What are they bombing today?

I was on my way home from Umm Jawad’s house one day when I heard rockets exploding. “So what are they bombing today?” I started asking people. A boy was about to tell me, but before he could get the answer out, I said, “I know. Don’t tell me. They’re bombing the Martyrs’ Cemetery, aren’t they?”

“That’s right, Auntie,” he said.

He was a beautiful, sweet boy, just like you when you were little, Saleh. “God keep you for your mama!” I said
to him.

I stood there just thinking about him for a while. Then suddenly I popped out of my reverie. My God! I thought to myself. What are you doing, Amna? And I came running.

Didn’t I tell you no place was safe any more? You remember Mustafa al-Ramlawi—Abu Antar? Well, they killed him at Mafraq al-Shuhada checkpoint. I can’t help thinking to myself: if they’ll stoop to the level of killing people as harmless as Mustafa—God have mercy on him—then what’s to keep them from killing the whole lot of us?

“Even the Martyrs’ Cemetery isn’t safe any more!” I said to myself. Six rockets hit it. And why? Did you hear that boom? It shook all of Gaza. Really, nowhere’s safe any more.

A little while ago Aziz passed by. You know Aziz, right? He said good morning and asked me if I needed anything. “No, sweetie, bless your heart,” I said to him. “Just take care of yourself.”

“Well, anyway,” he added, “I won’t be far away.”

“So,” I asked him, “are you all going to dig new graves?”

He nodded. “The guys’ll be here soon.”

That boy’s obsessed with digging graves. He always says to me, “You know, Auntie Amna, they kill more of us off every day, so we should always have some graves ready. A few days ago they dropped a rocket that left three dead. Then, when people gathered to save people in the car and on the street, they flew over and left seven more dead and fifty wounded. Somebody had lost a leg, so they went looking for it and found what they thought was it. But when he saw it, the man screamed, ‘How many right legs do you think I have, damn it?’ It was a massacre, Auntie. We spent two days scraping flesh off walls and ceilings. We managed to gather it all into bags, but we knew there was no way we’d be able to tell which body parts belonged to who. So I said, ‘Why don’t we just bury them all in one grave?’ But they rejected the idea. Now tell me, Auntie: don’t you think that would have been better? Why should we make martyrs go looking all over the place for their body parts on Resurrection Day?”

I didn’t know what to say to him. Then he went on, “You know what I hope for, Auntie?”

“What’s that, my dear?”

“I hope for the day when we don’t have to dig extra graves any more.”

“Well,” I stammered, “we don’t have any say in that. But if we’re going to have to dig graves even before people die, then—though I’m sure you don’t want me to tell you this—make the graves big enough to give the martyrs lots of room. You don’t want them to feel cramped in there. And make them deep enough that the rockets they drop on the cemetery won’t get to them.”

When I said that, he burst out laughing as if it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “Don’t worry, Auntie, when I dig a grave, I do it as if it were for me.”

“Don’t think that way!”

“I wish I didn’t need to.”

He took a few steps away. Then he turned back toward me. There was a glare from the sun behind him, but I could still see his face. I rubbed my eyes, thinking: this can’t be. But when I opened them again, his features were still sharp, and I heard him saying to me, “But if I do die, don’t forget to come by and talk to me. People are so worried about who’s going to die, they forget to think about the ones who are already dead. Of course, they’re right to be worried. I mean, look at me: I’m busy all the time trying to take care of people who are about to die.”

*

The first time I saw Aziz digging, I said, “What are you doing here?”

“I’m digging graves,” he said.

“And what do you think you’re going to find in martyrs’ pockets?” I asked him.

“Don’t you know?”

“No,” I said. I thought he was a grave robber, like the ones we hear about or see in movies.

“Don’t worry,” he reassured me. “People who rob martyrs don’t need to dig up their graves. You know why?”

“Why?”

“They rob them before they die. Then they pile lots of dirt on top of them so they’ll never come back. You see what I mean?”

“Yeah, I see,” I said. And I started to like him.

He started laughing right there in the cemetery. “Lower your voice,” I cautioned him.

“Don’t worry,” he said cheerily. “The people buried here love laughter more than anybody else, since they loved life more than anybody else.”

He scrambled effortlessly over to me among the tombstones as though he’d been doing it forever. He didn’t even need to look where he was going.

By this time I’d really taken to him.

I remarked, “We only learn life’s lessons when we work, whether the work we do is digging graves or building mansions.”

One time when I saw him working so hard, I said, “Listen, Aziz, tomorrow’s another day. You can finish that job in the morning.”

I was tired myself, of course. I wanted to go to sleep, and I wanted him and his buddies to do the same, but it looked as though they were going to go on digging all night.

Aziz’s answer was, “Can you guarantee they aren’t going to kill anybody tonight?”

“No,” I admitted.

“Well, then,” he said, “bear with us.”

It was hot as blazes that night, as though the sun hadn’t gone down. In any case, half an hour later, an F-16 came roaring overhead and dropped a rocket that weighed three thousand kilos. It killed Salah Shahada and six members of the Matar family alone. And the day of the funeral it rained three times—in July, of all things (it never rains in July!). We couldn’t believe our eyes.

Another time Aziz said to me, “I’ve started to scare myself, Auntie. I keep getting sadder and sadder.”

“Why is that, my boy?” I asked.

“I’ve started to sense the moment when I have to leave my friends or get out of bed to dig new graves. I’ll get a feeling that more death is on its way, but I don’t know which path it’s going to take, so I don’t know how to warn people, and that kills me. Then I dug a grave today, and the shovel was going in a lot more easily than usual.”

He took me by the hand and led me over to a spot where there were three graves side by side. Pointing, he said, “Do you see how the two graves on the outside are full of rocks? So why is it that the one in the middle doesn’t have any rocks in it at all? It’s pure soil.”

“I have no idea!” I confessed.

“It gives me a weird feeling!” he said.

And two days later he was martyred.

Before it happened, he told his friends at al-Mintar checkpoint to go on ahead of him.

“Where?” they asked him.

“To see Auntie Amna. Ask her to lead you to the grave Aziz told her about.”