Where the Streets Had a Name

by Randa Abdel-Fattah

  Baba leaned his elbow on the railings and looked at the horizon in silence, like a man standing at a headstone in a cemetery.

  He stood there for half an hour, unnaturally still and barely moving.

  Samy knew enough to remain silent.

  On his way home, Baba stopped at a coffee shop. He took his mobile phone out of his shirt pocket and called a friend. Abo Hussein arrived shortly afterwards. Samy and I watched them order mint tea and an argeela each.

  When Mama asked me where Baba went, I told her about the coffee shop only.

  The curfew lasts for several more days. My parents fight over everything. Mohammed’s nappy rash. Jihan’s wedding plans. Failing to stock up on enough fetta cheese and bread. Putting too much sugar in the tea. Putting too little.

  Jihan does her exercises in the cramped family room. Sit-ups, star jumps and jogging on the spot. She lifts cans of chickpeas and washing powder for muscle toning. When she can get away with it, she replaces meals with cigarettes (sucked up secretly behind the water tank on the rooftop of our apartment block). She has to stay hidden from the soldiers and from my parents, who strongly disapprove of smoking unless they are the ones doing it. Jihan is determined to lose weight before her wedding and is prepared to take on the Israel Defense Forces to do so. She should be more frightened of Mama and Baba.

  Sitti Zeynab sits in her armchair for days. She thinks Jihan has gone mad. ‘A little meat on a woman is nice. Do you want people to look at you on your wedding day and think you had a holiday in Gaza?’

  Jihan grits her teeth and presses on with her star jumps.

  ‘But I am just an old woman,’ Sitti Zeynab says, grinning at Baba, who’s too absorbed in smoking his argeela to interfere. ‘Why would the freshly hatched Jihan bother to listen to the wrinkled?’

  ‘First intelligent thing she’s said in months,’ Jihan mutters to me.

  During the curfew Sitti Zeynab leaves her chair only to pray, go to the toilet and go to bed. She has an opinion about everything. Each day Mama finishes a packet of cigarettes before the sun sets and tries her best not to kill Sitti Zeynab or Baba.

  I spend the curfew nights in front of the television, doing my homework. We’re studying world music in English. My teacher is a Michael Jackson fan and loves the song ‘Remember the Time’. Our homework is to write our own song based on times we remember. I remember the time I was voted the best dancer in my class. I dance the dabka, a traditional folk dance, and when I dance I feel as though my feet have little wings on them. One step forward, bend at the knee, kick with the right foot, one step again.

  I also remember when Mohammed was born and Mama bit Baba’s arm during a contraction and drew blood. Baba was not allowed to so much as grimace.

  I remember the time I saw my first – well, my first and only – movie at a cinema. It was in Ramallah and it was not so hard to travel there then. The movie was called The Princess Diaries and I ate all my popcorn and drank my can of Pepsi within the first fifteen minutes.

  I remember Maysaa with her upside-down braid and buck teeth. I remember us in the playground showing the other girls some new dabka moves we’d learned in class. We formed a line and danced in a large circle around the playground, attracting new dancers as we sang:

  O, you who passed by and waved with the hand

  You marked the secrets of love in my heart

  I heard your voice when you talked

  Like a bird singing on top of an olive tree.

  Maysaa’s tongue always protruded slightly from her mouth as she concentrated on her dance moves. I remember Maysaa but her memory makes me sick because I also remember the day everything changed.

  From that day I’ve been the one who occasionally wets the bed. I’m the one who is subjected to a tsk tsk, a depressed sigh and an open prayer every time my aunts, uncles and family friends gaze at my face. The women cup my chin in their hands, manufacture moistened eyes and exhale loudly, killing me with their garlic or cigarette breath. ‘Your beauty snatched away. Wasted. Oh my darling.’

  On the last night of the curfew, I wake with a start from a familiar nightmare. Jihan and Tariq are snoring gently beside me. I frantically lower my hand to the mattress. Thank God it’s dry this time.

  Maysaa’s face had filled my dreams. She’s like a faulty tap that won’t stop dripping. You don’t notice it until the stillness of the night. And then each drip is like a nail being hammered into your head.

