The Blue Between Sky and Water (14 page)
Another two hours passed before the visitors were called, one by one, to see the prisoners. Women would spring to their feet weightless and disappear behind metal bars and doors. Nazmiyeh leapt when her name was called, and queued up to pass through metal and wood and and guns and soldiers and walls and metal detectors until she could sit in a plastic chair before a thick pane of smudged glass, through which her son looked back at her. He was still so handsome. His hair was dusted with the ash of age and the desolation of his skin was a plea for sun. And though his gray eyes had darkened and deepened, hooded by tired eyelids, they still smoldered with life. For thirty glorious minutes, Nazmiyeh swam in her son’s beautiful face. She watched his lips move and heard him through a receiver she pushed hard against her ear, the better to feel his voice. He gave his blessing for Alwan’s marriage, pressed his palm against the glass to align with his mother’s hand, smiled and reassured her that he was steadfast in fine spirit. Nazmiyeh held up photographs against the glass and he squinted to see the faces of new nephews and nieces, growing siblings and old friends. He told his mother of new and old inmates and some legendary political prisoners, but they never delved deeper because everything they discussed was recorded. Whatever the weather outside, in that small room with plastic chairs and a glass barrier between mother and son, the sky was clear and the air fresh. The sun shone and the moon smiled and the stars winked. Rivers flowed clean and the trees danced with the wind. Nazmiyeh greedily soaked it all up, committing to memory every word from her son. Every love note from his eyes. She concentrated on recording it all so she could replay it for herself and count the hairs of his mustache if she wanted. To replay the lyrics of his face.
The buzz of the alarm went off, signaling that their time together was over. Mother and son held one another in the tight grip of sight, safeguarding the memory of the previous thirty minutes.
The women were searched again before they left. The nakedness, box of clothes, metal detectors, bars and doors and walls and wasted time were the same, but humiliation did not penetrate them. They stood silently inside themselves, in the dignity of small rooms they built in their hearts, with plastic chairs, smudgy glass, and love songs. They remained in that space for the hours that followed on the bus, through checkpoints and a dimming sky. The mischievous boy who had been chided by Nazmiyeh was at it again on the way home. Nazmiyeh smiled this time and pulled him near. “You’re a handsome boy, my son. Here,” she said, giving him a sweet from her bag.
Teta Nazmiyeh and Jiddo Atiyeh had a special dance they did with their hands. Teta said it was how they told each other secrets. I wasn’t born yet, but I know their hands danced the day my parents married. And I know they interlaced in languid foreboding after the wedding.
Like all weddings in the camp, Alwan and Abdel Qader’s union brought hundreds of guests and thousands of onlookers into the streets and alleyways. There seemed to be much curiosity and anticipation for this union. Two separate
zaffehs
danced throughout the streets, one holding up the bride in white on a chair and one for the groom on a horse, both chair and horse adorned with flowers and flags. Women and men sang and hollered their prayers to the heavens, leaving a charmed wake that rose to the balconies filled with onlookers lining the alleyways.
It was Hajje Nazmiyeh’s joy, most of all. She danced and sang throughout the streets. Had people not been accustomed to her outrageous ways and kind heart, they’d have been scandalized by a grown woman in a traditional embroidered thobe trying to shake her hips in public. Instead, they clapped and sang with her. She carried two framed photos—a portrait of Mazen and a photo of Mamdouh and Yasmine—and held them up at times when she danced, to include absent family in the only way she knew how.
Mamdouh had been expected to arrive from America in time for the wedding. He had finally received the papers for full custody he needed to leave the country with his granddaughter, Nur. He was returning to Palestine with the newest member of their family, for good. From photographs he had sent, Nazmiyeh had been astonished to see that Nur had inherited Mariam’s eyes. She held a photo of little Nur and cried, believing that Mariam somehow lived in her. Mamdouh had also confided that he thought Nur saw colors in the way their sister had years earlier, which only intrigued Nazmiyeh more and increased her anticipation to meet her grand-niece. At last everything was falling into place. Falling into love.
It had been nearly eight years since she had seen her brother and Yasmine. They had come for a visit with great longing, hungry for home, and they brought two suitcases of gifts from America. When they heard the adan beckon, Yasmine cried. They closed their eyes and inhaled deeply the smells of the souq and they drank in the breeze off Gaza’s sea. Nazmiyeh doted on them and kept them close. The old beekeeper’s widow came and went daily, cooking for them. Nazmiyeh and Yasmine held hands like schoolgirls when they walked and stayed up late talking night after night. They smoked argileh every evening and filled the hours reliving stories of people and places in a time just under the thin skin of the eyelid. Nazmiyeh’s grandchildren, not much younger than Alwan, who was a still a young girl, consumed those stories, protesting when their mothers pulled them away to go home, and then dreaming of Beit Daras. Of a river. Of a woman who spoke with the djinn and a girl named Mariam who taught herself to read.
