The Blue Between Sky and Water Read online

  No one understood the meaning of her words and none dared ask for an explanation. It was enough to hear this land will rise again. They grabbed those final words of hope and inhabited them until their final days, which came to some in battle shortly thereafter, and to others in the wreckage of nostalgia that paved refugee camps.

  “May Allah grant you long life, Hajje. Take this for your trouble,” Abu Nidal said, placing a bundle of Palestinian notes before her. But she refused. “Put your fate in the hands of Allah. Lean on Allah and fight for us, Abu Nidal. I do not accept money. Allah is my provider and my protector. My son will fight with you. I will stay, so Sulayman, too, will remain to help us; but know that the enemy brings afareet from iblis, demons from the depths of darkness. May Allah grant you long life and may He protect Beit Daras and her people.”

  NINE

  Mariam and my teta Nazmiyeh listened that day behind the broken kitchen wall as their mother spoke to the mukhtars about iblis and afareet. Iblis was the devil, and afareet were his terrible followers, but Mariam could not understand why they were coming to Beit Daras. She buried her face in her sister’s chest and clutched her tighter. Nazmiyeh asked Mariam to fetch her wooden box and transcribe a note for her. It said, “If you want to marry me, your family must come tomorrow.”

  A week after young Atiyeh’s voice had been liberated from the stun of seeing Sulayman, he and Nazmiyeh had locked eyes again in the souq. She tried her meanest stare with eyes outlined in black kohl and underlined by a niqab veil she was trying on because it was adorned with pretty jingles, but he didn’t flinch. He squinted in a mock attempt to one-up her stare. Then he could see her brow relax and eyes narrow from the force of the smile he knew had formed beneath the veil. She returned the veil to the vendor and looked away, knowing Atiyeh was watching.

  They met this way many times, communicating with only their eyes. Six months later, they met by the ruins of the Roman citadel and for two more years, Nazmiyeh refused every suitor, waiting for Atiyeh’s older brothers to marry before his turn could come to choose a bride. They met on the first Thursday of every month in a spot they claimed as their own. Anguished by exhausting patience and unredeemed love, they finally agreed it not sinful to hold hands, and from the dexterity of interlacing, squeezing, gripping, and caressing fingers, their hands created an amorous language that spoke of complicity and promise.

  In this same place in 332 B.C., Alexander the Great had built fortifications after laying siege to a conquered Gaza, some thirty-five kilometers to the south. Enraged by five months of Gazan resistance to his Macedonian army’s march toward Egypt, he finally broke through, killing all male inhabitants and selling the women and children into slavery. Thus had been laid the foundations upon which the Romans, several centuries later, had built their citadel in Beit Daras. Some three thousand years later, they were remote ruins where love between Nazmiyeh and Atiyeh tried to find repose by holding hands on the first Thursday of every month.

  But in the days between their meetings, they were pursued and harassed by a panting want that gave them no rest. They did not even notice the unfolding political tumult until the town mukhtars arrived to visit Um Mamdouh, injecting greater urgency to their union.

  Family members tried to dissuade Atiyeh’s adamant resolve to marry immediately, but it was of no use. Pleased by his grandson’s determination, the patriarch gathered the men of the family. Despite the fear convulsing across Palestine as daily news of atrocities committed by Zionist gangs against both the British and the Palestinians emerged, Haj Abu Sarsour brought six men and a dowry of gold to ask for the hand of Nazmiyeh for his grandson, Atiyeh.

  Everyone agreed it would be improper to have a wedding celebration under the anxious circumstances. But as soon as calm and order returned to the country, Atiyeh’s father and grandfather vowed, they would throw the biggest wedding the village had ever seen. For now, they brought a ma’zoon to officiate the marriage of Atiyeh and Nazmiyeh so their union was halal in the eyes of Allah. Such a hasty marriage with a deferred wedding was unusual, but these were unusual times.

