The Blue Between Sky and Water (6 page)
Atiyeh swaddled his firstborn and stood over Nazmiyeh’s deserted eyes. The infant could not be assuaged and Atiyeh tried to coax his wife to feed her baby. He stroked her hair, put the baby in her unwelcoming limp arms, then took him back. He tried to calm the baby, but the crying hunger clawed at both father and son.
“What shall we name our firstborn, Nazmiyeh? How about Mazen? Do you want to be Um Mazen, my love? Let him eat from his mother now.”
“Name him Iblis!” she said. Devil.
Atiyeh paced nervously, unable to console the baby boy whose cries echoed now from the abyss of abandonment. Finally, Atiyeh held their son in one arm and swung the other across his wife’s face, slapping her with the full force of his angst. “Nazmiyeh! You will feed this child now, woman, or by Allah, I will divorce you!”
Nazmiyeh looked into her husband’s face and saw eyes of steel glistening with tears. She reached out her arms, slowly taking her crying child to her breast, and he latched on with a ferocity that first repulsed Nazmiyeh. But soon, her son’s suckling created a rhythm that spilled through her until she was a river, fluid and calm. She rocked herself in a languid cadence of maternity, mesmerized by the attachment of his mouth to her breast. Her body continued swaying, mother and son becoming one, and quiet tears dampened her cheeks. Atiyeh took her hand, and his fingers danced with hers, as they had done in an irretrievable time and place on the first Thursday of each month.
Later, she spoke to Mariam. “Please stay with me, sister.”
Sometimes Nazmiyeh would ask Mariam to give her a sign that she was still there. “I will never doubt it, sister,” she said, nine months pregnant with her fourth child as she crouched bathing the first three, each separated by ten months in age. They were all boys and with every new pregnancy, Nazmiyeh prayed for the girl she was destined to name Alwan. “Maybe give me a sign, sister.” Occasionally she would open Mariam’s wooden box and leaf through the papers, which bore writing she could not understand. These were times when Nazmiyeh wished she could read. She would put them back gingerly, careful not to tear anything, and place the box on her highest shelf, out of her children’s reach, protected between rows of folded clothing.
By the time she delivered her fifth boy, the pain of childbirth had become akin to the chill of winter or the sweat of summer, sometimes difficult to bear, but well known and dealt with. She paced, squatted, and pushed repeatedly until the child was ready and the midwife could pull it out. Nazmiyeh held her breath. “What is it?” she asked. Another boy. She inhaled the room’s stale air and closed her face, eyes tight, forehead furrowed, thinking of the next preganancy she’d have to endure soon, until her daughter, Alwan, could be born. She slowly exhaled her disappointment and asked Allah that the next one be a girl.
The beekeeper’s widow was related to us only by love. This childless woman was happy anywhere, as long as she could dig her hands into a fertile earth, let life-giving dirt live under her nails, and talk to the plants she grew.
Mamdouh stared at his ration booklet, issued by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which indicated he was the head of household. But there was no house and there was nothing to hold. He lived in a tent he shared with his sister Nazmiyeh, her husband, Atiyeh, their children, and Atiyeh’s parents. But Mamdouh was rarely there. For much of the first two years after they were forced from Beit Daras, he slept on the sand of Gaza’s shore under a canopy of stars. He found work as an assistant to a local blacksmith and gave one third of his earnings to Nazmiyeh and one third to the old beekeeper’s widow. He thought it was the right thing to do to honor the man who had been a surrogate father. There was another reason. During the years he had spent as the apprentice, Mamdouh and the beekeeper’s youngest daughter, Yasmine, had fallen in love. They had never spoken of it, and certainly never acted on it, for she had been betrothed and then married. Even after her husband had been killed by the Jews, she and Mamdouh had communicated their feelings only in rare glances, when he would arrive to give money to her stepmother.
The beekeeper’s widow was a cheerful woman who loved to cook, and that remained unchanged despite war, dispossession, widowhood, and poverty. She was the beekeeper’s third wife, not much older than Yasmine herself. And though the two young women had not cared for one another in better times, they became bound by their past as the only two survivors of their family after the war, and they made a tender home together from shared wounds, loss, and the widow’s love of food. Her days were spent cooking and securing the best ingredients for the next day’s meals. Within weeks of moving into a refugee’s life, she had collected her broken heart and scoured the landscape for an open plot of land where she could plant a small garden.
