8

Hospital

“Get up Habiba! I have to bathe you.”

“Where is the doctor? I’m tired.”

“He hasn’t come yet. Get up so you can bathe before he arrives. Your surgery is in an hour.”

“What time is it now? I feel very tired. Maybe it’s better to postpone the surgery . . .”

“It’s seven. Don’t worry. Dr. Shanneer is the best in all of Sharon. He graduated from America. Come on, let’s go.”

The nurse said the last phrase decisively to convince Habiba to get up before her daughter comes.

Most people calculate their age the way we measure the age of trees. Each ring counts for a year. But Habiba, who was in her seventies, used to say that she was fifteen. The years had left their traces on her face. She had made the long journey from Baghdad to Hatikva in “Tal al-Khirbe,” (The Hill of Ruins) as she insisted on calling Tel Aviv, which she never liked. She hated the humidity and the stinky caravans where those who came from Arab countries were housed. They lived in poor and miserable dwellings. The Tel Aviv municipality refused to incorporate the neighborhood even fifteen years after the establishment of Azrael (that’s what she used to call the state). She kept speaking Arabic to her parents and her children too. But her grandchildren mimic the Ashkenazis in their habits and lifestyle. That broke her heart. They were ashamed of their Arab origin and would insult Arabs a lot. Her mother called European Jews “Polish” and often said they were not real Jews, because their habits and ways were so alien to her. She would mention the wounding looks that inspected her and sprayed her with DDT after their airplane had landed in the airport when they arrived. They sprayed them like cattle being inoculated before being herded to a farm.

Her body aged, but the fifteen-year-old girl stayed inside. Habiba preferred that her daughter bathe her and not the nurse. She didn’t like hospitals. It was at a hospital where she first tasted separation when her husband died of cancer, twenty years after her arrival in Palestine. After that she only went to hospitals to visit mothers who had just given birth. That as a sign of good omen and a new beginning.

She bathed and went back to her room with the nurse to find her daughter waiting with a smile. The nurse helped her put on a blue robe. Her daughter combed her long hair and braided it. Habiba often told her how her hair used to be long and thicker than wool, but today it’s like a silk thread. She waited calmly for the doctor. The nurse disappeared and returned half an hour later to say that he hadn’t come. Habiba was anxious, especially that she hated surgeries. Were it not that Dr. Aziz Shanneer had come himself and reassured her, explaining in detail what he was going to do to her cartilage, she wouldn’t have agreed to have surgery at this age. She was on the threshold of her grave, as she used to say. He asked her how she knew that she wouldn’t live another twenty years? So why live them in pain when she can have a surgery with a very high rate of success. He made sure to look her in the eye as he said, in Arabic, “You’ll be as good as a new bride. Not like today’s spoiled girls.”

She laughed to overcome her embarrassment. She told her daughter that he looked like her father: tall with honey-colored eyes that change their color. Aziz laughed and said in Arabic, “Hopefully, everything will be fine, Hajja.” She liked “Hajja,” which she hadn’t heard in a long time. She smiled, because Arabic was the language of the heart and of sweet memories.

Habiba lied down waiting in her bed looking at the clear morning sky through the window. Her hair smelled like apples. She used to take her own shampoo along wherever she went. She feared that after all these years she couldn’t remember exactly what her late husband’s eyes looked like. So she asked her daughter to hand her his photograph from the inlaid wooden box. She’d put her most cherished items there. Some she had brought from Baghdad, others she collected here in Palestine. There were many family photographs, including one of her as a bride of eighteen next to her husband. Everyone in those photographs, except her, had died. There was a braid of her mother’s hair and a small pouch containing dirt from the garden of their Baghdad house. Her wedding ring, which became too tight after she gave birth to her second child, was in it too.

She opened the box and took her husband’s photograph out. It was taken one year before his death. She touched his face and eyes with her fingertips and placed her hand on her hair as if retracing his own touch. Then she asked her daughter to call the nurse to see what was going on.

“I don’t know why the doctor is late. He’s not answering his phone. Just wait. We’ll see what we can do. I will come back later.”

The nurse said, and sighed indicating her impatience with these repeated inquiries. Then she added:

“There is news that the Arabs in Israel, and Judea and Samaria, are on strike, but it is yet to be confirmed.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What is not clear about what I said?”

“Are the doctors on strike?

“No, just the Arabs, it seems.”

Habiba heard her stomach growling. She was told to fast before the surgery. She went back to gaze at the clear sky outside her window. The nurse came back later to tell them that the surgery was postponed, and they would be informed later of the new date. Habiba looked at her daughter and said, in a shaky voice tinged with disappointment, “Let’s eat.”