Chapter 9. Where Is Nuhad? #2
Nuhad did as she was told, but terror underlined the instructions with more screams. Her last glance out of the window was one of people running through the streets.
“Mama, what’s happening?”
“People are panicking! What else?” Basel paced back and forth. “The Zionist scum have spent all afternoon telling us to evacuate. Well, now what do you think happens?”
“Are we not evacuating?” Tariq asked, his voice small.
“No, habibi. No. We’ll be safe. Don’t worry.” Victoria sat beside him, pushing his hair back from his forehead like she did when he or Nuhad was sick.
“But other—”
“We’re staying here.” Basel’s eyes were hard. “Go get ready for bed.”
Nuhad did as she was told, but the ground continued to shake, now with the added thunder of a hundred fleeing footsteps.
They slept in the living room that night, all four pressed together on the floor. In her wide-eyed insomnia, she wanted only to go to her bedroom and uncover her journal from beneath the tile. She craved to put pen to paper and scratch all of the worries from her mind.
Eventually, her eyes grew tired. Nuhad managed to sleep for a spell, but she awoke to the horrible sounds of screams. Her blood went cold.
“Mama? Baba?” She felt her way blindly through the dark, but there was no need, for her parents had already been woken by the wails.
“Nuhad? Tariq? Are you okay?” Her mother felt for her, but the warmth of her skin did little to ease her breath. They sat together in the heart of the home, a family of four, as they listened to the shrieks of pain and death coming from the streets.
“It sounds like they’re being butchered,” Basel whispered. He rose, crouching toward the window to see what was happening. His fingers flicked open the shade, and by the light of the moon, fear sharpened his eyes. It was the first time in her life that Nuhad had ever seen her father scared.
“Be careful,” Victoria said.
“Ya Allah,” he breathed. “There are thousands in the street.”
The sounds of screaming stopped for a moment, and beneath it, they could all hear what people were shouting.
“Deir Yassin! Deir Yassin! Deir Yassin!”
The coldness of her blood further chilled to a bone-deep horror with the implication of what they screamed.
Deir Yassin was the small village just outside of Jerusalem that had been massacred only a couple of weeks prior.
Men, women, and children were slaughtered without mercy and the shock of this cruelty had spread among the whole of Palestine like a terrifying promise: You’re next.
“We have to go. We have to go.” Victoria stood, her hands pulling up Nuhad and Tariq beside her. Nuhad twisted from her reach, wanting to grab her journal, the painting she’d bought, her homework—she would get in trouble if she didn’t do it.
“But—”
“I will not allow my children to be razed to the ground like they’ve done with everything else in this godforsaken country!” Victoria’s words overtook the mass outside. After a moment, Basel nodded.
“Come.” Basel ushered them out of the door, locking up after him and slipping the key into his pocket.
The sheer number of people on the streets stole Nuhad’s breath before she could even gasp.
Men in nightclothes like her father’s carried babies; women wearing half-adjusted hijabs and house slippers had a panic in their eyes that burned brighter than the night; children in pajamas were being shuffled along, their hands squeezed white by tight grips that refused to lose them.
People pushed past one another in a desperate bid to seek safety, and the ever-growing, ever-moving mass of bodies swelled forward toward the sea.
Marina and the boy move quickly—it’s like the opposite of running in a dream.
They float. They fly. There is no weight holding her back nor shadow of the city biting at her heels—she is a dove’s feather soaring in the wind.
The fluorescent hallway and narrow alleyway flash by like movie frames flicking through a projector, faster than her eyes can adjust.
And then—
There’s the beach. The young boy, lying on the sand. A soldier above him, walking away, and Marina sees this through his eyes. He turns his head toward the ocean. His sister—
Stop.
It’s as if he forces the image, and Marina, from his head, and she sees the street as it exists again.
“It’s okay.”
Marina looks at him curiously, feeling as if she knows him but can’t quite place him. This part feels like a dream. Her being becomes even lighter as they move toward her grandmother’s home.
You know what it is.
Marina nods. The house is a small, inoffensive stone front that has been weathered by the sea for generations. There is a small pot of flowers on the front steps. In the window, candlelight glows.
“Yes.” She takes a deep breath in. “I’ve been here before.”
Does it know you?
He looks at her curiously, head cocked to one side. She nods.
“I think so.”
