Gaza Writes Back

by Refaat Alareer

  “Fal Allah wala falak ya zalame,”—God forbid!—Abu Ibrahim suddenly spoke out. “What are you saying? Half a year? Do you think we’ll stay in these tents for half a year? No, no, no. I don’t think so,” Abu Ibrahim continued, widening his eyes in furious amazement as he spoke.

  At this moment, both Abu Naser and Abu Ahmed wanted to say something. They exchanged looks for a while, as each of them waited for the other to say what he wanted to say. Each opened his mouth, started, hesitated, paused, and at the end, both remained silent. No one spoke up. No one had enough courage to say they realized what would later be a fact. Neither wanted to tell Abu Ibrahim—or rather to remind him—that it might take a little while longer than half a year before they could return to their homes, lands, farms, and olive trees. And it all ended there.

  Meanwhile, steadying a broken pottery jug of water in her right hand while balancing it on her head, Um Ibrahim in her embroidered black dress, decorated with an intense, raised, red pattern and her child, bare-footed, hurrying after her, came jogging up to her husband, and said, “’Ayzeen ‘amalko shay?”—Do you want me to make you some tea?

  “Yes, make some tea. Why not?” Abu Ibrahim replied. He had now joined his two neighbors drawing circles on the sand.

  The three men kept quiet as they carried on their relaxing activity. It was relieving, indeed, for the twigs, tightly pressed in the farmers’ fists, had now been fully implanted in the sands. It must have comforted them to plant a twig in the sands. Only then, Abu Ibrahim felt his growing uneasiness as silence extended before him, and feeling inclined to break this silence, he started improvising a hymn: “Raj’een ya blady”—We shall return, oh, Homeland—only to be joined by Abu Ahmed, who repeated after Abu Ibrahim in a slightly higher tone. Abu Naser, feeling the rising, passionate tone of this song, couldn’t help but raise his voice and take part in the singing.

  “We shall return, Homeland, we shall return.”

  Now, it being all three of them singing, the song went awkwardly. No harmony dominated as everyone sang on his own, and each willing to maintain his own rhythm over the other’s, it looked as though each was cutting in on the other, rather than singing with him.

  “Oh w ba’den ya jama’a”—Okay, what then, people?—Abu Ibrahim started angrily. “Are you going to keep bleating like this?”

  “Ok, let’s start all over again,” Abu Ahmed replied.

  “Mashi”—Okay—Abu Naser said.

  “One rhythm, one tone, don’t forget,” Abu Ibrahim reminded them. “Wahad tneeeeen talata”—One, twoooo, three.

  Raj’eenlek ya bladee, raj’eenlek rajeen—We shall return to you, oh, Homeland. We shall return.

  Raj’een la qaryetnah, raj’een la hakoretna—We shall return to our village. We shall return to our field.

  Raj’een ya zaytonah, raj’een ya laymonah—We shall return, oh, olive tree. We shall return, oh, lemon tree.

  They started altogether, keeping the same rhythm and the same tone they had wished for, Abu Ibrahim leading them to teach them the tone and the words he improvised. Hardly had a few moments passed when Abu Ibrahim was indignantly rebuking his two neighbors for failing again to sing in harmony.

  “Let’s try again,” he said.

  The three men carried on their efforts trying to sing in harmony, but they failed to maintain it for more than a few moments each time they tried. They tried time and again until they reached their sixty-fifth attempt, and yet never did they succeed in uniting their voice. They were truly bleating. And at a long last, exhausted with the long distance he had crossed and seeing the futility of his painstaking efforts to keep up with the other two men, Abu Naser just fell asleep, and soon after, he was followed by Abu Ahmed and Abu Ibrahim. The fire had died, and, every now and then, a cold, gentle breeze blew over the half-standing tents. Everyone had fallen asleep.

  In the morning, the three men, Abu Ibrahim, Abu Ahmed, and Abu Naser, stooped down as they walked on, struggling with the burden over their shoulders and followed by their sons, daughters, wives, and hundreds of people here and there, all doing the same thing. All were leaving.

