Afraid to leave

“Let him sleep,” I told Amna. “Let him sleep!”

I’ve seen a lot in Gaza, and I’ve heard about plenty more on the West Bank. But what happened here in the Martyrs’ Cemetery was something I’d never seen before.

A bunch of women had circled the grave and were crying over whoever was buried there. Every single one of them was convinced that the person in the grave was her husband, her son, her brother, or her sweetheart, and every one of them had her eye on the cemetery entrance, hoping against hope that her beloved would show up all of a sudden and say, “And what are you doing here?”

There was nothing to indicate that the person buried there was him. Nothing, that is, but that vague sort of feeling that closes in on your heart from all sides until there’s nothing left of it but a mass of sorrow.

“Let him sleep,” I told her.

“But I’m afraid that if I leave, some other woman will come along and take him away from me.”

*

The other women who’d gathered at the grave looked just as sad as Amna did, and just as afraid of losing the person lying there. They seemed to have tacitly agreed to divide these feelings among themselves so that in a few days’ time, the vague possessiveness each of them harbored might give way to a sense that the person they were mourning—or afraid to lose—belonged as much to each one of them as he did to all the others.

There were boys who would come and cry for a while—some less, some more. A few days later you might see them playing together among the graves, like brothers who’d realized that the person buried there was a father to all of them. It was as if they’d reached the same conclusion the women had when, as they talked about Gaza’s young men near and far, they referred to them all as “our boys.”

As the days passed, I began hearing different stories about this person to whom their sorrows clung. According to one, he’d been wanted by the occupation authorities. According to others, he’d died one day on his way home, or on his way to a demonstration, or a funeral, or some unknown destination.

One woman wailed, “We’d only been married for six months! How could they murder him just like that? He didn’t even get to see his son!” As she spoke, she held her unborn child close as though he were in her arms.

Another said, “He was my fiancé!” Grieved over his loss and the loss of the chance to wear the white wedding dress she’d dreamed of, she went on and on about how wonderful he’d been.

A third woman reminisced, “He used to say, ‘There’s death all around us. But we’re still here, and we’ll live to see our grandchildren.’ He was excited about becoming a grandfather. When we got married, he was in his early twenties, and I was nineteen. ‘Hopefully we’ll be liberated from the occupation,’ I told him, ‘and you’ll see your great-children, too.’ But all he said was, ‘People are dying off faster and faster now.’ He knew he wasn’t going to see his grandson. It breaks your heart to be just steps away from somebody you’re hoping to see, only to have them put your eyes out like that.”

A fourth said, “He was all I had here. My family’s scattered all over—everybody’s in a different country.”

When evening came, either the mothers would round up their children, or the children would come on their own to take their mothers home. The girl who’d lost her fiancé would gather her black skirts in preparation to leave, and a couple of girls who always came and left together would slip quietly away. All I knew was that the deceased had been like a brother, a father, a son, and a fiancé to them. “And more,” one of them added.

Out of respect for their grief, the other women held back from asking them too many questions.

In the end, the only one left was Amna, the unofficial keeper of the grave.

In the mornings, the other women would bring her food, but she never touched it, and most days the children ended up gobbling it down.

Then all of a sudden the bereaved fiancée stopped coming. She was gone for three days. One of the women said, “We’ve got to go ask about her. Maybe something’s happened to her.” But on the fourth day she came back.

“What happened?” we asked her after she’d sat down. She didn’t say anything. Then she burst into tears. She cried so hard and so long, we concluded that she must have confirmed that the person in the grave really was her fiancé, after all.

“Did the man in the coma wake up and talk?” one of the women asked her.

“No.”

“Why are you crying, then?”

“Well,” she said, hesitating, “I don’t know what to say to you all, I’m so ashamed of myself. Yesterday he came back!”

A deep silence followed.

None of them knew whether to rejoice for this young woman over the return of her fiancé, or to cry for herself because the chances of the person in the grave being her own loved one were that much greater now.

Finally, the woman who was about to become a grandmother said to her, “My fiancé and I married and had a family and we got to enjoy our children. You have every right to do the same. Congratulations!”

This just made the girl cry harder.

“How can I go off and leave you here all by yourselves?”

“You can do it because you have to. Now go!”

“If I knew who this martyr was, I’d name my son after him. But there are all sorts of names in that grave.”

“Go get married and have a family. Names are the least of our worries now. Look at us: every one of us has her own name for the person buried here. What matters isn’t the name, but the human being who died.”

As sunset approached, the girl made sure she wasn’t the first to leave the graveside. She stayed put until there were so many children shouting and wailing that their mothers had no choice but to take them home. When she did get up at last, she said, “I’ll be back.”

