“I have never been in the sea. I have walked along the beach, of course, but never swum in it.”
“We used to go north of Beach Camp and play there, but it was dangerous because of the remains of an old port at the bottom. My Uncle told us that many children hit their heads on the jagged walls while diving.”
The call to prayers starts up in the distance and they listen. The chisel of the morning sun chips away the sea’s black sheet revealing a giant slab of slate. The driver asks the veterinarian if he would like to stop at one of the mosques in the city.
“No, Hassan. Let’s keep going. Wait, stop the car. Stop the car!”
The driver pulls to the side of the road.
“What is it?”
The veterinarian is already out of the car, leaving the door open, and he turns to the driver.
“I just saw the gazelle in that alleyway over there,” he says, pointing to the cluster of buildings on the street opposite the sea.
“Gazelle?”
The veterinarian runs in front of the car and into the alleyway and the driver watches the silhouette until it is lost in the puzzle of the side streets.
The driver asks the veterinarian’s wife if she saw the gazelle.
“There were a couple of goats picking at something along the roadside.”
“Maybe that is what he saw. It is still rather dark.”
“He has been obsessed with that animal ever since the invasion. He has dreams about it sometimes.”
“It was a beautiful animal.”
“I remember when they first brought the gazelle to the zoo; Shafiq slept there for a couple of nights. That was the only time in his life he didn’t sleep in Jabaliya. Tonight, Allah willing, will be the third.”
“Maybe he did see the gazelle,” the driver says, noticing in the mirror that she is holding a wooden spoon.
“Don’t forget that Shafiq’s grandfather believed he once had a goat that could talk.”
Nearly half an hour has passed and her husband has yet to return. And now the driver has gone out looking for him and she is getting restless and wants to stand outside the car, but doesn’t, for she cannot risk being seen. The sun pries through the window, flailing against the back of her head. It has been a couple of weeks since her morning sickness ended, but the sun is curdling her stomach. She rolls down the window, hoping the sea will soothe her, but looking out at the enormity of it, its endless expanse, only adds to her anxiety.
She feels as she did two nights ago, when Shafiq told her of what they were about to do and her mind spun and she tried to gather her emotions, although it was impossible. He reached down and touched her stomach and left his hand there and spoke of the baby and how others had done what they were about to do. Everything, at that moment, began to slow down and somehow seemed alright. But then he started up about not telling anyone, not even their families or best friends. No one. Leave without a word. That is when she started to cry and strike her fists into her husband’s back, which he allowed her to do. And she cried. And fell asleep. And she woke with fists clenched and twenty-four hours to strangle an acidic secret.
But now those hours have passed and it is the present and her mother and uncles and nieces and brothers are waking to a day, another day, no different, they believe, than the normal dullness of the unchanging hours of the stultifying tick-tock of Jabaliya. And soon they would be expecting her for lunch and when she doesn’t show, someone would go to the house and look in on her and the door will be open, for she left it that way, and everything will be the same as always, except, of course, she would not be there.
The car has become a tomb and she opens the door and walks around to the front driver’s seat and sits behind the wheel for the first time in her life. She presses the horn and it screams, startling her, but she doesn’t let up, and the longer she presses the more she feels that she will be heard.
The veterinarian reaches the car first, but there are already several vehicles pulled off the roadside, checking on the chaos. Some of the people are out of the cars and standing there yelling for the woman to stop blaring the horn.
The veterinarian pushes past the crowd.
“Everything is okay. It is my wife. Thank you for stopping to help.”
They look at him, and although backing up a few steps, no one leaves. He doesn’t recognize any of them and for that he is thankful. He tries the door and it is locked; he goes around the car and the other doors are as well. Tapping on the front window doesn’t get her attention. Her head rests against the steering wheel, both hands pressing the horn. He begins pounding on the window, but still the horn drones. In the reflection, he sees that more people have gathered, but he also sees and hears his driver.
“Go on, get out of here. There’s nothing of interest to any of you. Get out!”
As before, the onlookers back away, however, most remain.
“What’s happening, Shafiq?” he asks in a low voice.
“She has locked herself in the car.”
The driver hands Shafiq the keys and approaches the crowd.
“Why don’t you all show some respect and leave the man alone?”
The driver stares at them, one by one, until they slip into their cars or get back to their walks along the beach, but then, suddenly, a hush, a loud hush, pummels the morning. Those who have begun driving away, the others that have their feet once again digging into the sand, all turn back in the direction of the quiet and see the woman out of the car in the embrace of her husband and they look and pause and wonder what it was all about. Then they move along, as does the day, and in a short while so too do the driver, the veterinarian, and his wife get back into the car and continue in the direction of south.
They drive with the city on their left, the sea to their right, and of course the sea will go on forever whereas the city will soon be past them.
“Did you find your gazelle?” she asks with a chill in her voice.
“No, it must have gotten away.”
