Chapter 9. Where Is Nuhad?
Where Is Nuhad?
If Nuhad could have traveled back in time, she would have never wished for the British soldiers to leave. She’d prayed for it each time she saw one of them, her father’s voice echoing in her mind, but the day they left was the day that her life ended.
It was April, it was springtime. It was meant to be the perfect in-between season of weather where Nuhad could walk barefooted across the sand in a dress that twirled with the wind.
It was meant to be a time of celebration for the fishermen, whose catches would migrate closer to shore with the warming waters.
The small mountain that Haifa was nestled into was meant to flower, to sprout in juniper and lavender, poppy and periwinkle, from its base all the way to the top of Mount Mar Elias.
But the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary group, would crack the frost of the thawing ground and force their way into the roots, killing the spring before her bloom.
They were an unofficial army, one built from the Zionist settler colonialism that sought to expel Palestinians from their land and seize it; they said it was their God-given right.
Nuhad awoke to the sound of bullets raining, but there was something else this time. A distant echo of mortar shells shook the ground. Her heart leapt into her throat and she threw the covers off, rushing to the living room. Her mother already stood in the kitchen, her gaze suspended in the window.
Nuhad came up to her elbow, following her gaze, but she saw nothing but the building next door. “Mama?”
Victoria jumped. “Hi, habibti. Sabah il-kheir.” She patted her head and ran her fingers through Nuhad’s undone hair.
“What’s happening?” Normally, the sleep would still be in her voice, but a chilling fear ran through her veins.
“I don’t know. Baba went out to check.” Victoria snapped out of her trance and turned around. “You want some breakfast?”
As she slid into the seat at the kitchen table, the front door opened. Basel stood in the threshold, lit a cigarette, and waved the match to extinguish it. He took a long drag before he finally spoke.
“The British have already started leaving—”
“But they said they would stay for three months after the Mandate ended,” Victoria interjected.
“They lied. And they must have been working with the Haganah.” Basel raised his voice. His jowls shook with ill-held anger. “Because as soon as they left, the Haganah started for the Najjadah building.”
An Arab militia had been growing since the UN partition was announced—and in response to the Jewish paramilitary groups—and the Najjadah building had become their headquarters. Nuhad braided her hair as she listened to things far beyond her years.
“Tiberias has already fallen,” Victoria said. An unasked question hung in the air, and it would go unanswered, for no one wanted to think of what could happen to their beloved city.
“The sons of dogs are becoming bold,” Basel grunted. He finally closed the door behind him and sat at the kitchen table beside Nuhad. Smoke filled the air. “And of course they’re working together. Teezain bilbas.”
“What’s going to happen to us?” Nuhad rolled the edge of the tablecloth in her fingertips. She rolled and unrolled.
“Nothing, habibti, we’ll be fine. Go get ready for school.”
Nuhad stood, breakfast forgotten by all, and went to her room. She winced with each earth-shattering shelling. One for each arm hole and a third for the skirt as she slipped into her school uniform.
School passed agonizingly slowly with everyone’s eyes on the clock and their minds on the battle between the Arab militia and the Jewish paramilitary group. Everyone thought they had more time.
As Nuhad walked back home, the streets rumbled with the vibration of a large vehicle.
She jumped beneath the awning of a storefront and watched as a Jewish tank rolled past. A soldier stood on top and threw leaflets from the opening.
As one floated near her, Nuhad caught it and read at the same time she listened to the tank’s loudspeakers blare the repeated warnings:
“KEEP AWAY FROM FOREIGN VOLUNTEERS. STAY INDOORS. SEND WOMEN AND CHILDREN AWAY. WE WILL PROVIDE SAFE ESCORT TO ARAB TERRITORY. FOLLOW THESE DIRECTIVES OR WE WILL NOT BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR FATE.”
Sleep is a slippery thing for Marina. She’s consumed her grandmother’s journal from end to translated end. As tightly as she squeezes her eyelids to catch sleep, it evades her grasp skillfully with thoughts instead.
Thoughts.
Rania never warned her—she never said, don’t worry, your secret uncle is in here, but you’ll see.
She assumed Marina already knew. And why wouldn’t she make that assumption?
But the Nuhad that Rania grew up with, the one of childhood, had long disappeared by scarred adulthood.
