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Author’s Note:
Hello and Assalamu'alaikum to anyone and everyone who’s taken the time to read this, I really appreciate you following the story this long.
I’ve worked really hard on this for an extended period of time now, having to delay its release multiple times to ensure I had my facts straight and my story straight. I tried including as many embedded donation links to help families under the threat of warfare and starvation. Obviously though, I couldn’t include all of them which is why I’m attaching a link below for you to visit Operation Olive Branch, an organisation dedicated to guiding people like you and me in our efforts to directly help the people in Gaza.
Even if you find yourself financially unable to support a fundraiser or line please do check other ways you can help aid the Palestinian cause by going through some of the other options in the same link.
https://linktr.ee/opolivebranch?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAabGLd4-s1Rw9PGx1_Rs22eJXbBYeYM0INVGT76ZtSR8VSKN06lpElu19dU_aem_ZmFrZWR1bW15MTZieXRlcw
Part 10-Final
June 14th, Friday-Jummah day
We prayed in communion, the sun burned on my sore back except on this day it burned with a flicker of hope for a new one. As we concluded the midday prayer the kids scattered toffees across the excess tarp we used for praying on the mud. I sat on it for a few minutes after the men left to get started on the fire for food. I collected my thoughts, the catastrophizing of which got steadily better in the weeks after the execution. I also made duas for my partner Yazan, whom I was informed had been martyred two days after the incident.
Hasbunā Allah wa ni'ma al-wakīl, I whispered into my palms, concluding my own prayer as I watched the children try to convince the adults to join in for the Eid festivities they prematurely planned.
(Allah is sufficient for us, and He is the best disposer of affairs)
They grew tired of not having others to play with, not having an air filled sphere to kick around obsessively and so they often lingered around me; sometimes acting as paintbrush caddies when my hands were caked with clay. I made my salawat and picked up the shiny rolls of chocolate, scooping them into my shirt. “Why didn’t you use the money to buy a ball? We have the Eid game to play on sunday” I said looking at the page of the calendar waving in the warm wind to the right of our rows. Hamza crossed his arms confidently, I was happy to see him like this.
“We won’t give you our chocolates for free!” he beamed, holding out his hand. I grinned at his business acumen and dug the pockets of loose harem pants.
‘Pay up!’ said Hossam, smiling broadly as we swung his arms around his friend’s neck, jokingly holding a finger gun to his head. The humour of the Palestinian children is dark, I reflected as I forked up 4 shekels for each of them.
The kids, especially Hamza, grinned contently at their earnings until Sarah snuck by, wearing a black baseball cap speckled with excess paint from my brush, and smacked the back of Hossam’s neck with her stump, making him drop the coins into her one intact hand cupped below his. It seems the cutting of her limbs didn’t take away her playful cunningness. I met her eyes as they sparkled with that delightful naughtiness I’d last seen before the war.
‘Haad mish 'adil!’ complained Hamza, with only one of the four shekels I gave him in his hand.
(that’s not fair)
‘Heik hu!’ she stood firmly, balling up the coins in her one fist. ‘Biddak akel, mish heik?’ she posed to the boys, who surrendered to her logic; you really couldn’t make men, even the little ones- choose anything over food.
(that’s how it is! you want food don’t you?)
In the distance, smoke- the good kind, emanated from the cooking of wholesome food made its way towards us, filling our senses and amplifying one of them. My stomach made a sound, the children laughed at all together, I had no siblings and even at the age of 24 with Alhamdullilah- a sizable circle of friends, I was not used to this kind of teasing.
I went back into the ceremony hall I had been living in for the past few weeks, with the exception of coming out to pray and eat the food made by this girl Renad, a pre teen who was practising making some dishes for eid, the costs for which the kids argued about outside as I returned to the product of my pain.
I stepped up the side of the stage, scrubbed clean of the dust and reconstructed it to the best of my and Mahmoud’s ability. Mahmoud was a student here before the place was bombed. He was devastated to see the condition of the place upon returning from his temporary living situation east of Rafah, in the aftermath of the ground invasion.
Despite mopping the grooves of the wood deeply and vigorously with a stick and dishcloth we used as a mop, you could still see the patches and marks of where the blood soaked in, to reside in the foundation of the performance stage forever.
I tiptoed around the clothes like I did that day with Farouq after the extermination, this time however, I was minding my step around sculptures I made in their places.
For starters, I feel like I have to tell you– these are not the type of sculptures that come to mind when you think of a tribute.
I nearly tripped over the still wet sleeve of Mohanned, the shiny black paint I sprayed in layers dripped slowly through the cracks in the floorboard. I need to get to repainting that as well, I winced thinking about my Eid spent detailing wood in the crevices under the sculptures.
This was worth it, I told myself, marvelling at the scattered clothes around the room cast in plaster, immortalised. They were worth it.
I kneeled down between the two poles that were screwed into the ground. The chains that bound a human here were flung haphazardly, the metal rusting from the water exposure on that very first night after the massacre.
I leaned forward to get the helmet used to break them, I stared at it for a minute- thinking about those vindictive and crazed ones that used to stare back through the screen. I wiped it with the sleeve of my simple qamis, dyed pale yellow, and tossed it aside with a metallic roll to take out my tools soaking in a mixture of vinegar and olive oil. The pungent smell immediately hit me in the face so I quickly got the tools I needed, shaking off the excess fluid and covering the mixture back up with the helmet. Some would say it’s in bad taste to use the armour of a soldier to protect my senses but I would argue that it’s being put to better use now. All that thing did while it rested on the neck of men like that was shield their eyes and ears to the horrid things they were committing. Things like this, I thought as I looked at the piles of clothing surrounding my feet, encased in plaster that we mixed from the rubble.
We were making dreams out of our nightmares, I thought fondly, gripping the handle of my scalper harder. I hadn’t felt this in tune with everything around me since the dhur salat me and Farouq prayed on the day it happened. In the days that came after I worked mechanically towards a clear goal. I’d realised that there was no point in returning “home” and coming back to document the next siege. Because they obviously weren’t done yet, if the drilling and land pillaging from dusk to dawn meant anything, but we were done. The people here, notwithstanding me, were tired of convincing the world of something they would never be able to see for themselves, convincing them of horrors they could banish with a swipe.
Still, the young Samir- the boy who unstuck his grades from the fridge to put his drawings on it would want the world to see something, to feel anything for my people hiding and crying undercover. Again, it’s not like I could abandon all these memories, however horrific they were. How could I return “home” with my Danish passport and stand in front of that refrigerator with drawings made by my younger self pasted on to block it all out? All I would feel is a sense of being forcibly removed from my actual home. Which was the reality of the occupation. Still, I wonder,
What is home?
My thoughts echoed, as abstractly as the tie dye patterns I painted on the sculpture of Roshdi’s shirt, because of course there were no walls for them to bounce between anymore.
I paused the slicing of damp clay I was doing to resemble folds in the white button down shirt Saleem wore until he didn’t. I looked around at the creations of clay surrounding me, this was where I was most myself. In a room, any room, even a place like this that could barely be called that- creating.
But the creating I was doing right now didn’t give me the same empty feelings that first drove me to pursue journalism instead. The low lying buzz of which led me to doing it less and less, until it finally stopped being a hobby that I kept at despite the pressure of studies and started being a memory I don’t even remember making. Until now that is.
I resumed carving the opening of Mr.Nasser’s tan brown “lecture pants” as we joked that day in the absence of the soldiers that we’re in reality, stalking us the whole time, envying our genuine laughs. I looked back at the printed picture I took after they dried, when the sun came out following the brief episode of rain.
I was the most in my element when I was creating…for.. Change? That wasn’t it, I didn’t expect anything to change from this. It was made clear to me by the mural I saw in december that paintings artists poured their blood and sweat into were no different from the home a man spent 40 years to build from the ground up, were no different from the stage so many people's dreams came true on-
I quit thinking so hard about it and fully resumed my role. The only role I was useful for, and was happy to do for the rest of my life.
I breathed in the air, clear in the absence of flood machines filled with toxic gas, or avalanches of dust and dirt off the mountains we tended trees on for generations, generations that were wiped out but remembered by the town folk. The expelled and the exiled.
I sanded a few pebbles I collected while skipping stones on the ocean with the children, to create the buttons of his shirt. I could’ve simply used some real ones but my “neighbors” if you could call them that, when really they tended to me like a beloved son–were already suffering from a shortage of proper clothing. I placed the buttons strategically on the shirt with extra plaster mixed with water to create an adhesive-like consistency. I placed them with the utmost care. I didn’t want to mess anything up, I didn’t want to mess with this snapshot in time I was recreating. I stood up finally, tucking the thin carving knife behind my ear, to see how everything was looking too far. It was almost done with the exception of the paint splattered floorboard, the protective sealant I could only apply when everything was dry and of course, the people who once wore them. I scanned the stage, turned around and looked down to see the cream coloured shirt I had to mould on the floor, because that’s where it was scattered after ripping it off the man. Originally, in the photo, that shirt adorned drops of blood that seeped into the fabric and stayed even after vigorously washing it, but I decided not to paint it after setting the shirt on piled rocks placed to hold its shape when applying the clay and paper mache layers. There was not one drop of red paint used in this entire room. The people who wore these clothes didn’t only die in them, they lived that day out in them and I preferred to portray them in that light, as though they were still alive. Because they were.
وَلَا تَقُولُوا۟ لِمَن يُقْتَلُ فِى سَبِيلِ ٱللَّهِ أَمْوَٰتٌۢ ۚ بَلْ أَحْيَآءٌۭ وَلَـٰكِن لَّا تَشْعُرُونَ • ١٥٤
’Never say that those martyred in the cause of God are dead—in fact, they are alive!
Though you perceive it not.’
A part of me wondered if I should just skip out on the anti-wear layer, and let it age like things do, like the people who wore them were supposed to do. I placed my hand on my hips and wondered what was missing. A twinge of sadness touched me. I realised that I had missed out on the filmmakers pin for Roshdi’s shirt and the scored lines on the seams of the doll they had ripped apart in front of Nabhan.
I offered to have someone mend the scraps of the doll and return the only memento of his dear granddaughter back to him, as I did for the families of everyone involved, the ones I could find at least. Either the memory was too painful for them to keep or they didn’t see the value of holding onto their clothes, and I don’t blame them one bit for those reactions. How would you react, if you spent weeks hiding in a school or tent encampment? Being promised that your loved ones would return to you but when they do it’s in the form of fabric and ashes? Before I left them I told them what I had in mind, if they were okay with it. I was fully prepared to be on the receiving end of their entirely valid expression of misery, or a razor sharp slap to my face. But instead, they welcomed the idea of making something anew from the misery, as opposed to recording night and day only for it to fall on deaf ears. The daughter of the poet and professor Mr.Nasser wrapped me in a hug, pushing her fathers brown suit jacket back to me before she shyly pulled away. ‘He would’ve liked it’ she said in a video call I arranged during the beginning stages of the project, her eyes glistening with tears in the buggy video.
My eyes bounced from the dove while sculpting his shirt to the burst of colour in the sculpture of the beloved filmmaker’s shirt to the void of black worn by the man who no longer saw any beauty in the world, and therefore decided it wasn’t worth enduring any longer. The twinge of sadness shifted to guilt as I wished to have held him off for longer, to keep him here so he could see the beauty return. I wiped blooming tears and took a step back to see what was missing.
The keffiyeh Amir wore hung on the edge of the stage, tassels gently beckoning me. His militant uniform was taken for examination by the authorities and his scarf was the only thing that remained.
An image made itself clear to me. I took the scarf in my hand and folded the corner diagonally, aligning it to make a triangle. I tied the corners along the base of the triangle to the pole that stuck up from the ground, that I simply could not get to unfasten from the floor. I frequently stepped back to examine the scene and felt that the harmony of the statues were disrupted by the black metal poles jutting out of the ground. Not only was the unity disturbed but the black pole served as a reminder of the treachery the forced the crowd to stand speechless in front of that day.
I tied the tassels together on each of the three sides to make a singular triangular sheet. A flag.
The keffiyeh I fashioned into a flag stood limp due to slow wind at first but as I flapped it back and forth, it slowly started to pick up- gently waving in the hot summer air, turning a symbol of destruction into that of triumph and pride. I myself watched proudly at the gentle dancing of the chequered red and white and remembered when I swore that this pattern would never look the same to me again again. That was true still, but in a different way.
‘Ya Samir!’ the voice of Ezz Zead projected from the outside. I turned around to see him standing there with a bottle of soda in his hand, unopened. He directed it’s mouth towards me in offering and I ran to him. Normally I would refuse the bottle and prefer that someone else drink it but on this particular day I was parched, my bad habit of forgetting to eat or drink when engulfed in my craft was one of the many habits I carried from denmark criticised by my family here. He handed me the soda and made his way towards the stage, looking at the fluttering of the flag I just set up. He looked back at me with a soundless expression of…gratitude, I observed, reading his features and the way he fiddled his moustache to hide his lip, biting back a cry.
‘Ya'ṭīk el-'āfyeh ya zalameh, shughul mumtāz’ he said, spreading his arms widely.
(may God bless you, good job man)
I never knew how to take compliments but I knew shrugging as if it was no big deal would be perceived as arrogant and a correct perception of the unnecessary gesture at that. So I stuttered, fiddling with the cap of the soda until he came over and opened it for me, patting my back in a way that said ’’I know what you mean” and I sighed, sucking in the slightly warmed juice that still quenched my thirst with pleasure.
Ezz Zead started heading back towards the tent where food was being served, asking me to come quickly before it was gone.
Apparently I wasn’t the only one who was delaying their meal, I realised as I stood against the wall, drinking the rest of my soda while watching Omar and Hammad demonstrate dribbling to the pre teen boys who managed to acquire a brand new football during the time I spent working on the sculptures. The boys showed the kids how to tap the ball lightly with the heels of their feet, keeping it close as they moved. Hamza and Hossam, or the ح brothers as we called them, ignored their tips and continued to kick the ball with the same thrill seeking intensity while Abdullah , who actually watched the two older boys intently, hoping to learn something new, mimicked the movements with his own two feet. I emptied my soda and watched him cautiously. The boy just had open heart surgery at the European hospital and was due for another one soon. Luckily Jenan arrived at just the right time, running past the tents to reach the rowdy boys, gold plait tumbling down her back in the dimming sun.
‘Yalla boys!’ she commanded, merging English and Arabic to get their undivided attention, which she did as they stopped the game to address her, the ball rolling away from their feet. She put her hands on her hips and asserted that they halt their game and come for lunch immediately.
‘Renad’s made sumagiyya!’ she exclaimed.
The faces of the five boys all lit up, with Hossam already running towards to smell of it while Hamza looked indecisively between the ball and the steam wafting through between the tents.
Omar, upon hearing the mention of the highly favoured dish, questioned her.
‘Leesh amaltīh il-yom? Kan lazem tkhallīh lil-Eid.’
(why did you decide to make it today? you should have saved it for eid.)
