flames and ran around with them on their bodies, yelling. What an invention! Everyone knows that the Jews are the smartest people in the world. I became nearly weightless and floated around Gaza. I slid over the sea, even. Such is the magic of the age of ten.
From the tremendous noise in Gaza, it became quiet here, inside the age of ten. As I hovered in the center of that silence, I could see Rhet Shel inside a strange cave at the base of our house. Baba was holding up a wall with his back, yelling for Rhet Shel to leave him, and I knew that I should call for Rhet Shel. So I did, and I continued to roam the world, as if I were a breeze.
Rhet Shel did not answer my call, but a man emerged from my father’s body and whisked Rhet Shel toward me. I knew that man was not a man at all. It was Sulayman. This is what I want to tell you about being ten: You know things without knowing how you know them. Then all the men in town carried me through the streets to my mother, who was so happy to see me that she just held me and cried.
FORTY-ONE
Stories were written in my Teta Nazmiyeh’s skin. When I was a small boy of four or five, the wrinkles on her face were part of a game we played together. She would mark two random dots on her face and take a nap. I could wake her at any time, but only after I had figured out a path of face lines that connected the two dots. Teta could get half an hour’s worth of shut-eye, knowing I would be fully engaged by the map of her face. My favorite was connecting the left ear to the corner of her right eye. It was nearly a straight path, with one long wrinkle across her forehead that scooped down to join three more large lines emerging from the corner of her eye, especially when she laughed. Those games etched Teta’s face in my memory, like lanes leading home.
Israel’s Bombing of Gaza altered the clock. As if time had been wounded, it now moved in a crawl, its daily passage impeded by the rubble that carpeted the terrain, its presence so thick that Hajje Nazmiyeh felt the sun dragging along the heavy weight of each hour. So much needed to be done, yet there was nothing to do. People gathered with nothing to say. Even when they spoke, their words were coated in a silence that stared into a chasm as they picked out and buried their dead. Even rage and calls for revenge seemed perfunctory. Tears made for a sort of refuge. A place to go to feel something in a wreckage that demanded numbness. For many, it was simply a waiting to die. Hope seemed vulgar in this hour, and the idea of death was so comforting and alluring that no one spoke, lest words do away with the seduction of a quiet ending.
But time did pass, however painstakingly. Slowly, people returned to themselves, salvaging life. Hajje Nazmiyeh collected some of her pots, random papers flying about that could be used for schoolwork, broken pencils that might still be of use. Perhaps a shoe that could be coupled with another, even if it didn’t match. For some children—because, Allah be praised, children are resilient—the rummaging was turned into games and contests. But for most, the landscape of destruction hid the broken parts of them—memories of bombs, fear, and the recently dead—and no one wanted to find those. So, they sat on the peripheries of their own lives, on rocks, huddling around fires for warmth, waiting for time to limp along. Someone threw a plank over a large rock to make a seesaw and children played, their laughter small suns. The harsh winter spent outdoors in tents amid the rubble gave way to springtime pushing up from the scorched ground, absorbing the pollution of bombs and grief. Insects reappeared, then birds, then butterflies.
Nazmiyeh’s home was partially destroyed. She and Alwan could still walk through the front door and recognize their home, but the top floor where one of her sons and his family had lived was torn off, and the door leading to Alwan and Abdel Qader’s bedroom opened now to the outdoors choked with rubble. The bathroom, too, was gone and they were given tents, along with fourteen other families whose homes had been bombed. The tent came with lanterns and blue cots, each bearing a white outline of Earth, the symbol of the United Nations. But Hajje Nazmiyeh didn’t use their tent, instead taking refuge with another of her sons on that first night, while they tried to retrieve the body of Abdel Qader. And so the melancholy requiems of the Quran poured from every speaker, every minaret, every soul.
It took several days to dig Abdel Qader’s body out from under a collapsed building. That’s why Alwan forbade Rhet Shel from joining in the salvage competitions with the other children. Once again, Nazmiyeh’s sons abandoned their individual lives and coalesced at their mother’s feet, a workforce of strong, able men who had felt helpless during the invasion, running and huddling for shelter from the whims of death. They labored, propelled by rage, humiliation, resolve, and love, first to retrieve Abdel Qader’s body and wash and bury his corpse; then to rebuild their mother’s and sister’s home.
