The Blue Between Sky and Water (16 page)
The fishermen bantered in the world of men at sea, cigarettes dangling from the sides of their mouths, unshaven hard faces in the sun, a contented brotherhood floating on a silent immensity, waiting for it to deliver their sustenance. They stayed that way for hours before reeling in nets of small fish. They knew the catch would not be bountiful so close to shore, but they thanked Allah for what they had, as a pile of writhing sea creatures glistened in the sun. They cast their nets once more, and this time, they caught a miracle. Prime sea bass, grouper, bream, snapper, red mullet, striped mullet, sardines, tuna. The fishermen could hardly believe it. Where were all these fish coming from? Answered prayers, the mysterious ways of Allah’s mercy. And the excited cries of fishermen in boats near and far filled the air over the water.
The elation at sea was suddenly muted as Israeli naval vessels sped toward the fleet of small fishing boats fanning Gaza’s shore. Most boats quickly gathered their nets and sped off with their good fortunes toward land. Abdel Qader and his comrades were closest to the vessel and could not flee the Israeli boat heading toward them. As they stood folding their nets, one of the fishermen exclaimed, “Check that we’ve not drifted beyond three miles!”
“We’re fine. Just stay calm. We’ve done nothing wrong,” Abdel Qader said, and suddenly, the ocean became a small room with a small fishing boat, a naval vessel, and no windows or doors. Abdel Qader shouted over the water, “We are not beyond three miles.”
Soldiers laughed and shot a hole in the boat. The fishermen scrambled to plug it. “You say you want freedom, but you are oppressing the fish,” one of the soldiers said, laughing. “Maybe we should tangle you in a net to show you how the fish feel.” They ordered the fishermen to throw their catch back into the sea, and they all watched those sea creatures swim away. Then the soldiers ordered the men to strip and get out of the boat, making them count to a hundred while treading water. When they finished, the soldiers ordered them to start counting all over. The minutiae of cruelty alleviated the languor of patrolling the sea; so the soldiers were amused, but then they grew bored, though they waited and took bets as the fishermen counted in the water.
Abdel Qader and his cousin Murad were flanked by two of their comrades, Abu Michele, a Christian, and Abu al Banat, a man who had six daughters and no boys. People called him “father of the girls.” He was the first to succumb to exhaustion and as he sank, some soldiers cheered as others paid out money to them. Abdel Qader and Abu Michele tried to hold him up, but they could barely hold themselves. Abdel Qader pleaded, “Have mercy. We have children and families.”
Murad quietly closed his eyes and melted like despair into the sea, then one of the soldiers took aim and shot Abu Michele’s shoulder. Abdel Qader uttered the
shehadeh
, preparing to meet his end. But the soldiers were done. They sped away, their wake flapping against remnants of the boat. Abdel Qader relaxed his body and let it glide through the water, holding his breath, holding off the compulsion to breathe water deeply into his lungs, until a hand reached for him. He climbed in the water and cut through the surface with a loud gasp of air. Abu Michele floated next to him, nearly passed out, and said, “Don’t leave me to die, Abu Khaled.”
Several families from Khan Younis were grilling food, having a picnic on the beach, when some of the children came panting from the water, pointing to something in the distance. The adults rose to their feet, squinting their eyes to make out the approaching shapes. There was at least one man, in distress. They saw hands waving, then heard the man’s calls for help. Two young men from the family had already jumped into the water, swimming to the rescue. Closer, they saw another, injured, clinging to wooden remnants of what was probably a boat. Others dove in with abayas to cover the naked men before they limped out of the water. The injured man had been shot in his shoulder and had lost blood and consciousness. They rushed him to the hospital. There, they questioned the men.
“What’s your name, brother?” someone asked.
“Abdel Qader, Abu Khaled,” the man said and added only this much more: “We’re fishermen. The Jews came. There were two others, returned to God’s sea. I have to go tell their families now. I will be back for my friend with his family.”
When Jiddo Atiyeh passed away, Baba stood in the front row of the prayer lines for the deceased. Like everyone else, he said to Mama and Teta, “May his remaining years be added to yours.” And when it was just us at home in the evening, when he was smoking an argileh, when he exhaled his thoughts in a cloud of smoke that stared back at him, he said, “I am glad for Ammi Atiyeh to have died of age. It’s a blessing to die naturally.”