“I didn’t know that goats were so elusive.”
“I, of all people, don’t you think, would know the difference between a goat and a gazelle?”
“Where are we going, Shafiq?” asks the driver.
“South, until we can go no further.”
In the early months of the Gaza Zoo, sometimes two or three times a week, the veterinarian and the driver would make this trip to the border. There they would pick up animals that were brought through the tunnels; smaller animals mostly—birds and lambs and, once, even a monkey. Since these animals usually were not drugged for the harrowing half-mile journey beneath the border, they were often in a panic when in the car. Once, a monkey reached through the cage in the back seat and grabbed a hold of the driver’s ear, nearly causing a crash.
“What are you laughing about, Hassan?” the veterinarian asks.
“I was just thinking of our adventure with the monkey.”
The veterinarian smiles a soft smile of recall. He removes his glasses and rubs his eyes and plows his hand through his thick, gray-speckled hair.
“This is a difficult place to live.”
The driver says nothing as he studies the veterinarian gazing out the window as he speaks.
“I have never seen an animal in the wild, Hassan. Imagine that; me, a veterinarian.”
Up ahead, the buildings of the border camp and town of Rafah come into view. The driver begins to slow.
“Please don’t slow down, Hassan.”
“Sorry, Shafiq.”
“The sooner we get there, the better. But, thank you.”
“There is no need to explain or to thank me.”
“It’s so damn difficult to breathe in this place. People should not have to struggle just to breathe, Hassan. I owe my child something better. Even if I die trying.”
They pass to the east of the most southerly of the eight refugee camps in Gaza and even though the mid-morning sun is hot and uncomfortable, they keep the windows up for the dust is nearl
y roof-high.
Everything has been arranged beforehand, and within minutes the three of them are at the mouth of one of the tunnels. First, the veterinarian’s wife goes down the fifteen steps of the ladder before yelling that she has made it. The two men hug. The veterinarian is a few steps down the ladder, his head even with the top rung, and he looks up and tells the driver that the car is his and asks him to wait until tomorrow to let his family know where they have gone.
With that the veterinarian goes, rung after rung, into the throat of the tunnel. The driver leans over the hole, trying to get one last look at his friend, but his head blocks the noon-high sun, rendering the hole bottomless.
The afternoon dissolves with the driver sitting in the car, twenty yards from the tunnel. When night slams the shutters on the day, the driver turns on the low-beams and angles the car so that they cast their light on the white tarp that now covers the entrance.
Struggling to keep awake, the driver finally succumbs to sleep. Soon, there comes a knock on the window. Startled, the driver wakes and he is overwhelmed by a rush of joy and a few seconds pass before he recognizes that it is not Shafiq standing there, but one of the tunnel workers.
The man is saying something, but the driver cannot understand, then he rolls down the window and hears the last of the man’s words.
“… made it.”
“What’s that?”
“They have made it through the tunnel and to Egypt.”
Still he stays the night at the border, turning off the lights of the car, sitting atop the hood, which has retained, for a short while, the warmth from the engine. A man brings him some coffee and they talk.
“Are many people smuggled through the tunnels?”
“Not many. First, you need a contact on the other side, or enough bribe money, or both. And the people have to go through one of the smaller tunnels, which is dangerous and not at all easy.”
“Did it really take them all this time to go less than half a mile?”
“You try crawling that far in a tunnel, with panic sucking from you what little air there is. And your friends, their journey has just started.”
“Do you know Shafiq?”
“I know of him because of the animals that came through here.”
“We are no different than them,” the driver says.
The man looks as if he will say something, but the words are clotted in his throat, and he stabs the ground repeatedly with the toe of his shoe, as if the words were somehow entombed there.
Literally days after the four decades of occupation ended, second floors began to sprout atop the sixty-year-old cement block houses in Jabaliya, something that was illegal under the military. Everything that cluttered the roofs had to be removed before the new floor was added. No longer are the military watchtowers the highest structures in the camp—they were the first to go. Now there are towers all along the border, two miles away, but from here one cannot see them, unless you are trying to. Walls, still graffiti-stained, now speak in tongues of sparing factions, rather than against the occupation.
Through the remainder of September and well into October, as the driver goes about Jabaliya looking for passengers, he takes in all these things. Why haven’t I noticed these changes, he wonders.
Business is slow. During the first weeks he drove up and down and across the streets of Jabaliya, sometimes he sat outside the market, but passengers were a rarity and when he did find one, he often knew them and refused the coin they offered, settling for an apple or a couple of falafel as payment. As of late he goes to the city, where business is a little better, but still the days are long and monotonous.
At times, the passengers complain of the odor of animals, something he no longer notices, but is certain it is present. He thinks of the animals that he and the veterinarian brought in the back seat of the car and it wasn’t only their behavior that told of their distress, but also the smell of it. Some passengers refuse to ride in his car and they look for another taxi, and with them he doesn’t haggle. Sometimes he even opens the back door and thanks them when they get out.
