But mostly we didn’t speak much, especially in the first few days of his return. You are everything, Nahr filled all the rooms and the silence echoed with those words when we were together.
The first morning after his return, I arrived just as one of his aunts was making coffee. “Good morning, daughter!” she said. “I’m glad you’re here early. I have to get home. My grandson is sick. Here, take over the coffee.”
Bilal was sitting on the terrace looking out upon the valley. The Jewish-only settlement jutted on the hill in the distance like a tumor, acres of olive and fruit trees separating us from them. He looked like an old man, with sunken eyes and protruding cheek-bones. His head had been shaved. I approached slowly, not wanting to intrude. “Morning of goodness,” he said, a smile in his eyes.
“Morning of light and jasmine.” I joined him with coffee and a kiss. Now, in the Cube, I conjure those glorious, quiet mornings with Bilal and the morning sun, the land, the threats, and the breeze caressing our faces.
I carried the coffee tray back to the kitchen and prepared a simple breakfast. Bilal made his way inside. The wind hummed from the terrace, rustling the leaves, playing the chimes and merging with the small sounds of our breakfast—the swish of water from the faucet, the whistle of the teakettle, the occasional clank of a plate or knife, the squeak of the oven door, the rhythmic thump of Bilal’s cane as he moved, then the sipping of hot mint tea, the tearing of hot bread. I hadn’t wanted to disturb the symphony of our silence, but Bilal’s voice was a welcome interlude. “Why didn’t you remarry? You could have gotten a divorce for abandonment a long time ago without having to come here.”
I continued to eat, considering my answer.
Moments passed. Finally I said, “I don’t know why. Why didn’t you ever marry?”
“I didn’t want to have anything to lose. Did you want to remarry?”
“No.”
“Did you imagine being unmarried forever?”
“Technically, I’d be a divorcée forever.”
He chuckled. “Smartass. Is that how you saw your future?”
“What are you trying to get at?”
“Nothing in particular. I just want to understand you. I’m wondering if you were happy without a partner.”
“Are you withdrawing your proposal?”
“Technically, I never proposed.”
I didn’t like that he said that, even though I knew he was joking. “According to the whole town, you did,” I said.
“Well, I am honored, and over the moon that we’re getting married.” He grabbed my hand.
“Technically, I never accepted.”
He laughed. “According to the whole town, you did.”
We let the lovely quiet move in again. Then he said, “You don’t mind that I’m …” He hesitated, looking at his own body. “… that I’m like this?”
This was a good opening to broach the conversation we needed to have, but I was afraid. “There’s something I have to tell you,” I began.
“Don’t tell me you’re divorcing me already.”
I smiled awkwardly and spit out the words: “I don’t think I can have sex with you.”
He looked shocked and hurt.
“I mean, not you. Not just you. I don’t know that I can have sex with any man,” I said.
“Do you prefer women?”
“No. I’m just …” I struggled to find the words I had rehearsed. “I don’t know why, Bilal. I’m just damaged.”
His face softened and he pulled me gently toward him. I slipped my arms around his waist and we stayed that way, my head nestled at his neck, the rhythm of his breath lulling me to a sense of home.
“We can be damaged together,” he whispered. “As long as I can hold you like this, I will be a happy man.”
Within mere days of being home, Bilal began to regain weight and color returned to his face. He still found it difficult to walk without a cane.
“How was it to see Mhammad?” he asked me one morning on the terrace.
“I wondered when you were going to bring it up.” I sipped my tea.
“We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
“Well, for starters, it surprised me that some people thought Mhammad was living in Canada. From the whispers in town, I can’t tell if he’s a hero or a traitor.”
“He’s both. And he’s neither,” he said, cryptic language that made me sigh. “I’m not trying to be obscure,” he assured me. “The truth is, I don’t know who or what my brother is.”
“Then finish the rest of the story you told me before I went back to Amman,” I said.
Later that evening, he did.
Mhammad and Bilal had watched their clothes burn in the barrel on that day so many years ago that set the course for all of our lives. The night, tranquil and beautiful, hid their frightened bodies, and belied their shattered futures. The crackle of flames gave no hint of the inferno to come, as Israel would exact vengeance from all Palestinians for the deaths of the two soldiers in the woods.