‘Liltadreeb’ she said simply, standing behind her and the young head cook’s decision. She then assured him ‘Ma tiḥtashmi, biykuun aḥla b-il-Eid’.
(For practice. Not to worry, the food will taste even better on eid)
‘Alaysa kadhalik ya ʿam Samir?’ she asked, turning to me for my opinion, catching me off guard.
ṭabaʿan bilttaʾkīd, bilttaʾkīd, I replied fully certain that whatever they decided to try out today would taste lovely on both occasions. She smiled in my direction and started leading the way, at which point I was compelled to follow. Jenan teased Hamza while I was looking for a place to stash my empty bottle.
‘Yalla, lazem takul qabel ma tel'ab diddi’ said Jenan, kissing her muscles and wearing a grin of confidence which Hamza stuck his tongue out at.
(come on, you need to fill your belly before playing against me)
I disposed of the bottle and pocketed the steel bottle cap, having an idea of what to do with it once I returned tomorrow to polish the sculptures. I looked back one last time at the tribute, an understanding of just what I meant to do all along finally dawning on me as I turned on my heel and followed everyone back.
My intentions, frozen behind ice and blurry even to me- thawed and unfogged.
Creating was the one thing that made me a free man,
a free Palestinian, irrespective of how many times the identity has been stripped away from me through denying my right to live and my right to live freely with the pride I saw in all these faces as we sat down to eat. It wasn’t only about that though. I wanted the freedom to leave a mark. To replace the torn down walls of my city with new ones, new ones as resilient as the people I spent the past 6 months of my life with and as unshakeable as the faith each one of them carried, even whilst the matter of their lives were being debated, put up for sale and doubted.
The keffiyeh billowed in the distance and I vowed that each and every stroke of my chisel or my paintbrush would go into making art that would be remembered as anthems for our destined liberation.
the world says
art should not be political
i disagree
for my art to be not political
i have to be able to hear the birds chirping
and not the bombs falling
-El Jones
Part 9
The fire department never came. It was the rain that did. Our salvation was here, albeit a bit late but-
No.
It arrived like it was decreed to do so, divinely, and I was not about to sit here on the sidewalk lamenting all the ways my lord abandoned me when my nafs knows that’s not true. When my eyes themselves bore witness to the stage crashing down on the tyrant, missing the girl by a split second and silencing his taunts with a rain of debris.
I watched the black smoke be put out by the world’s largest fire hydrant. I marvelled at the strong integrity of the building revealing itself in the overhead sun, finally apparent with the disappearing smog. The overhead sun stared straight down at this mess, bright but not brighter than the flares lit by the soldiers in the small hours of black before it rose, not brighter than the white phosphorus the rascal children of Gaza mistook for celebratory fireworks in October.
As rain seeped into the building, spraying sideways into the windows of the vacant floors I remembered my camera, long forgotten and left on the chair. The rain will probably destroy the internal battery, I thought to myself; in no rush at all to retrieve it.
After the dust dispersed, a few actual ambulances arrived. Farouq and I went to follow them into the building as we were the only ones still at the scene. Everyone still alive went to accompany the injured in transferring them to the European hospital in Khan Younis with the nearest surviving hospital, a field hospital that was already exceeding its maximum capacity, caring or rather; doing its best to care for the patients displaced from the largest healthcare centre. And now they had even more coming their way. I hope they get the care they need, and aren’t shunned by the overburdened doctors. Luckily enough they were going there with four, including the American Volunteer.
2 men with longing looks of bloodlust in their eyes or rather the aftermath of it dragged away Mouin, a friend I hadn’t made yet but who lived opposite to me in the small tents they had allotted for press and civilians. Or at least the civilians they deemed civilian. Although he wasn’t being treated with the dignity of one now as they dragged him by Grey toes while the hands carrying him, the fingers that had committed a 1000 atrocities were protected with firm gloves.
Again, I thought about the irony of the help we needed back then arriving now, when all that was left to show for the horrific massacre that occurred in this room were the charred bodies of the shaheeds and of course, their clothes. The fact that most of them were the bodies of the IDF soldiers brought me little peace. That fact alone could be reason enough for them to twist the narrative. I could see the headlines in bold now as I neared the stage, leaving Farouq who searched the disintegrated supplies closet, stepping over the door that was blown off its hinges to find something to cover up his mass produced inmate jumpsuit from the damp chilly air.
“IDF soldiers killed in blaze while fighting a hotbed of terrorism”
It occured to me that I should have offered him my vest. I shrugged off the awkwardness.
The bodies were being wheeled out like a crew taking down props after some sick production. Routinely and as orderly as grief stricken survivors could ask for from stingy humanitarian organisations. A stretcher shoved past me and my face crumbled at the small, grey arm stuck out from under pale white coverings, princess pink tulle spilling over the edge of the cot,
I hope she will be the happiest ballerina in heaven.
Engines started up and revved away carrying more than their allowance of weight inside them in the form of corpses and in the form of mothers clinging to them. The awful part was that the bodies inside those trucks weren’t limited to the army and civilians executed in this room. Those ambulances outside and those box trucks included some, but not all of the people shot dead in the street, targeted by snipers skilled for the kill or quadcopters that shoot at anything that moves.
Farouq came back behind me while I made a round of the room, looking for my camera. I then hopped onto the thin, elevated strip of wall lining the perimeter of the floor, peering outside the hole on the left of the stage, where I first looked in to see Mr.Nasser tortured, wondering if maybe they threw it outside when Farouq comes up behind me, tapping my shoulder.
He hands me the unscathed hunk of metal and I felt like chucking it out the window where I thought it was. ‘Where did you find it?’
He points to the foldable metal chair, one of the only four intact in the room, beside a crushed one splattered with blood slowly thinning into the pouring water. A torn piece of sparkly bodice was caught on the piece of the ceiling that crushed it, and the little girl sitting on it.
Sombre stoicism festered into a boiling, blinding anger at the unfairness of it all . How was it that this camera, this insentient cube of metal and glass that only ever served as a testament to everything tha was wrong with the world– survived,unscathed, while a human child—innocent and full of life left to live—lay crushed beneath rubble. I somehow survived through all of this and get to have this piece of machinery, this.. This thing in my hand while her father returns to his nonexistent home without his daughter, his bloodline, in his arms?
I dropped the camera down with its overly swung strap. Its metallic surface decorated with beads of water haunted me with its untouched perfection. Like I guessed however, the battery was almost dead, so there’s that.
I walked with Farouq to the stage where he sat, too weak to stand, legs dangling from it, over a wet pile of clothes, besides another wet pile of clothes, in front of another wet pile of clothes and examining a string of gold between us. Ahed’s necklace. A testament to the life she led before it took her place in being killed by the israelis. I stuffed it inside in the pocket of my useless utility belt that carried no tools or food, just sand from being kicked around everywhere.
Meagre but saturated sun exposed some of the brown of the stage, some of the memories.
I swung an aching heel over the high structure and stuck my elbow into the loose plank to bring me up. I kicked away dust bunnies with congealed blood clung to them and made sure to tread carefully around the clothes like they were precious butterfly wings thumb tacked to the platform, for seemingly no reason other than to preserve what was left of those people for the time being, before the pieces of them we’re fed into an industrial sewing machine to make pyjamas for kids who could sleep without the sounds of warplanes threatening to split their heads, and their homes apart… Farouq sat, defeated, breathing into his clasped hands with prayer or silent anguish.
He took a deep breath which is when I looked down at him and asked ‘did they do this kind of thing in the desert?’
‘Laa, in the desert our dead bodies are rolled towards fridges or furnaces, and our parents do not have to carry us to either of those.’
My face changed at his idea of mercy, he was sickly from the outside, but I wasn’t able to see how sickly they must have turned him from the inside. I couldn’t stand anymore, I sank to the ground and hugged a padded knee to my chest, bullets of sweat beginning to bloom on my temple and listened.
‘The fortunate ones are returned to their families, albeit in pieces and the rest live out their sentence as spirits in cyro cells.’ he expressed indifferently, his wording almost poetic, in Arabic.
‘--and the remaining pieces?’ I asked, so desperately wanting to be surprised by the surely despicable answer.
He traced the jagged edge of what I perceived as the greater israel border onto the film of dust and rubble. After all that map was plastered in all of our childhood homes, however temporary they were before we swam between and outside borders in the camps of neighbouring countries, awaiting the next ambush so we could slip between the cracks to return home; home to “Falestina” in bright red on posters yellowed by age, placed on the walls to preserve any last bits of patriotic sentiment in children who were beginning to manifest Ben Gurion’s famous phrase–“The old will die and the young will forget.”
We will never forget this. And I will never forget the look on Farouq’s face as he wiped emotion off his face, features hardened by ungodly sights and said,
‘our organs are placed inside dying children who will grow up to pretend as if we don’t exist.’ I looked around the stadium, devoid of bodies proving that yes, and they will stop at nothing to make sure we don’t.
‘But verily our blood flows in their veins’ he said, a powerful statement emitted from a weakened soul.
And now our blood flows in the cracks of this stage, I thought passively, eyes locked on the arch of blood drawn from killing off people one by one in those positions. Clothes were strewn all over, littering the stage with bitter reminders.
I mustered up enough strength to look at the videos, just to check if they were taken off or if someone had caught wind of my scheme and switched it off. I switched it on with the bar in the corner glowing orange, threatening to black out any minute, I skimmed through the openings of the oldest videos and pictures, passing by the group photo we took minutes before disaster followed by a darkened shot capturing the back of the first victims feet and how he fell to them upon his death, all on tape. I couldn’t bear to sift through the evidence today like I did every night before today, mindlessly turning off my emotions to get the job done. I forgot what I was doing this for entirely.
My finger clicked past a flash of pink, I hit the back button, seeing the previous video. It was Hoda the girl crushed instead of this infernal device. She must have been sitting next to it while it was recording. The girl came in front of the camera lens, the flash of pink– and held it up to her face. She was smiling, I saw as I started crying, looking at the toothy grin and the faces she experimented with, winking as she said softly, playful in the most perilous situation.
‘Bye bye camera, raḥ arūḥ anām. raḥ alʿab maʿik lamma aṣḥa.’
(bye bye camera. i’m going to take a nap now. i will play with you when i wake up)
The camera switched off, leaving me yearning for more words from that pretty smile, stolen by her fate.
It was the loss of my cell phone that revealed the indigestible truth of this whole affair– the fact that things remained the same with or without my reposts of the bleak Gaza horizon, a skyline of everything we built from the ground up crumbled. Some journalists died to get the footage they required only for it to get thrown to the dogs who misconstrue everything it means to be a Palestinian living in this insufferable, volatile climate.
My lungs started to fill with smog that was no longer there.
I unbuckled my utility belt and caught my breath on the edge of the stage where the same rays of sun that shone on Adnan’s face migrated and now illuminated his blue scrubs green, as they lay on the ground- basking and inflating in the coming warmth.
The sun didn’t seem to care how devastated we were, it continued to rise day in and day out; setting at the same time, signalling to everyone else around the world that their work had ended while mine had just begun, because the horrors I witnessed in the secrecy of night proved different that the ones committed in the day. And that was the rule of my life until today; where it was proved to me here that they could commit crimes just as severe in the broad daylight… with the entire world’s eyes on them.
My thoughts were interrupted by the crackled sounds of crying emanating from outside the university building. I immediately hopped from the stadium, ignoring the wooziness that hit me afterwards as I ran.
The one thing I can do is run, I said critically to myself– reminiscing about jogging across paddy fields when I was a trackstar in high school.
And all that running for what, so I could dash out of predicaments I was better off dying in? I went over my tapestry of dark thoughts with a rosy paint roller, remembering Mohanned with every remotely resigned thing I pondered. Instead I analysed where that sound was coming from, the voices sounded familiar but– how could that be? They were all at the hospital right now weren’t they? Despite everything, despite my despondent state of body and mind, urgency coursed through my veins again as I jumped over some chicken wire to a street where a baqala stood at the very end, beside the dishonoured masjid.
I went into the miraculously intact front door, ringing the chime that hung above it to see a large group of mostly women, a few men, and even less children huddled around 3 coffee tables craning their necks up to the tv held still by a worker boy propped up on a dinghy ladder angling the router just right with the end of a broomstick handle.
I settled myself between two guys with their eyes locked onto the screen and craned my neck up to see the news as well where I saw–Karim, like I had never seen before looking bashed all around but clean in a spring green shirt moving his hands around explaining the crash! The boom! The way the room shook with the might of Allah before persecuting the soldiers whom he explained, had been spying on them before coming in and forcing everyone “to become like babies'', ‘Khalluna nseer zay il-babyat’, his way of telling the world that they forced us to take off our clothes. His own kiddish way with a lisp, yet clearer than I ever could convey. He carried much of the interview with the camera switching to Hashim who now wore a cast that went up till his hip showing that the limp we saw earlier was far worse than we thought and was sustained by what he revealed was a bullet to the spine. Everyone was laying everything bare, un-afraid and un-affected by what the israelis might say or do, because they had already subjected us to the worst.
A bright red bar transported words from the left to the right of the screen, and from the right to left again, in Arabic this time. This was an international broadcast.
‘23 Palestinians taken hostage by israeli defence forces in abandoned university hall’
A female voice, ethnically persian or african took the mic and spoke with journalist trained, polished words–
‘An American designed GBU-39 bomb targeted the Al-Quds open university, opening fire on israeli militants stationed in the area where Gazans fleeing from Rafah took shelter at 10:22 am’
‘Witnesses say members of the idf forced them to strip naked on the graduation stage, proceeding to torture them with whips and weaponry even throwing blades at them before killing 10- almost 11 people with the narrow escape of Ahed Tariqi.’
An image of everyone entering the hospital with Ahed sitting in the waiting room with those same cuffs sliding down her calves flashed on screen. The report went into more of the details of what we saw, of what I recorded. Myself and everyone in the room kept counting on an interruption from the israeli media office to pop up on screen, saying that the whole thing was a “horrific mistake” or a “targeted assault on terrorists” or whatever crap they kept coming out with to make the world believe them this long.
But their lies were unfurling in front of them in a web of their own doing. I set the camera down, relieved of my immediate responsibility to get these clips to a proper publication. Of course I would have to get these somewhere and I would, there was still a long way left to go and a long lineage of lies left to debunk but again, for now at least, I didn’t have to worry about reliving it until a later date.
life is coming, I silently murmured to myself remembering Saleem’s words.
As the crowd around me conversed with one another, something was happening in my head. The frayed ropes of my memory were reaching for each other, bursting with ink upon connection. I remained sitting while everyone got up, finally being able to recall the rest of the poem, which I only realised in this moment, was what Mr.Nasser was alluding to as he spoke his last words, a sonnet.
“Knives might eat what remains of my ribs, machines might smash what remains of stones,
but life is coming, for that is its way, creating life even for us.”
The men of the shop, along with Farouq who sat in the corner unbeknownst to me, chewing slowly on a rock hard disc of Taboon, all got up from their seats and made their way to the Masjid. I followed after, looking at the only working clock in the shop and remembering the time for Salah.
