Chapter 3. Home #2
“I love doing that,” Rania said, panting, as they walked up the steps to Nuhad’s home. Nuhad nodded. They both beat their feet against the stones for a moment, shaking sand from them. “Can you imagine that some people don’t live near the sea?”
“That’s not a life I want to imagine.” Nuhad made a face at herself in the transparent reflection of the shop’s window.
“Assalamu a’alaikom,” Rania yelled as they walked inside the store. A smattering of wa’alaikom assalam answered her, but the ground floor was mostly empty. Only a couple of elderly fishermen hung around, chatting with one another and examining the poles that hung on the wall.
“Keefkom?” Basel gave them each a hug and a kisses on both cheeks, setting his newspaper down.
His typically well-waxed mustache was drooping on one side—he must have been sleeping on that side.
He leaned against the counter as he glanced at the canvas underneath Nuhad’s arms. “What do you have there?”
“It’s a surprise,” she said, raising her eyebrows. “Ready?”
Basel sighed and shook his head in jest at Rania, who giggled. Nuhad flourished the painting, holding it up and then pulling it back down to see her father’s reaction.
“Yaiy. This is beautiful,” he said softly. Nuhad met his eyes. “This is perfect for dar Sayadi. The home that the sea protects. Rania, do you know this story?”
Nuhad sat on a stool, getting comfortable as Rania shook her head politely (but of course, she’d been told the story many times).
“There’s a myth across Haifa: the sea protects the Sayadi family,” he continued.
“If ever a thunderstorm sweeps through Haifa and batters the roofs and blows down the doors, our home has always been spared. Even Nuhad! Here’s something you don’t know, Rania.
As a child, we put her in the water and she just knew how to swim. We didn’t teach her.”
“You just knew how to swim instinctively?” Rania murmured, turning to Nuhad. She nodded.
“It’s in our blood. We’ve been granted a gift,” Basel said.
His thoughts were far beyond where he stood, his eyes reflecting foaming waves and sails.
“Our ancestors have given and taken so much from the sea in a communal, cyclical relationship, that the sea now shields us from any harm. You know, some even believe that it’s the old Canaanite gods who watch over us, protecting the last of their stones. ”
“Who’s the Canaanite god of the sea?”
Basel paused. “I actually don’t know. Some customers will say this and then say that God himself could not strike down our home, so I guess it’s interchangeable. But don’t tell your mother that. She’ll demand you repent for blaspheming inside of her home.” He winked.
“Now we’ll definitely say that!” Nuhad said, leaping up the creaky wooden steps. Basel whacked her lightly with the newspaper and they laughed as they disappeared into the house.
The door at the top opened to the living room lit by the shine of the sun and sea.
Golden light poured in against the old, comfortable couch; the vases from her mother’s family; the intricate Persian rug that covered the floor; the box of mint that grew on the windowsill; the trinkets from Damascus and Beirut her mother had collected on a shelf.
“Here.” Nuhad picked an empty spot on the wall and raised the painting against it. “Isn’t it perfect?” Sunlight shone against the setting sun of the canvas.
“I love it!” Rania clapped her hands together.
“Me too.” Nuhad smiled.
This was the house in Haifa when it was once a home. It held light and laughter, and it felt the windswept joy of sea salt within its stone walls.
Now, it’s the sickness,
the one that slithers through the wet stones and rotted wood; the sickness that festers far beneath the roots, into the blackened depths of the drowning sea; the sickening things of 1948—the settlers—sick—leaving me with nothing but emptiness.
The malady began when the first soldier came,
the sharp scent of gunpowder fresh on his fatigues and death biting deep into his flesh—not one who was to die, no, one who had formed death with his own hands; assumed God and let the blood stain his hands, soak into his very being—and he uprooted my own family; he uprooted, uprooted. He sliced. Everyone—cut.
I didn’t know—didn’t know, couldn’t understand the uprooting, couldn’t protect them—why? and so I waited,
waited,
while the soldier took root, forced into my stone—drove himself into what was my family’s—
drops of seawater dripping into the stones and wearing them away, onto the wood and rotting them from within, each drip signifying more time, each innocuous and painless on its own but together adding up to erosion and sickness.
Time molded itself into a child, then two, then three—alive—with no knowledge of the blood their father had spilled—the soldier transformed into a mere man, a civilian but I could still smell the stench of death on him—and slowly they grew like a sickness, lying on the beds and couches where my family had once lain—until finally, mercilessly and unjustly, age grew on the soldier in carvings on his face and forgetfulness in his mind and the children were no longer children but adults.
I waited for my family. Rot—I waited.
And the sickness spread with each passing droplet, the confusion slowly, obscenely, deepening into a fury and an illness with each passing day,
as the soldier of death gouged shallow roots, putrefying with rotted wood from the inside out,
leaving me to feel as if I had drowned decades ago—1948—as I waited for my family under the weight of churning tides; and in the dry soil of uprooting and watered by salt, a seed was planted in their stead—
She was Death.
Death rose with the Sea, and together, She and I knew what we must do—interlocking as one, We drew water from the ocean, pulling from the sand, and We came through the floorboards and soaked the tub where the soldier—now an old man—lay, napping in the bath—but even the floods would not wash away the scent of his bloodstained flesh—and we did it together, Her and I, and slow, slow, slowly, like droplets of seawater dripping onto stones, the saltwater / seawater / tearwater creeped up: his chest, his throat, his eyes that were sleeping—
sleeping—
until they opened, red-rimmed and bloodshot with need of oxygen; his lips parted in one final, desperate, gasped attempt for air—
But it was too late.
my first blood—
Death filled in the dry soil of uprooting, soothing the shallow, salty roots in the stones; together, We keep the saltwater coursing through the stones, soothing me from the inside, dripping against time, lying in wait for that which was cut to return. Regrow that which was uprooted—
that which is still here, beneath the floor, buried in darkness,
drip / sick / drip / sick