“Give me back the picture and let’s get that ice cream.”
“Just a minute.”
I look closer at the lion and see that she is not the same; something is different about her. Behind Hatem and the lion is a backdrop that looks like a savannah. There is a beautiful tree silhouetted by an orange sunset. But that is not what makes her different.
“Where did you get this picture taken?”
“In Gaza City.”
“At the zoo?”
“No, at a building, like a big photo studio.”
“When?”
“A couple of weeks ago. What’s with all the questions? Come on, let’s go.”
I return the photo, still not certain of what it is about the lion that doesn’t seem right. He hides it in the back pocket of his jeans and goes to his house. I check to make sure I have money for the ice cream and remain in the shade waiting for Hatem to come out.
Father is late arriving home and I feel the tension in the way mother prepares dinner. The chopping of the spinach has a roughness to it; her kneading knuckles press deeper into the dough; the lid of a pan rattles more than usual. There are many possibilities for Father to be not on time: he had to work late; he had to wait for a taxi; the battery in his phone has died again. But I can sense Mother thinking the worst. I avoid her, wishing I hadn’t stopped playing so early. In my room, I wonder about what Father may have brought through the tunnels today. Some evenings, when my mother is working on the loom, Father will tell of what happened in the tunnels. As of late he rarely brings animals into Gaza, although there have been a few—a gazelle, a peacock, and a couple of monkeys within the past months. The animals are much too expensive to bring through the tunnels so Father hauls other goods: cigarettes, kerosene, medicine, and one day he came home all excited for he had driven a car beneath the border.
Father tells me of his days when Mother is not around; she doesn’t like to hear anything about his work, dreading that he will someday not come home, for a growing number of tunnel-workers are being killed in collapses or in military missile strikes. When my father says goodbye to us in the morning, my mother’s mood changes and remains edgy until he walks in at night.
This is how it is tonight until the door opens and I run out of my room to greet Father. But I stop, for there is something in his silence with Mother and they just look at each other and he glances at me, but turns away, and the two of them go into the front room where the carpet-loom is, and they close the door severing me from them. Quietly I go there and stand to the side of the door from where I can hear, not voices, for my parents are not speaking, but crying. And even the crying is muffled, as though there is a pillow or something smothering it. I step out of my sandals, so that they will not flop as I walk away, but there are voices now, also muffled, but clear enough.
“All for a sheep…” my father’s voice cracks.
“Ali. Ali. Ali,” my mother’s voice quivers as she repeats my father’s name as though it is the verse to a song or a prayer.
“All for a sheep. What the hell do we need another damn sheep for in this place?”
My father’s words stun me. Never have I heard him speak like this. I force myself to step away and go to my room, wanting to close the door, but afraid that its hinges will squeal. I leave it open and wait, knowing that when my parents emerge from the other room that things will never quite be the same.
It is a month since my father’s friend died in a tunnel collapse and summer has nearly fled Jabaliya and soon school will begin. Father no longer works in the tunnels, but most mornings he goes somewhere until evening.
I am up early the next day and have breakfast with him.
“What are you going to do today?”
“Probably play soccer this morning before it gets too hot.”
“You have to go back to school Monday; maybe we can visit the zoo this week. Would you like that?”
“Yeah, sure.” I hope that my voice doesn’t give away my apprehension, but Father seems distant these days, and I don’t think he has noticed. I, too, am distracted as of late, especially this morning. My father kisses me atop the head and goes off to work, leaving me to the day ahead.
I have promised Hatem two ice creams if he shows me the place where he had his photo taken with the lion. We hop the back of a donkey cart and go more than halfway to the city. Hatem doesn’t want to come in and he leaves for the market after pointing out the building to me.
I stand across the street, continuing to finger the coins in my pocket, while the voices inside my head argue over whether I should go into the building and have my picture taken with her. But I know that the only way that I can see her up close is to do so. It is this that shoves me across the street and into the building, inside which there is a large room with nothing in it other than a sofa sitting on a raised wooden floor. The room is surprisingly cool and I stand looking around.
“Welcome,” a voice behind me says. I am not sure where the large-bellied man with the gray-black beard has come from, for I don’t see a door other than the one I entered and I didn’t hear him come in.
“Hello,” is all I say.
“Are you here for a photo?”
“Yes.”
“We have three animals today. A monkey, a parrot or the lion.”
“The lion, please.” I feel sweat forming on my forehead, but don’t dare wipe it away.
He goes behind the sofa, and like magic, pulls down a screen with the same picture that was the backdrop for Hatem’s photo. He shows me two other backdrops—a tangerine-red sunset and a picture of the sea.
“I like the first one.”
“Yes, that is nice, especially with the lion. Okay, why don’t you get settled on the sofa and I will bring her out.”
He disappears through a door behind the screen with the sunset picture. I stare at the picture and wonder if this is really how the sun looks in other places and will I ever have the chance to see it. I am still standing when the man comes out, the lion with a chain around her neck. I can’t believe how big she is. The man smiles through his beard and tells me not to worry, the lion has had her teeth removed. Now I know why the lion looked so different in the photo, and I can see it even more so in person. I have a hard time looking away from her large head, with its mouth sunken and hollow, and how sad she looks and this is what consumes me until I finally see the way she is walking, gingerly as though the slightest pressure causes excruciating pain. I see her paws, huge yet delicate, with their raw red holes where the claws used to be.
