The Blue Between Sky and Water (25 page)
The electricity came on at the perfect time, just as it was getting dark and Rhet Shel had to come in from playing with her friends outside. Nur and Alwan, like nearly every person in the camp at that moment, reflexively put their phones on the chargers. The battery pack of Khaled’s respirator was already plugged in, waiting. A soap opera series was coming on and Hajje Nazmiyeh hurried back to watch it. On days when the electricity was out, she would go to watch it in a home where someone had a generator. “I prefer watching it in my own house,” she said and carried on about the characters, lamenting this one’s fate, cursing that one, wishing for some event to happen to yet another. She would yell at the screen sometimes, laugh or cry, and she used it as a teaching tool for Rhet Shel. “See that? That’s how you get what you need in life,” or “That’s the kind of man you want to marry when you grow up.” Nur followed along until a text from Jamal pulled her heart wide open.
Can you talk? I am going to the water to clear my head. I could use a friend.
Nur thought he had messaged her by mistake. He hadn’t. He said he was leaving his wife. His life had been devoid of love for so long. What was he saying? Why to Nur? The sudden intimacy of his words terrified and thrilled her.
“I’d be afraid. Leave the son of a bitch. He’s cheating on you with every harlot in town!” Hajje Nazmiyeh dispensed advice to the television characters.
Then he said it, in a text.
She knows I’m in love with you.
Nur stared at her phone, light from the television dancing on the darkened walls around them, unaware that Alwan was watching her. She did not text back, and Jamal quickly apologized. He said he had thought she felt the same. That she had made him feel alive for the first time in years.
With trembling hands, she wrote and erased that she felt as he did. She wrote and erased how desperately she wanted to see him. Another text came.
Please say something.
Aware of Alwan’s attention, Nur went to the toilet and wrote back.
I can meet you by the sea, near Tal Umm el Amr in three hours.
She remembered the first time he took her to those ancient ruins of Saint Hilarion monastery that spanned centuries from the Roman Empire to the Umayyad period in the seventh century. They had stopped to eat lunch after visiting patients and Jamal had talked through five thousand years of history.
The television soap opera had been over for some time and they were already well into watching an Egyptian film when the electricity went out. It was just as well because Rhet Shel had already fallen asleep and both Alwan and Hajje Nazmiyeh were dozing off.
Another hour passed in waking dreams that thickened the darkness with unbearable want. Nur removed the covers slowly and as she got up from the bed, she was startled by Alwan’s grasp.
“My love, the sea can wait,” Alwan whispered from the depths of sleep.
Nur waited until quiet settled again, and crept out of the bedroom past Hajje Nazmiyeh, who snored on her cot in the family room. The door creaked slightly on its hinges and she paused until the rhythms of the night were restored, then she stepped into a black outdoors. Nur had never known such uncorrupted darkness as Gaza’s nights. In places where light appears with the flick of a switch at any moment, the streets are always illuminated. Light would pour from the bedrooms of insomniacs. From the call of twenty-four-hour stores. Street and highway lights. True darkness such as this was unattainable, for it was not merely the absence of light, but the presence of something unseeable filling every crevice of life. Not even the moon nor the brightest stars could light more than their own periphery in this blackness. Nur walked through it, the remains of the day, loneliness and desire clinging to the walls of this darkness to guide her. The sonorous rolls of the ocean, the calls of crickets, occasional scurries of wild cats and rats, and the small intonations of her steps made for the music of that night. She kept walking until she knew where she was. Not far away, amid this beautiful black, Jamal was waiting. She went to the place where they had once shared a lunch. The moon danced on the surface of the ocean, on some of the ruins’ edges. She walked until she heard steps not her own. She moved, then heard them again, until Jamal was behind her. “Nur,” he said. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”
But words felt like intruders, so they said little else. The darkness panted and Nur was breathless. The taste of his skin, the moisture of his lips moving down her neck. Their breathing grew jagged and hungry. She felt her bare breasts pressing against him and inhaled the air off his skin as deeply as her lungs would allow. And when he slipped into her eager body, a small gasp marked the moment she felt home.