When we got there of course, the place was a sty. A religious centre of purity and serenity was ran through with the muddy hooves of those heya-
I bit my tongue, not wanting to invalidate my ablution for the Friday prayer, the prayer we ended up conducting in the swept clean (of cars that is) parking lot. The agreed upon Imam, a man with silvery hair and a beard that extended past his jawline, dusted off his jubbah unfortunately torn at his mid calf and said concisely yet powerfully,
‘Straighten your rows, let’s pray.’
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Part 8
‘Inta bikhair?!’ he repeated louder. I nodded after which he took my hand in his again, asking me to skip over the flame. I grabbed his hand but hesitated when I caught a glimpse of Ahed on the stage, trying to free herself from the chains as she struggled in a ring of flames, sweat dampening her hair as the heat licked her shackles. I pulled myself free from Farouq’s grip and ran along the line of fire to the stage.
(are you okay?!)
Just as I neared the steps, Ben brought himself up from his fallen stance by his blood caked fingernails. He staggered up in the flames and reloaded his gun, attempting to cause a death before tasting it himself.
I stood dumbfounded. I kept commanding my body to move, telling it that I couldn’t afford to get there after the bullet, but I simply couldn’t move my legs. I panicked and let the rolling floor shake me, they were shelling the outside of the building.
Some of the soldiers who were buried under the wreckage started to crawl their way out, disoriented and holding on to any sharp stone they could to free themselves, the same fate they bestowed on so many people.
‘Stop! We're inside! Cease fire!’ the ginger woman shouted in a tremulous voice. I focused and held my hand out the distance my feet couldn’t go, to Ahed’s confusion yet she still held her own slender arm out for me and I grabbed it climbing up and over the stage to meet her eyes coloured with the flames surrounding us, then her shoulder, then behind it where Ben stood, furious
‘I won’t let you be!’ he bellowed in angry coughs when-
Another rumble started up. The stage was breaking apart from the top.
The whole structure was about to land on the soldier too blinded by robotic rage to see the entire stage come crashing down on him until he was under it. This time the rifle hadn’t even fired. The huge curtain track had missed Ahed’s barefoot by a hair; however, all this curtain now surrounding two of us just caught on fire and she still wasn’t free of her shackles.
The air was beginning to thicken with smoke when I reached for the Helmet of Ben’s head, severed by the wooden framework of the stage with the same sociopathic stare.
I raised the helmet high, directing the little energy I had left into bringing it down against the rope of small interlocked chains binding her ankles to the ground anchor. The ache in my arms was numbed by primal desperation unlike anything I had experienced thus far. I swung at it again and saw yellow sparks produced from the friction. Each strike made sounds that brought Ahed’s hands to ears, extending the chain and making it tense up under the repeated hitting which resulted in it wearing out quicker.
The link between the metal loops were loosening, giving way, and I inhaled audibly taking in whatever strength from the tainted air and brought it down again with 5 times the force. I successfully broke the chain, and a few hundred sweats.
I helped Ahed get up, she apologised for her slow running due to the numbness in her legs from being on her knees for so long, and while I managed to break her free from the restraints on her wrists, her feet were still being weighed down by the cuffs biting into her ankles. Nevertheless we ran and I managed to get her into the pickup truck Farouq stole from the prison ward who was driving him and a few other detainees back into the pillaged city upon their release. External paramedics did not arrive at the scene yet but someone had gotten hold of a van that held the elders, Abu Hannan and the kids-
Wait. Only the two boys were there.
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Mona and the other girl who lay asleep, were still inside. I thoughtlessly ran back in with no support, or so I thought, against the driver barking for me to get in the vehicle. The distressed uncle begged for his niece back and for the van to wait just a bit longer as I and Doctor AbdulRazzaq made our way to Mona.
Mona was lying stretched out on two adjoined chairs when the explosion flung her out of into the circle of flames beneath the stage, I ran to her from Roshdi’s dismembered body as Abu Hanan and Karim screamed at the sight, crying for help from the cars stacked with people on the inside and outside to wait for their niece and sister.
Doctor Maarouf held out his hands to catch the child. I had her in my arms, She made some soft sounds. She asked for some water, and I wondered if she even knew what was happening. I thought she was crying. But she was dying. I stepped over the moat made of the ground surrounding the stage and handed her feather light body to the doctor with whom I rushed towards Karim and his Uncle. His Uncle scooped Mona from the Doctor in a frenzy and began patting her cheeks as and tried to make her stand before the buckling of her knees and her shut eyes, eyeballs rolling inside in the last flicker of life made it clear that she was dead.
Shrapnel had entered the back of her head and neck. Abu Hanan wailed with his fingers interlocked with the small girl’s cold dead ones while Samira, the 50 year old woman who used to make us Qatayef every Friday with the exception of today brought Karim to her lap at the edge of her seat in the car, holding the trembling boy close to her but failing to cover his eyes which shone with the scene of his sister slowly fading out of this duniya.
My breathing became ragged and unbelieving, I was having a panic attack. I swallowed it upon seeing Shima and Besan push a metre long trolley with wooden planks on it and some discarded floor mats. A makeshift Ambulance. Besan laid Mona’s small limp body onto the “ambulance” when Shima looked me up and down, searching for something, or someone.
‘Where’s Hoda?!’ She asked, her voice was frantic and my breathing quickened again, delaying my lack of an answer for her when the doctor jogged back from the inferno.
Without. Any one in his arms
‘She’s dead’ he said, gulping for air after sucking in the poignant scent of the burning building.
That car started and revved away as another one arrived, and a man stepped out, demanding answers- and asking AbdulRazzaq to go back in and get her. I didn’t look back to find the girl, believing the expertise of the doctor, until we had to hold the panic-stricken father back from rushing into the flames and that’s when I saw her.
Crushed from another set of adjoined chairs, her legs poking through the rubble, where I couldn’t see her, in the blindspot. I watched the face of the man lose colour in the fiery surroundings as he realised with me that she was dead. Killed from the hair on her scalp to the pink of her little painted toenails. His expression went from one of denial and desperation to act fast and save her to an outpour of grief as we stood by the side of the road, watching her, everyone who was executed and everyone who couldn’t get out of the fire, burn up.
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Part 7
The elderly in the room, purposefully left alive by the israeli soldiers to foster guilt and sadness in their unstable hearts, urged the remainder of us to carry the bodies over to a different room on the same floor- away from the treachery and kept safe for their eventual jenazahs, if they didn’t make a morgue of this place by the time the clock strikes centre.
I got up from the floor to do exactly that but was advised against it with a silent pat down from Mouin. My limbs were restless and I was constantly fidgeting. I could see the red blinker on the camera of mine dimming to orange on a chair in the other half of the room, indicating a nearly full memory, and a nearly dead camera. I kept looking for an opening to run and stuff it in the puffy vest I hung over the back of my chair, but the soldiers kept hovering around, scoping out their audience and looking for their next target.
And their radar just so happened to land on Ahed, a young girl who pulled her ripped jean jacket over her body tighter while looking out of the window even whilst the morning sun shined searing rays over the sill.
Ben, one of the lead commanders of this “minor” operation, which would become the most major thing in news that no one could ignore if I retrieved my camera – saw the light catch on her hair and was immediately drawn to dragging her by her lioness mane onto the stage. I sighed deeply as the scenarios and outcomes looped themselves in my head, each possibility getting worse with each step she took towards the stage.
They forced her shoulders down till her knees buckled under their heavy weighted armour. She landed on the floor with a knee bruising thud and sat there for a moment, her head facing the ground and her expression not discernible with sun bronzed curls falling over her face. A second soldier with Yam coloured hair slipped his fingers under her curtain of hair and grasped her chin, stripping away her deserved solitude with a tug of the jaw. I couldn’t see anything with his ass facing me but I could tell Ahed whispered something to him, something like “don’t embarrass me” or “what’s going to happen to me”, even if I misheard either of those sentences, it was clear that she was deeply concerned about the sanctity of her dignity, but complied to keep the masses from being slaughtered at one shot. I gathered that from the way she meaningfully and steadily looked into my eyes with a stare full of warning. Our shared gaze broke when the soldier got up and answered her, looking down on her like some stray dog at their mercy.
‘lā taqlaq bishānihi, we’ll take care of you’ he repeated back, yet again, with the same devilish grin as the assaulter who in some way worked to bring Adnan’s final wish to fruition.
‘Baaaaas’ droned Ben who paced impatiently a couple metres behind Ahed, toying with the gears of his rifle- locked and loaded. ‘Is she going to take those terrible clothes off or what?’ he whined. Dover replied in a sarcastic chortle, ‘No, it seems she’s “not interested” in being embarrassed’. The commander nearly broke a rib and dropped his rifle on his toe laughing,
‘Habibi- you don’t need to undress to embarrass yourself, you Palestinian animals are already an embarrassment to this world.’ he cackled, chorusing with his spitting friend.
Ahed started rocking on her knees and praying; the soldiers wore a look of hungry excitement as she reached into her pale blue shirt.
They sucked the saliva back into their mouths after she pulled the pendant of a gold chain with engravings of the quranic verse on a shape made to resemble the Palestinian state. She started rehearsing the shahada to herself, only taking second long gaps to excuse herself for breathing in her petrification and constant cries for the Lord. The soldiers took on an awful form to their faces as they clearly recognized every word of the proclamation, like always, only being reminded of their religion and their tragic transgressions of it when inside a room with a muslim– one without a shadow of a doubt in her faith. Her continual devotion became a pulley for the frustrations locked in Dover’s throat.
‘Shut up! Shut up!’ he yelled over her, kicking her sides, only making her chant the same declarations with her cheek to the ground. He pounced over her body, clawing at her skin and trying to yank the jacket off her back when his superior, silently spectating his outburst, came over and told him to step to the side, taking his place as he towered over Ahed who remained in a foetal position. Still praying.
‘Don’t worry Dover’, he glowered down at her, ‘If she refuses to undress it’s no problem,’ he turned to me, making me realise how deeply I was staring at everything that was happening, I just couldn’t seem to rip my eyes away, something that everyone else in the room, and in the entire world–grew accustomed to doing.
Fear coursed through my veins and infiltrated my emotions as I watched him recede to the back of the stage, whistling and rubbing the barrel of his rifle with a baby’s shirt. Ahed was shackled to the ground with an anchored contraption, the short thick chain was attached to a metal ring that worked as a pin in the wood. She couldn’t hold her necklace anymore and just read into her chest, making Dover, who played an unbothered persona, rub the gun more fiercely before tossing the shirt, the shirt of someone’s child, to the side.
‘Like I said, ya3ni no problem’ he said, deliberately distorting his p’s to b’s, mimicking, no- mocking the Arab palette. ‘We can take care of her clothes once I kill her’.
The people to my sides, Shima and Besan, wept at the horrific implication with Shima’s face turning ashen grey, her eyes wide with shock and disbelief, while tears streamed down her cheeks. She raised a trembling hand to her mouth as the reality of his words penetrated her. Besan scrubbed down the wall she was leaning up against her sobs wracking her body as she slid to the ground. Abu Hannan was unable to meet anyone’s gaze. Every father in that room squeezed their eyes shut in trying to block out the horror of the situation. The room drowned with an oppressive air of sheer helplessness that made us a hopeless people today.
Dread hung in heat waves around us and I just wanted to ask why, why did they hate us so much. What pleasure does it bring them to violate our lands, our rights, our wives and now an innocent girl, someone's daughter, someone’s whole life. They not only planned to take that life but abuse its vessel after they shot it out of her. Ahed’s sobs alternated between cries for her father and cries for her creator.
The soldier waded the floor around her, finally settling into a position and raising his rifle up to his left shoulder. He flipped the safety off and pulled back the bolt. The metallic clink sent a malignant spider down my back.
He lined up the shot, aiming it for the back of Ahed’s skull as though her body was made of bottles to be knocked out in target practice. Ahed, on her knees, prayed even louder, fright lacing her voice in trying to be brave.
She recited in Arabic broken by sobs, seeking protection from the torment of the grave, and the trials of life and the question of death she was facing now. ‘O Allah! I seek refuge in you from the mischief of the false messiah-’ she looked back in a series of broken turns to see the soldier’s face twisted and cocking his gun at her with a click that caused her to tremble and turn her gaze back to the edge of the stage, beyond which lay the body of the first man executed.
‘If I were you I would stop all this damn talk about AllahAllahAllah. Ackh!’ he spoke.
‘..when you know damn well you're at our mercy,’ he sneered, kneeling down and planting the mouth of his rifle on the ground. The girl hadn’t looked back to acknowledge him but I knew she heard him when her eyebrows scrunched the skin on her fair face, an obvious marker of distress which was pushed aside as she continued praying.
‘In this room, I am your Yhweh.’ he blasphemed, using the name they supposedly believed to be ineffable for someone such as himself, someone who couldn’t even begin to make the girl falter in her prayer by declaring himself the very God she was submitting her life to.
My head was screaming for answers,
‘So you don't even believe in God! But you think he promised our land to you!’ I yelled, after getting so close to being invisible.
‘It doesn't matter if I believe or not,’ the soldier retorted, his voice dripping with contempt, along with the slightest bit of truth. Pins of discomfort threaded through my veins.
‘The fact is, he's not here to help you now, is he?’ he asked, and I gave no reply as I looked around at this doomed room.
‘We will conquer your city... and your bodies!’ he said, glancing down on their red haired sacrifice and then firing a pistol in his other hand to receive an uproar of applause from his unit.
‘Did you hear me?’ he asked again, directing his cynical stare in my direction, noticing that the bang didn’t make me flinch strongly enough for his liking unlike the others, and the children who jolted awake.
‘ NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE YOU.’ an echo boomed, pulling at the knots in my stomach and pulling me out of my transfixed state, bringing back the fear that was suppressed for a mere moment by it.
He decided to ignore me completely and straightened his relaxed stance once more, steadying the rifle against his shoulder a second time. His eyes narrowed as he latched them onto the scope, looking at the back of Ahed’s ducked head in a largened view.
Only, his finger didn’t even graze the trigger when the entire place began to rumble, the ground jumping underneath our feet.
I meant to jump over the chairs and run but the shaking beneath my bruised bare feet became violent and fully flipped me over when a blast thundered right outside the building, blowing both doors out of their bolted frame behind us and the huddled defence forces, pushing them to the ground. The previously intact portion of the ripped wall collapsed, charging the ground in an avalanche of brick and stone, crushing a few of them and throwing Ben off his feet.
The bullet escaped from the muzzle due to a misfire made by the impact, shooting up into the air past Ahed and into the ceiling where it rebounded heading straight for me as I stared blankly in shock with my hands and feet on the ground.
I was a dead man until a man swept past, sweeping me with him, saving me from the falling bullet. I looked to see who saved me from it and at first, I barely recognised him from his sunken face, features chiselled brutally by starvation. It was Farouq, a man whom I had only seen 3 months prior when he was taken hostage, when he was still starved but not to this extent. I wondered how he had the strength to push 140 pounds of me aside from imminent death. A flame started in the old storage closet and started catching everywhere. A string of fire emerged between me and Farouq who yelled in my face, but I couldn’t hear him in the barrier of heat.