  Instead, in preparation for the marital bed, Nazmiyeh and her friends, along with their mothers, spent the day in Gaza’s Turkish bathhouse, exfoliating her skin in steam rooms, where women scrubbed, plucked, waxed, and massaged every part of her body in lavender oils. They relaxed on ancient hot tiles, drinking karkadeh, chilled hibiscus tea, and breathing the moist air infused with eucalyptus.

  TEN

  I didn’t live in these times. But when I went into the blue, when my condition became as it did, Sulayman revealed all to me. I don’t fully understand it and don’t expect you to. But maybe you can believe, as I do, that there are truths that defy other truths, where time folds on itself.

  The Jews Came, as Hajje Um Mamhoud said they would, and they were repelled by the two thousand residents of Beit Daras and their loyal djinni, Sulayman. They came again and again, in March and several times in April of 1948, and their fury grew with incredulity and indignation that a small village of farmers and beekeepers could overcome the firepower of the highly trained Haganah, with their mechanized weaponry and fighter planes, which they had smuggled under British noses from Czechoslovakia in preparation for conquest. During the last attack in April, fifty women and children from Beit Daras were slaughtered in a single day, after which the men ordered their families to flee to Gaza, while they remained to fight. “Just until the hostilities subside,” they said. “Take enough things for a week or two.”

  Nazmiyeh hastily packed a bundle of food and belongings to last two weeks and set off toward the river to fetch Mariam. She made her way in the village, walking through walls of fear. The air was heavy, almost unbreathable, and people moved in fitful motions, as if unsure that one leg should follow the other. Women hurried with bundles balanced on heads and children hoisted on hips, pausing occasionally to adjust each. Children struggled to keep pace with their elders, who pulled them by the arms. Bewilderment carved lines in every face that Nazmiyeh passed, and despite the noise and chaos around her, she thought she could hear heartbeats pounding on chest walls.

  Near the river, the air became lighter and lifted off the ground, winding into tree branches and rustling leaves. The sky was a soft clear blue with lazy, idling clouds. Mariam sat against her rock, a boulder by the river she had carved her name into the day she learned to write it. Her wooden box of dreams lay next to her and her notebook was open in her lap. Nazmiyeh could see her lips moving, as if she were conversing with herself, even laughing, a pencil in hand.

  “There you are. Come, Mariam. We must go,” Nazmiyeh said. But Mariam continued in her conversation, as if she had not heard her sister.

  Nazmiyeh moved closer. “Who are you talking to, Mariam?”

  Mariam leapt to hug her sister. “Khaled,” Mariam answered, but Nazmiyeh, seeing no one, despaired that her sister was afflicted with the same madness that jumbled their mother’s world.

  “Mariam, is Khaled a djinni?”

  “No. He’s your grandson,” Mariam said.

  An explosive blast cracked the air.

  “We must go, Mariam. Did you hear that explosion? Get up now and come with me.” Nazmiyeh pulled her sister’s arm. Mariam gathered her things into her wooden box, as she sang the strange song Nazmiyeh had heard her sing before.

  O find me

  I’ll be in that blue

  Between sky and water

  Where all time is now

  And we are the forever

  Flowing like a river

  “Enough! It’s time to leave!” Nazmiyeh yelled. “The men will stay to fight and we will return as soon as the Jews are gone.”

  Enshallah. By Allah’s will.

  Back in the village, Mariam begged her sister to allow her to flee the following day with their neighbors who were also going to Gaza. “Minshan Allah, please, Nazmiyeh,” she pleaded, adding that she wanted more time with her mother and Mamdouh and Atiyeh, who were staying to defend the
village if the Jews came back. Unsure and confused as everyone was, Nazmiyeh reluctantly agreed. The neighbors were leaving early the next morning and promised to take Mariam with them, enshallah.

  So Nazmiyeh set off with her husband’s family, her sister to follow her with the neighbors, her brother and husband staying to fight, and her mother also remaining so Sulayman would be in Beit Daras to help. Without her family to watch over, Nazmiyeh walked with others in the trek toward Gaza, deafened by the screams of her heart wanting to go back and get Mariam.

