“I also went to the funeral, but I saw no pictures.”
“There were only a couple and one of them was dropped. I picked it up.”
The boy becomes agitated and fumbles with the envelope of the photos.
“I need some extra prints of each of these pictures.”
Salim, still holding the photo, gives the boy a concerned look.
“Are you sure that you’re okay?”
“It’s just that I will never know what she looks like.” He points to the picture in Salim’s hand.
“Why must you know what they look like?”
“So I don’t forget their faces, like I have forgotten my father’s.”
Salim says nothing, glancing away from the boy’s face. He takes the envelope and goes to the machine and makes two copies of each, including that of the female martyr.
Before returning to Jabaliya, the boy goes down Omar El Muhktar Street and to the beach. The night before, while on his way to the cemetery, he had made a promise to himself, something to make up for what he was about to do.
He sits in the sand and watches the waves crash and race up the shore then retreat. The repetition helps to calm him. Over and over, steady, certain. A woman catches his eye. At first he thinks she is playing with a child, making a castle in the sand. As he watches, he sees no one else with her. He moves closer and studies the drawing she is making on the beach. She looks up. She is beautiful.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“I’m making a map.”
He studies the map, but isn’t sure what to make of it.
“Go up there, atop the mound and it will be easier to see.”
He does and it is clear from there what she is drawing. The map every child is taught at home, the map that is seared into their minds at school. It is large, two or three times larger than the boy. He watches her from the mound and when she finishes, she asks:
“Can you see it?”
“Yes, clearly. It’s wonderful.”
“Thank you.”
And like that she walks away, southward along the beach. Ahmed watches until she is a mere dot and then he goes to the map in the sand, careful not to step on the borders. As she was finishing the map, the idea came to him that this is the perfect spot to fulfill his promise of the night before while in the cemetery.
With his hands he makes fifteen holes inside the map and buries a martyr in each of them. His promise, his penance; give the martyrs another place, a more beautiful resting place than in Jabaliya.
A week passes and the boy must make several trips to the city to keep up with the demand. Each time he orders more prints, he stops by the beach and buries one. He has sold more than forty of them during the week of mourning—the foggy-like quality of the photo, the eyeless stare mesmerizing you. I have, myself, been entranced by the picture, at times unsettling while at others a drug-like tonic dragging you into its comforting depths. I find myself gazing at the photo, which the boy has taped on the wall of the house, right next to the door of his room, perhaps specifically in order for me to see. There have been times when I have been so mesmerized by the photo that long stretches of time have gone by.
After the week of mourning, the boy is in his normal place in the market, talking to a customer, when a woman walks by, slowing down and looking at the photos. She passes back and forth numerous times and each time that she does she gets closer to the cart.
Then she stops, two steps from the boy. The woman takes those two steps and with one sweep of the hand has the photos—all fifteen martyrs—in her grasp and she is tearing them to pieces. She throws the fragments into the air and they flutter in all directions somersaulting onto the vendors and their goods—tomatoes, cucumbers, apples, into bubbling falafel grease, onto the boy himself.
“Just like their lives,” the woman shouts. “A thousand pieces, never whole again.”
The boy finds out that the woman is the mother of the girl in the picture. In the coming days, he discovers the first female martyr was eighteen years old and a first-year university student. For many days the boy stays in the house, telling his mother that he is sick, but she knows the truth, heard about it the very evening it happened from many who witnessed it, and some who didn’t.
It is at this time that the boy stops feeding me and I begin to find other places in Jabaliya to roost. Some nights I leave the camp altogether and spend it in the city or one of the other seven camps in the Gaza Strip. I find myself antsy, however, and after a night or two away I return to Jabaliya, sometimes even to the boy’s house.
On one such morning, a couple of weeks later, the boy opens his bedroom door and I am shocked by his gauntness. He hugs and kisses his mother and eats a little breakfast then tells her he is going to the city. She is relieved that he has eaten something and is leaving the house for the first time in a long while.
He takes the back of a donkey cart most of the way and walks the rest. Walking, he looks even more awkward in all his thinness. Surprising me, he doesn’t go to Salim’s, but stops at a bakery where he buys a piece of sweet honey pastry. When the vendor cuts a square of the pastry, the bees hover above it only to return when the vendor goes away.
The boy takes small bites of the pastry and then looks up at me sitting on a street sign. I think he is going to offer me the last piece, which I usually don’t like because of its sweetness, but so overjoyed that he is paying me a little attention I would gladly fly down and gorge myself on it, if offered, not caring that it would make me sick for days. I lift my wings a little, but realize that the boy is not looking at me, but through me; he doesn’t notice me at all. He throws the remainder of the pastry into a side street. A couple of pigeons swoop down and fight over it and I watch until one gives up and flies away, leaving the pastry for the other to slowly peck away at.
I do not follow the boy to the photo shop, but watch from the street sign, a block away. He is inside for about fifteen minutes and I see him come out with a yellow envelope in hand, the same as the one within which he keeps the photos. He appears happy and the feeling of elation that coursed through me minutes ago, when I thought he noticed me, returns. The boy heads toward the beach and I wait until he is nearly out of sight before lifting off from the street sign and trailing him.
