Against the Loveless World

by Susan Abulhawa

  “Habibti,” he said. “That Israeli professor used to send me reagents for my lab when I taught chemistry, because we didn’t have the budget at our university. In return, I gave him data to publish under his name from time to time. He’s a total shit, but I can depend on him to get me reagents and compounds without asking questions. Phthalate anhydride is an inert and harmless compound. He has no idea what I’m using it for. But now I have enough to make up a large enough batch of what I need in high concentration.”

  We ate so much ice cream that night we skipped dinner.

  REDEEMING HISTORY

  THE PEOPLE OF Nablus were the first to leave their homes en masse. On Monday, July 29, 2002, the fortieth day of curfew, thousands of young men and women took to the streets, throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. Jenin had inflicted casualties on the Israeli military; Nablus was openly challenging their curfew; and Bethlehem fighters were hunkered down in the Church of the Nativity, refusing to surrender despite a terrible siege around them. Ramallah endured the heaviest military presence, because Yasser Arafat was holed up there in the Palestinian Authority’s headquarters. Each district had its own stories of what was ultimately nearly sixty terrible days of confinement that turned homes and cities into prisons.

  Some younger activists said Bilal and Ghassan “did nothing”—that the leaders they looked up to “hid like rabbits” when needed. Their words hurt Bilal deeply. I suspect he felt no small measure of guilt for not doing more, for passing the hours in the decadence of love instead. He didn’t talk about it, but for a time he was not himself, as if he blamed me. It wasn’t long, though, before he returned to being the man of days past. But these vacillations would become a pattern, a tangible manifestation of the clash inside him, between the fighter who gave his life to national liberation and the husband who simply wanted love and family.

  He worked longer hours in his bathroom laboratory during the two weeks after we received the powdered phthalic anhydride. He made gallons and gallons of other phthalates to pump into the water pipe flowing to the settlement once curfew was lifted.

  When we were finally let out of our home prisons, the statistics were ominous. Hundreds of Palestinians dead, thousands arrested, untold disappeared, thousands more wounded or crippled, hundreds of homes demolished … and on it went. It was hard not to become numb to the violence and those sadistic numbers. I could not exist in a constant state of outrage and mourning, unlike Bilal. He sought out the individual lives, the families left behind.

  “Look at this.” He showed me a Sunday Digest clipping from June 30, 1957, quoting excerpts from a diary at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem. “Read the next to last paragraph,” he said.

  After the massacre of the Arab village or Deir Yaseen, I took fifty babies into our nursing home. As I stood talking to the frightened women and registering the babies, a boy between three and four years of age looked at me and seeing that I was not an Arab gave a shriek and fell in a faint. I hastened to get water to revive him, but he was dead. What horrible sights had he seen to bring on heart failure?

  “Deir Yaseen wasn’t just a massacre, an abstract word with numbers and grainy photos of a long-ago time. To me, Deir Yaseen is this little boy. There are stories like this for every pogrom they committed against us,” he said. Bilal surrounded himself with stories, stacked shelves of them to collect people’s pain and paste it into historic events and political analyses.

  I listened, helped him work out plans, and pumped high concentrations of phthalates into the settlement’s water pipe.

  We monitored Israeli media, searching for relevant news about that particular Israeli colony on Bilal’s land. After five months of pumping phthalates into the pipe, an article appeared in a local Hebrew-language newspaper describing strange symptoms among the residents. Bilal translated that the health ministry was coming under criticism for ignoring their request for an investigation. But officials fired back that the reported symptoms did not raise alarm. “Some men are growing tits. Okay, maybe they go on a diet,” a source from the ministry was quoted as saying. But there were other issues. Women were having difficulty getting pregnant. The source replied that “this happens to people sometimes. They have to keep trying or go to fertility. Plenty of other women there are pregnant.” It was true that there were a few pregnant women. But there was more: asthmatics having frequent flare-ups, new cases of wheezing and other respiratory issues.