There was no work on land. Israel’s siege of Gaza saw unemployment rise to eighty percent and malnutrition began a slow creep into the new generation. Abdel Qader joined the growing number of jobless men, who gathered in their neighborhoods every morning. These were laborers, accustomed to rising before the sun to wait in Israeli checkpoint queues to get to their jobs. They were men with large calloused hands, damaged nails, and the scars of hard work. With strong, if not young, backs. They’d gather, compelled by the pull of a breadwinner’s habit to leave their families early and return late, tired and proud from the hours of backbreaking toil. They’d gather to escape the shame of idleness. To avoid the eyes of their hungry children. Few of them ever stood in the UN ration queues. They could count on their wives and daughters and sons to accomplish the humiliation of waiting for hours to haul back the bags of rice and flour. But Abdel Qader had only one son, barely seven years old, and a pregnant wife who had already had too many miscarriages to risk another one by carrying the heavy rations.
He delayed going to the handout lines as long as he could. He even tried to get his nephews and nieces to help, but they were already getting their own families’ allotments. When there was no work to be found and nothing was left to eat, he hung his head and waited in the ration lines with women and children, who looked at him with pity, fueling his sense of impotence and uselessness.
His shame shape-shifted to anger, and Alwan was the easiest target. Her weakness and inability to deliver healthy children sooner was to blame. He questioned his choice of a wife with narrow hips who had taken so long to bear him a child. Luckily, the firstborn had been a son, sure to carry on his name. Still, if she had been a better wife, he would already have many children who could have stood in these lines to spare their father such disgrace. He should have listened to his mother and sisters when they had tried to dissuade him from marrying Alwan, whose grandmother had been the crazy lady of Beit Daras. And whose mother, Nazmiyeh—though he loved the woman, God bless her—was the most crass hajje he had ever known. He should have been more pragmatic in choosing a wife. It was all Alwan’s fault. The fault of her deficiency and her cursed family.
Abdel Qader left in the morning and returned in the early afternoon with two bags of rations flung over his shoulder. He threw them in the middle of the family room for his wife to deal with. Alwan stared at the heavy bags and touched a hand to her swollen belly. She grabbed the rice bag and leaned her weight to drag it into the corner. The effort caused her to wince. She made a silent plea to Allah to protect her pregnancy and admonished her unborn child to behave and not try to come out too early before grabbing the bag of flour to move it to the corner with the rice. Then she gave thanks for the solitude of her suffering, relieved that Hajje Nazmiyeh was making bread in the outdoor
taboon
s under the orange trees where the matriarchs gathered daily.
Still reeling from the humiliation, and still blaming Alwan for it, Abdel Qader did not look at his wife as she struggled with the sacks. He walked out, unsure where to go. He wanted to walk out of his skin, out of his anger and his impotence. There was no job to go to. There was no boat. The sea had betrayed him. He was too ashamed to join the men. Too bored with them. He walked. Nearby, he saw his son Khaled with other small boys, listening to horrible English songs and dancing like a girl. The sight renewed his anger, which finally gave him purpose and authority, if only briefly.
Though he’d have liked to have smashed the tape player for the momentary sense of power, he was not so rash as to destroy a material object he could not afford to replace. He pushed the stop button and stood with stern eyes that made his son cower.
“How can you listen to this trash?”
“Baba, this is rap. It’s not Israeli.”
“They’re all the same, and don’t talk back to me when I speak.” He slapped the small face of his son, knocking him to the ground. “Go help your mother, boy!”
With tortured eyes, Abdel Qader turned slowly away, toward aimlessness. Toward the sea.