Bilal hesitated as he spoke, opening and closing his right fist, trying to control its tremor. “The memory of sinking a knife into a man’s neck is embedded in my hand. Even after my body stopped shaking that night, my hand didn’t. It never really stopped.
“Mhammad was calm as we stood over the barrel burning the evidence. He asked for the knife, warned me never to speak of what I had seen in the woods, and demanded that I leave for Jordan first thing the next morning. I assumed all the borders would be closed, but my brother assured me it would be a while before anyone found the bodies.
“That’s how I knew that he and Itamar … I knew they had a plan. That they were working together,” Bilal said. “I went inside our home, showered, and packed.”
Bilal had lain there that night, a young man waiting for the sky to fall, crying, replaying the last few hours in his mind. His brother and the Israeli soldier. Their aggressive lust for each other. The laughter of the other soldiers. The camera. The knife in and out of a man’s neck. He had to leave before his mother awoke.
“I went downstairs around four thirty a.m., feeling my way in the dark, and put my things by the door. Suddenly a small table lamp came on, illuminating my brother in a chair. He must have been there all night. His eyes were weary and dark. I could tell he had been crying and wondered if he saw the same in my face.”
Mhammad handed him a box. In it was a book containing several Polaroid photos embedded in the cover. The camera itself was also in the box. “He told me to find someplace safe to hide them, and to rescue the photos if anything ever were to happen. He didn’t say what. Just that I’d know.”
They were the Polaroids of Mhammad and Itamar together, taken by the laughing Israeli soldiers, which Mhammad had taken from the bloody scene as leverage to keep his family safe. Mhammad and Itamar had cooked up a plan that spared Bilal and his family, landed Mhammad in prison, and earned Itamar a promotion, putting him on track to becoming a high-ranking commander.
“It sounds like Mhammad sacrificed himself to save you and the rest of the family.”
“He did. But he’s not innocent either. Everyone’s hands are bloody and dirty in this place,” Bilal said. He continued, “I stayed in Amman for a few years. Went to college and then worked as a chemist for a plastics company in Kuwait.”
“What? You were in Kuwait?”
“Just for a couple of years.” He swept his arm through the air, indicating the green landscape before us. “Kuwait was all concrete and sand. I hated it. I’ve never been as lonely as I was there, not even when I was in prison.”
“My God! We could have passed each other in the streets,” I said.
To make their story believable, Mhammad had stabbed Itamar superficially in the soft tissue of his abdomen with his own military knife, and had hit him on the head with a rock, just hard enough to leave marks and swelling to prove he was unconscious, unable to go for help. Several hours passed before the soldiers were r
eported missing and a search began. When they reached the woods, a bloody and dazed Itamar emerged an instant hero—but not because he’d survived an attack.
“Only Arab-killers are Israeli heroes,” Bilal said.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
Bilal sucked on a cigarette, the tip lighting up brighter. His right hand trembled.
“Two brothers we knew growing up lived nearby. Haj Ayman’s boys. They were rumored to be collaborators. I don’t think it was true, but they’d been a disgrace to their family, did drugs, went to Israeli bars and had sex with foreign women. Stuff like that. But they weren’t traitors.” He sucked on his cigarette again. “Or maybe they were. I don’t know.”
I waited quietly, remembering the newspaper stories claiming Mhammad had two accomplices found dead at the scene along with the Israeli soldiers.
Bilal looked at me. “Mhammad and Itamar knew Haj Ayman’s boys suspected them of being lovers. Mhammad sacrificed those boys, two Palestinians, for his Jewish lover.”
I was taking it all in, trying to make sense of my brief time with Mhammad, seeing the man I’d married in another light. “Or maybe he did it for you?” I asked.
He exhaled and ran his fingers through the bristles of his graying hair, cupping his temples as if to hold his thoughts in place. “Yes. He was trying to protect me,” he said, tearing up.
