The Blue Between Sky and Water (15 page)
It happened again that Alwan became pregnant, but they dared not hope. Her belly continued to grow, unimpeded by the assumption of birth, even in the ninth month of gestation. Atiyeh and Abdel Qader were at sea when Alwan went into labor, but she forbade her mother to send word to them. She wanted to spare her husband, to bear the disappointment alone. She refused to go to the hospital, insisting on privacy in another hour of misfortune. So Nazmiyeh called the midwife and together they delivered a baby boy after only four hours of labor.
Thus I was born. On December 27, 1998, three weeks before Teta’s next scheduled visit with Khalo Mazen.
I don’t know who named me, or when. Mariam called me Khaled, but I don’t know if I told her that was my name or if she called me that so my teta would name Khaled when I was born. In that way, it was Mariam who named me before I was born, after I went into the blue at the age of ten. I know it doesn’t make sense. I’m sorry I can’t tell it any other way.
Nazmiyeh lifted the crying baby boy grandchild and Alwan’s heart sank when she saw her mother’s stricken face. “What’s wrong with him?” Alwan demanded.
Nazmiyeh looked at her daughter, then back at the infant. “Khaled. Name him Khaled. He’s a beautiful healthy boy,” Nazmiyeh said, putting her grandson to her daughter’s chest.
Allahu akbar!
Overjoyed, Alwan took her precious boy. Khaled. She liked the name, but she insisted they wait for Abdel Qader.
Nazmiyeh immediately sent word for Atiyeh and Abdel Qader to return at once. News reached those closest first and soon their home was crowded with friends and relatives. Alwan’s brothers, their families, and their in-laws came, as did Abdel Qader’s siblings and their families. Alwan’s mother-in-law abandoned her grouchiness and came with good cheer. Neighbors flocked to see.
Allahu akbar
, they all said. Congratulations, may Allah bless and protect this child. Allah is all knowing and merciful. And while they mingled in the big room, spilling outside into the alleyways, they were allowed to see Alwan briefly, but not baby Khaled. Hajje Nazmiyeh forbade anyone from seeing or holding Khaled, except the mother-in-law and later Atiyeh and Abdel Qader. She claimed it was about germs, but in truth she was afraid to tempt fate. She feared the curse of
hassad
, the malice of hot, envious eyes. Not until she could dress her grandson with a blue amulet to ward off the evil eye, and recite protective Quranic verses over him, would she permit others near him.
Atiyeh and Abdel Qader returned to shore as quickly as they could. By the time they arrived, their home was full and the name Khaled had stuck, even though Abdel Qader had originally planned to name him Mhammad, after his own father.
Abdel Qader held his boy, his eyes brimming, and others cleared the room, making space for a new family’s togetherness. In a tender solitude of their own making, Alwan and Abdel Qader marveled at their baby, inspected his pinched placenta cord, playfully praised Allah for the healthy endowment between his legs, watched him suckle from Alwan’s breast, kissed him and consumed his scent, and gave boundless thanks for Allah’s generosity.
Allahu akbar
.
As is the Arab way, Khaled’s second name was his father’s name, his third name was his grandfather’s, and so on, followed by the family name. So he was Khaled Abdel Qader Mhammad Ghassan Maqademeh. And just as children take their names from their fathers and grandfathers, they in turn name their parents. Thus, from that day forward, Abdel Qader became known as Abu Khaled and Alwan was Um Khaled.
Teta Nazmiyeh was the one who cut my umbilical cord. She said she knew I would be her favorite grandson from the moment she held me. But that was our secret and I kept it.
When Alwan and Abdel Qader’s son, Khaled, was born, Hajje Nazmiyeh thought he had been in the world far longer. She was the first to get a good look at him. Holding her newborn grandson in the name of Allah, the most merciful, most forgiving, she nearly dropped him when she saw the tuft of white hair at the top of his black mane, remembering her sister Mariam’s words:
Khaled has a white streak in his hair
. Allah was all knowing and mysterious in His ways. She tried to contemplate what it meant, but she became tangled and confused in her own thoughts.
Foolish old woman
was her final word to herself on the matter, but that did not prevent her years later, as Khaled learned to speak, from asking him if he knew or dreamed about a girl named Mariam.
“No” was the consistent answer, however creatively she framed the question.
