Nur touched her belly and said, “This is probably the only time in my life when I’ve been happy to be fat. I can go back and stay for another month to figure things out. I can’t thank you enough for helping me get a grant to continue the counseling project. It feels good to do something meaningful. The fellowship could give me the time away that I need and I won’t have to go back to the US.”
“What about the other thing? You know you can’t be doing that now.” Nzinga’s words landed heavily on Nur. “Oh, Nur, don’t look at me like a question mark. You know how I always ask you to show me your nails when we Skype?”
Nur was more puzzled. “Yes.”
“I was never looking at your nails, darling. I was looking for the two marks over your knuckles that are made by your teeth.”
She stretched her hand in front of her, seeing calloused old brown marks that had once been raw and red, however small. She didn’t think anyone had ever noticed them, the place where her two front teeth would press down on her hand when she made herself vomit.
Nzinga took her hand lovingly. “That’s how I knew you were home when you went to Gaza. You didn’t have those red marks anymore.”
“No, I don’t do that anymore,” she said, tearing up.
“Maybe you don’t see this now, but I think that man had something to do with that. Just feeling truly loved by a man, even if it was only for a while, is something I don’t think you’ve ever really felt since your jiddo passed away,” Nzinga said.
“Maybe. And maybe it’s one of the reasons I always looked for Tío Santiago,” Nur said. And as the hours yawned, Nzinga asked about the last meeting she had had with her mother. “I don’t want to rehash that again now,” Nur said.
“Actually, Nur, you’ve never spoken about it. Every time the subject came up, you’d say you didn’t want to rehash it, just like now. You’re about to be a mother and maybe you should go there with me now, so you can hear, out loud, about the kind of mother you don’t want to be,” Nzinga said. “I have all night. Let’s get some coffee first, though.”
SIXTY-SEVEN
Nur’s Tío Santiago had been a source of love for her, however brief and intermittent his presence was. Sometimes, Santiago would call Nzinga to ask about Nur when she was still in school. Then he would disappear for long stretches of time, and Nzinga knew he was either in rehab or prison, or using heavily. When they met in Cairo, Nur showed her the old harmonica. “He was a kindhearted, haunted man,” Nzinga said.
The waiter poured two small cups of Arabic coffee for the women.
“Arabs sure know how to make coffee,” Nzinga said, flirting with the young waiter, who smiled good-naturedly and replied, “Arabs invented coffee, Madam.”
“Is that right?” she asked, holding him in place with her vast brown eyes. “Let me ask you something, son.” She scanned his dark skin and wooly hair. “Do you consider yourself Arab or African?”
“I am Egyptian, Madam.”
“Is Egyptian African or Arab?”
“It is both, Madam,” he said, and he continued when he saw that she clearly had more questions. “And as an Egyptian, I am proudly African and Arab. They are not mutually exclusive.”
“Are you saying that because I’m black?” She went back to flirting.
“Do you consider yourself black or African?” The waiter gave it back. “Isn’t black a pigment category that white slavers invented to reduce the inhabitants and diverse cultures of our continent?”
By now, an immense smile had unfurled on Nzinga’s face, the gap in her front teeth like an accessory to her benevolence.
“Ooooo. Handsome, and damn smart! If I were younger, you’d better watch out. What you say is true, but you know, now we own the word black and we put our unity in it and get power back, you see.” Nzinga laughed, raising a Black Power fist. “Did you meet my young friend, Nur?”
At that, Nur and the waiter both blushed as they nodded politely to each other. Then Nur spoke to him in Arabic. “Thank you, brother, for this excellent coffee.”
“You are welcome, sister,” he answered, and walked away.
As soon as he was out of earshot, Nzinga whispered, “You should go for that fine brother, Nur!”
“Nzinga, you remind me so much of my aunt Nazmiyeh. I never made the connection before, but you’re so similar.”
“She sounds magnificent,” Nzinga said. “You should learn to flirt a little. No harm in it.”
“That’s the last thing on my mind right now,” Nur sighed.