Silently, the boy disappears from her side, dissipating into the air like smoke. Marina pushes open the door. It’s as if the entire house turns to face her as a sunflower does to the sun, rumbling deeply in the stones below. It opens for her. She knows it opens for her alone.
“To the car!” Basel yelled, his voice hardly carrying over the screams. He gestured to the Studebaker parked in the street. With Tariq in hand, Victoria nodded and tried opening the door.
Nuhad followed suit, panting as she used all of her strength against the surge of people; as soon as she opened it a few inches, she stuck her hand inside for leverage.
But an unseen person fell into her from behind, and the impact knocked the wind out of her and caused the door to slam shut on her ring finger.
A yowl escaped, an unreal sound that she didn’t recognize as her own, not until her father picked her up and shoved her through the open door of the driver’s seat. Her forehead knocked against the middle console.
“Climb to the back!” he yelled, but there was no need, for he was already shoving himself in behind her, forcing her to the dark leather upholstery in the back seat.
“You have the key?” Victoria asked. “Go. Go!”
The old Studebaker roared to life, the engine chugging rhythmically and vibrating beneath them. Nuhad tried to suck at her finger, but the sensitivity pained her, and so she waved it about as her father tried to clear through the road. Her head throbbed dully in the background.
“Get out! Out of the way!” Basel yelled through his rolled-down window, but there was only a single-minded focus on evacuation. The car inched forward once, twice, and stopped when Basel turned it off.
“What are you doing?!” Victoria yelled.
“We’re never going to make it out like this. We have to go on foot, like everyone else.” Basel turned back and locked eyes with Tariq. “Come. Come here. I’ll send you through the window.”
Tariq crawled forward, his pale blue pajamas bright in the darkness, and he whimpered a little as Basel held him out of the window. Tariq’s feet kicked out a path through the people and Basel managed to lower him onto a thin sliver of space beside the car.
“Come, Nuhad.” Basel did the same with her. Once Nuhad was safely on the ground, he and Victoria managed to crawl out of the windows and lower themselves onto the street.
“To the sea! To the sea!” From every direction, screams blazed together, one man shouting up ahead for his cousin to hear, or one mother screaming at her daughter to hurry her little feet.
They formed a line—Basel grabbed Nuhad and Tariq by the hands and Victoria came to Nuhad’s other side. Together, they were linked in a fragile chain as Basel pushed their way through the bulging, heaving mass of people.
The crowd was so thick, so viscous in its movement that Nuhad felt as if she couldn’t breathe.
Her hands gripped tightly to her mother and father, knuckles straining to keep hold, and the oxygen came only in irregular gasps in time with her heartbeat.
People pushed at her from the back and sides, and she in turn pushed those in front of her; it was an impossible, unending torrent of forward motion.
Her unsteady balance threatened to trip her with each dangerously shuffling footstep—if Nuhad fell, she knew she would be crushed.
Then, she lost contact with her mother’s hand.
Nuhad glanced behind her, hair flying into her face, and through the black strands and mass of people she could no longer see Victoria.
She yanked on Basel’s hand as hard as she could, and he turned to face her.
His face was pure terror—unlike anything she’d ever known from the father who was supposed to be a strong, unmoving guide.
In the darkness, the whites of his eyes were ablaze.
“Mama!” Nuhad screamed, pointing her chin toward the onslaught. Her voice barely carried above the screams, the bodies, but Basel understood. He hoisted both children over his shoulders, flopping them so that they folded over his body, and pressed against the oncoming tidal wave of people.
Thick anxiety clouded all other thoughts—her mother had been lost, sent back with the current—but in the darkness, she saw a pale hand reach out from the cobblestone darkened by shadows.
“Mama!” she screamed again, and pointed at the outstretched palm below them.
Basel gripped the two children and Nuhad was righted, clutching at her father’s loose nightshirt.
He half crouched to grab Victoria, but the relentless surge of panicked people fell to the side and on top of her in their own inescapable forward-moving rush; turning, he put his back toward them and became an immovable object as he helped Victoria up.
Nuhad and Tariq grabbed at her arms and strained to pull her up. She managed to get to her knees and Basel put one of her arms around his shoulder to help her stand. Victoria’s face was a white moon.
“I fainted. I fainted. I’m okay,” she said, but Nuhad was the only one who heard her.