Israel had long ago blocked building materials from entering Gaza, but a local entrepreneur had started a profitable enterprise recycling rocks and rubble into new building bricks. The brothers pitched in to buy what they could of these bricks and used various mud mixtures instead of cement, which was impossible to find in Gaza. Their wives and children would also come, bringing food and solemnity that eventually turned into the familiar chaos, laughter, and bickering of large families.
In the rhythm of this restorative daily toil, the constancy of regimented prayers, the serial burials as bodies were recovered, the poetic hymns of the Quran, the gatherings of families and neighbors, the conversations, tears, and children’s play, homes were restored as much as possible, grudges faded away, scandals were no more, and slates were wiped clean. Men reclaimed masculinity from the grateful eyes of the women who tended to their tired bodies and sweat-drenched clothes. They found solace from the mothers, like Hajje Nazmiyeh, who preempted any silence with dua’as to Allah to keep and bless their sons; from wives, who made love to them; and from children, who clung to their limbs, chests, and necks for the comforts a strong father could impart. The women worked alongside the men, clearing rubble, repairing, and building anew. They cleaned and cooked and baked and organized the children’s chores. The constant movement and ache of muscles and bones rocked their wounded souls, at least to distraction.
But there was nothing anyone could do for Alwan. She was like a tree in endless autumn, standing still, leaves drying, weakening, then falling. She became an island unto herself and for some time it was hard to find her in her eyes. She wanted to return to wearing niqab, but Hajje Nazmiyeh said, “Nonsense! It’s not even Islamic. You don’t get to hide your grief behind pretend piety.”
On the surface, life looked like decay. The destruction of buildings and infrastructure was so immense that debris and dust painted the air gray for days. The green earth was scorched then layered with the fragments of broken things and broken bodies. But after the dead were buried and all the tears had fallen, time thinned out to a liquid that rushed over Gaza like a stream over rocks, smoothing the jagged corners and coating them with a new moss of life. The legion of able bodies clearing rubble, rebuilding, recycling, cooking, and gathering was an industry that reconstituted community.
Nazmiyeh and Alwan placed Khaled at the center of it all. Weeks after the assault, he still had not emerged from his episode. Between futile visits to doctors, the family kept constant prayers over him. He breathed in and out. That part worked, thanks be to Allah. A kindly Norwegian doctor named Mads put tubes in and out of him connected to plastic bladders for nutrition and waste. The doctor said that everything on the inside worked and he taught Alwan and Nazmiyeh how to fill his bag with “food” and how to empty his waste.
“Does that mean that he can hear and understand us?”
“I don’t know. There are no resources to check for brain activity. This is all I can do for now,” the doctor apologized.
Khaled
“Where could I cry out the despair and rage I felt for all this terrible fate we saw at such close quarters?”
—Dr. Mads Gilbert
Time does not exist here. Everything is now, but when I am with Sulayman
I cannot also be with Mama and Rhet Shel and Teta Nazmiyeh. I leave Sulayman when I feel my mother. I hear her speaking to someone I do not know. She is telling this stranger that my eyes usually roll in my head. But now, “Look!” she says.
“His eyes are set and he is blinking. It’s like he’s awake,” she says.
She is trying to convince someone that I can hear her. But of course I can. I yell, YES! But I already understand that they do not hear me. I stopped trying when Sulayman said that my words roam in my mind with no way out.
I hear a man’s voice. “We are all one, Hajje,” he says to my teta. I wish he would come into my view so I could see him fully.
There he is. With a camera. Will I be on television? He asks Mama what happened. He wants to know if there was anything wrong with me before the invasion. Mama tells him that I had episodes and spells that came and went.
“They found him like this and brought him here,” Mama says.
“Then he started shaking. He was having seizures. We had taken refuge at the school. We left the house because the bombs were getting too close. Everybody was running for safety to the UN school. Khaled and Rhet Shel were with me,” Mama says, and yet I wonder if she is speaking of me at all because I do not remember any of that.
“My husband, Abu Khaled, left us there and went back to save the chickens.” Mama’s voice is cracking, like she will cry. Then she does. She cries and Teta thanks Allah for his mercy and asks Him for strength to endure His will. Mama speaks again.
The Blue Between Sky and Water Page 14