If I were blind

If I were blind, I’d say there’s more death around here than there is life.

But every time I’m about to reach this conclusion, I open the door, lean against the doorframe, and watch the kids in the street.

There are always new bunches of them, and all the same age. They seem to appear out of nowhere, like almond or lemon blossoms. Whole groups of them that I’ve never even seen before. They come racing down the street, tripping and falling and getting up again, and by the time they know how to make it to the corner on their own, a new flock has shown up. The new one fills the street and pushes the old one out into the wider world as mothers peek out at them anxiously through half-opened windows and doors.

If I were blind, I’d say there’s more death around here than there is life. Death swoops down, ripping the life cycle to shreds before it’s finished. It’s no wonder families worry about their children whenever they hear gunshots, and whenever darkness falls.

All of a sudden children are born, grow up, leave the neighborhood, and die. What might they have become if they had survived?

A few days ago I read the transcript of an interview with an Israeli sniper who admitted that his commanding officers had asked him not to shoot any child under the age of twelve.

The journalist asked him, “When you’re sitting behind a barrier or in a tower, how can you tell whether a child is above or below this age?”

“Well,” the sniper replied, “we can’t tell a kid to pull out his birth certificate before we kill him.”

Saleh picked up the photos and headed for the spot where his dad had been martyred. He didn’t know the way, but he kept asking people for directions until he found it. Once there, he stood for hours on top of the ashes that remained from the explosion, and whenever anybody passed by he would stop him and say, “Do you recognize this man? He’s my dad. This is where he was martyred.”

Meanwhile, we had no idea where he’d gone. We looked all over for him. We asked in hospitals, in national security centers, in one neighborhood after another, but there was no sign
of him.

We were all crying, afraid Amna would get back before he did.

My sister said, “There’s only one place left to look.”

“Where’s that?” we asked.

“The place where his dad was killed. He asked me about it.”

So off we went. And that’s where we found him. When I came up to him, he looked at me as if he’d never seen me before.

“Do you recognize this man? He’s my dad, and this is where he was martyred.”

“I know,” I said.

He was so exhausted, his legs could hardly hold him up any more.

We brought him to our house, and by the time Amna got back, he was asleep.

She wanted to wake him up and have him sleep in his own bed.

“Leave him here till morning,” we said. “The boy’s worn out.”

“But how can I sleep there alone with Nadia?”

“You could sleep here,” my mom suggested.

Grandma was watching the scene with tears in her eyes.

“But . . . .”

“Now don’t you ‘but’ me,” said my mom. “Think of all the times we’ve slept at your house.”

After that it wasn’t hard to track him down when he disappeared, although we made a point of not letting him disappear in the first place.

One day he said to me, “I can’t sleep any more.”

That night, we woke to the sound of Amna screaming.

We went running to her house. Her pained cry jolted even Grandma awake. When we got there, she was pointing to Saleh’s empty bed. She couldn’t talk. All she could do was scream.

The three of us—Amna, my mom, and I—went running through the streets.

We told Lamis to stay at the house. After Samer was martyred, we’d started worrying more about her. And we’d gone on worrying even though it had been years since his death. Something made her seem like the baby of the family despite the fact that she and I had been born only five minutes apart. What worried us most was that she never talked about Samer. It was as if he’d never waved to her from the street corner just steps away from our house. As if he’d never existed.

We combed every street in the camp, but couldn’t find him anywhere. It finally occurred to us that maybe he’d gone home, and sure enough, when we got back he was asleep in his bed.

Amna wanted to wake him up. My mom took her by the hand. She was trembling.

“Leave him be. He doesn’t sleep well any more. Just be thankful he was finally able to.”

When I think back on Lamis and Saleh now, I can see that they had more of a connection than they seemed to on the surface. It wasn’t just my fear that the two of them would disappear all of a sudden. It was a deep something-or-other that I can’t quite put my finger on.

Saleh said to me, “I’ve promised myself not to give the occupiers any rest at night. After all, I can’t sleep. So why should I let them?” He also told me Lamis had promised him not to give them any rest during the day.

“So,” I remarked, “you finally agree on something.”

“We’ve never disagreed.”

When I asked him to explain, he said, “All I know is that that’s what she told me.”

After Samer was martyred, Lamis went to her room and turned the mirror around to face the wall. When I went in, I found her looking at the back of the mirror as though she could see her reflection.

When Samer died, Lamis seemed to change overnight. For one thing, she seemed all of a sudden to have discovered the existence of pop songs. She listened to them nonstop, and made constant shuttles between the front gate and the mirror like a train rushing breathlessly back and forth between two stations.

“That girl’s about to go crazy,” Grandma said to me.

“Why do you say that?”

“Don’t you see her? She stands in front of the mirror all day long!”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well,” she said, “the quickest way to drive yourself crazy is to stand for a long time in front of a mirror.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because when you do that, you see your reflection more than you see yourself.”

“And what does that mean?”

“It means you recognize yourself in the mirror better than you recognize yourself outside of it. In other words, you see yourself as a fantasy more than as a reality. Then after a while, all you see is the copy, and the original disappears.”

“You’re scaring me, Grandma.”

“No, don’t be scared. You sister’s still safe. As soon as she realizes that stinker is going to see her, and that he dreams about her, her reflection will come out of the mirror, because she’ll see him in it. And then she’ll come back to reality.”

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

“You’re still young. It’s too early for you to understand things like this.”

“What do you mean, it’s too early for me to understand, Grandma? Okay, so I’ve got a puny head. But I swear to God, I understand everything.”

“You still aren’t getting my point.”

“Let me write it down, then. Then maybe I’ll figure it out some day. Can you repeat what you said?”

“For heaven’s sake! How do you expect me to repeat something as important as what I just said? You can’t repeat something like that! It only comes out that way once, and that’s that.”

“Please, Grandma—for my sake!”

“Okay, I’ll try. I can repeat the gist of it, at least.”

I went and got my notebook. She repeated what
she’d said as I scribbled. When we’d finished, she said, “And what are you going to do with what your grandma said?
I’m afraid I might see it in the newspapers after you grow up.”

“Don’t worry.”

“What I said was for your ears alone, Randa. After I’m gone, I don’t want people saying, ‘Wasfiya said this, and she didn’t say that.’”

Looking at me intently, she added, “I’ve told you these things because you’re going to understand. I know you’ve got a little head. But there’s a good brain inside it.”

Saleh seemed to be the only person who reminded Lamis of Samer. We’d close our eyes and see him closer to her than anybody else. But the second we opened them again, we’d see her pushing him away, as if he were the cause of everything that had happened. Then his closeness to her would seem like a miracle that had taken place once upon a dream that bore no connection to reality.

This used to confuse him really badly, and more than once he cried.

“But Lamis isn’t like that!” he insisted.

I asked him to explain. And when he did, I could hardly believe my ears.

She was always trying to make us think she would never forgive him. But when we weren’t around, she would do just the opposite.

I started keeping my eye on the mirror. I even went so far as to put a string on it so that I could tell whether she had turned it around to see herself when we weren’t looking. But she never turned it around once, and that scared me.

When I told Grandma about it, she said, “The girl slipped out of our hands while we were looking right at her.”