Daily, the beekeeper’s widow picked the fruits of her labor for cooking, making herbal remedies, and bartering. She used her vegetables to haggle and bargain for fresh goat’s milk, which she churned into butter, heated into curds and yogurt, strained into
labneh
, and filtered and dried into cheese. She traded her beets, cabbage, cucumbers, and potatoes for chickens and eggs. While other women waited in their tents, burdened by shock, mud, and humiliation, immobilized by stagnant days of waiting for the next day’s newspaper, for the next ration, waiting for someone to do something, for the rain to come or the sun to set, waiting to go home to Beit Daras, the beekeeper’s widow began to suffuse the air with the smell of normality. She inspired other women to invest themselves in their makeshift dwellings and it was not long before women began to gather as they always had, to wash their laundry, gossip, roll grape leaves, sift through rice to remove rocks and rice bugs. Their husbands put up laundry lines for them and built communal kitchens and underground ovens to make bread. In the congestion of national upheaval and a collective sorrow that would deepen to the roots of history and expand through multiple generations, the refugees of Beit Daras went back to their jokes and scandals. And while they waited to go home, babies were born and weddings were planned. The tug of life’s sustaining banalities pulled them from their cots into communal spaces, where they prayed together, drank the morning’s coffee and afternoon’s tea together. The war had been a great equalizer and put everyone, no matter their family name or fortune, into the same canvas tents lined in equally spaced rows in open, shadeless fields. All the children played together and soon they all, boys and girls alike, attended school taught outdoors or in tents. The scoundrels, saints, gossips, mothers, whores, pious, communists, egoists, pleasurists, and all other
ists
went back to their former ways in this new, misshapen fate.
In time, mud bricks and corrugated metal replaced the cloth tents and the refugee camps gave rise to a subculture marked by adamant pride, defiance, and an unwavering insistence on the dignity of home, no matter how long it took or how high the price. The camps would become the epicenter of one of the world’s most tangled troubles, and some of the greatest Arab poets and artists would be born from their crowded midst. And there, in the heart of national homelessness, the love and care that the beekeeper’s widow injected into every meal made her domain a source of life from which the aromas of onions, rosemary, cinnamon, cardamom, and cilantro drifted throughout the camp, provoking memory, stories, and hope. At mealtime, her place was always full of people. Neighbors, new and old friends. And of course, once a month, Mamdouh came. He would arrive self-consciously, investing great concentration and will to walk with as much symmetry and grace as he could manage. The bullet to his leg during the Naqba had hit his growth plate, stopping it from growing, while the other had stretched on several centimeters more, warping his gait and making his movements awkward. The lift he added inside one shoe helped, but it was not enough.
The beekeeper’s widow would prepare Mamdouh’s favorite dishes using a special
hashweh
of her own blend of spices with rice and meat to stuff vegetables from her garden. Mamdouh most loved her
koosa
, stuffed zucchini in spicy tomato sauce. The time he could spend in her home on payday was as much of a reward as his earnings, not only for her flavorsome food, but because it afforded him an opportunity to see Yasmine, for it was well known, although unuttered, that he would come to ask for her hand in marriage some day when he had saved enough to start a family.
Indeed, he put aside the other third of his wages for that very reason, and in less than a year, Mamdouh had accumulated enough to seek work in Cairo, where he landed a job with a large construction contractor. Before leaving for Cairo, which was at that time administering Gaza, he took his sister and her husband with him to ask for Yasmine’s hand. He offered a modest dowry of two hundred Egyptian
pounds
and an engagement shabka of a gold necklace with matching dangling earrings. To welcome Yasmine into the family, Nazmiyeh took off one of her own two shabka bangles, which her husband had bought to replace the ones stolen by the soldiers, and she lovingly slipped it on her future sister-in-law’s wrist. The women began
zaghareet
, ululations that spread a heart’s joy into the air for all to hear.
The trilling announced to the world that Yasmine had accepted, and a spontaneous celebration now began. Neighbors had already congregated outside Yasmine’s home in anticipation, for matters of marriage could never be kept secret in Palestinian communities, and now in the close quarters of the refugee camp, everyone knew nearly everything about everyone. Dancing and singing went on into the night. The beekeeper’s widow and Nazmiyeh, as the female representatives of bride and groom, announced the official engagement party would happen in two weeks, after which Mamdouh would travel to Cairo alone to work and save for their wedding and new home.
