Don’t make me laugh!

“Please! What would people say if they heard me?”

. . .

“I know—we used to meet in secret as husband and wife more than we ever did before we got married. You’d message me to come out of the house and walk in any direction I wanted to, and to let you choose the moment when we’d meet. As I walked, I’d feel as though you were all of Gaza, from north to south, from east to west. ‘What’s happening to us?’ I’d ask. ‘How is it that a wife has to arrange trysts with her own husband?’

“And you’d say, ‘This is the one good thing about living in hiding. You appreciate being together more when you have to work so hard for it.’

“And that would make me mad. ‘What do you mean by that?’ I’d demand. ‘So you didn’t appreciate being with me when we were courting?’

“‘No, no!’ you’d insist. ‘But now that I have to stay in the shadows so much of the time, the light that glows when I’m with you gives the world a meaning beyond the misery we’re enduring.’

. . .

“You used to take me down long alleyways, to places I’d never even known existed. I’d tell you you were going too far in your security precautions, and you’d say, ‘These aren’t security precautions—they’re marital precautions! Just think—if we got caught together, tongues would be wagging all over Gaza. People would start saying, “Did you hear? We saw a man with his wife!”’

“Then you’d start laughing again. But I’m not going to laugh this time. I can’t.

“‘You know,’ you once said to me, ‘my heart used to nearly beat out of my chest at the mere thought that I’d get to see you, and as I followed you from a distance, I’d think to myself: now there’s a woman who’d be worth starting a war over if anything came between us! Ironically, though, they started a war first, to keep me from seeing her.’

“I felt so grateful that life’s cruelty hadn’t hardened your heart toward me. Then—as if you could read my mind—you said, ‘You know when a person gives up, Amna? It’s when he forgets the people he loves and starts thinking about nobody but himself. He might imagine that his own life is the most important thing in the world when it’s nothing but dust and ashes.’

“‘For God’s sake,’ I’d beg you, ‘don’t get poetic on me and make me cry again!’

“By the way, Randa says we’re all poets—or, rather, not that we’re all poets, exactly, but that inside each of us there’s a poet who comes out when we really come face to face with ourselves. When that happens, we start to glow, and we might say things nobody would ever have heard come out of our mouths otherwise. You remember the movie Jenin that was on one of the satellite channels? When that young nurse Hala found out the corpse she was sitting beside in the ambulance belonged to her brother Jaber, who’d been martyred in the camp, she said, ‘Sadness isn’t tears. Sadness is the ability to keep yourself from crying for somebody else’s sake.’ In this case, the ‘somebody’ for whose sake she was keeping herself from crying was her little brother, since she didn’t want to shock him with the news of his big brother’s death.

“According to Randa, some people have lots of luminous moments like these, while others don’t have many at all. Unfortunately, some people only have this kind of experience right before they die. And I believe her. How could I not believe Randa, of all people? But do you know the crazy things that go through that girl’s head? Besides the fact that she still insists that her name is Lamis, she talks about sneaking out of Gaza and going to visit the grave of Ghassan Kanafani—that heartthrob of yours! She says she wants to dig his grave open, give him all the stories she’s collected, and say, ‘In spite of all the death that’s in these pages, there’s enough life in them to make you jump out of there and go back to writing again!’”

. . .

“You see what a beautiful night it is, Jamal? It’s so quiet, it makes me feel as though Gaza must have been liberated a long time ago!”

. . .

“Randa keeps on telling me, ‘You know, Auntie Amna, somebody like Ghassan Kanafani should get to write at least one novel posthumously. I mean, do you really think he doesn’t know what’s going on now? He knows more than all the rest of us put together And it tortures him not to be able to write the way he used to.’

“She says, ‘Beautiful people whet Death’s appetite. And Ghassan is one of the beautiful people.’ She says that because they’re beautiful, Death senses their presence from the time they’re born and starts trying to snatch them up. Sometimes it gets them, sometimes it doesn’t. Now, some of the beautiful people hear Death sneaking up on them from the very start. Granted, you’re not going to see Annihilation chasing a newborn baby down the streets. But just because you can’t see it happening doesn’t mean it isn’t real. And Ghassan is one of those people who started running really early. “‘You see, Auntie Amna,’ she says, ‘Death has no pity on people like these because they’ve had no pity on Death.’ She tells me they don’t run because they’re not trying to escape. Rather, it’s more like a wild, cutthroat race. The only reason beautiful people become beautiful is that they’ve managed to rescue the things they love—the things we love, the things Life loves—from Death’s clutches. They liberate the rose, the tree, the sparrow’s wing. They liberate the horse’s neigh, the sun, and the rain. They liberate butterflies, tigers, and gazelles. But if Death catches up with them, it takes back all the beautiful things they’ve rescued. Do you think this world could still exist if it weren’t for the fact that these beautiful people keep snatching its beauty from the jaws of Death?

