The Blue Between Sky and Water (23 page)
Nazmiyeh had surrendered to the misfortune that she might not ever see Nur. As she had when her sister, her mother, her brother, her son, and her husband had been lost to her, she petitioned providence, called in tearful prayer, and left her heart at the doorstep of fate.
“This book sounds like it should always belong to Nur. I don’t know how I will ever get it to her,” Mamdouh’s friend had said to Hajje Nazmiyeh. He feared that he could not live up to the duty of
amana
, a sacred promise to safeguard something for another person. In the end, he gave the book to another friend who was traveling to Gaza and who would find Nazmiyeh and take it to her. This is how things got delivered in Palestine. Travelers entrusted packages to one another, even if strangers, and no one violated the duty of amana.
Nazmiyeh put the wooden lid aside and Nur could see the contents. A familiar watch, a lot of papers with childish writing she could not decipher. Nazmiyeh slowly removed the papers, and there it was. Nur reached for the book, touched its cover, caressing the words written by her so long ago.
Jiddo and Me
. A drawing of her (a smiling little girl with black hair), her arm (a line) stretching her hand (five small lines) to reach the five small lines connected to a straight line drawn to a smiling old man with gray and black hair. Nur lifted the book from the box; its dusty frayed ribbon was still tied in a bow. As she held the tails of the bow, they were transformed to a bright blue hair ribbon held by small outstretched hands. “Jiddo, will you tie this in my pigtails, please?” echoed a little girl’s voice in her mind.
A mature hand took the ribbon. “Which one?” he asked. His voice was resonant and kind, and Nur searched that memory to find his face. But she couldn’t. Only the ribbon, her hands and his, her voice and his.
She opened her eyes, the book clutched to her chest, and said to Hajje Nazmiyeh, “I can’t remember my jiddo’s face.”
Nazmiyeh’s tears were turning into laughter. “Allahu akbar!” She repeated her praise loudly and powerfully and began speaking with her departed sister. “I know you have a hand in this, Mariam. I know you are here. You never left. Oh, Allah is merciful. To Him all there can be of gratitude. Our child is home.” Then she looked into those mismatched eyes, held Nur’s face in her hands, lifted it closer to her own. “Our Nur is home. I never stopped praying for you. I never stopped asking Allah to bring you home. You’ve been here all along! Allahu akbar. Look how Allah is all-knowing. Look how He brought us together. You see, my child? You see how wise is Allah?” Hajje Nazmiyeh kissed Nur’s face, rocking their bodies by the force of this grace. “Oh, how the scents of Mamdouh and Yasmine waft in this house now. Oh Allah, my Lord. How You are merciful.”
Bewitched by the unfolding mystery, Rhet Shel ran to fetch her mother from the neighbor’s house.
“Allahu akbar! I knew there was something about you. You never felt like a stranger. Allahu akbar!” Alwan embraced Nur the moment she walked in, her neighbor friend in tow.
They telephoned the rest of the family and all the sisters-in-law came early the next morning. News traveled through the camp in all directions like rumors in Rome of a Madonna statue crying bloody tears. “Did you hear? That American woman! Turns out she’s Hajje Nazmiyeh’s niece. Remember that day in the souq? Remember he had a granddaughter and she was trying to bring her here? That American woman is the girl! They just figured it out, praise Allah!”
People came to the house to congratulate Hajje Nazmiyeh for her answered prayers, and rumors of djinn were ignited and fanned once again. In the noise of miracles, prayers, and innuendo of djinn, Nur retreated inward until evening dimmed the skies and peeled away everyone but those orbiting her heart—her great-aunt Nazmiyeh, Alwan, Rhet Shel, and Khaled. Life had collected her pieces and returned her to love’s source. There had been no coincidences. The world was stunning and it occurred to her that not once during her time in Gaza had she felt that old impulse to empty her stomach. Then, at night, she held the remains of love and read its pages to Rhet Shel until sleep came with the lullaby of Hajje Nazmiyeh’s snoring, Alwan’s coughing, and Khaled’s immense silence. Her thoughts wandered in and out of memories and longing. Always, they returned to Jamal. To the details and parts and the whole of him.