And I had never seen the light of day turn to darkness so quickly.
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Part 6
I finally caught sight of Hashim weeping on one of the chairs as Besan tried to quiet him, offering him the cat nestled in her arms as consolation for his lost friend. All that patriotism he both preached and critiqued rushed out of his face in tears. He was scared, he looked like he just wanted to go home.
Wherever that was.
It was consolation enough to me that the children were asleep. The sound of warplanes kept them up at night and the orders to keep moving made them exert themselves during the day. Even though the sun shone outside, they didn’t have to pick up and leave this time. Because there was nowhere to go, they already touched ground everywhere there was to go these past 7 months. I was happy to see they were getting their rest finally, even as the world crumbled around them.
Adnan was manually checking the pulse of a sleeping beauty, wrapped in a torn tulle skirt from her waist to her feet dangling off the cart wiped of any fruit or food. She was so deep asleep that Adnan must have thought her dead from shock. However he brought his finger under her nose to find her greatly alive, while patting down a boy who took to sleeping on the floor, shaking with goosebumps, his eyes twitching as if he was reliving trauma that crept into his nightmares.
The girl who was thrown off the stage after her brother’s death, offered to soothe the boy with song when approaching Adnan or help with the cut on her forehead that hadn’t stopped bleeding since it happened.
I guess a soldier all the way on the other side of the hall caught a whiff of Palestinian people helping each other, and apparently, he didn’t like that.
The nurse clicked open his nearly empty first aid kit and held up a small cotton pad to her bleeding brow bone when a forearm tattooed with the star of david shot up from under the protective circle of turned over chairs and grabbed his which was reaching for a roll of bandages in the box.
‘What is this?’ Adnan tried defending himself bravely, “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
‘Neither did they,’ the buzzcut man dismissed, grimacing with golden teeth on display and a golden cross necklace hung from his neck, blacked out with ink up till his strong chin- which he used to signal Adnan, whom he held with his hands behind his back, towards the stage. Adnan reluctantly stepped up the side of the stage and allowed the guard to force him into where the light hit it in a heated shower. He then wordlessly pulled his surgical scrubs over his head, dumping them by his feet and looked to his abuser-in-waiting for approval.
‘Enough?’
‘Hardly’ scoffed the man, unable to see the olive skin under the elbow length white undershirt he still kept on. The doctor stripped off another layer, another sheath of dignity, from himself and stood awaiting his punishment in white trunks. Only it didn’t end at punishment.
Upon seeing the soldier reach for the grip of his gun, tucked in the front of his waistband, the nurse pedalled backwards. ‘You want to kill me?’ he expressed, a little shaken but not surprised at the officer's aptness to rid him of his life.
‘Bingo’, he phrased, an accent about as thick as his ego protruding through.
‘Why?’ Adnan whispered, almost inaudibly yet still loud enough for everyone in the room to start murmuring prayers.
‘Li’ann ya Akhi,’
(because, bro)
‘Ana baqdar atruk el-sughar, bas guys like you… well..’ he explained with a chuckle.
(I can spare the little guys but..)
‘Reporters,’ he spat, targeting me and staring cock eyed into those of another man, Mouin who stood, clutching the cheap camera that he still had and used sparingly as a harmless freelancer to his side.
‘Reporters just love getting their pieces from you doctors, you doctors who defame us and save everyone we kill’ he boomed, projecting his voice into the sparse and restless crowd, waking Karim and making Aboud- the sick child with a severe case of c-ptsd, whimper. Adnan’s face went green upon hearing the parts of his sick, twisted ideology revealed to be true.
In the corner of the room, beside the utility closet I came in from, a couple of bored soldiers were brutalising a man with a ghostly, clammy face. One of the soldiers, an exceptionally veiny lad with a devilish curve on his mouth, drew a deep gash with the razor sharp bayonet of a rifle on the man's forearm which he threw out with a cry that turned the medics' noses in his direction.
Everyone in this room was familiarised with each other’s name and each other's families either by talking or by connections established before the war tore them apart, they even knew the particular diseases that ail one another. This man was a haemophiliac, who’s clotting disorder made it lethal for blood to spring from his flesh like that. Shima didn’t or rather, couldn’t move, both anxious for her condemned friend and not knowing how to aid the man with her dentistry. Meanwhile Besan shot up to go help him when she was stopped by the soldier who told her to halt.
‘The chavil ’ spoke the man, disinterested in whatever the ‘chavil ’ requested.
“His last wish is to take care of…that” he repeated their odd and signature saying, gesturing towards the man writhing on the ground, breathing harshly as the blood poured in gallons out of a single artery.
Adnan was ushered to the back of the room by his captor and another soldier to make sure he didn’t slip away, but I knew that was the furthest thing from his mind right now. Even with his own life hanging by a thread, he made it his last wish to nurse the victim’s wounds. He rushed to the bleeding man, his hands trembling with the thought of the life he would lose after helping sustain another’s. One last time.
The bandages in the box ran short halfway through the process of annulling the bleeding. So he tore a piece of his own shirt that he re-wore after being called to action.
The soldier, standing with anticipation behind Adnan like the grim reaper, began counting down the seconds until his pre-flexed finger would pull back on the trigger. ‘Ten… nine… eight…’ The seconds dragged on like hours, each one a dull beating in my ears as I watched from afar.
Adnan worked frantically, applying pressure to the wound, using his thumbs to press down directly on the the deep gash. He then layered the makeshift bandages and wound them tighter over and over around the laceration with more pressure each time.
‘Seven… six… five…’ The bleeding, as well as the countdown- slowed, and I felt a gust of relief accompanied by absolute dread.
‘Four… three…’ The bleeding finally subsided, and for a fraction of a second, a fragile silence fell over the room. Adnan exhaled a shaky breath, his eyes filled with a fleeting relief as his eyes shifted from the injury to meet the victim’s grateful ones, welling with tears.
‘Two… one.’
The shot rang out, and Adnan's body slumped forward, crashing onto the man whose face bleached as he screamed at his saviour, the most alive he’d ever been 2 minutes ago, now dead on his lap.
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Part 5
Metal chipped at the plaster of the broken wall when a rope with a grappling hook at the end swung over it, immediately followed by the struggling sounds of someone climbing it. Sounds of impending doom. Despite the huffs, a velcro-gloved hand clawed over the edge and he pulled the rest of his body up, his head rising to block the light that gap let in and instead cast the room in a speckled darkness, unsure as ourselves.
A nasal voice echoed in the room.
‘More guns than a street in tel aviv eh?’
A hulky, swollen soldier hooked himself over the half torn down wall that separated everyone inside from their wrath. He was here to bring that wrath to us. He scuttled down the wall like a spider, dragging the curtain down with his gloved fingers. They needed to make a big scene of killing us. He leapt from the grills of the air vent that went nowhere now and jumped with a splintering bang into the singular cart of food the escaped merchant pushed all the way here. Juices of semi-rotten fruit splattered on the rubble and rocks, a warning of what he and his nation could make of us, but wouldn’t.
Because we had doctors, there was Maarouf who literally walked over broken glass to return to his work of saving children after being depleted physically and mentally from a most agonising detention, there were four young resident specialists without trucks, or beds but gauze from Gaza in their banged up kits, we had men who’s masculinity didn’t start or stop at powertrips fueled by destroying families, artists like Roshdi, Saleem and I,who refused to return to their families in body bags, girls who didn’t spend their once peaceful days dreaming away about their futures for them to be snuffed, and most of all children whose dreams we couldn’t bear to see shattered yet again.
Roshdi pulled me to his side by my upper arm and patted my back once. “Stand tall, we are Falasteeni.”
‘..And we fear nothing’ something inside of me replied, an invisible question mark hanging at the end. I straightened the part of my back his hand targeted and levelled my down turned face with theirs, held high in all its twisted, cocky glory.
An image flashed of a bullet piercing a tube through my exposed neck but I shook it out of my mind. I’d like to believe my heart was better than believing the lies of traitors. My instincts told me to hit record on these very lies as I switched from photo to video mode, placing the pad of my thumb over the mic and flash unit to mask the sound of the shutter.
A sense of dauntlessness filled my lungs but was quickly quelled when someone pulled the curtain we had our backs to, open, making us tumble over inside of it as they slipped in to push back the veil before the sound of our crash was heard.
‘What are you doing!’ I demanded of the doctor who stood there breathless. Dread for everyone on the other side replaced the dauntlessness that briefly dwelled in my chest. The doctor didn’t give me an explanation before repeatedly shoving me and Roshdi further backstage to a repository for more of the same stuff we saw in the storage closet and barring the door handles shut with a broom.
‘We won’t make it out of this alive, or save anyone, if we don’t preserve ourselves’ he said, making my head scream with doubts. ‘You know they'll kill the medics and the reporters before any-’
‘Then why did you leave them there?!’ I asked, thinking of the young frontliners shaking there in their scrubs. Both Roshdi and AbdulRazzaq were speechless before he finally said, ‘Ma sima'thum jayyeen…my hearing was taken away from me in the prison, but not my senses.’
(I couldn't hear them coming)
‘Yalla, let’s hide until we can see ourselves in again’ he called, stringing Roshdi along the fire escape into the front of the building. I looked at his movements appalled, shoved him from persuading me and bent to the door back, placing my ear at the door where I could hear the units waltz in musically in an un-uniform sequence of steps. Both men and women filed in, cracking their knuckles and no doubt wearing sculpted smiles while they did it.
AbdulRazzaq kept whispering ‘Yalla!’ behind me till he finally ripped me away from the portal to hell and dragged me outside the exit. Then we went around the building to a sizable window, glass smashed in behind an overturned podium.
I placed my finger tips at the corner edge of the window and flattened the erect hairs on my head so as not to be seen while peeking inside.
The mother at the very front row pulled the cap of her scarf over her eyes, still seated, and there was a silent retaliation in that gesture alone or lack thereof. None of us were required to rise for these bastards, or look them in the eye.
A soldier with an assault rifle far too big for his puny body caught this act of defiance and went towards the woman and her elderly father who wore a terracotta coloured turban and an unwavering determination on his face to protect his nursing daughter.
‘Oy Dover! tireh et ze, this woman thinks her son’s breakfast is more important than her execution.’ He reached a twiny arm for the prayer cloth covering her child’s face and her aurat. Nabhan slammed his hand around the mutaharresh’s wrist. It shook, like the hands of elders do but it didn’t loosen its grip on the dainty wrist. He spoke in broken English the pleas of a broken hearted man.
(look at this)
‘You have already killed my beloved granddaughter, you do not need…her, or the ..baby’ he spoke, hesitating before saying the words that I now know were supposed to be ‘my daughter’ and ‘the boy’ out of fear for these brutes killing them on the spot driven by spite and personal vendettas against the old man.
They seemed to like
1) killing entire family units and leaving one or two people,
2)giving those people no time to grieve before forcing them to relocate and
3)killing boys. Why? Because boys grow into men, and there is nothing the Pharaoh or the nation of pansies these soldiers were borne of fear more than men.
The soldier tsked at the man’s audacity in stopping him from killing an innocent mother and her child then whipped his hand away, kicking him off the chair, making the eyes of the baby doll in his other hand pop to the ground. The soldier's hand reached for the top of the woman’s skull anyways, deliriously desperate to see the fear in her eyes, but there was none. Only a look of depletion was delivered to him as another slightly shorter soldier whom I assumed was this “Dover” character sauntered next to her, seating himself as he held a Swedish pocket knife, which any Dane knew was easily fatal, to the newborn. No tears escaped her eyes as she painfully admitted, hoping to appeal to even an atom of humanity in them.
‘I lost my womb to have this baby…please-’
The soldiers grunted, like her humanity stopped them from having their fun. The one on the right took his hand off her neck with a shake, sliding his knife back into its slot of the tools chamber glinting red in his hand. The younger of the two laid his hand on his army mate’s shoulders and whispered, but not really because nothing these donkeys did was ever shielded by any shame or secrecy, they were always braying in the limelight.
‘The old geezer will die and the whore is a worthless kill, forget them.’
A look of deliverance washed over the elderly man and protective mother, whose relief ran in tears down her shaking body, despite the indignity spat at them from the soldier’s mouth. The pair of Shayateen left them, hoisting each other up onto chairs and began rounding the people up with the help of guns positioned and poked repeatedly into the spines of everyone who already had their hands raised up in surrender.
The men and girls were herded to the steps preceding the stage like cattle. You could feel the hatred rolling off the guard in waves as he sunk his fingernails into the back of Ibrahim’s neck, yanking him indecisively everywhere around the platform like a kitten until they decided centre stage was going to be the set up for their humiliating production.
Three soldiers, two of whom had pushed the old man over and threatened to kill the woman’s son, ganged up on Hashim who stood beside the lectern in front of the window we stole glances from. Amir, unaware of our escape, was crouched behind it- clinging to his humble revolver. The soldiers didn’t pay any mind to breathing noises created by lack of oxygen in the ski mask as they flicked their fingers at Hashim’s forehead and pulled at his earlobe. That’s what these guys were all about. Being childish.
Half of them were children. Children inseminated with hateful ideals and brought up with an almost biological detest for us Palestinians as a race.
Fight or flight was the only thing the children of Palestine knew, daily efforts to survive the aggression made them lose energy to learn and to read and know themselves in classrooms. Or preserve their history in heritage sites, all of which were conveniently reduced to rubble in the war. Meanwhile the only things Israelis learnt in their classrooms had to do with their “superior” lineage, similar to the preachings of the “superior” Aryan race, and their history which, combined with the weapons used to equip their pamper plated infantry were used as ammo against anyone opposed to this mess.
Saleem was one of the first herrings picked from the tightly strung net. He stuck out because of his height and was dragged because of it onto the stage by his shirt-tail. Two officers, both shorter and broader than him, stood at his sides with rifles hitched to their hips as Saleem’s eyes roused over the room. There wasn’t a shred of fear in those eyes, there wasn’t bravery either, there wasn’t anything. Just brown pools swirling in wait. Part of me thought the poet sought to go out as a martyr and that’s why he came here. But that’s not true, nobody wants to die, especially not the man that was brimming with words to say and sayings that inspire. He resisted the violations of the soldiers, who were grabbing at his shirt and ripping it down the middle, leaving the tie to hang around his neck like a noose and hitting him on his back with a kalashnikov. He did not let so much as a groan escape his tightly pursed lips as he was pushed down by a force that sent him to his knees, holding his body up by his arms like an animal.
The one with the horse laugh, which made him more of an animal than any Palestinian ‘pups’ in the room, took his yarmulke off his scalp and flipped it, setting it down in front of the hunched over Al Nasser to mimic a dog bowl. His peers burst with roaring belly laughs and this display or revelation of their own lunacy and cheap tricks, they jabbed each other in the arms with their guns when a chinese officer, somehow having even less of a right to this soil and it’s sweltering sun than her half polish army, stepped forwards and hushed her superiors who watched her step onto the stage judiciously, having clearly taken some offence until she dug through her puffy pockets from which numerous toffees bounced out of and palmed a couple of stolen shekels, tossing them into the hat in front of the crouched man. She spun around to the other soldiers suggestively, not even acknowledging the fact that she had just thrown pennies in front of a highly esteemed man in every regard. That was the epitome of israeli arrogance, they care for nothing apart from money, guns, power and cynicism. Their cynicism knew no bounds.