  From Beneath

  by Rawan Yaghi

  I didn’t even know if my eyes were open.

  After the chaos, everything seemed so calm. I sensed the dust covering my face. It seemed to block my nostrils, and as I tried to inhale through them, I felt I made it worse. I decided to breathe through my lips. I could feel my breath hitting one of the bricks. I heard a faint shout of an ambulance siren and then my breath was the only sound I could hear. One of my arms was trapped somewhere under the wooden edges of my bed, the other under what seemed like more heavy bricks. My toes, my legs, and my hair were jailed and sentenced not to move. I felt a lot of pain, but I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. I was never trapped in so little a space. My world felt so narrow and sharp.

  I was afraid. I waited and waited and, as my mother once advised me to do when I was afraid, I tried to recall all the joyful events in my life, though they were few: my older brother’s big wedding party, my grandmother coming back from Mecca and bringing me a singing doll, the last ’eid when I got my biggest ’eidiyya ever, my mother bringing us home a new baby—though I wondered if that was a happy event for me, but I had certainly seen the joy my parents had looking at that little thing.

  My breath softly came back to my face, with the smell of grayish objects rather than a breeze carrying the scent of our garden plants, touching my nose and cheeks as if to comfort and tell me that everything will be okay. But a minute later I started crying. The sky was starless. And only then did I realize that my eyes were closed, for I started to feel my sticky eyelashes. It did not matter, opening and closing them were thoroughly the same. I cried so much that my tears, mixed with the dust on my face, felt like mud crawling to the edges of my cheeks and filling the canals of my ears. I must have been bleeding, because a horrible pain started growing in my chest. The back of my head seemed to pull me down further and further with every scream I made, and I felt I had enough strength to push everything around me away. But nothing seemed to move. I desperately needed to stand up and run to my mother’s warm hug. And just then it occurred to me. No one was coming to help me. There was no movement in any part of the house. I wept even harder.

  I wanted to help. I tried to move. Only one muscle. A toe at a time. I felt something very sharp poking through my flesh.

  I stopped crying. I waited. I bled.

  Just Fifteen Minutes

  by Wafaa Abu Al-Qomboz

  “Mom, I want my dad. You must call him and tell him to come back home. Do you hear me?” Islam said, irritated.

  “Islam, why are you yelling? Just wait a minute, and I will call him,” she said.

  “Okay, okay. I am sorry,” Islam said. “I want to paint something. Dad always helps me; he is an excellent painter. My teacher asked all the students in the class to paint a map of their original villages,” he explained to his mother. “I know that my country is the best, and my map will be fantastic. Dad told me this, when I started Grade 4,” he continued.

  Islam started to leave his room but hesitated for a bit. Something on the wall distracted his attention. He saw it almost every day, but he could not figure out what it was. This time he felt it was about to come to life, the trees swaying wildly, the clouds looming in the upper right corner. It was so vivid. He took some time to stare at the picture. It was a painting his father helped him paint, only this picture does not show the sun. He did not like that. He ran hastily to his mother.

  “My dad, he is late… .” Islam rushed back again to gaze at the picture on the wall. “Mom, Mom… I am talking to you. Can you hear me?” Islam shouted from the other room.

  His mother, moving around the house normally, acted as if he was not speaking, as if he were not there at all.

  “I remember when I was living there in that small house. It was a small house. The old tree, yes, which Dad planted. Yes, he planted it. Or mayb
e my grandfather did. No, I was the person who planted this tree,” he yelled, hoping his mom would come and look.

  Islam looked at his mother. He felt that she was so tired. He could see how her eyes were getting smaller and darker. He wished his father was there to help, but he spent most of his time outside their home. He did not seem to have time to help around the house, unless it was a heavy thing to lift. Islam wanted to be strong like him. Maybe he could help his mother, and then she would have time to speak to him instead of him talking to himself all the time. It was four o’clock and his father was not home yet. His mother once told him that his father was “wanted.” He did not know what it meant except that he did not see much of his father.

