The Blue Between Sky and Water (13 page)
The strange dream that haunted Nur changed when she began Arabic studies in college. From the first day of class, the children of her dreams by the river were there, with the same words, but this time, she could blink. Khaled held up a chart of the Arabic alphabet and from that point forward, Nur could communicate with them only by blinking. In the dream, Khaled’s fingers moved along the letters and she would blink when he came to the letter she needed. Letter by letter, she assembled Arabic words and sentences to communicate with Mariam and Khaled.
Nur would close her eyes each night and open them on the other side, where she could blink and blink to unlock words that lived deep in her, slowly understanding the conversations between Mariam and Khaled. These encounters in her sleep were vivid and became more animated when Nur spent a semester at the American University in Cairo for language immersion. But always in the morning, she would awake in the mist of a vague sense of it all, grasping at threads of a fading dream she knew had been living just moments before. In vain, she would close her eyes to conjure it all again.
Alwan was my mother; heaven lay beneath her feet. For years after they took her brother Mazen away, she watched my teta Nazmiyeh try to summon Sulayman. But Teta didn’t have the gift, so Mama pretended she did. She was only a child but it took Teta a few days to realize her little Alwan was making it all up. Teta pinched her daughter’s ear and told her Allah does not like children who lie to their mothers.
Alwan was not considered beautiful. She was slender, with long features that gave the impression of height, though she was not tall. Her face was made of geometric shapes, with a long triangle for a nose. Her body, too, was angled, with thin limbs and few curves. “Not much for a man to hold on to,” her mother-in-law said. Although her individual features were oddly put together, she was not unattractive. Her solitary manner endowed her with a mystery that intrigued the boys, like a puzzle to solve. She was known to be pious and became the only woman in her family to wear niqab, although her mother, Nazmiyeh, eventually convinced her that niqab was un-Islamic. But rumors that she spoke with the djinn followed her from childhood and kept some would-be suitors away.
It was make-believe that she spoke to Sulayman. But when her mother yanked her ear for lying, Alwan sulked for the rest of the day, until Atiyeh returned from the sea. Unlike her mother, who discharged her emotional bile and forgot about it, Alwan held on to hers.
“What’s wrong, Alwan?” her father asked.
“Mama twisted my ear because she doesn’t believe that I can speak to Sulayman,” she said, immediately regretting her words as her father’s eyes widened, astonished by a memory resurrected of a long-ago night of terror in the pastures of Beit Daras.
“You speak with djinn? May the devil be banned from this home!
“Nazmiyyyyyyyeh,” Atiyeh called to his wife and immediately began reciting prayers. Alwan started to cry.
He glared at his wife and daughter in silence as they assured him that neither of them could speak with Sulayman or any other djinn. And in this domestic tribunal, the bond of mother and daughter was reinforced with complicity and their shared wish to speak with Sulayman. The next morning, her father called to her after breakfast. “Slip on your sandals, Alwan. We’re going.”
“Where, Baba? Amto Suraya’s?”
“No.”
“To buy things?”
He did not answer. She walked along, understanding that now was a time for silence.
They arrived at a sheikh’s home and Alwan clutched her father’s caftan when she saw the carved-out space where the sheikh’s right eye should have been and the white cloud that sheathed his left eye.
“Come here, daughter,” the sheikh said, and her father nudged Alwan toward him.
She sat on the cushion next to the scary blind man, fingers buried in her mouth, her eyes beseeching her father to please, please take her home.
The scary man traced her features, trying to see her with his knobbly hands.
Alwan’s fingers were still curled into her mouth, and her bottom lip quivered and turned outward as she whimpered.
The blind man read Quranic verses over her for what seemed an eternity. After a while she was not afraid of him but continued to contemplate the space without an eye and the eye with a cloud. She was tired and hungry, but she drank the special water he gave her and stepped over the
babboor
seven times as he instructed. She recited the Fatiha and felt proud when the nice old sheikh with one cloudy eye and an eye-hole complimented her for having memorized an important Quranic chapter at such a young age. He said she must be very smart and she recited more to prove him correct.
