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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