Jamal greeted the women, placing his right hand over his heart instead of shaking theirs. He walked over to Khaled, who sat in a wheelchair in the middle of the room, propped up with cushions. His little sister was clutching a stuffed bear, her body curled into her brother, her thumb planted in her mouth, and both were watching a small television, mesmerized by a wordless Tom and Jerry cartoon. A small tray of candles by Khaled’s side flickered, melting slowly.
“Say hello, Rhet Shel,” Um Khaled prompted, and the little girl got up to shake Jamal’s hand, then Nur’s.
“Welcome, my son. Welcome, daughter.” The grandmother walked in from the kitchen. She wore a traditional fallahi black thobe, embroidered in fine patterns with the rose, olive, and lemon colors of the land. A delicate black headscarf framed her smile and, together with her immense bosom and wide hips, gave her a quality of maternal generosity. Though her skin was creased and rumpled by age, she didn’t seem much older than her daughter, as if the lines on her face were nooks and crevices where youth had settled.
Hajje Nazmiyeh, who was considerably shorter than Nur, pulled Nur’s face closer with both hands, searched her eyes, then kissed each cheek in greeting with what seemed like disappointment. Then she turned to Rhet Shel. “Habibti, come help me bring out the food.”
“Oh no, Hajje. You shouldn’t have troubled yourself like that,” Jamal said.
Hajje Nazmiyeh looked at him disapprovingly. “You know better than that, son. You come to Hajje Nazmiyeh’s house, you will not leave with an empty stomach. And don’t worry. My son is on his way. You will not be the only man.” She disappeared into the kitchen, helping Rhet Shel bring the rest of the food out.
Alwan, Um Khaled, had taken the day off work in hopes that this new American psychologist named Nur might come with answers to unlock her son and restore him to himself. One of her brothers arrived and they all shared a late breakfast of eggs, potatoes, za’atar, olive oil, olives, hummus, fuul, pickled vegetables, and warm fresh bread. Though Nur was fluent in Arabic, she found it difficult to follow the rapid Gazan accent, and she did not understand the brief tangent exchange when Alwan questioned her mother’s inspection of Nur’s face. “Did you think it was her?”
“Of course. How many Americans are named Nur?” Hajje Nazmiyeh said. “But our Nur has Mariam’s eyes.”
Alwan hid her annoyance and ended their mumblings in front of the guests. “There are probably thousands there with that name. It’s not the time, Yumma. This is about Khaled.”
Hajje Nazmiyeh was amused that the American Nur could speak Arabic, and while Alwan probed her about her son’s condition, what could be done for him, Hajje Nazmiyeh corrected Nur’s pronounciations of words. Rhet Shel sucked her thumb, staring at Nur with a mixture of delighted curiosity, shyness, and mistrust.
Seeing one of the candles almost spent, Um Khaled turned to Rhet Shel to fetch a new one, explaining to Nur, “I keep candles burning while he is awake. This is how he blinked the first time. I am sure of it. He responded to the candles.” She held her breath with closed eyes, and exhaled slowly. “He is somewhere inside himself.”
Jamal and Alwan’s brother looked away, helpless before this mother’s sorrow. Nur touched her palm to Um Khaled’s clenched hands and Hajje Nazmiyeh hastened to dispel the sadness forming in the room. “Enough of that, daughter. Say alhamdulillah and welcome whatever Allah brings into our lives.” She motioned for Rhet Shel to clear the plates with her.
The men stepped out to the local coffeehouse, leaving the women to plan for Nur’s sessions with Khaled. Before leaving, Jamal whispered to Nur in English, “Don’t promise anything you cannot deliver.”
Boys were playing football outside, so Alwan closed the window, smiling hesitantly at Nur. “Can you make my son wake up?”
Nur looked down, searching the floor for words “Um Khaled … ”
“In our home, just us women, call me Alwan. It’s okay. I know Americans use first names,” Alwan interrupted. “I am sure my son is not in a coma.”
“I think you’re right, Alwan, but … ” Nur hesitated when she saw how those few words made the sun shine in this mother’s eyes and spread a smile through her body and into everything in the room. She remembered Jamal’s warning and continued. “I think the best I can do is to try to find a way for him to communicate.”
