Amna, super-neighbor

A lot had changed. And so had my sister and I.

Without warning, my sister had given up half her girlfriends so that she could spend more time with Amna. Since this narrowed the gap between us in terms of how many friends we had, it gave my mother the impression that I was less isolated than I had been before, even though, actually, nothing had changed.

By some miracle, I got into a lot less hot water with my mom than I always had before, since now she always knew where she could find me—at Amna’s house.

My sister and I would wait for her at the front gate when it was time for her to come home from the rehab center where she worked as a supervisor. Since she had a degree in psychology, she must have been a perfect fit for the job. She would come around the corner with a sad look on her face, but the minute she saw us, she’d flash that signature smile
of hers.

It took a long time for me to realize how much distress she kept buried inside.

“Nothing hurts more than to see a child suffer,” she confided. “Imagine seeing a child you know will never walk, who’ll never have any sort of a predictable future.”

Sometimes our mother would tell us to go out and play, and we’d do what she’d told us, not because she’d asked us to, but because Amna hadn’t objected to her request. If Amna didn’t object, this was our cue to give her some time alone with our mom. Yet even then, we wouldn’t go far. Instead, we’d sit in the doorway, or rest against the two palm trees in Amna’s courtyard. My sister would sit under the little one and I’d sit under the big one, our ears pricked for orders from our mother.

“It’s hard to keep standing tall when you see this sort of thing,” we heard Amna say.

Amna had to go often to hospitals to meet with wounded children and talk their families into placing them under special care.

“It kills you to know that so many children will never see the sun again.”

Children whose eyes had been put out by bullets caused her torment. This sort of injury was getting more and more frequent, and there were moments when she’d start talking as if she were somewhere else.

She said, “When I walk down the street, I keep looking around for their eyes. I think to myself: maybe one of them fell here, or there, and I freak out over the colors that are spattered all over some of the walls, thinking they might be the kids’ eyes. Well, last night I dreamed they’d brought us some glass eyes. There were green ones, blue ones, brown ones, hazel ones, and black ones. Some were small and some were big. But they were dead, of course. I was horrified, and I thought: maybe they gouge out some of the kids’ eyes, suck the life out of them, and then give them back! One of the kids suggested that they all close their remaining eye and then pick one of the glass eyes off the table. We said no. But they started to cry, and some of them shouted, ‘But that’s fair!’ So we went ahead and let them. But it turned into a nightmare when the kids opened their eyes and we saw a green eye next to a black one, a hazel eye next to a blue one, and that sort of thing. At first they thought it was funny, but then all of a sudden they burst into tears as though they’d met up with little monsters that had been living inside them. I kept my cool as well as I could, and we gathered up the eyes again and took the children out to the hall. But I woke up more scared than ever.

“I mean, really: what do you do when a seven-year-old girl starts screaming all of a sudden, ‘These are dead eyes! I want my real ones! I want them now! Now!’ and then falls down in front of you, her limbs shaking out of control?”

Saleh was just two months old when Amna’s husband Jamal was arrested, and curfews were becoming more and more frequent. So there was plenty to worry about. In any case, one day my mother sat staring at the window that opened onto Amna’s courtyard. She stared at it for so long, we started to think there must be somebody standing outside, but that only she could see whoever it was.

“What is it?” I asked.

She didn’t answer.

I asked her again, and this time she heard me. “I’m going to turn this window into a door,” she said. “That way it will be easier for us to get to her house, and for her to get to ours.”

By this time we’d grown up a little and had stopped fighting so much over which of us was Lamis. The fights had started when we decided that Lamis’s name was prettier than mine. Then we’d started fighting over Saleh, who had a crush on my sister, and there was a never-ending battle over which of us would take care of him. I could tell she was interested in him too, since her circle of friends had shrunk, and a single boy who lived next to al-Maghrebi’s corner store had replaced four girls who’d been her bosom buddies before.

I admit, Saleh liked her the most. I have no idea how he could tell us apart. But when he was old enough to find his tongue, his favorite question was, “When will Lamis be back?”

When he came around asking for her, I’d say, “I’m Lamis.”

“No,” he’d say. “You’re the other Lamis.”

This question of his caused all sorts of complications in Lamis’s life. As soon as my mom heard it, she’d yell at me, “Go find that stinker of a sister of yours and bring her here right now!”

“Randa, you mean?”

“No, Lamis! Are you trying to drive me crazy?”

Then I’d see a sly grin creep onto his face. He’d figured out the easiest, quickest way to get her to come home without lifting a finger.

He hadn’t figured it out overnight, of course. He’d gotten lost twice when he went out trying to find her, and the third time we thought we’d never find him. Every time we tracked him down we’d ask him, “What brought you here of all places?” And his answer would be, “I was looking for Lamis!”