“I don’t know how Haj Ayman’s boys came to be at the scene. I guessed that Mhammad or Itamar lured them. Maybe with drugs. I don’t know,” Bilal said. “I don’t want to know. Itamar murdered them there. He staged the scene to support his heroic tale that he shot the Palestinian attackers before passing out from his injuries.”
“Does anyone else know?” I asked.
“No.”
“Not even Ghassan?”
“No.”
“Why me?”
He hesitated and turned back to the landscape. “You should know who you married … and who you’re planning to marry now.”
Something I could not name lodged in my throat. I had no language for such overlapping love, disappointment, disgust, and sympathy.
Their deceit, once planted in the public imagination—like the epic fabrication of a Jewish nation returning to its homeland—had grown into a living, breathing narrative that shaped lives as if it were truth.
Heroes, Palestinian and Israeli, were made from their lies that day. Israel honored its fallen soldiers and decorated Itamar for killing two Palestinians. Haj Ayman could hold his head high in the country now because his sons had chosen the righteous path of resistance and died martyrs. People came to pay their respects and honor his fallen sons. The community’s blessings lessened the pain of watching Israel demolish his home and make of him a homeless old man.
Israel wreaked havoc throughout Palestine and needed a live suspect to show for the massive destruction they inflicted on thousands of innocent Palestinians. The authorities always suspected Bilal, because he’d disappeared overnight and later emerged as a leader in exile. But someone had to pay. The day after Mhammad was tried and sentenced, the military demolished Bilal’s home too.
“I had no idea,” I said.
“This isn’t the house we grew up in,” he said. “When my father died, my paternal uncles took our inheritance. We were just kids. Our mother was illiterate and trusting. She signed some things, or possibly they forged documents. They took as much as they could. But we kept our childhood home, the orchards, and the rest of the land. We couldn’t do much with it. It cost more to hold on to it, but selling was unthinkable. We managed as best we could. My mother’s younger brother, our uncle who lived in Chile with a Chilean wife, sent us money every month to help out. When Israel demolished our house, he deeded his and my mother’s childhood home to her. He had plenty in Chile and wasn’t ever coming back. He just asked us to let his children live there if ever they visited, or, if Palestine was liberated in their lifetime, to let them return if they wanted.”
Mosquitoes were starting to bite. I wanted to go inside, but feared interrupting Bilal. I endured the bugs while we watched the serenity of a tired sun ignite the sky and paint the hillside with a palette of reds, oranges, and yellows. “How did they catch Mhammad?”
“They found a repair-shop receipt with his name on it at the scene. When they arrested him, he denied being there, of course. His precious Tamara didn’t back him up, though. He said he didn’t recognize the Arab, that he only remembered two attackers, but possibly there had been a third. Then Israel tortured some little Palestinian boys into confessing that they had seen Mhammad with Haj Ayman’s boys that day.”
Bilal closed his eyes with a sigh, perhaps remembering his boy-hood when the military had tortured him too.
“I don’t think Mhammad and Itamar ever intended for him to go to prison. All the blame was to fall on Haj Ayman’s boys. But they hadn’t counted on that receipt at the scene.”
By the time the Israeli military found Itamar, the two dead soldiers, and the bodies of Haj Ayman’s boys, Israel had already raided hundreds of Palestinian homes, arrested more than 1,800 Palestinians, mostly young men and boys, and terrorized whole towns looking for them.
“What did he say about why they were in the woods in the first place?” I asked.
“Itamar’s story was that he and the dead soldiers had spotted and followed a Palestinian carrying a rifle. They couldn’t radio for help—their equipment wasn’t working. He claimed someone knocked him out as he and his fellow soldiers were handcuffing the terrorist. When he regained consciousness, the two Palestinian attackers were standing over bleeding soldiers. Then Itamar reached for his gun, like in a goddamned James Bond movie, I guess, and shot them dead. Itamar and Mhammad staged the scene so the evidence supported the testimony he gave to his superiors.”
“How did they miss the receipt if they staged the scene?” I asked.
