I wanted to be alone and escape everything. I always dreamed to be like a blooming flower, covered with that magical meaning of warmth and life.
I missed my son, Salam, meaning peace, and my daughter, Hayat, meaning life. I could not figure out why I chose these names for both of them, but maybe it was my way to defy the atmosphere of the world they came into.
I used to hear my mother’s shouts coming out of the kitchen, my brothers’ joyful yells reaching everywhere.
Then everything was gone—my mother, my brothers. The tormenting smells filled our home. The sun’s rays, forming transparent wings like those of a guardian angel, held the house. Then I could see nothing but dark peace. Yes, even peace can be dark.
I still vividly see my mother’s pale face like a full moon. “You are so selfish,” my mother always told me. I did not know what made her see me like that.
After the accident, I thought of a good explanation: I am the only survivor of my family; I wanted life to be only for me. I should spend the rest of my life trying to get rid of this trait. Being selfish was something painted upon my forehead by my mother’s words.
My brothers’ yells still sound like thunder everywhere I go. Their dismembered bodies are still emerging in my dreams like blinding flashes. They were buried under concrete rubble of our old house along with their fears and despair—or hope, maybe, which will no longer be fulfilled in this cruel world. No one can know what their last thoughts were. Now that they are gone, all I can do is to imagine if they were bright or dark.
That wheat field behind our house is still shining with old, tired memories. The only thing that has changed is my way of seeing it.
“It is the land of battles,” I pointed to Hayat, the first time I went there again. For ages, I could not face the terrible fact of being the only survivor of a horrible massacre.
It was one o’clock in the morning. The air’s loose strings were circling me like ghosts. I asked my mother, “If something bad happens to us, what should I do?”
“Escape, sweetheart.”
“Where?”
“To God, to God’s heavens, darling.”
I smiled.
My mother’s words seemed to be taken from a sacred book. She was the one who escaped, not me. She escaped with the winter’s wind, like the falling leaves of autumn.
My mother was like a holy figure standing in the shadow of God’s throne whenever she picked lavender from our backyard. And because I was afraid of them—of the invader of our land—she always reminded me, “The more morals die inside a human being, the more crimes he will be able to commit.” I thought I forgot that. Yet, strangely, when things happen, especially bad things, I immediately recall past advice, wisdom, or warning.
When I was awakened at the hospital, I did not need any clues to feel the change that happened to me. I turned to the nurse and asked her, “Are you real?”
“Do not worry. You are at the hospital. You are not severely injured. It’s okay.”
In hospitals, most of the time we are told things we already know or are afraid of. I could see her white uniform, and I still remember when they put me in the ambulance without covering my face as they did with my family. I wished I could tell her I knew. But I kept silent. All I wanted was a much simpler answer—an answer telling me it was just a dream and everything will be okay, an answer that could sound like a perfect lie rather than reporting reality in such a harsh way.
I tried to smile at the nurse, but I couldn’t. I felt as if there was a mask on my face.
“My face?” I asked.
“It is just a superficial wound; do not worry. It will heal in no time,” she reassured me.
I did not want her to explain, because it all seemed trivial at the time. Nothing mattered: not my face, nor my future—not even the war I survived, which taught me the meaning of loss. In fact, I did not want my wound to heal. I was satisfied with such tangible shame that could at least make me always remember those who lost their lives so others could survive. I could not run away from my shame this time. I do not want to. People outside must be recovering now from the war, I thought. I felt as if Gaza had turned into a vast hospital where everyone was suffering.
Even now, I am still grateful to the air which carried my soul over woods, mountains, and clouds, that air which helped my hand move tenderly up and touch the bloody scar boldly. It was heaped up with blisters. I thought, “Things may sound peaceful if we do not think about them, but once we do, they evoke harsh memories in our minds.”
I became a girl with a scar.
The scene behind my son, Salam, looked perfectly like an old painting, but his cynical smile disrupted the symmetry. It was a remarkable thing about him that he never smiled when I stood in front of him. I gently touched the burning scar across my left cheek. He was looking at me as if in a kind of silent attack. Behind him extended vast fields of green corn, emerging like the grandeur of paradise. I wanted to make him smile. I wanted to link him as a child to the perfection of the scene. He would not listen, his sympathetic eyes fixed on the tragic story starkly portrayed upon my cheek.
