I am the anti-Noah. My ark—this zoo—is a death ship.
Hassan and I are at the back end of the zoo, the petting area, gathering the last of the animals. We have just lifted one of the sheep into the wheelbarrow, doing so with great care so that we do not get burned. Embedded in several of the animals, we have found flakes of phosphorus in their wool and fur. A soft bleat comes from the far end of the petting zoo. The both of us turn at the same time; the sound of life has frozen us. We leave behind the wheelbarrow and follow the bleating. Sidled against a tree, a small goat, perhaps two months old.
“Take the wheelbarrow back and I will follow you with the goat.”
With care I lift the goat and cradle him in my arms, but he begins to flail in pain. I place him back on the ground and look for where he is hurt. I find the lower parts of both rear legs to be injured, along with numerous shrapnel wounds.
“I know this is going to hurt, my little friend, but only for a second until I get you on my back,” I whisper into its twitching ear.
The bleats are high-pitched, but once I have secured the goat onto my back, it begins to calm down. I walk with care, but as quickly as I can. Impossible not to think of my grandfather, Ghassan, six decades ago.
I place the goat on the operating table and pull the light cord, but, of course, there is no light. I know this, but still pull the cord twice more.
“Shafiq.”
I look up and see Hassan framed in the doorframe.
“There is no light,” I say to him. “The goat is not strong enough. Without removing the shrapnel, he will certainly die.”
Hassan studies the room and then the goat.
“Perhaps there is a way,” he says, rushing out of the building.
I remain behind, trying to calm the shivering goat. I turn to the sound of the screeching wheel of the wheelbarrow. Hassan pushes it into the clinic. One of the dead sheep is inside. Coming from the wool, a soft tongue of flame.
“What are you doing?”
“I think the sheep can provide us with enough light to operate on the goat. But we must be fast.”
“We can’t do this.”
“We must, Shafiq. What better homage to life than for the dead to extend the life of another?”
Hassan settles the wheelbarrow next to the operating table. A cone of light rises from the sheep. Hassan goes to the corner and hauls over a large mirror, bracing it against the wall opposite the wheelbarrow. Now, twin tongues toggle the room. I grab the pliers and begin to remove the larger pieces of the shrapnel. Clink, clink, they drop onto the metal table. Hassan holds the goat. The fire from the sheep grows and with it so too does the smell of garlic, the telltale sign of white phosphorus. I feel through the goat’s fur, locating the shrapnel and then removing it. I reach for the bottle of rubbing alcohol and drop it onto the floor. I look down at it, not bending to pick it up, but brace my hands against the table. I begin to shake and the shaking leads to sobbing and the sobbing to Hassan grabbing me by the left arm while steadying the goat with his right.
“What is it, Shafiq?”
“I can’t go on.”
“But you’re almost done and the goat will live.”
“No, Hassan. This place; I can’t go on in this place. It’s killing me, if I am not already dead. There is nothing left of me. When I look into a mirror, I see a dead man.”
“It’s a bad time, Shafiq. Only a bad time and it will pass.”
“And then what? What happens when this bad time passes?”
Hassan looks into the mirror and the fire of the slowly burning sheep wriggles in its reflection.
“I need to escape the prison of my sorrow, Hassan.”
Staring into the growing flame, I hear, not the goat with life, but the sheep in its death. I try hard, but cannot make out what it is saying. The greenish flame pecks at our faces in the mirror, mesmerizing me. A peacefulness hovers over the room. Nothing moves. The slightest of breaths cannot be heard. For a minute, I almost feel alive, but then a burst of light, and the fire erupts, devouring the both of us in the mirror.
Two soldiers smash into the clinic. They look at the burning sheep and then at me and the goat. When their guns are aimed at us, both Hassan and I raise our hands high. The goat scrabbles on the metal table and finds enough footing to leap onto the floor and dart between the soldier’s legs and out the door. One of the soldiers turns and runs out, takes aim and fires.
“Run, my little friend!” I shout. “Run!”
The frantic clopping of the tiny hooves become distant until no more. A smile finds its way to my face.
We are led at gunpoint out of the clinic and down the northern street of the zoo.
The garlic-like odor remains clotted in my nostrils. I want to ask Hassan if he also smells it or is it my imagination. I have enough sense not to talk. We pass several of the coffin-like cages. I cannot bring myself to look into them again.
“Stop there.”
My arms are still raised and I do not turn around to face the voice.
“Toss us the keys.”
I do as the soldier demands.
“You, too.”
Hassan does the same.
The soldier points his rifle first at the both of us and then to the cage which once housed the lion. Again, a poke of the rifle toward the cage. We go inside. I think I will never live to have a child; think that now that the zoo has been destroyed I have left nothing of myself in this world; wish that they would take and shoot us on the beach, where, once more I could see the fold of the waves. The slamming of the cage door startles me, thinking it is gunshots.
“This is where you belong.”
