So we can buy the wedding dress

“I came so that you and the bride and I could go buy the wedding dress together,” Amna explained. “She should get to pick it out herself, don’t you think?”

“Yes, she should,” I agreed.

“But while I was on my way over here, I heard Abu Antar had been martyred, so I decided to go offer my condolences to his family.”

“You mean Mustafa al-Ramlawi?” I asked, shocked.

“I’m not sure,” Amna admitted. “I just knew him as Abu Antar.”

“Who on earth would have killed Abu Antar?” I demanded. The minute I opened my mouth, I realized how naive my question was.

“Seriously, Randa? Who do you think? He was walking past Mafraq al-Shuhada checkpoint when a shell came right at him, a tank shell, and blew his face off. Nobody could even recognize him afterward. The only way they were able to identify him in the end was by his clothes. Imagine having to identify somebody from his clothes, and not his face?”

“God have mercy on him,” I murmured. I conjured his image: a fortyish-looking man who used to go around barefoot, his clothes falling apart. He’d make the rounds of the camp’s vegetable stalls with a burlap bag on his back and stuff it with fruit that had gone bad.

“So,” she went on, “I thought I’ve got to go pay my respects, since maybe nobody else will. I asked where his house was, and they told me he’d lived alone in one room, and that sometimes he’d be away for days at a time. One woman said to me, ‘Are you a relative of his?’ ‘No,’ I told her. Then she said, ‘I’m so sorry for your loss!’ Imagine, she was comforting me! Granted, he wasn’t all there upstairs, but he had the sense never to hurt anybody. I asked the lady where the funeral procession would start, and she said, ‘From the hospital, from al-Shifa Hospital.’ So I went over, and I got there just in time. There were so many people, I figured somebody important must have died or been martyred. Anyway, I asked somebody where Abu Antar’s funeral procession was, and he said, ‘This is it.’ Oh, God, Randa, I cried! I thought: well, something’s right with the world after all. Here was this man I was afraid nobody would remember, and all those people turned out for his funeral. So, then, I thought to myself: we’re destined to survive—we Palestinians, I mean. If we weren’t, they would have beaten us a hundred years ago.”

“I found out that the soldiers had held his body for hours. They said he’d been trying to plant an explosive device at the checkpoint!”

“Abu Antar? You’ve got to be kidding. You’d have to be crazy to believe a thing like that!”

“Anyway, when the funeral procession started moving, I walked behind it. There were thousands of people there, I swear to God. Thousands! They marched from al-Shifa Hospital to al-Nusayrat Camp, and from the camp to his house. When we got there, there were lots of people crying over him, and like I said before, I knew for sure now that there was something right with the world after all. They held prayers for him in the camp’s big mosque. Then they went to the Martyrs’ Cemetery, and I followed them there.

“When I got to the cemetery, I remembered that I’d been on my way to see you. Then I thought: since the cemetery’s near my house, I should pass by to check on the men. So I went over, thinking they might have woken up. But no—they were conked out, just the way I’d left them. So I tiptoed out again. After all, you never know what might happen when people wake up. A mother might wake her son up and say, ‘Go buy me a kilo of potatoes,’ and five minutes later he’s a martyr. You remember Samir Alaywi? He didn’t go out to get potatoes for his mother—he was a father with seven daughters and a son. He went out to distribute invitations for his brother Muhammad’s wedding, but he didn’t make it home alive. You know . . .”

She paused.

“What was I saying? Oh, yeah. You know more than I do, though. Aren’t you a journalist?”

I was about to tell her that I hoped to be a journalist some day, but that so far my dreams were too big for my little head.

Then she said something that took me by surprise. “I know you’re a writer, and that some day you’re going to publish the things you write.”

“Who told you that?”

“Come on now, Randa. Your Auntie Amna gets around more than you think she does!”

When I begged her to tell me, she swore me to silence. Once she was satisfied that my oath was sincere, she paused for a bit, her eyes still searching mine. Finally she whispered, “Lamis.”

“Lamis?” I said, trying to sound shocked. “But I’m Lamis!”

“Do you think I wouldn’t recognize Lamis when I see her? Or that she’d hide something from me? I mean, she’s about to become my daughter-in-law!”

Then, looking around, she asked, “Is she home?”

“No,” I said. “She went out.”

Grandma’s voice came from a room in the back. “Who are you talking to?”

