The following month, in January, 2004, the first suicide bomber in Gaza killed himself and eleven others on a bus in Jerusalem. I remember this day vividly for I had flown to the desert, a place I like to sometimes go when the humidity of the coast becomes too much. I find myself, as I grow older, and we pigeons do not live all that long, with more and more of an urgency to get away from this Gaza. Once, last winter, I started to fly westward and for two and a half days I continued on, slowly making my way across the Sinai all the way to the great city of Cairo where I nibbled from crumbs of sesame bread at Tahir Square and was fed the finest halva paste from a kindly old woman along the banks of the Nile.
That day I am talking about, the day of the first suicide bomber from Gaza, I had spent an afternoon and a night in the desert and had had my fill of it and was happy to be going home. As the center of Gaza City came into view, and off in the distance the Sea, a missile roared past, so close that the wave of heat from it knocked me back and scorched my left wing, which still, to this day, bears the rough, hardened edges on my carpal.
Before I regained my senses, an explosion rocked the city. I did not know where to go. I thought of retreating to the desert, but decided on the beach where I found a tangle of brambles and stayed the night there while the explosions blistered the city and camps.
Funerals jammed the streets over the next days and I watched them from above, although my injured left wing made it painful to fly. Luckily, there was a nice wind where I could soar for the most part; only when landing or taking off did the pain raise tears in my red-black eyes.
Back in Jabaliya, the boy followed in several of the funeral processions and was enamored by the photos of the dead. There were so many photos and he wondered where they could have all come from so quickly, within hours of their deaths. Some of the photos were large, pasted on a board and carried above the heads of the mourners; others fit neatly into one’s pocket. The smaller pictures were what the boy liked the most, easy to take with you and look at whenever and wherever one had the desire to be reminded of the dead person. But still, the unanswerable question: How could these photos be made so quickly? Only from God could they come.
Ahmed continued to follow along in the processions of the martyrs, which often quickly turned into protests against the former occupiers, who now, rather than being a daily presence in the Gaza Strip, strike at the camps and cities from helicopters and jets and tanks and sometimes the military enters the Strip before pulling back within a few days.
After the funerals, there is a week of mourning and Ahmed goes to the houses of the dead and drinks the bitter black coffee, which he likes, and eats the sweet dates, which he doesn’t like. Sometimes he is given a photo of the martyr and he has begun to collect them and soon he has eight. Most of the pictures are in black and white; a couple, however, are in color.
One day while in the market, Ahmed was fascinated by an old man selling relics of the occupation: bullet casings, tear gas canisters marked Made in the USA, necklaces with rubber bullets, shreds of army uniforms. He asked the man if he had any photos to sell.
“Photos of what?”
“Of those who died at the hands of the soldiers, or the suicide bombers.”
The old man rubbed his gray beard.
“That’s a good idea, young man. Why don’t you do that?”
“I’m not really sure how to do it.”
“Just sell them. What needs to be done?”
The boy rushed home and took out the photos he had collected and placed in a special yellow envelope. He told his mother about what the old man said and she thought that it wasn’t a bad idea, if for no other reason than to keep her son busy during the weeks of summer vacation. That evening the boy’s mother took a piece of rope, which she used for hanging laundry, nailed the ends to two pieces of wood, tall as the boy, and with clothespins pinched each of the photos onto the rope. She told her son to take it to the market the next day.
“But what if I sell one of the pictures?”
“Isn’t that what you want to do?”
“I only have one of each.”
“Make copies of the photos.”
“But where?”
“Find out.”
The next afternoon Ahmed took the photos to Gaza City where he met Salim, the man everyone advised him to go see. Inside the shop sat a large machine, a copier he told Ahmed, and it was with this that he could make prints of the pictures. He gazed admiringly at the machine. So this, he thought, was the God from where the photos were born.
“How much are the pictures?”
Salim quoted the price; reading the face of the boy, he asked:
“What are you planning to do with them?”
The boy told him and, like the old man the day before, he too liked the idea.
“Tell you what, I will make you two copies of each photo at no cost and when you sell them you can pay me, plus an additional ten percent.”
Ahmed returned to Jabaliya with the photos and began selling them the next morning.
The greatest thing about being a bird is that we have no borders. During the occupation, I flew near and above the long lines at the checkpoints, above the thousands of workers waiting to cross the Green Line to their low-paying, labor-intensive jobs. No hands ever rummaged over my body, patting me down, never checked my ID card, never turned me back at the border and sent me home without explanation.
Many times I go to the former villages and towns of pre-1948 Palestine. I have flown over and landed upon remnants of crumbled stone houses, waterless wells, and weed sprouting walls. I have seen fields misted by sprinklers in the early morning; through this water I have flown and cooled off in its spray.
These are the haunted places that I hear spoken of in the low light of the nights in the camps. Burayr. Hamama. Hatta. Kawkaba. Najd. On days after visiting these places, I am saddened and wish that I could write, on a piece of paper, simple sentences that these places exist only in the memory, and like memories the truth and reality of it is stretched, molded, reformed, and sometimes forgotten altogether. If I could, I would write my simple sentences, roll them up on a simple piece of paper, tie it around my simple neck and, like my ancestors, deliver the news to those who have not lived in those villages and towns for more than half a century.