“Bravo, Alwan!” said the sweet old man. Her father thanked him and gave him an envelope before they left.
On their way home, they stopped to buy sticky sesame treats, Alwan’s favorite.
“Forgive me if I was harsh. You can have whatever candy you want in the store,” Atiyeh said, carrying Alwan, whose small arms squeezed her father’s neck tighter.
As passing years knead the heart, time would soften Atiyeh, and age would find him an old man telling his grandson Khaled, “All the men who survived the massacre in Beit Daras swore that Sulayman had helped them. Some even said they had seen him strike at the enemies. But I just couldn’t have djinn in my house.”
Over time, and following the stern instructions she was given that day, thoughts or conversations of the djinn disappeared from Alwan’s world. But an aspect of otherworldliness clung to her reserved character, and mothers of would-be suitors, who would rather be safe than sorry, avoided her. On the other hand, Alwan was the daughter of Atiyeh, Abu Mazen, a respectable fisherman and observant Muslim, and her brother, Mazen Atiyeh, was a legendary political prisoner. But Alwan wanted to marry for love, as her mother had. She wanted to live out a story of seduction and romance that grows from a glance to a gaze to breathless longing, and maybe to a forbidden dance of the hands, like her parents had done in Beit Daras on the old rubble of Greek and Roman glory. Alwan manufactured love stories and lived them out in her imagination, but only there, beneath a disinterested surface.
When Abdel Qader came with his father to ask for her hand in marriage, she was nearly eighteen years old. Her parents, brothers, and friends advised her to accept. He was handsome enough, from a good family, and a hard worker. He too was a refugee in the Nusseirat camp and came with a modest dowry. Best of all, he was a fisherman like her father.
Alwan accepted, and Nazmiyeh erupted in zaghareet, rushing out to share the news with family and neighbors, who added the trilling of their own zaghareet into the air. This spontaneous call among women brought inquiring neighbors and visitors to their home, curious to learn who Alwan would finally marry. Later in the evening, as Nazmiyeh was preparing for bed, she said to Alwan, “I’m too tired right now, but tomorrow we are going to talk about the private affairs of marriage. I have so much to tell you about things I learned with your father.”
“
Yumma
, please don’t,” Alwan pleaded, scandalized.
“You’ll change your mind once Abdel Qader gets hold of you and you don’t know what the hell to do.” Nazmiyeh laughed and turned on her side to sleep.
Abdel Qader had left school at the age of thirteen to help his father on the family boat and since then, he had known few days away from the sea. Even during the Eid holidays when no one worked, Abdel Qader nonetheless sought the rhythm of the ocean rolling beneath him. On shore, he kept the steady pace of a laborer’s hands, whether patching or painting the hull or deck of his boat, fixing the plumbing of the two running taps of their home, or building, perhaps, new shelves for his family’s belongings that lined the thin walls separating them from the neighbors. Everyone agreed that he was a good and hardworking man, and Alwan could see no reason to refuse when he came to ask for her hand. Alwan’s brothers, too, liked Abdel Qader, even though they did not know him well. In fact, few knew him well, not even his fellow fishermen who understood the way the ocean calls a man to solitude. Beneath his kind manners and calm temperament was an impenetrable quietude, like the sea itself, and other fishermen loved him as they loved the sea, knowing they would never plumb the depths or secrets of either.
Before the family could grant final acceptance, however, decency required that Mazen also give his blessing.
It took three years after Khalo Mazen was arrested before Teta Nazmiyeh could see him again. Thenceforward, her life was metered by visits to the Ramon Prison, and the events of life were counted relative to their proximity to each visit.
Although Mazen was allowed one family visit every six to eight months, Nazmiyeh renewed her application monthly with the Red Cross to travel to the Ramon Prison. Since Mazen was unmarried and without children, only his mother was allowed. On every trip, Nazmiyeh would lament the injustice. “What’s going to happen when I die? There will be no one who can visit my son.” The prison authorities were unmoved.
On these long-awaited days twice a year, Nazmiyeh would wake at three
A.M.
