16

Alaa

It is almost midnight now, and I feel so tired I cannot fall asleep. Do you remember that evening when I slept at your place in Jaffa, a month before you moved to live with my parents? I was tossing and turning in bed, and had gone to the kitchen five times to drink water. You must have heard me, because I kept shuttling between my bed, the kitchen, and the bathroom. Your voice preceded you out of the dark, and you asked me if I wanted some mint tea. As if you knew, without even asking, that I wasn’t able to sleep in the room next door, and that I was staring at the silence. The silence and not the hush. “Hush” has some peace of mind, but silence is like waiting for the unknown. I smiled even before seeing your face. “That would be great.” We drank the tea together without saying anything. We sat watching the silence, in and around us. That was the first time I felt you were tired of life. We sat for a whole hour and drank the whole pot of mint tea, cup after cup, exchanging a few words about the taste of mint. You said that sometimes it has a rancid taste. I disagreed, but ever since you said that, I feel it’s a bit rancid. When I look back at your life, I am surprised that you didn’t get tired of life until you were in your eighties. Maybe you did, but I never noticed. What am I tired of? Why do I feel so tired? You once said that a human being dies when s/he loses hope and the taste of life. Did you say all that, or am I imagining it?

“Good Night Grandson.”

You said it in a night-calm voice and went to go to sleep.

“Mad, she’s mad.” That’s what my mother said when she discovered that you’d bought and prepared your own shroud. “How did you know?” I asked her. Your grandma told me. She always referred to you using “she” and “your grandma.” I rarely heard her say “my mother.” You bought your shroud ten years before you departed. Ten years. Can I call your death anything but a departure? You could’ve stayed longer with us. Your presence brought us together and gave our lives a special flavor. You were my only grandmother. My father’s folks left him with his uncle, and were forced to flee to Jordan. But they never returned. No one knows what happened to them on the road. Maybe they perished in one of the massacres? They were worried about him because he was so little. They left him with his uncle so they could put things in order in Amman first. But no one heard anything from them. They went and never came back. When we used to go on school trips to the Galilee, or any other place, I used to wonder: Should I tread lightly? Was I walking over the corpses of those who had passed through, and who were decimated in the nakba? Was I walking over a land made of decomposed bodies? When I walk in Palestine I feel that am walking on corpses. The images of multitudes of people escaping in terror are always on my mind. All my grandparents had died, except for you. Do we inhale the decomposed corpses? What are we going to do with all this sorrow? How can we start anew? What will we do with Palestine? I, too, am tired. But whenever I wake up in the morning, I remember you and smile. And I say, just as you used to, “God will ease things.” Then I listen to Fayruz singing “Yes, there is hope.” Because her voice translates what you used to say, with a slight variation. I think that’s what you meant by “God will ease things.” But is there hope, really?

Perhaps our presence could no longer give you hope or zest? Perhaps you departed because life became bland. You said that often in your last year. Because people wither and die when they can no longer savor life. You said you didn’t want to inconvenience anyone after your death, and that’s why you bought the shroud. You even put the funeral expenses in a pouch, next to the shroud. But then you gave the money to charity after mother started sobbing when she knew about the whole thing. And after one of the neighbors told you it wasn’t right, religiously speaking.

Your initial reaction to the neighbor was a roaring laugh. You said, “I’m not going to wait for nitwits to tell me what’s right and wrong. They’re smaller than my foot and have the nerves to tell me what’s right.” Speaking of nitwits, do you remember that afternoon when you were sitting with Um Yasmeen in your courtyard, and the proselytizing sheikhs came to lecture you about faith and religion? One of them said, with an idiotic smile, “You have to wear the veil, Hajja. You made the pilgrimage to Mecca and you will surely be rewarded greatly for that. But a veil and a long gown would suit your age and your faith better than this scarf, which exposes more of what it covers. Do you want to be like them Christian and Jewish women?” You shook your head and let him finish. Um Yasmeen was red in the face and was about to get up and leave. You held her hand and pushed it so she would remain seated next to you. As soon as he finished, you asked her to take off her shoe. You took it and stood up to beat him with it.

You spat on him and yelled, “Um Yasmeen’s shoe is worth ten of you. Go away! You worthless imbecile. I never want to see you, or any of your kind, in this neighborhood again. I swear by the Ka‘ba I visited, if I see you here again, I’ll pluck your beard. Get out both of you. So, Um Yasmeen is an infidel because she’s Christian? What kind of nonsense is that? Did God give you power of attorney? You have no manners and no sense, you losers.”

Both of you burst out laughing. And the nitwits never dared set foot near you again. You said you saw her eyes well up. When you told me the story you said, “Where was our prophet Jesus, and his mother born anyway? Shame on these people. That’s not the type of religion I learned from my folks. These idiots now claim to know God more than we do? They are Godless. There weren’t any problems, not even between us and the Jews like there are today. The problems started with the Zionists. This is what my father told me. Your mother’s grandpa, he was a partner with a Jewish man named Zico. And they were friends. But when the Zionists came, they kicked most people out, slaughtered them, and took everything. They ruined it and sat on top of it, as the saying goes, grandson.”

I feel tired . . . always. I don’t know why. Is this what you felt as the years piled on? I asked you once, when I was little, if you were scared of the soldiers, police, or of Jews, Ashkenazis in particular? You said, “No one is scary grandson. And if you are ever scared of someone, just imagine them naked, and see how most people have disgusting bodies and they look funny when they are running naked.” Then you laughed heartily.