When the inevitable day of their departure arrived, the family was inconsolable. Mamdouh and Yasmine would have stayed and never gone back to America, but for their son, who had refused to return with them. He was in college, engaged to a Spanish woman. Both Nazmiyeh and Yasmine prayed hard to hasten a breakup between them. Their son, Mhammad, had been to Gaza before Alwan could remember. He could not, or was unwilling to, speak Arabic and complained about everything from the food to what he perceived as a lack of sanitation. Alwan’s brothers wanted to give him a well-earned beating but Nazmiyeh intervened, though later regretted it. “That’s what happens when you only have one child. They never get the mean and nasty beaten out of them by their parents or siblings. I should have let our boys whup him. Would have done him some good,” she had said to Atiyeh.
In the years after that visit, their son married the Spanish woman and had a daughter, Nur. Yasmine’s cancer returned and she soon passed away. Then Mhammad died in a car accident and Mamdouh bowed in gratitude to Allah for sparing his beloved Yasmine the heartbreak of losing her only child. It was then that Mamdouh resolved to return to Gaza for good, but not without Nur. “Come home, brother,” Nazmiyeh had pleaded. “There is no dignity in life or death away from your home and family.”
It had taken a few years, all his money, and long legal procedures to gain full custody of Nur. And when he finally did, Nazmiyeh’s happiness was as big as God’s outdoors. Now, her only daughter was going to be married, her brother was finally coming home, bringing Nur, her only niece, who was perhaps inhabited by Mariam’s spirit—and someday, she was sure of it, Allah would bring Mazen home, too. Allahu akbar!
Although Nazmiyeh was disappointed when her brother called to say he had fallen ill and had to delay his trip, she was not too concerned. He assured her their reunion was a matter of short time. She proposed delaying the wedding, but Mamdouh insisted that everything go on as planned; he would be there soon enough. “Enshallah, our family will be whole again.”
Shortly after the wedding, Mamdouh began to call several times a week. He was in the hospital, and though he tried to assure Nazmiyeh that all would be well, she sensed otherwise. He had a lung infection, he said. Infections always clear up with antibiotics. He said he would be home soon. His long exile would be over. Exile, he said, had stolen everything. It had excised his home and heritage and language from his only son. It had taken his Yasmine. Exile had made him an old man in a place that had never become familiar. But life had been merciful, too, for he had a gift of this miracle granddaughter, who could now return home to Gaza with him. Already, she could speak Arabic and her appetite for stories of Palestine was endless. They were making a book together, of all the things they loved. “It’s called
Jiddo and Me
, ” he told his sister.
“May God keep you both in the palms of love and extend your life, brother, to be both father and grandfather to her,” Nazmiyeh had replied, but in her heart she wanted to ask why the urgency for such nostalgia.
Then the calls stopped.
Nazmiyeh dialed his number, but only heard an automated message in English, which she could not understand. She asked Alwan to give it a try and got the same effect, then she demanded one of her sons try, believing that both she and Alwan were dialing incorrectly. He got the same message and Nazmiyeh stomped off, cursing her children for their inability to perform the simplest task of getting another person on the phone. She would get up several times at night to check the yellow phone in the big room. Then she laid a makeshift bed, a mat and pillow, next to the yellow phone and slept in the family room, waking frequently to check it for a dial tone. She would dream that Mamdouh called and would rise grasping at the smoke of that dream, trying to will it into reality. At meals, they pulled the phone beside her. When one of her grandchildren bragged about his report card, she immediately demanded he try dialing her brother’s telephone number. “You’re the smartest of everyone. I’m sure you can dial properly,” she said.
The boy, only eleven years old, looked around at the equally bewildered adults as he dialed the yellow rotary phone, one number arc at a time.
“It’s okay, son. We just keep trying and then it will work eventually,” she said at the sound of that wretched American automated message, and she took the phone back, checking the receiver again to ensure a dial tone.