More and more, as of late, the driver leaves the house early in the morning and takes the coastal road and pulls off to the side and walks the streets looking for the elusive gazelle. Other days, he will stand, leaning against the car, gauging the mood of the sea. A sea that acts more like winter, rough and dark and brooding, than an October sea.
The driver finds it interesting that whenever he is any way in contact with his car, be it, as he is now, leaning against the hood, or sitting inside it or while driving through Gaza, that he is constantly nagged by thoughts of the lack of business. Each person that passes his car seems to mock him and it becomes too much and he goes inside the shop across the street and orders a coffee and waterpipe. He sits alone in the back corner, enjoying the low light and the pleasant murmur of conversations, and, most of all, the break from the pestering voice inside his head.
On his way out of the shop, the conversation of several fishermen stops him. They are talking of a boat that left Tripoli, hauling refugees. The driver lingers, hoping to hear more, afraid to hear more, but the conversation shifts as the tides do each day and the driver heads to his car, sitting there empty as usual.
To learn of the rumors and the news and the innuendos of the sea, one must go no further than the fishermen who take from it. The driver parks his car in the early morning and walks along the beach, where the fishing boats soak in the sun after their long nights in the water. One morning, he sees one of the fishermen from that afternoon a couple of days before in the teahouse. He recognizes the man by the missing right earlobe. With his toes entwined in the green fishing net, the fisherman speaks without looking up.
“I could feel the death in the sea that morning, could smell it in the nets and taste it in the fish.”
The fisherman takes the silence of the driver as disbelief.
“The sea is my mother, my wife, my children. One just knows when there is death in the family.”
This time he looks up from the net and the driver turns his head toward the coastal road.
“Do you know someone who may have been taken by the sea?”
“I am not sure.”
“But it is possible?”
“Yes. It is very possible.”
Most days, he sees the same fisherman and they talk. On a crisp morning that spoke in the voice of the encroaching winter, the driver has to help the fisherman up from the sand.
“Let me give you a ride home.”
“No. I am fine once I get moving. It’s this damn weather that stiffens my back.”
“My car’s right there. It’s not a problem.”
The driver goes to open the door for the fisherman, but hesitates when he is slapped by the memory of the veterinarian. They both stand there, the driver with his hand on the door handle.
“You okay?” asks the fisherman.
“I was just thinking about an old friend of mine.”
“Does this happen to be the friend that you are worried about?”
“Yes. I was his driver for many years.”
“And was he on the boat from Tripoli?”
“He and his wife may have been. They left Gaza in September.”
“Were they trying to go to Italy?”
“I’m not sure, but the morning I drove them to the border, he asked me of the temperature of the sea, which I found strange. Now, I think, that is why he was asking.”
The fisherman digs at his fingernails with a hook and asks: “Have you ever seen the desert cry?”
The driver starts the car.
“Is such a thing even possible?”
They sit there and the engine idles and the dark sea bows and crashes and sprints until it can go no further, then it races in retreat and joins the chorus of the water as it has done for so very long, before a single person was even here to witness it.
What the fisherman says is astonishing.
Nearly a year after the t
sunami slammed Japan, a large Japanese fishing tanker has been found drifting near the west coast of Canada, more than four thousand miles away.
“Did the sea tell you this?” he asks.
“No, our sea only tells of its stories. This is a story from an ocean. I read about it on the Internet.”
The driver laughs after hearing this even more astounding news.
“The Internet?”
“Yes, I get stories of the other seas at the internet café on Salah al-Din Street.”
Both men laugh and it feels good and neither of them questions it, nor do they dare delve into the bleakness of the last time they have done so.
Some days the driver goes to the beach later in the morning after his friend, the fisherman, has gone home to sleep. Rarely, but every once in a while, when an unexpected warmth enters him, he will allow himself to imagine, while scouring the beach, that the vet and his wife and now a child are in some old city on the continent across the great sea, and they are watching their child wander and play in the streets made of cobblestone. Or maybe the driver will close his eyes, never walking a step further for fear of missing something important in the flotsam, and he will let his mind roam, seeing the vet working in a small clinic, taking care of the pets—the cats and dogs and hamsters—of the people in a village where the borders are simply crossed. Possibly, the vet works in the one of the zoos, but somehow the driver doubts this.
But these moments, these afternoons of the imagination, are the exception.
Nearly every day, hours before the fishermen begin to congregate along the sand, before they launch their boats into the water, the driver walks the beach, tense like on those distant nights when, as a teen, he used to go out with his friends into the camp and paint anti-occupation slogans on the walls—this is the tension that burdens him when out here walking. He returns home on these days, debilitated, not physically so much as mentally, for his concentration has been so acute.
In the Cemetery of the Orange Trees Page 15