The Blue Between Sky and Water (7 page)
But the isolation they created for Nazmiyeh and Atiyeh only drew them closer. One baby came after another into a life that barely brought enough food, and evenings spent counting coins from each day’s catch of fish. It was a life that blossomed tenderly, with routines, silliness, tears, and demands. When the boys were small, Nazmiyeh would harness them two at a time to her back as she toiled, and as they grew, one by one they would accompany their father on his fishing boat in the Mediterranean Sea, where they learned to see magnificence and wonder, and to bow to Allah in humility and gratitude every day surrounded by water for miles. Nazmiyeh would wait on the shore until they disappeared into the sea’s expanse. Sometimes, she would stay there a while longer, staring into the mysterious blue between sky and water, singing Mariam’s song.
O find me
I’ll be in that blue
Between sky and water
Where all time is now
And we are the forever
Flowing like a river
When Teta Nazmiyeh talked about her brother, Mamdouh, or my khalo Mazen, her eyes would change. They became empty rooms that she’d enter and hurry to furnish with their stories. It was not nostalgia, but a chore of memory, a task to keep them near.
Three years after Mamdouh and Yasmine left, they returned for a visit with their firstborn, a one-year-old boy they had named Mhammad, after Yasmine’s father, the old beekeeper of Beit Daras. Nazmiyeh, of course, always pregnant or nursing, and with children dripping from her arms, took in Mhammad and pleaded with her brother to move back to Gaza where the boy could grow up with his cousins and in his own homeland. Even if it wasn’t Beit Daras, it was still Palestine. But Mamdouh had found a place in Kuwait where he was thriving, having ascended rapidly from a laborer to construction foreman. His lack of sufficient schooling was masked by a natural mathematical and spatial prowess. He was deft at reading blueprints and engineering plans, and a well-known Palestinian architect had taken Mamdouh under his tutelage in Kuwait.
“Palestinians are building Kuwait from the sand up,” he told Nazmiyeh. “You should see! My mentor is designing the layout of the entire country. Another Palestinian has already established Kuwait’s military and still another Palestinian has established its police force. The leading doctors and surgeons are all Palestinian and they are running nearly every domestic ministry, from education to the interior.” Mamdouh paused, then announced proudly, “I am going to be an architect.”
With so many childbirths close together, Nazmiyeh was never without babies strapped to her back, clinging to her legs, or dangling from her breasts. Though she complained endlessly of their boundless needs, and she swatted at the older ones like irritating flies when they were too demanding or misbehaved, she was always heartbroken when they left for the sea with their father. She would wait at the sandy Mediterranean shore in the void of their absence, watching the roll of one wave follow another. For the man and boys of Nazmiyeh’s heart, the enchantment of fishing was also in the homecoming to the woman waiting for them with exuberant anticipation, large meals, and, for Atiyeh, lovemaking that went long into the night, changing forms until his soul would ache, depleted by his love for her.
But their delight was always hampered by Nazmiyeh’s despondency when they left. So, during those early years after the Naqba, when Gaza was ruled by Egypt, it was decided that one of the older sons would stay behind when Atiyeh went for overnight fishing trips. It was during one such time in the winter, when twelve-year-old Mazen, her eldest, had remained home as man of the house, that Nazmiyeh had swept through the Nusseirat refugee camp like a tornado, kicking up dust and fury that reminded everyone who knew her why she should not be crossed.
Earlier, just an hour before, Mazen had stormed through the house, tears and fury pumping through his young body, incredulity shaking his voice as he confronted his mother, “Were you raped? Am I the son of your rapist?”
Nazmiyeh stiffened. She stepped away from the vegetables she had been cutting, looked into her son’s eyes, gray, almost as blue as the morning sky. Her firstborn who had suckled at her breast longer than any of the others, now on the doorstep of manhood. She took him into her arms, absorbing his rage and humiliation.
“No,” she began, with implacable calm. “Who told you that?”
Mazen gave her a name.
“I know that boy,” she said and walked out her front door, Mazen following.
She didn’t need to go far before spotting the boy with his friends. He ran when he saw her approach, and Nazmiyeh called to the others, “You better stop him or I’ll cut off all your ears! Every last one of you!”
