The Sea Cloak

by Nayrouz Qarmout

  Bedtime, May 1978

  Thirteen-year-old Sara sits in the corner of their family’s one-room shack, the walls of which are made of mud, roofed by sheets of corrugated iron. Beneath her, spread across the floor, is a cold, plastic mat; she supports herself with a pillowcase stuffed with old clothes, her head deep in her school notebooks, revising. All her spare time is spent this way: her eyes down – studying, or up – dreaming. Of travel, of going to university in Cairo, of escaping Jabalia. The camp’s sandy alleyways have so far only led her round in circles, like a maze, always back to where she started. The only route that didn’t feel like it was a trick was the one to school each morning. She strode towards it, proudly, rebelliously, convinced it would lead her out of there, in the end, to finish her studies elsewhere.

  She cannot hear the chaos of her five sisters running around her, in a room that doubles as a bedroom, study, and kitchen. She is too engrossed in her books. Nor can she hear her mother’s continual nags and calls for assistance. Until, one day, the unexpected happens. Her aunty, the one with the frightening eyes and gravelling voice, has come to the house asking for the strangest thing: the girl’s hand in marriage for her son. ‘We have decided that your daughter, Sara, would make an adequate wife for our third son, Fouad, and we expect you, as a family, to accept this offer.’

  Her parents look embarrassed, then their expressions turn to something else. They fear for her, Sara realises. They fear she will become entangled in the traditions that they themselves were raised with and could never escape. ‘You have to marry your cousin, Fouad,’ they announce after her aunty has left. Years from now, all she will remember of that day is her screaming; a dizzying memory of wailing, pulling at her hair, pounding her fists against the mat. ‘He hasn’t even finished school! What about my studies? What about Cairo?’

  June 2008

  She smacks the floor again with her cane, scaring the guests assembled near her. Then she rises from her plastic chair and, in a voice that cuts through the clamour of the guests singing and clapping to the old village songs, she hisses at her bride’s mother: ‘What were you thinking, Sara? Where has your undisciplined brain wandered to? Sending your daughter to Paris to marry a husband 20 years older than her! She’s only nineteen, for goodness sake…’

  Sara stirs from her thoughts. ‘You don’t have a say in anything to do with my daughter,’ she shouts back. ‘Have you forgotten? I was her age. Younger in fact!’

  Yara makes her way gently through the crowd and embraces her mother. ‘Listen,’ she says, turning to her grandmother, ‘Mama had nothing to do with my decision. I wouldn’t marry a cousin, even if he was my age. That’s all you care about, keeping the family together, not how old I am or my husband is. This is my life.’

  Border Crossing, February 2009

  Yara has been waiting for hours. Her name is finally on the list of those allowed to leave, but there will be no leaving today. The Rafah crossing is closed already. The cars queuing along the dirt track from early morning have barely moved all day. Their passengers’ dreams of escape into Egypt have evaporated, for the day at least, along with the steam rising from their car bonnets. The two Hamas soldiers, sitting in front of the entrance building with their legs crossed, seem to know something all the wannabe travellers don’t. Tomorrow, perhaps, not all the places will be taken up by party members, or people with friends in high places.

  Yara gives up, and tells the taxi driver to turn around. That college professor in Paris will have to wait for her yet another day. He decided to marry Yara without even coming to Gaza; his parents arranged the contract, with the help of an Imam in France and one in Gaza, but they have only ever met over MSN Messenger. The traditions of the camp still run in his veins, he says, even though he hasn’t set foot in Palestine in decades. But with each new delay, the rumours of their imminent divorce persist. It has been four months now. Too long to be married and still strangers. The taxi lurches violently, as it drops off the broken tarmac and circles round in the dust, before remounting the road and heading the other way. When Rafah opens, Yara thinks, it will be heaven’s mercy: the earth is too much for me.

  A Telephone Call, January 2009

  ‘What are you doing, habeebti?’

  ‘I’m baking bread.’

  Her mother laughs. ‘Have you tried French bread yet? They say it’s delicious. Don’t tell me you’re still using that copper skillet like a Gazan peasant, Yara…?’

