The footprints end at the edge of the grave. I stare at them, hugging the warmth of the coat against my body. The drizzle patters off my head and my hair is wet before I realize that the jacket has a hood. I put it on and the rain patters against it, louder but more hollow. How hard must it fall, I wonder, before the footprints will be erased, or is it even possible that it will ever rain that hard again?
He marvels at, while at the same time is saddened by, how adept the children are at recognizing the sounds. How they tell him that the shot just heard was from a tear gas gun rather than a Kalashnikov or that was the sound of a bomb rather than an exploding Molotov cocktail. It is the children in the house who are the first to hear an army patrol wending its way up the night street. Or, at least, they are first to admit to hearing it.
The gurgle of falafel grease wakes him and he goes a couple of houses down the street. The morning already speaks of heat and he studies Aysa scooping ball after ball of the bright green chickpea batter into the pond of grease, watches them dance and brown and crisp.
In a short while, Aysa’s little sister steps outside and sees the American and then disappears into an alleyway; before the falafel are cool enough to bite into, a half dozen children are there. Several of them exchange a coin for some breakfast falafel, others just come to watch the stranger, who has now become a familiar sight in the morning and early evening streets. Aysa hands him a falafel and, as always, refuses the coin.
Some take lemons each day, others a small bottle of cheap cologne and a rag, the grandmother, Fatima, hands the American half an onion to help combat the scorch of the tear gas.
He loves the nights, rare that they are, when he, and a few others, slip on black jackets and vanish into the lightless camp. They avoid the main streets and keep tight to either side of the alleyway walls, straddling the trough of open sewage. Once in a while they pass someone and whispered greetings are exchanged, as well as whether or not any soldiers have been seen.
One night, as they near their house in block number four, a jeep can be heard, and it is not far away. Then the beam of a spotlight startles the main street; the men separate and find different places along the alley walls, getting as close as possible. With his face against the cement blocks, he feels the geography of their pockmarks, and how, as if in defiance of curfew, they have held the sun’s warmth in them. As the searchlight stalks the streets and the patrol passes, he draws even closer to the wall, realizing that it is here, and only here, where one can find a moment of solitude in this place.
A Three Cigarette Story
Once there was a beautiful and powerful hawk. It spent its days soaring high above the land and from so far up it could see everything that moved on the landscape below. The swiftest of rabbits, snakes, field mice. The hawk, when it saw something that it liked, would follow it from above and when the creature broke out into an open space the hawk would dive toward it with blinding speed. In flight it could adjust its speed and direction with a tilt of its wing. Nothing escaped the eyes of the hawk, nor, once the creature was in its claws, could it ever wriggle free.
One day, while in its nest, a large net was cast over the hawk and it was taken away. It fought and clawed and tried ripping the net with its powerful beak, but it couldn’t break free. Soon the hawk found itself in a metal cage, the bars so close together that it could barely work its claws between them. The hawk couldn’t spread its wings inside the cage and as the days passed into weeks its wings became useless. Unable to open its wings, they became bent and slowly the beautiful brown feathers began to fall and drift through the bars of the cage and float to the floor. After weeks of captivity became seasons the hawk was scrawny, ridiculous looking with its bowed wings and without feathers.
Suddenly, on a late winter’s afternoon, the cage was opened and the hawk was free to go. The hawk took its time, looking all around for those who had captured him. The hawk waited and waited and when he saw no one, stepped cautiously to the edge of the cage, then took the final step and was in midair. Trying to spread its wings, the hawk couldn’t do it; they remained bowed and the hawk plummeted to the floor, falling hard.
Stunned, the hawk looked up and saw the bottom of the swaying cage. He wondered how he would be able to get back inside. Knowing that it couldn’t make it back to the cage by itself, the hawk began to screech, and even its screech had changed; it had lost all of its power for it had rarely done so in its captivity.
In time, one of the captors appeared and began mocking the hawk. He laughed and laughed before asking if he had had enough and would he like for him to help the hawk back into the cage. The hawk said yes, yes he would like help. The captor picked up the hawk and placed him into the cage. As he was about to shut the cage’s door, the captor decided against it, for he knew that the hawk could not go anywhere without his help.
The cage door remained open and the hawk remained inside. Many cycles of the moon passed before the useless wings of the hawk fell off and then it was some time before its claws too were shed and stronger legs began to form. The hawk didn’t know what was happening; for a long time he was frightened by this changing of himself.
Whenever the captors came to the cage, although it was rare that they did, the hawk cowered in the back corner, cowered under his fallen wings. When he was once again alone, the hawk marveled at his transformation. Legs nothing like a hawk’s, arms grown in place of his wings, even his beak had been blunted. The hawk waited for his captors to come back and on the day that they did he was huddled in the corner as usual, but as soon as they turned their backs on him he leapt out of the open cage, pounced on the both of them, crushing them with his all-powerful arms.