“Oh, I’m just talking to myself, Grandma.”

“Poor thing. Where’s your mind gone, girl?”

My mother, seeing us from the other side of the dirt enclosure, came up to us and said, “Amna, what are you doing standing in the doorway? Come in!”

Amna came in, and I closed the door behind us. My mother led us back to the room whose window had been turned into a door that opened onto Amna’s side yard.

“Go make us some tea,” my mother said to me. But before I’d gotten out of my chair, she changed her mind.

“That’s all right,” she told me. “You stay. I’ll do it.”

At some point my mother had started to realize that I was the only person Amna was really comfortable talking to. This pleased her, actually, and whenever Amna and I went out together, I’d detect a happy, peaceful look on my mother’s face.

“With Amna I know you’ll be all right.”

My mother often came along with us on our outings, so she knew that the places we went to most were martyrs’ wakes.

“A duty is a duty,” Amna used to say to me. “These people shouldn’t feel they’re alone after losing somebody they love. There’s nothing harder than losing a son, or a daughter, or a brother, or a husband, or anybody dear to you for that matter. The loss itself is bad enough, but what makes it even worse is the timing. It comes exactly when you expected it to—since there isn’t a single moment when you don’t expect it. But it always takes you by surprise. You know what I mean?”

“Would you mind if I wrote that down?”

“Wrote what down?”

“What you said just now.”

“Oh, I see what you’re up to!” Then, after a pause, “Is that the sort of thing a person would write down?”

She stole a hard-to-interpret glance over at her yard. Then she went back to talking to me as though the house she’d just looked at wasn’t even hers.

“Is Lamis here?” she asked.

“No, she went out.”

“Really? Didn’t she know I was coming?”

“I forgot to tell her.”

“You forgot! Randa, is that the sort of thing a person forgets?”

“Sorry.”

“Okay, well, your mom—have you brought up the subject with her?”

“You know, it’s fine with my mom. She always says, ‘Where could we find a groom better than Saleh? And where could we find nicer folks than you all?’ But sometimes she thinks about my dad, and my brother, and me, and she says, ‘Is it right to have a wedding when the bride’s father is in prison and her brothers are on the run? We’re going to be so busy crying over them that we won’t have the energy to be happy for the bride and groom.’”

“She’s right,” Amna conceded. “But look at me. My situation is about as bad as they get. But I always say: we don’t know what tomorrow will bring. So we’ve got to keep going and do what we’ve got to do, you know.”

“Yeah, I know. But some people aren’t as brave as others.”

“That’s true.”

My mother brought the tea in and set it down. Then she turned to leave.

“Why don’t you have tea with us?” Amna asked her.

“I’m busy. I’ll be back after I’ve finished the laundry.”

“And why doesn’t Randa help you? Or Lamis? After all, she’s old enough to be married herself.”

“God bless them,” murmured my mother as she left the house without a backward glance.

When my mother was gone, Amna whispered, “Well, at least I reminded her! That ought to get us halfway toward making it official.”

I nodded.

“Look, we’re late getting out today, and Lamis isn’t here. And if you want to know the truth, what happened to Abu Antar has really gotten me down. I mean, I’m sure he’s more comfortable now than he was before. But wouldn’t there have been a better way to relieve him of his suffering than to kill him off with a tank shell?”

She paused.

“Damn it all. Damn it all,” she kept saying.

Wanting to console her, I whispered, “Maybe God wanted to honor him by letting him die as a martyr.”

“Ya think?”

I nodded.

Then, without finishing her tea, Amna shot up out of her chair. “Where are you going?” I asked, startled. “It’s still early.”

“They’ll start to worry about me,” she explained. Gesturing toward her little girl, whose whole life had been colored by her mother’s grief, Amna added, “It’s gotten dark, and as you can see, Nadia’s tired.”

Seeing her on her way to the front entrance, I invited her to go out the side door that joined our sitting room to her inner courtyard, hoping she might go back to her old habit. But, as I knew she would, she declined, saying, “If I leave that way, I feel as though I just stayed at home and didn’t go anywhere. But if I go out the front, I can say I went on a visit.”

I escorted her to the door, and watched her until she disappeared.

When I went back into the room where we had been sitting, I could see her through the window-turned-door. I heard her key turn in the lock. She looked in my direction, waved, and smiled before disappearing inside.

I smiled back, but that didn’t stop tears from streaming down my cheeks.