46

Alaa

I couldn’t sleep. It’s six in the morning. I think of you a lot. Actually, in the beginning, when I lay down on the sofa in the living room, listening to the radio and looking out of the window, I didn’t think of you a lot. But then I saw the old sewing machine you used to work on and live off until a few years before your death. Mother used to be angry with you. She would say that our situation was good and my father’s work secured a life better than most of those around us. But you refused to give up sewing and be dependent on your son-in-law. I asked you once why you never stopped sewing. Was there something more than just not wanting to depend on my father? You said you felt you were like family to all those brides. That women used to come to you for help because their families were forced to leave and they stayed, together with their husbands, with those who stole the country. You often said “they” without mentioning who they were. You told me about Abla, our neighbor, who came knocking on your door when she was still fifteen. She ran barefoot, crying and saying that her father had come back home drunk. She begged you to go with her so that he wouldn’t fight with her mother. Her mother had no family or relatives of her own in Jaffa. She didn’t know to whom she could turn. You were her family. You went with her and spent the night at their house so her parents wouldn’t fight. It is for the sake of these people and for your own that you kept on sewing. Survivors are the loneliest. Despite all the stories, it’s difficult at times for me to imagine what you felt those first days after the nakba. When the extent of the damage left by the flood became clear. That is how I imagine the scene. A scene that has yet to end.

Survivors are the loneliest. Yesterday I read that one of Jaffa’s names is “The Stranger’s Mother.” Maybe that is the reason the city spat us out. Because we are no longer strangers in it. Perhaps we will return to it now because we have become strangers to it while in it or outside. Do inanimate objects have a memory? Do the things around us have a memory? Does the sewing machine have a memory? Does it remember your feet, tears, fears, and the long hours you spent behind it? Does it remember the stories of the brides and the women who came to you to sew their dresses and who told you their stories?

I miss you a lot and I miss my father. Father committed suicide. Yes, suicide. We didn’t tell anyone, because it was shameful and haram. But I have stopped lying. When someone asked me about him recently, I said that he committed suicide. At first I said he “passed away” and he offered his condolences. I was silent for twenty seconds that felt like ten minutes, then I said it. He said it’s unbecoming of me to say that about him. I laughed and told him it’s the truth. Do you know what he said to me? “God help everybody.”

I miss you. Missing you is like a rose of thorns.