  “He must come before it gets dark,” Islam hoped.

  “Islam…Islam, wake up!” a friendly, nasal voice called.

  He turned his head to the place where the voice came from. He did not care.

  “Islam, Islam…. Your father will be here soon. He will stay for fifteen minutes this time. You know that your father is very busy, so be polite,” came his mother’s voice from the other room.

  “Fifteen minutes? I can wait for fifteen minutes.”

  She smiled. “You are a naughty boy, aren’t you?”

  “But he is very late, and… .” He smiled too and stared at the picture again.

  “My map will be the best one. Dad will paint it for me. Well, I will help him a little. In addition, it is the map of my country and my house. It is my map. He makes me choose the colors (although I still remember how he once protested my use of red and suggested green instead) and sometimes allows me to color in. It is one of the few things I got to do with Dad, as he is a very busy person. Last time he promised to let me do all the coloring.”

  “Mooom, I tell you, I won’t take the map with me to school if Dad does not show up as you say,” he protested, hoping his father won’t let him down. He wanted to take the map to school and show it around. He wanted to brag about it, about working together with his father to make it perfect.

  “Islam, Islam…. Wake up quickly. Argh, you’re very lazy, man!” Joe snarled, hitting Islam with the two pillows on the sofa, his voice grating on Islam’s nerves. “Islam, you will be very late; you know that you will be very late. If you don’t wake up, I will have to… .”

  “No, please, just fifteen minutes. I know the Master’s thesis. Anyway, please, just fifteen minutes. Don’t pour water. It is so cold. Uh, you know, I like my tea with a little sugar. Please, let me sleep just for fifteen minutes. I need those fifteen minutes.”

  “I can wait fifteen minutes,” Joe replied.

  Islam stretched his hand calmly from beneath the pillow, gently touching the framed map next to his bed, making sure it was still there, and went back to sleep.

  “You’re finally home, Dad. You’re finally home,” he repeated in his sleep.

  House

  by Refaat Alareer

  They stood still, absorbing every little detail of their house. They could not tell, despite Salem first being uncertain about his father’s plan, if it was seeing their home again after three years that gave them both goosebumps.

  The house was on a little hill overlooking olive and lemon groves that stretched westward, like a hand-woven green carpet extending endlessly and attached to the clear sky of the dawn with nothing but reddish threads of the early day. Their house was finally in front of them. These last steps leading to it, they realized, would be the most perilous, even deadly. Hope of return was their only motive, their only sustainer. Abu Salem hoped to get to his house; his son hoped they won’t get shot at or, worse, arrested. Abu Salem carried a small, brown bag nearly the same color as his jacket. He refused to let his son carry it, despite his son’s insistence.

  The closer he got to the house, the more he sped up his pace, as if he were magnetically being pulled by the house. The two-story building still had the tent on the roof like it did three years ago. Abu Salem erected the tent soon after he moved to the house, lest he should forget the days his family spent in a tent in the Qalandia refugee camp. Forgetting, he believed, was a scandal, like surrendering to the enemy while you had plenty of ammunition; it was out of the question. Longing for that time when the only authority he had over him was that of his father, or that of his grandfather, became a daily ritual.

  After what seemed like three hours of walking and crouching and hiding, they finally made it to their house. The last few hundred meters were the most difficult, though. The house was so close, yet so far away. As they neared the unfinished part of the Wall, they crawled, lay still for several minutes, and had to deal with several passing military patrol jeeps and stray dogs.

  Abu Salem was a sixty-one-year-old refugee who taught English at his local village of Ni’lin in the West Bank. His oldest son, Salem, was accompanying him to go back to their house, which the occupation forcibly took exactly three years ago. As he aged under occupation, Abu Salem grew more and more obstinate. The occupation had taught him that. Teaching taught him to talk and to argue a lot. The occupation, his father, and his father’s job as a teacher, all trained Salem to talk less and obey more.

