Against the Loveless World

by Susan Abulhawa

  “You should leave right away, darling, because they close the border early on Fridays,” Bilal urged. Before I could process it all, a taxi was waiting outside, only a few short hours after I woke up to what I thought was going to be an ordinary lazy Friday.

  Bilal held me in a long, strong embrace and kissed me hard, like he wanted to pull me inside of him.

  “Don’t worry, my love. I’ll be back in a few days. At most I’ll be gone a week or two,” I said. He studied my face, as if trying to record every detail.

  “Take this.” He pulled a sealed envelope from his back pocket. “Give this to Jehad when you get to Amman.”

  “What is it?”

  “A coded letter. He’ll understand. But don’t open it before you’re in Jordan.”

  I put the envelope in my purse, slipped my arms around his waist, and rested my head on his chest, tuning myself to the rhythm of his heartbeat. He squeezed me again.

  “I love you, Nahr. You’ve given me the best days of my life,” he said.

  I got into the taxi, kissed my husband once more through the window, and set off.

  That was the last time I ever saw Bilal.

  I love you, Nahr. You’ve given me the best days of my life. Those words bounce around in my head now; their letters fall apart and float in my eyes, behind my face, in my throat, and I scramble to reassemble it all, afraid I have forgotten the sound of Bilal’s voice or the thuds of his heart in my ear against his chest. I lie on my bed in the Cube, concentrating to put it all together to replay: I love you, Nahr. You’ve given me the best days of my life. Sometimes I can’t and am seized by panic. I’m terrified of forgetting.

  A longing to see my family in Amman tugged at me as the taxi set off. Sadness curled in my heart, imagining the apartment without Sitti Wasfiyeh. I had not experienced death so close since our father passed away. The incomprehensibility of death, the finality of it, settled on me. My grandmother had been an unbroken presence throughout my life. In that taxi nearly halfway to the border, I saw Sitti Wasfiyeh with a new clarity—a refugee four times, a mother who lost her only son, whose daughters could not tolerate her, who defended herself and protected her pain by hurling insults, who spent her life chasing the home Zionists chased her out of. I had a desperate yearning to feel my mother’s big-bosomed embrace. And Jehad, how sweet it would be to have time together alone. We could at last speak about his role in the resistance, and why he had wanted to keep it from me. I checked my purse for the letter. I pulled it out, then returned it unopened.

  The unusual quiet in the streets pierced my reverie. There was barely any traffic, even in town where honking horns were a mainstay of life. Surprisingly few people were walking around, especially for a Friday. Come to think of it, the entire day had been strange. I replayed the morning, starting with Bilal.

  Why did he want me to answer the phone? Did he know it was for me? He must have. He must have already spoken with Jehad before I woke up. Why was he so insistent I leave so quickly? He was anxious that I took so long to pack. Why didn’t Jumana answer her telephone?

  Something was happening. I realized that the driver had been driving in silence. I asked him to turn on the radio news. Instead, he put on music.

  “No, please put on a news channel. Don’t you think things around us seem strange?”

  “I’m sorry, daughter. I am not allowed. I’m supposed to just drive you straight to the border,” he said.

  “What do you mean, you’re not allowed?” I scooted myself up and leaned over the seat.

  He didn’t answer, but hesitatingly changed the channel. “You’re right. Something is going on,” he said, turning up the volume.

  The broadcaster was in midsentence: “… due to heavy military presence. We don’t yet know what happened, but eyewitness reports are coming in. In the meantime, the military has cordoned off the area. It seems they cut off all telephone communication because no calls are getting through to residents in the area.”

  I dialed Bilal on my mobile. There was no answer at the house or the bakery. The driver pulled over in front of a blacksmith shop. People were clearing the streets and shops were closing. The driver leaned toward the radio, as if the better to hear. My heart raced as pieces of the day came together in my head. I yanked out Bilal’s letter to my brother and ripped it open, and was shocked to discover it was addressed to me!

  To my darling, beautiful, dear wife. Habibti, Nahr, I pray you are reading this letter in the safety of your family in Amman and that you will remain there to raise our child …

  I realized he knew. I hadn’t concealed the test kit well in the wastebasket!

