The Blue Between Sky and Water Read online

  CONTENTS

  Family Tree

  Introduction

  Khaled

  I

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  II

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  III

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  IV

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  V

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  FORTY-EIGHT

  VI

  FORTY-NINE

  FIFTY

  FIFTY-ONE

  FIFTY-TWO

  FIFTY-THREE

  FIFTY-FOUR

  FIFTY-FIVE

  FIFTY-SIX

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  FIFTY-NINE

  SIXTY

  SIXTY-ONE

  SIXTY-TWO

  SIXTY-THREE

  SIXTY-FOUR

  SIXTY-FIVE

  SIXTY-SIX

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  VII

  SIXTY-NINE

  SEVENTY

  SEVENTY-ONE

  Khaled

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph Sources

  By the Same Author

  A Note on the Author

  For Natalie: my daughter, my friend, and my teacher

  In the Late 1970s and ’80s, Israel assisted in the rise of an Islamist movement in Palestine, which would come to be known as Hamas, as a counterweight to Yasser Arafat’s Fateh party, a secular revolutionary resistance movement in the mold of similar guerrilla insurgencies around the world during the Cold War era. Following the Oslo Accords in 1993, signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), an endless “Peace Process” was launched, and Hamas became the principal institution of Palestinian resistance to Israel’s military occupation and ongoing repression of the native people’s aspirations for autonomy. After two decades of failed negotiations that saw great expansion of exclusively Jewish colonies on confiscated Palestinian land and entrenchment of an apartheid system in the occupied territories, Palestinians launched an uprising and held elections for new leadership. In 2006, members of Hamas won majority seats in the Palestinian Authority in what were deemed to be fair and transparent elections. Israel and the United States, however, were displeased with the outcome of the elections and moved to subvert the new leadership. While Fateh continued to control the West Bank, Hamas gained control of Gaza. Unable to dislodge Hamas, Israel sealed off the tiny Mediterranean strip of land, turning it into what became known as the largest open-air prison in the world. Declassified documents, obtained years later, revealed the chilling precision with which Israel calculated the calorie intake of 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza to make them go hungry, but not starve.

  Khaled

  “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet.”

  —Dov Weisglass

  Of everything that disappeared, Kinder Eggs are what I missed most. When the walls closed in on Gaza and adult conversations became hotter and sadder, I measured the severity of our siege by the dwindling number of those delicate chocolate eggs, wrapped in thin colorful foil, with splendid toy surprises incubating inside the eggs on store shelves. When they finally disappeared, and the rusty metal of those shelves stared back naked, I realized that Kinder Eggs had brought color into the world. In their absence, our lives turned a metallic sepia, then faded to black-and-white, the way the world used to be in the old Egyptian movies, when my teta Nazmiyeh was the sassiest girl in Beit Daras.

  Even after the tunnels were dug under the border between Gaza and Egypt to smuggle the things of living, Kinder Eggs were still hard to come by.

  I lived in these times of the tunnels, a network of underground arteries and veins with systems of ropes, levers, and pulleys that pumped food, diapers, fuel, medicine, batteries, music tapes, Mama’s menstrual napkins, Rhet Shel’s crayons, and anything else you can think of that we managed to buy from the Egyptians twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

  The tunnels undermined Israel’s plans to put us on a diet. So, they bombed the tunnels and a lot of people were killed. We dug more that were bigger, deeper, and longer. Again they bombed us and even more people were killed. But the tunnels remained, like living vasculature.

  Once, Israel convinced the United States and Egypt to install an impenetrable underground steel wall along the Rafah border to cut off the tunnels. People watched through binoculars from the sand dunes of Rafah, and they laughed for a month as the United States Army Corps of Engineers went to work. The Americans saw us, and though they left as uninterested as they had come, we were sure our laughter floating across the border had unnerved them. As soon as they were gone, our boys went to work inside the tunnels with blowtorches, cutting through the metal that was meant to cut off our sustenance. It was a gift, because the underground wall was made of high-grade steel that we recycled into other things.

  We were used to being the losers. But this time we won. We outsmarted Israel, Egypt, and the great United States of America. Gaza was one giant party for a while. Our newspapers published cartoons that showed Mubarak, Bush, and Netanyahu scratching their heads and asses while we laughed from Rafah’s sandy hills, holding what we had made from that excellent steel: car parts, playground equipment, building beams, and rockets.

  My teta Nazmiyeh said, “Allah have mercy and protect us. All this joy and laughter in Gaza is bound to bring blood and heartache. Light always casts shadows.” She must have been thinking of Mariam.

  It wasn’t long after that when I went into the quiet blue, that place without time, where I could soak up all the juices of life and let them run through me like a river.

  Then Nur came, her mouth full of Arabic words that were sawed off and sanded at the edges with the curly accent of a foreigner. She came with all that American do-gooder enthusiasm that thinks it can fix broken people like me and heal wounded places like Gaza. But she was more shattered than any of us.

  And every night, when Nur put my sister Rhet Shel to bed, Teta Nazmiyeh pulled the sky in place and Mama embroidered in it the stars and moon. And in the morning when Rhet Shel awoke, she hung the sun. That’s how it was when Nur came back.

