Chapter 6. The City Beneath the Sea
The City Beneath the Sea
Rania leans back and flicks open the cigarette pack on the coffee table, her fingers searching for release. She lights one and it is a dark red glow against her mouth. As she inhales, her shoulders finally fall, relaxed, for the first time since she returned from the house.
“I can’t believe it,” Marina repeats. Her eyes are trained on the aged journal, and her hand hovers above as if afraid to lose it but also too scared to touch it.
“I’m glad you found it.” She takes another long drag and smoke retreats, curling around the pair like long, slate fingers holding them together.
A small part of her knew that the house would reveal something to the girl, that there was a secret dormant in its foundation.
But strangely, she feels no vindication from this journal.
Gray and heavy, a familiar shadow instead hovers at the edges of her heart.
“The house showed me,” Marina whispers. “It led me to it.”
Rania nods silently.
“You knew. You knew that her house has been—that there’s always been something—”
“I only know the things that I’ve seen.” Rania sucks on her cigarette again, letting the drag calm her from the inside. “The house responded to the occupation. Like we all did.”
“But how can—”
“The dead may be buried,” Rania says, “but when a city is built atop them, their blood never washes away.”
Marina is the one who nods now, and something like a light of understanding flickers behind her eyes. She gingerly pushes the journal toward Rania.
“Will you translate it for me?”
“Of course.” Rania reaches for it, her hand trembling slightly.
Papery, old air wafts out of the pages as she cracks it open.
Her eyes scan the simple diary entries. “It’s mostly everyday things—boys, our friendship, her family.
Like this: ‘Today was a good day, because I snuck three chocolates and Mama didn’t notice. ’”
The corners of Marina’s mouth turn up slightly. “How sweet. Maybe I’ll finally learn about her. And my family.” There’s a hint of sad pity to her voice and it irritates Rania. There are worse things in life than to be ignorant of the painful history one comes from.
“That real estate agent was a piece of work,” Rania says, changing the subject. “He kept trying to sell me on the stones, saying that they were classic relics of an old home and they give it character. I should have hit him over the head! As if I didn’t know the house better than he did.”
And every house.
“I’m glad you came to distract him.” Light piano notes float through the open window—Rania’s downstairs neighbor’s son is practicing.
“That couple came out and I figured you were in there by yourself.” Rania flips through the journal again, her eyes scanning but not reading. “I wouldn’t go in, and of course he knew I was Palestinian, but I thought it would still give you some extra time.”
“Thank you,” Marina says quietly, looking out toward the music.
A line catches Rania’s eyes, and her heart skips a beat: Today Rania and I went to see Auntie Fay’a so that she could help us with our university essays. Rania closes her eyes, suppressing the pain of a lost future to the recesses of her mind.
“Habibti, are you sure you want to see this journal? There are so many memories. Not all of them are good.”
The girl’s face falls. “Of—of course. I want to learn about my family.”
This, too, frustrates Rania. “Ya’ani—it’s not so black-and-white. Nuhad probably told you everything she needed. Some things are best kept unknown.”
“Oh.” Marina looks like she wants to say something else, but her jaw clenches.
“Marina, do you think you don’t know who you are because you don’t know your family’s history?”
“No, I just—it would be easier to know. It would help. Like, what ground do I stand on? What are the pieces that put me together and make me whole?” She pauses.
“All my life, I’ve only ever known the pieces separately—the parts of Tata’s life, the parts of my mom’s.
And I can feel myself fragmenting, too. But I don’t want to be Marina, friend and daughter of Haifa, or Marina, software developer extraordinaire, or Marina, the lost mixed child whose entire life—friends, hobbies, personality—is a patchwork combination of feeling out of place.
I don’t want to be defined by the pieces I choose to share with others and their perceptions of me. I—I want to find myself.”
“You’re you! Isn’t that good enough?” Ash piles over the cigarette tray as the cigarette lies limply in Rania’s hand. “Keep Nuhad’s memory sacred. You already know all of the history anyway. There’s no point reliving it.”
Marina’s eyes—the ones that look so much like Nuhad’s—look down at her hands. “The Nakba?”
Rania raises her eyebrows in affirmation.
