At home on this night the driver goes to the back of the house, in the unsettled darkness, and he brings out the ladder that reaches the top of the twelve-foot-high wall. He can’t recall the last time he used the ladder, but the memory of the long, jagged scar etched into his brother’s back is vivid after all the years. He recalls his brother’s feet disappearing through the foot-high gap between the top of the wall and the corrugated roof as the soldiers broke down the front door. Eighteen months later, he saw his brother again, the six-inch scar worming along his back, and he touched it and he remembers it feeling as though something were alive in there.
Now he rests his arms on the wall and his head atop them. He listens to something scuttling across one of the nearby rooftops, a mouse perhaps, more than likely a cat, and nearby there is the hum of a television. A man passes through the alleyway below and the driver wonders whether he can be seen up here. The footsteps of the man fade and someone has turned off the television and there is not much more for his ears.
The wooden ladder creaks as he adjusts his feet. He looks down into the two rooms of his house and they seem different from up here—bigger, yet at the same time, shrunken. Maybe it is the lack of light, but probably it has more to do with the perspective. He will leave the ladder where it is and tomorrow, with the light of the sun, will climb it once again to see the house anew.
A pang of loneliness inundates him, catching him off balance. Still staring at the inside of his barren house, the driver thinks of his brother and how, after being released from prison he left Jabaliya for Kuwait, leaving him with a dying father and no one else. But then he was hired by the vet, giving his days a purpose for the next dozen years and he was able to ignore the mundaneness of his life, the vice-like grip of this place, the contemptuous voices when you come upon the sea or the vengeful land borders north, east and south. You can go no further, the words spit into your face.
And it is this, he thinks, these words that drive our young to kill themselves while killing others; this that serves as our shovels to burrow the tunnels; this that brings us to all fours, crawling for hours in the hopes of finding a place where we can go further. Isn’t this what we all want and need and strive for: to be able to go a little further? And when there is no hope to do so, isn’t this when we are at our most vulnerable?
The driver turns his head back to the opening between the roof and the wall. He listens some more to the night sounds in Jabaliya and he thinks he can hear the inhales and exhales of the sea. He doubts that this could be true from such a distance, but forces himself to think otherwise, to believe that this is what he hears.
Leaving the ladder against the wall the driver gets into the car and goes down School Street. As he approaches the giant willow, he shuts off the engine and allows the gravity of the street to take him to the market. He restarts the engine and passes the Martyrs’ Cemetery, the newest and largest resting place in Jabaliya. He comes upon the coastal road and drives south, then turns abruptly and stops with the car facing the beach and the sea.
The driver finds a cool place on the steering wheel, a place where his hands haven’t warmed it, and he rests his head and it feels good. Taking his foot off the brake, he presses the pedal to the floor and the car lunges onto the beach and over the bumps of the uneven sand. He shuts off the headlights and only the pinpricks of light from the fishing boats—the galaxy of the sea—can be seen. When the car hits the tide-wet sand and the water, it stalls and the driver is thrown against the steering wheel. He sits there calmly and hears a wave crashing and feels it bump against the car and rush past the wheels and then tug the car as it reverses its course.
This is as far as you can go, he thinks.
He opens the door and steps into the cold ankle-high water and is surprised that the sea can hold such a chill. Reaching back into the car, he searches for the flashlight under the seat, finds and switches it on. The dim path of the light guides him and he doubts that the batteries will hold out until sunrise. He takes his time scanning the beach, looking for any hint of the veterinarian and his wife. He comes across several shells, a water bottle, a splinter of wood, the remains of a half-eaten fish.
He continues on until the flashlight flickers and blinks and finally goes blind. He bangs it against his thigh, but it isn’t resuscitated. Seeing the ghost of the car down the beach, he thinks of waiting in it until the sun comes up and the fishermen return and they can help him push it out. Although he is cold, the driver walks away from the damp sand to where it is drier and he sits there and looks up at the stars and wonders what they look like from across the sea or over the desert or from anywhere other than here.
Out on the sea the lights of a fishing boat grow larger and this reminds the driver of the Japanese vessel that drifted across the ocean. Nearly a year it took. And as he has done every day since hearing this story, the driver thinks of the veterinarian and his wife and wonders how long it will take for any hint of them to wash upon this ancient shore. How long, he wonders, for a sandal or a suitcase carrying only memories or a key that no longer has a house to unlock?
The American continues to wander, to gather stories: to Egypt and Sudan; Japan and North Korea and China; to many cities in his own country.
Sometimes, when alone on a secluded beach or on a mountain before dawn or in bed at night, he thinks of his bundle of stories, the need to tell them, and how they have become enmeshed with his, to where now there is no longer a border dividing them.
But there is this one, a moment he will carry with him to the grave.
