Chapter 8. Already Gone
Already Gone
“Oh, so you’re visiting your grandparents’ homes?”
The night passed quickly, and by morning breakfast had already been delivered.
Marina snuck a glance at her roommate as she ate—she was a little bit older, with freckles spattered over her nose and cheeks, her skin slightly pink from the sun.
They chatted easily. The girl was from New York and had been visiting for the summer—she had been on a boat with friends and jumped off of the diving board into the sea, but turned and flipped right as someone called her name, causing her an unnatural landing and a couple of broken bones.
Her head had been knocked hard by the water and she passed out, and the hospital was keeping her under observation for a concussion.
“Yes,” Marina says, her voice slightly hesitant. When she’d told her that she had come to visit Palestine, this was the last thing she expected this American Jewish girl to say. But her face is eager, pleased that she’d landed on the correct answer.
“Where were they from?” she asks, her hint of a Brooklyn accent rounding around the words.
“Haifa and Nablus.”
“Nice,” she says, nodding. “We had that happen to us. A Palestinian guy came to our house once—maybe last year?—and asked if he could look around, since it was his grandparents’ home.
” She flips her straight brown hair over her shoulder.
“My mom was nervous, but I was like, yeah, of course. He should be able to see his grandparents’ home. ”
“Right,” Marina says. She wishes that Khaled were still here, to see the expression on his face, but he left the night before. He’ll bring Rania to the hospital sometime today.
“Like, it was stolen, you know? Technically,” she continues.
“What happened?” Marina asks, as curious to know the ending of this story as the girl is eager to tell it.
Her eyes widen. “Well, he came in and was just so overcome with emotion. It was really sad, actually.” She pats at her heart and pouts slightly. “He wanted to buy it from us, but—you know. He lived in Ramallah. It’s just not allowed,” she adds.
“Ah.”
“And when he got to the garden—we have this beautiful lemon tree back there—he came to it and just stared at it. He plucked a lemon from it—whatever, I would’ve liked to have been asked, but it’s fine—and asked me who planted the tree.”
“Probably his grandparents,” Marina says automatically.
The girl continues. “Well, I told him I didn’t know.
It could have been one of his family members, but how would I know?
And then he just became, like, really furious.
I’ve never seen someone get so red in the face before.
He just started yelling about the tree, and seeds, and”—she shakes her head, shrugging—“I don’t know.
Anyway, my mom called the police after that. But he left before they got there.”
Marina remains quiet, her eyes up toward the white ceiling. Of course, she thinks. Who wouldn’t let the grief grow into anger and consume them?
“So when are you going to go?” she asks, but before Marina can respond, Khaled strides into the room with his grandmother in tow.
“Hi, habibti, salamtik!” Rania rushes over as quickly as she can and sits beside Marina. Her eyebrows have been drawn on hastily. “How are you doing? How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine, really.” Marina sits up on the bed and leans back against the pillow. “How are you?”
“Ya Marina, you gave me such a scare. I came back to the pier with some food and didn’t see you!
And instead, there was an ambulance with flashing lights.
” She draws the picture with her waving hands.
“I run up to the ambulance, hoping it’s not you, it’s someone else, but no—they’re carrying you in a stretcher and putting you in the back. ”
Marina bites at the inside of her cheek as a stone of guilt falls deep in her stomach.
“And your face was so white, ya Allah, so white,” she says, drawing her hands now to her cheeks, patting them anxiously.
She’s reliving it. “You were wet, and shaking, even though you were unconscious. And the guy in the ambulance is asking me, is this her, is this her, because I was screaming, where is Marina, where is Marina?” She sits back, panting a little.
“Nuhad would have had my head if anything happened to you. She would return from her grave to punish me, wallah.”
“But nothing did,” Khaled says soothingly, patting his mother’s arm. His forehead is wrinkled with concern, and the rock in Marina’s stomach doubles in weight.
A doctor raps on the door quickly a few times before entering. She nods curtly at Marina’s roommate over the edge of her black-rimmed glasses and stands at the foot of Marina’s bed. She tucks an unseen piece of hair behind her ear.
“How are you feeling?”
“Fine.” Marina glances quickly at Khaled, who raises his eyebrows slightly. “I’m fine enough to go home, I think.”