  I rub the beads of sweat from my face. Sitti Zeynab is farting and snoring in blissful ignorance of my pain.

  It’s about three in the morning and I need fresh air. This is understandable given that I sleep in a room filled with enough gas to light a stove.

  I tiptoe out of my room, past my parents’ bedroom. Mohammed is fast asleep in between Mama and Baba. I slowly open the front door and peek out.

  A jeep is on patrol. I quickly shut the door and wait for it to pass. I wait. And wait. And when I’m sure that it’s passed I wait a little longer. Finally, I open the door a fraction again. Three soldiers are now roaming the narrow street. They’re strapped with machine guns. They suddenly stop. Two of them look younger than Jihan; the third is as old as my father. They huddle together and one of them passes the other two a cigarette each. They light up and lean back against a broken stone fence in front of the dilapidated building of apartment blocks directly across from my home.

  There’s a deathly ghost town kind of silence to the night. There are no cars or footsteps. No bats or owls or rustling of leaves. Perhaps bats and owls have curfew restrictions too. The soldiers’ voices crash against the silent night, like a bird smashing into a glass window.

  One of the soldiers starts to tell a story. I can’t help but stare and watch the transformation from soldier to human. His face lights up, vibrant and excitable. His gun jiggles up and down as he becomes more animated. The others roar with laughter.

  I’m entranced. I lean my face against the door frame and stare at the trio standing a mere six metres from me. For days I’ve only seen the faces of my family. I study the soldiers’ faces: the shape of their noses, the colour of their eyes, the contours of their cheekbones and the stubble mapped around their chins. My eyes glaze over and I’m weightless, unaware of my limbs, muscles, blood.

  One of the soldiers sees me and, startled, points his gun at me. ‘Get inside!’ he shouts in broken Arabic.

  The other soldiers grab their guns and frantically look around, their eyes saucering in panic. The stench of fear is in the air. My fear, their fear, in dangerous competition.

  I anxiously step back inside the house, slamming the door behind me.

  Chapter THREE

  The curfew is finally lifted. School is open again.

  Samy knocks loudly on the front door. ‘Yallah, Hayaat!’ he hollers. ‘Come on.’

  I bound through the house and pass Mama, who, with a large loaf of bread in one hand and a screaming Mohammed in the other, yells at me to not run through the apartment.

  ‘Make sure you drink up that knowledge,’ Sitti Zeynab cries.

  ‘She only has education going for her now,’ I overhear Mama say to Sitti Zeynab with a heavy sigh. ‘For who will marry her with those scars?’

  ‘Don’t worry. Every pea has a pod,’ Sitti Zeynab says. ‘My Hayaat is royalty, I tell you.’

  ‘She could marry somebody blind,’ Tariq says innocently.

  ‘Don’t be abeet,’ Jihan scolds. Abeet, dumb, is her standard label for Tariq. ‘We have standards too!’

  I rush out of the apartment block and almost knock Samy off his feet. The first to accept a dare, lose his temper and bring a teacher to tears of exasperation, Samy is skinny and pale, his face framed by a heavy mane of wild black curls. His eyebrows are thick and black and hang over his small grey eyes. They say that his eyes were filled with colour before the imprisonment of his father, when he was six, and the death of his mother from a heart attack soon after. We moved to Bethlehem when I was nine and so I nev
er knew Samy’s parents.

  They say that Samy’s father was the type of person who commanded respect. ‘When he spoke, he inspired even the most foolish empty-head,’ Um Ziyad, owner of the local bread store, informed my parents when we moved in and Mama and Baba were offered an exposition on the scandals of the surrounding homes. ‘Even the most lazy twit, my son included,’ she told them, ‘was inspired to go on strike and to engage in civil disobedience after reading one of Abo Samy’s essays or hearing him at a public address.’

  They say Samy saw his father being dragged out of the house by agents from the Israeli internal security service, Shabak. Somebody had informed on him. That was common enough. The Shabak agents came in the evening. They beat Samy’s father and then took him away. Samy never speaks about it. Maybe he was too young to remember the details. I’ve never dared ask.