“Forgive me, but I need you to smile for the camera, son.”
“I cannot. I do not like cameras. I do not like pictures.”
I left his room as I did not want to bother him, my only son.
“Do you think history repeats itself?” my history teacher once asked me unexpectedly.
It was hot and I felt sweaty. I could hardly breathe. This question hit me hard. I was broken. I stood hiding my cheek—I used to do that whenever I was the center of attention—then cried. I cried until I could no longer feel the awful heat; it was like being in a bubble, hearing nothing but my deeply buried memories. Everybody in the class, including me, was stunned by my reaction. After a while, the teacher told me to sit again. I finally spoke, “People all turn into dust at the end, teacher. I think history does not repeat itself, yet when we go back in time, by thinking, our memories dominate our present and future.” I knew how much hypocrisy my answer implied, for what I thought about was my mother’s scar on her right shoulder.
My history teacher did not accept my answer; she believed in a highly organized world, though it meant repeated pain that so many would encounter again and again. I have to confess that, as time passed, I came to agree with my teacher that history is always repeating itself, not necessarily in the same form, but it brings the same deformity to us.
While taking the lives of my family one by one, death stood over my body and spared me. I did not want to pass. It was August and I wanted my body to melt over the breathing sand. Why did he let me go? Why did death not consider me a suspect and put me in jail? Why did it take Hayat and let me live instead?
It was not a time of war when she died, but it was not a time of peace either. A shell killed my family, and a fatal disease took my Hayat. Illness, like a bullet, invaded her body. There were no goodbyes, only wonders of why everything had to happen that way.
Every time I face trouble, I blame my scar. It’s like a curse. It made me marry a man with one hand and later tortured my children every time they looked at me. Nobody likes the deformed, except their Creator.
My daughter’s disease was a declaration of war. Even before she was sick, she saw death everywhere.
“A tree is moving. A tree is killing. I hate trees,” Hayat would say.
I knew that she meant the soldiers she saw in the news and how they used their green uniform to hide among trees. I did not want my daughter to hate nature, yet she was stubborn and insisted her visions were true. “I saw trees killing; I am sure, Mom.”
It all happened a long time ago. Now my beautiful, little girl has become ashes glittering in the depth of my heart. I could not explain why I keep seeing her face in lavender, years after her death. It is a reminder of my mother who used to love those flowers. Sadly, my daughter and my mother were gathered in the same frame of loss. They are now the same distance away from me.
I did not know that the lavender was a sign. The lavender was a sign.
After leaving my Salam’s room, I went to the florist’s in order to buy some lavender. I did not buy lavender that day; I only bought a small tree. When I put it next to Salam’s desk, I whispered to my daughter fully certain she was there, “See, Hayat, it does not move.”
Home. This word suddenly rose in my mind as flashing fire. I felt colorless. I drank too much water until I became awfully united with my shadow. My shadow grew sadder and taller than me. My shadow never disappears, even in the midst of radiant light. Our home was lightly affected by a missile directed at a car passing our street. Only the windows shattered, and that was enough for history to repeat itself through a scar on Salam.
When Salam and I left the hospital, we rented a new house, trying to make the best of the new situation and hoping that everything would be better. It was pale like a dead man, narrow like a grave. I wanted to take down all the mirrors before Salam had shouted, “No, leave them.”
When he came closer to the mirror in the hall, he stood still like a palm tree. He never fell. His scar was more acceptable than mine. I brought a new small tree and put it in the new house. There I saw the troubled soul of my child. I whispered as I used to do since Hayat died, “See, it is still. No more killing.”
“It is your birthday. Wish something for your coming years,” everybody shouted in one dense, unrecognized voice. I could only recognize that fading voice which came out of my son. I averted my eyes, looked around, and stumbled through all the faces in the room till they finally rested on his. He was standing like a scared bird, waving one wing and using the other to hide his scar. Both of us floated over the chaos, forming a separated world, like a bubble made up of light. I looked deeply into my son’s eyes. Only he and I knew the secret wish. Seconds later, I was released of that world and said loudly, “I wished it.”
That night, I dreamed of Hayat holding a mirror for me. I was scarless. It was a hazy dream. When I got up, everything was dark except the moon, which looked like a radiant loaf of hope. For a moment, I imagined it falling. That upset me. I thought that I had forgotten that dream, yet unfortunately I did not. Things are recalled whenever they find the missing part.