  These were the women of my life, the songs of my soul. The men they loved were lost in one way or another, except me. I stayed as long as I could.

  I

  When our history lounged on the hills, lolling in sylvan days, the River Suqreir flowed through Beit Daras

  ONE

  My great-khalto Mariam collected colors and sorted them. Two generations later, I was named after her imaginary friend. But maybe it was not imagination. Maybe it was really me. Because we meet by the river now, and I
teach her to write and read.

  A Village of Villages Surrounded by gardens and olive groves and bordered to the north by a lake, in the thirteenth century Beit Daras was on the mail route from Cairo to Damascus. It boasted a caravanaserai, an ancient roadside inn for the steady stream of travelers who flowed across the trade routes of Asia, North Africa, and southeastern Europe. The Mamluks had built it in A.D. 1325, when they ruled over Palestine, and it remained for many centuries as el-Khan to the villagers. Overlooking Beit Daras were the remnants of a castle built by the Crusaders in the early 1100s, which in turn was perched on a citadel that had been built by Alexander the Great more than a millennium before that. Once a station for the powerful, history had broken it down into ruin, and what remained stood tenderly, holding all of time now, where children played and where young couples went to escape watchful eyes.

  A river, brimming with God’s assortment of fish and flora, ran through Beit Daras, bringing blessings and carrying away village waste, dreams, gossip, prayers, and stories, which it emptied into the Mediterranean just north of Gaza. The water flowing over rocks hummed secrets of the earth and time meandered to the rhythms of crawling, hopping, buzzing, and flying lives.

  When Mariam was five years old, she stole her sister Nazmiyeh’s eye kohl and used it to write a prayer on a leaf that she tossed into the river of Beit Daras. It was a prayer for a real pencil and permission to enter the building you go to when you have a pencil. What she wrote were scribbles, of course, despite the presence of an elementary school with two rooms and four teachers, paid for by monthly collections from the villagers. She would instead watch her brother and other schoolboys in their uniforms, each carrying a pencil in one hand—true status symbols—and satchels of books flung across their shoulders as they marched up the hill to that enchanted place with two rooms, four teachers, and many, many pencils.

  As it turned out, Mariam didn’t need the schoolhouse to learn, just pencil and paper. She created an imaginary friend named Khaled, who waited every day by the river of Beit Daras to teach Mariam to write and read.

  The color of the river was an enigma to Mariam, who sat on its bank contemplating what seemed to be colorlessness, borrowing hues from everything around it. On bright days, it was a crisp light blue, like the sky. In the springtime, when the world was particularly green, so was the river. Other times, it was clear and sometimes cloudy or muddy. She questioned how the river could take on so many colors when the ocean was always blue-green, except at night, of course, when the purity of black dressed everything for sleep.

  After much rumination, young Mariam concluded that only some things change colors. She also understood at an early age that her vision was like no one else’s. People changed colors according to their moods, but her sister Nazmiyeh said only Mariam could see the changes. Imbuements of blue were the norm when people prayed, although not always. People’s expressions did not necessarily match their colors. White auras felt malicious and some people had them even when they smiled. Yellow and blue were sincere and content. Black was the purest of all, the aura of babies, of utter kindness, and of great strength.

  Flowers and fruit cycled through hues with the seasons. So did trees. So did the skin on Mariam’s arms, from brown to very brown in the summer. But her hair was always black and her eyes were always the way they were: one green, one brown with hazel accents. The green left eye was her favorite, because everyone loved to look at it, but such curiosity made Nazmiyeh nervous that her little sister might become cursed with hassad, the misfortune of the evil eye that befalls one because of the jealousy of others.

  TWO

  My teta Nazmiyeh told me that she had been the prettiest girl in all of Beit Daras. She said she was the baddest, too, and I tried to imagine my teta in the glory of her youthful badness.

  It was up to Nazmiyeh to protect Mariam from the evils of hassad. Some people just had hot, greedy eyes that could easily lay the curse, even if they hadn’t intended. So, Nazmiyeh insisted Mariam wear a blue amulet to ward off the envy people felt toward Mariam’s unique eyes, and Nazmiyeh regularly read Quranic suras over her for more protection.

  The subject of Mariam’s eyes came up once among Nazmiyeh’s friends as they washed clothes by the river. Most were recently married or expecting their first child, but some, like Nazmiyeh, were still unmarried. “How can she have only one green eye?” one asked.

  Nazmiyeh flung off her headscarf, releasing a medusa’s head of shiny henna-dyed coils, plopped her brother’s white shirt in the wash bucket, and quipped, “Some Roman stud probably stuck his dick in our ancestral line a few hundred years ago and now it’s poking out of my poor sister’s eye.”

  In the private female freedom of those laundry mornings, they all laughed, their arms deep in wash buckets. Another young woman said, “Too bad it wasn’t a double-headed snake so she could have two green eyes.”