  Samy lives with his uncle and aunt, Amo Joseph and Amto Christina. They’re childless. They do charity work at their church on Saturdays and Sundays, run religious workshops on week days, coordinate the replanting of uprooted olive trees in their spare time and volunteer at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency after dinner. According to Mama they’re also ‘creating the cure for cancer, sewing up the ozone hole and bringing democracy to the Middle East’.

  Amo Joseph and Amto Christina are both short and thin. They believe that television is the work of the devil and music is the devil’s hobby. Hymns and nationalistic songs are approved. Cartoons, Hollywood movies and Arabic X Factor are not. Consequently, Samy and I have spent a lot of time trying to formulate a convincing argument to persuade Amo Joseph and Amto Christina that television will not result in us stewing over burning coals.

  Baba likes Amo Joseph because when Amo Joseph’s not saving Palestine, he’s smoking his argeela. They never discuss religion. They sometimes discuss politics. They always discuss the ‘good old days’, and most conversations include some mention of olives trees and figs.

  Mama likes Amto Christina and Amo Joseph but disapproves of my friendship with Samy because he’s ‘always scowling’ and can regularly be heard to be arguing with Amto Christina and Amo Joseph about anything from leaving wet towels on the bathroom floor to going to church without brushing his hair.

  Maybe Jewish mothers also disapprove of their daughters spending their spare time with boys, I don’t know, but there are many times I’ve overheard Mama complain to Baba that it’s unnatural for me to be so friendly with a boy. ‘She is still too young to know of such things,’ Baba tells her.

  ‘Yes,’ she replies, ‘but it is better to stop it now, before they both become aware. She has no girlfriends, ya Foad. Not since . . . Well, she hates to be around girls. She hates to be around anybody except Samy! It is wrong, ya Foad.’

  ‘Nur! Think for a moment. Is it not obvious why she does not like to be around girls?’

  ‘Well, yes, but there is something wrong about their friendship. It is too strong. I don’t like it . . . It frightens me.’

  ‘Pah! They are both children, so let them enjoy their innocence while they still have it.’

  For now Baba’s view prevails and Mama is left to sigh melodramatically every time I tell her I’m outside playing with Samy.

  This morning Samy isn’t interested in how I spent my time during the curfew. All he wants to know is which contestant has been eliminated on X Factor.

  ‘I’ll race you to school,’ I cry, after I’ve painstakingly explained every single detail of the elimination episode. ‘I need to move again!’

  We pant and puff our way up the long stone road, squeezing ourselves in between the masses of people enjoying their first morning under the open sky in days.

  We dodge honking taxis, donkey carts, chattering families and minibuses. We run through the capillary system of narrow alleys, past churches and mosques, through crowded bus stops and up the stone paved roads, towards Manger Square. We run past walls painted with slogans in Arabic and English: Just Peace! Freedom! Down with the Occupation! We sprint alongside beautiful limestone villas and ostentatious colonial hotels and wave at other children playing in front of apartment blocks. We jump over the outstretched legs of men who sit on their doorsteps soaking up the sun as they caress their prayer beads or fiddle with their crosses. We run under and around clothes hanging on makeshift clothes lines. We run and it is good to feel the sun touch our faces, to feel the wind whip through our hair. Most of all, it is good to hear life again.

  Samy fights for me. He punches Khader in the gut. Khader returns with an uppercut, which Samy blocks.

  ‘You sissy orphan!’ Khader spits. ‘Defending a girl. A girl with a face like mincemeat.’

  Samy lunges at Khader’s stomach head-first. ‘Ibn Haraam!’ Samy screams. ‘Bastard!’

  Khader, who has a far more solid build, shoves Samy, who trips and falls to the ground. Khader raises his leg to kick him.

  ‘Leave him alone!’ I shout, slapping Khader’s neck and crouching down to look at Samy.

  Khader bursts into laughter. ‘Have him!’ He walks off, clearly delighted with himself.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I ask Samy.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where does it hurt?’

  Samy pulls himself up. ‘Hurt?’ he repeats in an angry tone. ‘My reputation, ya Hayaat! Coming to my rescue. Oof! If I was bleeding like a cow in a butcher’s shop I would not want you to come to my rescue. All my credibility is gone now! Just leave me alone.’