“It’s gonna be okay. The first decision you need to make is whether you’re going to keep this baby. You know how I feel about it, but this is your life and your body.”
“I think you know what I want, Zingie.”
“Say it.”
Nur hesitated, lowered her voice. “I want it.”
“Want what?”
“To keep it,” Nur said; but Nzinga’s expression demanded more. “I want to be a mother.” A tear formed and fell from Nur’s eye. It ushered more silent tears and then more words. “I want someone to love who will love me back. Someone who is mine. Not in the owning way, but in the spiritual way. I want to know what that feels like.”
“Love is the best reason to have a child, my child,” Nzinga said. “And this baby has already changed you. I’ve known you for most of your life and tonight is the first time I’ve ever seen you cry since you were a baby. That’s a good thing. Everything is going to be all right, Nur. That’s where you start. Even if it’s hard. It’s gonna be fine. You’re gonna be just fine, beautiful girl.” That made Nur cry all the more, but she did so without sound, with some happiness, too, and relief.
“Is there something else on your mind?” Nzinga asked. She waited long for an answer.
“What if I’m a bad mother …” Nur finally managed, then gulped those words back into her throat with a sob.
Nzinga took her hand. “There is nothing in you that remotely resembles your mother, Nur.” Nur said nothing, and Nzinga continued. “Let me ask you this: Do you love Rhet Shel? I mean, do you look at her and want for her the best that life can possibly give her?”
“Of course.”
“That is your proof that you are not your mother and never will be. I’m sure you’ve figured out along the way that she is a classic textbook narcissist.”
“I’ll tell you about the last time I saw her.” Nur looked away, then back at her coffee. She took a sip, placed the cup back gently. It was two A.M. now. The night stretched over Cairo as Nur inhabited a trauma of memory.
SIXTY-EIGHT
We were locked up in Gaza. Of one and a half million people, five or six could trickle in or out each day through Egypt. Misery leaked into the streets and fermented under the sun for years. But seeing Nur helped me understand the freedom we did have. We wanted to consume the world outside our borders, to take in the sun of another shore, open our eyes to a moon of another sky, walk the ground of another earth. We wanted to live, to move and travel, to work, produce, and export. Our prison was not being allowed to see or do, and our escape was to find ways to taste the rest of the world. Nur was allowed to move as we couldn’t. But rather than taking in all there was, she went everywhere trying to empty herself, because her prison lived within her, and the escape she longed for meant disrobing herself of her skin. Until love was planted in her belly and began to grow there.
It was easy for Nur to find her mother’s address. She and Sam had moved to San Diego and had their twins, Eduardo and Tomás, who were in middle school when Nur decided to visit when she was still in college.
Across the street from her mother’s home in the Clairemont neighborhood, Nur waited in a rental car. A mist of light began to illuminate the street. The red of the front door emerged from the shadows, and a decaying, once-white picket fence was revealed around the small ramshackle property. Nur recalled that her mother had always wanted to live in a house with a white picket fence; and she heard words rise up from a burial ground of me
mory. Why can’t we use the trust for a house? Why can’t one fucking thing in my life go my way?
An old man walking an old dog peered into her car suspiciously as he passed on the sidewalk. The small sound of a cat rummaging in someone’s trash moved Nur’s attention. When she turned back, she saw a tragic version of Sam walking out of the house, closing the door behind him. His yellow hair was dusted with gray. He wore old jeans and a black T-shirt that seemed to be made entirely of sadness. It was hard to see the details of his face from afar, but there was no mistaking the weight of gloom pulling his skin. Life sagged and dragged in him, as if it couldn’t wait to leave him, and he walked with heavy steps and a vacant expression. Nur watched him until he disappeared down the street, around the corner. Strangely, she felt no anger. Not even when she tried. Only pity.