  The next morning, when the neighbor family awoke, Mariam had already left. She had told their daughter in the middle of the night that she was leaving with Nazmiyeh after all. Instead, she had gone to the outskirts of the village to hide in her best hide-and-seek spot, the small shelf inside the water well, just big enough to fit a small crouching child with her wooden box of dreams, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and a small bag of bread and cheese. She needed to see Khaled, to let him know where she was going so he could find her again.

  The well was some distance from the center of the village where most of the fighting had been taking place. On a normal day, Mariam would have taken for granted that the whimpers and cries and claps in the distance were the calls of wild animals—dogs, goats, donkeys, birds—or the shots of hunters. But this was no ordinary day. The thunder of bombs and the way they jarred the earth was unmistakable, and she knew that the muffled sounds that followed reverberated from human agony. For nearly two days, Mariam did not move from the shelf in the water well, not even when strange men speaking in a strange language arrived to fetch water.

  ELEVEN

  War changed people. It created cowardice and bravery and produced legends. It told the story of my great-teta, a strange woman, made of love, who never told a lie and who moved through the world differently than most. Her story was repeated many times, and in the retelling, she became known as Um Sulayman, the brave old woman of Beit Daras.

  The Naqba, the Catastrophe that inaugurated the erasure of Palestine, started slowly in 1947, one atrocity at a time throughout the country. For Beit Daras, the decisive battle occurred in May 1948, soon after European Jewish immigrants declared a new state called Israel in place of ancient Palestine. The Haganah and Stern Gang now called themselves the “Israel Defense Forces,” and they marched into Beit Daras after hours of sustained bombardment with mortars. A battalion from the Sudanese army came to help, but it arrived too late. The forest was engulfed in flames, swallowing homes to the north. Clouds of smoke hovered low, painting the world black, settling on the dead like dark shrouds and invading the lungs of the living, who heaved and convulsed as they sought refuge. Chaos reigned, perpetuated by more explosions, gratuitous now that Beit Daras was fully consumed by the fog of death and defeat. The villagers who had stayed behind either had been killed or were already fleeing toward Gaza, and the rest were taken prisoner, never to be seen again.

  Palestinians escaping from other villages converged on one of several main paths to Gaza that passed Beit Daras. Hajje Um Mamdouh, her son, Mamdouh, and Nazmiyeh’s husband, Atiyeh, survived the defeat and were now joining the stream of fleeing humanity. Sulayman helped them escape captivity. Um Mamdouh instructed the two young men to don women’s abayas, then she pulled two red threads from her thobe and tied one around the crown of each boy’s head. “Everything below these strings will elude the awareness of soldiers. Sulayman will see to it. But you mustn’t remove the threads until you’ve reached safety, and then, you must not ever unravel the knot, no matter your circumstances,” Hajje Um Mamdouh instructed.

  When he stepped outside, dressed as a woman with a thin red thread cutting across his brow, Mamdouh could see and smell through his veil this new world of ash and the smolder of tired fires and expired lives. A rage rising from the black earth through his feet made it hard to move, and the incomprehensible loss of life and country seeped into his lungs, making him cough. He stood in a queue with three more families of women and children who had been rounded up by Zionist soldiers and were now dropping all their valuables into piles of food, jewelry, clothing, even photos. Mamdouh managed to leave with a single photograph, the only one the family ever had, taken by a journalist who had visited Beit Daras occasionally. It had been snapped on one of the days Nazmiyeh had tried to surprise Mariam by the river, to meet Khaled. Mamdouh was standing on the riverbank with his arm around Nazmiyeh, who stood sassily, hand on her hip. Their mother was there in a fine embroidered thobe she had sewn herself, but she was somehow still absent. And Mariam, perhaps eight years old, was captured in an expression of casual conversation with her friend Khaled, a boy of perhaps ten years, with a white streak of hair, as the two of them sat around her wooden box of dreams. When the photographer gave them that photo, the family could not recall seeing Khaled that day at the river and, until holding the photograph, had assumed he was a creation of Mariam’s imagination.