“Not likely.” The doctor’s lashes flatten against her eyelids as she glares at Marina over her clipboard. “We’ll need to keep you here for an X-ray. Maybe an MRI—we’ll see.”
“But, I need to—” Marina searches the recesses of her mind for an excuse.
“You’re in no shape to go home just yet.” The doctor’s words are clipped. Clinical. “I’ll be ordering the X-ray for later today.” She turns on her heel and leaves.
Khaled moves to stand beside Marina’s bed. “We’ll get you out of here,” he murmurs. His voice is low and laced with worry.
“I have to leave. I have to leave, right?” Marina says, her eyes darting back and forth between the two of them.
She looks to Rania, who nods slowly. “Of course. Don’t worry.”
Khaled’s attention diverts and his face turns toward the television. Picking up the remote, he raises the volume.
Professional Hebrew threads through the speakers, but Marina can understand what they’re saying without needing translation.
A young Palestinian boy’s face fills the tiny square.
He looks so serious through the pixelated CRT screen with eyes brown and wide, as if he was caught off guard and could do nothing but reprimand the person with a serious look.
It’s the boy who was shot yesterday. Marina recognizes his face, and this recognition is almost materially painful in her chest—she has never been connected to a victim like this before.
“They’re taking him to jail,” Khaled says, half in English and half in Arabic.
“To jail?” Marina echoes. She cannot tear her eyes from his image on screen; here, without the dirt on his face and the pacing soldiers with their fingers on the trigger, he looks like a child. He just looks like a child.
“He’ll live, hamdillah. But they’re sending him to jail on terrorism charges.”
“Terrorism?” Marina repeats again in a whisper, and she finally looks away as a newscaster fills the screen instead.
Rania looks at her with pity, she thinks. “Habibti, don’t you know by now that we are terrorists just for existing? Erase the fact that we want our homes and land. Just by existing, we are terrorists. That’s enough.”
“No, I know, but—”
“But nothing. Children are terrorists for throwing stones. Men are terrorists for being men. Women are terrorists for giving birth to more Palestinians, to more terrorists.” She shakes her head. “That’s just how it is to them.”
Marina’s mouth twists and puckers in disgust. She looks down at her hands. “What can we do?” She can hear the helplessness in her own voice. The boy’s face is still imprinted in her mind.
“We can get you out of here,” Khaled mutters. He’s looking at her again with the same kind of genuine concern from last night, but now anger and grief hang on his shoulders. “For today, that’s what we can do.”
“Shway shway,” Rania says to Khaled, nodding, and with that gentle smile, Marina can see younger Rania in her profile. It recalls the memory that the house had gifted her and she speaks without thinking, momentarily distracted by the television. The image in her mind is still clear.
“Did you ever get fresh fish with my grandmother?” she asks. Rania turns to her, a slight surprise parting her lips.
“We did. All the time.” Her face softens with the memory. “And there was a dessert place right next to our favorite fish place, too.”
Her eyes appear just as tender as they did in the memory.
“That reminds me.” She shifts in her seat to find her large, square purse. From within she pulls out several sheets of paper stapled together and Nuhad’s journal. “Isma’ai, Marina.”
“You translated it?” Marina asks, wonder apparent in her voice. Rania had dashed any hopes for Marina to dive into her grandmother’s past.
Rania clutches it to herself and holds one finger up. “You have to promise me something, okay?”
Marina nods.
“I know you want to learn where you come from, habibti. But sometimes history is better left alone. Can you promise me that you’ll leave alone whatever you find in here? Just read it. Get to know your grandmother. Don’t dishonor the dead by digging things up.”
“I promise,” she says, but the words feel like a lie as soon as they slip from her mouth.
Rania hands her the stapled packet and journal. “I spent all last night translating it for you. Some might be wrong. But I couldn’t sleep, so I made tea and went to work instead.”
“Thank you,” Marina says, and her voice is suddenly filled with so much emotion that she hopes Rania can’t hear the hunger that lies beneath it.
She recalls Khaled’s words. She doesn’t want to turn her grandmother into something untouchable, but she needs to know who Nuhad truly was.
Even in the mundanities of her life. Who was the young girl that sacrificed everything for a daughter and granddaughter who hadn’t even existed yet?
She cradles the packet in her arms and smiles at Rania, but her face turns back to the television. The boy’s name was Bilal Khalidi.
In her, the remembrance and the pain receded. And now she is gone.