To them, the Americas and their parasitic pet, the life of an Arab only matters if there’s oil at our feet, and if the reserve was to go dry they would force our heads down in prostration to theirs. Like they were doing now when our tolerance for their sick games ran dry.
‘Achkhim! I feel like playing mhmm.. a game of jeopardy,’ she mused, collecting looks of intrigue and cruel curiosity. A small plum cheeked one from the back of line, shuffling innocent civilians towards the stage, had his hands shackled around a hollowed girl's frail wrists. He pulled the girl protected with nothing from his advances but a thin sweater and unintentionally ripped jeans, and shouted ‘We will jeopardise them!’ as he mimicked the act of pumping his front into her backside, making all his sick comrades laugh uproariously once again. The girl nearly twisted her arm trying to stop their bodies from touching when the donkey pulled her head back by her long brown hair. I shut my eyes, blocking out the depravity of it all knowing that wasn’t an option for the girl who’s tears of shame dripped down her chin behind her curtain of hair.
The female soldier didn’t even flinch at the endangerment of another woman and asked a question after using Saleem as a stool to rest her foot. She ground her boot into Saleem’s bare back and pulled his face up by his hair.
‘Me and my buddies, heard you from the outside- calling yourself a gold medal or some kharra’ she spat, feigning an accent like her “buddies”. She continued spitting,
‘So if you should be truthful, then you will swallow these shekels.’ she tossed a few more in the hat to which the crowd of cynic coin worshipers themselves started whooping in excitement. The short warmonger looked very pleased with herself at having won the approval of her comrades who, in all honesty, didn't look too pleased with the idea of someone of her ethnic background being part of their ranks. In all honesty I don’t know what possessed her to enlist for an army that drags their eyelids sideways in her absence either. Saleem’s eyes, pulled open by the skin of his held scalp darted down to look at the hat actively getting filled by more and more coins, clinking sounds were the only thing heard in the entire room, besides the complete hush of people too afraid to move or protest.
Saleem pushed back against the woman’s foot, shoving it away with his shoulder, which was then struck with a nine tailed whip, drawing shallow, bloody cuts into his upper arms and the plate of his chest. Saleem, the “sentimental” tortured poet whose eyes glistened with tears at the mention of pain inflicted upon others didn’t even shed a tear when it was happening to him. He just looked into the whippers eyes, rummaging for any shred of remorse or fluctuation in his clobbering. And he found it. The soldier stepped back, swinging the whip behind him and between his legs like a Hyena in the face of a brooding leopard. He coughed and told Saleem to get on with it, eating the coins.
When he didn’t do anything of the sort the two of them started kicking Saleem in his hollowed stomach, steel toed combat boots rang against his ribs and my heart beat against my own, threatening to jump out at hearing the scream he’d held in this long. He spasmed on the stage, breathing hard and bumping his head against the padded knees of the robotically able soldiers in an attempt to hold them from kicking him further. While they kicked his sides with the same thoughtless ferocity each time and pushed him backwards into the curtain that spilled over the stage, they bargained with him to instead strip fully, down to the socks he still had on. When he refused to do either, give up his dignity or bend to their wind and eat coins, the Chinese, feeling the repute she recently gained threatened, held the other man back with her hand and raised her foot in a final blow that knocked him in the jaw,a miss- aim that ended up being more fatal as she squawked in frustration
‘Eat this then dog!’
His bottom teeth smashed into the top row and his head fell back, his body followed. It seemed like his head twisted out of his neck as the back of it hit the wood with an echoing thud. Bone boomed against the floor and I wrung free from Roshdi’s hand, super glued to mine with fearful perspiration. I reached my hand out, my tight lipped mouth tore open to call out to Mr.Nasser, whom I later learned from the doctor holding my body back my body back, was as good as dead.
One thing was made clear in all this, even if they smashed our heads into the ground with a steel anvil, the tips of our nose would never so much as graze the earth, except in prayer, the security of which I wanted to submit to in this moment. All I wanted to do was get on my knees and pray. I can’t, I can’t because I know it would be my last, but I had… so much to feel sorry for, and too many people to pray on behalf of now.
He was dead, or was going to die. Roshdi bit his fist, stifling a cry and whispered Allah yerhamu as he pressed his palpitating heart.
(god have mercy)
Doctor Maarouf told me to breathe deeply through my nose as he held a hand over my open mouth, like I did when Mona was about to scream in the alleyway.
He took his hand off my face once I assured him that I was fine. I asked him if he was sure our Saleem had passed. He nodded saying how he wished it wasn’t so but getting hit in the jaw or the back of the head in that way was like a kill switch for a body. You were either dead or a vegetable. So you were dead both ways and either way we couldn’t go back for his body until-
The execution was over.
My breathing hitched again and I couldn’t stop the tears from coming, I wasn’t going to stand here and watch that. But I couldn’t run away. The kids were inside, Nabhan and Samira were inside, min ajl Allah there was a newborn and its mother inside. What did the baby do to meet death a month after its life had begun? No, those children were due a chance to live normally, to grow as people do, as Palestinians do when they are left to be. I looked at the road behind me and the hill of cement I carried Karim on my shoulders over. The boy had a wandering eye and kept swaying from my back so I held him tightly. I could close my thumb and forefinger around his calf and there would still be room for him to wiggle and slip out. Were these the legs of a 5 year old child?
(for God’s sake)
I thought about his mute self as I turned my head towards the window. I thought of his wasted frame sitting in the corner of the room…rocking..rocking with his lips sealed. I pushed myself off the motorcycle Dr.AbdulRazzaq sat me on. The motorcycle, with the seat caved in from carrying that entire family fell to the ground and I was pushed off the ledge of the window by Amir who shot up to prevent me from blowing his cover. Roshdi caught me and shook my body with tears in his eyes.
‘inta majnoon?!’ he shouted in my face, and I began to cry. I didn’t know what to do at all.
(are you crazy)
‘ma ba'raf shu a'mil..We have to get them out of there, what about the children? we have to get my camera out of there!’
(what do I do?)
The doctor stood to the side, utterly detached but aware. His face changed at the mention of the children as he rubbed his wrists anxiously, scarred from being held in chains for 2 months in captivity.
He looked at me with a helpless expression, which summarised how I felt right now, I felt far too helpless for someone with my voice- my power. The look on his face didn’t match his words of reassurance as he took me into his arm and rubbed my back up and down saying
‘la tiqlaq, Allah ma'na’ he recited as he hugged me.
‘We will get your Camera back.’
(not to worry, Allah is there)
Between sobs I kept choking. ‘We have to, I can’t leave here–fāḍi il-'īdīn! how will the world kn-’
Gunshots
All three of our heads turned to the window where a man in a dirtied yellow shirt but no bottoms fell backwards, like the man I saw on the street near the displacement camp, except the hole was blown through the his head between where his eyes would have been, splattering the bright canvas of his shirt in red. The Doctor’s jaw dropped and I tried pulling away from Roshdi who only held onto the sleeve of my shirt tighter.
‘What a mess,’ One of them expressed, kicking the body- rolling him off the stage like a lump of clay. ‘Clean this up,’ he ordered from his underlings who did as they were told indelicately, pulling the shirt off the dead man’s body and using it to clean the spilled blood.
A heavy chorus of breathing started from both the men slowly accompanied by emergent laughter from around the corner.
A gang of soldiers, 2 identical girls and 3 effeminate men ululating, mocking our customs came around and started throwing rice from a 6 kilo packet they could barely balance in their hands onto me and Roshdi.
‘Mazel Tov!’ The tall brunette applauded, he took the bag from his teammates and came closer, throwing the rice over us as the others followed in a train of dabke. Roshdi sneered at them from over my shoulder and backed away, putting a blockade between us, the doctor and I, and the group of heckling soldiers.
The lanky one came nose to nose with Roshdi and breathed into his face, repulsing Roshdi. The soldier seemed bothered and poured the rest of the packet that could have been cooked into a maqloubeh for everyone in that building on Roshdi’s sandals and my bare feet. Was there anything more callous than that? Those people inside considered dying by the hands of bloodthirsty settlers before starvation hits them a barakat. The pouring continued in silence as Roshdi stood his ground, chest puffed in imitation of their pompousness. He looked down at his own feet buried in sullied rice.
‘Now you have proper shoes like mine! What do we say say to people who-’
Roshdi kicked the rice onto the soldiers feet. I didn’t move, and stood there, stranded in a mountain of rice. The soldier let slip a condescending laugh, turned around, and turned back quickly pulling the front of Roshdi’s shirt peeking out from his torn puffer jacket. The soldier’s forearm muscles popped in trying to pull him up by his shirt because although he was unbelievably tall, he was scrawny. He felt the girl's eyes on him and let go of him slowly instead of going for the bottlecap pin hooked to it. He read the english out slowly,
‘Bo lir'ot et habanot ha'eleh’ he said, calling over the two mirrored girls with his hand.
(come look at this girls)
His tone was absurd as he spoke to the ladies on either side of him.
‘You see this here? This man makes porn, all these la'azazel filmmakers do.’
Roshdi looked appalled as the girls covered their mouths, opened them and started cackling. ‘Is that true commander Ben?’ they said between girlish giggles. The left woman with a tan mark of sunglasses on her face sounded fully American. The Ethiopian to my side was patting down the doctor, incessantly asking him for the details of his release even though he had scored, red bands on his arms to prove it.
If only he knew he was fighting for a promised land his children would never get to live in I thought to myself, remembering the picture of all those men and women disembarking the jet with their children, who may be their last ones.My eyes drifted from the doctor’s discomfort and back to Roshdi who looked slighted by the israeli’s wild claims and obvious hypocrisy as his brow twitched and fist folded.
‘Yes that’s right you know, they bundle their women in blankets like the national treasure and use normal girls like you for their desires.’
That. Plucked a chord in the usually peaceful harp inside me. I ripped his hand away from my friend and dropped it to his side. The face of the hypocrite and womaniser morphed into one of connivance when he reached for something in the bulky cargo pocket of his trousers. My camera, out of its sleeve. I held my hand out for it stupidly anticipating the thief to give it back before the realisation occurred to me.
That camera had hours, possibly even days of damning evidence against the occupation, in fact, if I recall correctly- hadn’t the South African lawyers in the International Court of Justice use the very videos filmed and uploaded by journalists here in Gaza to make their case? Even if nothing came from that venture, the result of which I and many others alike predicted with little faith in the International Court’s pursuit of justice, the treachery of the israeli government was exposed to a lot more people than the pictures and videos we put on social media ever did. For once it reached the people at home, the people who kept their televisions on and the people who controlled the ballots. I thought about Mr. Nasser lying in his cold blood inside,what his last words might be, and how I couldn’t let them go unheard.
Urgency surged through my veins and I grappled with the soldier who kept tossing the camera in the air to his crew. I hesitated when reaching for the sleek bunned girl popped gum and hummed as she pranced around with footage that could end her life, I threw my good mannerisms out the window and snatched it from her uncoordinated fingers.
I exhaled the trapped air in my lungs and rolled my eyes upwards in relief when the spectre towering over me called over the strong African, but before he took the camera away again, I made sure to resume recording. The Ethiopian rushed over with his balled fist to deliver an eye-blackening punch that pushed me to the ground, launching the camera right into his spider-like fingers. I scrambled up with Maarouf and Roshdi supporting me as he walked away with my camera, my life for the past 5 months.
The polluted air invaded my eye, making me press it close with my hand, narrowing my field of vision. I could practically feel the skin on my cheek purple as I rubbed the vein. I accidentally grabbed his shirt, for support but the material tore, releasing him with a little trip forward.
He stumbled forwards and turned around to find me sprawled on the ground with a torn piece of his top his in my hands. The girls chortled at my disconcertion and the leggier woman struck my hand, taking the square material and holding it up with her primped claws.
‘Look Yosef!’ the other girl pointed. His attention turned to me as she narrated
‘He ripped the shirt of our Yosef! Ha-tembel’
‘ken, like that story in bereshit tanakh’ the one waving the torn piece chimed in to her commanders elation,
(the first book-referring to the tale of Joseph in genesis)
‘Akh-shav at ko-le-tet! Correct as always my dear’ snapped the soldier, planting a peck on her cheek. ‘This man means to seek me like potiphor’s wife,’ he added, his tone laden with conceit when he jabbed a cold, metal object, into the nape of my neck. He let my camera fall to my lap, holding it by its string and swiftly snatching it away before I could touch it. Him and the other soldiers slipped back into the building, all the while laughing.
(now you’re getting it)
Every bit of my being was fuming. He compares what he doesn’t know, he was no Yusuf, that man is left of any of the beauty and none of the morals. He was deluded in his dream of bulldozing my home. My home. It’s only fault being that it shined with the same splendour of our prophet, betrayed by the world as he was betrayed by his brothers. I couldn’t go without looking at the jewels of life that roamed around these ruins one last time. I kicked the mud away and went in the opposite direction of their disappearing figures.
Turning the corner once again, I found myself back to standing at the punctured door of the storage closet. I went inside and opened the second door, careful not to let any creak escape from the rusty hinges.. Footsteps loudened behind me as I ducked low, avoiding drawing any attention at all costs, and I was close too until I heard an ear shattering wail of pain from the direction of the stage that commanded my attention.
Bloodshot eyes of a man stripped down to his underwear, bruised blue already on various places stood shaking, with his legs apart- a fortress under threat. He might have been a construction worker or an offloader for trucks judging by all the cuts of a whip it took to make him crack. A young girl of 15 or 16 was handcuffed in the front by his side, she wore a loose head cover that became undone with every jump of fear and men’s clothes. The man, her uncle or brother, collected himself and dug his bare heels into the stage harder, which only made them whip with more and more ferocity until his point was made- their whips of hide and hair-thin barbs would only repeatedly slash his musculature.
Blood pooled around his legs in a nauseating display, but he only looked into the icy eyes of the soldier that shoved over his torturers on both sides to make way from himself, and his jet black instrument of death. Finally something resembling fear took over his expression as his focus darted to the waxy, purple body toppled from the edge of the stage, lying in a crumpled position next to crumpled clothes that were used to mop up his own blood, a bullet hole through his head trickling the last dregs of blood, of life down his spine.
Before he could look back into the eyes of the soldier a gun was aimed at his chest.
A malicious looking militant, whom the girl only spotted when it was too late, licked his lips and struck the man with thunder in the back with a club, making him choke out his blood, pushing him forward to the gun that was fired in a millisecond bringing out a stream of blood from his mouth, his gums were stained red as he clenched his teeth and his hands flew to his chest, clutching his bare chest.