The hawk rushed out of the building where he had spent so many years of his life and he ran and ran until he came to the tree where he nested and from where he was taken by the captors. He called up to the nest, which was smaller than he remembered. None of the hawks responded and so he called again and it was a while before one of the hawks peeked out of the nest and looked down upon him.
“What is it you want?” the bird in the nest asked.
“Don’t you know me? It’s me, your brother.”
“My brother has been gone for years.” The hawk pulled its head back into the nest and couldn’t be seen.
“But it’s me. I may not look the same, but it is true. Ask me a question; a question that only your brother would know the answer to.”
The head of the hawk reappeared from the nest.
“What part of the rabbit do I like to eat first?”
“That’s easy. The rear legs. You always eat the rear legs first.”
Still doubting that it was his brother, the hawk asked a second question.
“What is my favorite kind of cloud?”
“That’s easy too. You don’t like clouds, for when hunting you can hide in them, but you always enjoyed the challenge of the hunt and never liked to hide in waiting.”
The hawk in the nest was shocked and filled with joy and although he didn’t recognize his brother he left the nest, landing softly on his brother’s strong arms. The brother embraced the hawk and made as if he were going to kiss him, but instead, took his brother’s neck in his hands and snapped it with a quick twist. He dropped his brother-hawk on the ground and walked back to the cage, which still had its door open, awaiting him.
Even here in Jabaliya, a place only rumored to have seen snow, the cold of Ohio stalks him.
The quarter-sized flakes batter the March landscape, the car being towed away during the late-night blizzard, the almost serene beauty of the snow pelting through the flashing yellow lights of the tow truck, growing smaller, dimmer until gone.
Snow continues to fall and twelve nights later the throttling ring of the phone and now it is his father who has been taken from him. A year before, nearly to the day, he cried while standing over the open casket of his father’s father, fingering rosary beads as the priest plowed through the prayers.
Now he stands above hi
s father’s casket, minus the rosary beads, and thinks of the dwindling number of men in the family and of himself and how he made the two-hundred-mile trip in a borrowed car—his perfectly ironed shirts, done with care by a friend an hour after the phone call, flapping in the breeze of the rolled down window. And he walks up the fifteen steps, following the pall bearers into the church and then to the cemetery he goes across the still-frozen ground in shoes, like the car, not even his own, and he places a rose, red, and feels his lips against the second of April, cold-skinned casket.
That afternoon, following the funeral, he and his friends from Ohio walk past the house where he grew up, but was sold several years before. He looks over the stone wall into the backyard where he once played baseball and football alone for hours. Back then, he could never see over the wall, but now it seems so much lower and the yard so much smaller. His friend, who loaned him the car, comments on how he would love to go into the house and look around. They don’t. He can’t wait to get back in his borrowed car and drive west once again.
The quiet, more than the God, is what he seeks in the church. Each morning he goes to the earliest Mass. A gather of old men and women speckle the spacious pews. He is careful, when kneeling, to hide the bottoms of his shoes so that the woman, two pews back, doesn’t see the holes in them. He responds to the prompts of the priest, takes the Eucharist into his hollow stomach and returns to the pew, the same one every morning, and he wishes to lie down on the soft wood and pillow his head on the hymnals and sleep the mornings and days and nights and ache away.
When he is able to get a car, he goes into the city and begins to meet some of the homeless. One day in the city library he meets a homeless man from Alabama. They talk of the difficulties in going back home and asking for help. The two of them go that evening to a church basement and get a meal. He pretends that he, too, is homeless, but they all know he is not.
Through a patch of woods, five minutes from the house, there is a one room library. He goes there during the days to escape the chill of the house, the loneliness, the knocks on the door, the pestering of the phone. He has never read literature before, only magazines and a lot of newspapers. The librarian leaves him alone, as if she knows.
He begins with the smallest of the books—works by Wilder and Steinbeck and Orwell—and they blanket his coldness, people his loneliness, muffle the knuckles against the door and the gnawing whispers in his mind. This becomes his new church, a place where god answers his prayers.
The Boy Who Sold Martyrs
A man once asked me:
“Do birds cry?”
To which, I replied:
“Just listen.”
If you are fortunate enough to live in one of the houses in Jabaliya camp, across the street from the giant willow, then you are blessed by its cooling shade from the early afternoon summer sun and, in winter, if the winds are blowing from the southeast, as they so often do, then the tree serves as a buffer of sorts from the chilled rains.
In one of these houses, the house with the blue door, stands a boy in the back room staring at the martyrs lying, side by side, on the sleeping mat.
The boy is in his early teens, as easily thirteen as fifteen. Looking down at him from above—in the eight-inch gap between the rusty metal roof and the cement block wall—one can see the bald patch on the top right side of his head, a red-brown island of skin amidst the boy’s muddled soot-black hair, a scar from a spill of hot oil when he was two. The boy is tall for his age, but thin, and when he walks one can see that he has yet to grow into his body; he lopes and his gangly legs bump, at times, into the cart that he pushes to and from the market each day.