The doors of other homes opened and closed with men, women, and children leaving to start their days at work or school. Soon, two boys came out. Eduardo and Tomás, surely. They were skinny, with disheveled stringy brown hair, and had book packs hanging from their backs. Nur was squinting to make out their features when she saw a slight woman in tight jeans and a nice peach blouse walk out behind them. The woman turned immediately to lock the door and, in an apparent act of habit, the boys kissed her cheeks before running off at full speed down the street, disappearing around the corner where other students were also heading. They were already out of sight when the woman turned around from locking the front door. From her car, Nur saw the face of her mother, her hair pulled tightly at the back of her head. The years had not made her older and Nur was surprised how beautiful she looked. A rush of warmth flushed Nur’s chest and she felt weak with a sense of forgiveness. She fumbled with the car door handle until she was finally out, standing by the side of the car, in full view of her mother. The woman craned her neck to make out the person staring at her from across the street. Then, she froze. Even from a distance, Nur could discern the stone of her character and the contours of suddenly iced-up thoughts. Nur’s initial impulse to run into the imaginary outstretched arms of this woman was doused in the cool morning air and trampled by the old shoe growing larger inside of her. She stood motionless, her motherless fate holding its breath.
Her mother turned on her heels back toward the red door, reversing her motions of a moment earlier. Nur watched her, still unable to move, and noticed the smallness of her mother’s waist—and a memory intruded.
You sure don’t get this shit from me, Nubia, her mother had once said, pinching the flesh of Nur’s belly. Look how small my waist is, she had continued, and Nur had sucked her abdomen in to hide as much of herself as she could.
The red door finally opened and Nur’s mother disappeared back inside. Nur exhaled. She felt her knees buckling and quickly got back into the car, where she gripped the steering wheel to steady her shaking. She stayed that way for what seemed like an eternity, and by the time she had mustered the strength to move her limbs, either to start the car and leave or to open the door and get out again—she didn’t know which she wanted to do—someone was knocking on her window. Startled, she looked up to find a police officer. He questioned her briefly and suggested she move along.
As Nur started her car, she looked up at her mother’s house and saw the corner of a curtain in an upstairs window lifted, a figure standing in the room. Then the curtain closed. Nur looked back at the officer, then drove away.
“There is something extraordinary about being rejected by one’s mother,” she told Nzinga. “It impoverishes the soul. It leaves holes everywhere and you spend your life trying to fill them up. With whatever you can find. With food. With drugs and alcohol. With all the wrong men you know will leave you, so maybe they will replicate the original hurt you felt. You do it to feel abandonment over and over because that’s the only thing you know of your mother. And it’s all you know to do to bring her close.”
“Oh, Nur, my child.” Nzinga, for once, did not know what to say.
“It’s okay, Zingie. I’ve made whatever peace I can with it. The biggest part is a commitment to being the kind of mother I always wanted to have myself. I have no choice but to have and love this baby, no matter what it means.”
“Ever since you were a little girl, Nur, you have had some kind of self-awareness. People live and die without ever knowing themselves the way you do,” Nzinga said. “Tell me, is this also why you insist on returning to Gaza?”
“Maybe so. I keep thinking about Rhet Shel. I don’t know how long Alwan will be around and Aunt Nazmiyeh is too old to take care of her. She has a big extended family. Uncles, aunts, cousins. But Rhet Shel will just get lost in the shuffle. They all have so many kids. I had trouble in the beginning remembering names and who was whose kid. There isn’t room for Rhet Shel to get the same love and attention. And she deserves that.”
The next shift began filing into the hotel. It was nearly five A.M. when both women succumbed to the trample of exhaustion. Nur lay in her bed looking up until a dream began to dance on the white ceiling.
There was a river, and the little boy of her dreams appeared for their Arabic lesson. “Khaled!” Nur cried. “It was you all along!”
“Of course,” he said.
“But where is Mariam?”
“She is waiting for my sister Nazmiyeh in the water well,” said a man’s voice.
“Jiddo!”
And Nur awoke to the sound of the noontime adan.
VII
In the abandon of that solitude, we could see how tiny we were, how small and defenseless our earth. And from that terrible dignity, we heard the susurrus of a long-ago old woman’s words: This land will rise again
SIXTY-NINE
Nur was always on the way. Maybe it was the impermanence of foster care. The idea of aging in or out of home; of not having the option to return once you leave. She had no real anchors in the world, and so she was always on her way. On her way to herself. On her way to redemption. On her way to language. To something heavy enough to weigh her against the wind.