When Mama was a little girl, she unknowingly swam into a school of jellyfish and got stung very badly. After that, she wouldn’t let the ocean touch more than her legs, but her distance only magnified the sea’s presence inside her, and the sound of crashing ocean waves felt like her own heartbeat when she stood on the shore. There, she looked out at Allah’s blue immensity and felt Baba, as if waiting for him to float back to shore, his nets full of bounty.
Alwan took her time getting dressed, hoping Nur would get frustrated and leave for work. They were already late for the appointment because Alwan was late returning from the co-op. In a last effort to frustrate Nur into giving up on the appointment, Alwan tried to pick a fight.
“I’m so sick of coming home to all this noise,” she huffed, silencing the pop music, bringing the dancing of Rhet Shel and her friends to a halt. Nur winked at Alwan in collusion and whispered relief that Alwan had shut that awful music off because she hadn’t had the heart to do it herself. Alwan grumbled at seeing her plan backfire and reached down to hug Rhet Shel, who rushed to greet her mother. “It’s to make Khaled blink, Mama!” Rhet Shel protested.
Alwan kissed Khaled’s forehead. Her daily question to Nur, “Did he respond at all today?” was perfunctory and she didn’t wait for an answer.
“I already called the doctor and told him that we will be a few hours late,” Nur said. “We have plenty of time and you should eat something before we leave.” Alwan grumbled and huffed louder.
Nur called to her again, “Alwan, there’s a football match on the south dirt field. I’m taking the kids to go watch; so take your time.”
“He used to love to play with those boys,” Alwan said, startling Nur as she came up behind her on the sidelines of the dirt field.
“I didn’t realize you were here!” Nur said. “Are you ready to go?”
Two of Khaled’s friends ran to Alwan, embracing their Amto Um Khaled, begging her to allow her son to remain with them.
“If you think he’ll be cared for, it might do him some good to be around his old friends for a change,” Nur said, and the boys, encouraged by the American’s approval, became more animated in their pleas.
“Okay, Wasim. You and Tawfiq were his best friends. But he cannot care for himself at all; so, you must promise to keep him with you at all times. You must not mess with any of his tubes or else he could get an infection. There’s a letter chart by the wall in our house. Get that if you want. Sometimes he will talk to you by blinking yes or no.” Alwan paused, peering into the eyes of these young boys to find a measure of comprehension. “Do you understand everything I just said?” she asked.
“Oh, yes! We will take very good care of him,” they chimed.
“Here are his eyedrops.” Alwan handed them a tube from her purse. “Just put a drop in each eye if he’s not blinking on his own. I will be back in an hour or two. Make sure he’s home no later than that and make sure you remain with him at all times. Do you think you can do that?”
They erupted with assurances and gratitude, whisking their invalid friend away in his wheelchair. They could be heard saying, as they moved away, “I’ll bet we can get him to wake up. It’ll be like old times.”
Rhet Shel reached up to grab her mother’s hand, then Nur’s, and she started to cry for her brother not to leave as the three of them walked to the car.
Khaled
“I don’t want to die.”
—Fifteen-year-old Omsiyat
It seems another life since Wasim, Tawfiq, and I were always together. I was two years their junior, the mediator when they fought, and the object of their teasing when they got along. They were double cousins, their mothers sisters and fathers brothers. We stole a dirty magazine once from Wasim’s married cousin, and buried it in a secret hideout. No one ever knew. We loved each other like brothers, and that’s what we were. Brothers.
Wasim and Tawfiq pushed me along that day when Mama went to the doctor, maneuvering my wheelchair around and over rocks. We spent time by the old cemetery, an old hangout spot. They smoked cigarettes and talked to me, talked about me, unsure whether I could hear them. Sometimes I could blink. Then I couldn’t. My eyes remained open and they applied eyedrops obsessively. I imagined how we looked revisiting our old spots, especially when we arrived at Paradise Lookout, a small peephole, one of several carved out by bullets in a wall. Heaven was on the other side.
Yusra was six when I fell in love with her. I was seven. She had six sisters, no brothers. The town called her father Abu al Banat, which just means “father of the girls.” They were all so beautiful that their father used to say he would die of a heart attack worrying about them. It turned out that he died from drowning.