“Go on, get on the sofa.”
I am feeling light-headed and confused and I take a step toward the sofa and when I look at the picture of the beautiful sunset I drop to the floor.
Staring down at me is not the toothless lion, nor the bearded man, but my father. Looking past him I do not see the familiarity of the corrugated roof of my house, but an unfamiliar ceiling and I am not on my mattress, but rather a sofa.
“Son. How are you feeling?”
I turn to my father and sit up, saying nothing. I don’t see the lion; the bearded man is also gone and I wonder whether any of it actually happened. Then I see the picture of the sunset and know that it is true. But what is my father doing here? He looks away and I know that he understands what I am thinking.
“Here, take a drink.” He hands me a half-filled bottle of warm water, still looking at the sunset, as am I. The water is good and I finish it.
“Do you want some more?”
I wonder what he is asking about, then, when he takes the bottle from me and walks away I understand that he meant water. I stand and feel fine. My father returns with the bottle, full now.
“Thank you.” I drink more of the water, not only because it is refreshing, but also because it is a distraction.
“Abu Jabeer will give you a ride back to Jabaliya. I will be home later.”
I hand my father the bottle.
“Take it with you,” he says.
Father
doesn’t come home for dinner and without him we eat. Now that he no longer works in the tunnels, Mother seems calmer. When she is making her carpets, I head outside for a little while and watch the evening stroll up and down School Street. Soon I tire of this and sit in my room. I close the door and I’m still awake when I hear Father come in. The only light is that which peeks in through where the door is slightly open. I don’t move as my father stands above my mattress. There is an itch on my cheek; I dare not quiet it. I feign sleep. My father feigns conversation. I listen to the indecipherable voices of our neighbors, the Kanafanis. My father opens the door halfway, and it stays like that for a moment, but like the itch that rages on my cheek, when he closes the door, both are no longer there.
Although my eleventh birthday is less than a week away, Father has made no mention of it, nor has my mother. As the days fold into weeks it has become easier to be with my father and not be harassed by thoughts of the lion. This doesn’t mean that I never think of her, or that images of her do not invade my dreams. They do, but at times, more and more as of late, they are of that day when I first saw her come out of the tunnel. In these dreams so too is the girl—inseparable the both of them. How can they not be?
Some mornings, after my father returned to the camp from a night of fishing, he would come into my room and tell me of what he had caught. Many times it was the same story, for my father was a sardine fisherman, and his catch, for the most part, varied little. Before leaving my room, however, he would always tell me of the word he had caught that night in his net. Hope. Forgiveness. Appreciation. Loyalty. Rebellion. Make sure you eat all your breakfast, he would say as he left the room, your mother has taken great care cooking forgiveness into the food.
On other mornings, my father would have the word written on a piece of paper and he would give it to me and I would get up and go over to the stack of blankets and mattresses on the shelf and I would tuck the word in the middle of one of the banned books, between the cover of Shakespeare or Plato or Marx, and we would keep the words there, so that they would not be taken from us.
After my father lost his job as a fisherman he stopped bringing home the words with him. And why is it that, with tunnels so large we can haul cars and giraffes through them, why has my father never brought home a single word from his days working there? Certainly if a word can fit into a fishing net, it can fit through a tunnel. Or, is it possible that words—single words—are so large and dangerous to us, and them, that they too are part of the blockade?
I befriended the American in his first week in Jabaliya after I introduced him to my grandfather, Zajil. He would come to our house in block number five and listen to my grandfather’s stories.
One late afternoon, the two of us were sitting along the wall drinking some mint tea. Other than an occasional child who came over to say hello, we were, for the most part, alone. Just down the street a scraggly-looking goat was rummaging through a bucket of watermelon rinds. The previous evening a man hauling a load of watermelon was passing up the street and Uncle Ali asked him how much he wanted for the watermelon. The driver of the cart told him the price of one, but Uncle Ali said he wanted to buy the entire cartload, about three dozen watermelons. The two men negotiated a price and soon everybody on School Street was eating watermelon.
I went over to the goat that was benefiting from our watermelon binge of the night before and began petting him. I took several almonds from my pocket and fed them to the goat.
“Have you ever seen a gazelle?” I asked the American.
“When I was a child, I went to a petting zoo once and I think there was a gazelle there; some kind of deer anyway.”
“Did you pet it?”
“I think so. My parents took a photo of me with it. If I remember correctly, I was standing there, stiff as a board, about to cry.”
“Why were you crying?”
“I guess I was afraid of it. I was four or five.”
“I would love to pet a gazelle.”
The conversation stalled and we went back to drinking our coffee. We watched the afternoon on School Street trudge by. Suddenly, the American began to speak.