  … until we are reunited again. I write this as you are sleeping in our bed. I have already spoken with Jehad. I’m sure you know this by now, and I hope you have forgiven us both. I cannot bear …

  “Turn around!” I shouted at the driver. “Take me back, now!”

  I’m sure you know … I already read that. I couldn’t find where I’d left off.

  “Ya Sater!” The driver turned up the volume with trembling hands. “… just moments ago. We now have confirmation that two operations have been carried out by the resistance, twenty minutes apart. It appears they were accomplished in the manner of the hero Tha’ir Hamad. We are hearing that …”

  The driver suddenly turned the radio off, threw himself down across the front seat, and ordered me to put my head down. I saw military jeeps racing toward us in the distance and I quickly lay down. The car shook as they sped past us. I looked up slowly and saw the driver’s eyes staring at me from the front armrest. His eyes were swimming in their sockets, as if he didn’t really see me. “Keep your head down,” he ordered, terrified. We heard helicopters roaring overhead and more shopkeepers shuttering their stores. “God help us,” the driver said. “If this is another Tha’ir Hamad operation, they’re going to rain hell on us.”

  Tha’ir Hamad was a twenty-two-year-old lone Palestinian sniper who’d carried out an attack on soldiers at a checkpoint at the beginning of the Second Intifada. All he had was an old WWII Mauser rifle and thirty rounds of ammunition. Before dawn on the morning of March 3, 2002, Tha’ir Hamad dug a hiding place under some olive trees on a hilltop overlooking Wadi al Haramiya—the Valley of Thieves—and waited for the Israeli reserve company manning the checkpoint at Uyoun al Haramiya. He fired four times, killing four soldiers. The two soldiers who emerged to locate the shooter and assist the fallen soldiers were also shot dead. He fired at reinforcements when they arrived, killing the sergeant and wounding several of his men. An Israeli woman with her children arrived to pass through the checkpoint, but he yelled at her to leave, refraining from harming them. He finally left when the rifle jammed on the last bullet, twenty-five minutes after he started firing. The Israelis dispatched helicopters and canine search units to find the shooter, but they didn’t even manage to find his hiding place. He would have gotten away with it, had he not made the mistake of confiding in a friend. His name became synonymous with precision and expert marksmanship.

  I kept my head down, strangely calm, running the previous days through my head. I knew Bilal and Ghassan had something to do with this. We were all to find out five hours before they put their plan into action, but the pregnancy stick had hastened a change in plans to get me out of the country. Did he tell Jumana not to answer my calls? Did she know? I looked back at the letter.

  … forgiven us both. I cannot bear the thought of what they would do to you while you’re pregnant with our child. So I am …

  The driver turned the radio back on, keeping the volume low.

  “… third site, and now we’re told there are sirens at Huwwara, making this the fourth checkpoint ambush in half an hour. This is incredible! Incredible! No one has taken responsibility, as far as we know. We’ve received calls from eyewitnesses who told us that some of the soldiers were hit with arrows.”

  The voice of a caller crackled through poor cell reception: “I saw it with my own eyes at Huwwara. L
ong live the resistance! A group of shabab looked like they had gotten into a fight, and the soldiers all came out with their guns drawn to break up the chaos. All those boys and about ten more came up on them pointing aerosol cans—it turned out to be hornet spray—and released it in streams on their faces. The soldiers started scampering back when all these arrows—like American Indian arrows!—rained down on them. Praise God! Praise God! God bless our warriors! God bless the resistance. God protect them. Allahu akbar.” God is bigger.

  The driver and I listened in disbelief. “Praise God. Allahu akbar,” he said.

  My heart hammered at my chest now. “I think we should get out of the car and try to walk to the nearest house,” I said. “The street will be crawling with tanks soon, and they’re going to run right over this car. If you try to drive away, we’ll probably get hit with a missile from one of the helicopters.”