“What happened then? To you—and my grandmother?”
Rania stares at the red embers of the dwindling cigarette. Hadn’t she said she didn’t want to relive it? But the words alone recall the memories without her permission, and the one that blazes the brightest is the look of helplessness on her father’s face that day.
Their adopted family had waited until everyone was out for something—a celebration or dinner perhaps, Rania can’t remember now—and then changed the locks on the door.
It was the day before the war. Rania was a young girl.
When her family returned home and the key didn’t work, they knocked on the door, wondering what had happened.
Did their adopted family change the locks because a burglar had tried to come in?
Or something worse? But through the window, Rania had seen the silhouette of the mother with her child, holding him tightly, as if he was the only anchor she had, and Rania knew by the way her cheeks whitened and her lips pressed together that she had done this on purpose.
She’d claimed her new home. Every single one of their belongings was left inside.
Rania’s family was left without anything to call their own but the claim to the land.
The day after, they were just one of thousands of families like that.
It was enough to suffer it once, let alone retell and relive it. Sighing, she stands.
“It doesn’t matter what happened to me. It doesn’t.
And for you, for your family, you’re the living history of them.
And you’re here. We’re here. After 1967, then Camp David, the Oslo Accords …
we’re here.” Rania empties out the remnants in her ashtray over the trash.
The metal hits against the side: thunk, thunk—and the third thunk is covered by the unmistakable sound of a gun firing. Another shot. Another.
Marina sits up in her chair at the same time Rania straightens, looking past her and to the window.
A part of Rania wants it to be fireworks, waits for a few moments for the fourth firecracker to pop, but she knows better.
Complete and utter silence descends for a few precious moments before murmurs and yells begin to converge, overlapping into confusion.
Peeling paint flakes off against Rania’s grip as she heaves the window further open, looking below and beyond.
“What was that? Was that a—gun?” Marina asks. Her voice lowers on the word gun, as if whispering it will keep the reality away. She grasps herself with her arms and hugs herself close, and Rania finds it painful to look at her. She looks too much like Nuhad, like scared Nuhad.
“Come. Let’s go see.” Rania slides her feet into house slippers and opens the door, feeling Marina’s shadow close behind.
They need only walk a couple of blocks before they see a crowd burgeoning.
Many on the outskirts are confused, hovering, standing on tiptoe to see farther in.
Rania peeks around the edge of this amorphous semicircle, but the most she can see is a raised fist or two.
Gravelly, throaty yells shout in cacophony around them.
“Shu sar?” Her breath is low.
“I think a young boy was shot,” a fellow onlooker says. Her eyes, too, dart about as she attempts to see through the crowd. “That’s what others are saying.”
“And?” Rania prompts. Her lungs sear with the suffocation in this small, crowded space.
More people have come to see what’s happened, adding to the fringe, and in a matter of moments, Rania no longer stands at the edges but in the midst of a mad, mourning, murmuring body of people moving ever closer to the boy.
“Nothing! What could a child be doing? Kicking a rock down the sidewalk?” At once her eyes flash red and Rania knows exactly what thought runs through her mind. “Israeli police shot him.”
Details are the same monotonous pattern that do not give life or color to these stories.
He wasn’t doing anything. Israeli police told him to stop.
They shot him. The news will report it as an altercation and give the boy a knife.
This is not just the Second Intifada; this is life under Israeli occupation.
“Is he dead?”
“We don’t know yet.”
The air is gone.
Standing on tiptoe, Rania attempts to peer over the expanding crowd, and even from her short stature she can see the crimson pool that slowly spreads on the ground, and beside it, in it, the boy.
Fury and terror begin to rise in equal measure; everyone has seen the fallen child.
Off to the side are two Israeli soldiers, automatic rifles strapped to their bodies, and they yell at the crowd, their eyes darting for other soldiers.
One, his finger on the trigger, steps over the boy.
The crowd grows louder, angrier, hotter at this, causing an uproar—an anguished fury that is rooted in impotence and helplessness.
The people move as one body toward the boy, wanting to protect him from the inevitable violence they will all endure.
Look at him—look at him. He could be any one of our sons.