  The article was perfect. It gave us warning the authorities would come soon to investigate. We used the next few days to reverse the pump, to siphon and store as much clean water as we could; and when we saw water department trucks ride into the settlement, the pipe had been clear for four days. Nothing would show up if they tested the water. And that’s what happened. The only noteworthy result that came up in their tests was slightly elevated levels of pesticides, which had nothing to do with us. But they weren’t high enough to convincingly be the culprit, according to the article.

  The settlers’ health problems persisted, however, because we went back to sabotaging the pipe when it was safe to do so.

  Another article reflected the authorities’ annoyance with the settlement’s residents. They were newcomers, mostly from the United States, who had been given government subsidies to live on confiscated Palestinian land. Most could barely speak Hebrew, and Israelis saw them as soft and feckless—Jews who had not yet been hardened by the military or the realities of the country.

  “These people hate each other. If they didn’t have us to brutalize, they’d be killing each other,” Bilal said.

  Now Bilal increased the concentrations of phthalates until doctors complained and major media began reporting it. Religious leaders issued authoritative assessments that the area had been cursed. Finally we had our results: settlers were moving out of the colony.

  We stopped pumping phthalates. Vans of scientists tested the water, soil, building materials, roads, houseplants. By coincidence, the colony had been obtaining its produce almost exclusively from a community farm, which had been confiscated from three of Bilal’s uncles and cousins. Unusually high concentrations of pesticides were found in the soil and in urine samples from individuals tested. That was it. They identified the source and remedied the situation by reducing the use of pesticides. Case closed. But the damage was done. No one would buy anything from the farm after that.

  Residents weren’t satisfied with the official report and continued moving out. The farm struggled to sustain itself. News articles reported that some of the residents who remained believed “the Arabs” had cast black-magic spells to curse them. They intended to remain, confident that God was on their side. For them, it was a battle between God and the devil. But the colony was emptying by the day.

  We read it all and celebrated. We also prepared for renewed raids.

  I moved Bilal’s reagents, flasks, and tubes to the underground, taking a few things at a time every day when I went to work at the salon. Jumana didn’t know, because I did it on days when I opened the store, before she arrived. I didn’t like keeping it from her, but I’d learned from Bilal that the less everyone knew in general, the safer we all were.

  The military came, of course. Itamar made it a point to come himself to oversee the ransacking of our home. Bilal and I watched, our arms bound with plastic ties. Itamar spoke to us in Arabic, shadows of weariness tinting his face. “I don’t want to do this, Bilal. But I will get information from you one way or another.”

  “Information on what? You cunts watch us twenty-four/seven. You know when I take a shit.” Bilal pretended indignation.

  Maybe Itamar was pretending too when he squeezed his hand around Bilal’s throat and warned, “You know what we can do. If I have to, I’ll bring your wife in and make you watch my men fuck her one after the other.”

  Bilal held Itamar’s gaze, clearly unable to breathe, his face turning red. When Itamar loosened his grip, Bilal doubled over, coughing, sucking in gulps of air.

  “You ar
e a sick and cruel man from a sick and cruel society,” Bilal said. “You forget I know what rotten garbage you really are.”

  I thought Itamar would beat him, maybe shoot him. But he just stood there, breathing Bilal’s words, staring long into Bilal’s face, a mixture of sorrow, rage, and defeat in his posture.

  “There is nothing here,” he said to his soldiers, ordering them out. When two of them began to pull at Bilal and me, Itamar ordered them to leave us. The soldiers hesitated, confused. Itamar screamed, “Cut their cuffs! Leave them!”

  In 2003, the third year of the Second Intifada, the horrors of Israel’s crackdown incubated whole cities in humiliation and despair. But nine months after those harsh months of curfew, Palestinian babies were popping out of hospitals like popcorn. Most folks had obviously done exactly what Bilal and I had. When you can’t leave the house and there’s little food or water, fucking is all there is. Even as percolating anger and the solidifying plans of the resistance were as sure as the eyes and ears of traitors in our midst, families everywhere distributed sweets in celebration of baby girls and baby boys.

