Chapter 10. Salt #3
Nuhad glanced up at Siham without moving her head. She stared for a moment. “I guess it would be, for you.”
“It’s not like everyone was so far before, but”—Siham placed a hand on her belly and smiled softly—“there’s a difference between having a mother forty-five minutes away and having one right here. It’ll be nice when she’s born, having her family here.”
“She?”
“I’ve decided she’s a she.”
Siham’s belly had rounded out slowly with her growing child.
She’d realized she was pregnant a few months after they’d had to move into her home, and Victoria especially was ecstatic.
She’d already taken all of the extra time she could to take care of Philippe.
The young boy provided them all with a distraction, and a new baby would give even more chances.
Victoria—Nuhad could clearly see—was filling the cavernous hole in her heart.
“Do you know what I heard today at the school?” Siham asked. Nuhad raised her eyebrows. “The Haganah used loudspeakers. During the war.”
Nuhad’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”
“You said you heard screams, right? They used loudspeakers to broadcast them. Some were real, but most were fake. They wanted to add to the chaos. A lot were prerecorded over the speakers.”
“Fake?” Nuhad looks into the distance, staring at a candle flame. “Fake?”
“They played the sounds of people being tortured and killed.”
“How?” Only this was whispered, for if Nuhad said anything else, it would come out as a whimper.
She had heard bloodcurdling cries that night.
She still heard them in both her nightmares and her waking life; even when she stuffed her ears with her fingers, the wails came through the muffled wall of her mind nonetheless.
In fact, they almost felt more intimate there, for they were the only sound to penetrate.
“I don’t know.” Siham reached out a hand and patted her knee. She shook her head. “I don’t even want to think of how they got those sounds.”
Nuhad looked at her sister. It was true, what they said about pregnancy. It caused her sister to emanate a slight glow from the inside out—even now, when she was concerned. It also helped that, in the end, Nazareth had been spared in the war.
Nuhad forced a smile and shook her head.
Her sister hugged her sideways. “It’s going to be okay, khayta. Tariq is watching over us.”
Nuhad pressed a response out of her lips. “I know,” she said, but she didn’t. Siham was constantly referencing Tariq’s death, but he’d only been six or seven when she left home. She didn’t know him. Not really.
“Come on.” Siham stood and wrapped the sea scarf around her neck again. “Let’s close up early and get going.”
“But we don’t close for another thirty minutes.” Nuhad was already standing, ready to leave even as her words resisted.
“Yes, well, there’s a new settlement nearby.” Siham walked around the counter and blew out the few lit candles. “I’m not leaving you alone at night to close by yourself.”
Licking her thumb and forefinger, Nuhad stamped out the last candle. It hissed and sputtered to darkness.
“A new settlement? Here?”
“They’re coming in droves now. New ones are popping up everywhere.
Every day.” Siham held open the door for her sister and ushered her outside.
The cold nipped at her through her coat.
Outside, rows of stores with houses above them sat across from their store.
Nuhad avoided their gaze. “It’s not that far away. I’ll point it out on our way home.”
Nuhad opened the car door and shivered as the leather touched her through her clothes. “How?”
The car strained to start, then, roaring, Siham turned out of the small street that their family’s shop was on. “How can they live atop other people’s lives? I wish I knew. That’s another question entirely.”
They sat in silence and Nuhad looked out the window.
Winter had a way of stilling everything, of cocooning everything in its cold grip.
Siham’s words echoed in Nuhad’s ears. She wished that after the war, everything had come to a halt as it did in winter.
It was impossible to her that within the week after that night, Nuhad had been attending a new school.
She was expected to make new friends. Nothing had stopped, let alone slowed.
Siham slowly pressed on the brakes as the car came to a small overlook. She pointed.
“There.”
It was a small pinprick of light in the valley’s darkness. Buildings had already cropped up, seemingly from nothing.
“Is it…?”
“Yes. It’s new. Built out of thin air.” Siham waved her hand.
Nuhad pressed her eyelids shut for a moment and heard a low rushing sound in her ears. “How long have they been there?”
Siham shook her head. “They just moved in.”
Nuhad didn’t take her eyes off of the settlement as Siham drove away. Everything had frozen except for the settlement expansion. They just kept going. Taking.
As they stepped foot in Siham’s warm home, Nuhad’s shivers would not leave her.