They obeyed, frightened of this woman’s legendary ire. As she reached the boy, who was squirming to get away from the group holding him, Nazmiyeh grabbed him by the ear and began beating him with her slipper. The more he cried out, the harder she whupped him. People gathered. An elderly man stepped in, demanding Nazmiyeh stop and proclaiming the oneness of Allah to calm her.
La ellah illa Allah
. She did, for not even Nazmiyeh would violate the social order of respecting the elderly. But she continued yelling at the boy, insisting that he reveal who had told him the filth he was spreading.
Later that evening, the boy and his mother and grandmother arrived at Nazmiyeh’s home. His recoiled demeanor reminded Nazmiyeh of the day Atiyeh, stunned to silence by Sulayman, had come to their home in Beit Daras to beg her mother’s forgiveness. Nazmiyeh smiled, inviting them in for tea.
“Um Mazen, my son told me what he said, and I came here to tell you two things. First, to finish beating my son if you want. Second, that he heard no such thing from my home. It was the old midwife. She said in front of my son that when she delivered Mazen, you screamed he was the son of the devil,” the woman said.
“
Tfadalo
, sisters.” Nazmiyeh served the tea. “I will deal with the midwife when my husband and sons are back.”
The homecoming Atiyeh and his sons had come to expect was replaced this time with business urgency. The mukhtar of the town had been summoned to settle the matter of the midwife’s terrible gossip and Atiyeh’s arrival was eagerly awaited.
The men convened. Atiyeh, the mukhtar, the midwife’s husband, and several elders. The meeting began with coffee and an expression of repentance from the midwife’s husband. He assured Atiyeh that he had put his wife in her place and regretted her tongue that had dishonored them both. To rectify, he offered Atiyeh one of his wife’s gold bangles. They hadn’t much else to give. The mukhtar recommended that Atiyeh accept the offering, which would end the dispute, and he did. They shook hands, embraced, and greeted each cheek of the other in brotherhood, and the meeting ended with tea and sweets. The next day, Nazmiyeh went to the market, her wrist exposed with a new gold bangle, which she flaunted for a week to teach the old midwife a lesson before giving it back, a magnanimous gesture that earned Nazmiyeh the respect and eternal loyalty of the midwife.
No one dared utter a word on the matter again, and the midwife denied ever having had an ill thought about Nazmiyeh. People quickly forgot about it, but doubt was planted in young Mazen’s heart and it would germinate in him a deep sense of solitude and a quiet but fierce impulse of national resistance. He stopped going on the fishing trips and became his mother’s protector.
Teta Nazmiyeh’s legs would sometimes buckle and she’d have to stop whatever she was doing until movement returned to them. This sudden paralysis usually lasted only a few minutes, sometimes a few days. A traditional medicine woman told her not to worry. She said angels were watching over her, that arresting her legs was their way of protecting her from walking into harm. My teta believed it, sure that Mariam was her angel, and proof came during the Six-Day War.
When Nazmiyeh was carrying her tenth son, in 1967, Israel attacked Egypt, igniting a war that would last only six days and would bring a new generation of Zionist soldiers parading triumphantly into her life. The first one she saw up close wore thick-rimmed black glasses, an irrelevant innocence misplaced in malevolent militarism. His young face was infected with power and coated with the filth of invasion as he pointed his rifle with forbidding authority. Atiyeh and their older sons had been rounded up and taken away in a truck with other men. So, Nazmiyeh was alone with her terrified small children clinging to her caftan when her eyes set upon the soldier and he barked orders at her to walk along. Seized by a dormant rage that provoked her to rush in attack, her legs went limp and she fell to the ground before the soldier could fire at her. Her legs simply folded beneath her. It would be three years before she could walk again. Now forty years old, Nazmiyeh was certain that Mariam had intervened to save her, for she surely would have been shot. Neighbors lifted and carried her to a designated zone while helmeted soldiers in ominous uniforms and tall boots, identical sons of a Zionist bitch, ransacked and looted their homes, raped and killed, burned the land, and renewed the glory of Arab degradation.
The humiliation of that war soaked into their skins. Everyone staggered about drenched in another loss, new rage, and revived fear. People watched on their televisions as this Jewish army of Poles, Austrians, Germans, French, Brits, Italians, Russians, Ukrainians, Iranians, and others marched into Jerusalem, demolishing neighborhoods of non-Jews. It was a shocking moment that split the world in two: those cheering and those crying.