“All people have scars, I swear,” I told Salam one moonlit night.
“Have they all been through wars, mum?”
“Yes. Inner wars, darling.”
He kept painting many drawings of people with scars. Some scars were on their hearts, others on their heads.
“Who is this?” I asked him.
“My father. You told me he did not have a hand.”
“How did you lose your hand?” I had asked my husband.
“I lost it. I was a little child spending a lot of time playing with other fellows. One day my arm was trapped in an opening made in some gate; behind it were hungry dogs. I did not know. I just wanted to open it; I couldn’t even hear any barking that moment. See how unlucky I am! They bit my hand, turning it into a rotten piece of flesh. Terrified, I left it and ran.”
I liked how he dramatized things. I laughed. No one loses his arm that way, I thought. But I suddenly realized that I did not care about the truth.
I passed Salam’s grave without uttering a word. It was August and the sun rose embracing the universe. I noticed the lavender growing dignifiedly over his grave. He died by a stray bullet that conquered his chest.
Sometimes I am surprised by the faith I still keep in my heart after all that happened. Nevertheless, all I want is to have God’s forgiveness, for I really sometimes think that it was me who caused all of this for my beloved ones. It is said that the fire can destroy everything along its way for its own prosperity. Very often, I see a burning fire when I look at myself in the mirror, yet I do not want to believe that could be me.
Salam was left here, a red flower in blossom lying over a desert. I bent and closed his body towards my chest, allowing my scar to embrace his. I remember how I suddenly stopped when I had seen a falling moon embodied within him. It is not another war, for the first war which took away my family many years ago never ceased. They say wars end, but in fact, they never do. Wars never end.
“Why do you want to keep it? It is a large, ugly, dark photo of a refugee woman. I don’t even know why you insist on keeping it.” He was referring to a photograph that hung beside the front door of the bleak house as if in holy status. Images were all we had at that house. No cameras, no fields—only dim light.
“It is a portrait from the Nakba, and we have to remember those people who went through so much agony. Furthermore, we have to pray that the coming generations can remember our agonies too, my son.”
“What is there beyond the sky?” I asked my mother.
“What does it look like?”
“Like children’s dreams.”
I was afraid of telling my mother that I rarely dreamed. She would have thought I was a strange girl. I had a scattered childhood, but now I am piecing the puzzle together.
For some reason, I always imagined paradise like our green field, covered with a golden sun and a blue sky.
“What is massacre, Mom?” Salam asked when I first told him what happened to my family.
“I do not know; maybe the survivors can never understand it. Only those who bled can answer you,” I answered dramatically.
“But you bled too.”
“All that I can tell you is that nothing can justify it, not even the most sacred ends in the world, not even peace itself, understand me?”
“Yes, Mom. Nothing can justify our scars.”
I could not explain why I saw death in my son’s eyes at that moment. The clouds came and attacked the moon later. No moon was seen in the heavens anymore.
Now I am brought back home. I can still hear the echoes of my children everywhere I roam. The fields smell bloody and rotten, as if a hundred oxen were killed and thrown there. But they were not oxen. They were human bodies. It is war again which brought me back home, empty except for miserable memories.
I am only carrying bags of dazzling stars. They are heavy but useless, because they are not hung in the vast sky. I put the picture of the three of us everywhere. They were many; intentionally I would turn my face to a fixed direction. No pictures of me and Salam alone at all.
I kneeled in front of one of the big pictures in which we all looked happy and desolate at the same time. What a deceitful picture!
They did not like my daughter’s name, and they took her to oppose its meaning. They were jealous of my son’s name and took him to further a real one, a real kind of peace.
“You are smiling.”
“Yes, I am okay.”
The first time Salam truly smiled was when he was dying.
This time there was no beautiful scene behind him, no more begging him to smile for the perfection of the scene, and no cameras. Nothing but a fading smile.
The tree grew taller. Its leaves fell like devils’ faces. I missed my son and my daughter. When I went to the florist’s that day, I asked for some lavender.
“How many do you want, ma’am?”
“Many, so many please…. I want you to bring some to my home every day,” I told him trying to hide my scar. For a second, I felt it was getting smaller. It almost vanished.