Chapter 6. The City Beneath the Sea #2
“Go away. Go away!” the soldier yells, waving his hand and gripping his gun even more threateningly. His throat clings to the difficult sounds of Arabic. He waves at them like they are petulant children, or dogs. “Disperse!”
“May God curse your father, and your father’s father!
May God curse your entire bloodline!” A woman’s voice can be heard above the crowd, and her rage, the way that it cracks her voice and shakes her breath, is the match that ignites the rest. The yelling grows louder and people begin to test the boundaries of the soldiers, stepping closer and retreating, all eyes on their guns.
A mother nearby rushes her own son away, his arm clasped tightly in her hand, as she pushes out from the crowd.
Rania remembers her own shadow and looks over at Marina.
The girl has understood enough of the Arabic to know what happened here.
Through the lines of worry creased between her brows, she can see cracks of terror and anguish.
It is too painful, too familiar. Grabbing Marina’s arm, she pushes their way through the ever-growing crowd, jostling elbows with neighbors whose eyes are now lit with flames.
“It will only get worse,” she calls back to Marina. The girl’s gaze is trained in the opposite direction they walk, focusing on the boy. Rania yanks at her arm a little harder than she intends. “Yallah, Marina. We have to move.”
Marina’s long legs stumble after her, but they both stutter as they hear loud, staccato raps against the street.
Ambulance sirens wail in the distance and Rania quickens her pace as much as she can, the thin soles of her house slippers slapping against her heels.
The screams of anger grow louder even as their distance increases.
Despite the noise, she can hear Marina’s breath: loud, laborious, heavy.
“Breathe through your nose,” she orders.
A whimper escapes Marina’s throat, but she does as she is told, and the sound of her breath slowly quiets.
Rania only eases her pace once the endless blue is in sight.
Seagulls squawk overhead, eyeing for scraps, and waves gently lap against the sand.
The murder that has just happened in a Palestinian neighborhood feels impossible against this detached picture of beachgoing, café-eating Israelis.
Her feet feel the worn softness of the weathered wood of the pier as she walks them toward the sea. She releases Marina’s arm.
“Sit.” Rania motions to a bench but Marina shakes her head.
“I can’t.”
“What do you mean, you can’t? Just sit—please.” She adds this last plea for Marina’s benefit, for the young girl has started shivering as if they stood naked in the dead of winter. “I’ll get us some food. We can—I don’t know. Food will help.”
Marina nods, and suddenly Rania feels pity for her. These are the deaths that haunt this city—this country. Marina wasn’t prepared.
“It—it’s—” Words have escaped Rania for this. The air itself has disappeared from her throat. “There’s nothing to say. There is nothing I can say.”
“Can we move?” Marina’s soft voice is nearly drowned out by the waves and her face is splotched with red.
“Move?” Rania half laughs a disbelieving expulsion of air. It’s the type of darkly sarcastic Palestinian comment she herself would have made after the shock had worn off. “Sure, if you can get me a house on the beach in Greece, I’ll move there.”
“No—from here. Can we move off of the pier?” Marina asks. Rania turns, looking around them, but this is the easiest spot to sit at. On either side of them are beaches. “We’re too close to the water.”
Rania stares at her for a moment. “Just stay here. I’ll be right back with some food,” she says. “Food fixes everything.”
Marina sits, shaking, as Rania leaves. Nuhad is on her mind.
Nuhad—her best friend and confidante who understood the importance of the sea’s nurturing embrace when bad things happened.
Of course Rania had taken them to the sea.
Where else would she want to be as she navigated the complex labyrinth of emotions of being a neighbor to a martyred boy?
She looks back at Marina, whose shoulders are hunched and face is clearly etched with fear.
Nuhad’s own granddaughter, afraid of the sea. Of water. Rania shakes her head.
For several moments, the only sound is the light, flaky whispers of photos being leafed through slowly. Haifa sits with a fan of memories surrounding her; the floor is carpeted no longer with polyester rug but with her mother’s papers, photos, and belongings.
Opening the box from the nursing home led to an inadvertent exploration into each item she pulled from within.
More than anything else, the box is filled with old photos.