How was Rania to know that her friend would bury her brother along with her past?
And Haifa—her anxiety for the city was always a smothering, heavy blanket.
Did her own mother know what was buried in the city of the past?
Her lungs bear the weight of a mere taste of Israeli oppression already; she can’t imagine what her grandmother went through.
One side of her heart understands why Nuhad wouldn’t want to share her past, but the other knows that healing cannot come from locking the past away—in fact, it only makes the pain grow, from grandmother to mother to daughter.
Marina’s chest aches, a small, throbbing pang, for the pain of hiding everything away and never speaking of it ever again. Palestinians exist in fragments.
Bilal’s face stares at her in the backs of her eyelids.
Other Palestinian children cross her mind, flitting through the racing thoughts—what about the girl she saw drawing with chalk on the ground in Wadi Nisnas?
Rania’s small grandson doing homework on the table?
She thinks of them, repressing the constant question that drives at the front of her mind: What if Israeli forces kill them in cold blood too?
The white hospital blanket is gray in the darkness and twists farther around her body each time she rolls over so that maybe, hopefully, this position will grant her sleep.
The blanket becomes a force field in her mind, and Marina wants nothing more than to expand its reach and cover her land and people from their murderers.
Shame wraps her like a shroud. Marina has lived a lie thousands of miles away, thinking that she could empathize with other Palestinians.
She didn’t know what it felt like. How could anyone imagine the reality of watching a boy down the street be killed?
She couldn’t even truly empathize with her grandmother.
She tears the thin hospital blanket off, hot from the shame and anger that press against her heart and blacken her vision.
Both Haifa and Nuhad protected her from reality, but Marina has been living a lie her entire life.
Who is she? Who is she? Does it even matter in the face of brutal, murderous occupation? The question should be What can she do?
She squints at the wall clock in front of her. Another hour has passed. Dusty white light illuminates through the side pockets of the curtained window. Marina’s eyes close tightly, heavy weights atop her eyelids, and they stick there. They refuse to open again.
Hello.
There is a young boy seated on the chair across from her bed. His hair is dark and curly and falls over his forehead in a way that endears him instantly to Marina. He’s hugging his knees close to his body as if he’s cold, or shy. Matching pajamas paint lines on his tiny arms and legs.
“Hello. Who are you?” Marina whispers.
The boy grins at her and holds out a hand as he stands.
Come. I have somewhere to take you.
He speaks without moving his mouth, and yet his voice is velvety smooth in her mind.
It’s like she’s hearing his general sentiment rather than explicit words.
Her gut says to trust him, and though she doesn’t exactly know why, she decides to go with him.
The cold shock of the floor doesn’t sting her feet as she takes his hand and follows.
The Haganah sliced their way through Haifa as a surgeon cuts open a body—a knife through flesh.
The attack did not stay isolated to the Arab militia in the Najjadah building.
Amid the gunfire and mortar shells, the tanks rolled through the streets for hours, blaring the same warning with the ominous implication at the end.
Nuhad’s father ordered the family to stay inside despite the initial trickle of panicked evacuations.
Time passed slowly, except when all of the seconds were sucked from the air and frozen with each attack.
Nuhad spent the in-between moments staring out at the sun, waiting for it to set.
What was happening to Rania? To her school?
Surely they wouldn’t do too much damage to her city—Haifa was the most prized Arab port after Alexandria.
“Watch your brother” was the directive given to Nuhad each time her parents stepped out of the house on that first day.
It was the only time Nuhad could recall ever seeing such simultaneous vulnerability and strength from her brother, whose wide eyes betrayed the fear beneath the brave set of his jaw.
The impending night slowly smothered the city, and under its cover, panic began.
It was as if the entire city were watching the sun with Nuhad, for when the last line of orange disappeared over the sea, the people fell to chaos with the first scream. She snapped up in her chair with the harrowing sound.
“Tariq? Tariq? Where’s Mama and Baba?”
Her younger brother was curled up on the sofa, waiting for the interminable seconds to end with her. He sat up. “The neighbor’s.”
“Did you hear that?” Nuhad asked, but her question was answered when her parents came through the door.
“Lock it,” Victoria ordered Basel. She strode across the house to the living room window. “Nuhad, shut that window.”