  “Yes, yes. O God. Have mercy, O God.” We poked our heads up slowly. The street was quiet. People had disappeared into their homes or shops and the helicopter noise was receding. Our best option was an apartment building five meters away. Although we could not detect immediate danger in walking such a short distance, the eerie quiet was frightening. We could not be sure there were no Israeli snipers on rooftops. Slowly we opened the car doors. The driver began crawling out through the passenger’s side and I did the same from the backseat, just as a helicopter appeared overhead.

  “Helicopter!” the driver yelled. We reacted in opposite ways. He rushed out of the car toward the building, leaving open the front passenger door. I pulled myself back inside the car, closing the door. As he ran, the helicopter came overhead and military jeeps sped down the street. I cowered low in the car, and heard several shots before something smashed hard into the car, jarring and disorienting me. There was blood. The car was upside down. Soldiers were pointing big guns at me, dragging me first by the neck, then by the arm from the shattered window, which cut the entire right side of my body as they pulled me through.

  “Yaqoot? Are you Yaqoot?” they barked in accented Arabic.

  The letter was still in my hand, still not fully read.

  The letter! I wanted to read the rest of it. I cannot let them get the letter!

  As they dragged me along the street, I rolled over and stuffed the paper into my mouth, the asphalt grating the side of my face. I kept my mouth shut, slowly trying to chew the letter to manageable pieces as they bound my hands and arms, threw me in the back of a jeep, and rummaged through my belongings. There was blood in my eyes. I didn’t know where I was bleeding from or if it was even mine.

  One of the soldiers noticed me chewing. “What’s in your mouth?” he demanded, and I swallowed as much as I could. He yelled something in Hebrew to other soldiers, and within seconds several of them were on top of me prying open my mouth. I bit flesh and drew blood. There wasn’t much left of the letter.

  The next thing I remember is waking up in a hospital, my wrist handcuffed to the bed. A soldier sat in a plastic chair reading a magazine. I must have mumbled, because she called a nurse. The rest was a blur. I was in constant strange and variable pain, at times sharp, then muddled by the drugs in a way that made my head feel thick, cloudy, and heavy to the point that moving it required herculean strength in my neck. I could not reposition my body either, because of the handcuffs. When I tried to pull out my IV line, they shackled the other wrist. Then I remembered that Sitti Wasfiyeh was dead. Or is she? Oh God, Bilal!

  I don’t know how long I was in the hospital. They transferred me a few times to what I thought were other wards. When I finally regained my senses, I was in a prison clinic. I learned that I had suffered a head injury and fallen into a coma for two days.

  “There’s no baby,” was the only response I could get to my repeated question. Suddenly my womb was a cavern, a carved-out emptiness in the place where love, life, hope, and future had been planted. Even now in the Cube, sometimes I hear baby cries echoing from my belly.

  The initial interrogation was mild compared to what I expected. I was taken into a room, my head bandaged, various cuts and bruises at different stages of healing. I had a long red scar with stitches that spanned the side of my torso. The small room’s dingy walls were spattered with crimson specks. A used latex glove lay on the floor in a small puddle of dirty water. Two men in jeans sat me in a metal chair at a metal table. One wore a white T-shirt, the other a black one. Another man, in a suit, paced slowly around the room, all of us under the clink and hum of an old ceiling fan.

  White T-shirt asked how I was feeling and whether I would like a cigarette. I said I didn’t smoke. “A glass of tea then?”

  “No thank you,” I said.

  “She’s polite, this one,” said Black T-shirt.

  White T-shirt pretended to disapprove of Black T-shirt and said, “We have a lot of questions for you, Yaqoot. But first you have to tell us, where is Bilal?”

  I saw that he immediately regretted asking me, because I must have smiled or somehow betrayed a sense of relief.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  He tried but could not conceal his ire. Instead of getting information, he’d inadvertently told me Bilal had gotten away. All three men were rattled by my satisfaction. They unknowingly gave away one more bit of information.

  Black T-shirt began aggressively questioning me, his anger rising each time I would not answer or if I gave a nonanswer, while White T-shirt pretended to calm him, faking compassion for me, until Black T-shirt slapped me. I was momentarily stunned. I didn’t even realize it was happening until I picked myself off the ground. This time, White T-shirt genuinely rebuked Black T-shirt. They spoke to each other in Hebrew, but I picked up on two words that explained his reaction: zeekaroon and zokheret.