Atiyeh and all her children would rise with her in a quiet expectation imbued with prayers they made throughout the night.
Please, our Lord, make it possible for my wife, my mother, to visit my son, our brother. Please allow them a moment of love. Please do not send her home without his voice renewed in her heart.
Atiyeh would make breakfast for her, and the boys would pack food for the long journey and photographs for Mazen. They would travel with her through the darkness before the sun, across two checkpoints lit with high-beam spotlights from guard towers, wild cats foraging nearby in garbage piles, until they reached the chartered Red Cross bus, which other families of prisoners with the same prayers in their eyes would also board.
On the day she made the journey with news of Alwan’s pending engagement, Abdel Qader’s family joined them to see Hajje Nazmiyeh off. They brought sweets and letters, even though Nazmiyeh could take neither with her through Israeli security. Atiyeh touched her hand, invoking their private language, and they watched their fingers move in an ancient dance before he kissed Nazmiyeh’s forehead. “
Allah ma’ek, habibti
,” he said. Allah be with you, my love.
The bus was full, some seats doubled up with mother and child or two siblings huddled together, alternating sleep and anticipation of seeing their kin. Women from various villages, who met only twice a year on these trips, would fill the hours unpacking news of births, scandals, marriages, deaths, gossip, recipes. The children would play games. Some of them would get out of hand running through the bus and inevitably get whacked by a mother or grandmother who had had enough. Hajje Nazmiyeh chided a young boy running up and down the aisle, ordering him to calm down. One dreadful checkpoint after another rose on the horizon. Young soldiers with big guns would get on and off the bus, demanding to see ID cards, sometimes making everyone disembark, line up against this or that. Wait. And wait. Unpack what they were carrying. Wait. Show ID. Wait. Sweat or shiver. Wait. Answer questions: Why do you cover your hair? Why do you waste your time going through this? Have you ever tasted Jewish dick? It’s like candy.
Some soldiers were excessively polite, embarrassed by their jobs. One gave a piece of bubble gum to a little girl. “I am sorry you have to wait so long,” he said. The little girl smiled. The mother’s eyes were vacant. They all waited. Then they were back on the bus and the thought of seeing the men they love postponed the humiliations. But not for Nazmiyeh. Blocks of hatred stacked up inside her, building in the vast terrain of her thoughts prisons where she could put these soldiers and their heartless mothers to live in darkness forever.
Five hours later, they were waiting outside the prison. They entered and went into small rooms, where they were ordered to disrobe. They waited together in nakedness, trying to keep their eyes on walls and floor tiles. But not Nazmiyeh. She surveyed other women and made comments on the relative firmness of their breasts. “May Allah curse all the Jews for denying your poor husband the juices of those ripe apples.” She picked up her own breasts. “Mine used to stand at attention, too. But my hungry husband and babies sucked them dry,” she laughed awkwardly, aware and disapproving of her own inappropriate remarks. But no one reproached her. Women have a right to handle these moments in their own ways. Another woman shorn of her hijab, with wilted breasts flattened against her body, muttered a prayer with rote piety, asking Allah for strength for herself and for forgiveness for the
thalemeen
, the oppressors.
Every woman has a right to handle these moments in her own way, indeed. Except this way. “Shut up, woman!” Nazmiyeh’s nervous banter turned to ice. “Forgive them? Stupid woman! They have stolen our lives and the lives of our sons. We’re standing here like cows ready to be milked, or fucked if they please, and you want Allah to forgive them? Pray He burn them all, or say nothing loud enough for me to hear or so help me with all that burns in my heart now. We are trying to get through this to see our sons. Do not pollute my mood.” Nazmiyeh was grateful for this new contempt and she deposited it where breast measurements had been, which she had been clumsily using to fill the space of humiliation carved out with nakedness and a metal detector running between her legs and over her skin by a nonperson soldier. The woman with wilted breasts began to sob quietly as others consoled her and banished the devil with disapproving eyes at Nazmiyeh—
a’ootho billah min al shaytan
—when a female soldier wheeled in a large box of their clothes, and with a gesture of her hand, gave the naked women permission to get dressed.