Why are you always late?

“You’re always late!” Amna blurted out angrily. “Why is that?!”

“You mean he isn’t here?”

“That’s right, Randa. He isn’t here.”

She’d talked to me a lot about Aziz. Once she said, “Since you’re like my own daughter, I can’t help thinking about your future, and I’ve decided you need a husband like Aziz. Now to tell you the truth, I’ve talked to him about the idea, too. I said to him, ‘You need a bride as sweet as you are, and I’ve got the girl for you. Her name is Randa!’”

“Whoa! Take it easy now, Auntie! One of these days I’m going to wake up to find out that I got married without even knowing about it!”

She sidled up to me and, after making sure nobody was within ear shot, she whispered, ‘Don’t worry. I’ve gotten a lot older, but I’m not old-fashioned. To this day I still sneak out for secret rendezvous with Jamal. Don’t you dare tell anybody, though! They’re still after him, you know, and I’d die if I were the cause of some harm coming to him.”

All her talk about Aziz had really piqued my curiosity. I’d even jotted down some impressions of him in my notebook. I was curious about him not the way a girl would be curious about a guy, but as an aspiring writer, or as a collector of stories about Palestine.

Amna said, “Sometimes he comes to the cemetery and scans the place to get an idea of how many empty graves there are. I can see he’s doing it without his telling me so. Well, one day he didn’t find a single empty grave, and he started to cry. He cried like a baby. I took him into my arms and rocked him. He clapped his hands over his eyes, but he still kept on crying, and the tears seemed to be coming from somewhere far, far away. For all I knew, they were coming from the funeral of this land’s first martyr—or maybe from Jesus’s funeral. His tears seemed tired, like us. So when I rested his head on my shoulders, I don’t know if it was his head that I was resting there, or tears that, like us, have been looking for a shoulder to fall on.”

“‘Oh, God, I’m worn out!” he moaned, as if he were a thousand years old.

“One time he said, ‘You know, Auntie Amna, once this occupation’s over, I’m never gonna touch a shovel again, not even to plant flowers!’

“‘Don’t say things like that!’ I cried. ‘That’s just what the occupiers would want! They want us to stop being beautiful and loving beautiful things. Don’t give them the satisfaction.’”

She stopped talking for a while. Then she confessed, “To be honest, I don’t think he’ll hold up till the occupation’s over.”

It was on account of this comment of hers that I agreed to come meet him. He seemed to give off a special sort of light.

We looked all over for him that day. We passed by all the checkpoints. We searched the main roads. We went down every alleyway and back street we could think of. No luck. Finally Amna suggested, “Why don’t we look for him at his house?”

“Do you know where he lives?”

“No.”

“How will we look for him there, then?”

“Let’s go to the cemetery and follow the light you talked about. That’ll get us there.”

“Now who you told about the trail of light?”

“Oh, nobody!” she said evasively, like a little girl who’s been caught doing something she’s not supposed to do.

Wanting to put her at ease again, I quipped. “And what will his mother say when a couple of good-looking dames show up on her doorstep asking about her son?”

“I don’t know,” Amna rejoined, not skipping a beat, “but it’s sure to make her happy!”

“Happy?”

“Yep. Mothers are sort of weird that way. In front of other people they pretend to be put off or uncomfortable if something like that happens. But afterward, they laugh up their sleeves. Take it from me!”

. . .

“You remember how Lamis used to think up nice things to say to me about Saleh—as if I didn’t already know how nice he was. She was shy about it, of course, but I was happy to see that he’d grown up enough to catch her eye. I’ll be honest—it made me really glad. After all, where would a mother like me find a girl for her son as nice as Lamis? And he was happy, too, of course.”

Then she looked over at me and exclaimed, “Now look at me! I’m busy worrying about you and Aziz. But I don’t see anybody worrying about me!”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked, taken aback. “You’re my best friend!”

“Come on now, Randa! Things have dragged out for way too long. We’ve got to get those two together, and you promised to talk to your mother about it so that we could get the thing settled. But you haven’t done it yet!”

“I haven’t forgotten.” I said resolutely. “I just haven’t been able to find the right time.”

“Actually, I could have talked to Lamis directly,” she said, softening. “After all, she’s old enough to decide for herself what’s right for her and what isn’t. But protocol is protocol. I hinted to her about it the other day, and I think she got my drift. In fact, I think it made her happy, since she didn’t say anything, and well, like they say, ‘Silence means yes!’ If things go the way I’ve been hoping, there might be two weddings—Lamis’s, and yours.”

“So,” I demanded suddenly, “is that why you want to marry me to Aziz? Because you think I’m older than Lamis?”

She looked at me with tears in her eyes. “Seriously, Randa? I may have gotten older, but as I’ve said before, I’m not stuck in the past. I’ve even begun to wonder if I’ve lost my mind. I mean, what’s gotten into me, that I’d be willing to get so mixed up in this matchmaking game?”

“Since we’re at the market, let me get some vegetables. It’s been a long time since I cooked them something that’s good for their digestive system. The mulukhiya looks great today. See?”

I nodded.

“I’ll buy the chicken from somewhere nearer to home so that we won’t have to carry it all the way back.”

Turning to me, she added, “Why don’t you come for lunch today? Maybe he’ll surprise us and show up.”

“Who?”

“Have you forgotten already? Aziz!”

When I visited Amna a few days later, she was down in the doldrums.

All she could say was, “Why are you always late?”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “We didn’t have an appointment, did we? I just dropped by.”

“Even so, you’re late!” she repeated sourly.

“Did Aziz come and then leave? Or what?”

“He came, and he hasn’t left. But you’re still late.” She started to cry.

I left her and went out to the cemetery. As I roamed the graveyard, I wondered: does a single day go by without somebody being martyred around here?

I scanned the dates engraved on the tombstones. There were only a few days when we hadn’t lost somebody—as if Death had taken a little break, but that was all. How could it be so greedy? I couldn’t wrap my head around it. It seemed to devour everything in sight without a second thought.

I went walking down the years among those tombstones until I found myself looking at a date that brought me back to the present, or to be more precise, to one day earlier. Above the date there was a big poster and a bouquet of flowers that still hadn’t wilted. From behind the flowers, a young man’s face on the poster peeked out at me. The face looked familiar. And when I read the name, I burst into tears. It was Aziz.

“Maybe you took it more seriously than I did,” I told him guiltily. “Maybe you loved me so much you never wanted to see me, so you decided to cut things short from the start, and left this world. But I hope you did it because you were worried about me, not because you wanted to run away from me!”

Suddenly I jumped up and took off running among the graves. What was happening to me? Had I started talking to dead people?

When I saw Amna again two days later, she told me she’d been furious with me for not making time to meet Aziz. Kissing her on the head, I begged her to forgive me.

She did.

We sat for a long time in a silence that seemed to have descended out of nowhere and spread all around us without our noticing. Then, her voice sounding as though it were coming from some distant place, like the day I saw her for the first time at our door, she commented, “You see, Randa? I go to the market, come home, and cook up a storm. Then after all that, nobody eats a bite. The food’s sitting there just the way it was when I put it on the table. I don’t even know why I go to the trouble!”

Then she turned to me and said, “If I put out some for you, will you eat?”