I knew it was you

I knew only something huge, something cataclysmic, would have kept you from coming back to me.

I’d been watching television with Randa and Saleh. We’d been watching it, but not watching it. It was just sort of there in front of us without our paying any attention to it.

I kept thinking: why do we keep it on if nobody’s watching it?

For some reason, though, we kept looking at it every now and then. Randa kept asking me, “What do we expect to see on the screen that we haven’t already seen with our own eyes?”

Maybe we were just watching it out of habit. After all, we should be humble enough to admit that there are things on television that we haven’t seen with our own eyes.

“Besides,” she went on, “even if the stuff on TV isn’t something we’ve seen ourselves, it isn’t that different from what goes on right here.”

She’s smart, that girl. You know, if Saleh were even a little sweet on her, I would have tried to get the two of them together, and she would have helped him forget about Lamis. But the heart has its ways!

Sorry—I know I’ve told you that a million times.

The fact is, she’s never left my side. I always feel her hand in mine, and on my forehead. Even when I’m asleep I hear her talking to me. Now I’m going to tell you something strange. I know you’re not going to believe it. But when this girl sits next to me at night and puts her palm on my forehead, I sleep like a baby.

I said to her once, “Your name shouldn’t have been Randa. It should have been Rahma—Mercy.”

“First of all,” she replied, “my name isn’t Randa. It’s Lamis. And second, is there anywhere around here that ‘Mercy’ could have survived? If I’d been Mercy, I would have died before I was born. I would have died the minute that name flashed into my mother’s head. Just look at what’s happening: they’re killing everything. And you know why? Because they killed mercy first.”

She picks the impurities out of my dreams the way we pick little pebbles and clods of dirt out of lentils and cracked wheat before we cook them. I used to look at her fingers and think: if they weren’t so delicate, she wouldn’t be able to
do that.

But she does it perfectly. If she sits next to me while I’m sleeping, I don’t have any nightmares. As if she’d spread a net to keep out the things that shouldn’t get in, she keeps me from dreaming about things that would scare me awake.

One time I asked her how she did that.

“Do what?” she said.

“Come on now, Randa. You know and I know.”

“I swear I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

I didn’t want to say it out loud for fear that she might tell me I was crazy. So I didn’t. Instead I just said, “I’m better now. Why don’t you go sleep in your own bed? Don’t you miss it?”

All she could say was, “And who around here would sleep at all when he knows he might never wake up?”

You see? The things she says come from some deep place.

Another time she said to me, “When they close the roads and hem us in from the sky, I go roaming inside myself. I have to, Auntie. When I do that, I come across things I didn’t know existed. And you know what they are? Words. They take me by the hand and lead me along. They glow, and when they come together, a big sun rises, and I see more. I feel more. I see you, even. I see Lamis, Saleh, Jamal, my brothers. I see Grandma. I see all of you. And I understand you better.”

But she didn’t tell me what she saw on the television screen that day as we sat there looking at it but not watching it. She didn’t say. It was only later that she told me she’d known, but had wanted me to find out for myself. She said, “There are things you need to find out on your own. If somebody else tells you, they don’t mean anything.”

Even though she didn’t tell me that day, I sensed what had happened. I just didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to confirm it.

Without a word, she and I got up and said to Saleh, “You stay here with your sister. We’re going on a little errand, and we’ll be back.”

I didn’t want to get agitated or cry, since I knew that if I did, I’d be giving away the fact that you’d died. I wanted you to come to me. I wanted you to send me those short signals of yours that used to tell me where I could find you.

But Saleh refused to stay home. So we called Lamis to come. I asked her if she could babysit Nadia while we went on an errand.

Randa wasn’t saying a word. She kept so quiet, you would have thought she didn’t know how to talk. When Lamis got there, I figured Saleh would change his mind and stay home. But he didn’t.

That’s when I got scared. I thought to myself: he knows what’s happened, and so does Randa. I’m the only one who’s in denial.

The person on the TV screen had been bloodied beyond recognition. In fact, I wondered if I’d seen a face at all. For all I knew, by some bizarre coincidence severed body parts had come together in the shape of a face that wasn’t necessarily yours.

I thought back on how, every time I saw you, you’d looked different from the time before. It dismayed me at first. I thought: what is this occupation doing to me? It keeps throwing me into the arms of somebody I’ve never seen before.

Now, don’t misunderstand me here: you know how much I love you. But it still scared me.

I remember that time when I didn’t know who you were, and I said, “Shame on you! What’s an old man like you doing running after a girl half his age!” Then you started to laugh your head off, and if you hadn’t, I never would have recognized you!

Another time when you were following me, I thought you were a spy. You’d been trailing me from the time I left the house. It had never occurred to me that you might come that close to home, and I was always super cautious. I’d been trying to get you off my trail, but I finally gave up and headed back to our neighborhood. When you kept after me, I screamed, “Spy! Spy!” So the boys started chasing you away with rocks. But thankfully, you got away from them.

