Chapter 4. The Shatat #3
Rania remembers everything as well as the ghosts themselves—some days, she can’t be sure she isn’t also a haunting presence, torn from within by the reminders of the past. Sometimes it’s easier to live there, in her memories. Before 1948.
The rain helps. On days when the heavens split open over her city, Rania will stand across the street from the haunted house and stare, watching the water droplets fall down the stairs all the way to the sea.
She will see her childhood reflected in their watery paths.
But today, the sun bleaches the stone an even paler shade of white.
Grief envelops Rania each time she passes the house.
It sits on her shoulders, and at this point, she cannot recall what it feels like to be unburdened.
Walking the same route every morning, from Haifa’s inner ghetto of Wadi Nisnas, she winds her way to the sea and city center, where she passes her friend’s home.
She could avoid it, of course. She could take the longer route and give the house and its ghosts a wide margin. But she doesn’t.
Breath pushes and struggles behind her tightened lips as she walks past it.
Each morning and evening, as the sun rises and falls, there are approximately twenty seconds when Rania unconsciously holds her breath as she passes by the small stone house.
The intimate act of breathing, of taking in breath from the ghosts that seep in the stones, feels like a theft of its own.
It is far easier for Rania to pass by her friend’s childhood home than to see her own. Anger flares brightly and hotly against the tongue; grief sits heavily in one’s chest, reflecting on the loss in all its magnitude. Anger is easier to feel.
And of course, she remembers everything about her friend’s house—the smallest details. A cup of seashells on a bookshelf. Yesterday’s newspaper freshly stacked on the pile of old, unfinished ones. The way it used to be a home.
Rania knows these things are gone now. She can be sure of that.
But it doesn’t stop her from remembering, from attempting to catch the thin wisps of memories that settle through the air of Haifa like specters.
Her father had always told her that time heals all wounds, but time did no such thing for the port city.
Time worsened the occupation. The entire city is haunted—not just that house.
Everywhere Rania looks, there are ghosts.
Their shadows fall across the memories of families, gardens, and shops that all once lived and breathed, and intertwine especially around the ghost of Rania’s friend.
She looks out of the window of the house, for it was hers. Nuhad lived there.
In 1948, Rania and Nuhad were no longer the childhood friends they’d always been.
Nuhad’s family was forced to leave after the brutal genocide.
Rania’s family was one of the few that stayed.
Even after the family they sheltered locked them out of their own home, Rania’s family stayed.
On the day that Nuhad’s family left, a permanent red imbued the streets.
The stones became heavy with displacement.
The city grew haunted. The house began to sour.
And ever since Nuhad’s family’s displacement, the haunting of her home grew, passing through several hands, each one building atop the crimes of the former: a Polish family, settlers from the UK, a young Austrian, base operations for a tourism company, more upon more upon more, and most recently, a mother and son.
The gossip slips seamlessly: the house is haunted.
Cracks cleave the stones. The street cats give the house a wide berth, feeling what Rania knows.
Children on the same street are given harsh instructions to never go near the house, not even if a ball rolls onto its steps.
One child disappeared once, years ago, inside of the house.
He stole through an unlocked door and was never seen again.
One man, Rania heard, moved in and immediately left without a word the next morning.
On some nights, neighbors say they hear screams from within.
If one were to ask the long list of former residents, they would all say that the house is empty because it’s haunted.
The people—settlers—who have tried to live there say it like it’s a simple fact.
That some houses are just like that. Their haunting lies on the surface, the meaning of the word differing greatly from Rania’s.
She knows exactly why it is empty, why it is haunted.
Her definition is bone-deep, chilled to the core with the memory of what blood was spilled on the streets and whose screams tore through the air.
And perhaps this is why Rania doesn’t reroute her journey each morning. The ghosts remember: living and dead.
Despite Rania holding her breath as she passes it each day, the house is not where the air is choked from her lungs.
