Chapter 10. Salt #2
Siham had taken them in once Basel was safely in the hospital, welcoming them with fear and trepidation in her eyes at their state and the old woman and young boy they brought with them.
The cord tying Nuhad to the sea had thinned here; she could feel its fragility.
She felt how far her brother’s body was from them.
They would go back, Victoria said. They would try to find him and bury him properly after they got Basel a blood transfusion and proper stitching.
But everyone knew that it was over. Siham tried her best to make them feel welcome and at home, but how does one feel at home in a place that is not their home?
Voices interrupted Nuhad’s ceiling slideshow.
“Why aren’t we going to Lebanon?” Basel asked. His voice carried throughout Siham’s house. Victoria had learned, very quickly, to boil water when they fought in this new house in an attempt to drown out their voices.
“Ya Basel, we cannot have this same conversation again.”
Nuhad crawled from the cot she lay in to the door, where her ear perked at their conversation.
Her knees stuck to the cool marble tile.
It was a question her father had posited often in the last week, and so far, the answer had been the same, but the constant wondering left Nuhad feeling like a bird.
She was perched on the edge of a branch, her wings ready for the inevitability of flight.
A slam reverberated through the house and Nuhad knew that her father had raised his fist against the table. “Victoria.” His voice was low but harsh and Nuhad strained to hear him. “Everyone is going to Lebanon. It’s safer there. We need to take Siham and her husband, too.”
“How do we know it’s safer there? Do we have a guarantee? Do we know that they won’t be attacked like us?” Her mother’s voice waved in and out as she walked around the kitchen. “No. Siham has a home here. Tariq is buried God knows where in Haifa. Have you forgotten that? We have to stay here.”
“And what did Balfour say?” Basel’s voice rose over the whine of the kettle.
Nuhad’s knees ached and she shifted her weight to a squat.
“He promised the land of Palestine to the Jews. He did not say Lebanon, or Syria, or Egypt. Palestine! He said Palestine. How do we know that Nazareth won’t be next? ”
“Basel,” she said, her voice brimming with frustration. “Who could wage war against the city Jesus was born in? Mish ma’aoul. Nazareth is like Jerusalem—they’re both sacred.”
“The city Jesus was born in?! Jesus probably swam in the seas of Haifa and they still destroyed the city! He probably cured illnesses in the village of Deir Yassin and look at them! They don’t give a damn about Jesus!
They’re going to keep taking lives—keep taking everything.
” The whistle of the teakettle quieted as Victoria put the pot away.
There was shuffling for a moment, and then the door slammed shut.
Nuhad imagined Victoria’s arms waving as she gestured for Basel to go outside to continue speaking.
Slowly, with care to not open the door too quickly and have it creak, Nuhad tiptoed out of her makeshift bedroom and to the kitchen.
A narrow, tall window was high above the kitchen table, and through its open pane Nuhad could hear her parents’ voices. She crouched, her feet halfway in and halfway out of the kitchen, and listened.
“We have no guarantee about Lebanon. We are not going there.” Her mother’s voice was stern. “Unless you would like to go to the Haganah personally and make them stamp approval that they will not invade Lebanon too.”
Basel clicked his teeth with frustration.
“Victoria, don’t be stupid. We have already lost everything.” His voice quieted. “We have lost our business. Our home. Our son. Everything. Everyone else has gone to Lebanon from Haifa. Why not us?”
“We have not lost everything!” Victoria yelled. “How can you dare say that?! We will go back! Everything is still—”
“What are we waiting for, then? Yallah, let’s go back to Haifa! I’m sure our home is now miraculously empty and our things are still inside.” He scoffed. “You don’t see what they have been doing all over this land? Stealing! Taking the land, taking the houses! This is their plan!”
“Why are you giving up? Why are you ready to give up?”
“Give up?” Basel laughed sourly. “Habibti, that is the only option. What else are we to do?”
Victoria slammed her way inside. She glanced at Nuhad, still hovering at the edge of the kitchen. Her cheeks were pink with indignation.
“The Haganah zift. May God curse them and their whole history!” Victoria pulled down a bowl and slammed ingredients on the counter. Tahini. Spices. Chickpeas. “Nuhad, you remember that. They think they are God. They are killing people!”
“They’re not God,” Nuhad affirmed quietly.