Despite the growing encroachment of Israeli colonies and menacing guard towers, the family lived their days sustained by gifts of the sea, daily chores and toils, rumors and gossip, politics and defiance, and love. As all of Hajje Nazmiyeh’s sons married and began having children, she was surrounded daily by a regiment of grandchildren who petted her and competed for her affection. They were cousins who divided, fought, and united according to the current alignments of their mothers, whose jealousies and arguments provided a shifting landscape of allegiances. The wars of the daughters-in-law were sometimes firestorms of curses and sometimes icebergs that got dragged into Hajje Nazmiyeh’s kitchen on Fridays when they all gathered for the
jomaa
family meal after the noon prayers. And just as much as these
jomaa
gatherings were occasions for treaties, they were also battlegrounds, where biting remarks and gloating stares were flung across furniture, eyes were rolled, brows were furrowed, and feet were stomped. But there were lines they dared not cross. Allah’s name could never be invoked except in reverence, vulgar curses were not allowed, and Hajje Nazmiyeh’s word was always final, her authority absolute in matters of family disputes.
The jomaa ghada at Hajje Nazmiyeh’s would set the tone for the rest of the week. When one of the sisters-in-law came flaunting a new dress—“My husband bought it for me for no reason at all”—the others pouted for days, demanding of their husbands, “Why can’t you be like your brother and buy me presents every once in a while for no reason?”
The same happened with new furniture and appliances. It happened often enough that the brothers finally implored one another to ensure their wives would not provoke such jealous havoc. But in vain. When one of them became pregnant, Nazmiyeh joked to the other wives, “Looks like the rest of my sons are going to be happy in the coming weeks because I know the rest of you will try to get pregnant, too.” Alwan begged her mother to stop speaking like that. “They might think you’re serious,” she said.
“Who said I wasn’t serious, my daughter?” Nazmiyeh smirked. “You just wait. In a few weeks’ time, at least two of them are gonna come back and say they’re pregnant.”
Alwan read the Quran more often, as if to offset her mother’s unseemly speech. In the domestic wars between the sisters-in-law, Alwan was neutral ground. Nothing in her nature provoked the others. She was Hajje Nazmiyeh’s only daughter, not very attractive, and she had only one son and a husband who was odd and remote. She was also the closest to Hajje Nazmiyeh, the glue that held all the siblings together and forced the wives to share their lives and children with one another. Hajje Nazmiyeh was the wisecracking matriarch that the other matriarchs loved and hated in equal measure. She was perhaps the only matriarch who was referred to by her first name. All mothers were addressed as Um so and so. It was not a sign of disrespect that Nazmiyeh was not identified by her relation to anyone else, but a testament to the force of her being, a mixture of defiance, motherliness, kindness, sexuality, and sassiness. No son or husband could rename her. People were drawn to her. Her children and grandchildren doted on her and kissed her hands when they joined or left her presence. She was the mother-in-law who taught her new daughters how to cook meals the way their husbands liked them. She made them all blush with her questions. “Does my son know what he’s doing in bed? If he doesn’t, you shouldn’t be afraid to teach him.” She made them laugh. And when they needed to cry, they found a tender place to do so on her shoulder. Without realizing it, these women who thought they disliked one another became bound in sisterhood under Hajje Nazmiyeh’s aegis, and it showed in times of trial, like the day Hajje Nazmiyeh got the call about her brother, or in the coming years, when the sky crumbled, raining death on their roofs.
No one noticed my first “episode,” when I went in and out of the quiet blue. It was a day like any other. I was perhaps six, walking to school with my cousins and friends, when settlers descended from their perch. Jewish women pushing their babies in strollers, their older children marching along. I saw it immediately, the jubilant venom of bullies out for fun. We all scattered to take cover as the settler kids, under the watch of their mothers, hurled stones and broken bottles at us. Just before the world drenched me in a silent blue, I felt the hot wetness of my urine stream down my pants, against my leg. The next thing I recalled was my cousin chastising me as we huddled behind a boulder, “Next time don’t just stand there like a dumb donkey. If I hadn’t dragged you away, the Jews would have gotten you.”
