The Blue Between Sky and Water (22 page)

Jamal walked through the door carrying bags of fresh bread and fruits, props for a fictional happy family story that immediately fell apart because Nur was the first person his eyes found and pulled him toward before he stopped himself, changed course, and greeted his wife with the bags.

The young domestic helper, Sherine, scooped rice onto plates. Nazmiyeh thanked her, urging her to sit and eat with them.

“May Allah give you long life, Hajje,” Sherine replied. She continued serving, then returned to the kitchen.

Unsure which of the many utensils around her plate to use, Nazmiyeh reached for the large spoon on the right for the rice and proceeded to cut the meats with her hands. She pulled chicken and lamb from the bones and distributed the meat to the family around her, as she always did at meals, and kept the bones for herself, to get the clinging bits of meat and suck the marrow juice, the tastiest part. After she filled Rhet Shel’s plate, she piled tender chunks on Jamal’s plate, and he immediately resisted. But Nazmiyeh insisted, “Son, you know this is how we do things. You work hard and deserve someone to nurture you.”

Maisa felt the sting of that comment, shifted uncomfortably in her seat, then turned back to Nur, whom she had been trying to engage in English conversation. But Nur would only respond in Arabic. Finally, in ill-disguised mockery, Nazmiyeh blurted the English words she knew, “Food. Good. Welcome,” and continued in Arabic, praising the hands that cooked it and wishing Allah’s continued bounty for her hosts.

Jamal kept his gaze on his plate, moving food around with a fork, hardly eating.

“Excuse me, Hajje. With my daughters away, I haven’t spoken English with anyone in a long time. We usually only speak English and French at home so we don’t lose our language skills,” Maisa said, explaining that with Jamal away all the time for work, she was excited to have someone like Nur with whom to practice her English.

Nazmiyeh could not resist whispering into the space between her and Nur. “I can understand why el doktor stays away all day.” Only Nur heard those words, but others felt their energy. A silence settled and all that remained were the oblivious sounds of Rhet Shel eating and speaking to Khaled.

Jamal barely spoke during the meal, and he took leave shortly after, leaving Maisa to trudge through the thickened air of her home, forcing a make-believe narrative for her life. But in the unstable quiet punctuating their conversations, Hajje Nazmiyeh could see that Maisa would cry and fight with her husband after they left. The thought satisfied her.

The delicious meal was followed with fruit, sweets, hot tea, and coffee, most of which was consumed by Hajje Nazmiyeh and Rhet Shel. On the way home, both of them were five years old, delighting in their full bellies, debating which dish was best, and competing over who had eaten the most. “Well, of course it was me since I have a bigger belly that fits more food,” Hajje Nazmiyeh said to her granddaughter.

“But tomorrow you’ll be fatter and I’ll be taller,” Rhet Shel crowed, repeating words her teta had said in the past. Hajje Nazmiyeh had to stop to restore her breath from laughing.

“Allah help me, Rhet Shel is turning out a wisecracker like her teta,” Alwan said. She was laughing as she and Nur worked to situate Khaled. Then, with both children in the car, Hajje Nazmiyeh motioned for a moment with Nur and Alwan. They came near, pulled by Hajje Nazmiyeh’s seriousness.

Hajje Nazmiyeh spoke deliberately, her face frozen and sober, “Do you think Maisa yells in French and English when el doktor fucks her?”

A burst of hilarity rose from them. It fueled their movements as they got into the car. Even Alwan, who would ordinarily decry her mother’s impropriety, could not resist laughing.

Wanting to join in the mirth, Rhet Shel offered a joke. “What time is it when an elephant sits on your fence?” She didn’t wait to give the answer. “It’s time to get a new fence!”

They laughed with her, and roared when Alwan added, “And while the hired help from the camp is putting up the new fence, you go to Canada to practice your English and French.” Rhet Shel was pleased to have provoked such a guffaw and snuggled closer to her unmoving brother. “Blink if you’re laughing inside.”

As Rhet Shel started to doze, Hajje Nazmiyeh began putting words to the unuttered story she had perceived at the
ghada
. “I’ll admit her food was tasty and her house was immaculate, but don’t worry, Nur, she has nothing on you.”

Nur instinctively tapped the brakes.

“Keep going, Nur. You can’t hide things from me. I’m Hajje Nazmiyeh. Nothing gets past me,” she said. “That man is in love with you, and it is obvious his wife knows it. That’s what this invitation was all about. She wanted to check you out and make sure you saw how happy they are together. Why else would that man stay by himself with a bunch of women unless she made him? He sat there like an uninvited vagina on its menstrual period. For shame he let a woman control him like that.”