Through the window, Basel sighed. The door opened a moment later.
“Your color looks good,” Nuhad remarked to her father, trying to change the mood of the room. It was also something she’d checked for every day since they retrieved him from the hospital. Basel’s hand reached absentmindedly for his neck.
“It will take a lot more than that to kill me.” The edge of his lips turned up slightly.
The airplane is stuffy with bottled air. Each time Haifa closes her eyes, attempting to sleep, they spring back open. Subconsciously, she tears at a hangnail on the side of her thumb that’s already been shredded with worry.
Haifa believes in the supernatural world.
Her mother always told her that a ghuleh would eat her if she didn’t behave, and Haifa, susceptible to fear from a hyperactive imagination, would believe her.
It sparked a chain of beliefs that Haifa has unconsciously held herself to for the rest of her life.
She doesn’t waste salt, for if she does, she’ll be forced to pick up each wasted grain with her eyelashes in the afterlife.
If a shoe accidentally lands upside down, she has to right it immediately.
Over the front door of her home and around her neck hang evil eyes.
And now, as an adult, she sees Nuhad. She hears her warnings.
As a mother, she tried to keep Marina away from these superstitions.
They have chained Haifa to a life of hypervigilance and simmering fear and she wanted better for her daughter, but she knows that in this, too, she has failed.
Despite never warning Marina about the ghuleh that would eat her, or warning her of wasting salt with a cosmic punishment, she knows that her daughter still felt Haifa’s superstitions even without words.
With every evil eye trinket Haifa gifted Marina, with every flip of a fallen shoe at the door, Haifa passed down her beliefs without words. Marina, in turn, doubted everything.
And so if Marina said the house—her mother’s childhood home—is haunted, then there truly must be something wrong with it.
The city, too. As Haifa stares up at the dark blue ceiling of the airplane, she feels the true meaning behind Marina’s words, despite her unstable state.
There is a heaviness here, even now, in this vessel in the sky pointed toward Palestine.
Anxiety has flooded her veins through the long hours of this flight.
Haifa cannot move, cannot rid herself of the worry of returning to her mother’s city and seeing her childhood house for the first time, even haunted.
She sits up straighter—an unconscious response to measuring up to the dream.
Her hands whisk back and forth, back and forth, over the top of her thigh.
She sighs, giving up, and turns on the reading light above her. A small halo of yellow surrounds her. If she cannot sleep, she will read.
Her head bumps against the reclined seat in front of her as she digs through her bag for the translated sheets from Sara. The pages rustle delicately beneath the roar of the plane engine as she pulls them out, and there, by the light of the small, circular lamp, is her friend’s hasty scrawl.
The sweetshop was filled with the laughter and conversation of patrons each day, but its walls were not painted by the tall tales and jokes of the fishermen from their store in Haifa. Nuhad’s feet dangled over the stool she sat on at the register.
“Hi, Nuhad, keefik?” The cold brush of winter’s wind came in with Siham. She took off her coat and unwrapped the scarf from her neck. It was one of the only things Nuhad remembered from when Siham still lived with them—she’d bought it at a store by the sea. It was the color of the ocean.
“Hamdillah,” Nuhad replied, but she wasn’t feeling good thanks to the grace of God.
There were bags under her eyes, and she felt the weight of exhaustion each time she returned home even on easy days.
She hadn’t made any friends at her new school yet, and she spent most of her free hours working at their sweetshop.
It had been her mother’s idea and she’d gotten to work immediately, learning the secrets to making the perfect knafeh and baqlawah so that their family would have a means of survival.
No one needed fishing supplies an hour from the sea—even if they did, they’d lost it all.
“How has the shop been today?” Siham looked around at the quiet and answered her own question. Warm candles lit the emptiness and flickered; the sun had already set in the late afternoon.
“Where’s Philippe?”
Philippe was Siham’s first son. He’d been born prior to 1948 and was already a few years old.
His personality was beginning to show, quiet and moody, especially for such a young child, but Nuhad appreciated it.
She felt his feelings in his silence. When they played together, they understood one another without many words.
“Mama’s watching him.” Siham dragged over a stool, scraping it on the ground, and sat beside her younger sister. She sighed for a moment as she contemplated her words. “It’s … nice. Having everyone here.”