When he was late, she knocked on our door

I came out and Amna said to me, “Saleh is late getting home today, and I have to go to al-Shifa Hospital. There are a lot of children whose families I have to talk to.”

She seemed half-dazed.

“When he comes, have him stay at your house till I get back.”

Then she left, Nadia’s hand in hers.

“And what about Nadia?” I asked her.

“I’ll go get her from the nursery myself.”

We all knew Saleh had changed after what had happened to his father. He seemed to sense by some sort of filial instinct that his mother wouldn’t be able to bear another fatal blow to the heart. (Is there such a thing as a ‘filial instinct’ along the lines of a ‘maternal instinct’? Why shouldn’t there be? After all, a son comes out of his mother’s womb, doesn’t he? He’s her flesh and blood, isn’t he?)

He stopped leaving the house without asking Amna’s permission, and after a while he stopped going anywhere at all. He never let her out of his sight. If he felt she’d taken too long in the other room, he’d get up and go to the room she was in, making up excuses that wouldn’t have convinced anybody.

“I’m starting to worry about him,” Amna confessed. “I mean, I want him to obey me, but not to this extreme! At first, it seemed the only place he was willing to go was the spot where his dad was martyred. When we told him he’d gone there enough, he stopped going anywhere at all. I want him to get out, to play ball, to . . . and if he wants to throw rocks at some military patrol driving around in the distance, I want him to do that, too!”

Amna would say these things to my mother. Then she would repeat them forlornly to each of us individually. What she didn’t realize was that Saleh wasn’t acting this way in order to please or obey her. He was doing it because he was worried about her. Rather than not wanting to let himself out of her sight, he didn’t want to let her out of his.

My mom said to me, “If you’re Randa, then you’re torturing yourself for nothing over this boy. I don’t know whether you’d like him to be your brother, or something else. Do you still think of yourself as the little girl who wants the toy that chose her sister?”

At first I didn’t understand what my mom meant by a toy that chooses a person. I did realize, though, that she’d said it from the heart, and that she’d said it in a moment of calm lucidity.

*

Amna was at the hospital with a little boy. A dum-dum bullet had shattered half his spinal column and left him without legs to run with. Gone were the days when he could chase army jeeps, and then come home and tell his mother he’d been playing soccer. The little boy was sobbing, terrified that Amna would rob him of his mother the way the bullet had robbed him of the ability to play, run after soldiers, and make a nuisance of himself at checkpoints.

Suddenly a huge ruckus filled the corridors and the hospital rooms and drowned out the little boy’s sobs.

“What’s going on?” Amna asked the nurse who was standing at the door.

“There seems to be a wounded child.”

“Oh Lord, how long?” Amna said despairingly.

Not long afterward she got up absently like someone walking in her sleep.

Suddenly the cries of the little boy behind her disappeared. She wasn’t hearing anything any more.

“What happened?” she asked after the group carrying the wounded boy had passed.

“He’s been martyred,” one of the young men replied.

“How old was he?”

“Fourteen, fifteen, something like that.”

“God be with his mother.”

She went back into the room where she’d been staying with the little boy and sat down on the edge of the bed. He wasn’t crying. During the less than a minute she’d been away from him, his screaming had stopped. It seemed that the bullet wasn’t going to go on robbing him of the good things in his life while he looked on helplessly. It had robbed him of life itself.

Had he really gone silent? His mother had valiantly held back her tears as she pleaded with him to let “Auntie Amna” take him to be with the other children at the rehabilitation center, which, she’d explained, would be “just a school like the one you used to go to.”

The voices of the patients, visitors, doctors, and nurses on and around the beds that dotted the large room faded out, and once again Amna found herself rising to her feet. She followed the ruckus, which had turned to a deep silence whose bloody footprints led her down the corridor.

As she made her way with difficulty through the crowd, the space between the emergency room entrance and the stretcher felt like the longest distance she’d had to cover in her entire life. When she got there, she looked into the face of the boy who’d received a bullet to the head. She pondered his blood-drenched features.

“Do you know him?” someone asked her.

She shook her head and left.

She walked back to her house, our house.

She knocked on our door. I came out.

“Where’s Nadia?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she replied blankly.

I told her Saleh hadn’t come home.

“There’s a boy at the hospital who looks just like him.”