Most, I believe, know of the fate of their villages, but they still tell the stories to their children and grandchildren. What else are they to do with the threads of stories and memories—swallow and allow them to lacerate their tongues and throats, carrying them unspoken to their muted graves?
Young men give up their lives, often taking others with them, and Ahmed goes to the funerals seeking photos of the brothers, husbands, sons, grandsons. But today is different. This morning, as I see him take his cart down the street and to the market, he will work only until lunch because, after noon prayers, the funeral for the first female suicide bomber will be held in block number eleven.
I fly above Ahmed, down the street for a short while, before turning off toward the sea, where I will clean up and then, like many in Jabaliya, I will also attend the funeral.
The swell of mourners begins early in the north end of the camp and stretches to where the railroad once passed. For such a large mass of people there is only a hum rising, like the dust in June, ankle-high. I settle atop a roof across the street from the dead woman’s house. An old man throws several crumbs below me, a foot and a foot and another foot apart, as though he is trying to snare me. It wouldn’t be the first time that someone has tried such a thing. I ignore him.
Ahmed is late in coming, held up by a last-minute buyer. By the time he is halfway up the street, the door to the woman’s house has flung open, the remains of the body in its eternal bed and the once quiet crowd has grown to a fury of chants. The boy moves to the side then climbs his way onto a roof. I fly down to where he is and land five feet away, separated only by the width of the alleyway. He looks over at me, but quickly turns to the stream-like flow of the
crowd below.
As the procession passes, the coffin is in the middle of it like a lone ship at sea. I notice, as does the boy, that there are no photos being carried. Like I, he can only imagine what she looks like and wonder: if he has ever seen her, has she ever bought a photo from him, did she smile into the camera, if there ever was a camera to smile into. When the coffin is by us the boy sees it, a photo, smaller, like the ones he sells. But from up here he cannot see it clearly. He jumps into the alleyway and joins in the river of people trying to inch his way closer to the only photo of the woman.
Her photo is taped on the coffin. The boy, unable to get near the grave, again climbs onto a roof, in time to see the coffin lowered into the hole by a hundred hands. He sees what he believes to be the mother and is astonished by her face and the lack of tears trundling down her cheeks, the nonexistent wails of grief from her mouth.
Why isn’t she crying, he wonders. He thinks back to his father’s funeral and doesn’t recall himself crying either. Only before and after did he cry, almost always in the morning when, at breakfast, the absence of the sparkling flakes of sardines, always found in his father’s hair in the morning, were no longer there. It was this that made him most sad.
Maybe this is why, he thinks, they bury the photo with the coffin; some people, perhaps, just don’t want to remember.
I watch the boy and want to go over and rest on his shoulder and deliver to him a scrawled message, which I would carry around my neck. This time, if only I could, I would write: for some the grief is so powerful that any reminder of their loved one would crumble them, the living, to a powder, a powder so fine it can be carried like the khamaseen winds each spring carry the flour-like sand for thousands of miles, so far away from the one they want most to remain closest to.
On my trip to Cairo, and in other places I have ventured, I have seen groups of pigeons flying together, sometimes dozens of them, and they return to the same rooftop from where they began. Recently I have begun to see them more and more in Gaza as well. I have mixed emotions about these distant kin of mine; on the one hand I am a little envious how they always have a place to go home to and food to eat. That is also the reason I do not envy them, the simple fact that they cannot just go off to anyplace they want. I am not sure if they could even do this, even if they wanted to, given the way they have been trained. I have heard that these pigeons live two or sometimes three times longer than I, a pigeon in the wild.
But what if one of those birds wanted to fly off in the middle of the night, just like that, and follow a young boy from his house to the Martyrs’ Cemetery? What if they wanted to watch, from a gravestone, the boy jab the shovel into the soil? And would those pigeons try to warn the boy of what he is about to do? Or, like me, remain a silent witness?
The soil has yet to turn to the color of dust, the night keeping it soft and easy for the boy to dig. The repetition and his tired muscles give him a distraction from what he is doing. When a car approaches, the boy goes flat to the ground and waits for the lights and groan of the engine to disappear. When it does, he returns to the digging and soon the shovel knocks on the coffin. This is the worst moment of the night. Every time the shovel hits the coffin, the boy is certain that it knocks back at him. He knows that it can’t be true, but can’t stop himself from believing that it is. He leans over and reaches into the grave and clears away, with his blistered hands, the dirt, until he feels the picture. A beating of the female martyr’s heart thrums in his fingertips, through his dirt-encrusted nails. He stops, takes his hands off the coffin, only then realizing that it is the sprint of his heart that he feels gnawing his fingertips.