On the day of the official engagement celebration, the beekeeper’s widow bought meat on credit from the butcher, whom she would later repay with fresh produce, and prepared a feast of tender lamb cooked in cumin, cinnamon, and allspice and sprinkled with browned pine nuts over a bed of rice; heaps of rolled grape leaves and stuffed zucchini; various salads;
mezze
; and cucumber in yogurt sauce with mint and garlic. It was a meal that the refugees would speak about for weeks to come. “No one can cook like the beekeeper’s widow,” they all said. And Mamdouh replied, “Indeed, because she cooks with her heart.” The women guests spoke fondly of Mamdouh among themselves. He was a fine choice for Yasmine, even though he was lame and had no family except one sister, they said. One woman sucked through her teeth in irrepressible disapproval toward Nazmiyeh. “Everybody knows that woman can give a tongue-lashing with no shame and it’s not anything to be proud of,” she said. But another neighbor retorted, “Allah protect us from your tongue. That poor woman has been quiet as a mouse, pushing out one baby after another since the war. Bite your tongue and repent. I won’t have you talking about Um Mazen like that on her brother’s happy day!”
Suddenly homeless refugees after Israel took everything, Palestinians were ripe for both pity and exploitation throughout the Arab world, where the brightest Palestinian minds bore fruit for other nations, and once proud farmers chased the call of bread, becoming desperate workers far from their lands. My great-khalo Mamdouh was swept up in that stream of cheap labor that kept carrying him farther and farther away.
In Cairo, Mamdouh worked without respite. He lived in a dormitory with other Palestinian laborers. Every day, he awoke to the call of the
adan
beckoning the faithful to prayer and performed the morning salat before heading to his job, and at the end of the day, he would muster the energy for a cup of tea and a light dinner with his comrades before collapsing into bed. Sometimes, he stayed awake to count his money, which he kept in a small purse strapped to his body at all times until he could deliver his earnings to Yasmine for safekeeping. He took two days off each month to travel back to Gaza, where the beekeeper’s widow, Yasmine, and Nazmiyeh would have spent the previous day planning and preparing his favorite foods. They would be waiting for him with water warming over a flame so he could have a proper bath, the only one he got each month because only cold water came out of the dormitory tap. A simple cotton dishdasha would have been washed and kissed by the sun on the lines for him, and when he finally arrived, by taxi or rickshaw, the three women of his heart would wrap him with kisses and blessings.
Each time, he brought them small gifts and tales from Cairo. On one such visit, he spoke of news from Kuwait, where oil was pushing up new cities and industries, and a new society of entitled Bedouins was paying Palestinians to do everything from building and staffing their hospitals and schools to cooking their meals and wiping their asses. Several of his Palestinian comrades in Cairo had already moved to Kuwait and spoke fondly of the desert. “I was thinking maybe we could all go there,” he suggested, even though he knew his sister Nazmiyeh would never leave Palestine and he wasn’t sure his Yasmine would, either. The beekeeper’s widow, on the other hand, was ready to soar wherever the wind would take her, except to desert soil, where food could not grow from the ground; and Kuwait was merely a desert by the sea.
Nazmiyeh was in her fifth pregnancy when Mamdouh and Yasmine moved to Kuwait. Before they left, Nazmiyeh held her bother’s face, then Yasmine’s. She kissed them with tearing eyes and repeated the words that Mariam had deposited in her being: “We will always be together.”
Nazmiyeh felt the sting of being the only one of her family left in Gaza, but she knew Mariam was always there, and so was her husband, Atiyeh, a man who fought his own family to defend her. They had never accepted Nazmiyeh and, as more of his brothers married, the band of women who hated his wife grew more vicious under the lead of his mother, who never let it pass that her son had married beneath him. They said Nazmiyeh was bewitched like her mother, Um Mamdouh, and would invite evil wherever she was. Her sharp tongue was proof of the devil in her, they said. They thought she shook her ass purposefully when she walked and said they felt sorry for Atiyeh to have to endure such shame. They said her hijab wasn’t tight enough around her head and that she sometimes let her copper curls fall for all to see.