Palestinians cried, but tears always dry up or turn into something else. Eventually, the abnormal was normalized, and the constant brutality of Israeli soldiers became the cost of living. People persevered, and they fought back, too.
Nazmiyeh’s legs were still paralyzed when she gave birth to her eleventh son, provoking chatter that reverberated throughout the camp and entrenched Namiyeh’s reputation of mastery in matters of the marital bed. Women recalled how her husband had abandoned his entire family for her sake. How he had never looked at other women in that way, much less taken a second wife as some men had. Even now, when Nazmiyeh could not move her legs, she and Atiyeh had found a way to conceive another child. The women of the camp were mesmerized by the questions they dared not ask. How did she do it? They tried to imagine the mechanical details, and more women now sought her counsel in the particulars of intimacy and adventures of the flesh.
Although most women considered it good fortune to have borne so many sons in succession, Nazmiyeh was devastated by childbirth and her inability to bear the daughter she had promised to name Alwan. She cried when the midwife announced that she had borne another boy. Her womb felt tattered. Her legs felt nothing at all. Her heart ached to see Mariam as she put the newborn at her breast to suckle. She exhaled the exhaustion of the years and began to speak to her unseen sister while the midwife, accustomed now to her friend’s peculiar postpartum monologues, boiled the placenta for the curative broth that she sold as treatment for various ailments ranging from influenza to sterility. Nazmiyeh’s fertile womb had been a source of good revenue for the midwife, for it was thought to be supremely blessed.
“Oh, Mariam. Do you see, my sister?” Nazmiyeh spoke to the ether. “What shall I do now? I may not survive another one. My teats have not been dry in nearly twenty years.” No one understood why Nazmiyeh’s legs had stopped working, nor how they just as mysteriously walked again. Whatever the reason, it didn’t matter. Stories and explanations abounded, only adding to Nazmiyeh’s intrigue and legend.
Destiny was redeemed in Teta Nazmiyeh’s twelfth and final pregnancy, from which my mother, Alwan, was at last born. It was the same year that my great-khalo Mamdouh called from Kuwait to tell her that his family would soon be moving to Amreeka. To “North Carolina,” he said. My teta didn’t know where that was, only that it was farther away from her. One of her sons was already engaged and planning to move to Saudi Arabia for work. Rather than returning and regrouping, family were leaving and dispersing. She thought Palestine was scattering farther away at the same time that Israel was moving closer. They confiscated the hills and assembled Jewish-only settler colonies on the most fertile soil. They uprooted indigenous songs, and planted lies in the ground to grow a new story.
Nazmiyeh held her precious jewel to her breast, Alwan, the promised child. “She’s here, Mariam! She finally arrived, little sister,” Nazmiyeh mumbled during the delivery while the midwife collected the placenta and cleaned up the space. As they did with each newborn, Nazmiyeh and Atiyeh lay together, counting the fingers and toes, looking for birthmarks and committing to memory the inconsequential details in another milestone of love.
“Now that we have Alwan, we’re not having sex anymore,” Nazmiyeh declared.
Atiyeh gave a smirk, unfazed. “That’s what you say now. We both know you can’t live without it,” he said. “Besides, what will you say to all the ladies coming to you for advice? Your abstinence could affect population growth of Palestinians and we’d no longer threaten Israel demographically.”
Nazmiyeh laughed. “Okay. I’ll give you some of this good stuff for the greater good of Palestine,” she said.
The resistance in Gaza was growing and an underground railroad ferried weapons and organized fighters to join the PLO guerrillas. The plot to sabotage Israeli occupation took on a new urgency. At the same time as Alwan turned one, the fighters managed to destroy several gas pipes supplying nearby Jewish-only colonies, causing havoc for Israelis. In celebration, after three weeks of imposed curfew, Nazmiyeh decided to mark the occasion with a birthday party on the beach for Alwan, who was just learning to walk.
The sons built a fire to grill fish and vegetables. Two of them were engaged and brought their fiancées. Mazen, now twenty, still had not chosen a wife and his brothers joked that he was like Yasser Arafat, “married to the resistance.” The family sat on blankets, smoked, laughed, and listened to the call of the water, which was too cold for swimming. Other families picnicked along the beach, too, glad to leave their homes after the forbidding curfew. A group of men walked about without their families, and soldiers stood menacingly as they always did at their posts.