He is sitting in the chaos of Gaza City, not far from the place where he first arrived ten weeks before. It is an April day and he wishes it would rain, but knows that he will have left Gaza long before it ever does again. This thought, leaving, both excites and saddens him. It is a rare person in Gaza that can even dream of this. And maybe this is not even possible; can one dream of something that they cannot even fathom? And here he sits, pining about a few months.
He is taking a break from many hours of walking. A soldier on patrol looks at him, he at the soldier, both framed by a fruit vendor’s stall. The shutters of shops rattle, unraveling to the ground as merchants close for the afternoon general strike. He has another hour to go to Jabaliya and he tries coaxing himself up off his backpack on which he sits.
Looking up, and through the madness of the city, the American sees a young girl, wearing a white headscarf, walking over to him. Shyly she smiles and hands him a bottle of Gaza 7-UP. He thanks her, holding up his hand for her to wait. Digging into his backpack, he finds a small doll, which he gives to the girl. Many times over the years, he thinks of this moment and knows that the young girl, now a woman, still has with her, the doll, and, he, the story.
Books from Etruscan Press
Zarathustra Must Die | Dorian Alexander
The Disappearance of Seth | Kazim Ali
Drift Ice | Jennifer Atkinson
Crow Man | Tom Bailey
Coronology | Claire Bateman
What We Ask of Flesh | Remica L. Bingham
The Greatest Jewish-American Lover in Hungarian History | Michael Blumenthal
No Hurry | Michael Blumenthal
Choir of the Wells | Bruce Bond
Cinder | Bruce Bond
The Other Sky | Bruce Bond and Aron Wiesenfeld
Peal | Bruce Bond
Poems and Their Making: A Conversation | Moderated by Philip Brady
Crave: Sojourn of a Hungry Soul | Laurie Jean Cannady
Toucans in the Arctic | Scott Coffel
Body of a Dancer | Renée E. D’Aoust
Scything Grace | Sean Thomas Dougherty
Areas of Fog | Will Dowd
Surrendering Oz | Bonnie Friedman
Nahoonkara | Peter Grandbois
The Candle: Poems of Our 20th Century Holocausts | William Heyen
The Confessions of Doc Williams & Other Poems | William Heyen
The Football Corporations | William Heyen
A Poetics of Hiroshima | William Heyen
Shoah Train | William Heyen
September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond | Edited by William Heyen
American Anger: An Evidentiary | H. L. Hix
As Easy As Lying | H. L. Hix
As Much As, If Not More Than | H. L. Hix
Chromatic | H. L. Hix
First Fire, Then Birds | H. L. Hix
God Bless | H. L. Hix
I’m Here to Learn to Dream in Your Language | H. L. Hix
Incident Light | H. L. Hix
Legible Heavens | H. L. Hix
Lines of Inquiry | H. L. Hix
Rain Inscription | H. L. Hix
Shadows of Houses | H. L. Hix
Wild and Whirling Words: A Poetic Conversation | Moderated by H. L. Hix
All The Difference | Patricia Horvath
Art Into Life | Frederick R. Karl
Free Concert: New and Selected Poems | Milton Kessler
Who’s Afraid of Helen of Troy: An Essay on Love | David Lazar
Parallel Lives | Michael Lind
The Burning House | Paul Lisicky
Quick Kills | Lynn Lurie
Synergos | Roberto Manzano
The Gambler’s Nephew | Jack Matthews
The Subtle Bodies | James McCorkle
An Archaeology of Yearning | Bruce Mills
Arcadia Road: A Trilogy | Thorpe Moeckel
Venison | Thorpe Moeckel
So Late, So Soon | Carol Moldaw
The Widening | Carol Moldaw
Cannot Stay: Essays on Travel | Kevin Oderman
White Vespa | Kevin Oderman
Mr. Either/Or | Aaron Poochigian
The Dog Looks Happy Upside Down | Meg Pokrass
The Shyster’s Daughter | Paula Priamos
Help Wanted: Female | Sara Pritchard
American Amnesiac | Diane Raptosh
Human Directional | Diane Raptosh
Saint Joe’s Passion | JD Schraffenberger
Lies Will Take You Somewhere | Sheila Schwartz
Fast Animal | Tim Seibles
One Turn Around the Sun | Tim Seibles
A Heaven Wrought of Iron: Poems From the Odyssey | D. M. Spitzer
American Fugue | Alexis Stamatis
The Casanova Chronicles | Myrna Stone
Luz Bones | Myrna Stone
The White Horse: A Colombian Journey | Diane Thiel
The Arsonist’s Song Has Nothing to Do With Fire | Allison Titus
The Fugitive Self | John Wheatcroft
YOU. | Joseph P. Wood
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In the Cemetery of the Orange Trees Page 16