The sound of the boots fades. The both of us remain silent and where we stand. Hassan is the first to move and he goes over to the door and rattles it, but it is locked. He points to the back wall of the cage. Painted on the wall, in the language of the soldiers, two simple words, a syllable each. You Lost. I manage to move my legs the five steps to the rocks and large tree stump. I remember the day that we hauled all of this inside the lion cage. There was so much excitement—true joy—that in a week’s time the first lion in Gaza would arrive. And it did and was the most popular of all the animals in the zoo. Even more than the monkeys. Some days I would just stand outside the cage and watch the eyes of both the children and adults. This is what I intended when a group of us came up with the idea for the zoo six years ago. Ironic, I had always thought, how we find so much joy in seeing the animals in their cages. I close my eyes fantasizing of the rebirth of our once-fierce lion, a lion that once again had all its teeth and claws and heroism and it jumped out from behind the rocks, past Hassan and I, and, with a few vicious swats with its paws, he strikes the soldiers one by one by one.
But now, of course, the irony only grows; the zookeeper, the anti-Noah, locked inside a cage. I hear a distant baaaah of a sheep.
“Shut up.”
“What?” Hassan asks.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to speak aloud. I was only telling the sheep to shut up.”
Again, another baaaah.
A single gunshot blisters the Gaza night.
It is May, late into a Gaza night. During the day, any signs of spring have been strangled by the heat, but now, at this hour, with the wooden shutters open, the American can savor the caress of the cool sea air. Usually on nights such as this, when the wind comes in from the west, the American can hear the distant chant of the sea.
But on this night, as on so many nights, it is the sound of the footsteps of Bassam that he hears; at first, when he wakes, he thinks it is part of his dream, but then remembers that his friend is spending the night in the small apartment the American stays in when traveling to the more distant camps in the south.
He thought Bassam would like to stay a night or two away from Jabaliya, but he has been anxious the entire day, and now, his pacing brings the American out of his bedroom.
Bassam is in the kitchen making Turkish coffee.
“Coul
dn’t sleep?”
“I am not used to being away from the camp. You want some coffee?”
“A little. When was the last time you spent a night away from Jabaliya?”
“Other than when I was in prison, never.”
The American watches Bassam lift the coffee pot from the stove after its first boil. When the coffee settles, he places it back above the fire until the foam rises a second time. Bassam turns off the stove and sets the pot on the counter.
“Why don’t you stay in Jabaliya?”
“You mean extend my stay?”
“No, stay.”
While Bassam is pouring the coffee, the American rests his hand on his friend’s shoulder.
“After visiting my family, I am going to Sudan.”
“Why Sudan?”
“Do you remember when we were playing backgammon and the boy with the bird approached us?”
“Of course, but what does that have to do with you not staying?”
“I can’t really explain all this, but it was that night that I knew for certain that telling your people’s story, and others like it, that there is no greater way to live my life.”
“Ironic, isn’t it? How so many people who are free are trying to escape home, while others, who can’t go back, are dying to return.”
On his final night in Jabaliya, the American goes to watch a soccer match between two teams from the camp. The players do not wear uniforms; one team plays with shirts on, the other shirtless. The match is physical, tackles are aggressive, harsh words are shouted back and forth. Shafiq and the American sit on the side of a hill, saying little. At the end of the match, a fight breaks out between several players and soon spreads to others. The American asks what they are fighting about.
“A couple of the players on the other team are accused of being collaborators with the army. Come on, we need to hurry home.”
There is almost nothing said on the way to block number four. The American and Shafiq hug.
“I will see you later tonight at the farewell party.”
Again, they hug. Shafiq walks into the alley heading into block number five. The American waits for him to turn around. First, Shafiq’s hands and feet fade, then the back of his head. The American continues to watch until Shafiq’s white robe also disappears, leaving nothing but darkness.
In these the final hours of his months in Jabaliya, the grandmother, Fatima, hands him a metal tub, saying that she cannot send him back across the continent, across the ocean, and to his mother, without being clean. He takes the large metal tub, places it on the rutted cement floor of the shower and stands under the trickle of lukewarm water.
While taking his shower, he thinks of what his friend, Shafiq, has told him, just a few days before: that when he returns to his country, his family and friends would no longer recognize him. This will be the indelible scar that Jabaliya will leave behind.
Drying himself with the threadbare towel, less than five hours before the taxi will pick him up and take him to the airport, he realizes the truth of those words.
Although he promised that he would stop and say goodbye, Shafiq does not come to the farewell dinner. Instead, he climbs a ladder onto the roof of one of the houses and watches the American standing on School Street, alone, in the final minutes before the call to prayer, the last minutes of his final curfew.
He watches the American’s silhouette emerge and the silhouettes of those walking up and down School Street to say their goodbyes. There are handshakes and hugs, even the grandmother, Fatima, embraces him, and tears are coming from the tough young boys who, in a few hours, on their way to school and back, will fight the gun-toting soldiers with stones and Molotov cocktails.