One by one the boy looks at each of the photos of the martyrs arranged by the date of their deaths. Each evening, before going to sleep, he arranges the pictures in a different way: by block numbers, by whether they smiled in their final photo or not, by the place they died. He picks up one of the photos and says the martyr’s name, pausing five seconds before placing it atop the small cart sitting in the room. He repeats this for each of the fourteen martyrs, then, when all the pictures are atop the cart, the boy closes his eyes for an extended period of time.
In addition to being able to see many things more than most observers, and from vantage points beyond their capabilities, I can also read the boy’s mind; right now, for instance, the boy, with his eyes closed, is imagining the latest martyr and what she, yes she, looks like. The first female martyr in Gaza.
The thin, whip-like branches of the willow are not conducive to nesting. Not that it affects me in any real way, since I am a pigeon who likes to roost—roosting is much less permanent than nesting. Still, the willow offers a rare high vantage point looking over the cement forest of Jabaliya. Because of my habit of roosting, this is how I first learned of the boy, the seller of martyrs, whose name is Ahmed.
It was a brutally hot afternoon, the kind of day where the heat presses a bird closer to the ground to the point of where you feel as though you are not flying at all. I was exhausted, seeking shade where I could rest, but not wanting to fly the three miles into Gaza City where the higher buildings cast longer shadows. Shade is a rarity in Jabaliya.
About two o’clock I saw that the shadow of the willow had begun to stretch across School Street and onto the houses that sidled it. I landed on house number twenty-eight, the only one in the shade with a light blue door, my favorite color. The roof was also without much of the clutter that covers most of the houses, namely TV antennas, chunks of wood and branches, water tanks, and, every once in a while, a plastic chair or two. I perched in the shaded area of the roof and, tired that I was, stayed there dozing on and off while the blur of the street passed. It so happened that I was still there on the front part of the roof when the boy came home, pushing the cart inside.
He looked up at me, I, down at him, and that was it until a while later when he came back out with a handful of crumbled bread and tossed it up to me. From the first, I liked the boy. By the simple act of throwing the bread up to me, rather than on the ground where I would have had to go and get it, I knew he had a warm heart or, at least, the possibilities of one. The bread scattered on the roof and I ate it leisurely.
It continued like this for many afternoons and, in time, I began to roost at night on the spot at the back of the house, where I am this morning watching the boy prepare his cart for a day of work.
Ahmed has finished packing the cart and takes it out of the room and to the front of the house. He kisses his mother good morning and they share a small bowl of scrambled eggs and warm flatbread. I know that later, after the boy is finished with work, whatever remains of the bread will be mine.
At the risk of sounding conceited, and there is nothing worse than a conceited bird, I am no ordinary pigeon. I come from a linage of pigeons, the great carrier pigeons of the early twentieth century, birds that transported messages from country to country, war zone to war zone, saving many soldiers and civilians alike. We are also known for our superior vision.
In the language of the people of Jabaliya, we are called zajil, a kind of storyteller, if you will. Not all of us can see into the minds of humans. In fact, few of us can. My father, for example, could not do so, but both my grandfather and grandmother could. Anyway, all that I am trying to say is that it is natural for me to be interested in stories. After Ahmed began to toss me the breadcrumbs, it is his story that I became interested in, and through observing him for the past year I have begun to piece together his life.
It was not the day, that rainy February morning when his father’s body was found washed ashore, after he fell overboard from his fishing boat, that the boy began thinking of selling photos of the dead. Nor was it when the boy’s uncles and neighbors tried holding him back from seeing the bloated corpse; in those days the boy still could clearly remember his father’s features. As the funeral procession made its way to the other end of the camp, he easily pictured his father’s prominent jawline and the ears which had a slight bo
w to them. The rain clutched the red, black and green flag to the coffin and the boy believed that the clouds also mourned his father, a thought that comforted him.
Months later, the final week of elementary school, the boy was shocked that he couldn’t remember his father’s features. Ears, mouth, nose, eyes, all of them disappeared leaving only a blank, very white face with the brownish red hair atop it. During the middle of math class, the boy ran out of the school, across the playground, and home. He buried his tears in his mother’s collarbone and when he was able to manage the words he asked:
“Do we have any photos of Father?”
She was silent in her thoughts and answered him in a befuddled tone.
“No, I don’t think so.”
After a week of inquiring with family members she gave her son a definitive that there was not a single photo to be found.
“Just close your eyes and remember a good time with him and you can picture your father,” she said one evening that summer.
“I’ve tried, but his face is blank.”
“Try drawing a picture of him.”
“I have, but it never comes out like Father.”
“Try again.”
The next day, as the boy was playing soccer, a funeral procession stopped the game and Ahmed watched as they carried the wooden coffin down the street, not to the cemetery where his father was buried, but to the Martyrs’ Cemetery between blocks six and seven. It was a long procession, so much longer than when his father died, so long that the boy’s sweat had dried to a salty film by the time it passed. He saw many of the mourners carrying photos of the dead man and the boy thought, unlike him, they would never forget what the man looked like.
In the Cemetery of the Orange Trees Page 4