The settlers were there. Their lives were superimposed over the lives and deaths of the people who were killed or displaced to make room for them.
They traveled from far-reaching places to settle their blood-soaked land and make it a country of their own.
It was as if by settling over these bodies and houses, they made their worth greater by placement alone.
What made their lives worth more?
Haifa gnaws on a nail as she adjusts the first page in the light. Her eyes are drawn to the sentence written at the top like a magnet.
This is my confession.
She immediately looks out to the seat in front of her, pressing a hand against her mouth with the sudden realization that the pages are written by her mother.
Her handwriting was fragile, and thin, but with these words, she knows it’s Nuhad.
Who else would write and seal a confession behind a photo of the two of them together? It must be her.
Tariq died in 1948. And it was my fault—I killed him. I swam toward the boat just as a soldier caught him and shot him. I left him to die.
Haifa’s blood chills her skin and causes goose bumps to crawl over her flesh.
Who is Tariq?
Whether friend, or relative, or neighbor, Nuhad wrote of his death clinically, as if she were a doctor reporting the death of a patient. One paragraph. Tariq died.
It’s painful to read in her mother’s voice. Haifa slumps back in her chair, her eyes scanning the same line over and over again: It was my fault—I killed him.
The realization of it comes crashing on Haifa like a tsunami. If her mother really did kill someone, it makes sense as to why Nuhad became the distant, avoidant mother she’d always known. Nuhad was hiding a monumental secret.
Who was Tariq?
It had to have happened during the war—when Nuhad first began locking the past away.
If she did kill someone—and it must have been accidentally, Haifa rationalizes—why would Nuhad want to speak about the extent of the horrors she’d experienced, let alone relive them?
It would have been harrowing enough to experience it as a sixteen-year-old girl.
Haifa’s heart pounds as she reads the final sentence of the paragraph:
But this is not my only confession.
Basel started closing the shop each day at sundown, afraid of keeping it open after dark with the new settlement.
In the thin veil of a long winter night, Nuhad knew he feared every possibility.
More and more people were moving in each day, and the threat of displacement grew.
It was an aching, gnawing worry that fluttered through the backs of their minds, ever-present with the fragile decision to stay in Nazareth.
Nuhad’s back was hunched where she sat on the stool as she waited in front of the register. The door opened and the bell jingled.
“Ahlan,” she said automatically. They were a pair of men—one was older, with a full beard whose long whitish whiskers tickled his mouth, and the other looked to be his son from their similarly broad chins and deep brown eyes.
The younger one had a yarmulke on his head that he re-clipped as they walked in.
“Shalom,” the older man said.
“What would you like?” Nuhad asked. Imperceptibly, she nodded at her father, who stood beside the stove.
He had taken on the role of sweets chef, and his constant presence was a daily comfort with these new fears.
Basel met her gaze, understanding her meaning, wiped his hands, and came to stand beside her.
“What can I get for you?” he asked, gesturing to the glass case with sticky-sweet displays of hariseh and warbat and knafeh and baqlawa. Nuhad stared at them as their eyes were taken to the sweets. There were no guns on their backs. Her shoulders relaxed slightly.
“Hmm,” the older man mused. “What’s in that one?” He pointed to the triangles of warbat.
“It’s filo dough with ishta inside,” Basel said.
Nuhad noticed the confusion on the man’s face and kept her face impassive, though she felt a satisfying laugh bubble in her throat.
They could not claim the land and its gifts, not truly, not ever.
It was a small consolation, but it nevertheless turned up the corners of her mouth slightly.
“Mmm,” he said. “I’ll take one of that.” His son also pointed to another dessert, smudging his finger on the glass.
Nuhad stared at it and her eyes narrowed at this greasy blemish, becoming slits as she willed all of the hatred she held into its print.
That small oily stain would be wiped up later, and Nuhad’s evil eye curse along with it, but she didn’t care. It deserved every bit of hostility.
“Nuhad?” Basel’s gentle voice snapped her out of her gaze. “Can you get them some water?”
“Ah.”
“Are you okay?” he murmured, nodding slightly with the question. Nuhad smiled back and he squeezed her arm knowingly. Basel was kinder to the settlers after healing from his injuries, believing that if they only could understand the Palestinian plight, they would be compassionate and leave.