  And another, “Mostly too bad for your ancestor, Nazmiyeh. How she might have liked a double-headed one!” Their laughter reached higher notes, liberated by the vulgar immodesty they dared. Such was Nazmiyeh’s power to undress decorum, allowing those around her to acknowledge what lay unsorted in their hearts. She was crass in a way that both intrigued her friends and embarrassed them. Few dared reproach her, for though her tongue could be the charm to melt a heart, it could be a poisonous sting or path to appalling impropriety. People loved and hated her for that.

  Nazmiyeh believed the odd coloring of her sister’s eyes was related to her special ability to divine the unseen. Mariam was not a clairvoyant, but she could see people’s shine.

  “What do you mean shine?” Nazmiyeh once asked her.

  “The shine!” Mariam traced her hand in the space around Nazmiyeh’s head. “Right there,” she said.

  Nazmiyeh came to understand that the inner world of individuals formed a colored halo, which only her little sister Mariam could see. The family spent days after that testing Mariam’s ability. “Okay, tell me how I’m feeling now,” her brother, Mamdouh, said upon returning home from a fight with the neighborhood boys. “You’re red and green,” Mariam replied and turned back to whatever she was doing. Nazmiyeh mocked, “Red and green together means you’re scared and horny.”

  “Mariam has no idea what horny is; so I know you’re lying, you horrendous unmannered girl!” Mamdouh slapped the back of Nazmiyeh’s head and ran for cover.

  “You better run, boy!”

  “I feel sorry for the poor donkey who marries you,” Mamdouh said, taking cover by the door.

  Nazmiyeh laughed, which only irritated Mamdouh more.

  Although Mariam’s special ability waned over time, it remained one of two family secrets, and Nazmiyeh used it to her advantage. When the mother and sisters of a suitor came to their home to meet Nazmiyeh, she treated them with arrogance and sarcasm, because Mariam could intuit that they found Nazmiyeh unworthy of their son. In the market, she shamed many a merchant who tried to cheat her. Mariam’s gift was Nazmiyeh’s secret weapon and she forbade mention of it outside their household, just as she forbade talk of Sulayman.

  THREE

  Um Mamdouh, my great-teta, lived before my time. They called her the Crazy Lady, but she was all love, the quiet impenetrable kind. She saw things others couldn’t, though not like Mariam did.

  There were five Major family clans in Beit Daras, and each had its neighborhood. The Baroud, Maqademeh, and Abu al-Shamaleh families were the most prestigious. They owned most of the farms, orchards, beehives, and pastures. “Baraka” was Nazmiyeh, Mamdouh, and Mariam’s family name, but it was nothing to brag about. They lived in the Masriyeen neighborhood, a ragtag muddle of Palestinians without pedigree who had settled in the poorest part of Beit Daras. They had arrived in Beit Daras from Egypt five centuries earlier and had disguised or dropped their family names because they had escaped the wrath of a tribal feud or had perhaps dishonored their families in some way and had had to leave. No one really knew.

  For most of their lives i
n Beit Daras, Nazmiyeh, Mamdouh, and Mariam were known as the children of Um Mamdouh, the village crazy woman. Even though they had no father, people didn’t dare speak ill about their mother in front of them because Nazmiyeh would have appeared at their doorstep, her tongue sharpened with scandal and an alarming lack of inhibition. Although the children lamented their mother’s state and fiercely tried to protect her from the scorn of others, they could not always shield her. Um Mamdouh was often found staring off into the distance, engaged with the wind, speaking in a strange language to no one; and she would sometimes laugh inexplicably.

  Once, people saw Um Mamdouh hitch up her thobe and shit in the river, and Mamdouh, then only eleven years old, pounded a boy much bigger than he for daring to mention it. There were many nights when the three of them would have to coax their mother away from sleeping in the pastures among the goats.

  Their father was said to have left them before anyone could remember him, except Nazmiyeh, the oldest. “Our father came back once, and we all ate ghada together,” Nazmiyeh told them. Mamdouh could not remember, but he believed Nazmiyeh because she swore it on the Quran. Besides, it had to be true. How else could Mariam have been conceived?

  Still, Mamdouh wished he had memory of a father.

  FOUR

  I don’t want to get ahead of myself and tell you about Nur. She was still two generations away when my great-khalo Mamdouh went to work for the beekeeper. But if you believe as I do that people are part love, part flesh and blood, and part everything else, then mentioning her name now makes sense, at the source of her love part.

  As Mamdouh Grew older, his limbs stretched into manhood and his voice deepened in authority. He was able to secure a steady job with a beekeeper, whose jars of honey were sold throughout the country and beyond to Egypt, Turkey, and reaching even to Mali and Senegal. The old beekeeper realized in only a month that he had found the boy whom he could nurture to one day take over the family business that had been passed down to him through multiple generations. He had three wives, two of whom had borne him five daughters and one son, who died shortly after birth. Only one child, his youngest daughter, Yasmine, had shown an aptitude for beekeeping. Little did he know that in less than three years the centuries of bees, apiaries, beeswax, hives, honeycombs, and beekeepers that marshaled his life would be gone, as if history had never been there. All that would remain would be his love of bees, which Yasmine, his favorite child, would carry in her heart and plant in the soil of another continent. But no one could have known that then. The future of the people of Beit Daras was so far from their destiny that even if a clairvoyant had announced their fate, no one would have believed it.