“Kanafani knew he was living for a struggle that was bigger than he was, and he accomplished what he did in just thirty-six years. Actually, he did it in a lot less time than that. When he saw Death gaining on him, he started writing like mad, and all his writing was done in less than sixteen years. Randa asks me: ‘Do you think he did that just because he loved to write? If that were the case, then three-fourths of the world’s population would be authors! No, he wrote what he did because he loved Life. Because he loved us. Because he loved me!’”

. . .

“Randa told me that sometimes she goes out in the yard and sees Death flying overhead in an Apache helicopter or an F-16. So she comes running back inside and grabs Kanafani’s books. Then she brings them out and lifts them high and screams, ‘You can do anything you want, but you’ll never be able to kill these! He beat you, and all of these are ours. Remember?’”

. . .

“You know, Jamal? Sometimes I feel as though Randa looks just like me. In fact, sometimes I feel she’s more beautiful than I am, even though she thinks I’m more beautiful than she is.”

. . .

“Now don’t laugh at me! But I said to her once, ‘Let’s trade places. You be me, and I’ll be you.’ ‘I wish we could,’ she said. ‘Then I could stop fighting with my sister over that name!’”

“One day I told you Saleh wanted your picture.

“‘Why would he want my picture?’ you wanted to know. ‘I see him whenever I get the chance!’

“I explained to you that he wanted your picture because ‘whenever you get the chance’ wasn’t enough for him. He knew your appearance must be changing all the time. And sometimes I felt the same way, especially at those moments when I needed you, all of you, the way a woman needs the man she loves, and was having troubling conjuring your face. You know?

“Sometimes I feel as though we never had a proper wedding celebration. Now don’t get me wrong, I just mean, sometimes I feel as though we were only together twice: when we conceived Saleh before you went to prison, and when we conceived Nadia after you got out. It’s as if we’d become nothing but baby-making machines.”

. . .

“You think I’m exaggerating? Well, maybe I am. But what I mean is that the occupation has deprived us of a real life together. We might manage to get together now and then, but we need each other a hell of a lot more than that.’

“You told me you’d take a picture of yourself when you got the chance, but added: ‘As soon as you’ve shown it to Saleh, tear it up. All right? Tell him that this was what his dad looked like on that day. Then, after he’s taken a good long look at it, get rid of it.’”

What I didn’t tell you was that he wouldn’t let me tear them up. Every time I told him I was going to, he’d cry so hard that I’d change my mind. ‘Okay, then,’ I’d tell him, ‘I’ll put them away for you. I’ll hide them somewhere because the occupation forces are after him, and we don’t want them to know exactly what he looks like, because they, as you know . . . .’

“Then he’d snap at me, ‘What do you think I am? A little boy?’

“‘Of course you’re not!’ I’d assure him.

“When he closed his eyes, I’d go to the other room, turn on the light, pick up your picture, and get ready to tear it up. But before I could do it, I’d burst into tears. Knowing I’d never be able to do it while I was looking at it, I’d shut my eyes, but that didn’t work, either. So I’d get up and turn off the light, hoping that would give me the courage to tear up my sweetheart’s picture. I’d be crying so hard that the darkness around me would start to tremble. When the sun came up the next morning, the picture would still be in my hand, and my dress would be black with grief. Then I’d hide it, and when another came in, I’d hide that one, too.”

. . .

“Thank God I did that. Otherwise, I don’t know what I would have said to Saleh the day he came to me in tears, complaining, ‘Since you tore up all his pictures, we haven’t got a single one left!’

“I went to my hiding place and got them all out. When I handed them to him, he was so excited he started jumping up and down. It made me think of when you used to throw him up in the air and catch him again . . . throw him up and catch him again . . .