In the city center—the area that was once filled with Palestinian fishermen and bustling markets and is now filled with American Jews from Brooklyn—that is where Rania must truly survive off of a limited supply of oxygen.
It’s suffocating to breathe in the roads, the pine trees covering mass graves, the homes made of age-old stone and yet flying Israeli flags and holding settlers.
Even all these years later, it leaves her lungs empty.
Evil is a word reserved for the truly supernaturally bad; evil is used to describe behavior that humans cannot fathom.
The settlers say that the haunted house in Haifa is evil.
Rania knows that stealing homes and land, lives and histories, and then erasing them as if they’ve never existed—that is evil.
The house is determined not to let any stay after what happened to Nuhad and her family.
None have remembered the horrors nor absorbed the blood from those murdered quite so well as the house in Haifa.
Remembering is not an evil that should be thrust on the grieving.
The inevitable new residents will stay in the house for a month, maybe two.
Then they will follow the trail of blood left by all the others, fed to an ever-consuming cycle as sacrifices for a home mired in its own emptiness.
The last residents—the woman and her son—were only the most recent bodies.
The woman was missing for days. Police put up signs and held search parties, despite her last known location being the house.
In the end, they couldn’t even find a body.
Rania heard from a neighbor that her adult son still felt her presence, though, and said that she spoke to him through the walls.
Of course, Rania had thought. The voices he heard were Nuhad’s ancestors demanding their home and family back. Walls don’t speak—people do.
The man eventually left, with neighbors claiming he had himself committed to a psychiatric facility. It became a cold case. Unsolved. But to Rania, these are just words that shadow the truth. The ghosts inside the house took her, and sent her son home.
Rania pauses, breathing again, and seeks the shade of an overhang diagonal from the house to watch.
The real estate agent is carrying a small box from his car, but his muscles strain to keep it held.
Perhaps it contains papers and documentation, or maybe it’s just heavy with the weight of cheap Palestinian blood.
It’s what all of the house deeds in their fabricated cities are built atop anyway. She wipes her brow.
She hears the realtor’s steps in the store.
The familiar sound of the creaky stairs transports her for a millisecond back to the old Haifa, back to Nuhad’s house, back to running on the beach and giggling over chocolates snuck out of the cupboard.
The man walks out, and a bit of bile comes up.
Rania swallows it down. He’s red in the face, sweaty and heaving from moving things up a flight of stairs each time.
She grunts in approval—if her lungs must feel suffocated in this city, so can his.
Rania squints, but she’s too far to see the inside of the store.
Residents in the past have often ignored it, but some claimed it for their own, leasing their own businesses inside.
Clothing stores, tourism bases—all built over the true nature of the house’s history in fishing and seafaring.
All built over the bodies of the house. Words bubble, hot and blistering, against Rania’s tongue, but she walks away.
The house will take care of them for her.
She walks west, toward the sea, to her job as maid for an Israeli family.
As she nears, hotels and resorts increase, taking up beachfront property over unmarked mass graves.
The house that Rania cleans is new as well, overlooking the water.
The new ones are easy to spot. They’re made of wood—evocative of the homes in Germany and Poland that they left in order to become settlers.
The old ones, the stolen ones, are made of stone.
Rania enters the numbers on the keypad and waits for the gate to swing open slowly.
Beyond the gilded gate, a tropical garden with grass and an open garage with two high-end sports cars—one canary yellow, the other fire-engine red—greet her.
She steps on hexagonal stones through grass and beds of dried-up tulips to the back entrance.
The rear of the house opens to her maid’s closet, a small room filled with her cleaning supplies and a single, unusable toilet. It smells like bleach. Rania puts together her bucket and walks to the foyer in search of the owners.
A blast of air-conditioning hits her body, and, between shivers, makes her want to roll her eyes. Houses made of wood trap heat. It’s enough that settlers are cruel, but they’re willfully stupid too.