Sometimes days go by
Sometimes days go by without my seeing my brothers Jawad and Salim—in fact, without my seeing anybody at all.
They come by the house quick as lightning, usually in the dark. They kiss our mom’s hands and check to make sure we’re all right, not realizing that we’re the ones checking up on them.
But sometimes it’s quite a while before I see them again.
That doesn’t mean I spend my days behind some locked door. In fact, I may be the only one who can’t stand to stay in one place longer than I’ve got a mind to.
My mom says to me, “You’re always in such a hurry. Why can’t you sit still?”
“I don’t know,” I say, “I just feel as though I’m sitting in a frying pan over a hot fire.”
I go out into the street and look around, but I don’t see anything.
There are so many of us squeezed into this little strip of land, I can hardly see anybody right.
We’re crammed into our houses, into the streets, into the schools, into the marketplaces. In fact, we’re so starved for open spaces that if we looked at the sea even for a moment, our eyes might swallow it up.
And we’ve got more sorrow than we can bear. One time my grandma said, “In order to hold all this pain, we’d need bigger hearts.” It took me a long time to figure out what she’d meant by that. When I did, I asked her, “With life being so hard and all, how do you explain the fact that our dreams have never gotten any smaller?”
She turned to look at me. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“Well,” I went on, “some years ago you said, ‘In order to hold all this pain, we would need bigger hearts.’”
“I said that?” she exclaimed, incredulous.
“Yep. You did. I’ve even got it written down in my notebook.”
“Well, if I said something like that, and if you wrote it down, then it must be true.”
“So then,” I pressed her, “what about our dreams?”
“Our dreams have never gotten any smaller because they were so small from the start. They were born small and they’ve stayed that way. And that’s why we go on taking care of them all our lives. If dreams were big, they’d be the ones taking care of us.”
“Can I write that down?”
“Sure. But don’t add anything of your own.”
Of course, I didn’t get to hear her spout wisdom like this at just any old time. I had to create the right mood for one of her epiphanies. But that wasn’t super hard to do. All I had to provide was eight ounces or so of roasted watermelon seeds and a big cup of coffee, which she would follow with a shell-cracking session and a long soliloquy on how much stronger her teeth were than girls these days. It also had to be between nine and ten at night. This was the only time when she’d be willing to say the kinds of things I wanted to hear. And then she’d go to sleep.
“Nothing relaxes me like a cup of coffee!” she used to say to me.
And then, sure enough, she’d be off to the Land of Nod.
Some nights she’d wake to the sound of bombs exploding. She’d come and wake me up, too, and say, “Where did you buy the coffee last time?”
“From Abu Masoud,” I’d tell her groggily.
“Well, then, don’t buy it from his store again. His coffee’s so weak, a single bullet whizzing through the air is enough to wake me up. Next time buy it from al-Maghrebi—theirs is the only kind that’ll keep me asleep till seven in the morning.”
My sister had tons of girlfriends, but for a long time my only friend was my grandma—at least, until Amna moved in next door. Grandma said, “Thank God for that nice new neighbor lady, since now I don’t have to put up with your questions all the time!”
My mom added, “The girl can’t sit still for more than five minutes at a time. She’s always running around the neighborhood, but she can’t make a friendship that lasts more than a couple of days. If she can’t find somebody to pick a fight with, she picks one with her shadow!”
“Well, what do you want me to do?” I retorted. “Put on a polite front all the time? When I get to know a girl, I find out that what she needs is a babysitter, not a friend. They’re all so dumb and immature!”
“Well, if it isn’t the genius of the century talking!” my mother mocked.
“Yeah,” my sister chimed in. “She thinks she’s Taha Hussein.”
“Taha Hussein who?” Grandma wanted to know. “Is he a relative of ours?”
“He’s a famous writer, Grandma,” replied my sister.
“Oh, like a notary public?”
“No, he wrote books.”
“You mean, like the registers people have to sign when they get married?”
“No, like the books we read in school.”
“Oh, well, then, why didn’t you say so in the first place? You didn’t have to embarrass me like that.”
“Sorry, Grandma,” my sister apologized. She looked daggers at me out of the corner of her eye as if to say, “See? I passed the test, and you failed for the zillionth time.”
Amna was like a breeze that blew down our street one day, slowed up a bit, took a liking to the place, and decided to stay.
When she knocked on our door, I was the first person in our house to see her.
She was so beautiful she could have been a movie star, and she looked a lot like the Egyptian actress Athar al-Hakim.
“Are there any houses for rent around here?” she asked.
“For rent, no,” I told her, “but there’s one for sale.”
“For sale? We hadn’t thought about buying a house, and I don’t think we could afford to.”
The way she spoke to me made me feel as though we’d known each other for years. And she talked to me the way she would to a grownup, not to a little girl staring out a half-open door. Emboldened, I opened the door all the way.
“So,” she said, standing there uncertainly, “where’s the house that’s for sale?”
I pointed to the house next to ours. “It’s that one,” I said.
She took two steps back and looked blankly in the direction I was pointing. Then she crossed the street and gazed at the house as I gazed at her.
She walked back toward me. “It’s got a palm tree in front of it!” she exclaimed.
“Yeah,” I said. “There’s another one, too, but you can’t see it from outside the wall.”
“Thank you,” she said, and left.
