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.
⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘
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.
⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