He forces himself back to the coffin and slowly removes the picture. The darkness is such that he can’t see the picture and he places it in the envelope that he has brought and quickly refills the hole, smoothing the dirt as best he can. He moves the dirt with his sandals, erasing most of his footprints.
I am about to leave the gravestone from where I have been watching, but stay behind and let the boy make his way home alone.
Early the next morning, when the light is enough for the boy to see the picture, he puts it on his sleeping mat and studies it. The face of the woman is soiled with splotches of dirt; dirt is stuck to the eyes, most of the mouth and much of her headscarf. Some of the dirt he is able to scratch away with his fingernail, but much of it, the bottom layer, when he tries to remove it, part of the picture, a small blemish on the right side of her face, tears off. Afraid he will damage more of the photo, he places it reverently on his pillow and again studies it. When his mother knocks on the door, the boy covers the picture with a sheet.
“Are you okay? Breakfast is ready.”
“I’m feeling a little sick. I’ll go to work in the afternoon.”
“Do you need some medicine?”
“No, I’ll just sleep a little.”
He waits until he hears his mother open the front door, probably to do laundry, and then uncovers the photo. If only he could clean the mouth area, he thinks, just enough to see if she is smiling. Or her eyes even, that would tell me a lot about her. He opens the door a crack, and seeing no one, hurries toward his mother’s room. On the shelf he grabs a small bottle of rubbing alcohol, takes a hand towel from the kitchen and when he turns, standing there is his mother.
“How did you get so filthy?”
He looks at his hands and shirt and slacks for the first time in the brighter light at the front of the house.
“I was cleaning the cart.”
“In your room?”
“I will take it outside.”
“I thought you were sick?”
“More tired than sick. I couldn’t sleep last night so I started to clean the cart early this morning. I didn’t take it outside because I thought I would wake you.”
He checks the dirt under his nails and thinks, not of the grave, although that is pecking away at his thoughts, but of the lie he told his mother. Both, he is aghast at, but perhaps even more so the lie.
His mother places her forehead against his, feeling for a fever, and he freezes, thinking that she can certainly read his lie. She pulls back and carefully looks at him.
“What happened to your hand and arms?”
“I told you I was cleaning the cart.”
“What are these cuts from?”
The boy moves away from his mother and goes to his room.
“Ahmed, what is going on?”
He comes out with his envelope of pictures, added to it, the stolen photo.
“I have to get more prints made.”
“What about breakfast? How about telling me what is going on?”
“I have to go to the city. I’ll be home as soon as I finish.”
Walking down the street, the boy is certain everyone knows what he did. He ignores them and walks faster, cutting through the school grounds and out back through the cactus field, which he hates to go through, but is also a shortcut. I follow him. In the field he sits down and removes the towel and rubbing alcohol, which he placed in his jacket. He dabs some of the alcohol onto the towel and gently touches the dirt-covered eyes of the female martyr.
He thinks, at first, that it is working, but by the time he has cleaned the eyes he sees that the alcohol has removed the eyes altogether, leaving only a crooked white smudge where the eyes used to be. Like acid, like magic. The boy embraces the photo and begins to cry.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He rocks back and forth as though comforting an infant. At arm’s length he holds the picture, trembling, chilled. I am watching from one of the cactuses, careful of the hair-like thorns. I see the boy deteriorate, like the woman’s eyes in the photo. I turn away, but can’t help myself, and I look at the boy, through embarrassed eyes, once again. Sometimes, reading minds is a curse.
Suddenly, the boy stands up and spins around looking at all the cactuses. Many of them look like people, one of the main reasons he doesn’t like coming here. He begins to race through the field, away
from the camp and he doesn’t stop until, gasping for breath, he comes to the dirt road in back of the field. He allows himself time to recover. When he does, he continues at a slow, but steady, pace. Knowing where he is going, I fly up ahead and wait for him to arrive.
That he doesn’t know what the woman looks like maddens the boy. How can he categorize her without knowing whether she smiled or not, or how her eyes stared into or averted the camera. It is only by the photos that he can in any way try to attempt to understand what they were thinking in those hours or days before they left Jabaliya for the final time. Did they too feel the things he sometimes felt? Frustration, loneliness, the scorching need to escape this place, and even those moments of excitement, like when he sells a photo or two.
He arrives at the shop looking as if he has been crying again. His hair is befuddled like an abandoned nest, his glazed dark eyes are distant and bruised with sadness. He does nothing to hide the fact that he has been crying. He walks into the shop and Salim is cropping a photo.
“Hi, Ahmed…” He pauses, then goes over to the boy. “Are you okay?”
“Can you bring back her eyes?” The boy begins to sob, but manages the words.
With a puzzled look, Salim takes the picture.
“Where did you get this?”
“At the funeral. I dropped it in the mud and tried cleaning it with alcohol.”
“It’s impossible to bring back the eyes.”
“How about cleaning the dirt from the rest of the face?”
“I can try that, but I don’t think it will turn out very well.”
Salim takes the picture and makes a copy. The eyes and the smudges from the dirt look even worse.
In the Cemetery of the Orange Trees Page 5