“May Allah fill your heart with joy like you just did with mine.” Alwan embraced Nur.
Hajje Nazmiyeh had walked back into the room. “I can’t understand a word the American says,” she said to Alwan, then smiled at Nur. “It’s okay, child. You made my killjoy daughter happy and with Allah’s help we will teach you to speak Arabic right.”
“Maybe you can help me,” Nur turned to Rhet Shel, who was hiding in the corner with her stuffed toys.
Rhet Shel smiled for the first time, a shy thing she covered with her stuffed toy. Nur crouched to her eye level and pulled out what looked to be a plastic toy. “I don’t know what it’s called in Arabic, but in English, this is a harmonica,” she said to Rhet Shel, blowing into it.
Rhet Shel didn’t dare reach for it.
“Want to try it?”
Rhet Shel nodded.
“This used to belong to a very special musician. I can’t give it to you to keep. But you can play on it as long as you like,” Nur said. “Do you think you can take care of it for me?”
“Yes!” Rhet Shel promised. “Can I go show my friends?”
“Of course.”
Just then, the boys playing outside scored a goal. The raucous sounds of their elation poured into the room, and Rhet Shel ran outside to witness the fun and share her new music.
Khaled
“Our coffee cups, the birds and green trees with blue shade, and sun leaping from wall toward another wall, like a gazelle, and water in clouds of endless forms spread across whatever ration of sky is left for us, and things whose remembrance is deferred and this morning, strong and luminous—all beckon we are guests of eternity.”
—Mahmoud Darwish
I scored a goal playing football with Wasim and Tawfiq today. I could see Yusra watching from her window. I know it is all in my head. But I could feel the ball bounce off my foot into the net. I felt the embrace of my friends. I felt Yusra’s eyes upon me and my friends’ arms around me.
Wasim came to visit. He stood in my line of vision, then moved his face to where our eyes could not meet. But I saw him long enough to see hair on his face. The span of his shoulders had also widened. Not quite like a man, but not a boy like me. I wondered how much time had passed.
I go to Beit Daras often. Always to the river, where Mariam and I inhabit an endless space of blue. We wrote a song together. Or maybe we remembered it. Inherited it somehow.
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
My jiddo Atiyeh comes here, too, and knows Mariam well, though it is strange to see him without Teta Nazmiyeh. There is love in every space here and I struggle to understand reality, because I remember they are not living. How do I tell Mama of this freedom? That there is a Beit Daras in a Palestine without soldiers where we can all go?
For now, we communicate with candles. When I am sitting by the river of Beit Daras with my ancestors and the old villagers, a candle lights up the sky and I know it is Mama calling me home. I always go back for her. I always blink for her. She whispers to me that she knows I can hear her. My teta does, too. Teta Nazmiyeh said, “I know you’re still here, son.” She knows I am inside my body. She sings to me and tells me things in her heart. She tells me stories from Beit Daras, then I live them when I go there. The places and people she tells me about appear when I go back to the river, leaving her alone with my body, which feels more and more foreign to me. A shell of a boy to which I return only to stay with candles my mother makes from the stuff of her heart.
; Now, Nur is here and I stay tethered to Mama’s candles longer. She is no more the little girl by the river with me and Mariam, but an American woman with a purpose. She talks to Rhet Shel, telling her stories of a grandfather from Gaza, and when I return to the river, I see it was my great-khalo Mamdouh. He had been with us all along there. Nur does not know she has come home. When Teta pulled her close, Nur was also searching Teta’s face for traces of her jiddo’s stories of a sister whose mismatched eyes Nur had inherited. I want to tell all that I know.
Nur asked me to blink if I could hear and understand her. So I did and Mama declared triumphantly, “I told you so.”
Rhet Shel is Nur’s helper, and when they talk, I hear my little sister’s voice blowing away the anxiety from her small shoulders. Together they are making charts with letters and common words for me.