Khaled
“So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
—T. S. Eliot
They closed my eyes that day, and darkness wrapped around me like a blanket in winter. I thought it was over. That I could not return to the still body in a chair again. But I could hear Mama speak of her sickness and fear, and of love. I think she is not long for here either. Because she sits on the floor and plays for hours with Rhet Shel now. Because of her new unhurried way. Because if she were not dying, she’d have slapped Nur when Nur told her about that married man and what they had done on the shore. Mama had woken up at night and found the door unlocked. But she didn’t yell at Nur. She didn’t tell Teta or call Nur a homewrecker or a whore. She told Nur she was selfish and reckless with the lives of others, like all Americans were. Then she stopped speaking to Nur for days, except in dry tones when it could not be avoided.
Nur begged her forgiveness. But Mama would have none of it. She had stayed up waiting and Nur had returned barely before the sun. I could feel despondency grow inside Nur, just like cancer was growing inside Mama, and they both confided in me. I was t he unintended repository of secrets and quiet fear. A living, breathing depot of understanding that didn’t judge or talk back. Nur said, “No one has ever loved or wanted me like Jamal does.” And Mama said, “Americans are taught to think only about themselves.” They could lay bare their hearts at the same time they changed bags and cleaned tubes and wiped drool and shit and tended to bedsores.
Mama did not think Nur immoral. Whether she would admit it or not, Mama was her mother’s daughter and could not have avoided the lesson that cheating husbands, not their lovers, wreck their own homes. Mama thought Nur selfish, because she hadn’t stopped to think of the repercussions her actions could have on the rest of the family. On Rhet Shel. Their home would be dubbed a house of whores and her brothers, though they lived their own lives nearby, would be blamed, stigmatized, and pressured to correct the offense against the honor of the women under their masculine purview. “Everyone could be hurt, my son,” she said to me. “And for what?” She sighed. She coughed. She went quiet. Then she said, “May Allah have mercy. May He protect my children, for the sake of the Prophet and the heavens.” That’s where Mama was. In the sensible place of planning and praying and worrying, and she busied herself with the demands and minutiae of fear.
But Nur was planted nowhere. She was raw and utterly lost. I had never witnessed such devastating loneliness. She infected me with it and I would have to leave her there, speaking to an empty body. The doctor had started to avoid her and would not write or return her calls. The earth dropped out from beneath her feet and I could feel the irregular heartbeat inside of her, the endless tears she could not cry amassing into a vortex sucking her deeper into herself. Mama’s shunning pushed Nur farther beyond reach. Who in Gaza could understand how this woman who had everything—freedom to travel and live where she wanted, freedom to be safe, to get whatever education she wanted, to work and earn a living, to be blessed with a healthy body and promising future—could suffer so incomprehensibly?
Rhet Shel confided in me, too. “Nur is sad because Mama is mad at her.” And finally, Teta grabbed them both by the arms and demanded, “Sit here and tell me every detail of what the hell is going on or so help me I will take off my slipper and beat you both on your heads with it.”
I left. Sulayman came and we went again to the river. Mariam had moved from the shelf in the water well to the space behind the wall in our old home in Beit Daras, and I waited for my eyes to open to deliver her message to Teta Nazmiyeh.
The bandages and the tape were removed unceremoniously. A nurse in the clinic. Only Mama and me. That’s how she wanted it. My eyes had not died, the nurse said, but she didn’t know if I could see or not. They asked me to blink. I blinked. The nurse covered one eye then the other, asking me to blink if I could see her hand.
“Thanks be to Allah, he can still see with the right eye,” the nurse said.
“What about the left one?” Mama asked. The nurse didn’t think so. She told Mama to trust in Allah, but then she asked what difference did it make.
Mama said nothing more and left. The light of day assaulted me despite the sunglasses when she wheeled me outside, and I returned to the comfort of darkness behind my eyes.
We all had brown skin and curly black hair, but my sister’s tight coils and dark skin hinted of our African ancestry more than the rest of us. Some people called her “abda,” even as a term of endearment. “Beautiful abda,” they would say, and rarely did anyone question it, until Nur came and took a stand so forceful against that word that even Teta’s unbending will melted. It was one of those times when Nur’s American logic made sense and changed us, made us better. To hear Teta later threaten people over that word, one would have thought she had never used it herself. Nur showed Rhet Shel pictures on her computer of African queens and goddesses from places like Egypt and Zanzibar and Gabon, and Rhet Shel began to dream of those faraway places, where everyone looked like her.