“God forgive me for saying this,” Wasim began, “but since Abu al Banat was martyred, Allah rest his soul, it’s not as dangerous to come here to watch our future wives, even though we still have to worry about their mother and the neighbors.”
They lifted me to put my unblinking eyes up to the hole.
“They’re not in the courtyard, so you have to look up at the second window on the right.”
I couldn’t see anything, but I envisioned Yusra from times gone by—brushing her hair, fighting with her sisters. Helping her mother wash dishes.
“We have to get more from Tarmal Hill for tomorrow. I didn’t get nearly enough today,” Wasim said. I couldn’t hear everything because they were facing the wall, each with his nose pushed against the concrete to watch through the holes. But I knew they were talking about scrap metal, which is how they helped support their families since Tawfiq had stopped working in the tunnels. Then they were arguing. “Be a man. It’s the best place for scrap. It’s the Sabbath anyway. Soldiers aren’t allowed to kill anyone on their holy day, stupid. I’ll bet Khaled isn’t scared to go. If he could get out of his chair, he’d be running there by now.”
“You’re the stupid one. Think about the bombing last year. I’m pretty sure they didn’t stop on their fucking Sabbath,” Tawfiq said.
“Bombs are different.”
“I’m going home and you better come too,” Tawfiq said. “We have to get Khaled back anyway.”
Wasim’s voice deepened. “Come on, brother. Mama’s counting on me.”
I began to remember more in the hush of my body. Like the day Rhet Shel was born and Baba’s eyes trembled with love as he held her. And on my birthday, when the earth shook and buildings crumbled and Baba … he screamed at Rhet Shel to run. She was clinging to his leg and he kicked her away before the weight of concrete walls pressing on his back conquered and crushed him. Rhet Shel ran away crying and latched on to my leg. Then she lived curled into herself, sucking her thumbs raw, until Nur showed up with music and books and light from another place.
Rhet Shel Sat with Nur while the doctor examined her mother behind the curtain. She did not trust doctors, nor anyone else waiting to stick needles into the arms and buttocks of little girls. On her upper arm was a perfectly round scar where a doctor had once jabbed her with a needle and a lie that it wouldn’t hurt. Now, rubbing her arm in that spot, Rhet Shel left her chair to sit on Nur’s lap as they both waited.
The doctor did not speak much behind the curtain and Rhet Shel was prepared to hear her mother cry out from the shot. But no crying came. Her mother emerged tired, followed by the doctor, who pulled out a small sack of candied almonds from his white coat and handed it to Rhet Shel. She thanked him and changed her mind about doctors.
The adults spoke and Rhet Shel did not fully comprehend, but bits of their conversation would sit dormant in memory until, years later, she would retrieve them to connect pieces of her life. The siege she had heard so much about, the one that the Israelis had made, was hard, they said. As she sucked on the almonds and licked her fingers, the doctor said they had “run out” and opened a cabinet with nearly empty shelves to show them. “We don’t even have …” Rhet Shel didn’t know the word the doctor said, but it contorted his face and she understood that it—whatever it was—was important to have. He said it was best to “remove them” and her mother should think of them as “simply lumps of meat”; that it could give them a full year.
Rhet Shel considered lumps of meat, imagining cooked pieces of tender lamb, and she pulled herself up to whisper in Nur’s ear, “Can we get lamb shawerma sandwiches on the way back?”
Without understanding the look on her mother’s face, Rhet Shel instinctively knew to climb to her mother’s lap and whisper in her ear, too. “Mama, can we get shawerma sandwiches on the way home?”
“Of course.”
The taxi took them to Abu Rahman’s cart by the shore, and the three of them shared a few quiet moments, eating a small meal, listening to the ocean breathe before heading back to the camp.
When their taxi neared, they could see the camp was heaving. The energy of fear, rage, and outrage shot out from its center. People were running nowhere, as if in circles. Alwan put her hand to her heart. “Your mercy, Allah. Your mercy. It’s probably another martyr.” She beseeched Allah to give the mother, whoever she was, the strength to bear this terrible fate. “It seems all we ever do is go to funerals of martyrs.”
As they got out of the taxi, it became apparent that the crowd was running toward them. “Um Khaled!” someone yelled for Alwan and she hurried, leaving her heart and Rhet Shel on the ground for Nur to pick up.