“No!” they cried out in a chorus. “Don’t you dare!”

Every now and then the girl would bring a pot of tea and some food, and then sit down without saying a word. A number of the women tried to encourage her not to be so sad over her good fortune.

She’d cry—sometimes a lot, sometimes a little. And then she’d disappear.

Within a couple of weeks, only five women were still coming every day.

“There are only five of us left,” one remarked.

“But there’s only person in the grave,” remarked another.

“I think there are only four of us, actually,” another broke in. “There’s a lady whose house was shelled in al-Maghazi, and she was killed.”

“Who?”

“Umm Fuad.”

Suddenly they forgot all about the person in the grave and started crying over their companion in grief.

“She died before she could find out whether the person buried here was her husband or not.”

“She’ll find out before we do.”

Amna’s tears seemed to stream out in all directions as if she were crying for a million different people at once.

“You’ve got to go back to Nadia and Saleh,” I told her.

“What? Are you tired of them?” she asked.

Saleh and two-year-old Nadia had been part of our family from the night we went to the hospital. The person we worried about most, actually, was my mom. Whenever she fed Nadia or changed her diaper, she would start weeping uncontrollably.

“But why cry now?” I probed. “Do you want us to make Saleh feel even worse?”

She dried her eyes with the hem of her sleeve.

After a while she got so she could hold back her tears during the day. But as soon as Nadia and Saleh had gone to sleep, she would sob nonstop.

When I asked her, “Why are you crying now?” she’d say, “Who are you—Lamis or Randa?”

“Actually, I don’t know, Mama!”

“Anyway, whichever one you are—you ask me why I’m crying? If I don’t cry now, when will I cry? Why isn’t everybody in Gaza crying their eyes out right now? Why are we supposed to trill with joy all the time? We’re expected to do that because our kids are martyrs, and that’s an honor. But they’re our kids. Every day, every hour, every minute I expect somebody to knock on my door and bring me news I don’t want to hear. We worry and we worry and we worry. And in the end I’m expected to trill like somebody who’s got something to be happy about! Do you know why mothers are constantly crying over their kids? It’s so that, if they lose them, they won’t have to feel so ashamed over that trill they have to let out because the world demands it of them. A mother cries all day long because she knows the time is coming when she’ll be forced to betray her sorrows by trilling as though she were the happiest woman alive. But do you know who it is that makes us do that? It isn’t our families and neighbors. No, the ones who force us to trill at the funerals of the people we love are the ones who murdered them. We do it so as not to let them feel, even for a moment, that they’ve defeated us. But if we live to see this occupation end, we’re going to cry and cry! We’re going to cry over all the people whose funerals we had to trill at. We’re going to be sad when we want to, and happy when we want to—not at the times set by the people who’re shooting at us. We’re not really heroes, you know. We just have to act as if we were.”

That day I got really worried about my mom and my two brothers.

In the morning Amna picked Nadia up and took Saleh by the hand, and we went to the cemetery. As we approached, I saw the women from a distance. The more their number shrank, the more worried I got. At first they’d been able to spread their sadness around, since there had been more of them to share in it. But every time one of them disappeared, she’d leave her share of grief on the others’ hearts.

Amna held Nadia close, but she wasn’t crying. Something inside her made her hold herself together when Saleh was around.

“I told you it was him,” she said.

“Don’t give up hope,” my mother urged her.

“I’ll go to the hospital and ask,” I volunteered.

As I read the date of death on the temporary gravestone, I wondered: what name will end up here? Does a date go looking for a name to fill the scary blank space above it? Or does a name go looking for a date to give it more meaning and effect? Maybe each of them goes looking for the other. If so, which of them suffers more in the search?

“I’ll go to the hospital today,” I said again.

“No,” she pleaded, “don’t do that! If he didn’t die in the rocket attack, then he died from being away from me for so long. Either way, it has to be him.”

I went anyway, but I didn’t dare come back with that name, with that whole name.

Before I opened my mouth, she said, “You should have believed me before. Anyway, do you believe me now?”

I nodded.

The two girls were the last ones to leave Amna. They stood up and hugged her without a word.

Is there anything left to say? I thought to myself as they walked away.

Even so, something inside me prompted me to get up and run after them. I caught up with them at the cemetery entrance. When they heard my footsteps behind them, they stopped and waited.

“We’ve lived by ourselves for a long time,” they said. “So we know what it’s like not to have anybody.”

I started to ask a question, but before I could get it out, one of them said, “Don’t ask.”

The other added, “We didn’t want to go away before we’d made sure he had somebody. Now things are different. He won’t be alone any more.”

Then they walked away.

I tried to say something, anything. But I couldn’t get a single word to come out.

I sat down and cried.