Getting back into Gaza was difficult, fraught with the trifles of officialdom and the inquiries of oppression. The Egyptians closed, then opened, then closed the border. Nur’s papers were missing a dot or a dash. Her answers were insufficient. They told her to wait. She talked to people. Sang into her womb. Then she found a way to the tunnels with other travelers. Young men with the grime of subterranean work on their skin and on their spirits led Nur and a group of travelers through, pulling their luggage in a trolley on a wooden track. She held on to a rail with one hand and her belly with the other as she descended steps into the cold, damp underworld. At the base of the tunnel, her eyes adjusted to the darkness. Small lanterns a few meters apart hung on a wire running the length of the tunnel, effervescent pearls shimmering in a black void that whispered of rats, snakes, and crawling, biting creatures. She kept walking. For twenty minutes. Then there was light and she was on the other side, back in Gaza.
She went to the nearest empty taxi at the border. “Can you take me to Nusseirat?” she asked. As they moved away, she saw a large group of people run to greet a woman and her children who had traversed the tunnels with her. They hugged and kissed in the habits of family and the tempers of love. Nur imagined Alwan, Rhet Shel, all the cousins and sisters-in-law surrounding her. She hadn’t called ahead to let anyone know that she had made it through the border. They will be surprised, she thought. Her heart pounded, anxious to arrive.
“Turn here,” she told the driver. As the taxi moved slowly down the narrow street, honking for children to get out of the way, a young boy threw his football at the car and yelled at the driver to stop honking.
“Let me out here. It’s a short walk and cars can’t get through much farther.”
Several children ran to help her with her bags. One of them tried to speak what few words he knew in English and Nur heard a young man yell, “Idiot! She’s not a foreigner! That’s Hajje Nazmiyeh’s kin.” Nur recognized him and waved. “Salaam, Wasim.”
He nodded and ran to help carry her bags. The sun was still in the sky and life was bobbing along. Nur quickened her pace.
A child’s voice screamed, “Khalto Nur! Khalto!” and Rhet Shel sprinted out of a crowd of children. Nur whisked her up in an embrace. They hugged and kissed until Rhet Shel wiggled herself away, running ahead to announce the news. When Nur finally caught up, the women of her life had poured from their home and were waiting for her. Even the old widow who could not move well had come out.
In the warm midst of her aunt Nazmiyeh, Alwan, the sisters-in-law, a couple of the brothers, Rhet Shel, neighbors, and more children than she could count, Nur touched her belly. Laughter and conversations swirled around her. Tea and coffee and various sweets and snacks were passed around. It was the first homecoming she had ever had. The first time she had returned to a place that embraced her. She had always been compelled to move away. To leave and hope the next place would be better. Her hand still on the center of her world, Nur watched the room around her with joyful eyes. But for one interminable moment, all she heard was the heartbeat of certainty. Hajje Nazmiyeh looked at Nur’s hand, then at her face, and she pulled her near. She leaned into Nur’s face and whispered in her ear. “We will figure this out. People will touch their heads when they mention your name or your baby’s name. That’s my flesh and blood. But for now, take your hand off your belly so people don’t start thinking too much.” Nur pulled back to look into Hajje Nazmiyeh’s weathered face. Mischievous eyes that loved life looked back at her.
Nur had brought gifts from Cairo, but nothing made such an impression as the magical chocolate eggs. “This is a Kinder Egg,” Nur said, handing one to Rhet Shel, who could hardly believe her good fortune. She was afraid to open it, or eat it, or discover the toy inside, lest it be gone. But when she realized there was an entire box of them in Nur’s luggage, she invited her cousins. They peeled away the thin foil, gently, and experienced a moment of chocolate so sweet that everyone around them felt it. They stayed in the charm of that day until the house slowly emptied of guests and night slipped in. Rhet Shel fell asleep in her mother’s lap, and the old widow began to snore.
The Blue Between Sky and Water Page 24