Chapter 7. Dyspnea #3
“Only as much bravery as anything else.” He sits up on his chair and crosses his legs beneath him.
“Listen, Marina—we’re not superheroes. It’s not something special to live in Palestine under occupation.
We’re human. We have ordinary dreams of ordinary lives.
It’s just—yes, we’re trying to change things, and get others to see the injustice and end the occupation, through activism, or education, or throwing stones.
We all resist in our own ways. But in the day-to-day—it’s life.
Same as any other. We’re not special, and I don’t want you or anyone else to think that.
It turns us into something untouchable—a people with some brilliant ability to endure.
And when we mess up, when we do our best but it sometimes isn’t good enough, we’re villainized because now we have such a far way to fall. ”
Her face flashes hotly with shame. She doesn’t say anything.
“It makes people feel like they don’t need to help us because we’re so resilient.
” An exhaustion hangs from the word. “A grandmother in Gaza cultivates a garden, growing her flowers again and again, even as Israel bombs it. A father in Ramallah has to deal with the tiny water allowance Israel grants him and make it last each week between five children. In Haifa, we ride the tram with soldiers. But this resilience is forced on us.” He sighs, and his voice is quiet when he speaks again.
“You have to remember that we’re just people.
What’s the alternative? To stop living? To stop growing plants, or drinking water? Of course not.”
Marina nods quietly; rocks tumble down her lungs as she breathes. “Anyone would keep trying.”
Khaled presses his lips together and flips back, staring at the television again. “You should really get some rest.”
Marina nods, but her mind is filled with flurrying, racing thoughts as she lies down.
She thought she would find the truth in Palestine, but Nuhad had hidden it in order to protect her family.
Guilt creeps at the corners of her mind, asking why she needed to do all of this in order to understand who she is, but she brushes it away.
In the space where the loss would normally lie is a small hole slowly being sewn together by Khaled and Rania and Haifa and Nuhad and Haifa the city. Marina is the product of everyone in her life—she is the very living history that Nuhad sacrificed her life and community for.
She imagines the fast deaths and the slow ones, and steadily, she drifts into a dreamless sleep.
The Cohen household is filled with the laughter of Benjamin and Noa’s friends; they are hosting a dinner tonight, rescheduled a couple of days early due to the impending storm, and asked for Rania to come in outside of her normal hours.
With each course delivered, an equal number of dirty dishes is sent back to Rania to scrub.
Her arms have been aching from cleaning since before the guests even arrived.
“Aha,” Rania curses under her breath. The dish soap is out, and the extras are in the supply closet.
Her gloves snap back from her wrists with a wet crack, but powdery dryness covers her exposed hands from the glove material. Calluses thicken the heels of the hands that come up subconsciously to pat down her hair as she exits the kitchen and enters the dining room. The party is all there.
“Ah, Rania, how are you doing in there?” Benjamin’s cheeks are rosy with the flush of alcohol, and beneath the low lighting, a thin sheen of sweat glistens off of his forehead.
“I just need to get some dish soap, sorry. I’ll be right back.” Rania returns a polite smile and squeezes herself between Noa’s chair and the wall in order to get to the hallway, but Noa calls out to her.
“Here, here—let’s get Rania’s opinion, yes? Rania?” Noa turns to Rania with a glint in her eyes. “Do you know the haunted house? The one off of Derech HaAtsma’ut? It’s one of the ones that sits on top of a storefront area.”
Rania cringes as she stills in her tracks; she remembers the street by a different name. She nods. “Yes. It was my friend’s home.”
“Oh, then you’re perfect for this discussion!” one of the guests cries out, her words slurring together.
“So.” Noa clasps her hands and props her chin up.
She leans forward, lowering her voice. “Has that house always been haunted? Do you know? I ask because—I don’t know if you heard—the last occupants went missing.
Well, one of them did. The other had to leave after they couldn’t find her body. And now it’s up for sale … again.”
“I don’t understand how they keep selling that godforsaken home,” another guest mutters.
“They sell it to Americans. You didn’t know?
No one here will buy it,” a third guest says, sticking her nose into the air with a sort of false haughtiness, as if she knows the city and her houses more deeply than the Americans—as if she, as a grandfathered settler, is a single degree closer to the land.
“How does someone disappear in her own home?” Benjamin interrupts. “There must be a logical explanation.”
“And there’s the rub.” Noa breaks her ominous facade and laughs with the others. “Do you think the house is haunted? Truly, we’ve been debating this and need a tiebreaker.”
The room spins for a moment—Rania smells bleach and grasps at one of the guests’ chairs to steady herself. She cannot breathe.
“Are you okay?” Benjamin asks.
“It’s the haunted house curse!” Noa squeals. The table roars in laughter. It is so hot in this room.
“The house kills people,” Rania says, wanting it all to stop.
“Well, people certainly keep dying near it,” Noa says, stretching her mouth into a faux grimace. She wrings her hands as if she can shake the murders off of her. “So you think it’s haunted then?”
Rania nods. “Yes.”
“But Rania has an interesting perspective, dear,” Benjamin interjects. A glass of wine is swaying slightly in his hands. “Her friend used to live there. Was it always haunted?”
“Who knows what makes a house haunted?” Noa laughs.
Rania wants to be anywhere else in the world now.
Marina beats in the back of her mind like a constant drum—why is she here, cleaning for this party, and the girl is still in the hospital?
She would rather be waiting in the fluorescent-lit, sickly-scented, cold waiting room of the hospital for news on Marina than be subject to this questioning.
Anything, truly, would be better than this.
“Murder,” she says quietly. Her hands tremble, so she clasps them together. “Murder haunts a house.”
The room stills. Everyone stares at Rania.
“Murder hangs over a house like the ghosts you think you know. You don’t know,” she says.
The boy who was shot is emblazoned into her vision—his face is stamped in red over this crowd.
“The reason that house is haunted is because my friend and her family were kicked out in 1948. Like so many—murdered. Displaced. In my family, too.” Rania reaches for her throat, feeling the heat of the words that lie there.
Regret should be the dominating emotion—she’s ruined their night and possibly cost herself some hours, that much she can see by their falling faces—but she feels free in the truth. “That’s what makes a house haunted.”
Everyone freezes; Benjamin and Noa visibly stiffen. She grabs her husband’s hand beneath the table and squeezes. From where she stands, Rania can see this. She turns away, to the closet, and gets the dish soap.
When she returns, conversation has returned, if at a lower intensity. The room quiets entirely as Rania walks back through to the kitchen on unsteady legs. She makes it to the sink and grabs on to the stainless-steel edges as her vision continues to spin.
“Okay,” she mutters to herself. She only needs to make it through tonight. The next course comes out, and a fresh batch of dirtied dishes piles up beside Rania. She breathes through her mouth involuntarily.
The streets have quieted by the time Rania finishes. As her hand goes to put the extra cleaning supplies in the closet, Benjamin clears his throat behind her. She turns to face him.
“Rania,” he says. He has never said her name right. It is all jumbled in his mouth, the wrong tongue for the wrong name. “We’re making the difficult decision to let you go.”
Rania blinks. The only emotion she feels is anger for having finished her shift.