“I’ve thought about that for years. There are only two explanations. One, they truly didn’t notice it. Two, Itamar planted it. Just like my brother took the Polaroids for leverage, maybe Itamar wanted his own leverage.”
It was getting late. Bilal’s aunts should have arrived by now. As I helped him inside, he turned to me. “You still want to marry me?”
The telephone rang. It was Bilal’s aunts calling to check on him. They couldn’t come to stay because the military had imposed a curfew unexpectedly until 5 a.m. On his side of the conversation, I heard, “Thank you, Auntie. But it is not necessary for you to come anyway. I can take care of myself… . Yes, Auntie… . Thank you, Auntie. She left some time ago. Yes… . Thank you, Auntie. Good night.”
“She wanted to know if I left?”
“How did you guess?”
We laughed. The phone rang again. It was Jumana calling to say that Bilal’s aunts had called her to check on me.
“What did you tell them?”
“I said you were with Bilal, surely committing terrible sin,” Jumana said.
“Okay. Good.”
“See you tomorrow. I hope you commit sin.”
“Really, what did you tell them?”
“I said you had a terrible headache and were already in bed.”
Mosquitoes had left little red welts on my arms. “Wait here.” Bilal hobbled to the kitchen and returned with a saucer of olive oil. “Here,” he said, taking my hand. He dipped his fingers in the oil and rubbed it into my skin. That sweet silence I had come to know in his presence settled around us. When he was done, we lay in each other’s arms and slept.
A TIME FOR US
A LITTLE MORE than four months after Hajjeh Um Mhammad passed away, Bilal and I got married in a memorable fallahi wedding. We had wanted only a small celebration with family and friends. In part, it was all we could afford, but mostly it didn’t seem proper to have a wedding at that time; the Second Intifada was in its second year and Israelis had elected Ariel Sharon, the Butcher of Beirut, as their prime minister, and his brutal legacy was already being felt. But my mother and Bila
l’s aunts would have none of that.
“Exactly the opposite. We show those monsters how we will continue to live and love on our land, no matter what they do to us,” Ghassan said to Bilal.
Mama, Jehad, and Sitti Wasfiyeh made the journey from Jordan. “I agreed to get a visa from the sons of Satan at their godforsaken embassy just for you,” Sitti said. “Your mother tried to make me miss the wedding on account of the doctor claiming my heart is too weak. But my heart feels fine.” Then she turned to Bilal. “Nahr’s mother gets jealous because my son’s children love me more than her. You’re a good man for marrying my granddaughter, even though she was married before and couldn’t keep her husband very long.”
“He already knows, Sitti,” I assured her. “Mhammad is his brother, remember?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” she said. “I forgot.”
She turned again to Bilal. “Nothing is the same without her. I wish we were all still in Kuwait with my son. Or how about if we could all be here forever again?” She wiped tears away with her hijab. Mama consoled her. Sitti was losing her mind and these reveries happened often, Mama had told me.
Mama had been trying to pull me away all day. When I finally had a moment, she made me close my eyes and guided me into the guest bedroom.
“Open your eyes,” she said.
What I saw took my breath away. I flung my arms around my mother’s neck and began sobbing. “Habibti, Mama. May God keep you always. May He extend your life and presence in mine for all our days. This is the best present I have received from anyone, ever. Thank you, Mama.”
Laid out on the bed was a stunning, elegant embroidered wedding thobe, and an equally striking headpiece.
“Come, let’s try it on,” she said. As I moved to pick it up, Mama explained her creation. “I thought a lot about this and decided to use the basic patterns of a Jerusalem thobe, because we’re being erased from her story and her stone,” she said. Even the way she described her embroidery was poetic.
“Ordinarily I would use white silk for this thobe, but I found this gorgeous terra-cotta silk that harkens to Jericho. You see here on the chest piece: this is a collar worn by Canaanite queens. I added these geometric patterns typical of Romi thobes from the Ramallah area to show the olive, almond, and pomegranate trees. On the sides here is the crucifixion from when the Crusaders ruled over us, and here, you see, is the crescent for the return of Jerusalem to Muslim rule since the time of Salah Eddein.”
Against the Loveless World Page 26