  Ghassan said, “Those stupid motherfuckers are terrified we’ll outnumber them, so what do they do? They imprison everybody at home for months with nothing to do but make babies. And now there are thousands of little demographic threats. It’s damned poetic!”

  Farmers lost their crops, families lost sons and daughters, towns lost electricity and roads, Israel’s jails were packed with young and old, jobs were nowhere to be found, but all those babies brought people together, gave hope and something to do, pushed us to visit each other, to eat together, live again, and plot the next moves of an unrelenting national liberation struggle.

  My period was three weeks late.

  What followed was no surprise. Protests and strikes intensified, rock-throwing confrontations with soldiers increased, and a few suicide bombings rocked Israel. Bilal and Ghassan busied themselves planning. Jumana and I knew little and were not to be involved unless necessary. With Samer gone off to graduate school in Moscow, we were the sole guardians of the underground and kept Wadee and Faisal in the dark on most things. Whatever Bilal and Ghassan were planning would involve nearly all the weapons. Jumana and I knew that much, because we helped smuggle pieces and ammunition out of the underground one by one. We took them wherever instructed; usually it was just to the trash dumpster down the road, where someone we didn’t know would pick it up. Once, we wrapped one of the crossbows like a giant present that we took to a baby shower. We didn’t even know the expectant mother, but her brother took the gift box and we pretended to be friends in front of their guests.

  On a cool February evening when we all gathered at our house, Bilal and Ghassan gave us a bit more information.

  “Listen,” Bilal started. “Many people are involved in what’s going down. Some will be caught, even killed. They know the risks, as do Ghassan and I.” Bilal looked at me, Ghassan at Jumana, the twins at each other—looks suffused with love and the terrifying realities of our fates.

  “We’re covering our tracks, but it’s likely they will arrest us. That includes all of you by mere association.” They focused on the twins now. Wadee had joined this meeting reluctantly. He had made it clear he wanted nothing to do with any more plans, creating a rift with his twin that was painful to watch. He was desperately in love with his very pregnant wife, and though it was still clear to all of us that she did not reciprocate his affection in the same way, he had refocused his energy into winning her heart.

  Wadee plunged his head into his hands. “Why am I here? What does this have to do with me?” he pleaded. Faisal turned to him in disgust, but Ghassan interrupted.

  “Most likely they’re going to arrest us all,” Ghassan said.

  Wadee flung his head back, exasperated. Faisal looked ready to punch his brother. I don’t think he was truly angry at Wadee for wanting out. Faisal was incomplete without his other half, who seemed oblivious to everyone but his wife.

  Ghassan continued, “They’ll torture us. They’ll ransack our homes, the shop, and the salon too.” He paused to let that sink in. “It would be unrealistic to expect anyone to withstand torture without talking. None of us is superhuman. We’re not trying to be heroes. We have to give them something.” Nodding to Bilal to take over, he took out a cigarette, lit it, and puffed away as Bilal began describing all we had done with the pipeline, the phthalates, the pump, the trees.

  “You mean you’re the reason they abandoned that settlement?” Wadee exclaimed.

  “Technically, I am,” I chimed in, wanting credit for my hard work filling the barrels and running the pump for hours every day. But Bilal shot me a terrible look.

  “Ignore what she said. When you feel it’s time to confess, you tell them about the water pipeline, and that I alone did it. Nahr had no idea what was happening. None of you did at the time. If everyone confesses to hearing or finding out about it somehow, it will be convincing enough. But under no circumstances can any of you ever reveal the underground.”

  Bilal took in a long breath. “I need to say that again. Give up anything you want. Make shit up if you have to. But never, ever the underground.”

  We all nodded in agreement and proceeded to align our stories—specifically, how, when, and where each of us learned about poisoning the settlement’s water pipeline.

  All of it was to fall on Bilal. “We have a plan,” he said. “It may or may not work. But in any case, use this information to give them something if you’re tortured.”