I land on the knoll of grassy sand, the same from which the boy watched the woman draw the map on the beach. The map, of course, has long since been washed away, but the boy knows the place of his private cemetery. I observe him digging a hole and, as he always does, he says a small prayer in a whisper, before covering the photo with sand. The boy closes the envelope, and when he turns his back on the waves, meets my eyes and holds them for a fleeting moment. He walks northward along the beach, in the direction of Jabaliya. I linger on the knoll, content and certain that he recognized me.
I lie on the knoll of sand, perhaps I have even allowed myself to slip into the bliss of a quick nap. Refreshed, I scamper and begin to claw away at the sand; never have I been much with my claws, nothing like a hawk or other bird of prey. I tire easily and stop often.
The sun has extinguished itself in the sea, pulling the half-moon into the apex of the sky. The light is ample for me to work by. On and off I dig; there is no rush.
By morning, the fishermen have finished their nights of work and head home to sleep, their skin and hair sparkle with the silver flakes of sardines, like that of the boy’s father used to do. Rising hot, the sun grows hotter. It is midday before my claw scratches the picture. Faster I dig until the photo reveals itself. Exhausted though I am, I coax my wings up and down, up and down until I am above the city and pointed in the direction of the camp.
Within twenty minutes I am in Jabaliya on my familiar perch at the back of the boy’s house. The boy’s door is closed, but the yellow envelope is sitting on the small table along with some flatbread, the crumbs of which tease my longing stomach. I have never flown into the house; where I sit now is the closest I have been. But the bread crumbs are too mu
ch for me and I swoop down and onto the table. Piece by piece I devour the crumbs.
Engrossed in my hunger, I do not hear the unlocking of the front door and the boy’s mother is near the table before I react. I take off, dropping the bread from my mouth. In a panic I fly in the wrong direction where there is no way out. I circle, trying to get my bearings, but it is as though I am in a maze in this house I am so familiar with. Before I find my way to the back of the house, my escape, I see the boy’s mother opening the yellow envelope and I hear the noose of grief trapped in her throat, strangling her.
Have you ever seen a bird cry? That question asked of me a while ago.
Maybe you think that we can’t or don’t or simply refuse to. But, just close your eyes for a minute and think back to when you have seen a mother bird feed her babies and remember the care and love that goes into it. Or, think of how we build our nests with so much pride, or, for that matter, how we protect, in any way we can, our unhatched eggs.
To you doubters, I say, anything that can love, can cry.
The boy’s mother keeps her son’s photo in the envelope. Only when alone, in the early morning while eating the fresh, warm bread, does she sometimes take out the picture and embrace it with her longing eyes. On these mornings, after we share our tears, she leaves behind a piece of the bread for me, and next to it, sitting on the table, is the photo of the boy for me to see.
On days when he doesn’t have a ride into town, he takes the battered bicycle six miles to the woodshop. Most days he is alone and he loves the feel of the saw and the moan of the wood and knowing that he has plunged to the deepest of the well; some days, slivers of light can be seen peeking through the darkness.
Days that he brings the bicycle, winter or spring, he doesn’t bother sweeping off the beard of sawdust, allowing the wind against his face to peel it from him, scattering something of himself across the Ohio landscape.
One year later, in November, he moves to the nation’s capital, spending his first nights in the back of a rusted Chevette. With him, a box of books, and each night in the car he takes them out and opens them, placing them around him and they are the quilt that warms him on those nights.
Deep into the nights, while the tourists lie quietly asleep, he reads Baldwin aloud to himself on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
This is where he befriends a homeless man, more than twice his age, and they talk literature at the marble feet of the man who wrote the Gettysburg Address. One night, when the homeless man tells of his brother, a doctor in Tennessee, the American asks why he doesn’t ask for help.
“Pride,” the man answers simply.
He says nothing.
“This surprises you?”
“I knew a homeless man in Ohio and he said the same thing.”
“You seem like a proud person yourself.”
He wishes to be left alone with his book and the solitude of the still warm night.
“Where’s your home?”
“I have a room in Arlington.”
“No, I mean your home.”
“A small town in Pennsylvania. I never really fit in there; it was my father’s hometown. Do you know that I was thirteen the first time I talked with a black person?”
“And now you’re here talkin’ to me and reading brother James Baldwin a few steps away from where Reverend Martin once had a dream.”
He stares at the Reflecting Pool. Thinks of the fragility of the frayed string that separates the two of them.
“You may have a bed to sleep in, but you’re just as homeless as me.”
They look at each other.
“Where’re you running to next?”
“I’m not sure.”
Sixteen months later, he steps foot in Gaza for the first time.
A Four Cigarette Story
It is a fossil-dry August morning and Abu Khalil is in the back of his house, on the sixth rung of the eleven rung ladder, loosening the fake cement block, behind which he hides his books. He removes a much-used Hamlet and a recently obtained copy of Orwell’s 1984, leans over and hands the two books, with the care of passing an egg, to his youngest son, then replaces the thin piece of wood, painted gray with pockmarks, into the space, where its fits snuggly. Before climbing down the ladder, Abu Khalil admires the work he has done; the memories of the numerous times that the army came in searching for the banned books, and never finding a one, etches a wrinkled smile of satisfaction across his face. His son sees the smile and knows what his father is thinking.