The taxi arrives, trailed by the thigh-high dust of mid-summer. He throws his backpack into the trunk and there are final embraces before the taxi pulls away. Staring out the back window, he looks down the street and then up at the roof that his friend is on. Shafiq gives him a sad wave of the hand, but cannot tell if the American returns the wave, leaving him, for the remainder of his life, wondering whether he has been seen or, perhaps, has been mistaken for a large piece of firewood or a water tank or even a talking goat.
As Far As One Can Go
With the engine idling, and his long-time driver smoking inside the car, the last veterinarian in Jabaliya rests his foot on the back bumper, studying dawn in the only place he has ever known. He thinks of his wife inside the house, certain that she is doing the same, trying to sear into her eyes the smallest of details, those we see all our lives, but never seem to remember.
Forty minutes remain before the call to prayers will rattle the Gaza Strip, by which time the veterinarian hopes to be through the city and heading south. He knows that the longer they wait the more difficult this day will be; still, surprising himself, he tempers the urge to hurry his wife. The veterinarian is quite comfortable here with the feel of the bumper against his foot and the morning calm and the slow vanquishing of the stars. Besides, he cannot yell out for his wife to hurry for he would risk waking someone and this day must be kept a secret. In fact, it was only two nights ago that he told his wife the news. As he went to kiss her good night he whispered it, as one would whisper words of passion to a lover, words that you wanted no one else to hear. She showed no real emotion at first; it was something that they had talked about in the past, although briefly, but then suddenly she had started to cry and he held her tightly, as much to muffle her tears as to comfort her.
And it was only last night, six or seven hours ago, that he texted his long-time driver, Hassan, telling him that he needed to go somewhere very early the next morning. From the corner of his eye the veterinarian catches the comet-like glow of the driver’s cigarette, which he has flung out the window of the car. He watches until it disappears.
How things come full circle, he thinks.
It was in this exact place, nearly four decades ago, as a young boy, that the veterinarian stood in the bathroom and saw, through the window, six feet above his head, a trail of red racing by and then vanishing. Two seconds at most. At first, he thought it was a flare shot by the army. He said nothing that night, but several more times that week it happened again, nearly at the same time, just before eight o’clock. The boy dismissed the idea that it was a flare and he thought, hoped was more accurate, that it was a red star cutting across the sky. On the sixth night, he waited for his grandfather to come inside and the boy told him what he had seen. His grandfather gave the boy a sad-eyed smile and said nothing to him of how, each night, he flipped a finished cigarette into the air and it was this that the boy saw. Then, the boy’s grandfather bolted the door and shuttered the windows, including the bathroom, hoping to confine curfew out in the streets.
The driver stares at the cigarette somersaulting through the air until the sparks cough against the street and slowly suffocate. The early hour is not a surprise, for he has been called many times, and with much less notice, but the fact that the vet’s wife will be coming along—that is unusual. He can recall a handful of times, in all these years, that the both of them were together in the car.
When the vet removes his foot from the bumper, the driver waits for the door to open. Only once did he ever get out of the car and open the door for him. It was that first day, more than a decade ago, and the vet said nothing to the driver, holding open the back door of the white, early-model Peugeot until they were both inside, and in the rear view mirror their eyes met and the vet spoke these simple words:
“Only when I am too old to open the door myself, only then should you do so for me.”
Now he waits and wonders where he will be taking the two of them, for there are not all that many possibilities, at this time of day, or anytime really, here in the Gaza Strip.
The day she woke with morning sickness, twelve weeks before, Ahlam noticed for the first time the hairline crack in the bottom of her favorite pan. She studies it now and is tempted to take it with her, but her husband warned her to leave e
verything in the house untouched—carry them only in the suitcase of memories were his exact words. She imagines cooking in another pan, the weight of it, the feel of its handle in her grip as she coaxes the eggs or potatoes or beans. More to the touch, than sight, the crack can be seen.
She flattens her palm against the pan and keeps it there until the soft squeal of the car door nudges her from the kitchen. She stops and inhales a deep pull of the house, holds it in her lungs for as long as possible, then turns back to the kitchen and grabs her favorite wooden spoon, her grandmother’s wooden spoon, and tucks it inside her dress, next to the large metal key from their house, a house she has only heard stories of, where this same grandmother was born all those years before.
They are halfway through the camp before the veterinarian tells the driver to take the coastal road and another few minutes will pass before he speaks again.
“Do you know the temperature of the sea this time of year, Hassan?”
The driver glances at the veterinarian, staring out at the black sea, hems of white the only thing that tells you it is there, that and the knowledge that it has always been there.
“I’m not sure. Sometimes, as a child, I would go with my family and we would swim there. I don’t ever remember it being all that cold. That was in summer though, not the end of September.”
In the Cemetery of the Orange Trees Page 14