  Looking back, Salem felt sad he let his father go in the first place, though he had no choice but to obey his father this time, too. The idea of going back was absurd, even surreal. It bothered Salem sometimes how his father spoke about going back to their home, like when normal people under normal circumstances say they are going home from work or school. His father, Salem insisted, was oblivious to the facts on the ground: they simply can’t go back—not now, not this way, not with all the security measures and the gigantic Wall snaking its way through their lives. Salem, of course was always careful to mention those reasons in those exact words. But so far, his father was right: their journey back was impossible because their thinking made it so. Once they were there, it would be possible. It was possible, but danger, for Salem, could be looming anywhere.

  “How?” Salem had asked when his father first told him he was going back and that he wanted Salem to come with him. But after all those years, he got used to his father’s futile endeavors: his attempts to block the bulldozer that razed parts of his field, spending a lot of money on a lawsuit he filed to stop the confiscation of his house, his desperate search for someone to take his emotional missive to the Jewish family who might take the house in order to win their hearts, and now the trek up and down the mountainous fields to go back to have a final look at the house. All he wanted, he kept repeating to Salem, was one last look at the house he built himself and now could not even see because of the Wall.

  “I already spoke to your mother about it, and she is fine as long as I take you with me,” came the answer.

  “How?” repeated Salem, through clenched teeth.

  It was clear Abu Salem was reluctant to share the details with his son, but once he started to describe his plan, it was obvious he rehearsed the answer in his mind many times, as if he were preparing a difficult lesson plan.

  Abu Salem explained how the last morning strolls he took were to check the best and least dangerous way and time, to familiarize himself with the geography of the road to be taken, and to talk to local shepherds for advice. He came to the conclusion that dawn was the best time. Salem was not sure it was a smile he saw drawn on his father’s face soon after he revealed his plan, but Salem could swear his father’s eyes twinkled. They only did that when Abu Salem’s heart and mind were set on something.

  “So we head towards the unfinished part of the Wall after midnight. We will reach before dawn. It will still be dark, and the patrol guards will be sleepy or too tired to be on the lookout.” The words spilling out matter-of-factly, Abu Salem continued trying to avoid his son’s quizzical looks.

  “Are you going to hire a tracker?” Salem asked.

  “I know how to go to my house. I do not need silly trackers,” snapped Abu Salem.

  “We are close,” mumbled Abu Salem as they approached their house, talking to hi
mself rather than assuring Salem.

  “Close to what? Dad, between us and our house stands death! These few hundred meters are always watched by the soldiers. I say we go back now before it is too late,” argued Salem, finally finding some courage to voice his concerns when he realized that the situation was much worse than he expected.

  “If you want to go back, just go. At least I will die trying,” said the father decisively, hoping Salem would not go. Salem did not.

  But apparently, Abu Salem’s plan worked fine. The area was very quiet; they smoothly crossed to the other side of the Wall. And just when they felt relaxed, the acceleration of a passing army jeep brought them down to their knees.

  They hid for a while behind a little pile of rubbish. Just before the jeep was out of sight, Abu Salem grabbed a branch, dragged it behind him, and sprinted towards the road to make use of the dust that lingered behind the jeep, beckoning to Salem, who could not figure out why his father did what he did, especially with the jeep still in the distance.

  “Why didn’t you grab a branch?” asked his father when Salem joined him, both clearly irritated.

  “Why did you?” asked Salem.

  “You should have dragged a branch to cover your footprints,” Abu Salem snapped.

  “Let’s hope the dust and the wind will cover them up,” replied Salem.

  Their house and their trees gave them more safety now that they were a few meters away. Abu Salem spent the next five minutes examining the house and its surroundings. His facial expressions told there was something wrong. Salem was partly watching his father, partly looking at the house, and partly making sure no one else was nearby.