When he finally returned, Abdel Qader was drenched in seawater, his eyes swollen and red. He entered their home silently and went to change his clothes. Something in the way he moved, in the way his head seemed too heavy, dissuaded his wife and child from asking why his clothes were sopping wet. Alwan had done the best she could for their meal but Abdel Qader didn’t compliment her. He didn’t speak at all, and she wished for one of his rare affectionate moments. Instead, he sat in a pile of his own thoughts, next to his son but somehow very far away. He tried to summon the virility of anger by thinking he should have a bigger family by now. More children around the meal. But the truer part of him was ashamed of his thoughts and grateful for fewer mouths to feed. The previous hours in the ocean and the cowardly path he had contemplated still clung to him. He remembered that fateful day at sea when his boat and comrades had been devoured. The familiar brew of fear, helplessness, anger, and bewilderment began frothing in his body. He squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his fists to stave it off.
“What’s wrong, Baba?”
Abdel Qader opened his eyes, relaxing his fists at his son’s touch. Just then the adan beckoned the faithful to the evening prayer. He kissed his son’s cheek, the one he had slapped earlier. “May Allah cut my hand off if it hits your face again.”
“Let’s pray the
magreb
together, son,” he said, and the two stood close on their prayer mats, one large, one small, bending, kneeling, and prostrating themselves together before Allah.
The family ate and sat watching the news, then tuned in to Hajje Nazmiyeh’s favorite evening soap opera. Khaled went off to bed, and soon Hajje Nazmiyeh’s snoring in the big room suffused the house. Alwan finished the dishes and joined Abdel Qader, who sat outside smoking his argileh. Years into their marriage, with one child and too many miscarriages to show for it, Alwan understood that her husband blamed her for the degradation he felt.
“What can I do?” she said.
He didn’t look at her, continued puffing.
She sat by his feet for a while and mustered the courage to speak again, “I’m sorry, Abdel Qader. Hit me if you want. I can take it. But please do not turn away from me.”
Her words moved him to bend closer to his wife. He put his hands to her face and pulled her closer to him. He kissed her forehead, hesitantly at first, then forcefully, squeezing her close. “It’s not your fault, Alwan. By Allah’s will and mercy, we will get through this.” That was all he said. He held his wife and they slept that night in an embrace that held the world together.
When my sister Rhet Shel was born, Teta told me not to worry. I would always be her favorite, even though Rhet Shel was named after the only brave American she had ever heard of. “The rest of them just make weapons to kill, or junk to sell to people,” Teta Nazmiyeh said. “I don’t know why Allah made them so pretty with yellow hair and such.” She contemplated her own words. “Maybe to offset the badness in their hearts.”
Girls were often named after their grandmothers or some other beloved woman in the family, the Quran, or history. But Alwan and Abdel Qader’s daughter was named after an American young woman named Rachel Corrie, an international activist who had been run over by an Israeli bulldozer as she tried to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian family’s home. Witnesses all swore the driver had crushed her intentionally, and Gaza poured into the streets to honor her as a martyr. Corrie’s funeral marked the first and only time in Gaza that the American flag was carried through the streets with reverence, as it draped a mock coffin after her body was returned to her family in Olympia, Washington.
Soon, there were hundreds of little girls in Gaza named Rachel even though Gaza’s best efforts at the American pronunciation were two-syllable approximations that came out Arabized as
Ra-Shel
or
Rhet Shel
, the latter more attentive to the English
ch
sound. Abdel Qader swore that honoring Rachel Corrie in such a way had been his idea first, and he held on to the name until Alwan gave birth to their second child.
The months leading up to Rhet Shel’s birth were hard times, but Abdel Qader’s patience and prayers were answered with money and chickens soon after his daughter’s birth. He managed to secure a microloan from an aid organization for five hundred dollars, which he used to purchase lumber, wire mesh, and chicken feed. What remained would be spent buying live chickens and chicks for a family business.
It seemed to Khaled that his mother had been pregnant for years. When he was seven years old, his sister, Rhet Shel, arrived. He had wanted a brother and sucked air through his teeth as family and friends delighted in the new arrival. “She’s ugly, with no hair and yellow skin,” he told his friends Wasim and Tawfiq. “All she does is cry. Baba keeps talking to her as if she can understand. Why does he do that? Like he’s losing his mind,” Khaled complained.
Before Rhet Shel arrived, his baba had been wallowing in a collection of bad tempers and moods. He had lost his boat and refused to talk about it. Israel had shut the world down, making some people go hungry. Khaled heard his father say, “May God punish the Jews for what they have done to us.”