  By lunchtime Samy has forgiven me because that is simply how it is with us. We can never stay angry with each other for long – there are too many things to do together. He steals an open tin of paint from one of the classrooms and persuades Adham, Theresa and me to join him at the section of the Wall that circles part of our school. Adham and Theresa harbour some doubts. Being associated with Samy often means getting into trouble with the teachers. The cane is never too far away either. But Samy knows how to dangle the carrot before the donkey. Accusing Adham of being a coward in front of Theresa, who has long silky hair and blue eyes, is enough to puff out Adham’s chest and send him to the Wall, Theresa following out of curiosity.

  As we approach, the concrete looms over us, absorbing us into an unnatural shade. It is strange to be sitting in the open air and yet to feel like a bird in a cage. The Wall snakes its way through the land. A huge mass of concrete slicing through villages and cities, cutting off families from each other, worshippers from their churches and mosques, my father from his land. The Wall scares me. I feel as though it will crush and suffocate me, even while it stands.

  I look at the Wall and remember the day Rawya Amiry, the physiotherapist, lost her brother to it. This is what happens when I see the Wall. I see loss and death.

  Rawya’s eyes are so grey they are almost violet. She never wears make-up. Her hair is short and always slicked back with Brylcreem. (Mama used to consider her unfeminine but stopped talking negatively about Rawya after what happened. Rawya was suddenly promoted to the status of being one of the most beautiful women Mama has ever met and Mama says that Rawya’s hair, while short, is at least silky.) When I returned home from school that day I overheard Mama in the kitchen with Amto Samar. They were speaking in hushed tones as they chain-smoked, sipped sweetened coffee and read their coffee grains. I hid behind the door to listen to them, peeking through the gap in the slightly opened door.

  ‘Rawya went to work,’ Mama said, respectfully adopting the quiet tone she reserves for woeful tales, ‘just like any other day. They say she massaged a woman’s wrists and applied magnetic heat packs to a man with disc abnormalities. Perhaps she spoke about the weather or the peace talks or the best way to make cheesecake.’

  ‘She had no idea,’ Amto Samar lamented with a cluck of her tongue.

  Mama blew a ring of smoke to the ceiling and took a sip of coffee. ‘She came home and found that her heart had been ripped out of her body and flattened with a bulldozer!’

  ‘Ya Allah!’

  ‘Her deaf and mute b
rother, Hisham, you know him, yes? Always seemed a little creepy, but of course that was because he could do nothing but stare, God have mercy on his soul.’

  ‘Ameen,’ Amto Samar sang.

  ‘He didn’t stand a chance, ya Samar. The neighbours say they heard one of the soldiers shout out a warning through a loudspeaker. They tried to rush towards the driver of the bulldozer to tell him that Hisham was inside. But they were held back and Hisham was squashed into pieces, along with the rest of the house.’

  ‘God have mercy!’

  I heard the click of the lighter and saw Amto Samar light another cigarette.

  ‘I went with Foad and some of the others and searched through the rubble all night. Only parts of Hisham’s body were found . . . his head was near the refrigerator.’

  Adham, Theresa, Samy and I stand at the foot of the Wall, not far from a menacing watchtower. We’re as small as ants.

  ‘You first!’ Samy says to Adham, motioning at the paint tin and brush.

  Adham suddenly looks reluctant. ‘What if we’re caught?’

  Samy smirks, folding his arms over his chest and flashing a glance at Theresa. ‘So what if we’re caught? I’m not scared.’

  Adham raises an eyebrow and then snatches the brush and tin of paint. He leans close to the Wall, his tongue slightly protruding as he frowns in concentration.

  Jesus Wepped.

  ‘Ah!’ Theresa exclaims. ‘I know that verse!’

  Adham beams and Samy snatches the paintbrush from him.

  ‘My turn now! I can write in English too, you know!’

  He starts to write: F Y T

  I step up beside Samy. ‘F-I-G-H-T,’ I discreetly whisper into his ear. Before he can yell back at me I rush on with my words: ‘And I am only telling you to save your credibility in front of Theresa.’

  Samy gives me a furious look, although I know he’s secretly grateful for my advice. I grin and step back, enjoying his struggle to exercise self-restraint in front of Theresa, whom I suspect he likes given that he always tries to hold her hand during the dabka.