Chapter 5. Living Stones #3
Marina pauses, the edge of her fingers just barely a few inches from the path.
Her mother would do something like this.
Haifa would crawl on the floor and see where the water led, claiming that she didn’t believe in it, she just wanted to see, but still doing it all the same.
Marina leans back on her heels, affirming to herself the logic of what she resolutely knows.
She backs up on her knees, sliding back twice, but before she can move farther, the tile rises up to push her forward,
come closer,
and into one of the bedrooms. Marina gasps and flails her hands, attempting to ground herself, as her heart overtakes the logical part of her brain.
There is something here. Her eyes tear away from the mesmerizingly tranquil clear path to find two small beds on opposite sides of the room. The furniture is staged.
The trail of water stops and pools in a small puddle above a tile. Marina’s heart is settling into the truth: the house is trying to show her something. She presses her foot against it, testing. Perhaps it will fall and crumble, plummeting her to her death. But it doesn’t budge.
She looks back for a second, ensuring the house is still empty, before hiking up her jeans and leaning closer. Her heart pounds in her ears, a drum that yells at her to leave, leave, leave. But it’s her grandmother’s house. Nuhad grew up here.
Marina’s fingers search the tile, smoothing over the surface, asking it to reveal its purpose—it looks similar to the rest. Nothing is out of the ordinary.
Rapping her knuckles against the tile, careful to maintain some level of surreptitiousness, she hears it. It’s hollow. She traces the surface, the grout, for the answer that the house wants her to find. She pauses.
There.
It’s a small, unnoticeable catch on one of the corners. It’s just big enough for a child’s fingers to fit through, but Marina squeezes her nail beneath the catch and pushes it up just enough; once she has a handle, she catches it in the other hand. The tile lifts.
There’s a small, dusty hollow beneath.
There’s no floor like there should be. Marina looks farther in, but it isn’t deep. There are knots of cobwebs in the corners, and water-damaged stone, thick with salt and minerals. Something else is inside, and she leans closer, squinting.
In the heart of the hollow lies a journal.
Marina reaches for it, her heart in her throat.
It’s as if she already knows what this is.
She brushes the dust away; the cover reveals itself to be a plain, dark blue.
The binding cracks with disuse as she opens it.
Yellowed at the edges yet still white in the center, the pages are perfectly pressed from time, and a tight, neat Arabic script fills most of the contents.
Marina slowly works her way through the first sentence before surrendering to her rudimentary reading skills.
She flips to the front of the journal, where a name is written on the first page, one that she recognizes easily: Nuhad.
Nuhad. Nuhad’s journal.
Marina doesn’t have time to process the awe and horror she feels before the sound of a door opening comes from the front of the house, from the living room.
The warmth that had kissed Marina’s skin—the gentle thrum from the house that she didn’t even realize was there—snaps back abruptly, leaving a bone-chilling cold that raises goose bumps on her flesh.
“Thanks! Hope to see you soon!” The realtor’s voice echoes through the hall.
His footsteps draw nearer to the bedroom and Marina quickly stands, shoving the tile back in place and stuffing the journal into her waistband.
“And how are we doing in here?” He claps his hands together as he stands at the threshold. “The bedrooms are nice, right? Spacious closets compared to other homes in Haifa. Can I show you?”
He walks past her and toward the closet, but Marina is already moving into the empty space he’s created and walking back down the hall, the journal’s edges rubbing up against her stomach. “Nope, thank you, all good!” she throws over her shoulder.
It was her. It was her.
I fed her, and in her eyes, Nuhad’s eyes, the memory became a spot of brightness in the unknown, not the dark, not the nightmare, not the living horror, not the remembrance the—
the remembrance.
Remembrance is torment; reliving is torture but it is mine.
The memories play again and again with each dripping drop of water, but it is only yawning emptiness that replies—and then her.
All of the deaths, all of the fury and remembrance, led to her.
My purpose. She came—pain retreated—but then was forced away. Again,
every day,
the feeling of having the world ripped from your limbs, as if to tear an olive tree from its roots;
every day,
having a family live in the same walls and laugh the same laughs and fight the same fights, generation after generation, to feel a part of the family and be cared for in the same way. To protect them from harm,
every day,
to protect them from harm.
But I didn’t
I didn’t.
And settlers flooded in, an all-consuming, churning wave of people with no roots, wanting to play a fantasy, a dream—nightmare—pretending they had always been there, that their parody was armor to protect from the reality of living atop the rivers of blood over which the bones of this false city so brittlely stand; this city with pine trees atop mass graves instead of the people beneath almond trees; with gray stones and rubble instead of the full Grand Mosque and her clock tower, whose septuplet siblings stand across Palestine; with a parking lot instead of the bakery with the wood oven and ma’amoul; with government offices that attempt to stamp out more Palestinian families, more indigenous plants and people, more, more, more, every day, instead of the church of Saint Elias.
Instead of the city of Haifa—the true city of Haifa—with her families and
homes.
She’s gone. He took her; all of the pain, all of the death and the remembrance—led to her. He, who stands in my living room, looking out to sea—
i want him gone, i want her back i need to stop remembering.
Silently, Death rises from the pool of still saltwater below the earth, her ice-cold grip reaching toward him, wanting him gone like I want him gone; Together We pray to the gods—grant us vengeance, grant us her again—and Together We pull the water into the wall, allowing the rotted, still seawater to soak through the plaster—
he comes closer.
He inspects and puts one finger on the wall; I recoil from his touch but need him gone and so We soak the wall wetter, colder. He mumbles something and presses against it—Yes! Yes, press! Come to us—but he retreats and leaves. The door closes. Death falls back into her perch in the seawater,
and i am alone again.
It is sickening, to have her / my family / everything torn away,
and to remember—relive,
every day