  Bilal had once explained to me that Hebrew is a simple language, without many conjugations and with many verbs and nouns similar to Arabic. Zeekaroon and zokheret sounded like the Arabic root word zakira, meaning “memory.” I had a head injury, and I figured White T-shirt worried I might have memory loss and didn’t want to exacerbate it. From that moment on, I pretended to remember very little, even insignificant things.

  “Yaqoot, I am sorry for my colleague’s bad manners,” said White T-shirt. “Tell me where you were going the day we arrested you.”

  “I don’t remember being arrested,” I said. “In fact, I’m not really sure how I got here. To prison, I mean.”

  “Do you remember your grandmother dying?”

  “My grandmother is dead? Sitti Wasfiyeh is dead?”

  “Actually, no. She’s alive and well,” said White T-shirt.

  Here I may have revealed my confusion. “Why would you say such a thing to me if she is fine? Thank God she’s alive!” They know about Sitti Wasfiyeh from monitoring our telephone calls. Surely that’s the only way. Unless they captured Jumana and she told them, if she knew. I surmised that Israel had been hit hard. Their intelligence hadn’t expected such sophistication and coordination. My interrogators let me know that they were ripping through our neighborhoods with a fury “you cannot imagine.” I thought it was probably only a matter of time before they discovered the water-pipe rig we had set up.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

  The T-shirts exchanged a look and Black T-shirt slammed his hand on the table with a frightful bang that made me jump. I began to cry, cupping my face.

  “We’re trying to help you,” White T-shirt said. “We already know what you did to the water supply.”

  I was grateful to have been crying into my palms, or they might have seen my shock. I played along as well as I could. I said I didn’t know what they were talking about.

  “We already have enough evidence against you. Your accomplices confessed.”

  This went on for days, hours upon hours of waiting, then questions, threats, and yelling. They bound me in a painful position with my back arched abnormally across a chair for so long that my whole body spasmed when they finally unti
ed me. Eventually I confessed to helping sabotage the water pipe. I refused to implicate Bilal on principle. But I did sign a confession in Hebrew, and who knows what the confession actually stated.

  They sent me back to prison, where I resided in a room with four others. It was not at all like Bilal’s imprisonment where, despite everything, there was camaraderie and brotherhood among Palestinian political prisoners. Instead, they locked me up with Israeli criminals who despised me. One of them spoke Arabic and later tried to befriend me, warning me about this or that, advising me how to get the best food, and which guards or inmates to avoid. She claimed she was a Palestinian from the Galilee, in prison for “resistance activities.” She seemed a cartoon of what Bilal had once explained were “birds,” Palestinian collaborators who befriended new arrivals to extract information. She claimed she knew Bilal. “Well, I don’t actually know him. I’ve heard of him. Everyone has. You’re so lucky to be married to a hero,” she said.

  I nodded. She smiled.

  “I just want you to know that I don’t believe the things that were said about you. I hate it when people let their jealousy ruin a girl’s reputation,” she said.

  I didn’t react. She wasn’t a very good bird and could barely contain her impatience to get me to talk. She eventually left me alone and soon disappeared from the prison. That’s when harassment by other inmates and guards started. I was terrified but did my best to hide it, until two Israeli women came to my defense the second time I was beaten. They weren’t interested in being my friends, but they made it clear that there could be consequences if others didn’t stop attacking me. I don’t know why they did that, but I have learned one can be surprised by the presence of humanity in many guises and languages, and in the most inhuman of places.

  My trial was in Hebrew and lasted two days. It would have been shorter, but I had “wasted the court’s time and made things worse.”

  The first time Israel sentenced Bilal to prison, he was tried in absentia. They locked him up when he traded himself for his brother. Every subsequent imprisonment was for violating the terms of his release or simply administrative detention. He never had a trial in a courtroom. He once told me he would never have cooperated with their judiciary because that would mean recognition of Israel’s authority.