Later you said, “You nearly did me in, Amna! You’ve got to be careful, of course. But if you take it too far, you could be the death of me.”

Even though I knew Gaza was crawling with spies, I stopped screaming like that. If I concluded that somebody was a real spy, I was prepared to go running around all day just to wear him out. I also developed more patience, so that I was all right with the idea of coming home sometimes without getting to see you.

According to the TV newscast, the plane that had dropped the rocket had left one dead and another critically wounded. Then they showed a picture of the victim and asked those who knew him to come to al-Shifa Hospital right away.

Randa’s silence scared me. But when she realized that Saleh would be coming with us, she finally opened her mouth.

“Hopefully everything will be all right.”

She said it the way her grandmother might have said it—like somebody who knows what’s going on but doesn’t want to let on.

“Don’t worry—it wasn’t him,” I told her. “If it had been, I would have recognized him right away. Show me his pinky, and I could tell you if it’s him or not.”

I knew those scattered body parts couldn’t possibly be you. I mean: where was your height? Where were your eyes? Your hands? Your smile? Your step? No, it couldn’t have been you.

But then everything changed. When we got to the hospital, it was pandemonium. Hundreds of people had come to identify you, and everybody was crying.

When we finally managed to make our way through the crowd, we came up to a man wearing a blood-spattered white coat at the entrance to the morgue.

“I want to see him,” I told him.

“Are you a relative of his?” he asked.

“He’s my husband.”

“Twenty women have come up saying he’s they’re husband!”

“Twenty? Jamal only had one wife, and that was me.”

“That’s what they’re all saying. Anyway, go ahead.”

When Saleh started to go in, the man stopped him. “You’re the only one allowed in,” he said to me. So Saleh stayed outside with Randa.

He uncovered you, but I couldn’t see a thing. Even the parts of the body that hadn’t been completely charred by the blast had been blackened by the smoke. I searched for something that would indicate it was you, but I couldn’t find anything. I asked him to pull the sheet back a little more.

“There’s nothing left to see, Ma’am,” he said. But he pulled it back anyway. I started to cry. Then I started screaming, “Jamal! Jamal!”

“Do you recognize him?” he asked.

But I couldn’t speak. All I could do was scream, louder and louder.

A nurse came up, put her arm around me, and led me toward the outer entrance. The minute I caught a glimpse of Saleh, my tears dried up and my screaming stopped as if nothing had happened.

I saw you. I saw you in his face.

When Randa asked me about it, I said, “No, it wasn’t him.”

When Saleh asked me, I said, “It wasn’t him.”

And when I asked myself, I said the same thing.

“Okay, then,” Randa said, “let’s go home.”

“No,” I told her, clinging to the darkness of the night.

She understood me.

“I’ll go and come back, then,” she said.

Taking Saleh by the hand, she led him away. He followed her so calmly, it was as though she were his mother, not me, which scared me even more.

I sat down at the hospital entrance. After a while I realized that I was sitting back to back with another woman.

When I asked her who she was, she said, “I’m his wife.”

“But I’m his wife.” I objected.

Another woman heard us and chimed in, “I know the one you’re talking about, and I’m his wife!”

Still another woman claimed she was his mother. And nobody, she declared, can know these things the way a mother does.

We got quiet, and stayed that way for a long time. Then another woman said, “I’m sure he’s my husband.”

“He’s all I’ve got,” a teenage girl declared. “He’s my only brother. Why do you want to take him away from me?”

More silence.

Then I heard a little boy screaming, “Baba, Baba! I want my baba!”

I shot to my feet.

“Where are you going?” asked one of the women who’d told me you were her husband. She was sure of it, too. She said she’d had seven children by you—three daughters and four sons. When I heard her talking that way, I thought to myself: well, a woman who’s had that many kids by somebody must know him better than I’d know somebody I’ve had only two kids by.

“Where are you going?” she asked again. It was as if she didn’t want me to leave—as if she wanted me to be his wife instead of her.

“Didn’t they say on the television that somebody had been wounded?” I asked her.

“That’s what they said,” she affirmed. “They say he’s in a coma he might never come out of. Half his head was blown off.”

I sat back down.

No fewer than ten wakes were held: in Jabaliya, al-Shati, al-Nusayrat, al-Breij, al-Maghazi, Deir al-Balah, and Khan Yunis. Some of the people who came to offer their condolences told me they’d been to wakes in Rafah, too.

Even when they saw their brothers Jawad and Salim at the funeral-turned-demonstration, Randa and Lamis didn’t find out whether it had been you or not. “Time will tell,” was all they had to say.

But it turned out not to be that simple.