The girl’s hands flew to her face as she escaped the officer’s death grip to her brother's side. Her face twitched in disbelief, switching between the sight of her brother bleeding out on the floor, still groaning from the pain of the blow to his back– and the soldier who stood expressionless, remorseless, tied by the rugged soles of his shoes to the same place despite the recoil of his pistol.
The girl collapsed over his body, crying out softly for her Akhi into his bloodstained chest, begging him not leave her behind here.
Something about her devotion and dare to hold his body while the israelis were actively striking her with leather made me run, thoughtlessly, up the side of the stage while the female soldiers popping gum and cigarettes tripped me when I scrambled up the stairs. I crawled on the termite chewed wood towards Mr. Nasser. The creaking of the floorboard ignited a spark somewhere in his veins, I held my hand to his stomach- trying to get a feel for any pulse of life. His eyeballs moved beneath his eyelids rapidly and the meagre breaths he took became more paced with his lips opening to say something.
‘My boy.. Is that you?’, he said, calling for his son, or so I thought.
‘La, it’s me-’ my voice cracked seeing him struggle to lift his eyelids to look at me. I put his throbbing head in my hand and cradled it towards me. ‘It’s me, Samir.’
He laughed with an alarming, dry rasp. ‘I know’ he smiled, straining, his cheeks lifted as he slowly opened his eyes a watery sliver. “I’m sorry,” I begged, to which he scrunched his face in disapproval.
‘Don’t be sorry, it has been done; not by you.’
I sucked in air, locking eyes with Yusof for a second , who loomed over our perceived privacy as he looked at me sardonically with the ghost of a grin.
‘Look at me not him,” Saleem admonished, the professor's title being stripped away by the likes of someone who probably didn’t even graduate before enlisting to slaughter an entire race. He summoned the last of his strength and pulled me close to his words by the strap of my journalists’ vest.
‘Life is coming’ he whispered.
And as his eyes shut once more but for the final time I felt my faith fading as I doubted those words. Was it coming? How could it come? They snuff the light out of our lamps, they kick the children off the swings and my dreams– my dreams were a distant memory and not who I was anymore. They would surely be there to kill the life at its conception, when it comes, if it comes.
Both men lay beside each other as they took in their final breaths. The girl buried herself in her brother's neck. He took his hand off his chest and stroked the side of her face.
‘Qulha, laqeet ilna bayt fi il-jannah’ he conveyed, seeming the least bit bothered by the fate he shared.
(tell her, I found us a house in heaven)
‘La, la! You must tell her yourself!’ She refused as the lights flickered in her brother’s body.
Both of them seemed rather grateful to return to their creator, and who wouldn't?
The girl wept louder than I, but unlike me tears were the only thing that ceased to form on her face. Whether out of acceptance or pure exhaustion I couldn’t tell through my clouded gaze but she was soon peeled away from her beloved by the arms, manhandling her. Well, as “manly” as they could handle with her kicking and protests.
“Allah raḥ yiḥāsibhum!” she exclaimed, with her fingers pointed towards the sky. “My brother is dead! He was a newlywed!” She pleaded to no avail as the guards tossed her off the stage and watched her scrape against the broken concrete that I later noticed had drawn a scar on her brow bone.
(God will bring them to account)
Once they were done with her, the nefarious pair of enforcers advanced in my direction- hoping to seize me.
I would always wish that was the outcome rather than what really happened instead.
Out of nowhere Roshdi emerges between me, the Dutch speaking soldier, and the French accented machine gun wielder. The eye of the storm. The soldiers looked to each other, deciding the path to destruction they would agree upon before they lunged at Roshdi who stood, unflinching, in front of my pathetic, crumbled frame and Mr. Nasser’s cold, lifeless body that mocked his last words.
“Life was coming” yet people were dying in front of me, and now it was Roshdi’s turn.
They pinned him the to the ground by his hands, a soldier on each side grounding his fingers into the wood with their firsts before a third one, the hulky man that climbed over the wall– made his way towards Roshdi who kicked his legs to slither his upper body further away while he was incapably nailed to the ground. His head flipped back to me, irises contracting and expanding with worry. He said, imperatively
‘Go.’
At once I heeded his warning, scrambling and practically sliding down the small stairs.I got away from the stage, only attracting the divergent attention of a meek looking female soldier with auburn hair that reached her chin. She quickly snapped her bob framed head back to the stage, as did I.
They started the humiliating process of taking the clothes off him too, carrying out their actions sadistically slowly, peeling each layer methodologically off Roshdi’s sweating skin- drawing out the embarrassment as they flung out each article of his clothing for the unwilling crowd to see. All of which were torn from his person, pinned to the ground. First came his mottled grey puffer jacket, deflated from holes impaled by stray shrapnel. Then came his faded shirt that once bloomed with splatters of fluorescent colours, they tossed that aside and started snaking his worn denim trousers off, temporarily lifting their hold on his ankles only to force it down again.
A bullet was shot through the stomach of Roshdi before I could even catch the bolt sinking in the air. They crucified him. He was crucified. Horror unleashed the floodgates of my crying when I curled up under a chair and slammed my hands over my ears, bleeding from all the shots I had heard fired. I kept my hands cupped over them even after the only thing left to see or hear was the smoke emergent from the still hot muzzle as he waved it around menacingly and announced
‘Is there anyone else who wishes to die by this..lovely pistol?’
Most everyone shrunk in fear, hoping that it wouldn’t come to picking one of them to finish off the magazine. But never in a million years did I or anyone else in that room think that someone, a grey complexioned man in deteriorated leather, would actually step up to the stage, surprising even the officer with his death wish. And by the hands of an officer who revelled in orchestrating this occupation that killed so many of us at that; and now he was voluntarily taking steps to join them? I couldn’t process it, any of what was going on– the way he carried himself with the utmost shame until he neared his chosen killer, his eagerness to escape was deluding him into thinking this was the way out.
What if it wasn’t delusion that possessed him ? I thought as I stared at him pressing his chest to the tip of the gun, his hand moving to speed up the process by forcibly snapping the officer's finger on the trigger.
He didn’t achieve his quick death however, the israeli would never allow that as he smacked the disillusioned man’s hand off the metal and jabbed the tip in his chest, forcing him back and burning the skin of his sternum.
‘Strip’ stated the soldier. The man stood there for a second, waiting for the other to put him out of his misery, before realising he’d half to comply with this demand of indecency placed by them.
‘Protocol’, the hulking haqir fake rationalised while the man began to undress.
He dropped his jacket and started taking off trousers he didn’t need to unzip as a small twist made the waistband fall below his skeletal hips.
A laboured groan came from the back of the room. Amir pushed down the podium concealing him for nearly 2 hours with sheer force and desperation. The rest of the troop, growing bored with the killing off of civilians but still taking their time in making the process as diabolical as possible, shot up at his sudden appearance and wielded their firearms, faces glowing with the noor of murderous intent. Amir didn’t even spare them a glance when the only chance of his preservation depended on their sparing of his life. He was at their mercy yet his priorities were focused on the man who continued his undressing, tossing his striped shirt and ring with a clatter on the stage.
‘Mohanned! Inta majnoon?! minshān Allah la ta'mal hīk!!’ thundered Amir with disbelief in his eyes.
(mohanned! are you crazy?! stop it for God’s sake!)
Mohanned said nothing while Amir tried reasoning with him. The soldier said nothing either but yawned, knowing Amir’s attempts were futile and that he had found the fish desperate for death. After everything he tried fell to deaf ears, Amir resorted to the final plea.
‘shū raḥ yqūl Allah?’
(What will Allah say?)
There was a hitch in Mohanned’s even breaths that were slowed to numb the coming pain. He seemed to hesitate, looking back between the mouth of the gun, it’s dark vortex and Amir’s eyes before turning fully to face him and saying
‘God tells you that the game is over, and he says who wants to stay alive may, and who wants to commit suicide, may also.’
The blue backed soldier started fuming at the mention of God I presume, he ordered a female soldier to “take care of” Amir, in Hebrew while Amir himself stood silently knowing that whatever he said beyond this point would make no difference.
A female soldier, the same one with auburn hair, was sleuthing by the fighter this whole time, waiting for the right time to pounce, and she finally got the go to.
Amir, who didn’t understand the language, wasn’t fazed either by the sudden running in his direction, not until the woman flung her hands over his throat and grappled with him constricting his breathing and pulling him to the ground with force that caused the monumental podium to crush Amir’s lower body while she finished the job. She “took care” of his upper body by strangling him with his keffiyeh. Another person was dead.
I gasped without my knowledge, drawing attention from Mohanned to myself. My mind was fixed on the split second death I had just witnessed and what Hashim must be feeling in his heart but I hadn’t tried looking for him, instead looking at Mohanned whose mouth didn’t even drop at the corners, yet his veiny eyeballs shined with tears.
How many more people would it take for them to quench their thirst? The soldier still had his gun aimed for his back and there was no sign of him tiring anytime soon.
My lips moved to say something but no sound came out as I dumbly warbled something, something that wouldn’t make a difference either. But Mohanned saw me, saw me trying to think of something to discourage him– he had a choice after all right? The soldier behind him was more occupied with the glamour of the show we were giving them than the prospect of actually killing him, that’s how it appeared at least– that the suicideality of this man and the choice he would make was what made the game fun. That game was over in Mohanned’s estimation, judging by what he said earlier and what he said to me next, striking me in the heart before the bullet stopped his.
‘And you, don’t think I didn’t watch you take that picture. Pretending all was right and beautiful with the world.’
‘Ya3ni-’ I began trying to speak with a level-headed demeanour when I knew the word crisis was scrawled in bright red on my features.
‘What if there is no more beauty? I feel I have lived a big lie. He cut me off, I didn’t mean to answer him again, only to say ‘Still, we can make it-’ when he caught wind of what I was trying to do.
‘Make what beautiful? This?’ he said, gesturing to Amir who’s torso was mangled under the weight of the podium, eyes still wide open. all too knowing of the hell that our Gaza was grazed into.
I had nothing to say to him as I turned my gaze to the fallen body, his face shrouded by our symbol of resistance as the female soldier let the air drain out of it, and I would never see the chequered blanket the same again.
Mohanned took my silence as permission and raised his arm, giving the officer a clean but damaged slate to bludgeon.
“Suicide will be more beautiful,”
He said that as a bullet ran through his skull, and the tool meant for greatness within it that never ceased to torment him.
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Part 4
A cat scurried past the chairs, its fur was caked with blood and it ran with its tongue out like a healthy dog, but a very unwell cat. Even the animals were not spared here.
Karim slid down the mountain of rubble with his sour orange atop which the Merchant and his teenage daughter tried to salvage the grain and potato root. People were starting to set up camp here despite being familiar with the impermanence of the lie that was “safe spaces”.
But that was the way of the Palestinians, to make homes in ruins. Which you might argue is quite stupid. But you've never lived through a genocide have you?
It was better than leaving people’s homes in ruins.
Karim scurried, the cat scurried too, but not faster than the boy’s bow curved legs. When Karim finally cornered the cat and went to pet the poor thing in its furry neck it bounded erratically and bit his skin. Sharp, meat trained teeth provoking a shriek that made everyone's heads spin to the crying boy while biting their lips, waving at him frantically, begging him to bite his own before his cries gave out our position. Only later would I find out that they didn’t need anybody’s cries to scope us out in this thumb sized city.
A man dressed in normal clothes but with a ear plug-less stethoscope hung around his neck rushed to the boy, something small and squarish in his arm. He slid beside Karim and opened it up single-handedly, applying pressure on the double pronged fork shaped wound, making the child wince in pain from the blood threatening to spring forth from his body like the rock of a river. The doctor expertly wound it around the swollen hand, ensuring there was no gap for a sepsis infection to take root. His knees were bruised too, which the doctor took a look at but couldn’t help because he already used the antiseptic and bandages very sparingly on his arm. Who knows how many people would come out alive with a missing limb.
The people of Gaza looked like cyborgs, only without the advanced engineering to prop their body up, only faith. My accursed mind flashed to Aasef, dreams crushed twice- a leg once and his alaqah towards his complacent football idols the second time. All he had was a little faith.
Hallelujah and Alhamdulillah for that faith.
The kneeled Doctor called out the American name of a fair skinned man, likely a foreign volunteer, in teal scrubs who proactively jogged towards the cart where Karim fell, roping my eyes to where he stood initially, with three Palestinian doctors unlike himself. I looked back at the man tightening a tourniquet around the boy's arm with scrunched brows and hoped he would tell our story when he returned to the land of stars and stripes. I forced myself up from the chair I was glued to in my tribulation and moved towards the group that kept to themselves below the stage with a resolve I brought back from the grave that promised the trials wouldn't pass without my pen touching my paper.
I glanced over my shoulder thinking about the keeper residing on it who fervently scrawls every misdeed in their paper scrolls. Now I was in no way shape or form, that divine but in this world wrought with misdeeds that was my role, and by God I was going to keep it. A rosy cheeked nurse donned in a grey-once white nurse’s robe looked down at my approaching demurely and began petting that same cat, this time successfully and without procuring a bite from it as it curled around her leg.
I invited myself into their lost dispositions and took the stories from their mouths, the kinds of things they described- I couldn’t imagine facing at the age they were, not without it shaking my faith at least.
Shima, a 21 year old dentist fresh out of uni held the excess of her hijab in her hands as she described the process of unearthing the decomposed bodies from the building ruins and looking back and forth between skulls and pictures of smiling brothers and sisters before they died and trying to point them out by their teeth. Napalm nuked the flesh off their skeletons and the only way to make sure they made it back to their families was to profile them with their smiles. She shuddered, eyes roving her surroundings, reflecting upon our situation and said ‘The living and the dead are waiting to be found.’
Then, Besan’s rosy cheeks became tinted with anger as she said nothing but the word “Barbarians” under her breath while she stroked the cat with the same gentleness that preceded the anger of most Palestinians . I scooted next to her on the ground and asked for what she thought about everything, she inhaled a deep sigh and told me that she just wanted her life back, that she missed her best friend and that she was not prepared by her studies as a young trainee for what she faced being deployed by her resident hospital to assist the crisis.
The third doctor I talked to, an orthopaedic, blankly stared at something as he recounted the feeling of a medical compound being surrounded by troops with artillery aimed at the wards, ready to open fire after their forces finished ransacking the building. Shima added that the stench of blood was assaulting, that it permeated her senses and prevented her from working properly like she needed to in a condition that required the utmost attention.
Adnan recounted the pain of seeing his patients die before having a meal. The whole hospital was food insecure, a place where proper nourishment was needed the most to nurse patients back to health. He explained that in the aftermath of the last war, people were pursuing medicine in record numbers, planning to create new programs and departments for the diseases developed during them- and they had. But now those programs and the professionals that lead them were dead.
Imagine hurting people whose dreams revolved around helping others. That was the only thing I took away from hearing their side of the coin.
The American doctor jogged back with..Doctor AbdulRazzaq Maarouf, I read his nametag; children’s specialist. He was an average sized man with snow hairs yet black brows. Black, tensed brows. His eyes were weary and his sweat fresh. I snuck a glance at the snapshot of the sky behind the broken wall, the day was nearing noon and its lamp was going to be blazing.