They’re single, individual remembrances—not the collections from Nuhad’s dozens of scrapbooks with yellowed, sticky paper cementing memories in time.
As a child, Haifa would attempt to follow along, looking through the various piles and attempting to read the Arabic scrawl on the back unsuccessfully as Nuhad put them all together.
The hobby made Nuhad happy, or at least content.
There are so many photos here that Haifa almost thinks she should make a scrapbook in her mother’s honor.
But none of these things represent Nuhad—not really.
Papers and photographs filter through her fingers and fall to the floor, suddenly apparent in their transience.
Her eyes slowly fill instead with the screen of memory.
A photograph cannot capture the quiet authority with which Nuhad used to sit in the corner of the living room; a letter cannot comprehend the tenuous grasp she had on her own fate near the end.
These are just objects. There is nothing here but broken reflections piecing a shadow of a life together.
Grunting, brushing her hands against her pants, Haifa moves toward the kitchen.
Yellow lemonade is sitting in the yellow kitchen for her.
Liquid hits the cup loudly in the silent house as her mind wanders.
What’s meaningful after death? Haifa didn’t even know her mother well enough when she was alive, let alone to be the judge of what single photograph could serve as a good memory of her.
The photo of Nuhad stares at her from the mantel. Even from this distance, Haifa can see the beginnings of who she knew to be her mother, the lines around her mouth that eventually would haunt Haifa and whisper that everything was already gone.
The lemonade is tart against her tongue and she leans against the counter.
The clock says 5 PM Palestine time now, and Marina still hasn’t called.
She broke when she awoke an hour ago, needing to hear Marina’s voice, but she was only greeted by Hassan, who told her that Marina had been out since the morning.
Marina is discovering the place where Nuhad was a young girl. Where she had friends. A life. Everyday mundanities. She is discovering that Haifa could never have measured up to the city of life and memory. No, Haifa is a shadow of what should have been.
With Nuhad locking her past into an airtight box, she sealed the person she was from the person she became, becoming a shadow too.
On the rare occasion, Nuhad could recall a memory of youth, but did she also remember that she was a young girl once?
Could she have remembered that feeling? Nuhad, to Haifa, was only ever a woman who longed for her home and city, detaching entirely from reality some days in service of the bitterness of those memories.
She became ethereal. A dream, like Haifa.
She walks back to the living room, one fingernail between her teeth as she surveys the damage.
Smoothing her eyebrows, smoothing the lines and tension she holds in her face, Haifa feels her expression relax, as if she wants to prove to herself that neither her mother’s secrets nor Marina’s distance is hurting her.
It is in these moments that the grief weighs the heaviest.
“Okay.” Haifa sighs. She gathers the throw-away pile into the box and kicks open the door with her foot. Though it’s evening, humidity hangs over the air like a wet blanket. Her arms tremble beneath the weight; the box can hardly handle the burden of a life.
Unable to see over the box, Haifa trips over a raised crack in the pavement.
As she falls, the contents of the box fly into the air, and one piece makes a shattering crash as it hits concrete.
Heat braises her forehead as she sits up, inspecting the torn flesh of her skinned palms. She picks her way around the fallen glass and gathers up the contents again.
“Hm.” The photo from Haifa’s wedding—the one where Nuhad stood, smiling in the corner—is the one that smashed.
The fragile photo paper waves against the air as she picks it up, threading it carefully through the glass.
But something falls out from behind. It’s folded, and the softly permanent creases have been made and remade several times.
As she unfolds it, three more pieces of paper fall out from within the shattered frame. Faint, weak Arabic handwriting is barely visible on the main page, as if written with a trembling hand. On the three other papers is also an Arabic script that has been faded by time.
“Ana b-bidi—” Haifa struggles to read the main note, but the writing is spidery-thin and in a casual script that she’s never learned to read.
She pockets the pages and gathers the rest of the fallen papers.
The garbage lid slams shut behind the thud of the box, but Haifa is already on her way back inside by the time it echoes.
Sara’s number comes easily by memory, and Haifa punches the digits in one by one.
“Ah, Sara? Keefik?” she says after it connects. Unfolding each note, she lays them side by side on her kitchen countertop.
“Hi, habibti, how are you?” Sara’s voice sings familiar in her ear.