Chapter 11. We #3
“I wanted to know that too, sweetie. Who’s Tariq? Why were you screaming about him?” Haifa’s eyes betray pain and her voice is urgent.
There are several moments of silence. Marina stares between Haifa and Rania.
“Tariq—your mother’s brother. What do you mean, who’s Tariq?” Rania’s face has a pained look across it.
“My mother’s brother…?” Haifa leans back into the couch.
Marina notices her hands tremble. Haifa shakes her head as if she can change the course of what she clearly already knows to be true.
“She didn’t have a brother. She just had one older sister—a much older sister—Siham.
I remember Auntie Siham. I would’ve remembered an Uncle Tariq. ” She laughs lightly, nervously.
“Tariq. He was four years younger than Nuhad and I,” Rania says slowly. “She had an older sister, yes, but a younger brother also.”
“No. No.” Haifa laughs again, but in her wide eyes is denial. “No, she couldn’t have. I would have known.”
“She did, Mama. Tata had a younger brother.” Marina shifts her mother’s hand from her shoulder and holds it in her own. “Rania and I found one of her old journals. She wrote about him. Tariq.”
“Why didn’t she tell me?” Bereft of any denial now, her voice is lost. She sounds like a young lamb abandoned by her flock. “And … and what happened to him?”
Silence fills the room. Marina hesitates, meeting Rania’s eyes for a moment, then looks down at her palms.
“What happened to him, Rania?” Haifa asks.
“What happened to this city? He was killed, of course.” She waves her hand dismissively, almost irritatedly, but her face is anguished.
She doesn’t want to relive this, Marina realizes.
Death surrounds. Death is on the next block over, wearing an Israeli military uniform, holding an automatic rifle in hand, and lying in wait for the next Palestinian boy to kick a rock down the street.
“Where was he buried?”
Rania’s hands search for a distraction—she wants a cigarette—but she reaches for a hard candy. Her voice is somber. “There were so many mass graves for people. Nuhad—and I—always thought that he was buried in one of them.”
Iron-hot, the parking lot burns through Marina’s mind.
She wants to tell them, but who would believe that Tariq’s ghost guided her through the house and to his grave?
The morning still feels like a dream, as if she’d always just been lying on Rania’s couch.
She isn’t even sure it happened. Her mouth opens and closes, and she sits in her own discomfited silence.
“How did he die?” Even in the coolness of the early morning, Haifa’s glasses keep sliding off of her nose and she keeps pushing them back up. She seems helpless against the world and all of its cruel intentions.
Crinkles from the candy wrapper punctuate Rania’s voice as she plays with the small piece of plastic.
“Nuhad and her family left the morning after the siege. Tariq had died sometime that night, or that early morning, I don’t know.
I didn’t even know what had happened to them—I thought maybe they were one of the lucky ones to get on a boat.
It wasn’t until a couple weeks later that I learned they were still here, just in Nazareth.
” Rania sighs, but it’s purely a sad sound now.
There is no irritation waiting in this casket she must reopen, only grief. She folds the wrapper of the candy.
“How did Tariq die?” Haifa repeats quietly.
Rania shrugs. “I don’t know. Nuhad never told me.
I never asked. Those days were—” She cuts herself off and looks in the distance, searching for the word.
“They were hideous. My uncle and cousin were killed. We were sheltering a Jewish family at the time, too. They locked us out of our own home the day before the war started. We lost our home with everyone else.”
“Oh, my god,” Marina muttered. She notices a slight movement from Rania; her back stiffens and her shoulders clench toward her ears.
“Of course. It was like that for many people.” The wrapper has been folded into a tiny square and can be folded no further.
“And after, we all just had to pick up the pieces. The people I had known either were forcibly expelled or killed. Even Nuhad—until I heard from her, I just had to hope that she wasn’t dead. ”
“How was Tata kicked out? What happened to their home?” Marina asks. Haifa’s face is still frozen in a shell-shocked silence.
“By the time I finally made it to the old town in Haifa, near the port, a soldier was living there. He had taken residence immediately. The very same day that the war ended.” Rania’s voice becomes thick with memory.
“I never spoke to him but I knew his name. A few years later—maybe in 1951, 1952—a real estate company decided to come into the city and take what was left. With the military’s permission, of course.
They tore through every single home people were forced to abandon, or disallowed to return to.
They just broke in, changed the locks, kept the furniture.
And they sold everything to Jews only. Even if Haifa residents wanted to return and buy back their homes—tsawwari—they couldn’t. ”
“Ya’ani, it was his company? That soldier?”
“Yes,” Rania says. “And eventually, of course, he had children that took over. I remember seeing one of his sons’ faces on the company’s flyers. I didn’t recognize him, of course, but the name was the same. And then Nuhad’s house—well. It responded. Like we all did.”
“Oh,” Marina says softly. She wants to say: I can’t believe you’ve seen all of this, I can’t believe you went through a genocide, and continue to, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. But instead, she just reaches over for the old woman’s hand.
“That’s life, ah?” Rania smiles bitterly as she slowly extracts her hand from Marina’s. “I could never return to my childhood home. But I’ve always kept a close eye on Nuhad’s house. I pass by it every day, so of course, I wanted to know. She was my best friend.”
The room is quiet, and slowly the roar of car engines and construction fills the morning air. Haifa sits with a hand curled beneath her chin and her eyes are far away. She doesn’t ask about the haunting. Her face is like stone.
“Let me read the journal,” Haifa finally says.
“I left it—” Marina starts, but Rania waves her hand.
“While you were sleeping, Khaled brought your things back. Here.” Rania stands and picks up the journal and its translation from the dining table. “I don’t know how much consolation it will be.” She offers it to Haifa, her hand outstretched.
Haifa hesitates, but then takes it, holding it by the edges with only her fingertips. She’s scared, Marina realizes.
“Let’s all get some rest,” Haifa says, but her eyes are still trained on the papers. “It’s been a long few days.”