One day he stood at our door calling her name while she was talking to her crush, Samer. “What do you want?” she snapped, and he blurted out, “I love you, Lamis. I love you!”

She didn’t speak to me for a whole week after that. She was convinced I’d put him up to it. “Where on earth would a boy his age get the idea to say something like that unless somebody else had put the words in his mouth?” she demanded.

I swore I’d had nothing to do with it, but she didn’t believe me. Then finally, a few days later, I realized that the person who’d been embarrassed wasn’t her, but Samer, since other boys in the neighborhood had started taunting him, saying, “What’s with you, anyway? People are dying, and you’re thinking about girls?”

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Saleh escalated the situation even more a few days later.

When he saw that asking about Lamis wasn’t bringing her around any more, he resorted to more extreme measures. One day my mother brought the tea over to Amna’s house so that we could drink it there. Nadia was taking a nap, but Saleh came to join us. When my mother had finished pouring the tea into the glasses, Saleh took one, my mother took one, and Amna took one. But when I reached out to take mine, he shrieked, “No! That one’s for Lamis!” When Amna insisted that I take it, he rushed over to grab it before I could. So now he was holding a glass of hot tea in each hand. My mother pleaded with him to put them down, but he refused, and took a few steps back. His hands were smarting, and pretty soon tears were streaming down his cheeks. But we didn’t dare go near him for fear that he’d spill hot tea on himself.

Neither Amna nor my mother drank her tea, and I just sat there shaking like a leaf, as if I’d been the cause of it all. As for Saleh, he went on holding onto both glasses until Lamis got home.

That night, my mother lit into my sister with a fury, swatting her with everything she could get her hands on. “I’m Randa! I’m Randa!” she screamed. But my mother just went on beating her until she was so worn out, she slumped against the wall. She pressed her back against it so hard, it seemed as though she was the one holding it up and that if she had moved, it would have collapsed and brought the whole house—or even the whole world—crashing down with it. In one of her rare moments of despair, she cried, “Lord, what have I done to deserve this load of worries? I’ve got a husband in prison, two sons on the run, and two daughters that I can’t control or even tell apart!”

My sister had no idea what had happened that day. She was bound to find out about it sooner or later, but my mother didn’t say a word to her about what Saleh had done, and neither did I. I guess I was afraid that if I did, she might gloat over the fact that he liked her and not me.

We’d figured out easily enough that Amna’s husband Jamal was in the same situation as our dad. As for our two brothers, they bickered all the time. Each of them would talk up his own organization and diss the other’s—as if they’d forgotten that both of their heads were being targeted by the same bullets. My mother would try to break up the argument, saying, “Look: Israel’s out to kill you whether you’re with Hamas, Jihad, the PLO, the PFLP, or the DFLP, whether you support the resistance or not, and whether you’re for or against Abu Ammar. If you open the window to see what’s going on outside, you might die from sniper fire, and whether you’re walking down the street or at home in bed, a rocket might fall on your head. So for the life of me, I can’t figure out what you two are fighting over!”

Gone were the days when our mother would remark to Amna with a side glance in our direction, “You’re looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning. So, did the engineer come around last night?”

If Amna—who was still just a bride in our eyes even since having Saleh—giggled without answering the question, this would tell our mother that ‘the engineer’ had slipped in for a visit the night before. My sister, knowing why Amna had giggled, would giggle, too. “What was so funny?” I’d demand as soon as she and I were alone. “It’s not polite to laugh for no reason!”

“Some day you’ll get it, and when you do, you’ll laugh at yourself for not getting it before!”

“What?”

“Oh, nothing.”

The time came when Lamis started having to trail Samer from one checkpoint to another to make sure he was all right. Most of the time she would just watch him from a distance, her thirteen-year-old eyes filled with terror. But if her warnings were drowned out by the sound of gunfire, or if he disappeared into a cloud of tear gas, she would come out of her hiding place. This sort of thing happened so many times that some people started calling her jokingly “the Palestinian rapid intervention forces.” But one day she put her mockers to shame when she managed to hoist him onto her back and whisk him away from al-Mintar checkpoint, where soldiers had rushed out either to arrest him or to finish him off.

So suddenly Lamis was a heroine. Proud now to be her sister, I didn’t dare try to steal the limelight from her, and for a long time I avoided getting into arguments with her over her name.

Meanwhile, Saleh announced to her, “I love you because you’re brave.”

*

One day Lamis came home from school to find a picture of Samer plastered to our front door. Above it somebody had written in bold black letters: Martyred.

After that she got so unbearably sad that one day I said to her, “Lamis, if you’d like me to be you for a couple of days, or three, or however many, I will. That way you can rest from your grief for a little while.”

“I’d been wanting to say the same thing to you,” she told me. “You seem even sadder than I am, because you don’t cry.”