Chapter 4. The Shatat #2
The questioning continues for another fifteen minutes, and Marina feels as if she is playing the part of court jester, juggling idiotic questions while trying to keep the officer from sending her to further interrogation.
The line behind her has grown now, and several Orthodox Jews with yarmulkes and long, uncut sides of their hair are grumbling. Marina interrupts him.
“Am I done now? Can I go.” She says it like a statement rather than a question, gesturing at the people behind her.
The guard stares at her for a moment too long, and a small part of her rebels against the instinct to squirm under his scrutiny. Finally, he sighs and slaps a long yellow sticker on the back of her passport.
“Thanks,” she mumbles, but then she kicks herself for it. Her thumb grazes the sticker, rubbing back and forth against the barcode, as she sits down to wait. The plastic walls separate this space from the rest of the rushing airport.
“What number did you get?” a young man asks. He leans over, his body halfway across the armrest of the seat separating them.
Marina shifts away instinctively until she meets his eyes and realizes he’s speaking to her. “Sorry, what?” She kicks herself again for apologizing to this man she doesn’t even know.
“The number. Everyone gets one.” The man has blond hair that’s buzzed close to his head, and under the fluorescent lights, it makes him look almost bald. His suit unwrinkles as he sits up.
Marina narrows her eyes, wondering why he would ask for the number of her barcode sticker. She looks to the gate, where the line of Jewish passengers is moving quickly.
“What does it start with? Just the first number.” His eyebrows lift and fall, as if they’re in on the joke together.
“Uh.” Marina hesitates, but she glances down anyway and reads it aloud. “Three.”
“A three! The way they were interrogating you up there, I would have thought a five.” As he speaks, so do his hands. He gauges the confusion on Marina’s face. “It’s a security system. Israeli Jews are a one—the lowest threat. It goes up to six. Obviously, terrorists are a six.”
“Okay.” Marina can feel that her mouth has dipped into a downturn. “Sure.”
The sounds of whatever the man says next are muffled, like speech underwater.
He wants to commiserate with her over the system, hoping that she’d have been higher on the scale.
She picks up her bag and moves to another aisle in the lull once he’s finished speaking.
After a period, they board. Her feet trip over themselves as she moves to stand in line.
When the lights dim, Marina reaches in her pocket for the packet of sleeping pills hidden there. She squeezes her eyes shut, wanting to will herself to wake up in Palestine.
Below the thrum of the airplane engine, she hears her mother’s voice.
You’re going to Haifa!
Woven into the sounds of her excitement was nervousness. Anxiety. A bid for closeness. Marina only hears these things now, with her mother’s voice on a loop in her head. She felt her whole face light up, saw it reflected in Haifa’s instantly brimming tears.
And here Marina is—sitting on the flight less than twenty-four hours later. She brushes the paper with directions in her pocket and shifts in her seat, the armrest beside her nudged out of her reach by her neighbor’s elbow. Tensing, she squeezes her eyes shut even more tightly.
You’re going to Haifa!
She could see the fear and longing in her mother’s eyes.
It was the same mix of emotions that Marina felt.
But how else would Marina discover who their family was?
Who she was? All she had known for so long was the in-between—the mixedness.
And Haifa’s friendship was a constant that she could rely on, but sometimes—lately—she didn’t want to have to rely on it. It wasn’t the answer to who she was.
Marina wants what everyone wants: to be seen and known by others.
Fully. Not in halves, or pieces, or disjointed sections.
Even Haifa only knows what Marina allows: the accomplishments, the dreams and hopes, the friendships with other trailblazing women.
The highlight reel. And in turn, Marina knows, Haifa has only ever told her the highlight reel of their family history.
But Nuhad’s real life—and Palestine in general—has always been the one thing out of reach, the one missing puzzle piece that could possibly grant her that sense of wholeness she craves.
She didn’t know her grandmother deeply; she knew her in the pieces Nuhad so carefully curated for her benefit.
But she was soft, and kind, and endlessly patient, even when Marina first learned how to read Arabic and would sit beside her in the hospice, reading children’s books to her.