  ‘I’ve already told you, Mama. He bought it years ago before going to Paris, he’s fond of it,’ Yara says, but there is something in her voice that unsettles her mother. Yara falls silent.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ her mother asks.

  Yara lets out a solitary sob, like someone clearing her throat. ‘Mama, I never leave the house. I don’t know what Paris is like.’

  ‘Oh, habeebti, what have I done to you? I should have never agreed to this marriage…’

  ‘Don’t say that, Mama,’ Yara comforts her. ‘I was the one who wanted to marry him. We all have to grasp at the chances we can in this life.’

  A Knock at the Door, February 2010

  Sara takes her foot off the sewing machine peddle and waits for the noise to die down. When she eventually gets up to open it, there is a woman standing in the corridor with a baby in her arms. ‘Yara!’ she cries, after a moment of stunned silence. She hugs them both and doesn’t completely let go until all three of them are over the threshold and well into the flat. ‘You didn’t tell me you were coming back? How long are you staying for? Where’s the professor? Is he staying at his cousin’s? You should have said, I have no food in...’

  ‘No, Mama, no, wait, look...’ Yara hands the girl still sleeping in her arms over to her mother, and takes a long, deep breath. ‘I’m divorced, Mama. We’ve come back to stay.’

  For another speechless moment, Sara looks into her daughter’s dark green eyes. ‘Thank God,’ she says eventually. ‘You’ve come back to take care of your mother, now all your ungrateful brothers have abandoned her... I don’t even know where they are right now.’ The baby in the woman’s arms starts to cry, and Sara has to fight back her own tears. ‘Of course, and I can teach you both to speak French now too!’ Yara smiles.

  Breastfeeding, June 2010

  ‘Habeebti, I’m so glad you stuck with the breastfeeding, so many women give up these days.’

  ‘I’m glad too,’ Yara smiles. They are sitting on the veranda of their fourth floor apartment, overlooking the Shatilla camp and the sea beyond it. The sun is setting and the cold has started to set in. Yara’s mother seems distracted again. She is staring at her daughter’s small left breast, and the baby idly latching onto the nipple and gnashing at it for a moment, before spitting it out again.

  Sara’s thoughts retreat into memories of breastfeeding her own daughter, over 30 years earlier. How the milk would spill out of Yara’s mouth whenever she unlatched, and trickle down her delicate neck in tiny white streams. How she would mop up the droplets with her fingertips and lick them. She wanted to taste whatever it was that gave her little girl such comfort. To be comforted with her. She used to tell the girl, ‘Pretty Yara, it is a blessing that you didn’t inherit your mother’s black hair. Your father’s fairness will bring you good luck. My black locks never brought me any – except for the day I had you, of course.’

  She still remembers the ecstasy of kissing those soft, plump cheeks, and soon finds herself back in the summer of 1986 one afternoon, as the whole family sat around, fanning each other with old newspapers: Yara at her breast and, across from them, the girl’s father, Fouad, with his legs stretched out in front, and his head resting on his aunt’s – Sara’s mother’s – lap. Her memory of the scene retains every detail: the old woman knitting a woollen dress for her granddaughter, her ancient needles clicking, every so often pausing to play with her son-in-law’s hair. ‘Aunty,’ Fouad teases her, ‘now that I have two sons and a daughter, and Sara’s busy raising them, I want to marry again.’
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  The needles fly up into the air above him. ‘Get off my lap, have you come from behind the cows!’

  ‘But Aunty,’ Fouad laughs, ‘Sharia permits it. It’s halal.’

  ‘What, are you a fan of that polygamous sheikh at the Zarqa Mosque now?’

  ‘What’s got into you?’ Fouad asks.

  ‘You have Sara and you barely deserve her!’ She yells.

  ‘Why don’t I?’

  Sara looks up at him without saying a word. She doesn’t know if he was being serious or not, but she is glad her mother is standing up for her.

  ‘Listen, Fouad,’ the old woman continues, retrieving a needle from the floor only to wave at him. ‘I agreed to let Sara marry you and not go to university, even though she was the brightest student in the school –’

  ‘I see,’ he interrupts her. ‘Another chance to rub it in my face that she’s better educated than me!’