FORTY-FIVE
Nur came every day and stayed longer than she needed to. She thought she was keeping a promise. Doing something good. Helping. She was, of course, but only by coincidence. She came to bathe in the cramped bustle of family and neighbors. She came to watch life up close, to rub her soul raw with the rhythms of our families. The warm mist of our lives condensed on the cold dry surface of Nur and she sopped it all up. That’s why she came, for the dew of family caught on her skin.
He stayed focused for nearly half an hour and answered simple questions. One blink for yes, two for no,” Nur said excitedly into the phone.
“That’s excellent, Nur. It must be gratifying to see improvements so quickly,” Jamal replied.
“I don’t know how much we can really hope for, but the biggest change has been with Rhet Shel. Most of the questions came from her,” Nur continued. “She wanted to know if Khaled liked her hair, if he wanted to watch a film with her.”
It had been a miracle day to witness the emergence, however brief, of two children locked in their own minds in different ways. It was Rhet Shel’s idea to play Khaled’s old music, and she was sure that he was trying to dance when his cheek twitched. That small muscle spasm dropped Alwan to her knees with tears.
Hajje Nazmiyeh was having tea with the neighbors, all of them making bread in the outdoor communal taboon, when Rhet Shel arrived breathlessly, urging her grandmother away from the matriarchal collective to come see. Hajje Nazmiyeh quickened her pace, praising Allah’s infinite glory, as her eager granddaughter explained that Khaled was waking up. Behind them, some of Hajje Nazmiyeh’s friends followed.
Despite the disappointment of seeing Khaled still immobilized in his body, they had already been inspired by Rhet Shel’s elation and let it spread through them, too. The pop music of Nancy Ajram and Amr Diab leavened the air in Hajje Nazmiyeh’s home, giving rising form and lyrics to a day transformed by Rhet Shel’s charm. She tied her mother’s scarf around her narrow child hips and danced. Her young friends were there, having followed as the matriarchs did. They too danced as their elders clapped encouragement. It wasn’t long before Hajje Nazmiyeh joined and pulled Alwan into the fray.
They continued in spontaneous cheer, fueled by Khaled’s alertness and blinking on cue. Nur played the songs Khaled chose by blinking for the options Rhet Shel presented. Five songs, through which Rhet Shel’s happiness restored and repaired them, lifted Israel’s siege, ended the military occupation, and returned them to their home in Beit Daras.
The affection Nur felt for her surroundings edged against the walls of their merriment. She smiled silently, watching ordinary love unpack itself, hoping its splash would land on her.
FORTY-SIX
Propriety wouldn’t allow Mama to don niqab again after Baba died, but she wanted to. She’d have happily doused herself in a burqa like the women in the Gulf so she could always be alone in darkness and in memory. Only I could see the depth of Mama’s loss. She held her pain in her private world behind curtains. Some of it she balled up into small spheres of anger that she hurled at others for no good reason. But mostly, it festered in her body.
Nur’s initial success with Khaled was followed by months of frustration in which she failed to elicit a sustained response from him. Hajje Nazmiyeh told her that miracles are prideful. That they only come when faith is strong. But while Khaled continued to look out vacantly to the world, Rhet Shel flourished. Animated by her responsibility as Nur’s helper, she became her brother’s keeper, talking to him, combing his hair, washing his face, excavating his ears, nose, belly button, and nails of “the dirty.” In the evenings, when Nur left, Rhet Shel would pretend to read to Khaled as Nur had done during their sessions, and she took charge of his feeding, too, especially as her mother returned home from work coughing more, with less life in her face each day, and her teta’s eyesight was always too fuzzy.
Alwan would return from the women’s co-op pale-faced and tired from embroidering thobes all day, which were smuggled through the tunnels to Egypt and sold around the world. Rich Palestinian Americans—all Americans were rich, weren’t they?—were the co-op’s most important customers. They paid top dollar for anything from the homeland. Alwan had even heard of a family that spent a few thousand dollars for two buckets of dirt from Nablus to sprinkle over their exiled father’s grave when Israel would not allow them to fulfill his dying wish to be buried in Palestine.
“How much you think they’ll pay for Gaza’s dirt?” one of the women quipped.