There was always a hard candy or a wrapped chocolate in her purse for Marina, and Nuhad would dictate recipes to her aloud, reciting from memory the steps for kafta or kubbeh that Marina has already forgotten.
Haifa grew tense whenever they visited her, her blurred outline becoming even more frazzled, and Marina understood quickly that her grandmother’s hard edges had softened in old age and for her granddaughter.
It’s why Marina has to be the one to go now.
But they’re pieces. Marina, and her mother and grandmother, have only ever shown one another fragments of themselves. That’s all she knows.
Never the whole.
The lights turn on suddenly and Marina rubs her eyes at the captain’s announcement of their landing. Even before the wheels touch the ground, she can feel the heat. She waits until everyone else has gotten off to exit.
At the end of the long walk to customs, there are three officers.
Marina chooses the man who looks the most tired.
He is young and has dark gray bags under his eyes.
They make him look older, even though she would guess he’s around her age.
Through the glass, she can see an empty coffee cup that has sweated a ring around his paperwork. It’s 8 AM in Tel Aviv.
“Hello, shalom.”
Marina passes her passport to him beneath the glass divider’s semicircle opening.
“What is the purpose of your visit?”
“Tourism.”
It’s the same.
“Where is your father from?”
“Chicago.”
“What’s this middle name here? Where does this come from?” He points to her passport. It’s the most Arab name there: Nuhad.
“It’s Arabic.” She shrugs.
It’s always the same.
“So, you are Arab?”
“Yes.” She sighs.
“Are you visiting any friends or family?”
“No.” Does it matter?
“Where are you staying, then?”
He looks at the yellow sticker on the back of her passport and sighs, stamping. Marina recalls the conversation with the man from the gate and realizes that this man takes her threat level at the word of a yellow sticker on the back of her passport. To him, she is a three at best. A six at worst.
The blistering gaze of the unobstructed morning sun mixes with the heavy saltwater humidity—the weather feels stifling from the moment Marina steps outside. She tugs at the collar of her shirt and fans herself, but already droplets are dripping down her low back and between her breasts.
“Taxi? Taxi, miss?”
There are several taxi drivers yelling at her from the long row of yellow and white cars, but Marina follows the hanging signs—the English directions, not the Hebrew or Arabic ones—pointing to the bus station.
She walks along the dull concrete and silver walls, winding around the airport until she reaches the station.
From Tel Aviv, Haifa is only an hour and a half by bus, and from there, her bed-and-breakfast is just a short walk. Haifa gave her the entire itinerary.
The pockmarked green benches at the bus station are filled with new arrivals.
She checks the screen. Her bus isn’t coming for another thirty-four minutes, so she walks around the edge of the station until she finds a shady spot beneath another building.
She leans against the wall and slumps down to the ground. In the shade, she can see everything.
The airport is a shiny, stainless-steel glare against an empty backdrop.
People and cars inch over the crowded highway to get to it.
From the bus station, a mother in a long skirt walks toward the building Marina sits against. Her keys jingle and she turns the corner to the door on the other side, pushing her stroller over the smooth cobblestones.
Marina looks up at the building she’s against. It’s made of stone—ancient, white stone that comes away chalky and gritty in her fingertips.
Water splashes several feet away, and she turns to see another woman pouring down dirty water from the balcony.
She flaps out towels and bedsheets to dry over the edge. Marina’s eyes catch something else.
She stands, walks a couple of feet, and reaches one hand up. There are holes in the side of the old building. Her fingers dig into the small craters, nails scratching against gravel, until the realization hits her. These are bullet holes.
Marina keeps her hand there, frozen for one second against the grooves in the old stone, and then she jerks down. Vomit splatters against the pavement.
The heat reflects off of the white stone and glares at Rania.
She shields her eyes from the light and squints at the haunted house of Haifa, her breath held.
A real estate agent is hanging a new FOR SALE sign in the window.
A couple of others pause to watch with her—the entire city knows the house is cursed. But only Rania knows its history.
It cannot nurture life anymore. Ghosts of the past encircle its stones and crevices, filling the cavernous spaces whose echoes ring hollow in this emptiness. Her friend’s home, which was once filled with light and life, is now filled with hauntings and the shadowy memories of what once was.