Long days passed, but I didn’t forget that face. I told Grandma about the lady who’d come asking about houses for rent, and how she looked like Athar al-Hakim.*
“You mean she looks like the doctor?”
“Grandma, al-Hakim is her father’s name.”
“Whose father?”
“Athar’s.”
“Oh, so do antiquities have fathers the way people do?”
“Grandma, Athar al-Hakim is the name of an Egyptian actress who stars in movies and TV shows.”
“Oh, really! So do people have to buy names for their kids in Egypt? Is ‘Antiquities’ the best he could do? Supposing they did buy names there, he could have afforded one a lot better than that, especially if he’s a doctor!”
“Grandma, people don’t buy names.”
“You think I don’t know that? Of course they don’t! But that’s how the saying goes.”
“But honestly, Grandma, her first and last name together, don’t you think they’re pretty?”
“If you want to know the truth—and don’t get mad at me now!—no, I don’t. But take my name, for example—Wasfiya—don’t you think it’s prettier than all the names they’re giving girls these days?”
“Of course!”
“Well, there you have it. You said so yourself.”
One day I heard a knock on the door. I went out, and there she was, right in front of me. I was over the moon. And when I saw men unloading a truck in front of the house next door, I got so excited that I forgot to invite her in. I just left her standing there and ran back inside screaming happily, “Athar’s going to be our neighbor! Athar’s going to be
our neighbor!”
“Athar who?” my sister asked.
“Athar al-Hakim.”
“Are you crazy? What on earth would bring Athar al-Hakim to Gaza?”
Even so, she jumped up and ran to the front door.
A minute or so later she came running back shouting, “It’s true! It’s true!”
In response to the unexpected squeals of delight, my mother headed for the door, grumbling, “It would be nice to see you two half this energetic when I ask you to do something for me. What’s all this silly jumping up and down?”
“Hello,” we heard her say.
We stood behind our mom fuming over the fact that she didn’t recognize the celebrity who’d graced our doorstep, and was greeting her the way she would have greeted any old neighbor lady. “Hello”—was that all she could think of to say?
By this time I’d forgotten our new neighbor was just somebody who looked like Athar al-Hakim, and not Athar herself, especially now that my sister believed what I’d said. “Boy, what a dummy I am,” I thought.
“Hello,” Amna replied. “I just thought it would be nice to greet my neighbors before I settle in. Like they say, al-jar qabl al-dar.” Then she added, “I’m Amna, Umm Saleh.” As she spoke, she pointed happily to her rounded belly, which I realized I was noticing for the first time.
“Welcome,” murmured my mother. “I’m Umm Jawad. Come on in.”
“Another day, hopefully.”
“Umm Saleh!” my sister cried suddenly.
“Umm Saleh!” I parroted.
“And pregnant too!” she added.
“And pregnant too!” I parroted some more.
“So, then,” my sister mused, “she can’t be Athar al-Hakim after all.”
“She is too!” I insisted. “She must have given up her acting career to take care of her family.”
“But her name’s Amna, not Athar.”
“Yeah, that’s her real name for sure. Don’t you know that actresses and actors take stage names? Just wait, and you’ll see that I’m right.”
When we saw her husband a few weeks later and found out he’d studied in Egypt, that cinched it for me. “See?” I crowed to my sister. “So do you believe me now? They must have met and gotten married there. Then she decided to move here with him.”
“Do you really think Athar al-Hakim would be crazy enough to leave her acting profession and come here, of all places? And for what? To get married? Don’t you suppose they’ve got enough eligible bachelors in Egypt?”
“Seriously, now,” I argued, “if you were an actress and met somebody that looks like her husband, wouldn’t you leave your profession?”
She was quiet for a while. Then finally she said, “Yeah, I would, actually. In fact, I’d leave acting and the whole shebang for a guy like that.”
“Aha! So you admit it. She is Athar al-Hakim!”
“No, I didn’t say that.”
When my mom decided to pay Amna a visit and take her a set of coffee cups, we begged her to take us with her.
When she opened the door, I was so excited I was shaking. Even my sister, who’d kept on telling me our new neighbor wasn’t Athar al-Hakim, was all pumped up.
“So,” she wanted to know, “which of you is Randa, and which is Lamis?”
“I’m Lamis,” my sister announced.
“No, I am,” I contradicted.
“Here we go again!” groaned my mother.
We sat quietly in the tiny guest room while the two women talked about all sorts of things, but we didn’t hear a word they said. We were too engrossed in our new neighbor. When our mother signaled that the visit was over by standing up, the two of us burst out in unison, “Are you Athar al-Hakim?”
As we stood there, clinging to our mother’s dress from opposite sides, she looked at us oddly and said, “Athar al-Hakim? Who’s that?”
“Don’t you even know who she is?” we cried, crestfallen. Then we didn’t say another word.
When she saw us standing there frozen like statues, she responded with a giggle that brought us back to life.
“Of course I know who she is! But do I really look that much like her? This is the first time anybody’s asked me that question.”
She bent down and gave my sister a kiss. Then she circled around my mother, found me in my hiding place, and gave me a kiss, too.
“So,” my sister snorted as we got to the door, “are you finally convinced that she’s not Athar al-Hakim?”
“Well, yeah, but only because she’s prettier than her.”
* Al-hakim means ‘the doctor’ in the Levantine dialect in Arabic; athar in Arabic means ‘antiquities.’