  ‘No, but you know that’s also true. If I wanted to rub your face in it, I wouldn’t have accepted you as my son-in-law.’

  ‘It’s decided then: I’m going to get myself another wife,’ he announces, crossing his arms. ‘I’m serious.’

  Sara flinches, her nipple slipping from the baby’s mouth. Her mother becomes enraged: ‘I curse the breast that nursed you till you were full!’

  Sara turns pale. ‘Mama, what are you saying?’ The baby starts to cry.

  ‘You breastfed me! That makes me your own son,’ Fouad roars in disgust, ‘and the brother of my own wife! Do you not know the basics of Sharia?’

  A Fatwa, August 1988

  For a year or so, Fouad has tried to bury all memory of this conversation under the chatter of daily life. But it’s no good. Somehow the old woman’s words – I curse the breast – bubble up through his thoughts. He starts paying regular visits to his two local mosques, winning the respect of the sheikhs at each. After six months of quiet nodding, reverential agreement, and solemn hand-shaking, he feels confident enough to ask the head sheikh at each mosque a question. ‘It is an issue of scripture,’ he assures them. ‘A clarification.’

  ‘Three separate breastfeeding sessions is sufficient,’ the sheikh at the Zarqa Mosque tells him. ‘That would make you effectively the “son” of your aunt... and the “sister” of your wife’.

  ‘Technically, five full feeds are required’, the sheikh at the ‘Ahmar Mosque tells him.

  When Sara relays this news back to her mother, the old woman laughs: ‘We didn’t have the wisdom of Sharia to help us back then! We were still living in a mud-hut, eight people to a room, on the same tiny plot of land that our family’s tent had stood on since 1948! My sister was ill; she had no energy to feed the boy. So I had to. For a month. Maybe six weeks. Sharia didn’t help us then!’

  When Sara lets this slip to her husband one night, he knows he has enough.

  ‘I want more than a clarification, I want a ruling,’ he demands of the Zarqa sheikh the following morning, choosing this sheikh because he had one more wife than the other.

  And a week later the ruling is issued: an official fatwa to annul their marriage. Fouad waits for the letter to arrive confirming it. When it does, he reads it slowly over breakfast and, once read, jams it into his already-stuffed suitcase. Then he leaves, closing the door on their new, third-floor apartment, with its balcony overlooking the sea; closing the door on ten years of marriage, three children, and his first wife, to go look for a second. But as the door hits its frame, the sound of it wakes Sara, not just from her slumber or her train of thought, but from her whole life. With that sound, she knows what she will do: she will not despair or indeed look for a new husband, she will just sew. Stitch and sew and tear and cut. The sewing machine’s whirr will ring in the ears of all her children through all the years ahead, it will drown out the sound of her own regrets and it will keep the house together. As long as its whirring deafens them, they will not hear the bitterness of the mother that brought them into this world.

  June 2010

  Sara rouses herself. The sun has now set over the Mediterranean, and the restaurant down on the beach has lit its candles. Some are already floating out to sea, mounted in cut-in-half plastic bottles. She looks down at her granddaughter, finally asleep, and up at the baby’s mother. ‘I will sew, Yara,’ she says. ‘I will keep sewing. You will finish your studies and we will raise the child together. I will sew until you have a scholarship. I will sew until you escape this wretched camp. I will sew until you are free... in Egypt.’

  A Samarland Moon

  They sit quietly in the moonlight on the edge of the promenade wall, the waves of the Mediterranean crashing beneath them. A cold breeze stings their faces, but they keep their distance from each other; a clear gap can be seen between them at all times, like an invisible wall. They both tremble from the cold; the girl’s hair billowing upwards, sideways, then in all directions: even towards him at one point. When strands of it brush his face, he thinks he can bear it no longer. Eventually he breaks the silence.

  ‘To me, Rima, you are like the first day of spring.’