The male nurse roved his eyes around the room looking astonished and unbelieving.
‘Can you believe they convinced the world that you did this? to your own homes, and offices and-and-’
‘Sahih!Sahih!’ Amir’s voice swelled in agreement from the other end.
‘Biithmoona inno ehna bnihfar anfaq, bnifajir mustashfayatna wa wbnHmil asleha! Keef mumkin?’
I silently nodded my head in agreement. He was right of course, they were all right. Everyone was correct to feel deserted, dead and gone before they actually were. The wash of gloom resurfacing my mind like a shore wiping over the tide was cut off by his continuing,
‘w ha'l watan kulo endo asliha aqal min shari' fi tel aviv!’ He argued, escalating his voice to the shaken volunteer who stumbled back to find me writing details of the interviews in my notebook. “What did he say?” The American asked upon seeing my english cursive. I cleared my throat, clogged from simply sitting and listening to the three healthcare workers, not asking questions but just trying to hear them.
‘He says none of the things you said are even possible …when this nation has less firearms than a street in tel aviv.’ When he heard the way I said it, laughter arose from the doctor suddenly, effortlessly, to my confusion; which increased when others in the room chorused in starting with Besan and spreading like a circular domino to the children, who couldn’t possibly understand a head or tail of this. The sound of laughter was just contagious. However I was beginning to understand the accursed humour of the circumstance and began nervously laughing myself, looking around at the room of people just grateful to be alive.
I brought my camera back up from my hip and raised it to my eye level, getting up to get a wider shot of the displaced, scattered, but never lost folk. I had my feet on the felt like material of the curtain, suspended from a bar bent by impact and I watched it all as the laughter didn’t die but dissolved, traces of it still effervescing in the hall with Roshdi to my left, whistling at everyone to turn their heads for the photo. I half pressed the shutter to focus and noticed that Dr. Maarouf was nowhere to be found, I lifted my finger to call for him when Amir yelled out next to Hashim who wore a golden, toothy grin.
‘khodha bisur'a! ma baqdar abtasim li fatra tawiileh!’
(take it quickly! i can't smile for a long time!)
I quickly clicked the camera to capture his strained smile, pinched at the cheeks as well as everyone in that room, the children made peace signs and the nurses and doctors wiped their tears as they walked back to join the picture. I felt content somehow, we were in the most hopeless situation but I felt safe inside here.
until it all ended with the gradual shuffles and echoes of a fleet of trucks.
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Part 3
It’s always the darkest before dawn.
Karim halted his pace every few steps, crying from the pain of detritus and sharp rocks and scattered shrapnel. But we made it, with me carrying the boy on my back the last mile of the way. Doing so made me think of Yazan, and what he could possibly be doing now. Something heroic I bet. Now he was Falasteeni. Grew up all his life in a refugee camp bordering the Gaza city port. His grandfather was the sole provider of his female-filled household. Although in conditions like a camp the whole neighborhood becomes your family. I did live here for a good portion of my life too, I had memories but the time I spent here wasn’t memorable. I can’t reflect back on anything other than the process of moving away from here to the greener pastures of Denmark.
He worked hard and graduated at Al Azhar university (which was one of the first schools the army desecrated in November), against his grandfather's advices and reservations about documenting life in Gaza- having faced the brutality of what telling the truth gets you when he was a small town poet himself. Yazan was Able bodied but sharp with his mind and even more agile in his reporting. He was a journalist turned hero, in fact none of us were journalists- not anymore. We were changed some way or the other. Some were heroes but most were martyrs. I didn’t know what I was yet but I was about to find out.
In spite of everything, in spite of war being the first sound I hear when the morning comes and the last thing I see when the night falls, I really did think that when I came here I could reach people everywhere by reaching out to people here. And when we were freed, and we were going to be free someday, I could come back home and reach inside myself, to find out who I was as an artist. If I felt Palestinian or if I simply felt numb in the end. But I had to put a cloth on the canvas, forever because this right now was changing me beyond recognition, much like what was left of my country.
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We never actually went through the main entrance of the building and instead entered via an open supplies closet. The reception was all the way around the hostel block and Mona’s legs gave out halfway, and when I offered to carry her she refused.
I shut the door behind me, which had apparently been used as aim practice-letting in bead sized rays of pale light. Mona already had her fingers wrapped around the handle of a door behind the cupboards overflowing with extra caps, gowns and hand painted dioramas. The door must lead to the auditorium where students were meant to graduate this fall. A pang of pity struck me and I pulled Mona’s hand off the door, unsure of what lies on the other side. Mona, however eager she was to find one last, decent resting place seemed to realise this also and hung her head low, flicking dust off her stained dress.
I was halfway through dusting a much too big graduation gown to cloak Mona when I heard the sounds of arguing in Arabic through the door. All three of us crouched down to listen carefully at the words they were saying, trying to make out if they were friend or foe. Someone opened the auditorium entrance with a cry while 15 or so other people hushed him. I got between Mona and Karim and placed my eye at the keyhole where I could see what was going on.
‘Ya 'Adhra!’
‘Abu Hanan! Haddi halak.’ A stone faced man in a black, soot stained NYC shirt replied. ‘Shu sar?’
(oh virgin mary!)
(father of hanan! collect yourself, what happened?)
‘Ween el-awlad?’ the middle aged man sobbed with a gravelly voice.
‘humm maskeen Bashir fi al-hudood w kabbaluh,wittahmuh-’
‘khāli Bashir!’ Mona burst, I brought my finger over my mouth and shushed, listening to the man finish his sentence after a few preparatory breaths taken.
‘wittahmuh bitahreeb hamas!’
(where are the children? They kept Bashir at the border, they handcuffed him)
(Uncle Bashir!)
( they accused him of smuggling hamas)
I cracked the door open a sliver and looked out into the colossal conference hall where thousands of students stood on that very stage and accepted their diplomas. Now the grand room, once filled with promising young men and women, doctors, so many doctors, scientists, lawyers and artists was burnt to ash. So many joyful memories were scorched beyond recognition, like the structure of the whole place which just looked like scaffolds cast in powdery Grey now. Skeletal chairs still remained in their rows, frozen in time by a shower of bombs. The pleated red curtain that was on the left of the stage was now torn down and hoisted on two poles behind the almost entirely broken through wall. Nobody sat on the chairs and everyone was either pacing, lying on the floor, or squatting, ready to leap into action.
I saw the man whom I assumed was the children's other uncle at the far end of the gap that ran between the seats. His hair, dark like the children's, went back past his eyebrows and by the looks of his muddied shirt he looked manhandled. His speech slowed when the names Mona and Karim broke out from his cries.
‘tarakthum fis sayara ashan yakunu mahmiyin, bas lama rajaʿt-sayara wal-awlad mish mawjudeen!’
(I left them in the car so they would be safe, but when I came back both the car and the children were gone!)
I let go of the handle, subsequently letting the children rush out and latch themselves at Abu Hanan’s hip, he nearly toppled backwards from the force of their embrace and began to sob, in happiness this time at the sight of his living niece and nephew.
I followed the children slowly, feeling painfully out of place in my utterly useless journalist gear. I explained myself to Abu Hanan and explained the palm shaped burn on Mona’s face. The man did not care whatsoever as he thanked me for safekeeping his only surviving family, besides his brother Bashir; who’s name brought a sweat of worry back to his tensed up face.
The hard faced man came nose to nose with me after the children’s uncle released me from his bear hug. He looked at me with an expression of urgency, and hooked his finger under the strap of my vest.
‘Are you a news broadcaster?’
I nodded to which he immediately asked "Do you know where they are now?”
It felt pathetic to admit that I was as helpless as them. My live updates stopped coming in at around 3:00 am when I took to the streets, which meant the Israeli government had been disrupting our signals, on a technological level and a physical level with the strikes to radio stations and areas with higher densities of internet traffic. They wanted to leave us in the dark both figuratively and literally.
‘No, I don’t know anything…’ I said apologetically which only worsened his frustration. He began succumbing to hysterics. He widened the distance between us and looked at the uncle over his shoulder.
‘Ya Abu Hanan!’ he exclaimed. “kan mumkin nkun ahsan law fiʿlan kunt bitharrib Hamas!”
(we might have had a chance if you were actually smuggling hamas)
Abu Hanan pressed the children closer to him saying ‘Haddi Halak!’ mirroring the man’s words back to himself. He shifted his gaze to a darkened corner of the room where a youngster stood, hands crossed with his back to the wall. He wore a black ski mask and had his chequered red keffiyeh loose around his neck.
‘wa inti!’ the other man pointed in an accusatory way and then in Arabic proceeded to ask him ‘Why are you here? Where is the rest of your faction?’
The late teen, covered in camo just stared into the man's grey eyes, his deep ones not revealing a fraction of an answer. He was young for a resistance fighter, but old enough to have lived through the fourth war in middle school. Most children stopped their education there, in middle school.
It makes you wonder, how many members of the resistance did they create, In their futile attempts to shut it down? I remember being in a drought for details at the time, my family and I tried our best to call our relatives here but there was always something obstructing us from staying connected. I recalled that we lost a neighboring family with whom we shared a lot of laughs with when we lived on a stretch by the sea. We lost a cousin and his old father too and a couple of family friends. After coming here It was getting harder and harder to remember just how much I had lost, and I now recall the small span of time I spent separated from the tragedies here as distant and strange. Was I really living like that the May of three years ago?
When this May I was drowning in those details I missed back then.
The kid himself looked as though he was drowning in his own thoughts, like he himself didn’t know where they left him. He pulled the mask off his head, revealing his youthful features. Two shocks of dark eyebrows decorated his face and he had the powerful nose of a Jerusalem native, but he still looked as frightful as ever behind his apathetic posture.
‘wesh a'amel?’ He explained that the rest of the unit was fighting the enemy on the eastern outskirts of Rafah, a particularly faithful and defensive woman rocking in a chair in the corner added that they were doing a good job of it too, using the example of the resistance felling the highest ranking officer in Zeitoun.
‘shu a'amel?’ he repeated, this time loud enough for the 20 something people scattered in the draughty performance hall to hear. They showed him silence in response. He scoffed and began to tie his keffiyeh over his head and face, withdrawing the vulnerability he showed us.
(what am I to do? What am I to do?)
The woman went back to anxiously rocking her body in the squeaky chair, chanting to herself that it was going to be okay and that she would be returned to her parents and get married. I thought about how, in this room alone there were such drastically different ways to cope between people.
The silence kept on when another boy, of the same age but with lighter hair, with caring eyes that were observant and a little more spring in his wobbly, broken step, came by in front of the man at arms, both physically and mentally it seemed. He ushered him to the other side of the room and pressed him down into a chair while adjusting shattered spectacles.
The kid protested, insisting that he was the only trained one in the room and that he should stand ready when the army broke in. Instead, the young man sat down with him, placing a comforting hand on the boy's emergent bicep. As he lowered himself to the chair beside, he rubbed his own lower back, undoubtedly the region that caused the limp I noticed.
I myself went to sit two rows behind them, and feigned looking at my shoes like I had done so many times in this hall yet again. I was listening though, listening to what the light haired kid could possibly say to soothe the weeping warrior. But he didn’t say anything of encouragement, rather, he asked something unexpected.
‘Min ay 'eela inta?’
(whose family are you from)
‘Haniyeh. Leish ma sa'alt 'an ismi?’ he replied and checked in a flash, perplexed. The boy with loose golden curls, frizzed by bitter air chuckled and put his hands up behind his head.
(the haniyeh family. why didn’t you ask my name?)
‘I knew you wouldn’t answer. You would just tell me you are part of the liberation effort.’
The Haniyeh boy exhaled with his eyes open and brows furrowed as he stared into the eyes of a young fellow, who ideally should have been his peer, chatting him up in a lively classroom instead of a dead performance hall with rickety chairs. He pulled the keffiyeh tied around his neck higher up his chin, attempting to hide his expression but his eyes were telling of the fact that another boy with an apparent heightened clairvoyance cracked him like glass. Saw through him like glass.
‘Tayyib, la ttla' ʿalayya heik! Rah tquli ismak halla?’ he conceded, letting a smile dig dimples in his cheeks. The “interviewee" simply chuckled behind his keffiyeh looking up at the bare ceiling tiled with pipes and exhaust fans. ‘Like you said, I’m part of the liberation’ the nameless guy deflected, as per prediction to which the outdoorsy new companion of his tsked in frustration at.
(okay, don’t look at me like that! are you going to tell me your name now?)
‘This is what you guys do, you hide away your names and your identities for a joint glory. It’s very admirable what you do I say, but it doesn’t help the world that already thinks of us as mere numbers. I really like numbers I do, but I like them on a chalkboard in an equation. 'We aren’t numbers are we Haniyeh?’ he spoke in faltered tongue, dumbfounding Haniyeh before he too let his name be known.
‘Khalas! Khalas, el ism illi btedawar ʿalayh huwwe Amir, ya ustaz kalam kbeer.’ he exclaimed feigning desperation for stopping the other mans ‘kalam kbeer’ or ‘wordy talk’, when really what he wanted most in this hectic, pathetic excuse for a life was to sit down together and talk about the issues the knowledgeable young man referred to over hot black tea steeped with sage and sweetened with Yemeni honey. I relapsed back into lamenting my old life again before I put on my journalist ears again, and listened to the very conversation of that nature which was blooming in front of me.
(enough!enough, my name is amir mr. wordy talk)
The wisecracker laughed with Amir, alerting the sombre people around and Karim who was shuffling through rubble to find a tangerine that fell from the merchant’s cart. He laughed before abruptly stopping and turning to him with curiosity,
‘Ustaaz kalam kbeer?’
(mr. big words?)
‘Sah, wala lazim anadik ya ustaz kalam mish mratab?’
(yes, or should I call you mr. sloppy words?)
“Bas lazim tnadini Hashim,” he argued, sharing his own name.
(you should just call me hashim)
“I see”, Amir replied, this time in English to Hashim’s amusement. “Waw, enta btaʿrif tiḥki Ingleezi?”
(wow, you can speak english?)
“Shway shway” said Amir, shifting forward in his chair. He then said, assuming really, in a shway quieter voice, “Akid mish qaddak.”
(a little bit)
(not as much as you)
Hashim’s freckled skin flushed, I remembered how easily mine did the same after growing accustomed to chill European pastures. I was probably redder than a bride on the day of her nikaat in this human oven.
My eyes went to the lone bride in the corner of the room, pulling her ring on, and off and on her finger before they refocused on the boys.
Hashim was saying how he was as Palestinian as they come and Amir grinned, denying ever robbing him of his ethnicity and clarifying what he meant, which was that Hashim appeared more well read and certainly better preserved adornments wise in the middle of a siege . Hashim explained with confidence and in good faith how he was studying in the U.S, and that he begged his parents to let him come back one last time to the homeland for the winter holidays.