“Yumma, stop.” Alwan had had enough of her mother’s indecent talk.

“Don’t tell me to stop. I don’t like it when you do that. All I’m telling is the truth. And there’s nothing wrong with him being in love with Nur. Allah and his Prophet, peace be upon him, made it halal for a man to take another wife. And why not? He can afford it. Nur would be taken care of. There’s no shame in that.”

“She’s right here. So you don’t have to assume she is even interested,” Alwan protested, but Nur remained quiet, keeping her eyes on the road.

“I don’t need to ask her. I already know she loves him. Isn’t that right?” Hajje Nazmiyeh was smiling at Nur, whose fingers tightened around the steering wheel. “Maybe that’s why you came here in the first place. No shame in that, either.” Hajje Nazmiyeh shifted in her seat and that seemed to change her thoughts. “Also, how the hell can that woman and her daughters travel so freely in and out of Gaza when the sick and dying are being held up from getting treatment outside? You tell me what that means!”

“
Astaghfirullah
! Yumma, that’s enough. This kind of talk about people’s honor is sinful.”

“No, it’s not sinful. Sometimes I think that midwife switched you at birth,” Hajje Nazmiyeh said. “What’s sinful is that we don’t have a medical picture machine so doctors can get a picture of my grandson’s head and help him. It’s sinful we can’t take him on a couple hours’ drive to Cairo to see a specialist doctor. It is also sinful that you have lost so much weight and keep me up at night with your coughing. If you don’t go to a doctor in the next few days, I’m going to beat you with my slipper like you’re a little girl.” Seeing Rhet Shel open her eyes in alarm, Nazmiyeh whispered in her ear, “I’m not really going to beat her with a slipper.”

Nur turned to Alwan, compassion in her eyes, and something very soft formed in the space between them, where loneliness recognized itself. They saw each other: Alwan exhausted and ill, and Nur desperately alone. It was a moment of vulnerability that passed quickly and left in its wake a kind of sisterhood.

“Why don’t you stay over tonight if you like, Nur. The family is coming tomorrow and I’m going to roll grape leaves for
ghada
. I can teach you how to make them,” Alwan said.

Hajje Nazmiyeh assured Nur that she would do the cooking, and Rhet Shel bounced in her seat excitedly. “You can sleep with me and Mama,” she said.

The lull of evening’s darkness drew them together, three generations of women and two children, one blossoming and the other wilting. Nur never went back to the hostel again, except to retrieve her few belongings.

Khaled

“I have walked far enough to know where autumn begins: there, behind the river, the last pomegranates ripen in an additional summer and a beauty mark grows in the seed of the apple.”

—Mahmoud Darwish

Whenever I missed my mother, I simply grabbed on to the candle flame and it brought me home. Then I could see, hear, and smell Gaza in the aroma of Teta’s food. This side of life, inside the age of ten, is wonderful, but incomplete and not wholly home. Talking with Rhet Shel and Nur makes them very happy, but it is too tiring for my body. I had much to tell, but faced with the ability at last, my words retreated from the letter board they created. It no longer matters that they know Mariam still reads by the river, or that there is another “now” when Beit Daras is restored to her children, or that Nur is ours, Teta’s niece. I would like to tell Mama not to fear. But lately, I cannot find the candle flame. Sulayman said eventually the candle will flicker no more.

Sometimes, I don’t need it. I just go home because Mama pulls me to her, as she did in humiliation. I could see her, at that woman’s table, tending to the needs of that chair-bound body, my body, though it no longer feels like me. I become that boy because my sister relies on me to blink. She measures her world by the frequency of my blinks. Rhet Shel is fidgety, clinging to Mama, then to my body, then to Nur. And I feel increasingly distant.

I understand Mama’s anguish and her want to strike back. But there are so many other emotions in that room. Something thick and sticky moves between Nur and Dr. Jamal. Sulayman tells me it is love, and I think of Yusra and the last Kinder Egg I gave to her. But this is not the same. What runs between these two people is immovable. They cannot redeem it nor can they be rid of it and I want to be a part of it. I sense the weight of it, enticing and intriguing. It remains between them even when Nur leaves with my mother, Teta, my body, and my sister. Talk in the car creates a shifting landscape of emotion. I blink for Rhet Shel when they are laughing and their playfulness settles on Teta’s persistent love, Mama’s bewilderment, and the viscous trail of thoughts lingering between Nur and Dr. Jamal. Then I leave with Sulayman.