The day came when Israel removed its settlers. The world said it was as if Israel had cut off one of its limbs for the sake of peace. Palestinians in Gaza sucked air through their teeth and rolled their eyes. Isn’t that something, they said. They steal and steal, kill and maim, and they’re so brave for giving it back after they’ve depleted the soil of clean water and nutrients. To hell with them, they said, roaming the refreshing absence where settlers had been. Hajje Nazmiyeh started speaking with Mariam again, asking for signs. She didn’t know for what. She warned against so much celebration. “Light will cast shadows,” she reminded people.
Soon thereafter, Atiyeh passed quietly in his sleep. It was not unexpected, for he had already acquired the qualities of the dying—endless patience and deep wisdom, shuffling feet, trembling hands, and random smiles. Sometimes, with no apparent provocation, his hands and Nazmiyeh’s would find one another—watching television, eating, cleaning the dishes, or in bed—and their fingers would engage in their ageless private tango, born so long ago of forbidden longing amid remnants of a bygone castle and citadel. They both knew an ending was near, but they never spoke of it except in the quiet dance of their hands. Still, his death was shattering. It made Nazmiyeh suddently an old woman, the youth she spent in love now buried in a grave. Nazmiyeh removed her colorful scarf and tied black grief in its place. She watched in anguished nostalgia as her sons washed, carried, and buried their father. They gathered around their mother and kissed her feet as the Quran intoned from the sound box, its hypnotic melody moving through mourning bodies. People came with condolences and left in respect.
Around the slow motion of the family’s loss, Palestinian factions fought one another and when the faction less conciliatory to Israel won, Israel locked down the whole of Gaza, cordoning off even the sea.
From that day onward, Hajje Nazmiyeh slipped into the soothing blackness of widowhood, and she never added color except the embroidered stitches of heritage on her thobe. Abdel Qader kissed his mother-in-law’s hand, asking Allah to add many years to her life, and from the sea that lived inside him, he said, “At least Abu Mazen died naturally.” At least Zionists had not killed him.
An American girl named Rachel Corrie came to live in Gaza. Her beauty touched us all. All twelve million of us Palestinians around the world. In a letter she wrote from Gaza to her mama in America, she said, “I spent a lot of time writing about the disappointment of discovering, somewhat first-hand, the degree of evil of which we are still capable … I am also discovering a degree of strength and of basic ability for humans to remain human in the direst of circumstances … I think the word is dignity.”
Alwan, Um Khaled, had another pregnancy in 2003, which progressed late enough to identify the gender before she miscarried. Her husband had been telling his fishing comrades he was having a girl. And that’s why Abdel Qader blamed himself for the miscarriage. He had spoken with authority of things that are the exclusive domain of Allah. Still, he grieved, but he soon resigned to his characteristic surrender to Allah’s will.
“It was not our lot to have this child, Um Khaled,” Abdel Qader tried to console his wife. “We will try again. Enshallah, we will have our Rachel, habibti,” he said, as he sought Allah’s pardon.
Alwan took courage and protested, “Everyone is naming their daughters Rachel, Abu Khaled. I don’t want that name. It’s not even Arabic and we don’t know what the English name actually means.”
“Alwan, we agreed. You named the first one. I will name the next,” he said, sure of victory in this domestic disagreement.
Alwan said nothing more.
“Trust me, Um Khaled. Whatever the name means in English, here, it means purity of heart, unfailing faith, and deep courage.”
“Abu Khaled, let us not name a child we don’t even yet have. It’s bad luck.”
He agreed wholeheartedly, embracing his wife.
Once, Baba returned carrying the sea in wet hair and soggy clothes. On that day, Mama had sent me to trade with the neighbors a lemon and garlic for onions that Teta and I chopped up for our meal. A year later, when I went into the blue for good, Sulayman took me back in time to witness what had happened that day in the ocean. And in the going-back, we became part of that day. We, Sulayman and I, were the ones who had cajoled the fish to shallow waters.
Abdel Qader Bade an unceremonious farewell to the sea one day. The Mediterranean was calm and the sky endless. He and his fishermen comrades inhaled the expanse as they reached the limits of the three nautical miles imposed by Israel. It was as far as they were allowed before gunboats would fire, so they cast their nets and waited. They were four men in Abdel Qader’s boat, and Murad, his cousin, pulled out a deck of cards, worn and tattered from many games of
Tarneeb
in the moist, salty air of the sea.