They laughed. Some expressed sympathy. “Al ghorba is hard on the soul. That poor man lived trying to get home and he couldn’t, not even in death. May Allah have mercy.”
“We’re the poor ones. Locked up in Gaza,” another said, shifting in her chair to evenly distribute her indignation. “And before you bring it up, they get something valuable that they want for the money they pay us. Simple. Nobody’s asking them for charity. When they fight like we do or send us some weapons to fight, then we can call them Palestinians.”
Some women sucked through their teeth in agreement, some took offense, reminding the women of family members who had gone abroad to work and send money home. One woman, the youngest in the group but respected for her militancy, cautioned against perpetuating divisions that the enemy created among Palestinians, but she was quieted by another: “I’m tired of hearing your political lectures!” Then she turned to the others. “Seriously, ladies. Do you think we could make money selling dirt from Gaza?” They continued, but Alwan said little.
“What do you think, Um Khaled?” one of the women asked Alwan. “That American Palestinian seems nice enough. What’s her name? Nur?”
Alwan thought of the worshipful way that Rhet Shel looked at Nur, and she remembered how Rhet Shel had told her that she wanted to be just like Nur when she grew up. “It’s a sin to speak ill of others,” Alwan said. Her friends shook their heads and giggled. “You sure don’t take after your mother.”
But that conversation gave Alwan permission to venture behind closed spaces in her heart. Nur had given her false hope. Why had this woman left her life in America to come to their wretched Gaza refugee camp? Was she using her son to study or further her career at his expense? Westerners came and went all the time on poverty and war tours just to go back and write books. Alwan imagined the satisfaction of putting an end to Nur’s visits. Khaled was lost to her. She wished death’s mercy for him. What life did he have now, with just a body that breathed, ate from and shat into bags, to which she attended on borrowed energy? A slow burn simmered from her inability to make a better life for Khaled or Rhet Shel, who would rush to her when she walked in the door to help her poor mother as she struggled to sit, to move. Her Rhet Shel, still so very young, had become her brother’s caretaker. The gravity of bitterness pulled Alwan to its center, where Nur was the reason for all that pained her. And when her coughing began to deepen in her chest, she resented Nur all the more, as if her troubled body were Nur’s fault. Then she took ill at Nur for the bile of unuttered acrimony accumulating in her own heart; for the sin of it. She tried to shoo it all away. She prayed to Allah for help, and begged forgiveness
for the growing desire in her heart to call on Sulayman.
“Sulayman, if it pleases Allah, please help us. Bring my son back to us,” she pleaded.
“Mama,” Rhet Shel came running to Alwan, “el doktor Jamal’s wife invited us to a ghada for Nur tomorrow!”
Nur followed behind Rhet Shel. “I have the center’s car for two days to visit patients and they said I could use it for personal travel, too.”
Alwan thought she recognized a kind of pleading in Nur’s face. Or maybe it was a call for an unspoken truce to Alwan’s unspoken animosity. “I have to stay here with Khaled.” Alwan looked away.
But Rhet Shel would have none of that. “We can put his wheelchair in the car. Allah keep you, Mama, please?!”
Alwan had heard of Jamal’s wife, who came from a well-off Gazan family but whose brother had been suspected as a traitor. She considered whether she would be able to confirm the long-standing rumors about the woman’s brother or not. What was her house like inside? Was she a good cook? How do people like her live? Alwan was curious.
“Okay, habibti. We can go if your teta also wants to go,” Alwan said.
Nazmiyeh’s brow raised. “We will have a lot to talk about with the ladies!”
“You will,” Alwan corrected her mother, for she had stopped going to those gatherings, hoping that a respite from smoking argileh would calm the persistent cough in her chest. But soon she had discovered the sweetness of solitude, and she had begun to look forward to the stillness of being alone for a few hours a week when her mother joined the neighborhood women to smoke, drink tea, eat bizir, and gossip while their children and grandchildren played around them.
But tomorrow the women would gather in their absence. Alwan could hear them in her mind, anticipating reports from Hajje Nazmiyeh about the doctor’s wife and her ghada.
The Blue Between Sky and Water Page 16