“One day, a few years ago, I went to a homeless shelter to stay the night. I was going through some difficult times and wanted to see just how close I was to them. I stood in line until the shelter opened its doors. When it came my turn to go inside, there was a man there who told me to strip down so he could delouse me. I have never felt so humiliated in my life.”
As I listened to him, it was as though I were listening to my grandfather telling me one of his stories up in the cemetery of the orange trees.
“Were you homeless?”
“No, I was one good friend away.”
The American paused and took a sip of his now tepid coffee.
“Gaza reminds me of that night.”
“How’s that?”
“This place is one enormous wall built with the bricks of humiliation. When does it happen…” the American stopped.
“When does what happen?”
“That the dispossessed begin building walls?”
Across the way, atop a roof, several pigeons flapped their wings and cooed. One of the pigeons lost a gray-white feather and both of us watched its soft float all the way to the street.
One warm spring morning I took the American to the site where the train station in Gaza once stood. Nothing other than the skeleton of the platform remains. No rails. No ticket booth. No people. Nothing more than a ghost of the past, in this place teeming with ghosts.
I tell my friend the story of how, in that first winter in Gaza in 1948, the over 200,000 refugees were so desperate for firewood that they began to burn any and everything they could find: wooden toilet seats leftover from the British Mandate, trees, driftwood, and, lastly, they uprooted the railroad ties.
Before leaving, the American took a photo of me standing under the vacant, crumbling platform roof; I posed looking at my watch as if the train were late.
From a corner he watches several men, under the supervision of a band of soldiers, whitewash the painting of a red, black and green map from the wall. He is across the street when a soldier stares his way and begins walking toward him, slowly at first, then at a faster pace. The American remains where he is and in seconds the soldier is upon him, grabbing him by the shirt and shoving him backward. A second time he grabs a handful of shirt and pushes him further back, yelling at him in Hebrew, demanding his identification card.
He reaches into his back pocket and holds out his passport. Another soldier approaches, pushes aside his comrade and points him back across the way.
The soldier looks at the American and fingers through the document.
“I am sorry about that. We thought you were Palestinian.” He returns the passport and walks away.
The moment that changes everything for him.
While sitting along School Street, playing backgammon with Bassam, a small boy stands before them. The boy holds an injured bird in his palm, a string tied around its neck. He throws the bird into the air where it flies a few feet before the string runs out and the bird is yanked downward.
In his notebook, the American writes—bird on a string. For the first time, he really begins to see Gaza. Begins to see himself.
That night, while everyone else is asleep, the American doesn’t do so. Impossible to even try.
He thinks of his past years of darkness and how they pale to those of these people, but still, still it is his darkness and he has overcome it. He thinks to the boy with the bird on the string and he knows, more certain than anything he has ever known, that he has found, or it has found him, his life-work. These are the people and it is their stories, their stolen histories, their secrets, their tall tales that he must tell.
This is the greatest thing he can do, he thinks. This is the place he wants to be, but, he knows, achingly, that all over the world there are people like the Palestinians, and that he will not stay.
Border S
hearing
One never forgets the first time they have their wool cut and the terror of it.
For me, the moment came five springs ago. I was in the sheepfold, the only home I had ever known, and it was the night before all of us lambs were to be shorn for the first time. There was a hum around the pens and I overheard several of the lambs talking of what awaited us the next morning. Our wool would be peeled from our bodies by one of the workers. The talk was how they would throw us on our backs and pin us down and take the shears and rip from us, in a single sheet, our wool. Relentlessly the lambs went on about how you didn’t want Old Man Rashid to shear you. His beady eyes and the mouth, with its single tooth protruding like a husk, made it all the worse as he glared down at you with those clippers buzzing like a disturbed hornet’s nest. If you were unfortunate enough to get Old Man Rashid, the lambs continued, pinch your eyes tightly, until you see the white speckles dancing on your eyelids. I lay there wondering how those lambs knew so much of what was about to happen and yet I knew nothing. Perhaps their parents told them, I had thought, and since I had never known mine, that made all the sense.
That morning, the call to prayer startled the horizon and we, the lambs, were taken from the catching pen to the shearing stalls. We were lined up outside and one by one the lambs disappeared through a latch door and the insidious bleating stabbed the dawn and I searched for the man they spoke of the night before, looking for that single tooth and those eyes, but one worker seemed no different than the others.
While I was trying to locate the forewarned-about shearer, I was yanked by the back of my wool and thrown through one of those latch doors and when my eyes adjusted to the dim, dank room I saw a dozen Old Man Rashids, some with the heads of the horrified lambs in a strangle-hold, others with heads pinned between the shearer’s knees, but all the lambs had eyes bulging, like jelly, and in the beams of sunlight floated fluffs of the lambs’ wool, reminding me of the summer before when I and my friends blew on the dandelions and we chased their seeds that wandered in the wind before they impregnated the fields. Gawking at my future, I thought of my promise to myself of the night before: that I would not cry, no matter how terrible it all was. But at that moment, my kept promise had nothing at all to do with bravery, or even the honor of keeping one’s promise, but rather, it was fear itself that strangled my bawling deep in my gullet.
In the Cemetery of the Orange Trees Page 9