“Thank you, son. I will see you after lunch.”
“Bye, Father.”
Abu Khalil smells the bread and knows that it is ready. He steps into the heat and his wife holds out the large flatbread, two pieces in her left hand, atop which he places the books, and then she tops the books with another two pieces of the bread.
“Sandwiches for the intelligent,” he says, as always, to his wife. “I will be home in time for my afternoon nap.”
She watches her husband go down the street, unknowing that these are the final words of his own that she will ever hear him speak.
Abu Khalil turns right past the Martyrs’ Cemetery. Should have encouraged my sons to carry shovels, rather than books, he thinks, stealing a corner of the bread and savoring it in his right cheek. As always, when a military jeep passes, Abu Khalil grabs his crotch and spits at the passing soldiers. Trying his best not to allow the sight of them to rankle him, he thinks that, after delivering the books to the young philosophy student at the University, two pieces of bread will be his and that if he hurries they will still be warm and perfect with his mint tea at his friend’s house. The jeep is thrown into reverse and two soldiers spring out of the back and their guns are glaring at him.
“Drop the bread!”
Before doing so, Abu Khalil takes a vicious bite from the top piece, chewing as he watches, in slow motion, the bread and books separate as they fall to the street. One of the soldiers kicks aside the bread, nearly breaking Abu Khalil’s heart. The soldier then picks up the two books and takes them to the jeep. The driver looks them over, climbs out of the jeep and approaches Abu Khalil. He holds out the books, Shakespeare in his left, Orwell his right, and points Abu Khalil to the middle of the road. He stands there watching the soldiers round up men and children, old and young, women heading to and from the market, halting cars and carts alike. The soldiers force the crowd to encircle Abu Khalil. A few faces he recognizes and he turns his head to his sandals; his tongue discovers a morsel of bread in the hole of his back right molar and he finds comfort in it.
Suddenly, Hamlet is held before him. He looks at the worn cover, the spine of which has threads hanging bare and tousled in the air. The soldier opens the book, rips out the title page and holds it an inch from Abu Khalil’s face, so close that the letters have blurred.
“Eat it, old man.”
He cannot believe what he is hearing, first the words old man—I am only forty-eight, he thinks—and then what they are asking him to do. He recalls the sheep he saw, many years ago, nosing through the garbage in the camp and finally settling on a sheet of a lampoon.
Still not looking up, he shakes his head in refusal.
Placing the book under his chin, the soldier lifts Abu Khalil’s head.
“Fifty-eight pages, front and back,” he says. “For each you do not eat we take one of these people with us.”
He opens his mouth. The soldier hands him the title page.
“I will not feed you.”
Abu Khalil takes the thin, fragile paper and stuffs it into his mouth. Brittle, it crumbles and the brown edges disintegrate and it reminds him of the burnt edges of the thin, cracker bread, rokak.
He hears the tearing of another page and then another and he doesn’t need to count the number of pages he has eaten. The sentences he can taste, the words, the letters, the commas, and he can feel them saunter down his throat and into his stomach. Scene by scene. Act by act.
They leave him standing there,
the cover of the book at his feet, the crowd of onlookers scattering, in disbelief of what they have just seen. The jeep roars away and leaves everything quiet, at least in Abu Khalil’s head. He remains there, awaiting the inevitable knifing pain in his stomach, or for his bowels to loosen right there on the street. Nothing happens. In fact, he feels fine, as good as he felt when he left the house that morning. Someone puts an arm around him and asks if he would like to sit down, or go to the clinic, or home. He shakes his head no to all of them and begins retracing his steps of earlier that morning. No one gets too close to him as though he is a kind of djinn or crazed conjurer. But they are there, a lot of people, those who have witnessed what has just happened or already have heard about it as word gallops through Jabaliya.
He turns onto School Street, pulled by the redundancy of a lifetime he has walked this route. In his dreamlike state, he nearly collides with his son and wife. Each takes an arm and they ask question after question, none of which he responds to.
Not a sound comes from his mouth as the afternoon segues into night. There is no pain and, as with that morning, calm is a tranquilizer, leaving him, if anything, a bit catatonic. There have been many visitors, for the most part, well-wishers with genuine concern, but, of course, also those being outright nosy. Abu Khalil’s family thanks everyone, keeping them at the entrance before politely shutting the door. But the knocks become more and more and finally Abu Khalil’s son places a sign on the door, telling everyone they will talk with them in the morning.
That night, however, before the dawn dissolves the dark, an unusual thing happens.
Abu Khalil, his throat papyrus-parched, leaves his sleeping mat and drinks from the bowl of his hands, over and over, a stream of handfuls. Quietly, he goes to the back of the house, places the ladder against the wall and by feel removes the fake cement block. He takes the first book he touches, fingers the cover and turns to the opening page, which he rips out, paying no heed to the noise, and nibbles at its edges, before devouring it.
In the Cemetery of the Orange Trees Page 6