It’s now the start of the summer break I realized, and so did Amir. He scratched at the knit of the ski cap in his lap and uncharacteristically apologized, for the money Hashim was probably spending on the education he wasn’t getting anymore, trapped in his hometown by blockades. While I agree the feeling of being trapped in your own home is like none other in Gaza, I fail to understand why exactly he took the liberty of apologizing, it wasn’t like any of us had a choice, it was either preserve our nation or be preserved, in history books. The kid, understanding this, denied any apology and leaned back liberally in his rickety chair.
‘La yumkinuka wad' sa'ra 'ala al-hurriya.’
(you can’t put a price on freedom)
Hashim started toying with the broken zipper of his jacket like he felt guilty for having it when Amir slapped his friend’s back eliciting a cough and a gasp from him and said, ‘you may be educated and wise, but your Arabic needs more work’.
I sighed in my seat, sore from sitting even though I had been running for the past 3 days. When I got up I was met with the friendly belly of a scruffly bearded man with a strained yet curious face. I stumbled a few steps back as my nose accidentally grazed his shirt, he had no reaction. His glad gaze was fixed on the boys.
‘Jamila, mish helweh? How children forget their suffering in good company?’ I nodded silently, I wasn’t feeling chattery yet.
(beautiful, isn’t it?)
I could barely tell the children what I needed from them in the car, or in the alleyway. My brain buzzed from the un-processed memory of lugging the body and dropping it as delicately as I could into the car, trying to preserve the main points of recognition for his burial, which could only commence if some passerby with time to spare climbed over the car to retrieve the corpse before it decayed.
‘Alo?’ The man was tapping my shoulder as I got a hold of myself. These flashbacks were beginning to become episodes and these episodes were becoming unbearable. I snapped out of it and said sorry to him, and that seemed to communicate all the words I hadn’t said.
‘It’ll be alright ya sahbi, one day the nightmares will end and the relief will come. We just have to wait and watch if liberation brings it, or death.’
I was somewhat appalled, maybe I had just been apart from this too long, maybe this was how the people talked here. I saw glimpses of the pessimism and the acerbic comments people made, to cope I would assume. It still seemed strange to me, death presented itself before my eyes a countless amount of times but the word still burned on my tongue, rarely uttered but constantly thought about. ‘How could you say that?’ I asked, something between aghastment and understanding blurring my rationality.
‘Because it is true, that is our reality isn’t it?’
I’d no idea what to say as I reached my hand for the camera suspended at my hip, thinking of all the photos and videos immortalized on there while the people in them were only memories of mine now. My fingers ran along the stitches of the protective satchel as my vision stilled and unfocused like the camera inside of it. Then I felt someone unzipping the bag and I quickly cupped my hand to keep the camera from falling, the camera I hung on to this long.
‘Aha- sorry, do you mind?’ the man asked, full cheeks turning a hue of rose. I nodded my head again and let him look at the camera, the logo was covered by a sticker of spider man hanging upside down on a web, it was given to me by a young boy I met in Nuseirat. I never knew what became of him before I had to leave again, he was at the age where he wasn’t even fascinated by sports yet- he still wanted to be a superhero.
The man, introducing himself as Roshdi as he fished the camera out of the satchel, asked ‘what camera is this?’ upon seeing the brand name hidden behind the sticker.
‘Canon, EOS.’ I said plainly, watching him pop open the cracked lens cover and blow over the dust frosted glass, I hadn’t used it in a while, my profession went from watching to living and trying to come out alive somewhere in between.
‘This is a good one, I also had an EOS.’ he said with undertones of mourning as he held it up to his eye and pretend filmed. I switched it on for him to humour the man, if I could distract even one person from the disaster that swallowed us all around that would be enough.
‘but I had a 5D. See I’m not a reporter but I am in some way.’ he said in a way that would prompt questions from the reporter side of me. ‘What happened to it..?’ I asked, already half knowing but wanting to hear it from this Roshdi. He shrugged as he filmed the network of pipes on the ceiling,
"It was destroyed, all my equipment was broken when my studio fell.’
‘Studio?’ My eyes travelled down to his multicoloured t shirt and puffer jacket, sleeves ripped to survive the heat. A bottle cap badge with the abbreviation for the Palestinian Filmmakers Association was safety pinned to it.
‘Sahih ya Samir, I used to make short films about our Gaza, and its beauty. I think that’s like journalism, no?’
‘Yes it is.’ I wholeheartedly agreed.
He began taking a video of Hashim and Amir, still talking passionately.
‘Al-waldain alladhīn yaqfān hūnāka they remind me of the films I took. lahazat raqeeqa ya Samir.’
(those two boys there)
(tender moments, samir)
He filmed them teasing one another by playfully jabbing each other's shoulders as they went on talking.
‘In November when my studio was not yet under the bombs, I went to the sea and took video of a family celebrating their eldest daughter’s birthday, while airstrikes were going off in the background.’ He laughed, reminiscing that moment of pure Palestinian resistance, the willingness to smile and sing in the most dismal situations,
‘We sang happy birthday loudly, to forget the sounds of sirens and bombs. Then finally, when my throat was sore they fed me watermelon and cake.’ A tear emerged from his waterline.
‘They did not know who I was, I was from the other end of the city but they fed me cake, and watermelons.’ he repeated, putting the camera down and flexing his hand, clenching the finger into a fist. He looked back at me with tear stained eyes, taking me back to that hospital of children with white phosphorus burns streaking their once supple cheeks.
‘We both are two sides of the same coin you know, we capture two sides of the same story.’
‘And I’m the edge of the medallion!’ boomed an earthy voice from the diaphragm of a man who was well groomed despite everything, he wore a suit and looked like he had just come back from work (or more accurately, was expelled from it) to greet his family. His brown suit charred by more soot was torn at his knee and he wasn’t wearing a blazer but an untucked white shirt, loose threads trailing behind as he came to us, as attention grabbing as ever with a voice similar to the likeness of a Nelson Mandela. He shook my hand and the hand of Roshdi with whom he seemed to be acquainted already. He introduced himself firstly, as a poet, and then he told us his name.
I racked my brain for a Saleem Al Nasser amongst the archive of poets I researched when I was reporting on Gaza from Denmark. The article I did research for compiled and collated the names of creatives killed or imprisoned by the occupation. I squinted my eyes at the man trying to recall where I had seen his cloud of grey hair and intelligent eyes. Then I fished out something from the twilight zone of my mind. A poem.
Knives might eat what remains of my ribs,
machines might smash what remains of stones,but life..
I couldn’t recall the last two bits, but I knew he had to be the one who wrote it. Granted the prominent hooked nose bridge that served as a landmark for his face was obscured by unshaven facial hair but I was sure it was the same man, just a little more broken by Nakba.
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Part 2
‘Mona and Karim…’ I murmured quietly, seeing their sunken faces in the broken rear view. I considered going to a market shed or something to check my phone, and see if any international powers had interceded in Israel's besiegement of the crossing, their deliberate entrapment of the million people who fled here as per their commands.
To them, we were just dogs-no, not even dogs. We were subhuman species being chased around in the tiny petri dish that was the Gaza strip.
There were no roads anymore, so therefore there were no rules. I accelerated, keeping by the edge of the beaten down and wrung dry land. Through the rearview, the kids reached for the overhead grab handles before realising they weren’t there and held onto each other tightly, Mona nearly engulfed her little brother in her thin arms.
We were reaching the back entrance of the unilluminated hospital when my head darted to my left where I heard a grapeshot. Clearly other people had similar ideas of fleeing to the nearest NGO hospital. My mouth lay agape as the car sailed and tumbled over rocks at its own speed as the image of men who had been kneecapped writhing on the floor with their hands cradling their shins shifted further and further away. The children too, were on their knees, eyes unwillingly locked onto the sight that lay behind the back window.
Karim, who was dreadfully silent until now inhaled sharply, at which point he began to cry. I needed to get these two somewhere these sights wouldn’t violate their eyes any longer.
Trolleys were being wheeled out of the children's ward by the left over workers who couldn’t evacuate and soldiers stationed around the premises seized them like the scattered remains in the morgue tents at Shifa. My body shuddered, fingers losing sensation of the steering wheel, slippery with sweat. Bulldozers were lined by the dozen around the medical yard, pathological pilots sitting at their cockpits like watch birds. This wasn’t anywhere to hide.
I swung the car around, making Mona and Karim slide abruptly to the right and wince from the bang. I really did want to apologise but I needed them to know they could trust me, and you can’t trust a man who’s out of his senses enough to make time for apologies.
‘Mona’
The girl straightened up as she rubbed her sore shoulder.
’btiḥki Ingleezi?”
(do you speak english)
’La, ' she replied, as her head turned to her younger brother meaningfully. The anxiety clouding Karim’s eyes cleared as he raised his roughed up hand. I grinned. These kids will salvage knowledge from comic books if they had to.
‘The IDF will take this car if we keep driving, we need to leave it. Is that OK?’
He nodded apprehensively, not sure of what I planned to do instead. I reassured him even though I only had a vague idea of where or where I was taking this thing.
‘inti wa ikhtak, look outside the window and tell me if you see a good place to hide.’
Mona seemed dispassionate at the prospect of attempting to stay alive at all but looked out of the window nevertheless.
I sped by the ransacked market, stalls empty not only because there wasn’t any produce to sell but because our olive plantations and oil reserves were owned by Israeli brands parading them as the products of their heritage. The street was carpet bombed and I drove rashly yet hyper aware of the terrain below, paranoid after hearing horror stories of un-detonated shells exploding.
Everything was paranoia in Gaza, the people here slept with their eyes open while the Gala of death masqueraded as sleeping beauties. Before the war, Somaya told me she used to tune into the television and watch the stars roll down the carpet and ogle at the displays in fashion encased in impenetrable glass, but now those memories sickened her when she realised pieces of fabric were better protected than people.
My rash driving obscured the buildings (or what was left of them anyway) that zoomed by, but even so the children pointed out every alleyway, every barely concealed shack. Their efforts were not totally useless as I caught a glimpse of herons hovering above the refugee camp behind where I was headed.
My ears, bleeding from the bloody sirens, perked up when I heard a heavy, rolling rumble from the trough of the slight hill behind us and the distinctive thump produced by the tread pattern of a Plasan Sasa. My vision split towards the left side mirror where the image of the dull yellow, blood splattered tractor became bigger, and bigger.
I swerved left and the unbuckled children nearly flew out of the sunroof, even though I told the kids to search for potential hiding spots to distract them, I found their efforts coming to fruition now as I stuffed the car into a much too cramped alleyway. The exterior skidded against the textured walls on both sides, letting out a sound I prayed wasn’t loud enough to turn the heads of the terrorists.
Mona was the first to climb out of the roof, pulling her brother up and I crawled out after, settling into the dark corner we had made for ourselves. The V shaped hull of the vehicle moved along and I let out a buried breath, slumping against the walls and sinking to the ground.
There was a squelch.
I felt something cold and wet seep through the underside of my pants and I reached out my hand randomly to grab something for support as my brain started to register that a freshly dead corpse had been stashed here. I caught hold of the twisted forearm, nails white and the skin sticky.
Karim stuck to the corner like a wallflower while his sister’s eyes blanked, whites shining in the dark. She stood with her legs apart- frozen in shock, a skinny stream trickled down from between them.
She opened her mouth to scream but I jumped and brought my hand over her mouth with a lot more force than I intended, if I was thinking at all when I did that. I was terrified of compromising our safety, of the guys right outside this makeshift barrier hearing her bloodcurdling squeal and giving this dead man next to us some company.
Sorry,sorry, I hushed, feeling her teeth protrude through her cracked lips. With my hand over her mouth, still open with a stifled scream, I finally got a good look at the mangled body laying in the corner. My eyes adjusted to the blanketed dark and colour became visible to me, most of all red.
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My mind flashed to a crossing I walked in December, opposite piles of tattered blankets heaped to distribute amongst the freezing in Gaza.
Concrete particle stung my eye as I angled my neck up and along the curved stripe of pure and refined penmanship swirling across the wall next to me. The white lettering was muddled by debris,dust and cracks from the most recent attack, but it was precise enough for me to know that here were the words of God and lyrics of liberation mixed in a magnificent dial encircling what I can only assume was a declaration of faith. A declaration at the tip of the tongues of many martyrs I knew who tasted death, with honour and with a finger raised to the sky, a finger with a determined stiffness not even the setting in of rigour mortis could knock down. I recalled the number of bodies frozen In that position as every other part of their bodies flattened out to the earth. Some parts of the mural looked to be pressure washed, with the calligraphy being interrupted here and there and then again where a giant square slice had been demolished in the wall, ruining the wholeness of the painstakingly painted piece.
An ugly alien-ish green had taken hold of the hold thing, making it look overgrown with mould. However, an artist's eye, my eye, noticed the ghosts of red that were once bright and powerful strokes and splotches painted around the writing with great deliberation. My mind flashed again to curdled blood. War was making me crazy. Crazy, vengeful and filled with despair. And I had no idea where you could possibly place all this sorrow.
My eyes shot up from where it was fixed with my fingers on the mural to the source of the pollutants. A crew of jumpsuited men- yelling at me to stop dreaming or something along those lines. They were well protected from the cold in lined, patriot blue fabrics, all except the Gazan workers who wore football jerseys thinner than the winter air.
Metal screeched against concrete as crowbars pulled apart at the walls of the building, at the memories made inside. The rhythmic pounding of pneumatic drills agitated me, worsening the pounding that sounded in my skull like those blasted alarms. And it was the sight of those workers bouncing up and down on it so joyously like pogo sticks that set off an alarm in me.
And the whole painting turned red, like the streets on those October nights of aggravated aggression, assault and murder. And like the green that overtook the painting, a rage overtook me.
I ground my teeth, brittled by the absolute lack of anything nutritional, the concept of which was apparently foreign to the organisations arranging the aid convoys. I clenched my fist, which in my grievous, deluded state was clasped around the paintbrush I hadn’t felt in my fingers for so long. I looked up loathingly at the pink skinned motley crew from under my overgrown hair, and finally turned the corner, after forever spent in the haze of art, of what my life used to look like before this. But that didn’t matter anymore.
When I tripped into an excavated section of ground and my palm hit the other wall of the building for support, I vowed that this camera that I cursed on countless nights would be my only weapon against these tyrants. I would record everything as a testimony and one fine day, when all was said and done- these evils would be lined up in front of me in stretchers like the stretchers they sent my loved ones home in and I would have the videos and images projected it onto the ceiling for them to see- their eyes pried open by a mediaeval device. They would never silence me, and I would not be silenced like the words this artist had to say.
I snapped back into the alleyway we were in as Mona almost suffocated against my skin, tears springing to her eyes. Karim was punching my arm and I immediately pulled my arm away from her face, placing it on the camera at my hip instead, to make sure it was still there, to make sure it was still real.
Ya Allah. The IDF workers were long gone from this ghostly area of the town but I was still stuck, stuck on that December pavement, stuck in that hospital and now I was stuck between a caged in car and a dead end. Mona had gone to the ground, squeezing her knees together in embarrassment at having pissed in shock. I myself looked at my feet, giving her however much space I could in this cramped hole.
Soon we got out of there by taking off our shoes and walked the rest of the way to Quds open university.
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