It was slightly funny, but this trick didn’t appeal to me. Maybe because I was forced to undress many times. You remember the first time I went abroad, to France? They interrogated me for a long time at the airport, and they weren’t satisfied with a regular search. They took me to a room and left me in my underpants. I could smell the breath of the person searching me. His device made all kinds of noises as it roamed around my body. That was the first time I thought of my own skin itself as clothing. Otherwise he wouldn’t have used that device on my skin, searching for something beneath. I started to sweat and you know how much I hate that. I couldn’t smell my body or my own odor anymore. I was sweating like a broken water pipe.

White, white as snow, is what I felt when I was naked behind the curtain in that room. Not pure snow, but snow mixed with wet sand. There was frost coming out of the security personnel’s bodies while I was sweating. We had nothing in common at that moment except our animal instincts, separated by soft gloves. Gloves touching my body as if I were nothing. A mere sheep being offered . . .

I tried to see our city, Jaffa, your city and mine, the way you saw it. I tried to walk and talk to houses and trees as if I had known them long before. As if they were your old neighbors. I would greet them and would clean the street if I saw a stray piece of paper. This is our city and these are our streets, you often said. You always picked up a piece of paper if you saw one. Do you remember when I unwrapped a piece of chocolate you bought and threw away the paper? Remember how angry you were when I, still a child back then, insisted that it was good, because it was the Jewish neighborhood? Their streets were clean and ours dirty, so why not litter their street? You said that if I loved Jaffa I must look out for it, even if it’s in their hands. Their neighborhoods were still part of our city even if we weren’t living in them. I didn’t understand what you meant back then. But I did later.

Cities are stories and I only remember what I myself lived, or fragments from your stories and what you lived, but they are truncated. I remember their stories very well. The ones I learned in school, heard on TV, and read and wrote in order to pass exams. I had to tell their stories to pass in school and college. That’s why I remember them like I remember my ID number. I know it by heart and can recite it any minute. I memorized their stories and their white dreams about this place so as to pass exams. But I carved my stories, yours, and those of others who are like us, inside me. We inherit memory the way we inherit the color of our eyes and skin. We inherit the sound of laughter just as we inherit the sound of tears. Your memory pains me.

They say that my laugh resembles yours, but not my mother’s. Was mother’s laugh like her father’s? Poor mother. All that she knows about her father is that he left. After they opened the borders with Egypt, she mustered all her energy and went to Cairo to see him. He had gone there after leaving Beirut. But he died a week before she arrived. She met her half-brothers and half-sisters there, but she didn’t feel they were her siblings. Some of them had the same eye color as her, but they spoke with an Egyptian accent. She was upset they didn’t speak her Jaffan dialect, even though their mother was from Jaffa. Maybe she was jealous of them, because they got to grow up with a mother and a father, while she was raised fatherless. She didn’t say much more about that visit. The father who was displaced from Jaffa before she was born died before she could see him. She came back sad and crestfallen. When I asked her once about her date of birth, she said she didn’t like to think of it because it was the year of the nakba.

I recall some stories from your memory. The stories I read, heard, or the ones you/I made up, when you were tired. The most striking stories are the ones we make up. They are the most astounding and horrifying. What we live is truncated. Even what I lived is truncated in my memory. As if my memory is a glass house, full of cracks that are like wrinkles, but it’s still standing. We can see through it, but something is muddled. “Muddled” doesn’t mean a hazy view, or that both points of view are equal. These are the lies of those who write in the white books that we are forced to read. It is muddled because the pain is too great for us to endure memory. So we store it in a black box inside our heads and hearts, but it pains us and gnaws at us from within. And we rust, day after day. Yes, rust. I wonder at times why I feel all this sadness. Where does it come from? I realize soon thereafter: your memory is a burden that pains me. I feel so lonely in Jaffa.

I met Ariel today, but we didn’t stay up late. Just before midnight, I told him that I had to leave because I was going to Jerusalem the next day for work. I don’t know why I wanted to leave. Maybe I was bored, or wasn’t interested in recalling that time when we first met. When I heard myself speaking Hebrew to Ariel, I felt as if the voice coming out of my vocal cords was not mine. It just comes out, and speaks Hebrew on my behalf, while I am there inside myself looking and not knowing what I was doing to it, and to myself. I cannot stand this voice any longer. I felt estranged from myself. This is not the first time I have had this feeling. But it was so intense and overwhelming this time. I can’t take it any longer, and am running out of patience with them. But how many times have I said this before? I say it and it doesn’t matter whether I speak calmly or scream, they only see themselves. They hear, but they don’t listen. Is Ariel really any different from the rest?

I hear tumult outside. I’m thinking of you a lot tonight. Tata? Are you here? I called your name, but you didn’t answer. Maybe I’m at fault for not seeing you. Perhaps I should look more carefully. I went back in and closed the balcony door. I had gone out to call you. You used to say that the best thing about city apartments and houses is their balconies. I’m listening to one of your favorite songs now, Um Kulthum’s “Do You Still Remember?” I feel so cold, as if it’s mid-December. White cold. White, like pure snow that will soon be sullied. White, like this white city.

I wish you were here. Missing you is like a rose of thorns.