Friday was the day of no school, extra house cleaning, prayer at the mosque, and the best
musalsal
television series. But this Friday was different. It was slow and gentle. Rhet Shel was the first to awake. She made coffee, black without sugar for her mother and Nur, and with extra sugar for her teta. Though Rhet Shel couldn’t bear its bitter taste, she loved the aroma of ground and freshly brewed coffee.
She put the tray with two demitasse cups on the floor between her mother and Nur, who slept on floor mats near each other while her teta snored at the other corner of the room.
She shook her mother first, then Nur. “Wake up.”
Rhet Shel had awoken wanting to make her mother and Nur happy because they had seemed so sad the previous night. Though Rhet Shel had tried to disentangle their words from faint whispers in the next room, all she could gather was that her teta was not happy with either of them and she wasn’t going to live in a house where people didn’t talk to each other.
“Oh my little Rhet Shel. What would I ever do without you. No one has ever woken me to coffee like this before,” Nur said.
There might have been no sweeter words, until Mama pulled Rhet Shel close, kissed her round cheeks, and declared, “I love this girl more than any girl on the planet.”
“
Allah yostur
with all this love!” Hajje Nazmiyeh quipped with a smile. “Where are my kisses?” She feigned outrage and Rhet Shel leapt to smother her teta with them.
“I’m going to get Khaled so he can be with us while we drink coffee,” Alwan said, laboring to pull herself up. Rhet Shel noticed that the whistle of her mother’s breath had become louder.
Seeing a shadow pass over her granddaughter’s eyes, Nazmiyeh said, “Rhet Shel, why don’t you get yourself some milk so you can drink with us, too.”
The three of them talked, sitting on floor cushions, Rhet Shel in her teta’s lap, Nur next to them sipping coffee, while Alwan changed and readied Khaled. And when they were all in one room, Rhet Shel announced, “I’ve been waiting to show you something.” She positioned Khaled’s head to be in his line of vision. “Can you see my whole body, Khaled? Blink.” And Khaled blinked once. She hesitated. “Khaled, blink twice so I know you weren’t just blinking a regular blink.” He blinked twice with his remaining good eye. It pleased Rhet Shel, who crouched and began to tumble head over heels on the floor. Then she did a perfect cartwheel.
“Do you like it? I’ve been practicing all week. My friend taught me!”
There was applause all around and Rhet Shel climbed into Khaled’s lap first and left a kiss there on his lips. “Did you like that, Khaled?” He blinked many times, sustaining the momentum of Rhet Shel’s smile. Then she crawled into the space between Alwan and Nur to drink from her cup of milk, which she pretended was coffee, satisfied that she had made them not sad anymore.
Once, one of Teta’s old friends from Beit Daras who didn’t have daughters fell ill and needed to be helped with daily living, but she refused to go live with either of her sons because their wives were, in her words, “evil bitches.” When the woman’s sons tried to force her to move, Teta shamed them, and they left nearly in tears, returning later to kiss their mother’s feet. Teta moved in with her friend to care for her. She cooked for her, bathed her, and washed her privates when she went to the toilet. They both knew her days were numbered on this earth and Teta stayed with her until the end. Some of the other women who had been girls in Beit Daras washing their clothes by the river and who were now grandmothers and great-grandmothers came almost daily to sit together around their friend’s deathbed, remembering better times—“Those were the days”—and lamenting fate: “Who knew we’d die refugees?” And when they were out of their friend’s earshot, they gossiped about the evil bitches and their husbands who were willing to “sell their mother for a wife’s pussy.” Of course, those were Teta’s words and they all laughed, delighting in their friend’s audacity as they always had.
The Merriment of that ordinary Friday morning skipped along to the same tune with which it had started. After Rhet Shel’s tumbling show, they peeled, chopped, and soaked ingredients for the family ghada later on, then went to the mosque for jomaa prayers. On their way back to the house, which would soon be filling with the rest of the family, Alwan wanted to stroll by the ocean.