FORTY-EIGHT

Nur stopped wearing shorts in eighth grade after a boy told her that her legs looked like tree trunks. In high school, a popular classmate told her that her ass was so big she should kill herself. A year later, that same girl taught Nur how to be beautiful. “Just stick your middle two fingers down your throat after every meal.” It was then, too, that she began wearing brown contacts so she didn’t look like a “freak.” When she finally took them off, her eyes shook our world. Visitors came daily to hear the story and praise Allah’s infinite wisdom and mercy. Teta went back to talking with Mariam and rumors of Sulayman the djinni resurfaced. Fate had been cruel to take one of our own, assemble her destiny from pieces of loneliness, exile, rejection, and longing, then bring her home a stranger. People proclaimed Allahu akbar and praised His infinite wisdom for giving her Mariam’s eyes to help her see the way home.

There was no mirror in the bathroom. Nur and Rhet Shel instead watched each other as they brushed their teeth and washed their faces before bed.

“What are you doing to your eyes?” Rhet Shel asked.

“I’m removing my contacts. I can’t sleep in them. See?” Nur balanced the first lens on her fingertip.

“Why?”

“It could hurt my eyes if I keep them in for too long.”

“Why?”

Nur smiled. “Want to see a secret?” She removed the other contact.

“You have different colored eyes!” Rhet Shel exclaimed. “How did you do that?”

“I was just born that way. What do you think about that?”

“It’s beautiful.” Rhet Shel was awestuck. “I wish I had different colors in my eyes.”

Before Nur could respond, Rhet Shel was already out of the bathroom, pulling Nur by the arm, yelling, “Mama, Teta, Khaled! Guess what? Guess what!”

“Rhet Shel, lower your voice. It’s late,” Alwan said from the door, on her way to a neighbor’s home to borrow cardamom for the morning coffee.

“Stop shushing her!” Hajje Nazmiyeh admonished her daughter. “Come here, habibti, and tell your teta what.” She lifted Rhet Shel into her lap.

“Nur has a green eye!” she said in a hushed voice, obeying her mother. “She has one normal eye and one colored one. It’s green. Look!” She pointed up excitedly at a smiling Nur.

Nazmiyeh’s arms went limp. The lines on her face reclined into astonished faith, into the harvest of an old hope. Tears fell, curving against gravity under her chin, as if they would climb back behind her eyes and fall again in a loop, like the circles of her thoughts.

Rhet Shel shook her grandmother. “What’s wrong, Teta?” she cried.

Nur lowered herself to the floor, her mismatched eyes staring at Hajje Nazmiyeh from another time. In her heart, Nur understood. “My father was Mhammad. My grandfather was Mamdouh Baraka and my grandmother was Yasmine.”

A kind of breathless whisper escaped from a well of quiet within Hajje Nazmiyeh. “You’re our Nur?”

Unsteady hands stroked Nur’s cheeks, then cupped her face. “Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!”

Nur trembled under Hajje Nazmiyeh’s gentle hands. She was where she had begun, where the first parts of her had been made.

Hajje Nazmiyeh turned to Rhet Shel. “Habibti, go get me Mariam’s box.”

Rhet Shel hurried to the wardrobe cabinets and returned with a battered wooden box.

Nazmiyeh opened it slowly, her tears renewed by a memory of receiving a package from the United States many years ago.

It was several years after that fateful day in the souq, when Mamdouh’s old friend had called Nazmiyeh on the spice merchant’s red telephone that had delivered a reverberating grief. The man had called once more. Nur had not yet been settled and her case worker worried that the girl’s most important possession might be forever lost to her. A book she and Mamdouh had created together. By law, the case worker could not keep it. Nor did she feel confident in Israel’s postal integrity to deliver packages to Gaza. So, she asked Mamdouh’s friend, who had been successful in delivering the grandfather’s personal belongings to his sister in Gaza, if he would also deliver Nur’s belongings. Nzinga had explained the situation to Nur, who at that time was more concerned with managing her life as a teenager than holding on to an irretrievable past. The first was a small shoebox with Mamdouh’s watch, old photographs, a worn Quran, his and Yasmine’s wedding bands, and what remained of their shabka—a braided gold bangle, which had been given to her by Nazmiyeh at her wedding.