  “Each of you will get a call about five hours in advance of anything happening. You have to make sure that you get a solid public alibi for the next few hours after you get the call,” Ghassan added.

  “When is it happening?” It was the first thing Faisal had said.

  “We can’t tell you that. Even the people executing the plan will not know until five hours in advance,” Bilal said.

  Two elderly Egyptian women walk me down a dark corridor. They look familiar and I remember where I’ve seen them before. “No.” I tell them I don’t want to abort my child. But they just laugh and say, “We’ve already been paid.”

  I woke up from a nightmare gripped with panic and sat in bed sweating, Bilal still sleeping next to me. The clock read 3:48 a.m. It was Friday, the day we usually slept in. I tiptoed to the bathroom and peed on the pregnancy test filament, as the instructions indicated. I watched the line of my urine travel up the filament. It crossed the first window on the test, revealing a single red line, the “control,” to make sure the kit was working properly. The edge of my urine advanced to the next window, and slowly a pair of lines appeared. The insert’s interpretation said, Positive: Congratulations! You’re pregnant.

  I sat on the toilet thinking that the pregnancy-test makers should stick to the facts without assuming they know what is or isn’t cause for congratulations. Fucking patriarchy. I wrapped the test stick in tissue and tossed it, got back in bed, and fell asleep until I was assaulted by sunlight coming through the window. I had forgotten to close the heavy shades the night before.

  Bilal was already awake and dressed, making breakfast. “Morning of goodness and jasmine, my beautiful wife,” he said, unusually cheerful, as if he were in a movie scene. He didn’t normally like to talk in the morning. Mostly he grunted until he had had his coffee on the terrace.

  “Sabaho, my love,” I said, kissing him.

  The movie-scene cheer of that morning quickly slumped into ordinary quiet, and we went through the motions of our Friday routine. Coffee, a light breakfast for him, big one for me, newspaper on the terrace, lazy hours at home, and—although he didn’t believe in God—afternoon prayer at the mosque. It was something he looked forward to all week. I rather loved his contradictions. I went sometimes, but mostly Jumana and I would get together to cook, maybe take a few clients at the salon, go shopping, play cards. Then Bilal would take his shift at the bakery. Later all of us might gather at our house, or we’d go hiking and sp
end time with the flock (Bilal had eventually gone back to visiting with Jandal’s animals and their new shepherd). Fridays were sacred.

  The house phone rang. I ignored it because Bilal liked to answer. Instead, he turned to me. “Aren’t you going to answer?”

  How odd, I thought. It was Jehad!

  “Habibi, little brother! I miss you so much! Hearing your voice is the perfect way to start this Friday!”

  “I miss you, too, Sis … but sit down. I have some bad news.”

  I steadied myself. “What?”

  “Our grandmother passed away,” he said somberly. “She died peacefully in her sleep.”

  Now, lying on my bed in the Cube, I remember the call and the click of the receiver when he hung up. I remember the shock of it, then questioning how it is that death can be life’s only assurance and yet also its greatest, most devastating surprise.

  Bilal put his arms around me. He said he would get cash from the bank and arrange a car for my travel to Amman for the funeral.

  “What about—”

  “Don’t worry. It’s not going to happen for another couple of weeks,” he interrupted my question.

  “I thought you said no one could know except five hours in advance.”

  “Well, I just told you. Now, you should start packing and go to your family.”

  He’s right, I thought and went to pack. I was taking my time, assuming I would leave the next morning, but Bilal surprised me less than half an hour later with cash, informing me he had arranged for a car to the border.

  “I wish I could go with you, or at least drive you to the border, habibti,” he said, holding my face. The terms of his last release had curtailed his movements to an even smaller radius. He’d have been arrested if he drove me.

  I tried calling Jumana, to no avail. My brother called again, urging me to get there as soon as possible. He said our mother needed me, though he wouldn’t put her on the phone, which was odd.