Angels in disguise

I’m alone with you now.

The other women have all gone, and it’s just you
and me.

Every day or two some of them come back, though, and I know all’s well with the world.

I swear, it is.

They come to check on you through me, and on me through you.

“Did you really have to burn those pictures?” Saleh yelled. “We could have had something to remember him by!” Then he burst into tears.

I hadn’t wanted the pictures to make him sad.

“You know they bombed the cemetery?” I asked him. “Why would they bomb a cemetery? It’s because they never get tired of looking for pictures of the people they’ve murdered. Randa tells me they wanted to make sure the people they’d killed were really dead.”

Then, relenting, I said, “Okay. I’ll give you one.”

“I want them all.”

Now how did that boy know all the pictures were still around, hidden away somewhere?

Maybe I’d been even more afraid than he was—afraid a time would come when all I had left of you was memories. Memories that I love and hate, that come and go without leaving us anything but madness. Memories that have gotten so old that they stop helping us conjure a single face we love and need.

All those other women have left.

The person lying here might not have turned out to be you, but one of their loved ones. You might have turned up alive somewhere.

It feels awful to want you for myself, and to want you for all of them, too.

But the worst thing would be for you to be mine, and then to become somebody else’s. I’m not an angel.

Umm Fuad, the lady who was martyred recently—you know her, right? There were times when I thought the person buried here was hers. And when she was killed, I concluded that you really did belong to her. I felt that the person lying in this grave deserved something big. He deserved to have somebody join him, and that’s what she did. She joined him as a fellow martyr. I concluded that God must love her more than the rest of us, and I wondered what we’d done to deserve all this suffering. We all felt as though she’d taken you away, and there were moments when I thought the grave we were sitting around was empty. As for the children, they were too young to be conscious of something they couldn’t see. Except for Saleh, who went completely silent. Nothing mattered to him any more—not even Lamis.

So one day I told Lamis, “Take him to the sea! Maybe he’ll drown his sorrows there and open up to you.”

But he wouldn’t go.

As for little Nadia, she was blissfully ignorant of what was going on around her. She could even laugh.

A few days ago she broke loose from Umm Jawad’s hand and went running around the cemetery. Little kids have no idea what kind of a place it is.

When she laughed like that, I felt mortified, as if it had been me laughing. After all, isn’t she a little piece of me? She came out of my body and before I knew it, she was walking around. A little miracle. Imagine: you watch as a part of your body gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Then all of a sudden it separates from you and starts to cry. Then it starts to laugh. Then it starts running away from you. At first you catch up with it. But after a while it finds its wings and flies away. We end up being scattered here and there through our children. You know why? Because when Death comes, we want to make sure part of us escaped from it.

But it ends up catching up with them, too, you say?

You’re right, it does. But by that time, hopefully they’re scattered here and there through their children as well.

You’re not the only one who’s on the run. All of us here are. All of us.

Take Nadia, for example. She doesn’t know it, but she’s racing toward the day when she’ll know she lost you. As she moves forward, she’ll discover that she’s actually moving backward, toward you. She’s approaching the big, heavy question she’s bound to ask me one of these nights: “Where is he?”

And when it comes, I’ll look for an answer that’s bearable for both my heart and hers.

Like I said: it’s just you and me now.

Has the situation gotten any better—in your body, I mean? Did they give you back its missing parts? We’re born whole. So why do we have to die this way?

Umm Jawad says to me, “You’ve got to go home to your children now.”

And Randa’s told me the same thing. When she came to write your name over the date on the tombstone, she talked about how unfair history is. It’s unfair, she said, because a hundred years of sacrifices still haven’t convinced it that we know more about life than people who make an art of pulling it up by the roots. She said it was like an unquenchable fire. We scream in its face, “So you want more? Here!” And we cry. “You want more? Take these, then! You aren’t satisfied with the ones that died in scattered incidents today? You want a massacre? Then here!” And we cry some more. And all the while, we’re living for that moment when it tells us all of a sudden, “I’ve had enough.”

I’ll be back. I know I have to go, of course, because you’re telling me so. But that’s the only reason I have to.

I’ll be back. I didn’t know I’d live to see two pieces of my heart in a single graveyard.

When Mustafa was martyred, you said, “Don’t be afraid. I’m with you.” That strengthened me a little even though Mustafa wasn’t with me any more and wouldn’t be coming back. Some settlers shot him to death because the car he was in was trying to pass theirs. Can you imagine that? Is that a reason for somebody to die around here?

I once said to you, “If that was bound to happen to him, then it’s just as well that it happened when it did, before Saleh and Nadia were old enough to know him. If they had gotten to know him, it would have been a catastrophe. I mean, how could they have borne to part with somebody like him? And what makes it even worse is that he was gone in a split second—just like that—and for no reason!

I’ll be back. Don’t worry about us.

We’ll stay in your sight. In front of you. Around you.

You know, from the very start I had a sinking feeling that my life with you would be short, even if we had a hundred years together. So I knew it would be short to begin with, and then they came along with their tanks and their airplanes and their generals to cut it even shorter. It’s as if every year they subtract from our lives is added to theirs. At this rate, they’ll end up immortal.

In any case, I’ll be back.

I won’t go away.

Yesterday I was talking to Randa (who’s stopped telling me she’s Lamis, by the way), and I asked her about those two girls who kept coming to your grave.

I said, “Remember how sad they were all the time? But they didn’t talk much, did they? They seemed to be keeping some sort of big secret. I was almost afraid you’d been married to one of them! Otherwise, where would you have slept during all that time after you disappeared? I was going to ask them, and I had a feeling some of the other women wanted to, too. But none of us did. And you know why? Because at some point we discovered that we all loved you, and that maybe you didn’t belong to any one of us completely. But after it turned out that you were you, I asked Randa what she knew, and she said, “You’re not going to believe what I have to tell you.”

I swore to her that I would believe her.

“You’re still not going to believe it.”

“Yes, I will,” I insisted.

You want to know too now, don’t you? I mean, who could help feeling curious if he saw two stunning young women running their hands that lovingly over somebody’s grave?

Anyway, Randa said, “So you promise you’ll believe me, then?”

“I promise,” I said. “Now for God’s sake, don’t keep me in suspense any longer. I can’t stand it!”

Then, with a matter-of-factness that unsettled me, she said, “They’re angels.”

“No!” I blurted out. “That’s impossible.”

“See! I told you you wouldn’t believe me.”

Well, anyway, that evening I saw them come back, and for the first time I saw their wings. They were more beautiful than before. A lot more beautiful. They gave off a kind of translucent glow. They kept coming closer and closer until they were right next to me. Then all of a sudden I heard them speak, and it was like nothing I’d ever heard before. Their voices sounded as if they were made of light. Then they lowered their wings over me and said, “Go now. Don’t worry about him. He won’t be lonely with us. We’ll stay here till you get back.”

And that’s the way it’s been ever since: as soon as I get to the cemetery entrance, I see them there by your grave. They slip away so gently, they wouldn’t even scratch the air. They wave and leave the cemetery from the other side.

In any case, yesterday I said to Randa, “I know I’ve lost my marbles, but don’t laugh at me. Now, what I’m thinking is this: nobody’s ever been able to prove that angels can be either male or female. So how did you manage to do that?”

Then she told me her story from beginning to end, and for the first time I realized that people really can be angels.

“Now I believe you,” I told her.