  For a moment, dimples dent her expression as a smile flickers across her face. She is such a slight girl, a strong gust of wind could take her away. The boy’s eyes, meanwhile, are a dark, glassy brown, framed by heavy eyelids and thick lashes.

  Ziad is in his first year at university, while Rima is still in high school, a year from graduating. This night, sitting with their feet dangling over the sea wall, will be the beginning of their life together. The beach stretches out in front of them, empty and all theirs: a future to walk across, to feel their sneakers sink into, to watch the moonlight in its troubled distance.

  That moonlit night was three years ago. The sky she opens her eyes into now is brighter, and the air she feels against her face, as she peers through the passenger window of Ziad’s car, is warmer.

  They remain parked for a moment. Having buckled herself in, Rima’s delicate hands reach up for the rear-view mirror, and tilt it so she can inspect Ziad’s face from a different angle.

  ‘Ziad, look!’ she teases. ‘In the mirror, all you are is a beard.’

  He looks at Rima through the re-adjusted mirror, says nothing for a moment, then nods downwards at her legs: ‘I see that as you get older, your trousers get tighter.’

  ‘I told you to stop commenting on my clothes, Ziad. Girls of our generation dress likes this now! Deal with it.’

  ‘So what if all the other girls dress like that? Don’t you have a mind of your own to decide what you want to wear?’

  ‘Shall we just go?’ Rima sighs. They haven’t spent much time together recently and she doesn’t want to waste it on an argument.

  Ziad starts the car with a tense expression on his face, and pulls out onto the Beach Road. They stop at a red light on the busy Al Remal Street. ‘This road could do with being wider,’ Rima thinks out loud.

  ‘Like the Strip!’ Ziad laughs. A little girl around nine years old, in a school uniform, but with torn slippers on her feet, approaches the car. She knocks on Rima’s window, a parcel of faded mint leaves in her hands.

  ‘Please buy my leaves, my little brother is sick and we don’t have food at home.’

  Rima is incensed. ‘Why aren’t you in school? Who sent you to sell this?’ The girl doesn’t respond, but Rima’s barrage of questions won’t stop.

  ‘Aren’t your parents worried about you? Doesn’t the school ask where you are? Don’t you realise the street is dangerous?’

  The girl remains quiet until Rima grabs the mint, gives her some money and orders her to get back to school. Rima can’t sit still. She reaches into her bag for a notebook and uses it to fan herself with an impatience that unsettles Ziad.

  ‘Things like this make my blood boil! Tell me, Ziad, what would be better for this poor girl? You being close to God or you straying from the path?’

  ‘How has she got anything to do with me?’

  ‘How has she got anything to do with you…?’ she laughs. ‘We
ll nothing, evidently.’

  They pass a group of women gathered outside the Red Cross office.

  ‘Ziad, stop the car,’ Rima says.

  ‘I think it’s a meeting for the families of political prisoners,’ he explains, braking. ‘I don’t know what good these women will do for the cause. Look at them, standing there half naked, shouting. Shame on them.’

  ‘Is that really how you see them? Then I’ll get out now and join them, in that case; I’ll add my shouting half-nakedness to their cause.’

  ‘Don’t! Please, Rima.’

  ‘I’m messing with you. I wouldn’t just intrude on their plight like that. But I did want to see their faces,’ she says while looking directly at them. ‘I can’t imagine what it must be like to be a mother separated from her son.’

  Ziad stares at Rima for a moment, but doesn’t say anything.

  She turns the radio on and the sweet sound of Fairuz’s voice fills the car. It is a Gaza tradition: Fairuz in the morning, Umm Kulthum in the evening.

  Rima sighs, waiting for the verse to end. ‘I know you don’t like her anymore.’

  ‘Yes, and what’s wrong with that? A verse from the Qur’an is more beautiful than any music.’

  ‘That may be true, but there is nothing wrong with music – it’s the sounds and rhythms of nature.’ She tries to reason but gives up. ‘OK, let’s go.’ Ziad pulls the car carefully out onto Al Rimal Street but within a few blocks he sees a friend from work. The man comes to Ziad’s window and jokes with him for a few minutes. When he leaves he casts a silent look of disgust in Rima’s direction.