Finally, the yellow telephone rang. Nazmiyeh, two of her daughters-in-law, and the newlywed Alwan were in the local market buying fruits and vegetables for their
jomaa
meal the following day. She had agreed to leave her yellow telephone because Abu Bara’a, the spice merchant, had a red telephone. Atiyeh had promised that he’d direct any caller there, and he was hurrying to the market as the red telephone rang. A disbelieving Abu Bara’a handed it to Nazmiyeh, who was seated in his shop, sipping tea. Nazmiyeh’s eyes widened and she yelled for everyone who could hear to quiet as she answered.
“Mamdouuuh. Mamdouuuh. Is that you, my brother? Mamdouh?” Those moments appeared on her face as an inconceivable smile and as they passed, the smile fell. The sky fell. Beit Daras fell. Nazmiyeh fell to her knees and slumped to the floor. She held her face in her hands, the telephone at her ear.
From the epicenter of Nazmiyeh’s body, flanked by her daughter and daughters-in-law, concentric rings of silence rippled through the bustle of the market. Merchants left their customers to look on helplessly, and haggling was transformed into hushed whispers that Hajje Nazmiyeh had received The Call, and the news it brought was what they all had feared.
The call had come from an old friend of Mamdouh in California. He was a Palestinian who had known Mamdouh since he first arrived in the United States. Nazmiyeh knew of him and had even spoken to him before on the telephone once when Mamdouh and Yasmine had called her years earlier. The man was deeply saddened and sorry to have to make such a call. There was a package of Mamdouh’s personal belongings that could not be kept with Nur because she was too young. He promised to send the package he had received from the child welfare department. Mamdouh had asked him to make sure that Nur was sent to Gaza to live with her family, instead of foster care, but Nur was being reunited with her mother. There was nothing he could do. Nazmiyeh could hear tears in his words. There was no way to take Nur out of the country. He was sure that she was being raised Christian. Her mother would not allow him to speak with Nur. “I’m an old man here. A foreigner. I wish I could do more,” he said.
Nazmiyeh sat in that place on earth and the weight of her heartbreak conspired with gravity, collapsing her further, turning her into a body of dense silence.
A woman whispered in the crowd, “What’s going on?”
“Hajje Nazmiyeh got the call.
Enna lillah wa inna elayhi raji’oon.
May He have mercy on her brother’s soul,” someone responded.
My mother loved quietly and lived as if she watched the world through slits in the curtains. People thought piety provoked her to don the niqab when she was young, but it was to complete her invisibility—to take the curtains with her while she roamed her own life. But my father saw her. He stepped behind the curtain and loved her there. When she decided to take off the niqab, people thought it was because of Teta Nazmiyeh’s nagging. It was really for Baba. He never asked for it, but she knew he wanted the assurance of her face, all of it, in all the spaces of his life.
The years Brought Alwan several miscarriages and a stillborn baby. They brought expropriation of land and Israeli settlers and more soldiers. Jewish-only settlements and checkpoints carved the hills, and fate excavated Alwan’s womb. Though the early years of her marriage to Abdel Qader were hopeful and loving and sweet, shadows began to accumulate in the corners, and the disapproving eyes of his mother collected in her empty belly. The desert of her womb swelled until it occupied the whole of her thoughts and filled the rooms where she stood. “I understand if you want to take another wife, my love. I just ask that you not divorce me,” she said to her husband five years after their wedding.
“We get in life only what Allah wills, habibti. Let’s just put this in His hands for now,” Abdel Qader said.
He had indeed considered the matter of a second wife, mostly because his mother had become increasingly more vocal in lamenting his childless fate, but he feared that his seed, not Alwan’s womb, might be the problem. It was in those days that Abdel Qader agreed to move into Alwan’s family home. Her brothers had built their dwellings nearby and one had made his home by building a new floor on the family home. Only Alwan’s parents lived in their house now and Alwan’s bedroom was still empty. The choice to live there brought renewed vigor and optimism to them both. A raw decision had been made somewhere along the way, in the quiet places of the heart that do not know words, that they would be content with Allah’s will. They communicated this acceptance of fate in the marital language of intimacy. It was unuttered, but understood from the way they made love on their first night in Alwan’s old bed—disengaged from expectation, passionate. Alwan saw it in her husband’s eyes and cried from the pleasure of it. Abdel Qader held her tight, caressed her hard, kissed her deeply. It was a hunger, almost violent, that awakened in her an unfamiliar and unrestrained appetite. They consumed one another that night and carved with their mouths, teeth, and nails places of refuge in the other, where they left pieces of their hearts in each other’s body.