If I call her, she’ll answer

“I’m the only one who knows where she is, and if I call her, she’ll answer.”

“For God’s sake, Saleh!” I said, “You and your sister are all I’ve got. Lamis will come back on her own. She’s old enough not to lose her way home.”

“But Baba was older than Lamis, and he didn’t make it back.”

When Randa started to cry, he said to her, “Give me her picture.”

“Later,” she said. “I’ll give it to you later.”

Then he stole the mirror when nobody was looking!

“Fortunately,” he told me, “the mirror was facing the wall the whole time.”

Before I could ask him how he knew this, he said, “Because Lamis’s image had stayed in it.”

“I know how hard life can get, Saleh,” I told him. “But as long as we’re together, we can make it. I know how sometimes we feel like the world’s closing in on us from all sides, and we have to get some air. But I’d asked you not to leave the house without telling me.”

One time he said to me, “If there were nobody in the world but Lamis . . . and you . . . and Nadia and Baba . . . and we were here all alone without any soldiers, the sky and the sea would be more beautiful.”

When I told Randa what he’d said, it made her happy. At the same time, she admitted she was worried about him, and she asked me if she could write down what he’d said.

“Why not?” I said.

So she went and got her notebook, and started writing and writing.

“You’re writing more than what he said,” I observed.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m also writing down when he said it, and who he said it to.”

When I first got to know Randa, she was collecting pictures of martyred children. She cried because she had so many. Then she got the saddest look on her face. It was the saddest look I’d ever seen in my life.

“What’s wrong, Randa?” I asked.

“Some of these people had never had their pictures taken before. The only picture we have of them is the one that was taken after they were already dead.”

She started to cry over the fact that some of the pictures didn’t even look like the people they’d been taken of. They’d been so disfigured by the bullets and the shrapnel—by Death—you wouldn’t have recognized them.

“How can I put pictures like these along with the others when I know they were so much more beautiful before?”

“You could write about them,” I suggested. “Write down some of the things they’d said, the things they’d dreamed of.”

From that day on, she wouldn’t let her mother go to a single wake without her. As the women cried and talked, she would sift through their exchanges for the last things these children had done or said. When she got home afterward, she would sit and write. If I came over to see her, her eyes would be red from all the crying she’d been doing.

“Didn’t you cry while you were there?” I asked. “Of course I did. It’s just that when I write about these kids, I feel as though I know them, as though I’m living through what they lived through, and I realize that while I was at the wake, I didn’t cry enough. When I’m sitting here by myself, I feel like they were mine, that I’m the one who lost them.”

“God, if only the occupation would end before this notebook runs out.”

It looked like ten notebooks stuck together.

She went on, “Sometimes I cry for a reason that might not occur to anybody else, not even to you, Auntie Amna. I cry because my handwriting keeps getting smaller and smaller. I look at how many blank pages are left. Then I go outside and see all the soldiers in the street, and I come back in and cry.”

I said to Saleh, “If it weren’t for this girl, I would have given up a long time ago. Have you noticed how she speaks to me, and to you, and to Nadia? She never leaves Nadia out. She talks to her as if she were a grown-up. At first this surprised me, but it doesn’t any more. Sometimes there are things we don’t understand, and we should just let them be.”

Lamis wasn’t the way she used to be. She’d grown up. But so had Saleh. He’d caught up with her. I mentioned this to Randa, and she wasn’t surprised. In fact, she’d said the same thing to Lamis—or something to that effect. Something had changed. There was the fuzz on his upper lip, and the pimples on his nose. But what hadn’t changed was his determination to go to the spot where his dad had been martyred. He would stand there and show his dad’s pictures to passersby, and they all listened to what he had to say. Some of them cried. They could see he was too young to have this mountain of troubles heaped on his shoulders.

“I want to tell you something, sweet boy. And don’t laugh at me the way your dad used to do, or I’ll be mad at you both! Anyway, what I want to say is: I was sure Lamis would be your wife.”

. . .

“Now there you go laughing! Or are you crying? You’re crying. No, I want you to laugh, then. The Gaza Sea has enough saltwater in it already without your tears!”

It made me happy to see that Lamis didn’t come running like mad to look for her mirror the way I’d expected her to. She looked at the place where the mirror had been hanging, but she didn’t get upset at all.

Randa whispered to me, “Lamis doesn’t see herself any more.”

“How’s that?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “she feels like a ghost, and ghosts don’t need mirrors. In fact, a ghost is so delicate, its image might wound it.”

On the rare days when you couldn’t hear any shooting, when the snipers disappeared and the tanks went searching for God knows what with their gun barrels skyward, Lamis would go up to the roof and look into the distance. Every time she did it, she told us she’d been able to see more than the time before.

Once Randa asked her, “What did you see today?”

All she said was, “It was nothing compared to what I’m going to see tomorrow.”

Her answer confused us. So the day after that I asked her myself, and she repeated what she’d said to Randa.

Then Randa started going up to the roof so that she could see what Lamis was seeing.

It was a relief to me that she started to see Saleh more. I thought to myself: maybe she looks into the distance so that she can see him there. But now I wish I hadn’t said that. I wish it hadn’t even occurred to me.

“So that’s how it is!” I said to Randa. “Things had gone this far without my knowing about it? How could you not be honest with me? Why did I have to find out something like this by accident from Lamis, when I was eavesdropping?”

Randa didn’t reply. And what could she have said?

But I surprised her. I’d bought the wedding dress, and when she saw it, she was crazy about it. “Please give it to me, Auntie Amna! Please!” she begged.

“No,” I told her. “It’s for Lamis, and that’s that.”

“But I am Lamis!”

“No, you’re not. You’re Randa. Don’t drive me crazy now!”

“Okay, then, I’m Randa. But haven’t you noticed how small the dress is?”

“Of course I have,” I retorted. “Do you think I’m blind? And didn’t I tell you that people who love each other turn into little birds?”

“You didn’t say that about people who love each other. You said it about people who are martyred young.”

“Don’t you understand me any more, Randa? Why would you say a thing like that? Is there a difference between the first group and the second?”

“I don’t know,” she murmured.

Imagine that! Randa, the girl who knows everything, admitted there was something she didn’t know!

In any case, I said, “Well, if you didn’t know before, you do now.”

Saleh! Oh, Saleh!

You’ll never need another gust of wind!