  Now Mamdouh looked at the photo, trying to touch the past, to compel the clock to reverse its course as they moved in shocked steps sinking in a marsh of sorrow. Without words, they walked away from their lives, away from these new conquering soldiers, who were drunk on an ancient virulence that mixed greed and power with God.

  Dazed and confused by an unimagined fate, the villagers continued on the thirty-five kilometers to Gaza. In the distance, they heard the sound of a single shot, followed by the abyss of a woman’s scream. Soon, they merged with a larger procession of human despair from other villages. Sometimes, unseen snipers aimed and people dropped. There was nothing to do but collect the dead and injured and continue on. A bullet flew through Mamdouh’s leg and he fell, the abaya dropping away. His brother-in-law, still disguised as a woman in an abaya, tried to carry him, but could not. Nor could Mamdouh’s mother. But Sulayman could. He entered the old woman’s body and lifted her son, nearly twice her weight and height, and walked on toward Gaza with other fleeing souls.

  Arab soldiers appeared along the way. What remained of the defeated Arab battalions were stripped to their underwear and huddled in humiliation. Zionist soldiers came, too, shooting above the crowds to ensure no one turned back home. When a group of them happened upon a slight old woman effortlessly carrying a wounded man in her arms, they ordered her to stop. She turned the whites of her eyes at them, and a potent broth of fear foamed in the intestines of the soldiers. One of them shot the woman, and she fell bleeding, dropping her wounded son. But the soldiers did not move, their bones turned to froth, their hearts to ice, and their faces ashened before they burst into flames, writhed, and burned.

  Soldiers who came to rescue the killers of Um Mamdouh were also engulfed in the fire until twelve uniformed men of the new Jewish state lay charred on the ground not far from where the old woman and her son also lay, she dead and he with a severely wounded leg. Everyone witnessed it.

  The fleeing villagers of Beit Daras needed no explanation for that sudden fire. They knew it was Sulayman but their march was more urgent now, as more soldiers would surely come to exact vengeance for those singed remains. A man discarded the family belongings he was carrying and hoisted Hajje Um Mamdouh’s corpse. They could leave the many other bodies that littered their long march to a refugee’s life, but leaving Sulayman’s friend was out of the question. Hadn’t the old djinni fought alongside them?

  It was then that the fleeing villagers heard a woman’s voice yell “Alwan!” and turned to find Nazmiyeh running toward them, her hair loose and her body exposed beneath torn and bloodied clothes.

  TWELVE

  Teta Nazmiyeh talked to me about everything in the world, except the day Mariam was gone. The day the name “Alwan” was planted in her heart, which would later be harvested to name my mother.

  Once the Beacon Crossroad between North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, the green and sandy terrain of Gaza was the hub of the spice trade, the most lucrative business on earth in medieval times. Palestinians in Gaza were recognized among the finest artisans, producing highl
y sought-after jewelry as long ago as 2,000 B.C. Noblemen and pilgrims were drawn to Gaza across the ages and scholars from around the world passed through along the “Way of the Sea” that led toward the Great Library in Alexandria.

  Those same shores of Gaza had been a place where the Barakas and other villagers had gone for occasional Friday family outings. Once a place of joy, swimming, barbecuing, now it was a morass of anxiety and misery that stuck to Nazmiyeh’s every movement, to every effort to find Mariam in the crowds. And when she finally located her neighbors, the realization that Mariam had not left Beit Daras pushed Nazmiyeh farther into desperation. She blamed herself for not having forced Mariam to leave with her. She cursed her little sister for being so stubborn and imagined yanking her by the ear when she found her. She knew what must be done, but she would have to wait for nightfall to elude Atiyeh’s family, who would surely stop her. She slept early to rest before another journey, and for the first time in her life, she recalled a dream. It startled her awake amid the sleeping bodies around her. A little girl who looked like Mariam, with dark coiled hair and a foreign name, but without colored eyes, showed Nazmiyeh papers and said, “Teta, these are from Khaled. Want me to read them?” She nodded yes and the little girl said, “It says, Mariam is waiting for you. She left the water well.”